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Future Generations: Present Harms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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There is a special problem with respect to our obligations to future generations which is that we can benefit or harm them but that they cannot benefit or harm us. Goodin summarizes the point well:
No analysis of intergenerational justice that is cast even vaguely in terms of reciprocity can hope to succeed. The reason is the one which Addison… puts into the mouth of an Old Fellow of College, who when he was pressed by the Society to come into something that might rebound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish. ‘We are always doing’ says he, ‘something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us’.
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References
1 Goodin, R. E., Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 177.Google Scholar
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32 While intellectual disciplines like those of science still provide examples of the way in which the success of one generation depends on future generations—hence the use of scientific examples to make my case—it is nevertheless becoming a commonplace that a sense of history within intellectual disciplines is being lost. Within the sciences, this is a consequence not only of increasing commercial pressures (O'Neill, J. ‘Property in Science and the Market’. The Monist, 73, 1990, 601–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar), but also to what Husserl calls the technisation of the sciences, their reduction to formalized disciplines which require technical virtuosity rather than their being disciplines which aim at true descriptions of reality requiring reason. I discuss this in detail in O'Neill, J., Worlds Without Content: Against Formalism (London: Routledge, 1991).Google Scholar
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35 Marx, K., Capital Vol. III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972) 776.Google Scholar
36 An earlier version of this paper was read to the philosophy departments at Bristol University and Lancaster University—my thanks to those who commented on those occasions. I also wish to thank Andrew Collier, Roger Crisp and Yvette Solomon for their comments.
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