Eight weeks ago we began with one conviction, and it seemed secure. We owe the future a livable world, and the reason was plain: to leave a wrecked world would be to harm the people who have to live in it — a wrong with a victim at the far end of it, like any other wrong.
One at a time, we examined the grounds for that conviction, and each gave way. The victim, it turned out, is not there: the people in a wrecked future are not worse-off versions of anyone who would otherwise have existed; they are different people, who exist only because of the choices that wrecked it. So we looked for another ground. A worse world, we said, is simply worse, whoever lives in it — and that ran into the objection about a vast population of barely bearable lives. We tried fair terms — the agreement we would have signed without knowing which century we would be born into — but the unborn cannot sign anything. We tried rights — a plain claim on us — but a claim has to be held by someone, and there is no one there yet to hold it. And last week we stopped looking for a ground at all and tried simply to act without one; the most sober rule we had pointed to a disaster down one road and a disaster down the other, and could not tell us which to fear.
Every basis we have tried has failed. One remains, which we have not yet examined.
For a month I have deliberately held one answer back. It is the deepest form of the question that has run under all eight weeks — if not the harm to them, then what? — and it is unlike every answer we have tried, because it does not rest on any of the things that failed. Not a victim. Not a sum. Not a contract. Not a claim. It approaches the problem from an entirely different direction. So it may not fail in the way the others did.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the eighth of nine episodes. Last time we tried to act toward the future without a settled reason; we reached for the sensible rule — guard against the worst case — and found that it pointed both ways at once, a catastrophe down each road with no measure to decide between them. Tonight we turn to the answer I kept for last. It holds that the duty was never the kind that runs across, between equals, from one party to another — which is why the search for a victim, a partner, or a claimant kept coming up empty. It holds that the duty runs in one direction only: from the one with power to the one wholly subject to it. Before the hour is out we will see what that can do — and the one thing it cannot.
Begin with something easy to miss, because it has been in plain view all month. Every ground we tried, and watched fail, failed at the same point. Not for different reasons — for one reason, in different guises each week.
Consider them again. "We would be harming them" requires a them — a victim, an injured party at the far end of the wrong. "Fair terms" requires a partner — someone on the other side of the table who can agree or refuse. "They have rights" requires a claimant — someone present to hold the claim and make it against us. Three different grounds, and each is built the same way: it runs between two parties, from us to someone else. A wrong runs from the one who does it to the one it is done to. An agreement runs between the two who make it. A right runs from the one who holds it to the one who owes it. In every case the relation is between two people who, in the ordinary case, stand roughly level and can face each other.
And that is precisely where each of them failed. The future does not stand across from us. There is no one level on the other side. The party we would owe this to does not yet exist, will never stand level with us, and — the point that undid everything in week three — is not even a fixed party, because which people come to exist depends on what we do. Take a duty that requires two parties and direct it toward a place where the second party is absent and cannot be identified, and of course it returns empty. Not because the future does not matter, but because we kept reaching for it with an instrument built for someone standing in front of us.
Here is the thought that reverses the problem, and it is not mine; it belongs to the philosopher Hans Jonas, who set it out in his book The Imperative of Responsibility, published in German in 1979. What if that is the mistake? What if the difficulty was never the future, but the shape of every duty we brought to it?
Jonas's claim is a large one, and worth stating at full size. Every ethics we have ever had, he argues — the whole inheritance — was built for a world in which human reach was short. Consider the old rules. Love your neighbour: your neighbour, the person near you. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you: others you could meet, who could act on you in return. Keep your promises; pay your debts; do not harm the person in front of you. Every one of them governs people who share a world, stand roughly level, and can act on one another and answer for it. This was not a defect in the old ethics. For almost all of human history it was simply accurate — the furthest reach of any action was about as far as one could see. You could no more affect the people of three centuries hence than people you would never reach. So no one needed a rule for it.
Then, Jonas says, something changed — recently, and completely. We acquired power: not power over one another, which we always had, but power over the conditions of life itself — over the climate, the oceans, the genome, over whether there is a habitable world for anyone to be born into at all. For the first time, what we do now reaches down the centuries and bears on whether there is a future to speak of. The reach became long. And a new kind of power is not covered by the old rules; they were not made for it. "Do not harm your neighbour" cannot be extended to a stranger three hundred years off who exists only because of the act for which we would be blamed — we have already watched that sentence fail.
So Jonas's proposal is not a repair to the old framework but a new one. If the inherited duties all run across — level, between equals, two parties facing each other — then the duty we are missing must run the other way: not from one party to another beside it, but from the one who holds the power to the one who lies wholly under it. And there is one place, he says, where we already know this kind of duty well — so well that we forget how strange it is. We turn to it next.
Here is the place: a parent bending over a crib.
Look closely at what is happening there, because it is the one duty in human life from which everything that failed this month is absent — and the duty is total nonetheless. The infant never asked to be born. It agreed to nothing; you could not strike a bargain with it if you tried, for it cannot bargain, cannot promise, cannot hold up its end, cannot do a single thing for you in return. It has no claim to make; it cannot demand that you save its life. By every framework we have spent eight weeks on, there is nothing here — no contract, no reciprocity, no claim a court would recognise from a creature that cannot speak. And yet no one regards the parent's duty to the child as weak, or optional, or mysterious. It is among the most undeniable obligations there are. We would think a person monstrous for asking what they get out of it.
Where, then, does it come from, if not from any of the usual sources? It comes from the one feature left in the picture. The child is wholly in your power. It is utterly dependent, and you are the one it depends on, and the duty follows that relation directly — from your power to its helplessness. That is the whole source. Not an exchange between equals, not a debt incurred. The bare fact that a being's existence and wellbeing rest in your hands, and it has no one else and no means of compelling you, is itself what binds you. The more helpless it is, the more it binds — which is the reverse of a contract, where the party who can do nothing for you has the weakest hold. Here the party who can do nothing for you has the strongest. Responsibility runs from power toward dependence, toward the one with the least of its own.
Now Jonas asks the question that gives the argument its force. Is the future a child?
Consider it again with that in mind. The future is the most dependent thing there has ever been. It cannot ask us for anything; it cannot bargain; it cannot reciprocate; it has no claim to make, because — as we have said all month — there is no one there yet to make it. It is completely in our power, more completely than any infant, because we hold not only its wellbeing but whether it exists at all. And it cannot even do the one thing the infant can do, which is to be here, in front of us, crying, so that we cannot look away. The future cannot appear to object. By every measure that makes this duty strong — helplessness, dependence, power lying all on one side — the future has them to the greatest degree. If the parent's duty is real, and grounded in nothing but that relation from power to dependence, then, Jonas says, the same relation runs from us to the world we are deciding whether to leave habitable. And notice what it does not require. It does not require a victim — the duty never ran across to an injured party; it runs from power to a dependent one. It does not require a sum, or a contract, or a claim. The very things whose absence undid the other four grounds are things this ground never asked for.
See what that yields that nothing else did. From it Jonas builds a new rule — meant as seriously as Kant meant his, a new categorical imperative for an age able to wreck the future. He states it thus: act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth. Not "maximise the good," not "do what they would have agreed to," but simply: do not be the one whose action forecloses that anyone exists to come after us at all. And he adds a second instruction, knowing we will look for a way out; he calls it a heuristic of fear. When you genuinely cannot tell how something will turn out, and one of the possibilities is the end of habitable human life, you let the alarming forecast lead — you give the bad prospect priority over the hopeful one, not because pessimism is wiser, but because some mistakes cannot be made twice.
And notice what has just happened, for it has not happened once in eight weeks. We applied the test. Where is the victim? There is none, and this duty does not need one. Where is the party who agreed, the claimant who can make it? Gone, and this duty never asked for them. The argument that flattened every other ground reaches for this one and closes on nothing. For the first time all month, the objection that has been removing the ground beneath us finds nothing to remove. You can see why I kept it for last: the duty holds, and holds without a single one of the features that failed. So here is the question for the rest of the hour, and it should not be answered yet: is this the secure ground we have been looking for — or does it too carry a price, hidden as every other price was hidden, somewhere we have not yet looked?
There is a price. By now you expected one, because that has been the shape of the whole inquiry: each ground looks sound, you rely on it, and then its flaw shows a moment too late. This one is no different. It simply conceals its flaw in a new place.
Begin with that second instruction, the heuristic of fear — let the alarming forecast lead. It sounds wise stated in the abstract. Now try to use it. You are back at last week's task of setting actual policy, and the rule says: give the bad prospect priority. Very well. How much priority? How frightened should you be, exactly, and of what? For — and you saw this last week; it is the same difficulty in Jonas's hands now — fear has no natural stopping point. Let the worst case lead, and the worst case will lead you anywhere, provided someone can make it frightening enough. Ruin the present generation to shut out a catastrophe you cannot even assign odds to, and you will have followed the rule faithfully into disaster. Or hold the fear to something measured and proportionate — and notice that you have just brought in a standard, a sense of how much is too much, that the rule never supplied. Jonas tells you to let fear govern. He does not tell you how much fear is too much. And that missing measure is not a detail. It is the entire question of what to actually do, and the rule gives no answer exactly when you ask it.
Now the deeper flaw, and it lies in the most persuasive part of the argument — the crib. Return to it. Why is the parent's duty so clear, so unmysterious, so hard to argue your way out of? Part of the answer, the part Jonas relies on, is the helplessness. But there is another part he needs and does not have out here: the child is present. It is in your arms. You know its face. It cries, and you know, without reflection, what it needs — food, warmth, to be held — and whether you are meeting the need. The duty is clear partly because the dependent thing is present enough to instruct you. It tells you, minute by minute, what it wants.
The future does none of this. There is no face, no cry. We spent a whole hour last week on the point: we do not know who will be there, what they will have, what they will value, what they would even thank us for. So the duty Jonas hands us has the right shape — it runs from our power to their dependence, no victim required — but it gives us no content. "Be responsible to the future" is not like "feed this child." It is "feed someone; you are not sure who; you cannot see them; you do not know what they eat; and you will never find out whether you got it right." The relation is real. What stands at the other end of it, we cannot make out. A responsibility that cannot tell you whom you are responsible to, or what would discharge it, gives you the direction of a duty without its content.
So be exact about what Jonas did and did not do, because this is the decisive point of the whole episode, and easy to overstate. What he did is real, and not small: he found a ground for the duty that the no-victim argument cannot touch — because his duty never ran across to a victim in the first place; it runs from power to a dependent, and you cannot break such a duty by observing that no one stands level on the other side. That is a genuine result, and it is why this answer is built unlike the four before it. But "the no-victim argument cannot touch it" is not the same as "it tells you what to do." It survived the objection. It did not survive into an answer. It cannot say how much, cannot say toward what, cannot say when the fear has gone too far — and those are not side questions; they are the question we have carried since the first night: not whether we owe the future something, but what, and how much, and to whom.
So place it where it belongs. Not as the secure ground we have been seeking — I will not tell you it is that, and I would be selling you the easy thing I have refused to sell for eight weeks if I did. Place it as one more ground that stands and then cannot settle the question — except that this one fails in a different place than the others. They failed at the victim; this one clears the victim and fails at the measure. Which means we now have something we did not have an hour ago, and it is not relief. We have a duty that survives the objection that killed the rest, standing alongside all the ones it did not replace. And that turns out to be its own kind of trouble. That is where we go now.
Set them all out together, the five answers next to one another, because this is what the whole month was building toward, and it is not what you would have expected eight weeks ago. One: there is no victim, so perhaps, strictly, nothing in particular is owed to anyone. Two: a worse world is simply a worse world, owed to no one, and worse all the same. Three: we owe whatever fair terms we would have agreed to, not knowing which century we would be born into. Four: they have a plain claim on us, to the threshold of a decent life. Five, tonight's: responsibility runs from our power to their helplessness, as it does from a parent to a child, and needs no victim to do so. All five are looking at the same future — the same warming world, the same unborn strangers, the same choice to be made. And here is what must be held, both parts of it, without letting go of either.
First: they do not agree. They are not five names for one duty. They pull in different directions. The no-victim line says we may owe nothing in particular. The one-directional duty says we owe the permanence of life itself. Fair terms might permit a modest risk the future would have accepted; the heuristic of fear says recoil from the worst case whatever the future would have accepted. Set any two of them to decide policy and you might decide it differently. These are not allies. They remain rivals — each as much a rival to the other four as it ever was.
Second — and this is the part meant to improve matters and does not: none of them defeats the others. The one-directional duty survives the no-victim argument — but surviving that argument does not refute the person who accepts the hard conclusion and says he owes future strangers nothing in particular; it merely offers him another ground, which he can consider and decline. He is still there; that hard line never fell, and I said in week one that it would not. The worse-world answer still faces its objection — the vast, barely bearable population — and that objection never died; it stands. Fair terms still cannot make the bargainers want to provide for people they will never meet. The claim still has no one, yet, to hold it. And the one-directional duty still cannot say how much fear is too much. Five grounds, every one of them still standing — and every one still carrying the flaw we found in it. None won. None lost. They stand together, looking at the same future, none able to settle the question and none willing to withdraw.
So consider where eight weeks have actually left you, because it is stranger than where you began, and considerably worse. You came in with one ground — we would be harming them — and a single ground, even a mistaken one, at least tells you what to do. Then we removed it, and for a few minutes in week three you had no ground at all, and that felt like the bottom. It was not. Because we then went looking, and we found grounds — four more of them — and the trouble now is not that you have none. It is that you have five; they do not agree; not one of them settles the matter; you would act differently depending on which is in fact under your hand when you lower the thermostat — and nothing in any of them tells you which that is. Having no reason was a kind of poverty. Having five that pull apart is a kind of disorientation. You have to choose the ground you stand on, and no ground does the choosing for you.
And beneath all five — to say it once more, because it is the one fact that has not shifted since the first night — the pull is still there, exactly as heavy. You have now watched two things happen to it: your original reason dissolved, and then four candidate replacements stood up and none of them settled the question. And you still cannot bring yourself to say it — the future is fair game, do as you please. The feeling has outlived its first justification and survived the discovery that its replacements do not agree, and it has not lost an ounce. So either it answers to something none of these five quite captures, something you have still never had to name — or the cold line is simply correct, we owe future strangers nothing in particular, and you merely cannot feel that it is correct. I will not tell you which. Notice only what the night has done: it did not hand you a secure ground. It handed you five candidates and a choice no one can make for you, and left the weight in your hands with five things beneath it and no way to tell which one is bearing it.
Let me set down what tonight has given you, because it is real, and then where it leaves you, because that is real too, and I do not want the two to blur.
The gain. You came in tonight assuming every duty must run across — from you to someone, a victim, a partner, a claimant, standing more or less level with you on the other side. You leave knowing that a duty can run the other way: from whoever holds the power to whoever lies wholly under it — and that a duty of this shape needs no victim, no bargain, no claim anyone is present to make. That is not a small thing to have learned, and it is not really about the climate. You will meet it everywhere now: wherever you have power over something that has no power in return, and there is the pull of an obligation you cannot explain as an exchange. That shape is yours now; you know where it comes from, and you can recognise it.
And you know its limit, which is the other half of possessing it. A one-directional duty tells you which way you are bound — toward the helpless thing — and it does not tell you how much, or toward what exactly, or at what point care has turned into fear without limit. It gives you the direction. It does not give you the measure.
So here is where eight weeks have left you, and I will not tidy it, because the untidiness is the truth. We have now tried every ground there is for the thing you cannot stop feeling. We watched the first one fail. We found four more, and tonight a fifth that even survives the argument that broke the first — and we have ended standing among five grounds that look at the same future and not one of which settles it, and that do not even agree on what you would do. One week remains. And there is exactly one thing we have not yet touched — not another ground; we are done finding grounds. Something further back. All month we have argued about what we owe the future and why, and we never once stopped to ask where the whole idea came from — the idea that the future is a thing one can owe, a party one can be just or unjust to, that can stand in the argument at all. It feels as though it has always been there, beyond question. Next week I will show you that it has a beginning, and a recent one. And then we stop. That is the last of it.
So here is the one thing to carry out with you — and a shape like this only settles into your hands once you have felt it hold on something the climate has nothing to do with. So leave the planet aside. Picture this. You and a few others are founding something — call it what you like: a settlement, a school, an order, some small institution built to outlast every one of you. And the founding is yours. You are writing the terms it will run on for a hundred years: what it is for, what it protects, what it will never do. Now consider the people who will actually live within it in eighty years. They are not born. They agreed to none of this — they will be handed your terms the way you were handed a climate, with no say in it. They cannot thank you; they will not know your name. And here is the part you have earned tonight: which of them exists at all depends on the terms you set — different rules, different lives, different people in those rooms. So you cannot be said to harm them by choosing badly; there is no them yet to harm, and whoever comes to exist owes their being there to the very choice you made. The victim is not there. The contract is not there. The claim has no one to hold it. Every ground we broke is missing — and you still feel it, do you not. As you set down those terms you feel the full weight of getting them right for these people, running straight from your power to their total dependence on a choice they will never take part in. The duty holds, cleanly, with no victim in sight.
And then put to it the one question. How much? How much should you guard them? Wall the place around with rules so that nothing can ever go wrong for them, and you have confined the unborn within your own fears, closing off every life they might have chosen for themselves. Leave it open, and trust them to find their own way, and you have guarded nothing. How frightened should you be, on their behalf, of a future you cannot see? Follow the duty down to that question and it gives no answer — the same point at which it gave none all night. You feel, with complete clarity, that you are bound. And you cannot get it to tell you how.
Sit a founder in front of that, and the shape of our whole month comes clear: we feel the pull the whole way down, and then we treat the part we cannot answer as though it were a plan.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.