Future generations: further problems

Abstract

Moral evaluations of actions affecting future generations distinguish between choices that influence the identity of individuals and those that determine the total number of people who will exist. The Non-Identity Problem demonstrates that long-term policies, such as resource depletion or environmental risk-taking, do not harm the specific individuals born as a result of those policies, provided their lives remain worth living and they would not have existed under alternative conditions. Consequently, the Person-Affecting Restriction—the view that an act is wrong only if it is worse for some particular person—fails to account for the perceived wrongness of such choices. Reconciling these intuitions necessitates a broader theory of beneficence that transcends individualistic frameworks. However, adopting a Total Principle leads to the Repugnant Conclusion, wherein a sufficiently large population with a quality of life barely exceeding the threshold of being worth living is judged superior to a smaller population with high well-being. Attempts to avoid this through the Average Principle or by evaluating the “mere addition” of worthwhile lives encounter further logical inconsistencies, where transitive moral judgments about equality and welfare lead back to counterintuitive results. These dilemmas suggest that a satisfactory population ethic requires a new, non-person-affecting principle that adequately balances the quality of life against the total quantity of lives lived. – AI-generated abstract.