Philosophy for Us
Part Two · Across Time, Death & Meaning · Series 23

Climate & Future Generations

I'm sacrificing for people who don't exist yet and can't be harmed.

9 episodes ↓ 35 sources ↓ EthicsPolitical & Social

The question

You turned the thermostat down again. You took the train, the slow way, because the flight felt like something you'd have to answer for. You vote the way you vote partly for them — the ones who come after, the ones who'll inherit the mess. And you've never once let yourself finish the thought that sits underneath all of it: that you have no idea who they are. Not "you haven't met them." You can't meet them. They aren't late; they're not born. And here's the part that wakes you up. Picture the world if we change course — if we sacrifice, the way everyone says we should. Now picture the world if we don't. Two different futures. And not just two different worlds — two completely different sets of people. Different countries get built, different couples meet, different children get conceived on different nights. The grandchildren of the sacrificing world and the grandchildren of the burning world are not the same people who got a better or a worse deal. They're strangers to each other. Neither set exists yet. And whichever future we make, the people in it owe their entire existence — every breath — to our having made that one and not the other. So when you say you're doing it for them: for whom? The ones in the good future only get to be born because you chose it. You can't have wronged them by choosing the bad one. There'd just have been different people there, blaming you for nothing, because they'd never have existed to blame you at all.

What you practise

You already ask what we owe the people who come after us. Here the question changes shape. Most of us answer: we would be harming them. That reason fails. Big choices change who gets born, so people in a ruined future are not worse off than they would have been. Without the ruin they would not exist. You learn not to stop there. "Nobody is wronged" does not mean "nothing is bad". You also learn to find the moral choice hidden inside a number that looks like arithmetic. Nothing here hands you a verdict. You leave able to name the ground you stand on, and say what it cannot settle.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

  1. 01

    The strangers you're sacrificing for

    The small adjustments made with the future in mind — the thermostat, the slower train, part of a vote — are all made for people who do not yet exist. The first episode holds that unfinished thought still and asks who exactly is being sacrificed for, leaving the conviction standing but no longer secure.

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  2. 02

    Only wrong if it's worse for someone

    The most basic idea in morality — that a wrong requires someone it wrongs, a person made worse off than they would otherwise have been — is built into the strongest form the conviction about the future has taken. A real victim, a real harm, and a scale for the duty, all resting on one requirement that the next episode tests.

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  3. 03

    Different choices, different people

    Derek Parfit's non-identity problem, run at the scale of the climate. Change course or not, and different people are born of different choices — so no particular person in the wrecked future can say your choices made their life worse than it would otherwise have been. The reason relied on for two weeks returns no verdict, and the episode does not soften the result.

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  4. 04

    A worse world, full stop

    The convenient conclusion — no victim, so nothing owed — is examined rather than accepted, and against it stands the impersonal view that a worse world is simply worse, whoever lives in it. That view survives non-identity because it never needed a victim, and then meets Parfit's repugnant conclusion — an arithmetic no one can fault, leading to a vast world of barely bearable lives that no one can accept.

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  5. 05

    Standing across time

    A ground the size of a single person, between the lone victim and the cosmic sum — fair terms of the kind Rawls proposed, an agreement made without knowing which century you would be born into, and the plain thought that future people hold rights against us. Both give the duty a form; neither supplies the person, since the unborn cannot sign and a claim needs a holder.

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  6. 06

    The ethics hiding in a number

    The economists' offer — a discount rate that prices a harm a hundred years from now in today's figures, disputed between Stern and Nordhaus. The episode argues that the number is a moral choice presented as arithmetic; the ethics did not vanish into the calculation, it is hiding inside one figure that governs policy.

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  7. 07

    Acting in the dark

    Suppose the duty were settled — acting on it still requires knowing a future no one can know. The episode takes up decision under genuine uncertainty, where the calculation stalls for want of odds and the sober rule of guarding against the worst case points to an irreversible disaster down both roads without saying which to fear.

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  8. 08

    Responsibility runs downhill

    Hans Jonas's answer, deliberately held back — responsibility runs downhill, from our power to the future's helplessness, as a parent's duty runs to a child who never asked to exist. It rests on no victim, no sum, no contract and no claim; what it cannot say is how much fear on the future's behalf is enough.

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  9. 09

    Owed to whom?

    The final episode sets the five grounds side by side — harm, the worse world, fair terms, rights, and responsibility running downhill — none refuted, none able to settle the question, while the reluctance to wreck the world stands undiminished. No verdict is offered; the question of what is owed, and to whom, is handed back at its full weight.

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Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

Derek ParfitJohn RawlsThomas ScanlonMartha NussbaumNicholas SternWilliam NordhausJohn BroomeHans Jonas

Related series

Your turn

Your town has been offered a deal. The country needs somewhere to bury its spent nuclear fuel, and the rock under your valley is ideal. In return the town gets a new hospital, a school, and cheap power for fifty years. The waste stays dangerous for about a hundred thousand years. The engineers say a leak is very unlikely, but nobody can promise what rock and water will do over that long. The vote is next month.

  1. Say the waste leaks and poisons a village in the year 20,000. Would those villagers have been born if your town had voted no? If not, who has been wronged? Is the leak still bad?
  2. The government's figures count a death in the year 20,000 as almost nothing. Is that a fact about the future, or a choice about it? Whose choice?
  3. Nobody can put odds on what happens down there. Does that tell you to vote no, or only that you don't know? A no costs the hospital. Who pays for that?

A good answer names what the town owes the people who will live above the waste, if anything, and says on what ground — a ground that survives the fact that those villagers would owe their existence to the vote. It has to say where that ground runs out, and still get you to a vote.

Sources

Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.

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