Why future generations matter

Daniel Quinn, author of the book Ishmael that won the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship in the States, believes that just as there was a secret plan in Germany to annihilate the Jews, so today we have a secret plan to go on consuming the world until there is no more to consume. And in this secret plan we invest our future for generations to come and perhaps even the future of the human race. 'There's going to come a day,' says Quinn, 'sure as hell, when our children or their children or their children's children are going to look back on us - on you and me - and say to themselves, "My God, what kind of monsters were these people?" '

This for me is why future generations matter: that Jews were treated as somehow sub-human, led to the concentration camps; just as treating animals as inferior to humans led to battery farms; and in the same way, if we treat future generations as expendable, with needs less vital than our own, so too we will continue behaving abominably towards them.

It is also the reason that Avner de-Shalit's theme, 'Why Posterity Matters', is such an urgent one, deserving study in every educational establishment. I disagree with the details of his thesis, but the act of stirring up discussion on these issues is as important at this stage as reaching agreement.

Using everything from homely parables to algebraic equations and dry-as-dust philosophy, de-Shalit argues, in summary, that our obligations to the future derive from our membership of a transgenerational community that extends to the future and is characterised by a shared moral and political debate.

Obviously it is easier to feel concerned for those who are similar to ourselves in this way, but I believe de-Shalit is quite wrong to limit our obligations to those within our shared community. Thus as a thought experiment he supposes that 'we meet some Martians who happen to think the same way as we do about many issues, and even have the same values and norms. Let us say they are the Greens from Mars. Does this mean that we have any obligations to them? The answer is negative.'

On the contrary, the answer is positive. If Martians with no intent to do us harm were to arrive on earth in dire need of assistance to survive into the future, we would be morally negligent not to help them.

The difficulty stems from philosophers trying to construct reasons for concern about posterity without dependence on spirituality, love, compassion or intuition. To anyone who has ever had even an inkling of what Maslow called a 'peak experience', a temporary mystical perception of the 'ground of all being', reality as it really is, timeless time, with a feeling of connection to all beings, past, present and future, it is self-evident that we should do what we can not to cause unnecessary pain and suffering to present or future beings, that we are planetary caretakers, up from the clay, 'as luck would have it, and inching / over the same little segment of earth- / ball in the same little eon, .../ and the whole galaxy gaping there / and the centuries whining like gnats' (from a poem by William Meredith).

In fact a Norwegian philosopher Per Ariansen, in a paper entitled Sustainability, Morality and Future Generations, has extended the debate in this sympathetic direction, arguing that 'compassion may emerge as a constituent of ethics when it is rationalised by "surrendering" to the discipline of universalistic maxims; ... and will naturally aim to encompass future persons as well as present ones'. And to those who ask 'what has posterity ever done for me?', there is a good reply that transcends the limits of de-Shalit's 'transgenerational community': 'It offers you an altruistic aim independent of age, sex, family, creed or nationality; that is, a life with added meaning.'

The Council for Posterity, 20 Heber Rd, London NW2 6AA, tel 0181 208 2853, fax 0181 452 6434; e-mail: <rhino@bbcnc.org.uk>).