[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[no one]

Humans themselves have to change. That will never happen.
People will always have a gripe.

[Silver]

I have a counter question: did you support Trump who did not support a moral obligation to future generations?

[Belacqua]

Here is the basic question.  Do we have moral obligations to future generations?

Intuitively, it would seem so and it is a common consideration for many current policy debates. For example, why should anyone alive today care about preventing environmental catastrophe, say 200 years from now. Everyone alive today will presumably be dead and the beneficiaries of our prevention do not even exist yet, and might never exist. At the same time, if we do have obligations to people not even yet conceived, how can we say that no one has moral obligations towards those who have been conceived but not yet born, as in the case of legal abortion?*  This is philosophical question about if one can be morally obligated to a possible world. One potential solution, would be to treat potential as a kind of existence. In my estimation, the Scholastic tradition seems do so, at least in the following sense. While something may not exist "in act" it still isn’t necessarily nothing at all; it could still exist "in potency".

I don’t know. It’s just something I ponder lately and thought it might be fun to discuss without taking a position.

* Just to be clear, I am NOT interested in playing the “you’re-a-hypocrite-if-you’re-for-one-and-against-the-other” game or having a climate change/abortion debate. The bigger question is more interesting to me and I want to know how some of the more philosophically minded members would approach it.

Offhand it looks to me this way: anyone who opposes abortion has an equal duty to work against climate catastrophe, unnecessary war, and other death-dealing events that loom large but may possibly be prevented. 

The Scholastic argument against abortion has always seemed to me the only one based on reason, and not just "because the Bible says so." It makes sense to say that the only ontological change occurs at conception, and from there it is a question of potential coming to actuality, through one continuous process of gestation, birth, life, and death. 

Personally to me this doesn't seem like an argument against birth control. The fact that sex has the potential to create babies doesn't cause me to prevent conception during sex. 

I guess I'd say that working against the actualization and flourishing of an extant thing (the already-made fetus) is bad. However, neglecting to actualize the potential of a baby I might potentially have conceived but didn't isn't bad. I don't feel that I have harmed the flourishing of a being who never began to exist in the first place. (This is just my instinct -- I'm not ready for the full argument.) 

So then we have to think about which category to put future people into. Those who exist and have potential, or those who are purely imaginary.

When we think of people who will exist in the future, after I'm gone, I think we should have the same responsibility toward them that we feel to already-made things. That is, we don't treat them as the imaginary babies I might have made, but who never got conceived. This is because we know that they will exist -- we know that there will be somebody there existing and therefore having the right to flourish. All of those people who really will exist, but whom I will never meet because I happen to drop dead, are not just imaginary -- or will not stay just imaginary. So we have a responsibility to them.

[The Grand Nudger]

Put another and far simpler way - If murder is wrong - is it less wrong or not wrong if we hopped over to world b for some murder tourism?

Yes, if murder is a moral imperative in world b (I’m assuming the ‘murder’ has the same definition in both worlds).

No, if murder is equally morally wrong in both worlds (same caveat).

Boru

I can see a possible world where murder is a moral imperative for the creatures within it.  I don't even know that we have to go to our imaginary world to make that one stick.  For me, though, the answer would be no in both cases.  I think that our moral responsibilities must follow us wherever we are if they objectively refer to us. I see it as a change of venue, I suppose.

[LadyForCamus]

Here is the basic question.  Do we have moral obligations to future generations?

Intuitively, it would seem so and it is a common consideration for many current policy debates. For example, why should anyone alive today care about preventing environmental catastrophe, say 200 years from now. Everyone alive today will presumably be dead and the beneficiaries of our prevention do not even exist yet, and might never exist. At the same time, if we do have obligations to people not even yet conceived, how can we say that no one has moral obligations towards those who have been conceived but not yet born, as in the case of legal abortion?*  This is philosophical question about if one can be morally obligated to a possible world. One potential solution, would be to treat potential as a kind of existence. In my estimation, the Scholastic tradition seems do so, at least in the following sense. While something may not exist "in act" it still isn’t necessarily nothing at all; it could still exist "in potency".

I don’t know. It’s just something I ponder lately and thought it might be fun to discuss without taking a position.

* Just to be clear, I am NOT interested in playing the “you’re-a-hypocrite-if-you’re-for-one-and-against-the-other” game or having a climate change/abortion debate. The bigger question is more interesting to me and I want to know how some of the more philosophically minded members would approach it.

Whoa, Neo! Long time no see! I hope you’ve been well.

[Fake Messiah]

Here is the basic question.  Do we have moral obligations to future generations?

Intuitively, it would seem so and it is a common consideration for many current policy debates. For example, why should anyone alive today care about preventing environmental catastrophe, say 200 years from now. Everyone alive today will presumably be dead and the beneficiaries of our prevention do not even exist yet, and might never exist. At the same time, if we do have obligations to people not even yet conceived, how can we say that no one has moral obligations towards those who have been conceived but not yet born, as in the case of legal abortion?*  

Sure, are you not glad that our ancestors took out lead from car fuel, or would you rather breathe lead? Besides, pollution is not something that is 200 years away, but it's something that is already here. Just air pollution contributes to the deaths of an estimated 7 million people worldwide annually.

Or take yourself, you eat one credit card worth of plastic every week, dispersed as microplastics in food and water - will it start to bother you when you eat two credit cards every week because there are only more plastics in the environment, not less?

Also, people who have abortions think about possible worlds: like the ones in which they can go to college instead of working underpaid jobs to feed kids they can't afford, or they get abortions so that they can feed kids they already have, and so on.

[The Grand Nudger]

Or maybe they just don't want a kid, which is fine. There's probably more responsibility to worry about in the attempts we make to criminalize the procedure than there is in seeking one, if we're concerning ourselves with moral responsibilities.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Yes, if murder is a moral imperative in world b (I’m assuming the ‘murder’ has the same definition in both worlds).

No, if murder is equally morally wrong in both worlds (same caveat).

Boru

I can see a possible world where murder is a moral imperative for the creatures within it.  I don't even know that we have to go to our imaginary world to make that one stick.  For me, though, the answer would be no in both cases.  I think that our moral responsibilities must follow us wherever we are if they objectively refer to us.  I see it as a change of venue, I suppose.

I’m not sure how you can have a moral responsibility to a possible world with radically different moral strictures from yours. I agree that you carry your own moral responsibilities with you, but that’s not really the same thing. In order to be morally responsible to a world that has radically different morals from your own, it seems like you’d have to abrogate your moral responsibilities.

Boru

[tackattack]

I can see a tie from the moral landscape of the individual to the moral landscape of the society. If you have a moral obligation to the society you’re in and the societies aims to perpetuate that society and its goals, then you would be tied morally to said outcomes. Slavers from slave times were morally tied to propagating slavery until a societal shift moved that target. It is this agreed moral tie to societal goals that feeds definitions of reparations, norms and “the ultimate good”

//2 cents

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that's a possibility in possible worlds, yeah. That visitor conformity to equivalently justified moral standards on some radically different world could imply or might even require moral abrogation. I think that's true here in this world alone.

That, for example, even if we went to some part of this world and conformed to that parts moral imperatives - equivalently justified - we've done something wrong. Just eyes wide open wrong. Usually wrong for effect - at least in my experience. We justify it by imagining that were helping, sometimes..at least, I think we're right about that too.

---

-Slavers were financially tied, not morally tied. Still are. The notion that a society's perpetuation relies on slavery in any actual and necessary way would, to me, imply a moral obligation to destroy that society and liberate those people. Indoctrination is great. Like the distinction between to and in, above, the distinction between has and does is monumental. It may be true, for example, that a society has relied on slavery to perpetuate itself - but that doesn't mean that it actually does require it..or even if it did, that there would be any moral imperative to preserve it. One is a bit of historic trivia, or at most a practical concern. The other is a moral condemnation of a society's very nature.