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Future Generations: Present Harms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John O'Neill
John O'Neill
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Extract

There is a special problem with respect to our obligations to future generations which is that we can benefit or harm them but that they cannot benefit or harm us. Goodin summarizes the point well:

No analysis of intergenerational justice that is cast even vaguely in terms of reciprocity can hope to succeed. The reason is the one which Addison… puts into the mouth of an Old Fellow of College, who when he was pressed by the Society to come into something that might rebound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish. ‘We are always doing’ says he, ‘something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us’.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 263 , January 1993 , pp. 35 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

1 Goodin, R. E., Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 177.Google Scholar

2 For another clear statement of this assumption see Barry, B. ‘Justice between Generations’ in Law Morality, and Society, Hacker, P. and Raz, J. (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)Google Scholar. The classic account of the opposing view—that we can be harmed by events after our deaths—is found in Aris totle's discussion of Solon (Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, Irwin, T. trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985)Google Scholar book 1, chs. 10–13).

3 See for example Barry, B. ‘Justice between Generations’ in Law, Morality, and Society, Hacker, P. and Raz, J. (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).Google Scholar

4 See O'Neill, J.Six Presentations of a Mathematical Discovery (Lancaster: Lancaster University, 1988)Google Scholar for discussion of these narratives.

5 Bell, E. T., Men of Mathematics Vol II (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 396.Google Scholar

6 See Crowe, M., A History of Vector Analysis (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

7 Ibid. ch. 6.

8 Eliot, T. S. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919)in Selected Essay (London, 1951), 15.Google Scholar

9 A notable exception is Sagoff, M.The Economy of the Earth (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 60–65.Google Scholar

10 Golding, M., ‘Obligations to Future Generations’, The Monist, 56, 1972, 85–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See for example Sikora, R. ‘Is it wrong to prevent the existence of future generations’ in Obligations to Future Generations, Sikora, R. and Barry, B. (eds) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978)Google Scholar and Attfield, R.The Ethics of Environmental Concern (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) chs. 6 and 7.Google Scholar

12 Revised versions of Rawlsian principles are particularly popular: see for example Richards, D., A Theory of Reasons for Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1971) and Barry op. cit.Google Scholar

13 , R. and Routley, V. ‘Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future’ Inquiry, 21, 1978, 133–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Kuhn, T. ‘Objectivity, Value Judgement and Theory Choice’ in The Essential Tension (Chicago University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

15 See Gay, PeterThe Enlightenment (London: Weidenfeld, 1967).Google Scholar

16 Eliot, T. S. ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932).Google Scholar

17 See Oakeshott, M., Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962)Google Scholar for a modern presentation of that view.

18 By ‘a subjectivist theory of well-being’ I mean here the view that well-being consists in having certain psychological states. There are other senses of the phrase which need to be distinguished from this one and which are not my concern here. For a recent unpicking of different senses see Wood, A., Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Griffin, J., Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar part one, Kraut, R. ‘Two Conceptions of Happiness’ The Philosophical Review, 88, 1979CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Parfit, D.Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) Appendix I.Google Scholar

19 See Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’ in Bailey, C.Epicurus, the Extant Remains (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926)Google Scholar and Lucretius, On Nature, Geer, R. (trans.) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1965) Book 3, 830–1094Google Scholar for the classical statement of this view.

20 Cf. Nagel, T. ‘Death’ in Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

21 See Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b 26–30 and 1159a 14–25.Google Scholar

22 Herodotus, , The Histories, de Selincourt, A. (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954) 13Google Scholar

23 Augustine, , City of God, Bettenson, H. (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) Book V, ch. xiv, 204.Google Scholar

24 See the scholium on Epicurus, , Principal Doctrines xxixGoogle Scholar in Bailey, C. op. cit., 367–368.Google Scholar

25 Hardin, G. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ in Managing the Commons, Hardin, G. & Baden, J. (eds) (San Francisco: Wm. Freeman, 1977)Google Scholar.

26 Within the third world a more direct force causes peasants to be unable to express any intergenerational identity, i.e. poverty. If one does not graze one's land to the limits there will be no future for one's kin. Hence, even when one recognizes the effects of environmentally insensitive practices, one has no alternative. The continuing existence of those whom one wants to benefit requires such practices.

27 See Pocock, J., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar chs. 13 & 14, and ‘The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology’ in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

28 Pocock, J., The Machiavellian Moment 458.Google Scholar

29 Von Mises, , Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951) 62Google Scholar and Human Action (London: William Hodge, 1949) 595–598 and 620–624Google Scholar. My arguments here owe much to Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) chs. 14–15.Google Scholar

30 For Smith's view see Smith, A., An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976)Google Scholar, especially book I, ch.10, part 2. See Poole, R.Morality and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ch. 1 for a discussion relevant to the present arguments.

31 See Dubos, R.The Wooing of the Earth (London: Athlone Press, 1980) ch. 7.Google Scholar

32 While intellectual disciplines like those of science still provide examples of the way in which the success of one generation depends on future generations—hence the use of scientific examples to make my case—it is nevertheless becoming a commonplace that a sense of history within intellectual disciplines is being lost. Within the sciences, this is a consequence not only of increasing commercial pressures (O'Neill, J. ‘Property in Science and the Market’. The Monist, 73, 1990, 601–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar), but also to what Husserl calls the technisation of the sciences, their reduction to formalized disciplines which require technical virtuosity rather than their being disciplines which aim at true descriptions of reality requiring reason. I discuss this in detail in O'Neill, J., Worlds Without Content: Against Formalism (London: Routledge, 1991).Google Scholar

33 Weil, S., The Need for Roots (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952) 96.Google Scholar

34 While Marx criticizes the market, he recognizes the way it has thus liberated individuals. See, for example, Marx, K., Grundrisse (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1973) 156–165Google Scholar. This feature of modern society tends to be underplayed in recent communitarianism, particularly in MacIntyre's work (MacIntyre, A., After Virtue, 2nd edn. (London: Duckworth, 1985)).Google Scholar

35 Marx, K., Capital Vol. III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972) 776.Google Scholar

36 An earlier version of this paper was read to the philosophy departments at Bristol University and Lancaster University—my thanks to those who commented on those occasions. I also wish to thank Andrew Collier, Roger Crisp and Yvette Solomon for their comments.