🚀 go-pugleaf

An interesting question in ethics is how do we determine our responsibilities to
distant future generations, granted that we have responsibilities to the present
and to near future generations (say, the next two).

Any student of ethics must sooner or later suspect that the basis for morality of
any kind is, in the final analysis, the moral impulse of the people we generally
call "good", and that people are "good" because they are wired that way by nature,
nurture, and perhaps chance. There is no real definition of what a "good" person
is -- we recognize them when we meet them, but we can't define them.

We can, however, characterize what "good" people will want to do in a variety of
situations, and one of them is to sacrifice their personal interests for the
benefit of others, now and in the future. "Good" people are altruistic.

The futurist paradigm is that each moment in time is a choice among alternate
futures, and that we are objectively responsible for the consequences of the
decisions we make, no matter how distant in space or in time. We are morally
responsible to the extent that we can reasonably foresee the consequences of our
decisions, and for doing the best we can to foresee them.

The basis for a futurist ethics is what is sometimes called the "judgement of
history". What will future generations think of the decisions we made? To give
greater weight to the judgement of the future is the key, and it is based on the
premise that the future will have more information on which to render a judgement.

It is clear that if we discount the interests of the future at some constant
exponential rate, then at some critical rate the aggregate interests of the future
beyond, say, generation 2 (where the present generation is 0) outweigh that of
generations 0-2. That rate is approximately .21/generation. Therefore, futurist
morality consists of discounting the interests of future generations at a rate of
less than 21 percent per generation.

How does this apply to our present situation? Consider my analysis, posted to
sci.environment and elsewhere, that we have two main choices:

(1) We could continue living scattered over the surface of the planet, in which
case we will exhaust the material resources needed to sustain civilization, and
then the population will collapse back to the then carrying capacity of the
natural ecosystem -- probably less than 1 million persons -- and a stone-age
lifestyle on a desert planet. Those who linger on will do so at most until the
surface becomes uninhabitable due to increased output from the sun -- probably
about 100 million years from now.

(2) We can build cities that are compact, sealed, and totally self-sufficient
in materials, isolated from the natural ecosystem, that could support a world
population of, say, 1 trillion persons in civilized comfort over the next 5
billion years that the planet can remain habitable, while allowing the natural
ecosystem to remain undisturbed.

Assuming that each person alive today is equally responsible for his or her
equal share of all the persons who may live in the future (on Earth), that one
generation is 25 years, and that we (arbitrarily) weigh a civilized life twice
as highly as we do a primitive one, then for how many lives is each of the
5 billion of us now alive responsible for under each of the two scenarios given
above, and what is the ratio between the two numbers? What is the moral significance
of this under the futurist moral system? The answer is an exercise for the reader.

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starflt@uunet.uu.net, jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141