Opening — A Letter from Someone a Hundred Years Hence
Imagine a letter has arrived addressed to you. The sender is someone living in the year 2126. They have not yet been born, they have no name and no face, yet they will surely one day walk this earth.
The letter reads: "The decisions you make today have made my world. You have never once met me, yet I must live my whole life in the world you leave behind."
It is a strange thing. We feel some obligation toward the person next door, toward a colleague at work, toward a stranger passing on the street. But can we feel an obligation toward someone who does not yet exist?
Does it even make sense to owe something to a person who does not exist? A debt requires a creditor to exist, after all. What sort of being is a creditor who has not yet been born?
Intuitively, we want to answer "yes." Parents save for a child not yet born; people wish to pass on a clean river to their descendants.
This is part of the reason we plant trees. Knowing full well that the one who will sit in the shade is not us but some stranger we will never know, we still bury the sapling in the ground. The ancient Greeks left us a saying to the effect that a civilization grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. At the level of intuition, we already know that we have obligations to future generations.
Yet the moment we try to translate this warm intuition into logic, philosophers have discovered surprisingly tricky traps. Intuition whispers "of course we must," while reason demands, "then prove to me why it is obvious." And when we actually try to prove it, we find the ground beneath our feet is less solid than we thought.
This essay looks into those traps one by one, examining what our obligations to future generations are, and why the question is so difficult. That it is difficult does not mean there is no obligation. It only means that establishing the proper grounds for that obligation is a far more delicate task than we first supposed.
This essay walks through those traps in turn, tracing where intuition and reason diverge and where they meet again. The road is winding, but at its end we will look at the future with eyes a little clearer than when we set out.
There is something to make clear in advance. This subject borders on sharply contested political issues such as climate, debt, and resources. This essay does not advocate for or against any particular policy.
It seeks only to expose the philosophical questions lying beneath those policy debates, and to consider fairly which values the different positions hold dear. The conclusion is left to each reader. Simply holding good questions in hand allows us to begin a better conversation.
The Non-Identity Problem — Parfit's Most Cunning Trap
For Whom Do We Protect the Future?
The British philosopher Derek Parfit, in his 1984 book "Reasons and Persons," posed the most troublesome puzzle in the ethics of future generations. This argument, called the non-identity problem, sounds at first like wordplay, but the more one chews on it, the harder it becomes to escape.
The core idea is this. Which person is born depends on when, and in what circumstances, their parents decided to have a child. The union of sperm and egg changes entirely from one moment to the next, so a difference of only a few months — indeed, a few hours — yields an entirely different person.
You exist as the very you that you are because your parents met at that precise moment and conceived you at that particular time. Had they conceived a year later, that child would not have been you but someone else, like a sibling of yours.
Now, the large policy decisions we make — energy policy or environmental regulation, for instance — change the life of society as a whole. They subtly alter where people work, whom they meet, when they marry, and when they have children. So when a large policy changes, then within only a few generations the very roster of who is born changes wholesale.
Today's policy A → a hundred years later, 'set of people X' is born
Today's policy B → a hundred years later, 'set of people Y' is born
(X and Y are different people)
Here the trap is sprung. Suppose we chose a policy that uses up the environment recklessly. As a result, a hundred years later the world has become a worse place to live.
But had we chosen a better policy, everything in society would have been different, so the very people now born into that bad world would never have been born at all. Entirely different people would have been born instead.
We Made Things Worse, Yet Harmed No One
A strange conclusion then follows. The person born into the bad environment can be said (provided their life is more or less worth living) to be better off having been born than never having existed.
For without our bad policy, they would never have existed at all. So we have not "made them worse off." There is nowhere a "better version of themselves" against which their situation could be compared.
In short, we clearly made the world worse, yet no single person born as a result can point to us and say, "you harmed me." Traditional ethics often grounds wrongdoing in "harming some particular person." But in the problem of future generations, that "particular victim" vanishes like smoke.
To feel this paradox more sharply, it helps to distinguish two kinds of choices. Philosophers separate them into "same-people choices" and "different-people choices."
In a "same-people choice," who will be born is already fixed, and only whether their lives go better or worse is in question. Here there is no problem. If we make someone's life worse, that very person is the victim.
But in a "different-people choice," the very people who are born differ depending on the choice. Long-term policies like climate and resources fall precisely here. And it is exactly in this "different-people choice" that the trap of the non-identity problem operates.
The Thought Experiment of the Fourteen-Year-Old Girl
Parfit gave a vivid example of this problem. Suppose a fourteen-year-old girl decides to have a child. Because she became a parent at far too young an age, that child grows up in poor circumstances and suffers many hardships.
Instinctively we want to say, "she should have waited a little longer." Yet had she waited, the child born some years later would not be the present child but an entirely different one.
So to tell this child who was actually born, "you could have been in a better situation," is in fact false. The only options available to this child were "the hard life I now have" and "not existing at all." If their life is worth living, they have suffered no loss. And yet we still cannot abandon the intuition that "it would have been right to wait a little longer." For whose sake, exactly, would it have been right?
Parfit's Exit — The Impersonal Principle
Parfit himself did not accept this conclusion. He held that our intuition — "ruining the future is clearly wrong" — is correct.
But to justify that intuition, he thought, we must abandon the old framework of "harm to a particular individual." In its place we need an "impersonal principle," a new moral principle such as a duty to make a world in which whoever is born enjoys a better life.
In other words, his proposal is to shift the focus of morality from "do not harm this particular person" to "make whatever kind of life unfolds in the future a better one." Even without pointing to who exactly the victim is, the duty to choose a better world over a worse one remains. Though we may not know who will live in that world, making a better world is still right.
This puzzle, decades later, is still not fully solved, and it remains one of the most actively debated topics in ethics. The very fact that there is no tidy answer tells us something about the depth of the problem.
Three Things We Pass On — Climate, Debt, and Resources
Climate — A Bill on a Time Delay
The problem of future generations appears most sharply in climate. The effects of greenhouse gases do not appear at once. The impact of carbon dioxide emitted today accumulates slowly over decades and centuries.
That is, the structure is one in which the present generation enjoys the benefit while future generations pay the cost. This is sometimes called an "intergenerational externality." The benefit of one generation and the burden of another are misaligned across time.
It is a kind of "bill on a time delay." Imagine a restaurant where the person who enjoyed the meal and the person who receives the check are different. A restaurant where we eat the delicious dishes and the receipt flies off to our descendants.
Such a restaurant could not possibly be fair. And yet the structure of the climate problem is precisely this. Benefit and cost fall on different people, with time placed between them.
What is more, the guest who receives the check has not yet even entered the restaurant and had no right to choose from the menu. Future generations inherit only the result, without ever casting a single vote on our decisions. We might call this "a burden without representation."
Democracy is especially vulnerable before this problem. The vote belongs only to the living, the terms of politicians are short, and voters generally worry more about life right now than about the distant future.
An election cycle is usually only a few years, whereas the time scale of climate and resource problems is decades or centuries. Trying to measure a long distance with a short ruler, we keep pushing distant matters out of view.
For this reason, some countries have tried instituting bodies such as a "commission for future generations" or a "future generations ombudsman," deliberately inserting the voice of the future into the policy-making process. It amounts to setting one empty chair at the table for an invisible guest.
Debt — Mortgaging the Future
National debt has a similar structure. When one generation borrows to invest in roads, schools, and research, part of the benefit also returns to future generations.
But if it borrows merely to spend on today's consumption, future generations are left holding only the duty to repay. We throw the feast, and pass the dishwashing on to our descendants.
That said, debt is more complicated to reckon than climate. For debt is not the only thing future generations inherit. They also inherit the knowledge, technology, institutions, and infrastructure we have built.
So some hold that "even if we leave debt to our descendants, it is a fair bargain if we leave a greater asset alongside it."
What matters, on this view, is not the figure on the page but the whole balance sheet we hand over. A burden on one line may be offset by a gift on another.
The key is not simply the size of the debt but whether the "net worth" we leave is positive or negative. We should not be alarmed by the debt alone, but should look at what was built with that debt and left behind together with it.
If we borrowed to build a bridge that will last a hundred years, charging part of the debt to the descendants who will cross that bridge may actually be fair. It is reasonable, after all, for those who enjoy the benefit to share part of the cost.
Of course, there is a counterargument here too. Some assets, though they look like assets, may in fact be liabilities.
Aging facilities with rising maintenance costs, vast structures that are hard to manage, waste that is difficult to dispose of — these are such cases. Though entered on the ledger as assets, they become burdens to the one who inherits them. Distinguishing what is a true legacy from what is a disguised debt is harder than it seems.
Resources — Things That Vanish Once Used
There are also resources that cannot be restored once used, such as fossil fuels, rare minerals, and biodiversity. Economists of the nineteenth century already pondered this problem seriously.
There is an interesting thought experiment. What would happen if every generation left only half of the resources to the next?
Mathematically the resources never reach zero, but they grow thinner with each generation. Some distant descendant, inheriting almost nothing, will ask, "why are we alone empty-handed?"
Conversely, if every generation uses up its full share, then in some unlucky generation everything suddenly runs dry. Like the person left without a chair the moment the music stops, that generation, through no fault of its own, bears the entire burden.
What is a fair distribution? Should everyone share equally, or may we use more now, trusting in future technological progress? This is the question of intergenerational justice, our next theme.
| What we leave behind | Good for the future? | The difficulty |
| --- | --- | --- |
| A clean environment | Yes | Immediate costs concentrate in the present |
| Knowledge and technology | Yes | A double-edged sword (e.g. powerful weapons) |
| National debt | It depends | May be fair if left with assets |
| Depleted resources | No | Unclear what a fair share is |
The Discount-Rate Debate — What Is a Future Fortune Worth Today?
A Great Quarrel Among Economists
The point where the ethics of future generations stops being abstract philosophy and is translated into actual policy numbers is precisely the "discount rate." In economics, a discount rate is applied when converting future value into present value.
A thousand units of money a year from now is held to be worth less than a thousand units today. This is because people generally prefer the present to the future, because the future is uncertain, and because, on the assumption that the economy will generally grow, future people will be wealthier.
The trouble arises when this discount rate is applied to problems spanning a hundred or two hundred years, such as climate policy. Even a slightly higher discount rate turns enormous future damage into pocket change in present value.
The magic of compound interest works in reverse through time as well. Shaving off a little each year, the value of a sufficiently distant future converges almost to zero.
So depending on how the discount rate is set, a catastrophe a hundred years hence becomes either "a crisis we must stop now" or "a trivial item not worth our concern." The same future, the same damage — yet the size we perceive changes completely depending on which number we multiply by.
Present value of 'a future fortune a hundred years hence' by annual discount rate (approximate)
discount rate 1.4% → roughly a quarter of the sum (weighing the future heavily)
discount rate 5% → less than one percent of it (weighing the future lightly)
→ the same future damage differs more than thirtyfold by assessment
Two Economists, Two Worldviews
In the climate economics of the 2000s, two positions waged a famous debate. One side argued for a very low discount rate, holding that the welfare of future generations should be weighed almost equally with the present.
It thus reached the conclusion that we must invest boldly right now to avert the climate crisis. If we place future suffering on the scale with the same weight as present suffering, then vigorous action now is rational.
The other side held that we should use the higher discount rate actually observed in markets. Its stance is that we should reflect not ideal numbers on a desk but how people actually value the future.
Since the future will be wealthier, it may in fact be unfair for the poorer present generation to shoulder excessive burdens now for the sake of the wealthier future. The picture of the less well-off sacrificing for the better-off is awkward even from the standpoint of equality, it points out.
So this side recommended a more gradual, step-by-step response. As technology advances and society grows wealthier, the future cost of response may fall, so there is no need to bear everything all at once now.
What is interesting is that this debate is not a mere fight over numbers. Setting the discount rate is essentially an ethical choice.
For it is the answer to the question "is the happiness of future generations less important than ours?" expressed in a single number. On its surface it looks like a cold economic formula, but hidden within it is a burning value judgment.
Many philosophers hold that discounting the welfare of future people purely on the ground of time (so-called "pure time preference") is hard to justify.
How can the fact that "they are born later" make their suffering less important? If we do not take someone's suffering lightly because they were born in the country next door, is it not equally strange to take it lightly because they were born in the next century?
That said, many also hold that a certain amount of discounting can be justified for other reasons, such as uncertainty or future abundance. So the real point of the debate shifts from "to discount or not" to "what kind of discounting is justified, and at what level should it be set."
Intergenerational Justice — Fairness Across Time
Stretching Rawls's Veil into the Future
The philosopher John Rawls, often cited in discussions of justice, proposed the thought experiment of the "veil of ignorance." The idea is that if we set the rules of society while utterly ignorant of whether we will be rich or poor, healthy or sickly, the fairest rules will emerge.
If we do not know what position we will occupy, we will naturally try to make rules tolerable even for the person in the weakest position. For that weak one might just be us.
This is the principle by which the veil of ignorance draws out fairness. By keeping us ignorant of our own hand, it is a clever device that draws out rules fair to everyone.
Rawls extended this veil across time as well. What if you did not even know which generation you would be born into?
If we suppose you might be a person of a hundred years ago, or a person of a hundred years hence, you would never agree to a rule by which one generation exploits another unilaterally. For you yourself might be that exploited generation.
From this Rawls derived the "just savings principle." Each generation has a duty to pass on just institutions and an adequate stock of capital for the next.
There is an important sense of balance here. Rawls's principle does not demand that the present generation sacrifice without limit. The present generation also has a right to enjoy its own life.
So long as it establishes just institutions and passes on enough capital to sustain them, the duty is met. The goal is not endless saving but an "adequate handover." It is the work of finding the balance point between devoting everything to the future and turning away from it.
The Conundrum of Obligation Without Reciprocity
Yet in the tradition that understands justice as "give and take," the problem of future generations becomes awkward. For future generations can return nothing to us.
Even if we leave them a clean earth, they have no way to repay us. Time flows in one direction only. If justice is a matter of reciprocity, do we have a duty to extend justice to those who cannot reciprocate?
There are several answers to this. Some speak of a "chain of generations." What we repay to the future is, in fact, repayment for what we received from past generations.
We stand upon the civilization, language, knowledge, and institutions our ancestors left. The letters we write, the medicine we enjoy, the rights we take for granted — all were passed down to us by someone.
There is no way to repay that debt directly to those who gave it to us. For they have already departed. Instead we repay it by letting it flow down to our descendants. Just as a river sends the water it received from above on down below, each generation becomes a middle link passing what it received on to the next.
Others redefine justice not as reciprocity but as "responsibility toward the vulnerable." If someone lies wholly in our hands and cannot protect themselves, it is precisely that helplessness that gives rise to our duty.
It is the same logic by which we bear a duty to care for an infant even though it can repay us with nothing.
Future generations are, in a sense, the most helpless of beings. They can neither protest, nor negotiate, nor resist. They have not yet even the mouths to cry out their rights before us.
It is precisely that absolute helplessness, on this view, that makes our responsibility weigh the most. If the weaker a being is, the more it ought to be protected, then future generations, the weakest of all, ought to be protected most heavily of all.
How Shall We Teach Morality — The Capacity to Imagine the Future
The obligation to future generations is, in the end, an "obligation toward the invisible." The capacity to handle this obligation is therefore deeply tied to the capacity to imagine the future vividly.
Psychologists say that human empathy weakens sharply toward objects distant in time or space. A child weeping before our eyes moves us, but the suffering of some nameless person a hundred years hence reaches us only as an abstract number. This is called "psychological distance."
The trouble is that future generations always lie beyond this "far distance." They are distant in time, faceless, and exist only as statistics. Our moral emotions did not, in their origin, evolve for such objects. Our intuitions were honed for close neighbors within a small band.
Morality directed toward the future, then, is insufficient on natural feeling alone, and requires a conscious "training of the imagination."
Good stories, the teaching of history, and thought experiments are precisely the tools for building this muscle of imagination. Statistics cannot move the heart, but one person's concrete story can. This is why it matters to picture future generations not as an abstract number but as a single descendant.
For instance, we can teach a child "you must not foul this river," while at the same time saying "because your grandchildren will swim in this river." We turn an abstract duty into a concrete face. Much of the ethics of future generations is, in the end, the work of making the invisible visible within the mind.
Interestingly, the traditions of many cultures already contained devices to aid this imagining. Some communities, it is said, had a custom of asking, when making an important decision, "what effect will this have seven generations from now?" The exact number of generations is not the point; the point is the attitude of deliberately stretching the field of vision of a decision far into the distance.
Historical Scenes — People Who Looked a Hundred Years Ahead
Let us pause the abstract discussion for a moment and recall the stories of people who actually left something for the distant future. They began their work knowing full well that they would never see its fruit.
A Forest That Grows for a Century
Of various old universities and cathedrals in Europe, stories are told that someone, centuries ago, planted a grove of oak trees for future repairs. The great timber beams would one day age and need replacing, and trees of such girth do not grow overnight.
So the generation that built the structure planted trees in advance, so that descendants centuries later could swap out the beams. Neither the one who planted the trees nor the one who designed the plan would ever see those beams. This is the purest form of action for "faceless descendants."
Whether this story is true or somewhat embellished, the reason it has been handed down so long is clear. People feel a deep resonance in such scenes. In the act of pouring care into a place from which no return can be expected, we instinctively sense a certain nobility.
A Clock That Lasts Ten Thousand Years, A Warning That Lasts a Hundred Thousand
Even today there are similar undertakings. Some are building a great clock designed to run for ten thousand years. The purpose of this clock is not to tell the time but to make people sense and imagine "a very long span of time."
There is also a challenge in the opposite direction. When we bury high-level radioactive waste deep in the ground, we run into a thorny question. The danger lasts for tens of thousands of years, but the people after that long span will not understand our language at all.
How can we leave the warning "do not dig here; it is dangerous" in a way that will still work ten thousand years from now? Experts have seriously considered non-linguistic warnings instead of letters, such as vast spike-shaped structures or menacing landscapes.
The fascination of this problem is that it compresses the obligation to future generations into its most practical form. We are striving to convey something to descendants whose faces, language, and values we do not know — even though it is uncertain whether it is even possible. That very striving may itself be proof that we take our obligation toward the future seriously.
People Who Send Seeds Far Away
There is another scene as well. There is an effort to gather crop seeds from all over the world and store them safely, deep in cold ground. The aim is that even if some crop disappears through war or disaster, someone in the distant future can draw out those seeds and plant them again.
The people who began this work do not expect that they themselves will see the day the seeds are actually used. Perhaps they will never be used at all. Even so, they quietly go on gathering seeds. Just as insurance is best when no accident occurs, so this vault, if in the end it is never used, will have reached its best possible ending.
Such undertakings show one shared attitude. It is the wish to safeguard the very possibility of the future, even if one cannot confirm the result with one's own eyes. The obligation to future generations is, perhaps, nothing other than sowing seeds in a field we ourselves will never harvest.
A Cooling-Off Thought Experiment — Three Puzzles
To make the foregoing discussion your own, it is best to walk the maze of thought yourself. These are not problems with fixed answers but questions like mirrors, by which you test your own position. I recommend that you close the book for a moment, answer them yourself, and only then read the solutions below.
Puzzle One — The Music That Stopped
Suppose several generations play a game of musical chairs, sharing a finite stock of resources. While the music plays, each generation uses resources, and when its turn ends, it passes them to the next. But the moment the resources run dry, the generation then sitting in the chair inherits nothing.
The question is this. Who bears the responsibility for stopping the music? The generation that used up the last of the resources, or all the generations that consumed too fast from the very start?
A clue for the solution is this. We instinctively want to blame "the last person," but in fact they were merely the unluckiest. The real problem lies not in any one person but in the "structure" of continuous use without replenishment. This closely resembles the very reason it is hard to find a specific culprit in climate and resource problems. When responsibility is spread thinly across many generations, toward whom should justice be directed?
Puzzle Two — Two Futures
Two buttons sit before you. Press the red button, and a future comes in which ten billion people live lives that are more or less worth living. Press the blue button, and a future comes in which one billion people live very rich and fulfilling lives.
Which button should you press? If we reckon by the "total" of happiness, the red button may win. If we reckon by the "average" of happiness, the blue button wins.
A clue for the solution is this. This is precisely the entrance to the "repugnant conclusion" that Parfit wrestled with. Push the total to its limit, and we arrive at the conclusion that a vast world full of people whose quality of life is barely worth living is "better" than a small but rich world. Many people find this conclusion hard to accept. Yet if we reckon by the average alone, another uncomfortable conclusion follows: that removing one unhappy person "improves" the world. Placing population and happiness on the scale together is this slippery.
Puzzle Three — The Invisible Signature
We are signing a certain contract. The duty to perform the contract falls on us, but its benefits and harms all return to the people of a hundred years hence. Yet the other party to the contract, the future generation, cannot write their name on the signature line. For they do not yet exist.
Can we truly call such a one-sidedly signed agreement a "contract"? How can we be bound by a transaction to which the other party never consented?
A clue for the solution is this. Perhaps this is not a contract but something closer to a "trust." A trust does not require the beneficiary's signature. Just as a guardian manages property for an infant who cannot yet even speak, we can stand in the position of safeguarding the share of those whose consent cannot be obtained, on their behalf. If we change the ground of obligation from "agreement" to "entrusted responsibility," then duty toward a party without a signature begins to make sense.
Several Perspectives — What Do We Owe?
Even on the obligation to future generations, positions diverge. No single one is the complete answer. Let us lay them out fairly.
| Perspective | Ground of obligation to the future | Emphasis |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Utilitarianism | Future happiness matters equally | Maximizing the sum of total welfare |
| Rawlsian justice | The veil of ignorance and just savings | Fair institutions across generations |
| Care and responsibility ethics | Responsibility toward the vulnerable | Helplessness gives rise to duty |
| Communitarianism | Inheriting a tradition across generations | The duty to pass on what was received |
| Libertarianism | Skeptical of strong obligations | The rights of the present also matter |
Utilitarianism offers the simplest and most powerful starting point. For it holds that happiness is equally precious whoever enjoys it and whenever.
The joy of a future person carries the same weight on the scale as the joy of a present person. The coordinate of time cannot diminish the value of happiness. This simple egalitarianism is appealing.
But utilitarianism runs into the non-identity problem seen above and into other conundrums. For instance, troublesome conclusions follow over whether it is a duty to "create more happy people." If the goal is to enlarge the sum of happiness, a world with a sufficiently large number of people, even at a very low quality of life, may turn out to be the better world. Parfit called this the "repugnant conclusion" and pondered it deeply.
Rawlsian justice focuses on "institutions." Rather than who is happy, it asks whether just institutions and capital are passed on across generations. It amounts to sidestepping the difficulty of calculating the sum of happiness, shifting focus to the more tractable problem of handing over fair rules.
The ethics of care and responsibility attends to "vulnerability," seeing the responsibility we feel before a helpless being as the root of duty. On this view, future generations are not excluded from obligation because they cannot reciprocate; rather, precisely because they cannot reciprocate, they become the ones most in need of protection.
Communitarianism understands us as a single link in a "chain of generations." We are not isolated individuals but part of a long story stretching from the past into the future, and we bear the duty to carry that story on. On this view, obligation to the future is not a burden imposed from outside but part of an identity already inscribed in who we are.
The final, libertarian position is especially worth hearing out fairly. Some thinkers hold that granting "rights" to those who do not yet exist is conceptually a stretch. For a right requires a subject to claim it, and a person who does not yet exist can claim nothing.
They also hold that coercing the present generation into excessive sacrifice may itself be unjust. The concern is that constraining the present too tightly for the sake of the future may break the very engine of prosperity and innovation that would build that future.
An impoverished present cannot make a wealthy future. In that today's vitality becomes tomorrow's asset, keeping the present alive may itself be a way of serving the future. This too is a perspective worth considering seriously.
Even so, there is a minimal consensus that most ethicists share.
Future generations must not be treated merely as a means to our convenience, and we must at the very least not destroy the minimal conditions for them to lead a life worthy of a human being. Whether we have a duty to make them happier is open to debate, but that we must not collapse the very foundation of their lives — on this almost everyone agrees.
We may leave a debt, but we must not leave an unlivable world. However far positions diverge, this final line at least is broadly shared. It is only over exactly where to draw that line that opinion divides again.
Closing — A Seat for the Invisible Guest
There is an old saying: "We did not inherit this earth from our ancestors; we borrowed it from our descendants." The charm of this saying lies in reversing the direction of ownership.
We are not the owners of the earth but merely caretakers who hold it in trust for a while. An owner may dispose of things as they please, but a caretaker bears the responsibility to return what was borrowed intact. Change but a single word, and our whole posture changes.
The obligation to future generations is philosophically thorny. How are we to do justice to those who cannot reciprocate, who are as yet faceless, who will become entirely different people depending on how we act?
Neither the non-identity problem, nor the discount-rate debate, nor the conundrum of reciprocity has been tidily solved. Perhaps they will never be tidily solved.
Yet perhaps the very fact that the answer is not tidy is what matters. That there is no tidy formula means this problem cannot be settled with a calculator but goes on demanding our judgment and imagination.
Future generations are the invisible guests at our table. They can neither protest, nor negotiate, nor cast a vote.
It is precisely for that reason that leaving a seat for them rests not on compulsion but on our own moral imagination. No one commands us to do so. The future cannot sue us, and the future cannot give us its vote.
The obligation toward the future is, when all is said, a mirror that reflects what kind of human beings we wish to be.
When we leave one chair empty for an invisible guest, what that act tells of is not the future but the very us of right now. Just as what one does when no one is watching reveals the person, so what we leave behind when no one can ever repay us will tell of our age.
Let us return to that first letter. The someone of 2126 will, in the end, receive no reply. We do not know them, and they will never meet us. Yet how we live today is, in the end, our reply to that letter. A reply written not in words but in the world we leave behind.
That reply may not be a grand thing. A single tree, one honest record, one river left unbroken. Small things gather into the reply of an age. And writing that reply is less a sacrifice for the future than a way of proving to ourselves what kind of people we wish to be.
Food for Thought
- If you had to set the rules of society without knowing which generation you would be born into, what rules would you make concerning resources and the environment?
- If you accept the non-identity problem, how would you answer the question, "why is ruining the future wrong when there is no particular victim?"
- Should there be a limit to the sacrifice the present generation must bear for future generations? If so, where does that line fall?
- If you had to warn a person ten thousand years from now of a danger, what method would you choose? If letters will not work, what remains?
- What is the greatest legacy we received from past generations, and how can we let our "repayment" of it flow down to the future?
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Intergenerational Justice" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Nonidentity Problem" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/
- Derek Parfit, "Reasons and Persons" (Oxford University Press, 1984) — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reasons-and-persons-9780198249085
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "John Rawls" (the veil of ignorance and the theory of justice) — https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Rawls
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Climate Justice" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-climate/
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Sustainable development" — https://www.britannica.com/topic/sustainable-development
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Imagine a letter has arrived addressed to you. The sender is someone living in the year 2126. They h...