Note: I wrote a post recently that tries, in part, to answer this question. The post isn’t a 2 minute answer, more like a 15 minute answer, so I’ve adapted some of it below to try and offer a more targeted answer to this question.
Let’s agree that the 8 billion people alive right now have moral worth—their lives mean something, and their suffering is bad. They constitute, for the time being, our moral circle. Now, fast forward thirty years. Billions of new people have been born. They didn’t exist before, but now they do.
Should we include them in our moral imagination now, before they are even born? There are good reasons to believe we should. Thirty years ago, many who are alive today (including me!) weren’t born. But we exist now, and we matter. We have moral worth. And choices that people and societies made thirty years ago affect people who were not yet born but who have moral worth now. Our lives are made better or worse by the causal chain that links the past to the present.
Aristotle teaches us that time, by itself, is not efficacious. He’s wrong about that in some respects—in modern economies, time is enough by itself to inflate the value of currency, to allow opportunities for new policies or technology to come into existence and scale up, etc., which might influence us to believe that we should discount the future accordingly. But he’s right when applied to the moral worth of humans. The moral worth of humans existing now isn’t any less than the moral worth of humans a generation ago; for the same reason, the moral worth of humans a generation from now is just as important as humans’ moral worth right now.
Our choices now have the power to influence the future, the billions of lives that will come to exist in the next thirty years. Our choices now affect the conditions under which choices will be made tomorrow, which affect the conditions under which choices will be made next year, etc. And future people, who will have moral worth, whose lives will matter, will be affected by those choices. If we take seriously the notion that what happens to people matters, we have to make choices that respect the moral worth of people who don’t even exist yet.
Now expand your moral circle once more. Imagine the next thirty generations of people. So far, there have been roughly 7500 generations of humans, starting with the evolution of Homo Sapiens roughly 150,000 years ago. One estimate puts us at a total of just over 100 billion human beings who have ever lived. The next thirty generations of humans will bring into existence at least that many humans again. Each of these humans will have the same moral worth as you or I. Why should we discount their moral worth, simply because they are in a different spot on the timeline than we are?
If possible, we should strive to influence the future in a positive direction, because future people have just as much moral worth as we do. Anything less would be a catastrophic failure of moral imagination.
Note: I wrote a post recently that tries, in part, to answer this question. The post isn’t a 2 minute answer, more like a 15 minute answer, so I’ve adapted some of it below to try and offer a more targeted answer to this question.
Let’s agree that the 8 billion people alive right now have moral worth—their lives mean something, and their suffering is bad. They constitute, for the time being, our moral circle. Now, fast forward thirty years. Billions of new people have been born. They didn’t exist before, but now they do.
Should we include them in our moral imagination now, before they are even born? There are good reasons to believe we should. Thirty years ago, many who are alive today (including me!) weren’t born. But we exist now, and we matter. We have moral worth. And choices that people and societies made thirty years ago affect people who were not yet born but who have moral worth now. Our lives are made better or worse by the causal chain that links the past to the present.
Aristotle teaches us that time, by itself, is not efficacious. He’s wrong about that in some respects—in modern economies, time is enough by itself to inflate the value of currency, to allow opportunities for new policies or technology to come into existence and scale up, etc., which might influence us to believe that we should discount the future accordingly. But he’s right when applied to the moral worth of humans. The moral worth of humans existing now isn’t any less than the moral worth of humans a generation ago; for the same reason, the moral worth of humans a generation from now is just as important as humans’ moral worth right now.
Our choices now have the power to influence the future, the billions of lives that will come to exist in the next thirty years. Our choices now affect the conditions under which choices will be made tomorrow, which affect the conditions under which choices will be made next year, etc. And future people, who will have moral worth, whose lives will matter, will be affected by those choices. If we take seriously the notion that what happens to people matters, we have to make choices that respect the moral worth of people who don’t even exist yet.
Now expand your moral circle once more. Imagine the next thirty generations of people. So far, there have been roughly 7500 generations of humans, starting with the evolution of Homo Sapiens roughly 150,000 years ago. One estimate puts us at a total of just over 100 billion human beings who have ever lived. The next thirty generations of humans will bring into existence at least that many humans again. Each of these humans will have the same moral worth as you or I. Why should we discount their moral worth, simply because they are in a different spot on the timeline than we are?
If possible, we should strive to influence the future in a positive direction, because future people have just as much moral worth as we do. Anything less would be a catastrophic failure of moral imagination.
Thanks for your submission!