Our obligations to future generations: the limits of intergenerational justice and the necessity of the ethics of metaphysics

Abstract

Theories of intergenerational justice are a very common and popular way to conceptualise the obligations currently living people may have to future generations. After briefly pointing out that these theories presuppose certain views about the existence, number and identity of future people, I argue that the presuppositions must themselves be ethically investigated, and that theories of intergenerational justice lack the theoretical resources to be able to do this. On that basis, I claim it is necessary to do the ‘ethics of metaphysics’ in order to fully comprehend what, if anything, we may owe future generations. I defend these claims against some important objections.

Keywords:

• Intergenerational justice
• obligations to future generations
• ethics of metaphysics
• Hans Jonas
• David Heyd
• population
• climate change

Notes

2. This paragraph follows formulations in Sanklecha (2016).

3. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to make this clear.

4. The ethics of metaphysics also includes questions about what the non-human future should consists of; for example, whether particular features of the natural world should be preserved for their own sake. The inclusion of such questions is one important thing that distinguishes it from what Heyd (1994) calls genethics. The full ethics of metaphysics is, I believe, a good way of systematically unifying all of the things we care about when it comes to the future. But I will not describe it in this paper, because here I focus on future generations.

5. The last three sentences are taken from Sanklecha (2016).

6. I owe this to Ed Page, Matt Matravers and Lukas Meyer. My thanks to them.

7. I thank Lukas Meyer for helping me see this specific interpretative possibility.

8. When we describe it like this, I think we see that this is a rather religious feeling. To be clear, I don’t mean by this that it is religious in the sense of being dependent on belief in a particular religion (or any), or in the existence of God. What I mean is two things. First, there is a striking similarity between the structure of that feeling and the (contingently) religious idea of eschatology. It locates, at least in part but necessarily, the meaning of a life in a world inaccessible to that life. Second, it seems to me to be an expression of a human heed that, historically, has been expressed by and through religion. Positively, it may be described as the desire for the Absolute, an unmoved mover, an ultimate ground. Negatively, we can express it as the desire to escape what Kolakowski (2001) calls metaphysical horror.