Climate change represents a singular challenge for humanity. However, social attitudes on the topic seem to differ by age. Pew Research Center reports that, “in Sweden, 65% of 18- to 29-year-olds are at least somewhat concerned about the personal impacts of climate change in their lifetime, compared with just 25% of those 65 and older,” and that “sizable age differences are also found in New Zealand, Australia, the U.S., France, and Canada.”
This makes some sense. Climate change over the past decades has often not impacted the lives of many people in the affluent countries that Pew surveyed, and the activities that contribute to it will have greater and greater effects in the future. The ecological impact from greenhouse gas emissions is cumulative in a way that pushes many of the externalities associated with it onto future generations. In other words, the person, corporation, or nation that burned fossil fuels in 1970 will not see the consequences of those choices in the same way that people will in 2100.
This presents a philosophical question. Even now, most people that will suffer the most intense hardships and devastation from climate change may not be born yet. Moral obligations and rights are often cashed out in terms of individuals who actually exist. In other contexts, the non-existence of a person would clearly speak against considering their interests in our ethical calculations. Nobody worries about how our actions might impact the characters in fictional narratives or television shows.
Even if it is increasingly the case that more and more people who exist now will be severely impacted by climate change, egoistic inertia and mindsets are often hard to fight against. Insofar as an eighty-year-old person will not be around to see the worst of rising sea levels, they might feel as though they don’t have much reason to care about what happens to people who live long after they die. What are some possible philosophical and ethical responses to concerns about the well-being of future generations, including people who don’t exist yet?
One way forward is to carefully examine what constitutes personal survival in the first place. It might be the case that the sorts of reasons we have for caring about ourselves may in fact apply to other people, both currently and in the future. Most of us have the intuition that we should care about how our lives go in the future. It seems shortsighted and silly to actively sabotage our happiness or well-being in the future. This, indeed, is perhaps why more and more young people are concerned about fighting climate change and want to take steps to fight it. How might we explain why this would be the case?
The future versions of ourselves, or what we call ourselves, are significantly different from who we are right now. If you remember yourself at eight years old, you will likely notice plenty of different desires, motivations, values, memories, character traits, and other psychological features than you have currently. This only becomes more pronounced when you compare your eight-year-old self to the person you will be at the end of your life.
Derek Parfit pointed this out via various thought experiments about the survival over time. He describes cases of personal identity “fission” in which individuals could potentially be split in two. Parfit imagines that someone is copied by a teleporter and two copies of the same person are spit out. Then, the two copies of the original person go on to live very different lives. It could potentially be the case that one copy is a good person and the other a bad person who share very little in common with each other. Is the original identical to either person? That seems like a difficult case to make because the copies are not identical to each other, and we have no principled reason for saying that one person is less connected to the original version. It cannot be the case that the original is identical to the two copies but that the two copies are not identical to each other.
Parfit’s thought experiment may seem remote from the perspective of our daily lives, but we consistently change in all sorts of ways throughout those lives. Most of us concede that we have reason to care about later versions of ourselves (that is presumably why we make sacrifices in the present to help our future selves). What this must mean is that we have strong reason to care about future iterations of ourselves that we are not identical to because we share certain psychological similarities or features that persist over time (memories, desires, beliefs, etc.).
Building off this basic insight from Parfit, David Brink notes that while we may share certain psychological features with future versions of “ourselves,” we clearly also share them with other people:
“Interpersonal connections and continuity can be found among intimates who interact on a regular basis and help shape each other’s mental life; in such relationships, the experiences, beliefs, desires, ideals, and actions of each depend in significant part upon those of the others… parents help shape their children’s faculties, experiences, beliefs, desires, values, opportunities, and goals. Similar relations hold among spouses and friends who share experiences, conversation, and plans. They can also be found, to a lesser extent, among partners in cooperative ventures where the deliberations, desires, plans, and expectations of each are formed together and conditioned by each other. More generally, membership in various sorts of associations will affect the beliefs, desires, expectations, and plans of members so as to establish significant interpersonal psychological continuity among the association’s members.”
Just as we can see psychological connections between our eight-year-old and eighty-year-old selves in the form of shared memories, beliefs, or desires, it is also the case that those same shared features can also exist between other people whom we would not normally think of as other versions of ourselves. For instance, it might be the case that I share the same ethical perspective and general life goals with my sister, along with several key memories of going to a theme park. Insofar as there are many such similarities, then the psychological grounds for caring about a future iteration of my person may in fact hold for my sister. If that is the case, then I have reasons for caring about my sister that are analogous to why I care about myself.
It may be the case that such connections are especially plentiful between siblings or close relatives, but it is key to remember that there may not be a great deal of them between an eight- and eighty-year-old person who we normally think of as the same person. The bar for establishing self-interested reasons for caring about people thus may not be as high as we usually assume. Such relationships and psychological connections may obtain between individuals who are part of the church, political party, or social club. Indeed, Brink notes that it is in fact in our interest to extend our “selves” to larger groups and projects:
“Moreover, cooperative interaction with others allows me to participate in larger, more complex projects and thus to extend the scope of my deliberative control over my environment. In this way, I spread my interests more widely than I could by acting on my own.”
If, for instance, you take a particular political belief or stance about the good life to be central to who I am and what I care about, then it would be the case that extending that belief to others would be a way of taking a part of myself and putting it into something larger than myself that can transcend and survive beyond the limitations of my own physical body or existence. This need not be simply a matter of imperialistic sort of egoism. Once we reflect on this kind of connection between people, we should realize that who we are has in fact been shaped by many other people (as Brink notes). The ideas, beliefs, preferences, and core values that represent the deepest and most important part of ourselves are in fact not our own inventions out of nothing. We all came from somewhere and passing on who we are in this sense is really about participating in something much more expansive than personal self-interest and happiness. It is rather about building social networks and communities that exist through time and across different people.
All of this suggests that we have reason to care about institutions, communities, and individuals beyond ourselves if we care about our own survival. Indeed, it is already the case that we should care about other people for prudential reasons whether we recognize this or not. Throwing away the future of our planet, country, and species in order to burn more carbon is not an especially wise decision. It turns out that perhaps it is not only the people who will be alive in 2100 that will have reason to care about rising seas levels; even baby boomers alive now will have important psychological connections to the people that live in the future (much like they have some things in common with their previous selves earlier in their lives). While our future selves don’t exist yet, only the most present-biased moral agents would not concede we should care about what we will become later in our lives. It just turns out that what our future existence entails is larger and longer lived than we thought. In the end, we have many of the same reasons for caring about the fate of our great-grandchildren as we do ourselves, which should speak in favor of a more expansive view of a life well lived. With this in mind, we can all work towards a future in which our collective happiness and flourishing are not diminished by short-sighted energy and economic policies.
Michael Otteson
Michael Otteson received his PhD from the University of Kansas. He is currently works in the Philosophy and Communication Studies department at Utah State University. He specializes in Ancient Philosophy and Well-Being.
What a great post! Thank you. It has soul.
j.