It can seem strange to focus on the wellbeing of future people who don’t even exist yet, when there is plenty of suffering that could be alleviated today. Shouldn’t we aid the people who need help now and let future generations worry about themselves?
We can see the problems with near-sighted moral concern if we imagine that past generations had felt similarly. If prior generations hadn’t cared for the future of their world, we might today find ourselves without many of the innovations we take for granted, suffering from far worse degradation of the environment, or even devastated by nuclear war. If we always prioritize the present, we risk falling into a trap of recurring moral procrastination, where each successive generation struggles against problems that could have been addressed much more effectively by the generations before.
This is not to say there no practical reasons why it might be better to help people today. We know much more about what today’s problems are, and the future may have much better technology that make fixing their own problems much easier. But acknowledging these practical considerations needn’t lead us to believe that helping future people is inherently less worthwhile than helping the people of the present. Just as impartial moral concern leads us to equally weigh the lives of individuals regardless of race or nationality, so too should we place everyone on equal footing regardless of when they exist in time.
I think “Windfall” fits the bill as a positive surprise and has the benefit of being an existing word (I’m probably not going to bother setting up a ETH wallet to submit it).