What We Owe the Future

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why More Analogies What We Owe the Future Bibliography · Glossary In 1987, the Welsh government planted 700,000 trees near Newtown to absorb carbon dioxide. Most of those trees won’t reach maturity for another thirty years. The people who planted them knew perfectly well they would never see the benefit. Nobody forced them to do it. They just thought it was the right thing to do. Defending that intuition is harder than it looks. We normally ground moral obligations in relationships: you owe something to someone because you made a promise, caused them harm, or stand in some ongoing connection to them. Future people don’t satisfy any of these conditions. They can’t help us, sue us, or cast votes. And yet we talk and (sometimes) act as if we owe them…