Living Together · ages 9–12
Do people who aren't born yet matter?
You can do something that benefits you now and costs nothing to anyone alive. It just makes life harder for people in a hundred years. Does that settle it?
Here is a case. You do something that is pleasant now and costs nobody alive anything, and in two hundred years it will make life hard for whoever is here. Have you done something wrong?
Most people say yes, immediately. Then the trouble begins, because the usual test of wrongness — somebody was harmed — is very hard to apply. Parfit found the sharpest version of the problem. Suppose your decision changes who is born: different people meet, different children arrive. The future people cannot say “you harmed me”, because if you had acted differently they would not exist. So the harm is not done to anyone in particular, and it is still harm.
Duties like this have no precedent, which is Jonas’s point. Every previous generation could mostly outlast its own mess: forests regrow, cities are rebuilt, famine ends. Now we can do things whose effects will still be unfolding after every person alive has died, and the usual feedback loops that keep us honest — seeing the damage, being told off for it — do not operate across that distance.
Which is why Burke’s line is quoted so often. He described society as a partnership between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are not yet born, and he meant it as a claim about what a generation is allowed to do — including the claim that no single generation gets to spend everything, on the grounds that it happened to arrive last.
Try it
Write a letter to somebody who will live in your town in a hundred years. Then decide which of the things you do this week they would mind most.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Can you wrong someone who does not exist?
- Why is it harder to care about people far in the future than people far away?
- What do we owe the people who will read our letters?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
People who don't exist can't be harmed.
Then the only thing wrong with wrecking the planet is that it happens to annoy you later. Almost nobody accepts that conclusion, which means their principle needs repairing.
We can't know what they'll want, so we can't plan for them.
You do not know what your friend will want on their birthday either, which is why you buy something that stays good. Uncertainty is a reason for care, not for indifference.
Why should I give up something now for people I'll never meet?
That is the same question as 'why should I give up something for a stranger' — and you already answer it one way for strangers. Notice whether distance in time gets treated differently from distance in space.
What other philosophers think
- Edmund BurkeDescribed society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and those not yet born — a contract that no single generation is entitled to cancel.
- Derek ParfitPointed out that the people in the future will exist only if we act one way rather than another, so they cannot complain about a choice that gave them life.
- Hans JonasArgued that modern technology creates duties with no precedent, because we can now do things whose effects outlast every person alive.
- ConfuciusTreated care for ancestors and descendants as one continuous duty, not two separate ones.
If you want to go further
- Reasons and Persons — Derek Parfit1984. The non-identity problem, which is the strangest argument in modern ethics.
- The Imperative of Responsibility — Hans Jonas1979. On duties to the future, written by someone who had watched what twentieth-century power could do.
- Reflections on the Revolution in France — Edmund Burke1790. Where the partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn comes from.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.