(May 5, 2021 at 2:44 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: 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.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
