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Dowling College: PHL 042: Ethics

Notes by Christian Perring, Ph.D. ã 1999

Notes on Annette Baier: For the Sake of Future Generations

Baier is arguing that it makes sense to act in a way that does not hurt future generations of yet unborn people. However, she sees a problem for her view, which she devotes most of her paper to solving. This problem is the No Obligation Argument.

Although she does not choose this method, it is helpful to explain the no obligation argument by referring to an almost exactly parallel puzzle faced in medical ethics. Women who become pregnant can affect the health of the baby in two importantly different ways. First, they can help or harm its health once they are already pregnant, for example, by eating well or drinking excessively. But it is the second way that it is important: women can affect their baby’s health before it is even conceived, for instance by exposing themselves to radiation, or eating badly. Now suppose that a woman acts in such a way, such as taking powerful drugs prior to conception, and has unprotected sex with a stranger, which results in her baby being born with a disability. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is born blind.

Intuitively, we think it is obvious that she has acted recklessly and wrongly. However, if she had not taken the drugs, then she would not have become pregnant, and so her baby would never have existed. So, there is a parallel argument to the No Obligation Argument to be considered. Is being blind such a terrible disability that it makes life not worth living? No. Blind people can have fulfilling lives. So how can the blind child, Kevin, blame his mother: if she had not taken the drugs, he would not exist, and he is better off existing than not existing. So she had no obligation to Kevin to avoid taking the drugs.

Now we can look at the No Obligation Argument for future generations. Which individuals exist in the future depends very much on what we do now. Small changes in our behavior can affect who exists in the future. So if we pollute the earth, the changes that will result are likely to be dramatic for the future. The people who would exist if we did not pollute will not exist if we do pollute. The people who will exist if we pollute would not exist if we do not pollute. Non-existent people cannot complain: we do not believe that we should worry about the rights of people who will never exist. The people who will exist, who suffer the consequences of our pollution, will still have lives that are worth living, even if they are not ideal lives. So they cannot complain that we left pollution for them: they have us to thank for doing that; if we had not, they would not exist. Therefore, the No Obligation Argument concludes, we have no obligation to future generations.

While Baier does not agree with this argument, she finds it alarmingly powerful. It’s not at all easy to see where the flaw in the argument lies. This is why she carefully lays out the argument, so as to be as clear as possible.

We believe, rightly or wrongly, that we can know to some extent what the consequences of our actions will be. For instance, we believe that we know that pollution leads to global warming, which leads to the melting of the ice at the north and south poles, which will raise sea-level, which will cause flooding and severe climate changes all over the world. So we can see the long-term effects of at least some of our policies.

According to Consequentialism, the goodness of an action depends on its effects. (Utilitarianism is the most popular form of Consequentialism.) For example, Utilitarians will clearly say that we should maximize future happiness (or utility), and this means we should avoid pollution.

But not all moral views are of the consequentialist kind. In most religious views, right and wrong are decided by God, and we leave it to God to worry about the long-term consequences of our actions. God may disapprove of pollution, but if so, then polluting is wrong because God disapproves, not because it hurts other people.

Furthermore, Kant and Kantian views are non-consequentialist. But they do hold that we have duties towards other people, and this may include future people. But most moral philosophers have paid little attention to the problem of future people.

Modern moral theorists have tended to agree upon a principle about the effects of actions on other people. This says

Baier notes that depriving a person of rights can be an odd sort of harm. A person can be deprived of rights that she does not want, or is even unaware of, but still, it is a form of harm.

We can have very little knowledge of the specific needs and desires of future people, so we can’t know with any precision how our actions will affect them. But there are some basic aspects of human nature which we all share, and there are basic ways in which we can all be harmed, no matter how different we are.

Who exists in the future depends very much on what we happen to do now. Future people’s existence is very contingent.

If future people wish that the past had been different, it will mean that they wish they had not existed. For instance, if Baier wishes that the Irish potato famine had not happened, then it follows that her great-grandparents would never have left Britain for New Zealand and would not have met, and she would never have existed.

Baier now formulates the argument she finds troubling: nothing we do wrongs future people, because they would not have existed were it not for our actions.

Baier notes a subtle but important distinction between wishing that one had never been born and wishing to die. For many people, life may become so horrible that they wish they had never been born. However, it does not follow that they wish to die, and especially it does not follow that they wish to kill themselves. Many people think that it is wrong to commit suicide, no matter how hard life becomes. Wishing that one had never existed is not the same as wishing to die.

Baier starts to introduce her solution to the problem, which involves the concept of interests. "Interests" are abstract in a similar way to rights. They can be harmed even if one does not know that they have been harmed. Indeed, one can harm the interests of a dead person. We have different sorts of interests, depending on our roles. An interest is what is good for you, not something one feels interested in. What is good for you depends on what role you have in life, and indeed, you can have conflicting interests, due to conflicting roles. The concept of interest is important to Baier because it is possible to stop a person’s interests being damaged even though this doesn’t improve the person’s life.

We can damage the interests of people in the future by our actions now. Future people don’t exist now, but their interests do. These interests relevant to a certain role can be harmed by the action which creates puts people into that certain role. Baier gives some examples. "After the second world war, Transylvanians who had been Hungrians became subjects of Rumania, and could complain (as many of them did) that the very act which made them Rumanians also injured their interests as Rumanians)." Similarly, adopted children often feel that their parents don’t treat them equally to their biological children: adoption made them second-class children.

We can act for the good of a person before they exist, in the same way that we can do something for a person after they are dead. The people who will exist in the future, say 2100 AD, already have interests now. These are very general interests. "It is the interests which are fixed and predictable in advance which we can say preexist and more specific interests of theirs, such as the sources of a particular book they wrote, which last once they are dead."

Now we can see what was wrong with the No Obligation Argument: it was the Victim Principle. An improved version of the victim principle is much more careful:

1. more suffering than the person would have had, had we acted differently; or
2. more frustration than the person would have had, had we acted differently, or
3. greater injury to the person’s interests than would have occurred had we acted differently, where such interests include the interest in not existing at all, if other interests are thought to be very badly injured; or
4. greater violation of the person’s rights than would have occurred had we acted differently.

Furthermore, Baier adds a whole new premise which comes out of her previous discussion:

This leads to a revised conclusion:

So we see that Baier claims that although our intuitions apparently contain an internal contradiction, in fact they are consistent. We have the concept of an interest. This can be applied to the case of Kevin as well as to the case of future generations. Kevin has an interest in being born sighted, even before he exists, as much as people can have interests after they are dead. They are very general interests, such as having the basic normal range of human abilities. When Kevin’s mother takes drugs that lead to her child being born blind, she harms his interests.

How satisfactory is this as a solution to Baier’s problem? The concept of interests is somewhat plausible, but is hardly uncontroversial. Many deny that people have interests after they are dead: they account for our intuitions about harms to dead people by arguing that the disapproval we feel a person does in breaking a deathbed promise or in desecrating a grave by saying that these things are psychologically damaging to people who are still alive, and that the whole institution of promising or respecting the dead depends is threatened by such actions. Furthermore, this solution has the whiff of sophistry. It doesn’t really help to explain anything new, it just covers up a problem. So its explanatory value is minimal. While this solution is intellectually interesting, it is relatively unproductive. It does not explain the puzzling in terms of the familiar: rather it explains it with a technicality. The original intuition, that we have responsibility to future generations, was never really threatened, even if the No Obligation Argument is troubling.