See also: [[Samuel Scheffler]]; [[Sam Scheffler – Conservatism, Temporal Bias, and Future Generations]]. Inbox: - Agent-Centered Restrictions, Rationality and the Virtues ## Highlights ### Consequentialism and its Critics: Introduction Even when non-consequentialists believe that it makes sense to rank overall outcomes from best to worst, they also typically believe both in *agent-relative constraints* (or deontological constraints, as they are often called) which sometimes prohibit the performance of acts that would have optimal results, and in *agent-relative permissions*, which sometimes make the performance of such acts optional. The agent-relativity of these constraints and permissions consists in the fact that their application to individual agents is not based on or supported by appeal to what would be best from an impartial standpoint. Of course, to those non-consequentialists who do not accept the impersonal evaluation of overall outcomes at all, the moral principles governing human action are exclusively agent-relative. I will use the term 'agent-relative moralities' to refer to non-consequentialist views that include both agent-relative constraints and agent-relative permissions. Some consequentialists say, as Peter Railton does in "alienation consequentialism and the demands of morality", that the right thing to do in these cases is, as always, to perform the acts that will produce the best overall outcome. Of course, they add, one may not be able to bring oneself to do this if one's aversion to the relevant type of act is strong. So one may in fact do the wrong thing in these situations. But this need not be grounds for blame or regret, since it may still be desirable from a consequentialist point of view that one should have such an aversion. For if one did not, one might do even less good overall in the long run. [...] WHILE the ideal arrangement might be to have an aversion to harming that was felt in all and only those cases where harming was non-optimal, this may not be a psychologically realistic possibility for human beings. IN OTHER WORDS, EVEN THE BEST MOTIVATIONS THAT HUMAN BEINGS CAN REALISTICALLY HAVE—THE MOTIVATIONS THAT WILL LEAD THEM TO PRODUCE THE MOST NET GOOD IN THE LONG RUN—MAY ALSO CAUSE THEM TO DO THE WRONG THING IN CONSEQUENTIALIST TERMS ON AT LEAST SOME OCCASIONS. IF SO WE SHOULD STILL ENCOURAGE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BEST POSSIBLE MOTIVATIONS, AND WE SHOULD NOT BLAME WELL-MOTIVATED PEOPLE WHEN THEY CANNOT BRING THEMSELVES TO DO THE RIGHT THING. NEITHER HOWEVER SHOULD WE FLINCH FROM THAT DESCRIPTION OF THE SITUATION: THE THING THEY CANNOT BRING THEMSELVES TO DO IS THE *RIGHT* THING. Some people feel that [this] response treats the inability to harm others or to abandon ones commitments whenever doing so would produce inpersonally optimal results as a human weakness to which unfortunately certain concessions must be made. And this they regard as morally perverse. [Worries about whether agent-relative reasons are irrational.] Impasse: some people insisting that agent relativity is irrational, and others insisting that our agent-relative intuitions are so strong and so securely entrenched that it would be a mistake to abandon them. Scheffler's idea: the sharpest apparent conflicts between agent-relative morality and our conception of rationality are generated by agent-relative constraints: by the claim that one is morally forbidden to minimise morally objectionable activity. Accordingly, the suggestion is, we should [consider] a moral view that departs from consequentialism to the extent of incorporating agent-relative permissions, but not to the extent of accepting agent-relative constraints. On a view of this kind, one would always be permitted but not always required to perform the act that would produce the best available outcome overall. Foot: Maybe it doesn't make sense to talk about the goodness or badness of the state of affairs produced by an action. Expressions like "best state of affairs" make sense only in certain limited contexts where the virtue of benevolence provides them with a sense. Scheffler doesn't think Foots thing works, because the issue with agent-relative constraints vs rationality goes deep. ## Why Worry About Future Generations? ABSTRACT Why should we care about what happens to human beings in the future, after we ourselves are long gone? Much of the contemporary philosophical literature on future generations has a broadly utilitarian orientation, and implicitly suggests that our primary reasons for concern about the fate of future generations are reasons of beneficence. This book proposes a different answer. Implicit in our existing values and evaluative attachments are a variety of powerful reasons, which are independent of considerations of beneficence, for wanting the chain of human generations to persist into the indefinite future under conditions conducive to human flourishing. These attachment-based reasons include reasons of love, reasons of interest, reasons of valuation, and reasons of reciprocity. Although considerations of beneficence, properly understood, also have a role to play in our thinking about future generations, some of our strongest reasons for caring about the future of humanity depend on our existing evaluative attachments and on our conservative disposition to preserve and sustain the things that we value. ### Book talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHXDaA_QK94 T.S. Elliot: new kind of provincialism, not of space but of time. Main concern: inadequate appreciation of the values and standards of the past. S doesn't find population ethics useful for thinking about future generations. Why? 1. S interested in broad topic of how future generations relate to our practical and evaluative thought as a whole. What hopes we may have for our succesors, whether and why their survival and flourishing matter to us, and what reasons we may have for concerning ourselves with their fates. From this perspective, quesitons about our moral duties are only a subset of those worth considering. Values of many different kinds may be considered, need not take form of moral obligations. For utils, beneficence is the whole of morality. For non-utils, beneficence is at most one aspect of morality. Not clear we need an unrestrcited principle of beneficence. Nor is it clear we should expect all questions of population ethics to have determinate answers. STOPPED AFTER 20 MINS. ## 2015 Uehiro Lectures: Conservatism, Temporal Bias, and Future Generations http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/2015-uehiro-lectures-conservatism-temporal-bias-and-future-generations Over the past couple of days, I've maintained that we have reasons of at least four different kinds for caring about the fate of future generations. Reasons of love, reasons of interest, reasons of value and reasons of reciprocity. All of these reasons depend in one way or another on our existing values and attachments and on our associated disposition to preserve and sustain the things that we value. --- The concern for the future of humanity flows naturally from a conservative concern for the things that we value. Now, it's our very attachment to the status quo that propels our concerns into the future. Without such attachments, it's not clear how much reason we would have to care about humanities survival. --- Things look very different from the perspective of the beneficence based literature on future generations. The primary focus of that literature is on questions of population ethics and the standard method that's used to investigate those questions is to describe alternative worlds or alternative states of a particular world whose populations differ from one another in their size, composition and or levels of wellbeing. The hope is that by collecting our judgments about such cases, we can arrive at a satisfactory population axiology, a principle or standard that would allow us to determine the relative value of total states of the world, even when their populations differ in one or more of the respects I mentioned. Such an axiology would in turn supply the basis for a principle of beneficence, which would spell out either by itself or in conjunction with some other principles, our responsibilities for promoting the best population outcome. There's no consensus among those who hoped to find a satisfactory population axiology about which one is the best candidate. But even if there were such a consensus, what claim is the preferred axiology supposed to have on our motives? Why is it thought either that we do or that we should care, which population outcomes are judged superior by the lights of this or that axial logical principle? --- My suspicion is not that the proposed rationale for population axiology overestimates the extent of our concern for our successors, but rather that it underestimates and misrepresents our concern. It underestimates it because it neglects the variety of reasons we have for concerning ourselves with the fate of future generations. And it misrepresents it because what those reasons support is not a generic concern for the welfare interests of future people, but rather **a more specific desire rooted in the values we affirm in our daily lives,** that the chain of generations should be extended into the indefinite future, and that our successes should be able to live under conditions conducive to their flourishing. --- According to the alternative perspective that I've been defending in these lectures, by contrast, **we have a variety of reasons, all rooted in our existing attachments to humanity, and to valued forms of human activity and endeavor to care about the capacity of future generations to survive and to flourish.** From this perspective, **it's a mistake to think that our reasons for caring about the fate of future generations are hostage to our ability to construct a satisfactory population axiology, a complete theory of the relative goodness of total states of the world.** The contrast between these two views is both normative and motivational. **Normatively there is on the one side, a moral imperative to implement a general principle of beneficence. On the other side, there was a set of compelling reasons whether moral or non-moral to secure the ability of our successors to survive under conditions, conducive to their flourishing. ** **Motivationally there is on the one side a generalized concern for the welfare interests of all people, including all future people. On the other side, there's a conservative disposition to sustain the humanity we love and the existing values we now cherish. ** It will already be clear that I find the second perspective, more persuasive, both normatively and motivationally. As a normative matter I find the reasons that it highlights for concerning ourselves with the fate of future generations, more compelling than those suggested by the beneficence-based approach. And at the motivational level, the fact that it grounds our concern for future generations in a conservative disposition to sustain our existing attachments, puts that concern on a more secure footing and integrates it into a unified stance we may take toward the diachronic dimension of our values. --- The conservative disposition I've been discussing is not a form of political conservatism. It's a disposition to preserve or sustain the things that we value and both the things that we value in the steps necessary to preserve them. --- One way to aluminate this kind of conservatism is to consider how it relates to the very similar form of conservatism defended by the late Jerry Cohen. In his wonderful essay, defending what he calls small C conservatism, **Cohen advocates a bias in favor of existing value by which he means that we should regret the destruction of particular valuable things as such, even when it would lead to their replacement, by things of greater value**. #todo look this up **He thinks that "everyone who is sane" has this bias to some degree and that it is quote "rational and right, that they should"**. For Cohen, the crucial distinction is between **value in the abstract and the particular things that have value or alternatively between the value that things bear and the bearers of such value.** **The conservatism that he defends holds that particular things that have value take priority over value itself in at least two related senses.** First particular valuable things do not matter or count simply because of the amount of value that they bear or that resides in them. Second, we have at least some defeasible reason to preserve particular, valuable things as such, even if by sacrificing them, we could produce more value overall. **The upshot is that particular valuable things command a kind of loyalty. They do not become dispensable the minute we could replace them with something of greater value.** Conservatives of Cohen's sort will be defeasibly disposed to retain particular valuable things. Even if it means foregoing the opportunity to make things in general, as valuable as possible. Cohen too insists that the conservatism he defends is not political conservatism or what he calls large C conservatism as it is understood in the United Kingdom or the United States today. For one thing, what he favors is the conservation of intrinsic value. And since injustice and exploitation lacks such value, there's no case for conserving them to the extent that the policies endorsed by political conservatives are unjust then Cohen's form of conservatism provides no basis for defending them. Of course, something that's unjust, may nevertheless be valuable in other respects. And although it would be possible to give justice lexical priority over the conservation of value, Cohen is not sure he's willing to go that far. Yet, he indicates that he's much less willing than large C conservatives to tolerate unjust social arrangements for the sake of the other values they may realize or facilitate. In addition, Cohen argues that the economic market is hostile to conservatism in his sense, since it's always prepared to trade a valuable particular for something that has more value. So **free market conservatism is deeply anti-conservative in Cohen's sense. Under capitalism, he says the British conservative party turned into what he calls the anti-conservative market party** as he puts it in an especially memorable passage, which I can't resist quoting: For the sake of protecting and extending the powers of big well, oh, the powers of wealth, big C conservatives regularly sacrifice the small C conservatism that many of them genuinely cherish. They blather on about warm beer and sturdy spinsters cycling to church, and then they hand Wal-Mart the keys to the kingdom. They are thereby, in tune with the propensity of capitalism, which is to maximize a certain kind of value in sovereign disregard of the value of any things. Cohen contrasts his view, not only with free market conservatism, but also with normative ethical theories, like utilitarianism that favor the maximization of value quoting again, he says: "**to seek to maximize value is to see nothing wrong in the destruction of valuable things as long as there's no reduction in the total amount of value as a result.** Unlike the conservative, the utilitarian is indifferent between adding to what we have now got at no cost, something that has 5 units of value and adding something worth 10 units of value at the expense of destroying something worth 5." If the utilitarian is willing to sacrifice a particular valuable thing, whenever it can be replaced by another particular valuable thing with even slightly more value than the original item is being valued solely in proportion to the value that it bears. And to say that is just to say that the utilitarian, unlike the conservative does not value the bearers of value independently of the value that they bring. Yet Cohen concedes in response to a point made by Michael Mazzuca, that his form of conservatism does not exclude all forms of value maximization. Although it rules out comprehensive value maximization, it allows for local maximization in which one valuable existing thing is sacrificed in order to save a greater number of equally valuable existing things, thus maximize the quantity of what he calls preserved value. --- Even if Jill knew that by abandoning her own career as a painter, she could earn enough money to fully fund the careers of two painters, even more talented than herself, she would decline. In this sense she wants to create particular valuable paintings rather than to maximize the creation of artistic value, or even to maximize the creation of particular valuable paintings rather than becoming a painter. Moreover, Jill could have devoted herself to the preservation of existing, valuable things she could, for example, have become an art conservator. But she's chosen instead to create new, valuable things. And we may suppose she would have made the same choice, even if she knew that she would only be able to paint N new paintings over the course of her career, while as a conservator she would have been able to preserve N plus one existing paintings. --- Cohen's insight is best appreciated if we focus not on Cohen's category of particular value as a type of value or indeed on any other category of value, but rather on what it is for a person to value a given thing. Although Cohen uses both of these locations, the distinction between them plays no substantive role in his account. Whereas **I regard the distinction between something's having value and one's valuing it as significant. Valuing something in my view involves a complex syndrome of attitudes and dispositions, including a belief that the thing is valuable, a susceptibility to experience a variety of context dependent emotions concerning the thing, and a disposition to treat considerations pertaining to the thing as providing one with reasons for action in relevant contexts.** Here, I'm using thing in a broad sense that encompasses any object of our valuing attitudes. **It's possible to regard something as valuable (or in Cohen's terms as possessing particular value) without actually valuing it oneself** in this sense. Indeed, most of us regard many things as valuable that we ourselves do not value. **Valuing something involves more than just believing that it's valuable. It involves a kind of attachment to or investment in or engagement with that thing. This sort of attachment or investment or engagement is constituted both by emotional vulnerability and by a disposition to see oneself as having reasons for action, with respect to the valued item that one does not have with respect to other comparably valuable items of the same kind.** If I value my relationship with you, for example, then I will typically be vulnerable to feelings of distress. If you are harmed. And I will see myself as having reasons for acting in your behalf in relevant deliberative contexts that I do not have for acting in behalf of other equally valuable people. So, for example, if my, if I value my friendship with you, then I'm justified in thinking, I have reasons to act in your behalf that other people do not have. And that I do not have with regard to people who are not my friends. And if I value an antique rug that has been in my family for generations, then I'm justified in thinking that I have reasons to care for it or preserve it that other people do not have. And that I do not have with regard to other antique rugs. This does not mean that I have no reason to do anything at all on behalf of people who are not my friends or indeed that I never have reasons to help preserve other antique rugs or other people's family heirlooms. **It means only that by virtue of valuing particular valuable things, we have reasons for action that go beyond the reasons that we and others may have solely in virtue of the intrinsic value of those**. These points about the relation between valuing and reasons for action are relevant to Cohen's defensive of conservatism, because **in general, we cannot value things that do not exist and have never existed in the way we value existing things. Valuing involves attachment attachment requires acquaintance and non-existence makes the relevant form of acquaintance impossible.** **So for example, one cannot value the friendships one has not yet formed in the way that one values one's existing friendships.** One cannot value the projects one will someday develop in the way one values the projects one already has. One can not value the children. One has not yet conceived in the way that one values ones, existing children, nor can one now value the great works of art that artists will produce in the future in the way one values those great works that already exist. One can of course attach value to one prospects and plans before they have borne fruit and to one's hopes and dreams before they have been fulfilled. But in these cases, the prospects and plans and hopes and dreams already exist, one cannot in the same way, attach value to the plans one has not yet made or the dreams one does not yet have. If this point is correct, then it's possible to identify a conservative attitude more or less along the lines suggested by Cohen's discussion, that goes **beyond a temporarily neutral assignment of priority to the bearers of value over the value that they bear.** This form of conservatism includes, in addition, a bias in favor of certain particular bearers of value that already exist. The bias derives from the fact that **we can form value based attachments to existing things in a way that we cannot form such attachments to things that do not yet exist. And things that we value are sources of distinctive reasons for action and distinctive patterns of emotional engagement. ** The content of these reasons and the contours of these patterns of engagement will vary depending on the type of thing that's in question. But in most cases, the reasons will include reasons to care for and preserve the things that we value. And the emotions will include vulnerability to feelings of distress if those things are harmed or damaged or destroyed. In so far as this sort of bias is built into our valuing attitudes, every valuer must, to that extent possess the conservative disposition, this vindicates Cohen's assertion that everyone who is sane has something of this disposition. At the same time, it's important not to exaggerate or misinterpret the normative significance of this disposition. **Although we have special reasons for action pertaining to items that we already value, these reasons will not always be the strongest reasons we have in any given case. They may be outweighed by sufficiently strong reasons of other kinds. Furthermore, there will be many cases in which we can create new items of value without neglecting the reasons we have to care for the items we already value.** So conservatism is not incompatible with creativity. This is important because even if all sane people have something of the conservative disposition, all sane people also have something of the creative disposition. This disposition is not limited to artists or to others who are colloquially described as creative people. It reveals itself in the impulse to make, to build, to invent, to change, to improve, to reform, to renew, to innovate and of course, to procreate. It reveals itself even in the impulse to act because each act is a novel intervention in the world, each act contributes something new to the course of human history. In that sense, the conservative disposition to sustain and preserve the things that we value is itself a creative disposition. To be sure there are times when all it requires of us is that we refrain from performing actions that would harm or destroy those things. But there are also times when we must take affirmative steps, often requiring great imagination and tenacity, if we're to succeed in sustaining and preserving the things that we value after all conservators are not people whose job is simply to do nothing. The conservative disposition and the creative disposition are not incompatible then not only because there are cases in which one of them applies and the other doesn't, but also because there's a sense in which the conservative disposition properly understood is itself a creative disposition. This brings us back to the role of the conservative disposition in supporting our concern for the survival and flourishing of future generations. I've emphasized the extent to which our reasons to care about the fate of our successors are rooted in our value-based attachments to humanity and to the many different forms of human activity and endeavor that we cherish. Far from being a backward looking impulse that competes with, or inhibits a concern for the future of humanity, our conservative disposition to sustain and preserve the things that we value itself underwrites that concern. Nor does the fact that our concern for future generations depends on this conservative disposition, mean that it's incompatible with our creative impulses. To see this one has only to reflect on the creativity and imagination that will be required to overcome the challenges to human survival and secure the prospects of a decent future for our successors. Moreover, since human beings are in essentially creative species, whose history has a history of change, experimentation and innovation, and who are always developing new modes of living and new dimensions of value, a concern to ensure the future of humanity is itself a concern to sustain the open-ended and unpredictable course of human creative activity. As applied to the future of humanity, in other words, the conservative disposition is a disposition to ensure that human creativity and innovation will continue to flourish. Despite the ways in which the conservative disposition supports rather than competes with a concern for the future, **skeptics may deny that the disposition is rational in so far as it gives existing valuable things priority over valuable things that do not yet exist, it may be said to amount to an irrational form of status quo bias, but although I'm sure there is such a thing as irrational status quo bias, I have a difficult time seeing that there's anything irrational about the conservative disposition as I've described it. That's because I have a difficult time seeing what the alternative to it might be.** The conservative disposition reflects the fact that our value-based attachments can only be directed at what is or has been actual. We could not have a temporarily neutral disposition to form attachments to things that do not yet exist in the same way that we do to existing things. What would it mean to be just as attached to our future friends or to the children we will one day have, or to the great paintings that will someday be produced or the great novels that will someday be written as we are to our actual friends or children, or to the great paintings in novels that have already been produced boost. **When it comes to attachment temporal neutrality is not an option.** An alternate normative suggestion might be that attachment is always irrational. We should strive to realize an ideal of detachment and to free ourselves as far as possible from all of our attachments. Whatever may be said for or against such an ideal of detachment, however, it does not support the idea that our bias toward existing attachments in particular is irrational. Instead what's alleged to be irrational is attachment itself rather than the temporal sensitivity of our disposition to form attachments. It's true that if all attachments are irrational, then it follows trivially that a temporally sensitive pattern of attachments is irrational. But if all attachments are rational, then it also follows trivially that a temporally neutral pattern of attachments would be irrational. The ideal of detachment does not show that there's anything irrational about temporal sensitivity, per se. **In general, the interactions between our values and our attitudes toward time are complex. And we should be cautious about assuming that every manifestation of temporal bias in our valuing attitudes must be irrational.** Indeed, to the extent that the very term bias suggests irrationality or lack of justification, it's, undiscriminating use to refer to all forms of temporal preferences is unfortunate. Our values and desires are shaped by our self-understanding as temporarily extended creatures and by our experience of temporality. We would not have the values we have if we did not understand the temporal dimension of our lives and the ways that we do. And the direction of influence also runs the other way, the values that we form serve in turn to shape our attitudes toward time, we would not have the temporal attitudes that we have, if we did not have the values that we do. **We need to try to understand these reciprocal influences and not to assume that every manifestation of temporal bias in our valuing attitudes is irrational. As with studies of rational judgment and decision-making in other areas, the trick is to navigate between the complacent assumption that our ordinary thinking must be in good order and the revisionist application of oversimplified models that lack any authority over our actual practices and tendencies of thought.** I've tried to illustrate these broad themes by showing how a conservative disposition to sustain existing bearers of value, which some might take to involve a form of irrational status quo bias is built into our valuing attitudes and cooperates rather than competes with a concern for the future. The conservative disposition strongly supports a concern for the survival of humanity and the flourishing of future generations. To state my view in a way that is only superficially paradoxical: our concern for the future of humanity and for the flourishing of future generations, depends on a conservative disposition that applies directly only to presently existing and past bearers of value. --- To be sure it would be bad to have the experiences as of they're happening, but it would be worse if in addition, they really did happen. We may call goods and bads of this kind, partly experiential. With partly experiential goods and bads we don't have a general bias toward the future. Would you prefer to have painted five great paintings already or to paint one such painting in the future? Would you prefer knowingly, but painlessly to have undergone five rights violations in the past, or to undergo one such violation in the future? If our bias toward the future apply to these cases, we would prefer to paint one great painting in the future rather than to have painted five in the past, and to have undergone five painless rights violations in the past, rather than to undergo one in the future. .... The bias toward the future, meanwhile, applies most clearly to pleasure and pain, where these are understood as pure feelings or sensations with little or no cognitive content, rather than as ways of experiencing events or aspects of the world that have independent value or disvalue for us. For example, I would much prefer to have my grief at the loss of my friends lie in the future, rather than in the past. Beyond the case of pleasure and pain understood as pure sensations. It's not clear how far the bias toward the future extends. Even if we suppose that grief can sometimes be physically painful for example, I would much prefer to have my grief at the loss of my friends lie in the future, rather than in the past. Beyond the case of pleasure and pain understood as pure sensations. It's not clear how far the bias toward the future extends. Even if we suppose that grief can sometimes be physically painful for example, I would much prefer to have my grief at the loss of my friends lie in the future, rather than in the past. Beyond the case of pleasure and pain understood as pure sensations. It's not clear how far the bias toward the future extends. ... Suppose I were told that I could per impossible TRADE the first 40 years of my past existence for an additional 40 years of future existence. During which time I would remain in good health and would retain my physical and mental powers, except that toward the end, I'd be subject to the normal aging process. If I had an unrestricted preference for past non-existence over future non-existence, then I would gladly accept the trip. But since in losing the first 40 years of my actual existence, I would lose much of the personal history that I value most dearly, including all of my relationships with people I met during those years, I would not accept the trade. I would not accept it even if I were assured that I would establish new relationships in the future, that I would eventually come to value just as much as, or even more than I now value the relationships I would be losing. And this shows that I do not have an unrestricted or unqualified preference for past non-existence over future non-existence. ... The picture that has begun to emerge suggests that our attitudes toward time and value form a complex network, we exhibit no global temporal neutrality, but neither do we exhibit a comprehensive bias toward either the past or the future. **In part, we have a conservative disposition because it follows from the nature of attachment, that valuable things that already exist are reason giving for us in a way that future valuable things are not. Yet this disposition co-exists with an equally pronounced creative disposition.** We also display a bias toward the future with regard to our purely pleasurable sensations. But this bias does not apply to all of the good and bad things in our lives. And although we fear death intensely, but remain generally indifferent to prenatal non-existence we do not have an unrestricted or unqualified preference for past non-existence over future non-existence. ... In his discussion of our bias toward the future Parfit highlights the question of whether the bias is irrational and whether rationality requires complete temporal neutrality. He stopped short of explicitly endorsing this position. Although he does say that the bias is bad for us and that it would be better for us if we lacked it. I'm not convinced that he's right about that. Although I won't explore my doubts in any detail here, suffice it to say that **I'm not convinced that he's taken adequate account of the effects that temporal neutralism, even if limited to pleasure and pain and existence and non-existence would have on the rest of our values and attachments.** And although I've argued that our bias toward the future is limited, I'm skeptical of the neutralist claim that rationality requires us to eliminate or overcome it entirely. **I believe this is one of those cases in which when confronted with the complexity of our actual thought, we should be wary of the prescriptive application of a simplified model of rationality that would classify any recalcitrant attitudes as being normatively deficient. ** **There is of course a well-known parallel between the view that temporal neutrality is the default rational stance, departures from which stand in need of special justification, and the view that impartial beneficence is the default moral stance, departures from which stand in need of special justification. **The first view treats temporal neutralism as presumptively authoritative, and is suspicious of any tendency, people may have to be more concerned about what happens at some times than at others. The second view treats an equal concern for the welfare of all people as the presumptively authoritative moral position, and is suspicious of any tendency people may have to attach special value to their relationships with particular people or to be specially concerned about what happens to some people rather than to others. I reject both of these views. I'm comfortable with the thought that our temporal attitudes are complex and that we lack any single master attitude toward time that we are not uniformly biased toward the past or the future or uniformly neutral.** **I'm also comfortable with the thought that we have strong value-laden attachments to particular people and projects and relationships, and that these attachments are sources of differential reasons for action** and differential forms of emotional vulnerability. This bears on the contrast that I mentioned toward the beginning of this lecture, between two different ways of thinking about questions concerning future generations. As applied to those questions, a combination of temporal and moral neutralism leads more or less directly to the quest for a principle of beneficence that would solve the puzzles of population. At first glance, such a principal might seem to be the perfect antidote to the kind of temporal parochialism that I discussed in lecture one. I've tried to make clear throughout these lectures, **I'm convinced that this solution is illusory and that once one focuses on the rich variety of human values and attachments and on the complexity of our actual attitudes toward time, it begins to lose its charms.** It's tempting to think that once that happens, our reasons for concerning ourselves with the fate of future generations simply drain away. The beneficence based literature tacitly though, no doubt, unwittingly, encourages this thought. In these lectures however, I've tried to show the reverse is true. **Once we free ourselves from the thought that the basis for any concern about the future of humanity must lie in a principle of beneficence of some as yet unspecified sort, we can see that we have reasons of a number of different kinds, all rooted in our actual attachments as flesh and blood human beings for wanting future generations to survive and to flourish. In so far as these reasons depend on our existing values and attachments and on our conservatism about value, they depart from moral and temporal neutralism.** **Yet it is to these very departures rather than to any form of neutralist beneficence that we must look in order to identify our strongest and deepest reasons for caring about the fate of our successors.** Or so I have been trying to show. At the very least, I hope to have persuaded you, that **there is an alternative to thinking about problems of future generations in exclusively or primarily beneficence based terms, or indeed in exclusively moral terms of any kind.** If we broaden our horizons, we may find that we have even more reasons than we realize to worry about the fate of future generations. ## Greaves book review https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/Greaves_Book_review_Scheffler.pdf . This broadly utilitarian account, he says, misleadingly suggests that the reasons to care about future generations are entirely reasons of morality and (further) of moral duty (25-6). Further, on that account, moral motivation is generally based on sympathy (35). In contrast, Scheffler suggests, there are at least four types of reasons to care about future generations that do not have these features. These are reasons of interest, reasons of love, reasons of valuation and reasons of reciprocity. These four categories of additional reasons, he suggests, will together constitute an alternative, distinctively non-utilitarian approach (25) to the question. Reasons of interest arise from the fact that the “value of many of our activities depends… on the survival of humanity long after we ourselves are gone” (44). This is related to the more general tendency that many people have to want to “be part of something larger than themselves” (48). While some are quite content with hedonistic pursuits, and with creating simply for the sake of the creative enterprise, many of us are not like that. We derive far greater satisfaction from engaging in projects that we know to be important to others besides ourselves, and that are collaborative. Reasons of love arise from the fact that many of us occupy a mental state that deserves to be called a “love of humanity” (62). Just as when we love a person, he suggests, someone who loves humanity is apt to be distressed at the prospect of the object of love being harmed or destroyed. Reasons of valuation arise because many of the other things that we value, besides humanity itself, would be destroyed if humanity imminently went extinct. For instance, “beautiful singing or graceful dancing or intimate friendship or warm family celebrations or hilarious jokes or gestures of kindness or displays of solidarity” (70). while the psychology that Scheffler describes is a common one – wanting not only to be part of something larger than oneself when things independent of oneself will exist anyway and stand to benefit from one’s involvement, but wanting to be needed in the first place – it is not obviously a healthy one How does Scheffler’s four-part account relate to the standard story? One contrast is that **while the standard story is straightforwardly normative, Scheffler’s account is in one clear sense descriptive. He is not pointing out (as the standard account does) that the existence and fate of future generations matters “from the point of view of the universe”, and drawing the conclusion that they should therefore also matter to us. Rather, he is rather pointing out that they do already matter to us.** A second possible contrast is that while the reasons involved in the standard story are clearly ones of morality, Scheffler’s reasons are apparently supposed not to be (except perhaps reasons of reciprocity). This issue looms largest in the context of reasons of interest. On one very natural reading, reasons of interest are reasons of prudence, rather than of morality. We have self-interested (that is, prudential) reasons to want to live valuable lives, and thus the existence of future generations is instrumentally important to us in prudential terms. On this prudential reading, paying any significant attention to reasons of interest would be somewhat grotesque. There in the balance hangs an astronomical amount of human welfare: the happiness of quadrillions of future persons, and even the question of whether any of them gets a chance to experience the joys, loves, projects that life has offered us. But never mind them – I (rightly) feel better about my own life, as I cycle to work, as I hang out the laundry, if I (correctly) believe that future generations will exist and/or that my activities are benefitting them, and therein lies a significant part of my reason to do anything about it. Scheffler is of course aware of the prudential reading of “reasons of interest”. Perhaps because of its grotesque aspect, he goes to some length to disavow that reading (53 ff.), framing it as a common misreading of his previous book “Death and the Afterlife” (Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013]). Instead, he writes, the intended account is that “[w]e have an interest in [the] survival [of future generations] in part because they matter to us; they do not matter to us solely because we have an interest in their survival” (57). I find this reply a bit obscure. Insofar as I can understand it, however, it removes any prospect for reasons of interest to provide any independent grounds for caring about future generations, over and above either those that are involved in reasons of love and valuation, or those that are involved in the standard story. (On the prudential reading, whatever the demerits of the reasons in question, they are at least independent.) ... Whether it is reasons of love and valuation, or instead the familiar utilitarian reasons, that reasons of interest reduce to depend on how seriously we take the “to us” in the above quote. If the grounding fact is that future generations matter to us, then reasons of interest seem to add nothing (except the prudential) to reasons of love and/or valuation. The story, on this reading, is that we do in fact value future generations, and as part of this, we place especial value on activities of ours that preserve or benefit future generations. Alternatively, if the grounding fact is simply that future generations matter, as in the standard story, the account appears to be that since we recognise future generations matter, we recognise that activities of ours that preserve or benefit future generations are especially valuable activities. But that adds nothing to the standard story. ... Overall, Scheffler’s discussion is interesting and helpful, but I fear that its distance from the standard, broadly utilitarian, account has been oversold. Recall what were supposed to be the main two worries with that account: that it made reasons to care exclusively matters of morality and moral duty, and that it adduced only sympathy as a possible source of motivation. On reflection, we can see that these worries are overstated in the first place. The utilitarian account does involve exclusively moral reasons to care about future generations. It does not follow, though, that the utilitarian account is exclusively about moral duty. What it is more fundamentally about is axiology (a notion towards which Scheffler seems to voice some antipathy (chapter 4)): it centrally involves observations about how enormously much better the history of the world will be if future generations exist and flourish. Coupled with the simple fact (itself fairly widely agreed) that we all have pro tanto moral reason to promote the good, these observations are enough to establish that we have moral reasons, and potentially very powerful ones, to take steps to protect and benefit future generations. It is an optional further step to conclude from that that we have moral obligations to take those steps, and (even if we do take that step) it is an optional tactical decision to choose to emphasise the obligations rather than merely the reasons. Indeed, many utilitarians themselves are not particularly interested in the notion of moral obligation, or (as in the case of scalar utilitarianism) explicitly eschew any such notion. The reasons offered by Scheffler’s own account seem to fall into three categories (I am not sure which reasons fall into which categories, and one or more categories might be empty). First, some of them might be prudential reasons. This would make them genuinely independent of moral considerations, and perhaps motivationally useful in the case of people who don’t feel a strong pull towards moral concerns; but Scheffler himself vehemently denies this reading. Second, **they might not be reasons to care at all: they might simply be observations that we do care**, coupled with some more concrete remarks about the nature of our caring (as seems to be the case for “reasons” of love and of valuation). Third, some of them might be moral reasons, although not necessarily matters of obligation. This is perhaps the most charitable reading, but in that case the reasons under discussion are of a piece with those involved in the standard, broadly utilitarian account. The picture that seems to emerge is: **Future generations matter. Because we recognise that and because we are somewhat decent creatures, they also matter *to us*:** we love humanity, we value the things whose continuation would make the lives of future people good (as they have made our lives good), and we take particular satisfaction in activities that protect the existence and interests of future people. Reasons of interest, love and valuation are a real part of the story, but, on this reading, they all stem from the fundamental, broadly utilitarian, evaluative facts. They do not, after all, constitute a distinctively non-utilitarian approach. They need not invite a reading in terms of moral obligation, but neither need the utilitarian account.