What We Owe the Future

In 1987, the Welsh government planted 700,000 trees near Newtown to absorb carbon dioxide. Most of those trees won’t reach maturity for another thirty years. The people who planted them knew perfectly well they would never see the benefit. Nobody forced them to do it. They just thought it was the right thing to do.

Defending that intuition is harder than it looks. We normally ground moral obligations in relationships: you owe something to someone because you made a promise, caused them harm, or stand in some ongoing connection to them. Future people don’t satisfy any of these conditions. They can’t help us, sue us, or cast votes. And yet we talk and (sometimes) act as if we owe them something. The question is whether that behavior reflects a coherent moral position or is just a vague sentiment we invoke when it’s convenient and ignore when it’s expensive.

The Case For

Three philosophical traditions give different answers, and they mostly agree. Utilitarians count welfare: if future people will exist, their suffering and flourishing count in the moral calculation. Since there could be many more future people than present ones, their aggregate welfare could easily outweigh ours. This is the premise behind William MacAskill’s argument that the most important thing we can do is improve the long-run trajectory of civilization rather than address present problems [Macaskill2023].

Rights theorists start from a different place but reach a similar conclusion. If future people will have the same moral status as present people—which seems hard to deny—then the fact that they don’t exist yet is morally arbitrary in the same way that geographic distance is morally arbitrary. We don’t think we owe less to someone suffering in a country we’ve never visited. Why would temporal distance be different?

John Rawls asked his readers to imagine designing a society without knowing what position they would occupy in it. He extended this thought experiment across generations: if you didn’t know which generation you’d be born into, you would want rules that protected each generation from being stripped of resources by its predecessors [Rawls1999]. The philosopher Edmund Burke made a version of this point two centuries ago, describing society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born [Burke1790].

These arguments are not identical, but they converge on the idea that our obligations extend beyond the people we can see and hear.

The Problem of Non-Identity

The philosopher Derek Parfit spent years trying to figure out whether any of this actually made sense. His conclusion was unsettling [Parfit1987]. The problem is that the specific people who will exist in the future depend on the specific choices we make today. If we had enacted serious climate legislation in 1990, the people born in 2050 would be different people from the ones who will actually be born. So when we say we are harming future people by burning fossil fuels, which people are we talking about? The people who will actually exist owe their existence to the chain of events that includes our decisions.

This doesn’t mean the future doesn’t matter. It means that if we want to defend obligations to future generations, we probably can’t do it by pointing to individual harm. We need an argument that works at the level of conditions and possibilities rather than identifiable victims.

The Legal Gap

The law has mostly not solved this problem, which explains why our legal obligations to future people are so weak. Courts require an identifiable party who has suffered a concrete injury. Future generations fail this test on both counts.

The workarounds are real but imperfect. Environmental impact assessments require governments to consider long-term consequences. Some constitutions are designed to be difficult to amend, protecting future generations from present majorities. In 1993, the Philippine Supreme Court allowed a group of children to sue the government on behalf of future generations in Oposa v. Factoran, a ruling that has influenced environmental law in other countries. Wales and Hungary have created parliamentary commissioners specifically tasked with representing future interests. These are genuine innovations.

But the structural problem remains: today’s legislators have no electoral incentive to sacrifice for people who cannot vote.

The Case Against, and the Cynicism Problem

The philosophical arguments for intergenerational obligation are more coherent than the arguments against. The non-identity problem is the most serious challenge, and it is a challenge to one particular way of framing the obligation, not to the obligation itself. The utilitarian, rights-based, and contractarian cases all survive it largely intact. What is harder to survive is the behavioral evidence.

The gap between what we say about future generations and what we actually do is not subtle. Greenhouse gas emissions are still rising; fisheries are still being depleted beyond recovery, and pension systems are underfunded while present spending continues. Hans Jonas argued that our technological power has outrun our ethical frameworks precisely because those frameworks were designed for a world where our actions had local, reversible consequences [Jonas1984]. That may be true, but it doesn’t explain why the frameworks have remained so convenient.

The uncomfortable hypothesis is that “what we owe the future” functions primarily as a way of gesturing at seriousness without having to do anything. Thirty years of climate pledges backed by thirty years of continued extraction is fairly strong evidence that the stated preference is not the actual preference. Every cost-benefit analysis used in actual policy applies a discount rate to future welfare, which means a dollar of harm to someone in 2100 is worth almost nothing in present calculations. This is not a fringe view; it is embedded in standard regulatory practice.

There is also a pointed objection from the present: roughly 700 million people alive right now lack clean water, food security, or basic medical care. Diverting moral energy toward speculative future benefits while ignoring identifiable present suffering is a luxury. The language of obligations to future generations can even function as cover for deferring justice for communities already bearing the costs of extraction and pollution, who are disproportionately poor.

This is not an argument that the obligation doesn’t exist. People regularly fail to act on obligations they acknowledge; we don’t conclude that theft is acceptable because people steal. But it is an argument that philosophical clarity about what we owe is doing almost no work in the world, and that the useful question may not be “do we have a duty to future generations?” but rather “what would actually change our behavior?”

When the Future Is Used Against the Present

MacAskill’s longtermism is not merely an academic position. It is the philosophical foundation of a cluster of movements and organizations that have come to exert significant influence over technology policy and philanthropic giving. Émile Torres, a philosopher who helped develop these ideas before becoming one of their sharpest critics, named the cluster TESCREAL: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. The ideologies in this cluster share the longtermist premise that the scale of the future is so vast that almost any present sacrifice can be justified if it plausibly improves long-run outcomes.

The utilitarian arithmetic is straightforward. If trillions of people could live across star systems over millions of years, then even heavily discounted future welfare vastly exceeds present welfare. A donation that slightly reduces the probability of human extinction is, on this accounting, worth far more than a donation that cures a child of malaria. The future people win the calculation. They always win, because there are so many more of them.

The practical conclusions drawn from this reasoning were not to give to the most urgent present needs but to fund AI safety research, pandemic preparedness for civilization-ending pathogens, and other efforts aimed at preventing extinction or steering the long-run trajectory of civilization. This is not irrational given the premise. The problem is that the premise— that we can make meaningful probability estimates about civilization-scale outcomes centuries or millennia into the future— is not grounded in anything. It is speculation wearing the mathematical clothing of rigor.

The deeper problem is structural. If the future is so important that it swamps present obligations, then whoever controls the trajectory of the future has more moral authority than any present institution or democratic process. This is exactly the reasoning several tech billionaires have adopted. Elon Musk has described his accumulation of capital, media platforms, and satellite networks as necessary to prevent humanity from being locked into a bad long-run future. OpenAI’s founding mission statement—to develop AI safely “for the benefit of all humanity”— is a longtermist framing that positions the organization’s leadership as trustees of civilization accountable to no present constituency. The argument that today’s people must accept disruption, displacement, and concentrated power because future people’s welfare is at stake is being made by very wealthy people about costs borne by others who have no voice in the decision [Andreessen2023].

This is the same rhetorical structure as other forms of extraction: the resources and labor of present people converted into benefits claimed to accrue to a future whose composition and preferences cannot be known, managed by self-appointed trustees who cannot be held accountable because their beneficiaries do not yet exist. The people who will supposedly benefit have no way to confirm or contest the claim. The people bearing the costs can be told that their objections fail to grasp the scale of what is at stake.

The philosophical validity of longtermism as a position about what we owe the future is entirely separable from its political use as a reason why present inequality, present suffering, and present concentrations of power should not be interrupted. An argument that future generations’ interests justify present sacrifice is most credible when the people making the argument are also bearing the sacrifice. It is least credible when it is made by the already-powerful to justify policies that harm people who were not consulted and will not share in whatever future is being optimized for.

Isaiah Berlin spent much of his career analyzing how this kind of reasoning goes wrong at the level of philosophy rather than just politics. His book The Crooked Timber of Humanity took its title from Kant’s observation that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” [Berlin1991]. In it, Berlin argued that the goods people pursue are genuinely plural and genuinely irreconcilable. Liberty and equality pull against each other. Security and freedom pull against each other. Community and individuality pull against each other. These are not failures of imagination or coordination problems awaiting a technical fix. They are permanent features of human life, and no political arrangement will eliminate them.

The view Berlin was arguing against he called monism: the belief that freedom, utility, the glory of the nation, the arc of history, expected future welfare, or something else is the one supreme value, and that apparent conflicts between goods are ultimately solvable by reference to it. Monism is not just an abstract error. It is, Berlin argued, the philosophical root of political tyranny, not because monists are necessarily cruel but because once you accept that one value is supreme, you can justify any present harm. If the supreme value is large enough—and nothing is larger than the welfare of all future humanity—the calculation can authorize anything done to anyone living now. The people bearing the cost can always be told that their objections reflect a failure to grasp the scale of what is at stake.

Liberal democracy, on Berlin’s account, is not a system for finding the right answer. It is a system specifically designed for a world in which there is no right answer—in which the goods people legitimately pursue are inevitably in tension and the best that can be achieved is a negotiated, revisable, accountable balance among them. What TESCREAL bypasses is not merely democratic process as a procedural nicety. It is the entire institutional architecture designed to prevent any single value, and any single group of people claiming to serve that value, from overriding the rest.

The Material Basis of Democratic Accountability

The philosophical argument that longtermism justifies concentrating power has a concrete political parallel that requires no philosophy to understand. Democratic governance rests on a bargain. The governed have things that their governors need: labor, taxes, and consumer spending. This dependency is the material basis of democratic leverage. When value is generated by AI systems owned by a handful of corporations already expert at tax optimization, every mechanism of democratic governance weakens simultaneously. The tax base shrinks, consumer spending contracts, and collective bargaining fades away. The tendency for the return on capital to exceed economic growth accelerates because AI severs the last link between capital accumulation and the need for human labor; as that happens, wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands [Piketty2017].

The economic incentives point toward entities with the fewest democratic accountability mechanisms. An authoritarian government that deploys AI to replace its workforce faces no electoral consequences and gains a surveillance and control dividend on top of the economic efficiencies. Governments with vast capital, centralized decision-making, and no electorate to answer to are structurally better customers for this technology than democracies. This is one concrete reason the political movement around AI acceleration has shifted support toward figures who have demonstrated no loyalty to democratic constraints [McGrann2026]. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said it directly: “The balance of power of democracy is premised on the average person having leverage through creating economic value. If that’s not present, I think things become kind of scary.” The CEO of one of the leading AI companies is describing the technology he is building as a threat to the material basis of democratic governance. His company has not endorsed a single piece of legislation to address it.

What We Can Defend

Years ago, while hiking in the woods, I spotted a set of bamboo windchimes hanging from a tree. There were five weather-stained rods carved to different lengths, each of which had initials carved on it and a pair of dates. I can’t remember the years exactly—this was back in the days of chemical cameras, so if I still have the photo I took it’s in a box in my basement—but I remember they ran from the 1930s and 1940s to the 1980s.

The bar the chimes hung from had a hole carved in it for a sixth. I still sometimes wonder why it was missing. Had a squirrel chewed through the twine used to tie it on, so that it fell into the undergrowth and was lost? Had someone’s time not come yet? Or had there been no one left who knew or cared to add it?

After all I’ve read, I believe that caring about the future is a personal choice, and that the most defensible version of our obligation to it is simple: don’t foreclose options. I think we should strive to give our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, as many choices as we had. They should be able to enjoy the things that we can enjoy, like safe drinking water, healthy coral reefs, and free elections. I believe that we don’t own those things. We are just their trustees, and like all trustees, we are accountable for what we hand on—even if the beneficiaries aren’t in the room.