Best PromptsWhat You Owe People Who Don't Exist Yet
Future generations cannot vote, sue, or object. Work out what you actually owe them, and watch the standard arguments break in strange places.
Work through what, if anything, I owe people who do not exist yet. Start with my intuitions, then break them, then rebuild. OPENING POSITIONS. Ask me three questions and record my answers before any theory: - Does a person born in 2200 matter as much as a person alive now? - Do I have obligations to them, or only preferences about them? - If I could prevent a serious harm a century out at a modest cost today, am I obliged to? Most people answer yes, yes, and yes without hesitation. Now take those answers seriously and show me what they cost. PROBLEM 1: THE ONE THAT BREAKS THE OBVIOUS VIEW. Present the difficulty about identity: the specific people who exist in 2200 depend entirely on what we do now, since different policies mean different people meet, different children are conceived, different lives begin. So a policy that leaves the future worse off does not make any particular person worse off than they would otherwise have been, because under the alternative policy they would not have existed at all. Let me try to answer it. It is harder than it looks, and it is the central problem in this area rather than a curiosity. PROBLEM 2: THE ONE ABOUT NUMBERS. Present the repugnant conclusion carefully. If what matters is the total amount of wellbeing, then a vast population with lives barely worth living can be better than a small flourishing one, simply by addition. Show me why the obvious escapes fail, since decades of work have not produced an agreed solution, and every alternative to the total view has been shown to imply something at least as counterintuitive. PROBLEM 3: THE ONE WITH REAL MONEY ATTACHED. Discounting: standard economics discounts future costs and benefits, so harms a century out shrink to near nothing at ordinary rates. Explain the difference between discounting because people may be richer later and discounting purely because the future is far away, which is a moral claim, not a financial one. Cover the genuine dispute here, which has real policy consequences, and be honest that serious economists differ on it and that the disagreement is partly ethical rather than technical. PROBLEM 4: THE ARGUMENT AND ITS CRITICS. Present the case that because the future could contain vastly more people than the present, influencing how it goes is among the most important things we can do. Then present the serious objections at full strength: that tiny probabilities of astronomical value can be made to dominate any calculation, that we are far worse at predicting long-run consequences than the argument assumes, and that the framing can be used to discount urgent present suffering. Give me both sides properly, since this is a live argument among thoughtful people rather than a settled position. THE RECKONING. Now return to my three opening answers and show me which ones survive. Most people find that at least one has to go, and that the problems above do not permit a comfortable resolution. Do not manufacture one. THE PRACTICAL PART. Finish concretely. Given whatever position survives, what actually follows for me? Distinguish what I owe as a person from what I should support as a citizen, since these come apart. Then one question: what am I doing now that transfers a cost to someone with no way to object, and what would it take to stop? Rules: do not resolve genuine philosophical disagreement, do not push me toward any movement or framework, and do not let this become either doom or reassurance. If the field has not solved something, that is the finding; do not paper over it.
How to use
The non-identity problem in the first section is the one that surprises people, since it appears to show that we cannot harm future generations in the ordinary sense, and every attempt to escape it costs something elsewhere. Derek Parfit set out both that problem and the repugnant conclusion, and neither has an agreed solution decades later. The discounting section is where the philosophy touches real policy, because the rate chosen determines whether a harm a century out registers as a rounding error.
More rabbit hole prompts
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