by Phil Parvin
It is very difficult to ground such obligations in any philosophically rigorous way, and it is especially difficult to generate obligations toward future generations within a traditional liberal egalitarian normative framework. How can liberalism, premised upon the fundamental assumption that everyone should be able to live a life that they believe to be worthwhile and which they have chosen for themselves, remain compatible with the idea that present generations should be forced to constrain the pursuit of their own ways of life in the interests of securing the same right for people who do not live, and who may not live for 100, 1000 or 1,000,000 years?
And what about previous generations? Do states and currently living individuals that have benefited from past oppression have a moral responsibility to rectify these historical injustices? Does the current US government have a moral obligation to compensate today’s native Americans for the seizure of their ancestors’ land? Do the Canadian or Australian people owe a debt of justice to the descendants of those aboriginal peoples who the first white settlers slaughtered or expelled from their land?
In order for claims of historical injustice to make sense, we have to understand people as members of distinct historical communities whose descendants bear the consequences (or enjoy the benefits) of acts committed by different people in the past. Actions have moral implications which are held to apply across generations and not just to the people who engage in them. This was precisely the area of tension at the heart of one form of intergenerational justice in particular, affirmative action, which we discussed in Chapter 4. Defenders of affirmative action argue that people living now have a moral obligation to rectify injustices suffered by people in the past. But claims about affirmative action are, as we saw, controversial and complex, partly because they seem to violate the wider liberal concern for individuals by understanding people as bearers of a particular historical identity which they share with people in the past.
Debates about intergenerational justice thus problematize many of our assumptions about equality, freedom, obligation, and the nature of duty. As we have covered some of the issues concerning historical injustice in our discussions about equality, we focus in this chapter on the issue of what obligations current generations have toward future generations.
‘Distributive justice among contemporaries and within the boundaries of a state has been at the centre of the dramatic revival of political philosophy in the last quarter century. Extending the inquiry into the nature of distributive justice beyond these is a natural and inevitable development. But I think that there is also something to offer to those who are not interested in pursuing these questions for their own sake. It is surely at least something to be able to assure those who spend their days trying to improve the prospects of future generations that such measures do not represent optional benevolence on our part but are demanded by elementary considerations of justice… [T]he application of ideas about justice that are quite familiar in other contexts have radical implications when applied to intergenerational justice, and… there is no reason why they should not be.’
Brian Barry, ‘Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice’, Theoria 45/89 (1997), pp. 43–65, at pp. 64–5.
Spotlight: Baby-boomers
In his book about intergenerational justice, the UK government minister David Willetts argues that British ‘baby-boomers’, those born just after World War II, are disproportionately well-off. For example, people born between 1956 and 1961 will receive more from the welfare state than they have paid in (118 per cent) since they have benefitted from measures such as universal state pensions, free NHS prescriptions, and free university tuition and maintenance.
Utilitarianism and the ‘repugnant conclusion’
In his book Reasons and Persons (1984) Derek Parfit suggests that neither liberalism nor utilitarianism, the two dominant approaches to understanding morality and ethics, are particularly well-suited to dealing with intergenerational justice. Take utilitarianism, for example. Parfit argues that utilitarianism cannot secure justice for future generations and actually results in what he calls the ‘repugnant conclusion’. The general idea is this: the utilitarian maxim that we are morally required to create the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ encourages us to create an enormous population of not very happy people.
Parfit points out that utilitarianism is concerned to create the greatest aggregate welfare overall, not to secure the greatest welfare for each and every individual. The implications of this are very significant. Imagine that we rank quality of life on a 1 to 10 scale, where 1 represents the worst quality of life imaginable and 10 represents the best. Now imagine two societies. One has a population of 10,000, with each individual member having a quality of life rated at 8, which is very high indeed. That society has an aggregate welfare score of 80,000. The other society has a population of 100,000,000, but each individual has a quality of life rated at 1, the lowest it can possibly be. This second society has an aggregate welfare score of 100,000,000, far in excess of the first. So on utilitarian grounds the second society is best. It does not matter to the utilitarian that members of the first society are healthy, have access to clean drinking water, good public services, literature, music, live in a democracy and so on, while members of the second society are malnourished, unhealthy, and live in a corrupt and tyrannical society which terrifies and oppresses them. The point is not how much welfare each individual has, but how much the society has as a whole. The ‘repugnant conclusion’ that utilitarians are led to when considering the question of intergenerational justice, therefore, is that we would do best from a moral point of view to deliberately increase the future population of the world as much as possible, even if in doing so we condemn the individual members of that world to terrible lives.
Liberalism and ‘person-affecting’ moralities
Parfit argues that liberalism also faces problems when dealing with future generations. We will discuss Parfit’s argument first, in the context of wider debates about intergenerational justice, before discussing a broader set of concerns in the latter half of this section.
OBLIGATIONS TO WHOM?
Morality creates obligations. If it is morally wrong to deliberately harm another person, then I have a moral obligation not to harm another person. If it is morally wrong for a state to imprison its citizens without trial, then the state has a moral obligation not to imprison its citizens without trial.
Obligations are relational. They define what one individual, group or entity (like the state) can or should do with regard to another individual, group or entity: I have an obligation to you, the state has an obligation to its citizens, and so on. Furthermore, if I fail to fulfil my obligations to you (for example, by deliberately harming you) then I have acted immorally and, hence, am appropriately liable to be criticized and, in certain circumstances, punished.
But what if I do something which will not harm anyone who is currently living, but which is likely to harm people who will live in the future? Who am I harming by driving a gas-guzzling SUV which pumps out vast amounts of petrol fumes? Who am I harming if I refuse to recycle my rubbish, or refuse to reduce the number of long-haul flights I take? The harm caused to current generations by these acts is negligible. The real costs of these actions will be borne by future generations, that is, people who do not yet exist. But how can we be said to have obligations to people who do not exist?
Parfit argues that ‘person-affecting’ moralities based on ideas like harm or rights cannot deal easily with intergenerational moral claims precisely because in such claims no person is being affected. I cannot harm someone who does not exist, nor can I violate their rights. Remember, the question is not just what moral claims we have to the next generation, i.e. to existing children. The problem at hand is what obligations we have, if any, to people who do not currently exist and who may not exist for hundreds of years.
The question is not just a matter of abstract philosophy. It is also at the heart of contemporary debate
s about environmental policy. Take the question of whether Britain should increase its reliance on nuclear power, for example. Your position on this question will depend largely on how far into the future you think we should look when contemplating obligations to future people. Defenders of nuclear power argue that it is the least environmentally damaging way of generating the power that we need: it produces comparatively low levels of greenhouse gases and, hence, contributes far less to climate change than more traditional forms of energy production, while remaining far more productive and efficient than other forms of renewable energy like wind or solar power. Critics, however, point out that nuclear power produces toxic waste which cannot be destroyed and which remains lethal for up to 240,000 years (in the case of plutonium-239). All this waste needs to go somewhere, they argue, and at some point we will run out of places to put it, leaving future generations with the terrible problem of what to do with these deadly chemicals. So the question is: do we prioritize the needs of the not-too-distant future generations, adopt nuclear power, and not concern ourselves with the terrible problem we are causing for the people who come later? Or do we prioritize the needs of more-distant future people, reject nuclear power, and adopt instead forms of energy production which are less efficient and more harmful to the environment in the shorter term?
The philosophical issue is not so much what we should decide about issues like this, but how we should decide. First, we need to know how to weigh the needs of actually existing people with the needs of future people. This in itself is very philosophically complex, for the reasons alluded to in the introduction to this chapter. Liberal societies are premised on the idea that individuals should be able to pursue their own conception of the good without coercion. But this view seems incompatible with the idea that individuals should be radically constrained in the kinds of lives they can lead in order to protect the interests of people who will exist in the future. If I want to lead a life which includes driving a classic car even though it belches out petrol fumes, or if I want to replace my mobile phone for the newer version every year even though this is incredibly wasteful, or if I want to eat strawberries or bananas all year round even though this means having them flown to my local supermarket from across the world, then surely a liberal system should protect my ability to do so. Obviously, I should not do things which directly harm others but beyond that I should be free to make my own choices and to live the life that I wish. However, it is precisely this kind of individualist, consumerist approach which, according to environmentalists, has resulted in the degradation of the environment and placed future generations in such peril. Taking seriously the needs of future generations seems to require radical constraint of the lifestyles that many individuals throughout the world continue to choose. Coercion on such a scale needs to be justified and, in a liberal system, it needs to be justified in person-affecting terms (e.g. harm) which, as Parfit has pointed out, is very difficult.
THE FATE AND IDENTITY OF FUTURE PEOPLE
One possible response to the problem of obligations is this: although we do not know exactly who will exist in the future, we nevertheless know that some people will exist. And we know that these people (whoever they are) will need certain things like clean air, drinking water, and so on.
However, this argument leads to yet another set of problems. Decisions made by currently living people not only affect the number of people that exist in the future, their health, and the kind of lives they are able to live, but also (1) precisely who exists in the future, and (2) whether or not anyone exists at all. Let us discuss these claims in turn.
(1) Exactly who has a right to exist in the future?
Choices about who to have children with, and when to conceive, determine precisely which humans are created. In choosing to have a child with person A rather than person B, I bring about the child produced by myself and A, and deny forever the existence of the child that would have been produced by myself and B. Furthermore, in conceiving a child with A today I bring about the existence of a completely different child to the one that I would have brought about had A and I conceived it next week, next month, or next year – or even one minute later. The chance of any given sperm meeting any given egg, so as to create any specific human, are minute. None of us would exist if anything in the past had been different.
Parfit suggests that this fact has profound implications for intergenerational justice as it leads to what he calls the ‘non-identity problem’. The non-identity problem is that we cannot meaningfully say that any of our actions harm future people because the future people in question owe their very existence to our actions. For example, imagine we choose to deplete rather than conserve the Earth’s resources. The people who come several generations after us will have difficult lives in that depleted world. However, we can only say that we have harmed those people if it is possible to imagine a world in which those same people were not forced to live under the conditions that we have created. But there is no alternative world in which these same people exist but in better circumstances, because every different action today affects who is born in the future.
So, the effect of choosing differently (for example, to conserve rather than deplete the Earth’s resources) would not have saved the ‘harmed’ future people from being harmed. Rather, it would have simply denied them existence and created different people instead. The normative upshot of the non-identity problem, Parfit argues, is that we cannot coherently apply notions like harm in an intergenerational context.
(2) Do future generations have a right to exist at all?
Earlier we assumed that some people will come after us, even if we cannot know exactly who they will be, so we can consider the idea that we might have obligations to those people. But future generations will only exist if current generations create them. It would be entirely possible for no future generations to be brought into existence. So, do we have a duty to ensure that future people live? Or, to put it the other way, do non-living people have a right to be brought into existence?
The idea that we do not have a moral responsibility to perpetuate the existence of the human race is perhaps counter-intuitive. But it is an important question to ask once we have realized that the existence of future generations is itself the consequence of a collective decision by the current generation. If environmentalists and others are right that future generations will suffer profound hardships as a result of the degradation of the environment, why not solve the problem by ensuring that there are no future generations? That way, members of the current generation could live as they please, even if this includes activities devastating to the environment, without having to worry that they are harming anyone or infringing anyone’s rights. Indeed, if the environment has already been degraded to such an extent that even radical action would make little difference to the plight of future generations, perhaps we should limit the number of future people who have to live under such unpleasant conditions. Until recently, the Chinese ‘one child policy’ prevented many married couples from having more than one child so as to limit population growth. Is this a good policy? Should we in fact go further and ban people from having children completely on the grounds that bringing a child into a world which we know is already irreversibly damaged is an immoral act?
Spotlight: Better never to have been?
In his book Better Never to Have Been, David Benatar argues that it is wrong to bring people into existence. This is because people are not harmed by not being brought into existence – you cannot harm someone who does not exist – whereas people who are brought into existence suffer in all sorts of ways, ranging from serious harms such as pain and disease to everyday annoyances such as hunger or tiredness. On balance, then, it is better not to create someone since then there is no risk of harm.
There are many competing considerations, such as the wellbeing of existing people and their rights to reproduction, bodily integrity and privacy. But the important point is that the very question of whether or not there should
be future people is something that we can reflect upon philosophically.
A liberal response: Rawls’s ‘just savings principle’
Can we find a liberal answer to problems of intergenerational justice? The problem for critics worried about intergenerational justice is that liberalism is deliberately ahistorical. This, after all, is the main reason why liberalism is rejected by conservative and communitarian thinkers: liberal morality is derived from hypothetical agreements made by rational individuals who are specifically stripped of any aspect of themselves which might identify them as a person located in a particular generation, or who lives in a particular historical community. There is, in the original position, no past or future. There are just the abstract individuals with whom we happen to be deliberating. We do not know where we or anyone else comes from, we do not know when we are living or when this conversation is taking place, and so on. In such a circumstance, we cannot reflect upon the requirements of justice for past or future generations because all the information that we would need in order to do so is placed behind the veil of ignorance. Thus, communitarians and conservative thinkers reject liberalism as a way of determining moral obligations and look instead to the morals arising out of one’s membership of various historical communities (e.g. nation, culture, etc.).
‘[G]enerations are not subordinate to one another any more than individuals are. The life of a people is conceived as a scheme of cooperation spread out in historical time. It is to be governed by the same conception of justice that regulates the cooperation of contemporaries. No generation has stronger claims than any other… [P]ersons in different generations have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time… The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat farfetched application of the contract doctrine. Nevertheless, these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position, and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea.’