Topics Ethics

Question How can we balance conflicting moral obligations to the future and to the present? Things we do today--say, burn fossil fuels--improve the lives of people living now, while, science suggests, creating very serious problems for the future that may be impossible to aleviate once the negative effects are felt. Activities which may cause very specific good effects now have negative effects which are vanishingly small for a single instance but cumulatively disasterous in the future (this is, perhaps, an entirely different but related issue). This seems analogous in some ways to the trolley problem; if you would pull the lever to save five people while killing one, does it matter when the five people would have been killed? What if it were five people with ninety percent certainty one hundred years in the future?

Accepted:
June 25, 2011

Comments

Consider three kinds of cases in which my conduct, though beneficial to me, is harmful to others. In particular, let's assume that my conduct causes more harm to others than good to myself, and that I don't have any obvious right to the good. (1) The harm I cause falls on a small number of contemporaries. (2) The harm is spread out among a very large group of contemporaries, such that none of them is harmed significantly. (3) The harm is borne by future generations. One can imagine different versions of (3): (3a) the same sized harm is spread out among a very large future generation, or (3b) a significant harm is borne by each member of a large future generation. I take it that there is a good moral objection to causing the harm in each of these cases. But notice some practical differences. The harmed parties in (1) can normally be expected to complain loudly about the harmful behavior. But when the same sized harm is spread out, as in (2), there isn't the same incentive for individual complaint, since no one party experiences significant harm. Complaint is even less likely in (3), because the affected parties do not yet exist. Harm seems progressively more difficult to combat in these cases. I take it that this is one reason for regulative bodies in which individuals have fiduciary duties to represent and aggregate the interests of affected parties when the parties cannot effectively represent their own interests.