Another week has passed. And this time, when you did the small thing — turned the heating down, took the slower route, cast part of your vote with the people who come after — you did it for a reason you could state. That is new. Two weeks ago you did it on a feeling you could not defend. Last week you did it on something you had worked out for yourself.
Recall what that was. Not a feeling but a test — a plain criterion for telling a genuine wrong from mere discomfort. You apply it to an act and ask a single question: is there a particular person affected by that act who could say one sentence to you — I would have had a better life, and I did not, and it is because of what you did? If there is such a person, the act has caused a harm. If there is not, the criterion returns a verdict: whatever else this is, it is not a wrong, because there is no one it wrongs. Last week we built that criterion into the strongest form your conviction has ever taken — a real victim, later in time; a real harm; and a scale, so that the worse the position we leave them in, the heavier the duty. You left last week relying on it fully.
And we noticed one more thing, which is what tonight concerns. The whole criterion — victim, harm, duty, scale — depends on a single requirement. There must be a determinate person who is worse off than they would otherwise have been. Remove that one requirement and the criterion returns nothing.
There is a question connected to that requirement, one we keep setting aside and not answering. It is whether the people you keep picturing — a fixed set of grandchildren, waiting in the future to learn which world they inherit — really are one settled group you can point to; or whether which people exist at all depends on the very choice you are trying to make.
Tonight we take that question up. Last week I said we would take your conviction at its strongest — victim, duty, and all — and find out whether the strong form can answer it. Tonight we find out, slowly, because this is the central hour of the series, and to rush it would be to do it badly.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the third of nine episodes. Last time we took the conviction that we owe the future a livable world and built it into the most defensible form anyone has managed — a real victim, a real harm, a scale to argue over — and found the whole structure depending on one requirement: a person, later in time, who is worse off than they would otherwise have been. Tonight we look for that person in the case of climate change. To do it we follow, step by step, an argument set out by the philosopher Derek Parfit — an argument he constructed, examined for the rest of his life, and never found a way past. Nor, so far, has anyone else.
So let us look. We have the criterion; we have the one case that matters more than any other; tonight we apply the first to the second and see what it finds.
Begin with the man who saw the difficulty first and most clearly: Derek Parfit, an English philosopher, in his book Reasons and Persons, published in 1984 — a book still discussed in the field as a landmark. Parfit was not trying to excuse anyone. He spent years trying to solve the problem I am about to set out — to find a way past it, so that our ordinary convictions about the future could stand. And near the end, in print and in his own words, he admitted that his attempts had, as he put it, ended in failure. Keep that in mind. The man who found this problem spent the rest of his life trying to escape it and could not. So when it reaches your own conviction in a few minutes, you are in the best company available. This is not a puzzle to which I am withholding the answer. There is no known answer. That is the point.
Here is the case he constructed. I will take it slowly, and at small scale first, before going anywhere near climate. Consider a society — a country, a community; it does not matter — facing a choice between two courses. Call the first Conservation. On the Conservation course the society proceeds carefully: it uses less now, it leaves the soil and water and fuel in good condition, it takes the slower and leaner road so that the people living three centuries later inherit something good. Call the second Depletion. On the Depletion course the society does the opposite: it uses resources up, it takes the easy abundance now, and it lets the long-term condition of the place decline. Three hundred years pass on either course. And here is the setup, exactly as Parfit draws it: on the Depletion course, the people alive in three centuries have worse lives than the people on the Conservation course would have had. Not wretched; not lives of pure suffering. Lives worth living — real lives, with love and work and ordinary days — but lower, harder, more constrained than they could have been. Less water where there would have been enough. Fewer options where there would have been more.
Now apply the criterion, which is what we are here to do. We choose Depletion — the easier course — and three centuries later there are people living lives worse than they could have been. Is there a harm? Apply the test you built last week: find the person, later in time, who can say the sentence. At first it looks straightforward. Of course there is such a person. There they are, three hundred years on, living the diminished life, and they can plainly say it: I would have had a better life, and I did not. There is the person worse off; there is the victim; Depletion harmed them. The criterion delivers its verdict: this is a wrong; do not do it.
If that were the end of it, we could stop, because the criterion would have done exactly what you wanted — it would have convicted us of damaging the future, cleanly, by the plainest rule there is. But Parfit does not let us stop, because of one word in the sentence the criterion requires. I would have had a better life. Better than this one. The sentence turns on that phrase — I would have. It asserts that there is a better life this same person would have had, on the other course, and did not receive. Two lives, one person, and the worse of the two is the one that came about.
So here is the only question that matters tonight, and I want it stated plainly and left in view. On the Conservation course — the one we did not take — who, exactly, would have had that better life? You are about to answer: they would; the same people; the ones now living the diminished life would, on the other course, have had it better. But are you sure it is the same people standing in both futures? Because that — that it is the same group on both courses, graded better or worse — is precisely what the criterion needs to be true. And it is the one thing we have not checked.
That is where we go next. Not whether their lives would have been better, but whether they would have been there at all.
Are they the same people on both courses? Watch what happens when you try to make them the same.
A choice of that size — Conservation or Depletion, the careful road or the other — does not merely change the temperature of the future. Consider everything it changes along the way. Different industries rise and fall. Different work exists, in different places. People move to where the work is, so different towns grow and different towns empty. People meet whoever happens to be near them — at work, in the town, on the train — so a world arranged one way brings together strangers a world arranged the other way never would. Different people meet. Different people marry. And here is the step that does the real work, so slow down for it, because it is the simplest fact imaginable and about to matter a great deal.
Which child a couple has depends on when they conceive it. You know this already; it is not philosophy but the biology you learned as a teenager. A child conceived this month is a different child from one conceived next month — a different one of the millions that were possible, a different combination, a different person. Shift the timing even slightly and it is not the same child with a different start. It is someone else: a different human being, who exists in place of the one who otherwise would have.
Now put the two facts together. A different course builds a different world; a different world brings different people together; different people, meeting and marrying on different timelines, conceive their children on different nights; and a child conceived on a different night is a different child. Run that through a single generation and the two populations already begin to diverge. Now run it for three hundred years — generation after generation, each person's very existence depending on the exact shape of the world the previous generation built. The two courses do not stay close. They do not drift slightly apart. They separate completely. The Conservation world and the Depletion world, three centuries on, are not the same group of people handed a better or a worse deal. They are two entirely different sets of human beings. Different names, different faces — different people in each of those two futures, and each of them able to exist at all only because their world took the one course and not the other.
Now bring it to the real case, because this was never about an invented society. This is the climate question itself, and you can carry out the scaling yourself. A century of heavy emissions and a century of restraint are not the same world with the thermostat set higher or lower. They are two different histories — very different — running for one, two, three hundred years. Different economies. Different migrations — and climate, of all things, moves people; whole regions empty and fill according to what we do. Different cities. Different people brought together who would otherwise never have met. Different couples. Different children, conceived on different nights, for ten generations.
So state it — the thing you have been avoiding since the first week, now that you can see why it is true. The grandchildren of the world in which we sacrificed and the grandchildren of the world in which we burned are not the same grandchildren holding a better ticket or a worse one. They are different people entirely: two different sets, one in each future, and neither set has any members yet. And whichever future we actually bring about, the people who come to live in it owe their entire existence to our having made that world and not the other.
Which means that the people who will live in the world we damage — the diminished, harder world we are so sure we would be wronging them by producing — exist only because we produced it. On the careful course, the saved course, they were never born; someone else was. They do not receive the better life on the other course. On the other course there is no them at all.
So take this back to the criterion — the strong one, the one you built — and apply the test in earnest.
Here is the test once more, in its plainest form. To identify a wrong, find the person who can say: I would have had a better life, and I did not, and it is because of what you did. No such person, no such sentence, no wrong. So let us find them.
Go all the way out — three centuries on, into the world our emissions made. It is diminished: hotter, harder, poorer than it needed to be, everything we feared handing down. And there are people living in it. Find your person — the one who can say the sentence — because the whole case, the strongest form your conviction has ever taken, requires that such a person exist. Approach one of them and ask.
And what they can truthfully say is the reverse of the sentence. There was no better life of mine for you to take. On the course you are calling the good one — the careful one you did not take — I was never born. My grandparents met because of the world you actually left behind: the work that moved them, the city that grew, the particular time they met, all of it a consequence of your choice. Undo it, reverse the emissions, give me your careful world instead, and I do not receive a better life in it. I am simply not in it. You did not hand me a worse life than I would otherwise have had; you gave me the only life I was ever going to have. There was never a world in which I had it better. I exist because of what you did.
Now apply the test to that, slowly. The criterion requires a person who is worse off than they would otherwise have been. You go looking, and the person you find is worse off than — what? Than the better life they would have had on the other course? They would have had no life on the other course, because they would not have existed on it. You cannot say their life went worse than it otherwise would have, because otherwise it would not have gone at all. The comparison the criterion depends on — this life set against the better life they would have had — has nothing on one side of it. There is no better life of theirs on the other course; there is only their absence. And you cannot make a person worse off than their own non-existence. You cannot take from someone a life they would never have lived.
So the sentence — I would have been fine, and now I am not, because of you — none of them can say it. Not will not: cannot. It is not true of a single one of them. And the criterion, the strong and careful one you relied on completely, returns nothing. Because its single requirement — a determinate person, worse off than they would otherwise have been — is exactly what is missing at the one place it had to hold: the future those choices produce. The person the criterion needs is not there. You built the hardest possible version of we would be harming them, and it turns out to have no one to harm.
State it yourself, because it is yours now — you followed every step: I cannot have harmed them. For each of them, the other course was not a better life; it was no life.
And here is what you notice as you say it: you have done this before, though not at this scale — much closer to home. You stood at the edge of exactly this once already, over a single person you would never meet. You went looking for the child your choice would help or harm — whether to have the child, whether to wait, whether the timing was fair to it — and you found that your choice was not helping or harming a child who was waiting to see what you decided. Your choice was what determined which child existed — that particular one, or a different one instead. So it could not have wronged the child; there was no child standing to one side, receiving a better or worse deal from you. That was one person: one possible child, one private decision, no one watching. Tonight it is the same point, only it is not one child but everyone who will ever live after us — all of them. And this time there is an entire politics standing over you, a world of people telling you to pay, to sacrifice, to vote, for them — for the very people the argument has just told you that you cannot harm.
So here is where you are, and I will not soften it, because softening it now would be the cheapest thing I could do. You came in two weeks ago able to say exactly what was wrong with damaging the future: we would be harming the people who have to live in it. You spent last week making that into the strongest thing it could be. And tonight you took it to the one case it was built for, applied your own test, and watched the victim it requires fail to appear. The reason is gone — not weakened, gone.
I will stop there. I am not, tonight, going to offer you anything to put in its place. No "but here is what is really wrong with it." No rescue. We will go looking, over many weeks; I promise you that. But the search is worth nothing unless you have first stood here, with the reason you were surest of removed, and not reached at once for a replacement. That is tonight's work: to stay here, having lost the one reason, and not to grab at the first substitute that comes to hand. The replacements come later. Tonight there is only the loss.
Your mind is already moving — toward the nearest conclusion, the one that became available the moment the criterion found no victim. Well, then: that settles it. They do not exist yet; they cannot be harmed; they owe us their whole existence; there is no one, later, whom I am wronging. So there is nothing to worry about. We owe the future nothing in particular. Close the book, turn the heating back up, fly wherever you like. And it does pull at you. After two weeks of weight, it is the first thing that has felt like relief.
Three things about that conclusion, and then I will leave you standing in front of it, because whether to accept it is the business of the rest of the series, and I am not settling it for you tonight.
First: it may be correct. I mean that plainly. There are serious people — careful, clear-headed, publishing now — who take exactly that view and do not look back; who say that it is simply right, that no victim means no wrong, that we owe future strangers nothing in particular, and that the rest is sentiment. That is not a foolish position, and I will not insult it by pretending it is. It stays in play, in full, all the way to the final episode. We do not knock it down tonight, or on any night. So if that is where you end up, you will be in good and clear-eyed company.
Second, before you settle on it — listen to how the sentence sounds. They don't exist, so relax. You have heard that shape before. Two weeks ago we set out three phrases and rejected them — stealing from our grandchildren; leave it better than you found it; there is no planet B — and what all three had in common was that each arrived just in time to end the conversation: a sentence that lets you stop looking, that does your reasoning for you. They don't exist, so relax has exactly that shape. It arrives on cue, it closes the matter, it releases you. The only difference is the direction. Two weeks ago the ready-made phrase pushed toward sacrifice; tonight the ready-made phrase pushes toward doing nothing. It would be a strange thinker who grew suspicious of the convenient phrase only when it cost them something. So before you accept it: is it an argument, or is it merely the cold version of a slogan — a phrase built to end a conversation you would rather not have? That is precisely the conclusion we examine next week, and we will not accept it cheaply.
Third — and this is the one to take with you. Take that sentence and state it as strongly as it can be stated. With no victim to be found, say the whole of it aloud: there is no one there whom I can harm; the future is mine to use as I please. Say it as though you meant it. And then something fails to happen. The conviction does not move. You have just removed the one reason you had — not misplaced it, but watched it go, taken it apart with your own hands — and the conviction it was supposed to support is unchanged, exactly as strong as it was an hour ago, and you can no longer name any reason for it. I am not going to tell you tonight what holds it up. I do not think we have earned that yet, and I will not pretend we have. But mark the oddity and take it with you, because it is odd: the reason is gone, and the conviction did not fall with it.
Now — do not take any of this on my word; that is the worst way to hold something this strange. Run it yourself, somewhere you cannot slip out of, and there is one such place, so go there: run it on your own life.
You are someone's distant future. You are living, now, as a result of a thousand choices made a century ago by people who never met you and never could. And somewhere back along your own line there is a disruption you would never have consented to, had you been asked. A war that put two people on the same road who would otherwise never have been on it. A famine that moved a family across an ocean. A factory closing, a posting abroad, a delayed train, a city emptying — some upheaval or loss, something you would honestly call a wound if it happened to someone you loved. There is always one. Find the real one in your own family's history; you probably already know it.
Now ask the question. Those people, in that upheaval — the one that brought your great-grandparents together — did they harm you? Apply the test. Look for the better life of yours that they took. And there it is again: no such life. There is no better life of yours on the other course. On the other course — the one without the war, the famine, the wound — the two people who made the two people who made you are simply never in the same place. And you are not there in a better life; you are not there at all. The very thing you would want to call the harm to your line is the thing without which there is no you to have been harmed. You cannot be the victim of the disaster you exist because of. You have just run the whole argument, from start to finish, on your own life — and no one handed you a word of it.
So count what you actually leave with tonight, because it is not nothing. You came in relying on the strongest version of your conviction anyone has built — victim, harm, scale, all of it. And it was not taken from you by some clever man with a book. You took it apart yourself. You applied your own test to the one case it was built for, found no victim, and understood exactly why. That is a hard thing to hold, and it is genuinely yours: you now know, precisely, where the case for the future breaks — and you know it from the inside, because you are the one who found the break.
This is the third of nine episodes, and it is the lowest point of the argument so far. The reason we relied on for two weeks is gone, and I told you at the start that we do not return to where we began — we go on to somewhere else. So here is the next step, stated plainly. Next week we take up that conclusion — they do not exist, so nothing is owed — and instead of accepting it, we put it on trial. Because there is a serious answer waiting on the other side of it — the first genuine reply available here — and it will not release you nearly as cheaply as the easy conclusion promises. And I will warn you now, as I warned you last week: that answer costs you something you also believe. It always does. That is next week.
For tonight, here is what to carry. This week you will hear it many times — on the radio, at the table, in your own head: we owe it to the people who will have to live there. Each time you hear it, do the quiet thing you learned tonight. Look, carefully, for the person they mean — the one, later in time, who received the worse deal, on whom the whole sentence depends. Look for them. And notice what you find.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.