Three Faces of the Future

Why should I take the future into account? I mean not my future (to paraphrase the holiday ghost) but the "long future" (Benford, 1999, p. 27): put concretely, the future after I'm dead. I have interests right now and in my future that I want to see to, I have cares to attend to, obligations to meet. When I deliberate about what to do, I ought as a matter of course to consider all these things. They are all, we might say, visible from where I stand. But there are horizons to my vision, including a temporal horizon; things beyond it are beyond my ken. So why should I take the long future into account? This question currently vexes two groups in particular: the philosophers and the advocates. On the philosophical side, the works of John Rawls (1971) and Derek Parfit (1984) have opened a debate about how to justify an obligation to future generations. The problem becomes most apparent when we consider the puzzles that arise as different theories about how we ought to deliberate try to deal with the long future. Utilitarianism, for example, says we ought to prefer a plan that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Does that number include future people? If so, we ought to bring about a densely populated world, where the sheer quantity of people would still lead to a greater sum of well-being, though the quality of individual lives was quite marginal; but that is counterintuitive (Parfit, chap. 17; see also Rawls, pp. 286-7). An alternate, more Kantian, theory tells us that we should adopt such principles of justice as impartial negotiators would contract for--those in the "original position," stripped of knowledge of their particular place in society. Do these negotiators include future people? It seems absurd to say so. But if different generations are not represented in the imagined contracting, what is to prevent negotiators of a single generation from deciding to use up all resources for themselves? (Rawls, pp. 139, 292). Again, counterintuitive. And finally, how can we conceive of entering into ethically significant relations with people who don't even exist? These people may not even ever come to be, depending on what choices we make now (a point emphatically made by Parfit, chap. 16). So as Rawls remarked, "the question of justice between generations.... subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests" (p. 284). Philosophers are still looking for Parfit's missing "Theory X": a philosophically defensible justification for taking the long future into account. The question of the long future has arisen also for advocates, because we, more than any other generation, have the capacity to affect it. Undoubtedly everything that anyone has done has changed the environmental, cultural and social future. But the changes we are making now would seem to be more manifest, more predictable, and simply bigger than those made by former ages. In part this is because there are so many of us; practices like slash and burn agriculture that were consonant with preserving forests when pursued on a small scale, pursued on a large scale threaten to eliminate the resources they depend upon. In part it is because new technologies have expanded our power intentionally or as a foreseeable "side effect" to alter significantly and suddenly such things as the Earth's atmosphere, the number of fish in the sea or (soon) the human genome. When continuing these practices or using these powers, why should we consider our effects on the long future?-this is the practical question advocates arguing for restraint must answer. Our use of these powers and practices presumably satisfies us, the living; otherwise we wouldn't be adopting them. It is only when we take the long future into account that we can consider trends like global warming to be problems at all. I do not propose to say why we should take the long future into account, to answer the question as posed either to the philosophers or the advocates. …