IEP 511: Environmental Decision Making

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 3 Obligations to future generations

Introduction

Any of the benefits of our current practices accrue to current generations; many of the harms and burdens appear to fall on those who will come in the future. Examples – resource depletion, nuclear waste, global warming, buried toxins.
(Routleys: bomb on the bus example)

A suggested solution to this problem is that we extend notions of obligations of justice and morality from those that apply to current existing persons and groups to future generations. But, how do we do this? Who counts and for how much? It is the potential and the problems of this notion that we shall address.

The first reading for this block is Partridge, E. 'Future Generations' in D. Jamieson ed. A Companion to Environmental Ethics. It is available from this link http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/futgens.htm

Also read the very useful outline from stanford available here http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/

I. Different accounts of morality and justice:

A. The appeal to impartiality:

(tends to strong obligations)

1. Classical Utilitarianism. The best action is that which maximises total happiness, characterised hedonistically in terms of pleasure and the absence of pain. This view involves no temporal indexing of the pleasures, and entails that pleasure should be maximised across generations, be this by increasing pleasure or increasing future populations.

2. The rights of future generations: If current generations have rights in virtue of being persons, then so also do have future persons.

To see an example of defending this position, now read Partridge E. 'On the Rights of Future Generations': available here
http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/orfg.htm

3. Rawls’ theory of justice.
Rawls ensures impartiality in justice by specifying that the principles of justice are those that would be chosen by self-interested individuals under the 'veil of ignorance', that is, in conditions of ignorance of their position in society, their dispositions to take risks, and their beliefs about the good.
Rawls assumes in his own account that those in this original position belong to the same generation, and introduces obligations across generations by the ad hoc proviso that each cares about someone in the next generation. We discuss some of the reasons for this in the next block. Later theorists, however, have assumed that some or all generations are represented, where representatives do not know to which generation they belong.

Now read this helpful overview of Rawls's 'original position'
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/

For other internet resources on John Rawls see:
http://www.policylibrary.com/rawls/index.htm
http://www.erraticimpact.com/~20thcentury/html/john_rawls.htm
http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/y64l13.html

B. Morality without impartiality:

(tends to weaker obligations)

1. Contractarian theories: Moral rules/rules of justice are those that rational agents motivated by the pursuit of their own interests would agree upon to realise their long-term good in conditions of a rough equality of power. The point of morality is to allow rational agents to pursue their long-term interests in the company of other rational agents who are of roughly equal power and vulnerability.
2. Community: we have moral obligations only to those who belong to our moral community or to whom we have special ties.

II. Extending obligations – the problems for impartiality based theories

1. Classical utilitarianism:

a. Does it sanction injustice? Consider Stalin’s policy of sacrificing one generation for the benefit of all those that follow.

b. the repugnant conclusion

The choice between A: Small population, very happy and B: Large population, just above misery

Repugnant conclusion: if the value of a state is obtained simply by aggregating the quantity of whatever makes life worth living, then a world in which a significant number of people - say ten billion - are enjoying lives of very high quality would be worse than a world in which a vastly greater number of people have lives that are barely worth living.

Response – more from totals to averages:
Problem: if the value of a state is measured by the average quality of the lives led in that state, then a world in which a few - even one or two - lead lives of exceptional quality would be better than a world in which billions lead lives whose quality is just slightly lower.

How should the repugnant conclusion be avoided.
For useful papers on parfit's puzzle see
http://www.columbia.edu/~psk16/ppn.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/~kaichan/articles/Chan_2003.pdf

2. The rights of future generations:

The non-identity problem. Consider the choice between two policies, P1 and P2, one of which is more likely to have damaging effects in the future than the other. (The choice might be between resource depletion or conservation, or between high risk or low risk energy paths.)
The policy one chooses will effect not just the state of well-being of future generations, but who will exist, their identity, S1 and S2. One of the policies, P1, might produce a much lower quality of life than the other. However, since the population S1 that is produced would not have existed were it not for P1, then, providing their life is worth living, they cannot be said to have been harmed, or their rights to have been damaged, since they are not worse off than they would have been had they not existed. There is no specific person who is wronged or harmed.

Questions:
How might you solve the non-identity problem?

In thinking about it consider among other things the following:
a. Person-affecting restrictions in ethics: Consider the following slogan:
The Slogan: One situation cannot be worse or better than another if there is no one for whom it is worse or better.
Should the slogan be accepted?

b. If you wrong someone do you necessarily make them worse off than they would have been?

3. Rawls theory of justice: Who is subject to the hypothetical contract?

Question:
Does a variation of the non-identity problem raise similar problems for Rawlsian approaches?

III. Extending obligations – the problems for theories without impartiality

1. Contractarian theories of justice and obligation

the point of moral rules or rules of justice is to serve as a means by which individuals of limited altruism can realise their long term interests in conditions where they are roughly equal in power and vulnerability,
a. the absence of some of the circumstances of justice: Given that there is an inequality of power and vulnerability between current and future generations (we can harm them, they cannot harm us) the circumstances of justice or obligation are absent.
‘No analysis of intergenerational justice that is cast even vaguely in terms of reciprocity can hope to succeed. The reason is the one which Addison .... puts into the mouth of an old Fellow of College, who when he was pressed by the Society to come into something that might redound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish. ”We are always doing” says he, ”something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us”.’ (Goodin)

Isn’t a part of ethics concerned precisely with obligations to those who are of special vulnerability?

2. Community:

Given that future generations belong to a different community to ourselves, how can we have obligations towards them?

3. What responses to 1 and 2?

a. Accept the theories, and follow through the implications that we have only limited obligations to future generations.
b. Reject these conceptions of justice or ethical obligations since they fail to offer an account of our obligations to future generations.
c. Defend such conceptions either
i. by modifying them so as to include intergenerational obligations – for example by introducing the notion of an intergenerational contract – or
ii. denying the supplementary claims, for example that we cannot be harmed by future generations or that future generations and ourselves cannot belong to the same community.

4. Transgenerational communities (de Shalit, O’Neill)

a. Many of the projects we engage in, scientific, artistic, familial, political and everyday working activities, depend for their point and their potential success on a future beyond us.
b. It matters to us that future generations do belong to a community with ourselves - that they are capable, for example, of appreciating works of science and art, the goods of the non-human environment, and the worth of the embodiments of human skills, and are capable of contributing to these goods.
c. This is an obligation not only to future generations, but also to ourselves that we do not undermine our own achievements by rendering impossible our own success, and to those of the past, so that their achievements continue to be both appreciated and extended.

We have obligations as members of a transgenerational community of which we are potentially a part.

Bryan Norton’s example:

One generation saves a rare wetland. Next generation, uninterested in nature, drains it to make a MacDonald’s drive in. Point here is that would not count as a success for the environmentalist. It is not just about saving ‘options’, but passing down values to a community to which we belong.

Questions:
a. Does it make sense to talk of transgenerational communities?
b. Aren’t there obligations to distant generations which require an appeal to impartiality?

Graffiti on the perimeter fence of a construction site building a prestigious new cultural centre in Melbourne, it read ‘AND THIS TOO SHALL PASS’. Suppose it does - no cultural continuity.
It would still be wrong to leave those people a bequest of nuclear and industrial wastes that we know will do them harm.
We have obligations to future generations of a negative kind that are not adequately captured by an approach that relies entirely on ties of community.
Communitarian approach is incomplete. However, narrative and transgenerational community matters more than is often supposed.

Further problems: do we have positive duties to improve life for those that follow us? What could found such obligations?