Abstract
To what extent do we value future generations? It may seem from our behavior that we don’t value future generations much at all, at least in relation to how much we value present generations. However, in his book Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler argues that we value the future even more than we value the present, even though this is not immediately apparent to us. If Scheffler’s argument is sound, then it has important ramifications: It would give us a strong motivation to put more energy into abating environmental crises like climate change, and it supports at least a limited form of ethical longtermism. However, in this paper, I show that Scheffler’s argument is fallacious. Scheffler claims that we do not regard the fact that we in the present generation will all die relatively soon as a catastrophe, but we do regard the non-existence of future generations as a catastrophe. But the particular scenario used by Scheffler to illustrate this point—the plot of the book The Children of Men—is one in which both the present generation will perish and there will be no future generations, and it is this conjunction that is catastrophic, thus giving no information about which is worse. I suggest other ways to compare our valuations of present and future generations, and recommend that philosophers who are interested in the moral psychology of how we value future generations ought to engage with social science, as it is an empirical issue.
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Notes
Cuarón omits the definite article in the movie title, and I shall also do so in what follows.
Johnston (2014) argues that Scheffler’s argument is thus like a Ponzi scheme, but my concern here is independent of Johnston’s.
Scheffler argues against the value of human immortality in detail in Lecture 3 of his (2013), but I shall put those arguments aside, and focus on the arguments in Scheffler’s Tanner Lectures that are reproduced in Lectures 1 and 2 of his (2013). The issue here and in those two lectures is the value of indefinitely long existence, which is a different issue entirely from the value of an immortal life. (And see Fischer and Yellin (2014) for a response to Scheffler’s anti-immortality argument and others like it).
Of course, if we were to learn that we ourselves will live indefinitely long, we would likely live the next 80 years much differently than we would otherwise. But I shall set aside this consideration, as it does not affect the arguments discussed in this paper, and assume that the values of each of B, IF, and IP are independent of each other.
It might be the case that for the transitions, the gain of value (in the right-to-left direction) may be intuitively different to us than the loss of value (in the left-to-right direction) due to status quo bias. However, I will not dwell on this issue.
See Frankfurt (2013, p. 140), for a similar concern.
A google scholar search for “temporal discounting” yields “about 17,500 results”, though I should note that much of the literature is on intrapersonal temporal discounting,
A psycINFO search (conducted July 10, 2023) yields 1,205 results in a title/abstract search for “generativity”.
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Hiller, A. Valuing the “Afterlife”. Topoi 43, 65–73 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09977-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09977-4