Moral Obligations to the Future

Suppose that something like the classical utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, were true. I don’t think it is true. However, consequentialist reasoning dominates most policy analysis and discussion, and consequences must play some role in any plausible moral theory. That being so, it is useful to take an unflinching look at what a generalized version of utilitarianism would have to say about the duty of those of us now alive have towards future populations including those of the deep future.

For utilitarians it is morally required to maximize what is good for human beings. Bentham understood that good to be happiness, which he further believed came down to pleasure and the absence of pain. We need not here follow him so far, leaving it as a not further specified “good” that the morally right action is to maximize.

In assessing the maximizing act for this utilitarianism it is generally understood that the good of all people counts equally, no matter how different or distant they are from us. I take it that for utilitarianism, as well most  other normative moral systems, it also makes no difference how far in the future are the people who are to be counted equally. (Other things that may be correlated with temporal distance may, of course, make a difference. I am unlikely to have made a promise to, nor been rescued from peril by, anyone in the deep future. Were other things equal, however, position on the timeline would make no difference for most moral theories.)

This equality of moral status across time is an assumption not quite universally accepted. Some economists and perhaps a few others influenced by economists think that the good of future persons must be discounted by how far distant in time from us they are. Econ 101 teaches the rationality of discounting to present value a future flow of income or a future commodity, even if the flow or the commodity would be certain.  To discount the good possessed by a future person, assuming it to be certain, is, however, quite a different matter.  (See John Broome, “Discounting the Future.” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 23, no. 2, 1994, pp. 128–156.  Broome calls this “pure discounting” pp. 129-130.)  

It is a matter of simple mathematics that this sort of discounting of future persons would make it of doubtful rationality to have any concern for humanity a few centuries hence and totally bonkers to have any moral concern for our descendants of the deep future. In the end I think pure discounting could only be defended by arguing that people distant from us in time do not themselves count as much as we do as a moral matter. This is surely wrong, but it has little currency in philosophy, and I will not argue it here. I simply assume a zero value for the pure discount rate.

There is, of course, nothing problematic about discounting for our imperfect knowledge of the future. We properly discount the good of persons a million years in the future by the probability that there will be no such persons. Similarly, in evaluating policy purporting to benefit denizens of the future we must take into account the probability, increasing with time, that we will go wrong in projecting the circumstances of their lives. This sort of discounting is required by any responsible policy analysis.

To isolate the strictly future component of a utilitarian morality, I propose a wildly unrealistic thought experiment. Suppose that we, the entire current world population, were utilitarians of a pure future altruist sort.That is, the only thing we counted as good for purposes of morality were the interests of future people, starting with those to be born 200 years hence (with utterly inexplicable arbitrariness) and continuing out forever.

(I am also going to isolate out all non-humans even though other animals certainly, and space aliens and artificial intelligences possibly, should be included within our moral concern. But this is a thought experiment; I simplify.)

Even though our ability to predict declines as we look farther into the future, there is no reason to think that humans will not always need nutrition and water in some form and something to breathe with an appropriate percentage of oxygen. So, probably, all future people will benefit from a policy of preservation of physical resources. The details of the conservation program may change with time, though it should always be over-inclusive as judged from then current knowledge. Perhaps aluminum and most of the rare earths will one day be thought useful only for antique restorations while basalt and the toxin of dwarf tarantulas will be industrially indispensable.

Still, some of the rare earths will surely be important at least for the people of the near future and their use will then likely provide a platform for the intermediate future which in turn will, with any luck, build towards the deep future. We should conserve and recycle the rare earths now even if they should prove irrelevant millennia hence. The same applies to most of what we now count as resources. Future oriented utilitarians, however, cannot afford to ignore the spider venom that may be promoted to practical importance by wholly unanticipated scientific breakthroughs. If it is true that a million species are on the fast track to extinction, that is alarming within our thought experiment. (Spoiler alert: it will be alarming even after we exit the thought experiment and discharge our Benthamist, maximization of the good, assumption.)

If you are given to thinking well outside the box, you might be speculating about now that in the really deep future resource conservation on Earth might have become irrelevant because our descendants will by then have emigrated from their origin planet to other galactic real estate. May be. But that possibility is no objection to a general policy of resource preservation now and well into the future. First, as bearing on policy, this extra-terrestriality suffers a very substantial epistemological discount. That humans will ever seriously colonize space, let alone leave this planet behind altogether, is of indeterminable, but pretty low, probability. Second, even if Earth be only the first chapter of our history, Earth’s resource availability is going to be important to the very large project recounted in the last pages of that first chapter.

Focusing on a shorter time horizon, the population problem blazes forth. We are currently depleting and degrading physical resources very fast. Our net contribution towards the human good 200 years and more into the future could surely be increased were population growth reversed. Population down, consumption down, resource depletion down: all these will benefit, with high probability, the future short, medium, and long term.

(To go this far is, perhaps, to reject the “total utility” version of utilitarianism as it applies to population policy. Under not wholly improbable circumstances maximizing the total good might well involve a very large population each member of which enjoyed just slightly positive good. Maximizing average or median utility, are more attractive as work-a-day rules of thumb, but they too have problems  when seriously examined. Some very serious searches have failed to turn up a satisfactory utilitarian population policy formula. For a less rigorous but quicker look at this definitional problem for maximizing utilitarianism see “The Consequences for Consequentialism of Utility Monsters and Barely Happy Multitudes,” https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-consequences-for-consequentialism.html.)

Turning to a more granular round of policy recommendations, confidence about what will benefit the deep future will decline somewhat but will remain reasonably high for the near and intermediate period. These policies include the advancement of science, medicine, engineering, culture, sport and entertainment.

Once again, the epistemological problem: It is perfectly conceivable that the products of our science and culture and those of some number of succeeding generations will not figure into the good of the deep future at all. Perhaps, due to unforeseeable intervening catastrophes, their best lives will be like those of our Paleolithic ancestors. Preservation of basic resources will be about all we can do for them. It is also possible, however, that the knowledge and creations passed along by ours and succeeding generations will have provided a base for deep future good that will be rich beyond our imaginings.

Without any ability to assign probabilities to these and other intermediate possibilities, the utilitarian strategy within our thought experiment is surely to pass to the future the best we can. If it is lost or rejected at some point, it will have done some good along the way.

A little on the details: That future-looking-altruists would emphasize engineering, and medicine is obvious, and we have a great deal of evidence that pure science and even the most abstruse of mathematics not only have the intrinsic value of understanding reality, but are frequently fecund practically. (As legend has it, a math professor in the 1970s told his students that they could count on two pure math subject areas never having any practical importance: prime numbers, and Fourier transforms. Now we know that knowledge of prime numbers made possible public key encryption and thereby internet commerce and that Fourier transforms are the work horses of video compression.) In the thought experiment, then, we will multiply the number of STEM classrooms, laboratories, accelerators, and the like.

The next potential Mozart must get a chance to write music and the next Plato or Hypatia to philosophize. (It is a statistical near certainty that in human history most of our potential hyper-geniuses must have spent their lives plowing fields, scrubbing floors, and the like.) There will need to be substantial subsidies for the creative arts and humanities, at least as they have a decent probability directly or indirectly of enriching future lives. 

Their products and all other culture and entertainments of probable interest to the future will require aggressive preservation programs: temperature and humidity controlled storage for paintings; audio and video recording for live performances, scanning and digitizing for writings, photographs, films, and all this periodically updated as to the latest technology. The engineering to make this all cheaper, faster, and more reliable will be a priority, as will be some way for our descendants to find the good stuff in an ocean of intellectual, cultural, entertainment works that we bequeath to them. (Remember we have here adopted neutrality as to whether the good is a matter of giving pleasure, of preferences, of excellence, or of something else.) We can hope that with appropriate funding some combination of artists, critics, aesthetic theorists, economists, and coders will come to their aid.

This is, of course, only a rough sketch of a few details of policy formulated in obedience to a moral mandate to maximize the good of future generations. Clearly it would involve a radical change from current business as usual. There would be an enormous shifting of resources away from consumer goods and into the schools, universities, laboratories, recording rooms, sound stages and studios.  Some few people, members of the various elites, their fellow travelers and fans, would find this all to the good. Most would not. Giving up the next iteration of the IPhone would be a painful sacrifice for not a few.

It gets worse. There would also be a shifting from free time and fun time into productive time, and what will count as productive time would be constrained. For example, in the arts and humanities there will be lavish support for first rate work, that is, work with a reasonable prospect of passing the test of time. Some second raters may get supported where they plausibly contribute indirectly to the work of the first raters, but for lesser than the second rate, the majority, there will be no place.  

You love to sing and you perform to ovations in local clubs but are not good enough for the recording studio? You would readily accept a very modest living standard to do what you love? Well, you can’t. You can apply to teach grade school music, but if there are people who would do that better, there is garbage that needs to be moved from one place to another.  Broad individual freedom in the present is not necessarily of any help to the future. Filling every job from top to bottom with the person best adapted for it would be. Merit would trump individual choice. Everybody will be required to work hard and long, limited only by concerns of diminished product, quantitatively or qualitatively.

I would add, without exploring, that efficiency would likely also trump democracy.

With these chilling observations, it is time to put the thought experiment in its proper place. After all, even on utilitarian theory we present persons count too, not more than future persons but just as much. So, utilitarianism does not require us to sacrifice so completely for the future. Just how much it does require is in significant part a matter of our estimate of the probabilities of future populations. If humans survive for millennia in at least fairly large numbers, then there are going to be a vast number of people to be benefited by future-looking policies.  That leverage would call for an enormous redistribution of good towards the future, not the extreme redistribution of our thought experiment but perhaps very nearly.

Of course, again, populations may soon drop, perhaps to zero. Probabilities are at best rough and of low confidence. It does seem plausible, however, that, by best current lights, maximizing good consequences across time demands a great deal of us.

It demands too much.  Put aside the many other ways in which maximizing the good may be deontologically limited. (Think rights, justice, special relationships, desert, reciprocity, promises . . .) The population of the future is probably large enough that utilitarianism would obligate us to make insupportable sacrifices. This “demandingness” problem of utilitarianism has been discussed for a long time, although more often with respect to shifting resources to the contemporary poor than shifting them to future multitudes, perhaps poor, perhaps not. (See Andreas  L. Morgensen, “Moral demands and the far future,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phpr.12729 )

I side with those who think that maximizing consequentialism lacks the internal theoretical resources to tame the demandingness problem, in particular with respect to what would be the demands of the future.

A moral requirement can sometimes be violated and still be a moral requirement. It happens all the time. People aren’t even regarded as immoral so long as they don’t violate too big or too many requirements.  However, a moral theory that sets an overall agenda the demands of which almost no one will, or could, follow, is a mere theory, a speculative construction of at most conceptual interest. It cannot be our morality because it fails to provide the practical, human-coordinating function of a genuine morality. An appreciation of what the future requires of utilitarianism is a sufficient reason to reject it, unless it be a utilitarianism with significant modifications and limitations. 

Still, even though it is beyond us to treat the good of the future on a par with our own good, and even though other moral principles importantly limit any project of maximizing the good, a sober consideration of the moral standing of future persons surely requires us to do much more than we are now towards their good. Sound morality does not require us to sacrifice as the all-out program would demand for resource preservation, for schools and laboratories, for genius grants, or game development. A sober look at what the extreme would be like, however, should, be persuasive that, if future persons out to the deep future really are our moral equals, then it is quite beyond belief that we are doing nearly enough for them.