Megan MacDowell

Capstone Seminar

March 17, 1999

Evaluating Our Responsibility to Future Generations

"I suspect that if there is cause to fear for man's survival it is because

the calculus of logic and reason will be applied to problems where they

have as little validity, even as little bearing, as the calculus of feeling

or sentiment applied to the solution of Euclidian geometry." -- R.

Heilbroner

The above quote from Robert Heilbroner speaks well to my feeling

after reading some of the theoretical approaches to the ethics of our

"obligation to future generations" from this weeks readings. For example,

I found Derek Parfit's essay to be particularly unfulfilling. He set out

to find a formula "X" which was derived from logic and yet could provide us

an answer to all difficult questions about what we owe to the distant

future. Unfortunately, he got stuck on the way with several

not-quite-right formulas (A, B, and PAP) which he didn't feel worked

because of the alarming fact that in different scenarios there might be

either different individuals effected in the future or a different number

of individuals. He seemed to think individual identity was a big deal. I

didn't think he was going anywhere. I also got lost as Garrett Hardin

tried to explain how in order to help future generations, we must secure a

specially-priveledged elite in developing countries.

To help sort through this intellectual mumbo-jumbo, I decided to

address how real people think about future generations and our obligation

to them. Personally, I think that we do have an obligation to the future,

but this is something that I have never really had to defend. So I decided

to talk to someone who thinks about the duty to future generations on a

regular basis: my Mom. Besides her obvious focus on the immediate next

generation (me), my mother upholds a personal ethic of responsibility to

much more distant generations in her job. She deals with issues of low and

high-level radioactive waste and its disposal. I called my mother to ask

her for an explanation of why she cares about future generations and about

some of the issues relating to our obligation to future generations that

she encounters surrounding this issue.

The nuclear waste issue is relevant here because it deals with two

issues - how should we produce energy and how do we deal with the risks

involved with the byproducts of nuclear energy? As DesJardins discussed,

"Even a small amount of plutonium will remain highly toxic for 250,000

years" (71). So in considering waste disposal, the possible effects of

leakage create risks that potentially reach extremely far into the future.

The issue my mother is currently evaluating is the proposal by Carolina

Power and Light, Co. to double the high level waste to be held at the

Sharon Harris facility in Chatam County, North Carolina. Investigations

have shown that the doubling of waste in this facility (to the equivalent

of 10 times the capacity of Chernoble) will increase the risk of leakage

and suscepabilty to accidents. They also know that if a serious accident

were to occur, that an area the size of the state of North Carolina could

be effected by the radiation. This, of course, is a situation replicated

in various places around the country while we try to find a place to store

the waste continuously being produced by our increasing use of nuclear

power. I will list a few of the more difficult questions that arise from

this situation:

-How much are we willing to spend now to reduce risk to future

generations?

-Whose money should it be?

-How do we store waste - so it is buried once and for all (such as

in Yucca mountain) or so it is accessible enough

for continued monitoring and removal should technologies change (if we find

a process with detoxifies the waste, for example) or an emergency arise

(say astronomers discover a meteor will hit Earth near the site)?

-How do we chose between fossil fuels (nonrenewable and greenhouse

gas producing) and nuclear energy sources until better technologies are

developed?

But first, we should deal with the issue, as our readings try to

do, of why we should care.

My mother said this: "Life is made up of generations. Because each

generation loves its offspring and the following generation, so we are

really all connected in a chain of love." She restated it also as:

"because of the beauty and wonder of life." She said that it is not fair

for one generation to gobble up resources now causing future generations to

live an impoverished life (Mary MacDowell, phone communication).

Her ethic is clearly not based on cool logic, but on love an

caring. Heilbroner identifies an intuitive sense that we should care about

future generations - which sounds similar to my mother's and mine. But he

sites Adam Smith - "It is the love of what is honorable and noble, of the

grandeur and dignity, and superiority of our own characters" (278) - as the

cause of our intuitive sense, but my mother links it more directly to love,

rather than to honor. Martin Golding sees the connection with the

parent-child relationship. He writes, "The obligation to future

generations... Is rather like the responsibility that a parent has to the

welfare of his child. Discharging one's parental responsibility requires

concern, seeking , and active effort to promote the good of the child"

(285). But he fails to think that work for farther removed generations:

"Parental responsibility is enriched and reinforced by love, which can

hardly obtain between us and future generations" (285). My mother doesn't

see this limitation - she sees the chain which makes us care for each

succeeding generation because we know the preceding generation or two cares

for them (and eventually this traces back to us). Her idea also differs

from Golding's "moral community" idea - because the love connection is what

matters, not necessarily that the future generation thinks the same things

we do.

The problem my mother sees, is specifically with trying to use

logical principals to determine what we owe the future. Mainly she takes

issue with those who, following economic theory (and present-day culture),

believe that if everyone follows their own self interests, the result is

what is best for society (i.e. - Capitalism). As several of our readings

pointed out, economics has a hard time dealing with factoring future

interests into their cost-benefit analysis. They have been using the

principal of "discounting" future values, but as DesJardins points out,

this shouldn't work when considering future life and health (87). As my

mother stated it, the economic model doesn't' work. A limited number of

people benefit at the expense of future generations, other species, and

even our own neighbors.

But as the quote at the beginning of this paper implied, the

rational ethical argumentation also doesn't apply. Derek Parfit worries

that not all people share the intuition to care for future generations

(293), so he tries to make a formula based on logic - it doesn't work.

DesJardins points out the problem with pure theory - "As philosophers

turned their attention to environmental issues, it became clear that simply

applying standard ethical theories does not produce satisfactory analyses

of these issues" (94). He sees theory as precluding the need for the

development of an environmental ethic. Hardin apparently sees the value of

an intuitive ethic over a formula, and he proposes to educate young

children, because "only unconscious beliefs have much power to cause

actions that run contrary to the dictates of simple rationality" (283).

The only somewhat convincing theoretical argument I found in our reading

was Gregory Kavka's. He argues that "just as it is unreasonable for any

individual to favor his or her present desires over future desires, so it

is unreasonable to favor satisfying the desires of the present people over

those of future people" (DesJardins 84). What is important about his

thinking is that he gets away from just thinking on terms of the individual

and points us to thinking of "people" in the broader, time-inclusive sense.

Granted that my mother is not a philosopher per se (nor am I), I

found her comments helpful in understanding the sense of obligation to

future generations that a real person has and which impels her to action.

For me, and I think for most people, we have been either taught to feel

this obligation at least to some extent, or feel it intuitively. Agonizing

over the creation of a fail proof formula seems a waste of time. The

capitalist ethical philosophy (and the self-interest and materialism it can

encourage) is the greatest risk I see to preserving our culture's intuitive

caring for the future.

In terms of what are obligations exactly are to future generations

in terms of energy, I propose the following. First, we must reduce the

amount of energy we consume. According to the U.N. report, by 1993, world

energy consumption was almost 50 percent greater than in 1973 (20). We

should reduce our demand in the future and focus on efficiency and

sustainability. Keeping world population levels from exploding out of

control is important to keeping the demand from soaring. We also must

focus our attention on research and development of new, clean, renewable

energy sources. The U.N. report cites the "energy challenge" over the next

50 years as "providing a growing world population with sufficient energy,

without further damage to human health or disruption of critical

environmental functions" (25). However, the same report shows that "The

developed countries currently spend over 50 percent of their annual US$ 8

billion energy research budget on (civil and military) nuclear programs;

less than 10 percent is spent on renewables (28). Perhaps we can think of

this as Brian Barry does - that we are compensating future generations for

our current consumption by funding more research on alternative energy.

But in doing these things, we must also concern ourselves with protecting

people's health and lives in the present. As Hardin says, "when necessity

is in the saddle we dare not expect altruism from 'the people'" (282).

In addition, I think Heilbroner makes a good point that one way to

force people to care about future generations is to make them responsible

for actions that would effect them (278). This could be applied to one of

my previous questions as to who should pay for safe storage of nuclear

wastes. My mother believes that responsibility should be put on those who

produce the waste, therefore causing them to have to answer to the ethical

considerations, and to moderate production based on this and the high cost

of safe storage.

And finally, regarding the question "What did posterity ever do for

me?," I think the question is misdirected. We should think of all that the

past has done which effects our lives. We live in a country based on a

fairly strong Constitution, which we can thank past generations for, and

for important inventions, and for creating National Parks. We should also

think of how their bad decisions have effected us (there are of course,

many examples) and thus try to do the best for future generations.