[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[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.