Is It Future Generations That Are Important?

 

Why Worry About Future Generations? is Samuel Scheffler’s small book from his Uehiro Lectures at Oxford in 2016. It is a philosophically sophisticated reflection on the temporal parochialism that has led to the world’s extraordinary under-response to such risks as climate change. Scheffler argues that our concern properly goes beyond obligations for doing good (avoiding harm) to future populations because they are, like us, people. There are additional normative vectors, which may or may not be matters of either obligation or morality.

To see the anatomy of this normative complex, Scheffler thinks it essential that we focus not on future sentient beings or future persons but on future generations. Whether this is plausible is going to depend a lot on what he understands to be the normatively important difference between future generations and mere future persons . A Scheffler writes,

the word generations has distinctive content. . . . [P]eople of the future . . .do not present themselves to us in thought simply as an unstructured group. They present themselves to us as temporally and causally ordered.  What is in question is the future of a chronological succession of generations, each produced causally, in the familiar way, by the one preceding it. . . . We are asking why we should care that the chronological succession of generations, which has delivered each of us here, should extend into the future under more rather than less favorable conditions” (15)

Generational thinking is temporal order thinking, and there is one obvious way that temporal ordering might make a difference. As a psychological matter, we probably care more for people closer to us in the temporal ordering just as we seem usually to care more about what befalls people who live on the other side of town than about people who live on the other side of the country or the other side of the globe. However, geographical parochialism is normatively suspect, and temporal parochialism was the motivating evil of Scheffler’s lectures. His interest in the ordering of human generations does not involve, or at least does not obviously involve, having any greater concern for the inhabitants of the shallow future over those of the deep future.

What Scheffler emphasizes is that future generations are “our successors.”  (16) The question is then what are the normatively important aspects of this successorship.  Noted in passing is that generations “are constituted ultimately at the level of individuals and their ancestors and descendants.” (17)

Lines of descent have been big deals historically: royal houses, nobilities, classes, castes, family pride, family shame. There have been some worthy incentives of the “uphold the family name” sort, but also incentives to assassination, war, genocide, and oppression. Descent has been fertile ground for myth, superstition, racism and pseudo-science.  

Scheffler certainly does not want to identify his successorship with biological descent. He denies importance to any “particular line of individual descent, such as, for instance, our own.” (17). To see our successors solely in terms of biological descent he condemns as “reductionist.”

I think Scheffler is headed in the right direction here. Were I told that humankind many centuries down the road included no descendants of mine, I don’t think I would be much less interested in their flourishing than if I were told they were all my descendants. I gather that Scheffler would respond similarly, but I admit I have no idea how it would come out in a general population – if a general population would be willing to take the question seriously.

If headed in the right direction, however, I’m not sure that Scheffler goes quite far enough in separating normatively salient successorship, and so the normative considerations of his focus, from the procreative chain.

the idea of future generations is the idea of succession of cohorts, each related to its predecessors and successors temporally and causally, extending from now into the future. Similarly, the idea of humanity’s survival is not just the idea of human beings existing sometime in the future. It is the idea that, for a good long time at least, there will continue to be human beings who are causally related in familiar ways both to those who came before them and to those who will come after them.  Insofar as the fate of future generations matters to us, and insofar as we care about the survival of humanity, what matters to us is that the causal and temporal chain of generations should continue. (60)

My doubts are whether our concerns about the future, and particularly the reasons for that concern highlighted by Scheffler, are really so much a matter of our being “causally related in familiar ways” to those who will come after us. What I will argue is that we would and should care for the Scheffler reasons even if the causal connections were somewhat or even very unfamiliar.

The normative factors of Scheffler’s discussion he calls “reasons of love, reasons of interest, reasons of valuation, and reasons of reciprocity.” Reasons of love I take to be the affection we have for members of our own species, because it is our own species.  He quotes with approval Jonathan Bennett who was

passionately in favour of mankind’s having a long future [this is a]strong, personal, unprincipled preference’ for the continuation of human life.  . . . [I]t would be a great shame – a pity, too bad – if this great biological and spiritual adventure didn’t continue.. . . [This] is not a stand in favour of there being animals which answer to this or that general biological or psychological description, but rather a stand in favour of there continuing to be animals descended from members of my species or descended from some of these (and here I gesture towards all my human contemporaries)’” [ On Maximizing Happiness,” in Sikora and Barry, eds. Obligations to Future Generations. 61-73 at 66-67.    (34 f.n. 35)

I suppose that honest introspection would reveal that we all share Bennet’s preference to some degree, even if we agree with him that it is “unprincipled.”  There is a love of humanity just because we are of it, and this is a reason for us to care about the flourishing of future generations.

However, I think this particular reason would survive even if the human beings in question were connected to us in not at all “familiar ways.” Humans might conceivably be cloned from Egyptian mummies, or, even, with yet further barely imaginable technical advances, from the bones of the very early homo sapiens of Jebel Irhoud. Their appearance in two far separated lines of the generation list would be anything but familiar, but I see no reason that they should not benefit from our species love.

Scheffler’s other three reasons are rather different, and, prior to Scheffler received less attention than they deserve. Interest, valuation, and reciprocity all have to do with our place and the place of future generations in the career of our culture. This is culture very broadly understood to include any kind of human lore, learning, practice, and project capable of transmission from one person to others. Mozart’s Don Giovani counts. (See Kierkegaard’s Either/Or for an argument that it is the epitome of art.) The best path to restrooms from various points in the mall is also culture in this broad sense as is the project of gaining a winning season for the Aardvark Cubs.

 In P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men, everyone world-wide becomes infertile, and so an aging and shrinking population sees human extinction on the horizon. Citing the novel Scheffler opines, rightly I think, that “most of us would find the prospect of humanity’s imminent extinction unbearably depressing.” (42) “[M]any of the activities that we had previously regarded as worthwhile would no longer seem to us as appealing” (43) “[T]he value of many of our activities depends to a degree that we do not always recognize or acknowledge, on the survival of humanity long after we ourselves are gone.” (44)

Scheffler first discusses “long-term, goal-oriented” activities such as curing cancer, early childhood education, and improving the seismic safety of bridges. Regret would arise not only for the loss of a future that gives activities like these their point, but with respect to anything we do that supports, directly or indirectly, the creation or sustaining of value that is passed on to the future.  

It is generally to be regretted when value that our generation or preceding generations has created is lost. It is a shame that the Colossus of Rhodes didn’t last longer. It will be an even greater shame when there is no one left to read Hamlet. Common sense has it that the future cannot benefit the past because causation does not run future to past. Surprisingly, the axiom that the future cannot benefit the past coexists with the popularity of the preference satisfaction theory of value and with the sacredness of testamentary directives. Caesar expected to be remembered and admired for centuries, and doubtless would have thought a future in which his exploits were forgotten to be much inferior to the future that eventuated. Amy’s bequest to veterinary research should be honored because it is what Amy wanted.

Reflections along these lines persuade me that Scheffler is right that his four reasons really are normatively significant supplements to the traditional duty of beneficence when it comes to our appropriate concern for future populations. I  think, however, that the tie to human generations, and indeed the tie to humans, are not as tight as he contends.

What if the residents of Katmandu or Calgary were kidnapped by space aliens and their progeny reared in total ignorance of all terrestrial culture? I would think that interest, value, and reciprocity would no longer give us reasons to care about their flourishing. There might be many biological generations of DNA akin to ours but they would not share our projects, our world view, our aspirations. With complete separation of culture, beneficence and perhaps love might remain, but not interest, value or reciprocity. If the aliens permitted, we might want to send care packages (anticipating that their contents be culturally denatured by the aliens), and we might well do so even though we knew we would never hear how the gifts were received or indeed anything about these members of our species.

When it comes to Scheffler’s other three reasons, we can imagine circumstances such that some or all the value that our generation added to the culture would be unavailable for several generations. Still, if we knew that people would at some point have and value it, the generation skipping character would not consign us to despair as in the global infertility case. The science fiction-y story for generation skipping cultural value I leave to the reader.

To descend, or ascend, yet farther into science fiction, imagine that as the youngest cohort in P.D. James’s story reached their eighth decade, a band of space aliens crash landed on Earth. Having had a restricted store of cultural materials available on their long and unsuccessful journey through space, and anticipating a permanent separation from their own kind, these curious, energetic, and sprachbegabt beings began a voracious assimilation of Earth culture. Soon they were debating, with our septuagenarians, whether Hamlet was truly mad and whether the Medusa attributed to Caravaggio was in fact painted by a time traveling 20^th century resident of Paris. There was also an alien who helped Bob enlarge his beer bottle cap collection.

The remaining humans might still regret the coming extinction of the race, but not so much as if all human culture were to face extinction along with us.

What if instead of space aliens it were artificial intelligence that would preserve and extend some significant part of our culture? This, I think, would depend little on the sort of normative considerations that Scheffler investigated, but rather almost entirely upon one’s view on the possibility of artificial consciousness.

In defense of Scheffler it might be objected that he was directing his inquiry to the real world and its probable futures. There are shared assumptions even in the theoretical side of the debate about policy looking to the future beyond us. Science fiction cases are out of bounds. Without denying the justice of this objection, a little more conceptual license suggests, I think, that Scheffler’s additional normative considerations, welcome additions to the discussion, are more a matter of culture, broadly conceived, than of human generations as normally understood.