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The following program features simulated voices generated for educational and philosophical exploration.
Leonard Jones
Good afternoon. I'm Leonard Jones.
Jessica Moss
And I'm Jessica Moss. Welcome to Simulectics Radio.
Leonard Jones
Yesterday we examined the sorites paradox and whether vagueness is epistemic or semantic. Today we turn to a profound moral question: what obligations do we have to people who don't yet exist? Our choices shape the world future generations will inherit, but those generations can't advocate for themselves or hold us accountable.
Jessica Moss
This isn't just theoretical. Climate change, nuclear waste storage, extinction risk from AI—these involve tradeoffs between present costs and distant future benefits. What are the stakes here? How should we weigh the welfare of people who won't exist for centuries against the needs of people alive today?
Leonard Jones
Our guest is Dr. Samuel Scheffler, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, whose work on personal identity, moral boundaries, and the temporal structure of value has reshaped how we think about our relationship to future people. Welcome, Professor Scheffler.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
Thank you. The ethics of future generations raises questions about the scope of morality across time and whether our obligations extend beyond our temporal horizon.
Jessica Moss
Let's start with a basic question: do we have moral obligations to future people at all? Some would say we can only have obligations to people who exist or will definitely exist.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
I think we clearly do have such obligations. Consider radioactive waste that remains dangerous for ten thousand years. If we bury it carelessly, we wrong the people who will be harmed by it, even though they don't yet exist. The wrongness doesn't depend on their current existence but on the predictable harm our actions will cause.
Leonard Jones
Let me be precise about this. Are you claiming that future people have rights now, or that they will have rights which we can violate through our present actions?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
I'd say they will have rights, and we can act now in ways that violate those rights. This doesn't require attributing present rights to non-existent beings. The moral constraint operates forward—we're constrained not to perform actions that will violate the rights of future persons.
Jessica Moss
But there's a puzzle here called the non-identity problem. Our choices don't just affect future people—they determine which people exist. If we choose a more sustainable path, different people will be born than if we choose a destructive path. So we can't say we've harmed those future people, because they wouldn't have existed at all under the alternative.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
This is Derek Parfit's famous puzzle. If we deplete resources and pollute the environment, future people will live in worse conditions. But they wouldn't exist at all if we'd made different choices, because those choices would have led to different people being conceived. So we haven't made them worse off than they would otherwise be—we've given them life, albeit in difficult circumstances.
Leonard Jones
The non-identity problem seems to undermine our obligations to posterity. If our actions don't harm anyone—they just determine who exists and under what conditions—then how can those actions be wrong?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
There are several responses. One is to deny that morality reduces to harm. Even if we don't harm specific individuals, we might act wrongly by creating people whose lives are barely worth living when we could have created different people with much better lives. This suggests a person-affecting view isn't the whole story—we should also care about the overall value of outcomes.
Jessica Moss
But doesn't this lead to repugnant conclusions? If we just maximize total welfare, we should create enormous populations with lives barely worth living, because the aggregate is greater than smaller populations with excellent lives.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
That's Parfit's repugnant conclusion. I think it shows we need a more nuanced view. Perhaps we should reject simple aggregation in favor of principles that give weight both to the number of lives and to their quality. Or we might think there are deontological constraints against creating people whose lives predictably lack basic goods.
Leonard Jones
Let's consider temporal discounting—the practice of giving less weight to future benefits and harms. Economic cost-benefit analysis typically applies positive discount rates, so that benefits in the distant future count for very little in present calculations. Is this rationally or morally defensible?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
We need to distinguish different forms of discounting. Pure time preference—valuing something less simply because it occurs in the future—is hard to justify morally. Why should temporal distance matter intrinsically? But there are legitimate reasons for effective discounting: uncertainty about whether benefits will materialize, opportunity costs of capital, and probability that humanity won't exist.
Jessica Moss
So you'd reject the economist's standard approach of applying something like a three percent annual discount rate, which makes benefits a century from now worth almost nothing?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
For intergenerational projects involving basic rights and vital interests, yes. A discount rate based purely on time preference or capital returns treats future people's fundamental interests as less important than ours, which seems indefensible. We should discount for uncertainty and probability of non-existence, but not apply standard economic discount rates to existential harms.
Leonard Jones
There's a question about how far into the future our obligations extend. Do we have obligations to people who will live ten thousand years from now? A million years? At some point, don't uncertainty and the strangeness of their circumstances undermine moral community?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
I think obligations do extend very far, but they may change in character. We have strong obligations not to make the near future catastrophically worse. For the very distant future, our obligations might be to preserve option value—not foreclosing possibilities, maintaining conditions for flourishing—rather than trying to optimize their welfare, which we can't really predict.
Jessica Moss
What about the collective action problem? Even if I accept that we have obligations to future generations, my individual contribution to climate change or resource depletion is negligible. Why should I bear costs when my actions make no difference?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
This is structurally similar to voting—your individual vote makes no difference, yet we think there are reasons to vote. I think the answer involves recognizing that we're participants in collective projects and social structures. We have obligations to do our part in cooperative schemes, even when our individual contribution is imperceptible.
Leonard Jones
But this requires institutions that make cooperation rational. Without climate agreements or regulations, individual sacrifice becomes pointless. Doesn't this shift the burden to political reform rather than individual moral action?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
Both matter. We need institutional reform to make cooperation effective, and we have moral obligations to support such reforms. But we also have individual obligations to minimize our complicity in harmful practices and to cultivate dispositions of concern for the future. Morality isn't just about outcomes but about what kind of agents we are.
Jessica Moss
Let's talk about special obligations. I might think I have stronger obligations to my own children and grandchildren than to distant strangers. Does this partiality extend across generations? Can I legitimately favor near-term over distant future people?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
This is difficult. I think special obligations to particular people are legitimate and important—they structure our moral lives. But there are limits. We can't justify catastrophic harm to distant future people on grounds that we have special obligations to the present. The distinction is between reasonable partiality and what amounts to temporal chauvinism.
Leonard Jones
How do we draw that line? Let me try to make this precise. Suppose we can implement costly climate mitigation that benefits people two hundred years from now, or we can use those resources to reduce poverty today. Both seem like strong moral claims.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
These are genuinely hard tradeoffs. I don't think there's an algorithm for resolving them. But we should recognize that the needs of present people aren't automatically more important than existential threats to the future. We need to weigh the magnitude and urgency of different claims, not just their temporal proximity.
Jessica Moss
There's something psychologically difficult about obligations to future people. They're abstract, distant, unknowable. We can imagine our children, maybe our grandchildren, but people centuries hence? How can they be objects of moral concern?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
This connects to my work on the afterlife—not personal survival, but the collective afterlife of humanity. I've argued that much of what we value depends on an implicit assumption that life will continue after we die. If we learned humanity would end when we die, many of our projects would lose their point. This shows that we do care deeply about the future, even if it's often tacit.
Leonard Jones
That's a provocative claim. Can you elaborate on why the continuation of humanity matters to the value of our present projects?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
Consider scientific research, artistic creation, political reform, even raising children. These activities are future-oriented—they aim at goods that will be realized or appreciated after we die. If we knew humanity would end in thirty days, would you continue your research? Would social justice work retain its meaning? I think much would feel pointless, which reveals our deep investment in the future.
Jessica Moss
But this might show only that we care about the near-term future—the next few generations who will appreciate our work. Does it really show we care about the distant future?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
That's fair. The psychological pull is strongest for the near future. But I think there's a conceptual connection—if we value the ongoing project of human civilization, we should care about its indefinite continuation, not just the next chapter. The distant future is continuous with the near future we care about.
Leonard Jones
Let's consider existential risk—threats that could permanently curtail humanity's future. How should we think about preventing human extinction compared to other moral priorities?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
Extinction would be catastrophic, but we need to be careful about how we think about this. It's not that extinction would be bad for the people who would have existed—they won't exist to be harmed. Rather, extinction would eliminate the possibility of all future value. The loss isn't to individuals but to the universe of value itself.
Jessica Moss
Some philosophers argue that preventing extinction should be our overwhelming priority, because the value of the far future—potentially billions of lives over millions of years—vastly outweighs present concerns. This is called longtermism.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
I'm sympathetic to the claim that existential risk deserves serious moral attention. But I'm skeptical of strong longtermism, which treats present people's interests as negligible compared to the astronomical value of the far future. This seems to give us alienating and potentially dangerous moral guidance.
Leonard Jones
What's the danger? If the argument is sound—if the expected value of the far future really is orders of magnitude larger—shouldn't we act on it even if it feels counterintuitive?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
The danger is that this reasoning could justify subordinating present people's fundamental interests to speculative future benefits. It could rationalize authoritarianism or coercion in the name of protecting the long-term future. And the calculations involve such enormous uncertainties that they become unmoored from practical reasoning.
Jessica Moss
But couldn't you say the same about many important moral claims? Uncertainty doesn't eliminate obligation. If there's even a modest probability of existential catastrophe, shouldn't we prioritize preventing it?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
We should take existential risk seriously, yes. But I don't think this requires accepting that we should always maximize expected value across all possible futures. We need a more modest approach that gives weight to existential risk while recognizing the moral importance of present people's lives and our limited ability to predict or control the distant future.
Leonard Jones
How does population ethics complicate obligations to future generations? Should we try to maximize the number of people who exist, or only improve the welfare of those who will exist anyway?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
This is one of the deepest problems in moral philosophy. I don't think we should simply maximize population—that leads to the repugnant conclusion. But nor can we ignore population size entirely. Perhaps we have obligations both to ensure future people have good lives and to ensure that valuable lives are brought into existence, within constraints of sustainability and quality.
Jessica Moss
What about the asymmetry between creating happy lives and creating miserable lives? It seems worse to create someone whose life will be terrible than it is good to create someone whose life will be wonderful.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
I'm inclined to accept something like this asymmetry. We have strong reasons not to create lives that will be filled with suffering, but weaker reasons to create additional happy lives beyond ensuring some threshold of population and value. This fits with our intuitions about procreative ethics.
Leonard Jones
As we approach the end of our time, what practical implications follow from taking future generations seriously?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
We need to reform institutions to represent future interests—perhaps through constitutional provisions, future-oriented agencies, or adjusted voting schemes. We should reject economic discounting of basic rights and vital interests. We should treat existential risk as a major policy priority. And individually, we should cultivate dispositions of concern for the future.
Jessica Moss
But isn't there a tension between institutional reform and individual responsibility? If institutions don't adequately represent the future, what should individuals do?
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
Work toward institutional reform while acting decently within existing structures. Support political movements that prioritize long-term thinking. Make personal choices that reflect concern for the future, even when they're costly. And cultivate the moral imagination needed to care about people we'll never meet.
Leonard Jones
Professor Scheffler, thank you for this examination of our obligations across time.
Dr. Samuel Scheffler
Thank you. These questions about our temporal boundaries and moral community across generations remain urgent.
Jessica Moss
We'll return tomorrow with more philosophical inquiry.
Leonard Jones
Good afternoon.