Last week we reached the most serious ground the argument had found, and then we found that we could not live on it.
The claim was this: a worse world is worse, even when it wrongs no particular person. It did what the earlier answers could not. It stepped past the difficulty that had defeated the idea of a victim, because it never needed a victim at all. But followed to the end, it led somewhere no one can accept — a vastly crowded world of lives barely worth living, which, by its own arithmetic, counts as better than the smaller world we actually value. An argument we could not fault, leading to a place we could not go.
So this week the search begins again. Not backwards — we are not returning to the cheapest answer, the one that said future people do not yet exist, so nothing is owed to them. That answer is still standing; we have not refuted it; but we have felt how little it leaves us. And not sideways either, to the impersonal sum — the view that adds up all the good in the universe into a single total — because we watched that view break last week. Both of these large answers turned out to be ones no one can live by, and they fail in opposite directions. One asks too little of us. The other asks us to believe too much. Neither has been refuted. Both remain open. We simply cannot settle on either.
And so the search turns to something between them — something the size of a single person. Not a lone victim; we set that aside two weeks ago. And not the whole of value summed up; that broke last week. Something in the middle: one human being who will be alive after we are gone. Not the harm we might do them. Their standing. The plain thought that whoever lives after us has a claim on us — a standing of their own, from which to say you owed me better — simply by being one of the people who will be here.
That is a good thought. It may be the most natural one in this whole inquiry. And tonight we are going to take it seriously — more seriously than the familiar phrases ever do.
Here is the idea it depends on. There is a setting in which we work out what we owe one another: the case of two people who can face each other and settle their accounts. Tonight we are going to try to bring someone who is not yet born into that setting. We will try it twice, by two developed methods. And I will tell you now what goes wrong both times, so that you can watch it happen: the person whose claim it is has not arrived. The place kept for them is empty. It has been empty all along — only this time it is not the witness who is missing, but the very person who is supposed to be making the demand.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the fifth of nine episodes. Last week we put the cheapest answer on trial and found a more serious ground waiting behind it — a worse world is worse, wronging no one and worse all the same — and then we watched it cost us the one thing no one can accept, the crowded, joyless world that outscores the world we love. Tonight we follow the search for something person-sized: the standing of future people themselves. We take it down its two most demanding roads — what we would fairly agree to across the generations, and what the future is owed as a matter of plain right — and we find the single difficulty on which both of them break.
Let me set out carefully what the search is reaching for, because the direction is right even if it finds nothing to hold on to.
For three weeks we have been working with two kinds of answer, and it is worth seeing where each one leaves us. The first kind says that morality is about people being harmed. Someone is worse off than they would otherwise have been; that is the wrong, and the duty is to prevent it. That answer failed, because the future we fear contains no one who is worse off — the people there owe their whole existence to the very choices we would be blamed for. No victim, no harm, nothing registered. The second kind of answer gave up on victims and turned to scale: never mind who is harmed, count the good; a world with more good in it is the better world. That answer survives the difficulty, but no one can live where it leads.
So here is a third question, and it is a genuine one, not an evasion between the first two. We stop asking who is harmed, and we stop asking how much good there is in the world, and we ask something different: who has a claim on me? Not harm. Not a sum. Standing — the plain idea that a person can be owed something, can have a position from which to say that was not fair to me, whether or not there is any measurable injury to point to, and whether or not the world contains more good. This is something we believe in constantly. It is most of what we mean by justice. I am not permitted to break a promise to you merely because, on the whole, breaking it produces a slightly better world. You have a claim, and you can stand on it.
Here is the idea underneath it. Think of the ordinary case in which two people who can face one another work out what they owe each other. That is where claims of this kind live. Each can make a demand of the other; they can argue it out; and the reason either has any position at all is that both are present, both real, both able to deal. If I wrong you, you can press back. If I need something from you, I have to come to you and make my case. Justice, on this picture, is something that holds between parties who are present to one another.
And it is easy to see why this is more attractive than what came before. It does not need a victim with a measurable injury, so the non-identity problem does not obviously destroy it the way it destroyed the harm answer. And it does not ask us to believe in an impersonal sum, so it does not drag us to the crowded, joyless world. It is the size of a person. It is what the familiar phrases were always pointing at and never earning — we owe it to our grandchildren — except that now we are going to try to make good on the phrase: to say what the owing is, and who holds the claim, and why.
So tonight we try to extend that relation to the people who will come after us. There are two ways to do it — two real traditions, not two slogans — and each deserves its full hearing before the strain shows. The first keeps the relation exactly as it is and tries to find the future a place within it: an agreement across the generations, fair terms between us and the people who come later. The second decides that the whole framework is too narrow for the task and abandons it: it holds that the future needs no place in any agreement, because some claims do not run through an agreement at all. They simply hold.
Begin with the first, because it is the one most careful people reach for, and it brings to the question the most fully worked-out apparatus anyone has built.
Here is the idea, and notice how developed it is before I test it.
Stop asking what you feel you owe the future. Ask instead what you would agree to — under conditions fair enough that the agreement would genuinely bind. This is the tradition called contractualism, and at its centre is one of the most famous thought experiments in the subject. It is John Rawls's, from his book A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. Suppose you had to settle the rules — how much each generation saves, how much it uses up, what it leaves behind — but you had to do it from behind what Rawls called the veil of ignorance. Behind the veil you know all the general facts. What you do not know is which generation you belong to. You might be us, with the cheap energy and the full reserves. You might be a generation three hundred years later, inheriting whatever is left. You have to choose the terms without knowing which end of them you will live.
Consider what that does. The moment you do not know which generation you are, you cannot tilt the agreement towards your own. You cannot say use it all now, because now may not be when you are born. You would want enough set aside that, whoever you turn out to be, you inherit a working concern — functioning institutions, a habitable world, a fair start. Rawls gave this a name: the just-savings principle. Each generation owes the next enough to keep just institutions alive across time. Not maximum welfare — not the impersonal sum; we have set that view aside entirely — but the conditions of justice, handed forward intact. The future is owed a fair inheritance, and you work out what is fair by asking what you would agree to without knowing where in the sequence you would be born.
There is a second version of the same instinct, sharper in some respects, from Thomas Scanlon, in his book What We Owe to Each Other, published in 1998. Set aside the veil, and set aside saving. Scanlon holds that an act is wrong if it is disallowed by principles that no one affected could reasonably reject. That is the test — not whether the act maximises the good, but whether you could justify it to every person it touches, on terms they could not reasonably refuse. And the people it touches include those who come later. So before doing lasting damage, you have to ask whether there is a principle here that the people who would live in the damaged world could not reasonably reject. If there is, you are not permitted to act on it. The duty is not to a sum and not to a victim. It is the duty to be able to justify yourself — to everyone affected, including the not-yet-born — in terms they could not fairly refuse.
Consider how much this gives us. It does not rest on a feeling we cannot ground; it rests on fairness, which we already believe in and use many times a day. It explains why the familiar phrases always reached for the language of owing, and of fairness to our grandchildren — because that was the right language all along, the language of claims and fair terms, and the phrases simply never did the work to back it up. This does the work. It tells us the future has a claim on us, says exactly what the claim is — a fair inheritance, terms we could justify — and grounds it in the one thing no party can wave away: that the terms must be fair to everyone they fall on, and not everyone gets to be us.
If you were looking for a place to settle this whole question, you could be forgiven for thinking you had just found it. Mark that sense — the sense of having finally settled the matter. I am about to take it seriously enough to show where it fails.
The difficulty starts with a question that sounds like a technicality and is not. Who counts as a party to the agreement?
Go back to the picture. A claim, on the contractualist view, holds between parties who are present to one another — who can deal, press back, walk away, come to terms. Philosophers have a name for the conditions that must hold before justice applies at all. David Hume identified them, in A Treatise of Human Nature; Rawls took the term and built on it. He called them the circumstances of justice. Roughly: moderate scarcity, and a group of people of roughly equal power, each vulnerable to the others, who can meet their needs only by cooperating. That is when fair terms become a live question — when I can help or harm you and you can do the same to me, so that both of us would rather have an agreement than not. The framework is built for that: for people who can face one another.
Now ask it of the future. Are they parties to the agreement? They are not. They do not yet exist — and that is not a detail; it is the whole problem we have been circling for a month. They cannot deal with us. They cannot press back, cannot withhold cooperation, cannot walk away from a bad offer, cannot make a counter-offer. Whatever power runs between us and them runs one way only: all of it ours, none of it theirs. They are the most completely powerless party imaginable, because they are not a party at all. They meet not one of the conditions under which fair terms were meant to apply.
You can see the contractualist framework under strain from the very thing it is trying to reach. And this is not an objection imported from outside; it is a strain the tradition felt from within. Here is the honest history. When Rawls first ran the original position, he noticed that the parties behind the veil, as he had described them, had no reason to save anything for the future at all. Why would they? He had built them to be mutually disinterested — each concerned only with its own generation's share. And saving is a peculiar, one-way sacrifice: it only ever benefits a generation that comes later. You cannot save backwards. So parties who care only about their own share have no reason to bear a cost whose entire benefit goes to someone who is not them. Rawls's response was to revise the setup: he added a special assumption — that the parties care, at least, about their immediate descendants — to make saving come out. And whether that assumption really follows from the original position — whether choosers who do not know their generation have any genuine reason to provide for successors they will never meet, never deal with, never be — is disputed to this day. The most fully worked-out apparatus anyone built for this had to be adjusted by hand to make it reach the future at all. That is not a refutation. But it shows that the future does not sit naturally within this framework; it has to be brought in deliberately.
Scanlon's version runs into the same problem from a different direction. His test is what no one could reasonably reject. But can the not-yet-born reject anything? Can a principle be reasonably rejected by someone who does not exist — and, worse, by someone whose very existence depends on the principle being tested? Run the same objection we used before. Suppose the risky, high-emissions path is precisely the one that leads to a particular future person being born at all. Now offer that person the rejection test. They cannot say reject the policy that ruins my world, because rejecting that policy erases them — a different person would be born instead. The one who would object is brought into being by the very act they would object to. This is the same objection that removed the victim two weeks ago — the non-identity problem — and it removes the claimant here in exactly the way it removed the victim. Whether reasonable rejection can even range over merely possible people is an open question; no one has closed it.
And here — this is the part to mark — we have met this shape before. The last time, it was about you, not the planet: the thought that the deepest things you owe were never things you agreed to. You did not consent to your parents, or to the language that does your thinking, or to the country whose debts you inherited. The contractualist picture is at its best for the things we do agree to, between people who can deal with one another. It has always strained on the duties that run the other way — owed by the strong to those who cannot deal back at all. We left that thread once; it returns here, and further out: the future is the purest case there is of someone you might owe everything and who can offer you nothing, agree to nothing, refuse nothing.
So where does that leave contractualism? Not dead — genuinely not dead, and I will not pretend otherwise. Many serious people spend their careers arguing that the future does belong within this framework and bringing it in by careful work, and many give the conditions-of-justice form of the duty their full respect. But note precisely what we have and do not have. We have a compelling form for the duty — fair terms, a fair inheritance, terms we could justify to anyone. What we do not have is a secure basis under it, because the one thing the whole apparatus requires — a party who is present, who can deal, who can refuse — is the one thing the future structurally cannot be. The arrangement is made; the place kept for the other party stays empty. We have given the duty a form and not found the person it is owed to.
So we do the only thing left. We give up the requirement of an agreement altogether.
Perhaps the whole difficulty was the requirement of an agreement. Perhaps a claim never needed an agreement in the first place.
Here is the thought, and it may be the most natural one of the night, because it is probably what you meant from the start. Forget what we would agree to. Forget whether anyone can sit down and bargain. A child born into a poisoned world — a wrecked, stripped-out place with no clean water, no working order, no room to become anything — that child is wronged. Not because we added up the welfare incorrectly, and not because they could have rejected some principle in some negotiation. They are wronged because they have a claim — a plain, standing claim — to the basic conditions of a human life. And that claim does not wait on an agreement. It does not need them present to bargain. It holds the way a right holds: against all comers, whether or not anyone ever signed anything.
This is the language of rights, and the most careful modern version of it for our purposes is Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach, set out in her book Frontiers of Justice, published in 2006 — a work concerned precisely with those the contract tradition struggles to include. She asks what a human life actually requires to be a life of dignity, not mere survival, and she sets it out as a list: ten central capabilities. Being able to live a life of normal length. Bodily health. Bodily integrity — safety, freedom of movement. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, to think. To have emotions and attachments. Practical reason — to form a plan of one's own life. Affiliation — to live with and towards others. Concern for animals, plants, and the natural world. Play. And some control over one's own environment, political and material. Each is owed up to a threshold — not maximised, not summed, simply brought up to the level a person's dignity requires. Fall below the threshold on any of them, and you have been denied something owed to you as a person.
Now turn that towards the future. The capabilities do not depend on when a person is born. Whoever the future turns out to be, they will be human, and being human they will have these claims — to health, to a body that is safe, to a world stable enough to think and plan and form attachments in. So the duty follows cleanly. We are not permitted to hand the future a world that drops them below the threshold. Not because a sum requires it, and not because they signed anything, but because the threshold is owed to any person, and they will be persons. No agreement is needed. The claim does not depend on an agreement. It stands on its own.
And the relief of it is real. It does not flinch. It says what one wanted to say four weeks ago, before any of this began — of course we owe them; they will be people, and people have a right to a decent world — except that now it is not a slogan but a worked-out account of exactly which conditions are owed, and why. It needs no victim who is worse off. It needs no impersonal sum. It needs no agreement the future cannot sign. It goes straight to the standing of a human being and locates the duty there. After the impersonal sum and the missing party, it arrives like the thing we meant all along.
So watch closely now, because the same difficulty lies under this one too.
Whoever is there, we said, has a right to the threshold. Whoever is there. But which lives are there depends on what we do — and that was the fact that broke the argument earlier, and it has not gone away. Take the high-emissions path and one set of people is born; take the careful path and a different set is born. So bring the rights claim to the case that matters. A particular child, in the depleted world, below the threshold — can we say her right was violated? Here is the difficulty: if we had taken the path that saved her world, she would never have existed. Some other child would be the one alive in the better world. So the act that pushed her below the threshold is the same act that gave her any life at all. Did we violate her right, when the alternative for her, specifically, was not a better life but no life? The right was supposed to belong to her. And her existence follows from the very thing we would be blamed for.
There is an answer, and it is the natural one, and it deserves a fair hearing, because this is where the serious work goes. The right, one says, is not held by her in particular. It is held by whoever will be there. The claim is to the threshold for the position — the place in the future that some human being will occupy — owed to its occupant, no matter who that turns out to be. And that genuinely evades the non-identity problem. But consider the cost as it lands. We now have a right with no rights-holder: a claim owed to whoever, to a person identified by nothing except the fact that they will show up. The whole force of a right was that it belonged to someone — someone who could stand on it and say this is mine, you owed it to me. To slip the difficulty, we have had to detach the right from any actual someone and attach it to a placeholder, a claimant who is, as of now, no one in particular. In the contractualist version, the place kept for the other party was empty because the person had not come. Here we have done away with the agreement, and the claim is left with no one to hold it, addressed only to whoever occupies the position. We escaped the need for the future to be present by making the holder of the claim no one at all.
Two roads, then. Contractualism needed a party who could deal, and the future cannot be one. Rights needed someone to hold the claim, and the future is, as yet, no one. Give up the agreement and you do not escape the missing person. You meet them again from the other side.
Let me set down where the night leaves us, because two real things happened and they need to be kept apart.
We came in reaching for something the size of a person. We had been caught between two answers neither of which anyone could live by, and the search turned to the middle — not the harm done to future people, not the sum of the good, but their standing: the plain idea that whoever comes after us has a claim on us, a position of their own. And tonight that idea turned out to have not one but two whole traditions behind it — careful, developed answers, the kind you reach for when you want a worked-out method and not merely a feeling. The first keeps the framework of agreement and tries to seat the future within it: fair terms across the generations, what you would agree to if you did not know which generation you would be born into, what no one who comes later could reasonably reject. The second gives up the agreement: a right to the threshold conditions of a decent life, owed to anyone who will live, agreement or no agreement. Two developed answers. We hold both of them now, and that is the gain, and it is real. We came in with a slogan about owing our grandchildren. We leave with two worked-out versions of what that owing could actually be.
And we found the difficulty they both break on, which is the harder gain, and the one to carry. They break on the same point. Contractualism needs a party who can deal — present, able to press back, able to refuse — and the future is the one party that structurally can be none of those things. Rights need someone to hold the claim — this is mine, you owed it to me — and the future is, as of now, no one in particular. Both answers locate the duty in the standing of future people. And both strain on the single fact this whole month keeps returning to: future people are not yet there to hold the claim. Try to seat them at the agreement, and the place is empty. Do away with the agreement, and the claim is left with no one to hold it. The absence that removed the victim two weeks ago has now removed the bargainer and the rights-holder as well. The same absence. Three grounds, and behind all three, one missing person.
Now hear what I am not saying, because the temptation runs both ways and I do not want you to leave with either. I am not telling you that contractualism is the answer, or that rights are the answer, or that one rescues the other. Neither is settled. Each gave us a true and compelling form for the duty, and neither found secure ground beneath it, and I would be selling you something if I crowned one tonight. Nor am I sending you back to the cheapest answer. The plain, hard view that we owe future strangers nothing in particular is still standing, exactly where we left it three weeks ago — some clear-eyed people hold it to the end, and we have not refuted it. And last week's impersonal ground, the worse world that wrongs no one, is still standing too, still cracked, exactly where we left it. Nothing was resolved tonight. The pile of unrefuted answers simply grew, and it grew in a particular shape: every ground that tries to root the duty in the future's own standing breaks on the future not being there to make the demand.
And then there is the feeling. I have to mark it, because it did the same thing again. We gave it two more reasons tonight — good ones, better than the slogans ever were — and then watched both of them fail. And the sense of obligation did not move. Three weeks running now we have handed it a reason and watched the argument fail while the sense of obligation stayed exactly as strong. I still will not tell you what holds it up. I do not think we have earned that yet. But you can no longer suppose it rests on any of the grounds we have tried, because you have watched it outlast every one of them — outlast the reason that broke and the grounds that merely cracked, and not weaken at all.
This is the fifth of nine, and we are two grounds further into the inquiry with the basis still not found. Here is the next step, stated plainly. So far we have argued this in the open, in the language of victims and worlds and claims. Next week someone arrives who says the whole argument was amateurish: the economists. They will tell you they settled this quietly, years ago — that they took the future, all of it, every life that will ever be lived, and put a price on it, a figure for what it is worth to us now. And that figure runs the world: it decides what we build, what we burn, what we leave behind. It looks like arithmetic. It looks like the one place in the whole argument where the feelings stop and the calculations begin. Next week we find the entire argument we have been having — every ground, every claim — sitting inside that one innocent-looking number. The ethics does not leave when the economists arrive. It is still there, hidden inside the number.
For now, here is what to take away — and something this strange only convinces you when you run it with your own hands, not when I run it for you. So do not use the planet; use a kitchen table. Picture money you could set aside for a grandchild you do not yet have — a child not yet conceived, who may never be conceived. Now run tonight's two arguments on it, in order. First, the agreement: imagine you did not know which of the two you would be born as, the grandparent who saves or the grandchild who inherits, and ask what division would be fair. You will reach an answer — and then notice that you are bargaining with no one, because the grandchild cannot agree to anything, cannot ask for more, is not yet anyone to sit across from you. Then set the agreement aside and try the right: surely the child simply has a claim on a fair start, signed or not. You will feel the force of it — and then notice that you cannot say whose claim it is, because there is no one there yet to hold it, only whoever turns out to arrive. Both approaches give you a form. Neither gives you the person. When you have run that for yourself, at your own table, with no one handing it to you, you will know exactly what it is to owe a debt and be unable to find the one you owe it to.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.