[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[Pat Mustard]

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.

Given that your side is vehemently opposed to protecting the rights, either moral or legal, of actual living people, I find you coming on here trying to hijack the moral ground with faux appeals to "protecting potential people" to be simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.

To give evidence to the claim in my first clause, the groups vehemently opposed to abortion to protect a clump of cells' "right to life" are vehemently in favour of allowing parents to murder their children through medical negligence because of "sincerely held" religious beliefs. To the religious right and their followers and fellow travellers, a blastocyst has more rights than a 5 year old.

Fix your immorality to actual human beings before lecturing us about potential human beings Wooters.