Because people in the far future can’t benefit us, save for immortality/revival scenarios, would contractualism give us much reason to ensure they come to exist, i.e. to continue to procreate and prevent extinction? Also, do contractualist theories tend to imply the procreation asymmetry, or even antinatalism?
It seems like contractualism and risk are tricky to reconcile, according to Frick, but he makes an attempt in his paper, Contractualism and Social Risk, discussed more briefly in section 1. Ethics of Risk here.
Well, you’re right that intergenerational cooperation lacks straight reciprocity… but we do have chains of cooperation that extend across time and often depend on the expectation that future people will sustain it—e g., think about pension funds and longterm debt, or maybe even just plain cultural transmission
Because people in the far future can’t benefit us, save for immortality/revival scenarios, would contractualism give us much reason to ensure they come to exist, i.e. to continue to procreate and prevent extinction? Also, do contractualist theories tend to imply the procreation asymmetry, or even antinatalism?
It seems like contractualism and risk are tricky to reconcile, according to Frick, but he makes an attempt in his paper, Contractualism and Social Risk, discussed more briefly in section 1. Ethics of Risk here.
Well, you’re right that intergenerational cooperation lacks straight reciprocity… but we do have chains of cooperation that extend across time and often depend on the expectation that future people will sustain it—e g., think about pension funds and longterm debt, or maybe even just plain cultural transmission