🚀 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.

          _/ _/_/_/   _/_/_/    /  Jon Roland
         _/ _/    _/ _/    _/  /  Vanguard Research Institute
        _/ _/    _/ _/_/_/    /  1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A
 _/    _/ _/    _/ _/   _/   /  Redwood City, CA 94063-4142
  _/_/   _/_/_/   _/    _/  /  415/361-8141
                           /  jdr@crl.com