Do We Owe Anything to People Not Yet Born?

People who have not yet been born cannot negotiate with us, make promises or repay us. This has led some to argue that obligations exist only among people who can reciprocate now. Yet the view creates a problem: today’s choices about energy, public debt or the environment may leave long-term costs to people who had no part in making them.

In his account of intergenerational justice, John Rawls proposed a “just savings principle”. If people did not know which generation they belonged to, they would require each generation to preserve the conditions needed to establish and maintain just institutions. Derek Parfit later developed the non-identity problem: different policies can alter who will exist in the future, so a person may be unable to claim that they would have been better off under another policy, because a different person might then have been born. This weakens some claims about harming a particular individual, but it does not automatically remove every obligation.

Contemporary debate therefore asks whether duties can also arise from fair distribution, basic rights, or the requirement not to create lives below an acceptable threshold. My judgement is that they can. Obligation need not depend on reciprocity. Because future people cannot influence us while we can unilaterally alter their range of options, our responsibility is more visible, not less. This does not require unlimited present sacrifice for every distant benefit. A more defensible minimum is to avoid imposing foreseeable, serious and irreversible costs on later people, and to preserve the basic conditions that let them correct our mistakes and choose directions for their own lives.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/