Do Current Living Humans Have a Greater Moral Obligation to Future Generations Than to Living Poor Citizens?
Debate whether spending trillions on long-term climate mitigation for unborn humans unjustifiably diverts immediate resources from dying impoverished citizens.
Pick a Side
Choose a position to defend, or let fate assign your stance.
Arguments FOR
1. Trillions of future human lives depend on preserving a habitable planetary biosphere today
If humanity survives for thousands of years, billions of future people will exist; triggering climate tipping points destroys the carrying capacity of Earth forever.
2. Future generations cannot vote, lobby, or defend their interests against current exploitation
Current living generations act as a reckless colonial power, plundering finite fossil fuels and leaving a ruined, acidic ocean to disenfranchised future humans.
3. Preventing planetary ecological collapse protects all future human potential and civilization
If runaway greenhouse warming collapses global agriculture, human civilization may permanently collapse into dark ages or biological extinction.
4. Philosophical 'Longtermism' proves expected moral value lies overwhelmingly in the future
Philosophers like Derek Parfit and William MacAskill prove that caring equally about all human beings requires prioritizing the vast billions yet to be born.
Arguments AGAINST
1. Living human beings suffering acute starvation and disease right now must take moral priority
It is ethically perverse to withhold food and medicine from living children in rural Africa today to optimize theoretical climate models for people in the year 2300.
2. Future generations will be vastly wealthier, technologically advanced, and better equipped
Historically, each generation is vastly richer and technologically superior; forcing today's poorest to sacrifice for wealthier future humans is regressive.
3. The 'Non-Identity Problem': policy choices fundamentally determine which specific humans are born
Philosopher Derek Parfit proved that sweeping climate policies alter who conceives with whom; future people cannot claim they were harmed because otherwise they wouldn't exist.
4. Uncertainty of deep future predictions makes multi-century planning highly speculative
Nobody in 1800 could predict electricity, computers, or solar power; sacrificing living human lives based on 200-year speculative models is hubris.
Counter Questions
Questions to challenge claims and probe deeper into trade-offs.
- What is philosopher Derek Parfit's famous 'Non-Identity Problem' introduced in 'Reasons and Persons' (1984)?
- What did philosopher William MacAskill argue in 'What We Owe the Future' regarding the core tenets of Longtermism?
- If a developing nation must burn coal for 10 years to electrify rural clinics and save 500,000 babies from dying, is that morally justified?
- Why did the German Federal Constitutional Court rule in 2021 that the government's climate targets were unconstitutional because they offloaded emission burdens onto youth?
- How should economists calculate the social discount rate when evaluating investments that yield benefits 150 years in the future?
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