Do We Have a Moral Duty to Make the Future Go Best?

Imagine that a government has £1 billion to spend. They can either spend it on improving schools and hospitals now, or, instead, they can invest the money in reducing a small risk of a terrible catastrophe occurring centuries from now. If the future contains many more people than the present, then—we might imagine—the second option would do more good overall. Does that mean that morality requires us to choose the second option?

Some influential arguments in intergenerational ethics suggest that it does. Utilitarian theories say that we should impartially maximize welfare across generations. Benefits to future people do not count less than benefits to present people, just because future people have not been born yet. So, we should benefit future people if doing so maximizes welfare overall. Similarly, longtermists about intergenerational ethics argue that the most important aspect of our choices today is how they affect the long-term future. These views claim that we should make the future go best.

It seems plausible that if we can avert a terrible catastrophe, then we should do so. In addition, it does not seem to matter much whether the catastrophe will happen now or in the future. It therefore seems that we should reduce risks of harm to future people, especially if these risks are significant, and the cost to present people is comparatively small.

However, the claim that we should make the future go best can be criticized. First, moral constraints can prohibit maximizing future value. We are not permitted to commit a serious moral wrong, even if doing so made a vast number of future people very happy. Second, benefiting the future might be too demanding of present people. Third, it is difficult to assess far-future outcomes, and evaluating them might require making controversial assumptions about the badness of human extinction, the moral significance of very small risks, and the limits of mathematical reasoning about the far future.

Here, I explore a different line of argument. I believe that even if we can clearly benefit future people without committing a serious wrong or imposing great costs on present people, we are not necessarily required to do so.

Imagine someone who wants to donate to charity. They are considering giving money to an animal shelter, or to an organization that provides medical aid to children, or to a charity that works to reduce risks to future generations. Intuitively, it is permissible to donate to any of these causes, even if one of them does more good than others.

I believe that this intuition is correct. It is false to think that we have a maximal duty to benefit: we do not have to benefit others as much as we can. Rather, we ought to make sure that we do enough to help others.

As Kant famously argues, duties of beneficence are imperfect. This means that we do not have to benefit others whenever possible. We have latitude regarding when and how we benefit others. As I understand Kant’s distinction, duties of beneficence are real: we must help others, and we must do so often enough. But duties of beneficence are limited by nature: as long as we do enough to help others, we do not have to justify ourselves every time we fail to do so.

None of this means that we should not be concerned about humanity’s future. However, we have latitude in deciding how to benefit others—and it is at least permissible to benefit others in ways that do not align with longtermist priorities.

It might seem that my view is objectionably short-sighted. It gives people permission to focus their beneficiary efforts on the people, animals, and causes around them, rather than the enormous number of people who will live in the (far) future.

However, this view is compatible with holding that we have strong reasons to care about future generations. As I see things, such reasons are not grounded in general duties of beneficence, but in the responsibilities that we incur, and in the commitments that we make.

Like parents who have responsibility for the children they bring into existence, I argue that as a society, we have moral responsibility for the generations that we cause to exist. We bring the next generation into existence: we fund their education, train them in their jobs, and engage with them as fellow citizens; and they in turn will do the same for the generation after them. In doing so, we incur responsibilities towards the next generation, and the generations after that. This does not mean that we must make the lives of future people as good as possible, but we should enable them to live (or not prevent them from living) decent lives.

In addition, we have non-moral reasons for caring about future generations. As Samuel Scheffler argues, we have reason to care about future generations, because the continued existence of humanity is central to some of our key projects. For example, many of us have reasons to continue family traditions, and to contribute to scientific endeavors. Similarly, we commit to continuing institutions and maintaining norms that have been shaped by past generations and that we pass on to future generations.

The challenge of articulating and defending plausible views on our relationship with future generations is formidable, as has long been recognized in intergenerational ethics. I have argued that we do not have a general maximal duty to benefit, and so, we do not have a moral duty to make the future go best. Such a duty would make us care about the future in the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. We should, rather, care about future generations because we bring them into existence, and because the future matters to us. Future generations deserve our beneficence, but they do not demand it.

 

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Elad Uzan for excellent suggestions and feedback on an earlier draft of this article, which has improved it significantly. This blog post draws on ideas developed in “Against a Moral Duty to Make the Future Go Best” and “The Strings Attached to Bringing Future Generations Into Existence.”