Obligations to Future Generations

 

Toby Ord, author of the excellent book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, and Jim Holt, author of an excellent review of it in the February 25 issue the New York Review of Books (“The Power of Catastrophic Thinking”) make unnecessary trouble for themselves, it seems to me. Both of them frame the question of what to do on behalf of generations of human beings unborn as a moral question – a matter of what we “should” or “ought” to do (or not do). This inevitably leads to paradoxes and impracticabilities of all kinds, for the simple reason that there just is no moral regime hovering over us, like an etiolated God, issuing commands. 

Ord’s quantification of risks supposedly lends objectivity to his recommendations. But it quickly becomes clear that his final assessments are pulled out of a hat, or at least rely on an inapt metric. For example, as Holt puts Ord’s argument, “We know that the extinction risk posed by natural causes is relatively low because we have plenty of actuarial data.” But the appearance of, say, the next dinosaur-killer-size asteroid or comet heading our way is completely random and not something that can be relied on to be a million years hence just because its “per-century” likelihood is low. Furthermore, the risk is not just the probability but includes the feared consequence, which would be human extinction. 

Holt does offer a “nonmoralizing” “corrective” to Ord’s moralist argumentation. By this Holt means that we need not focus exclusively on the effects of our actions on others. However, Holt still retains the “should” of self-interest, which is itself a kind of moralism because of its presumed objectivity. He suggests, with Samuel Scheffler, that the value we find in many of our own projects crucially depends on the assumption of humanity’s indefinitely continued existence. That does seem right. But values move us from within and not because of an external or objective or universal “should.” Furthermore our values need not be selfish just because they are ours. You can value something for completely selfless reasons. 

May I suggest, therefore, as an alternative to the moralizing project of objectively obligating us to do certain things or to value certain things, simply appreciating the rhetorical force of the facts Ord advances about the possible effects of our actions and inactions on future generations when we deliberate about what to do. In this way Ord’s book would have persuasive power to alter and guide our behavior and policies without invoking the pseudo-authority of ill-suited statistics or being tripped up by insoluble pseudo-problems.

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