[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[Neo-Scholastic]

Before responding to specific replies, I would like to position my comments by noting that almost all moral decision-making in some way seems to involve using foresight.

If responsibility to a hypothetical future generation, not yet conceived, seems too intangible to understand  - consider debt and reciprocity.  The current actual generation has already benefitted from exactly this sort of responsibility…Or, perhaps, consider our own actions purely in the present.  Would it be better to lead a life which respects future life, or one which doesn't?  What do the two types of lives look like?  

That is a perfect example. It does seem unfair for people alive today to squander resources and burden future generations with debt.

The Scholastic argument against … 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…
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…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.

Your first paragraph makes sense to me. A fetus warrants our consideration by virtue of its ontological status as an actual being with potential, human potential. I guess you could say that even if we had no moral obligations to people not actualized, we would still want to consider how our choices effect the lives of unknown strangers who will live on after we are gone. In other words, I need not concern myself with people who may or may not exist in future, since it is more than enough to worry about contemporaries who will outlive me.

However, your last paragraph reminds me of the notion of knowing that something exists without knowing what that something is. We can know that it is likely someone will exist even if we don't know who will exist.

I don't know whether moral truths themselves are dependent upon intuition, but determining whether something is morally true or not seems to rest only on intuitions… Our morals appear to inescapably rest upon intuition, and intuition is a guide of questionable value… consider Munchausen's Trilemma…The third leg of the trilemma is that definitions, concepts or whatever terminate in an indisputably basic fact.  Basic facts are known through apprehension, or intuitively.  You can't define what would constitute a basic fact, as that would lead to another iteration of the trilemma.  So the challenge for those who would argue that morals have an objective foundation is to confront an equivalent trilemma for morals and show either that there is a fourth option that hasn't been acknowledged, or that  there are basic, indisputable beliefs about morals that are objectively true.  Failing to do either is just wasting my time….All reasoning starts from things which are assumed to be true.  Thus all reasoning is without an ultimate rational foundation.  This is no less true of arguments about color than it is about morals…I pointed to moral disagreements on slavery, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and masturbation as questions as to whether a consensus of intuitions among the majority of thinkers was sufficient to determine whether something is likely to be true.  And until someone shows some other basis for morals than intuition then skepticism that such exists is warranted.  Reason and rational chains of thought have one thing uniting them that intuitions do not: they are transparent and accessible to inspection.  If nobody has presented something possessing those qualities with respect to morals, skepticism is most certainly justified.

The fatal flaw of philosophical skepticism is its obsession with certainty. While there is a place for examining unchallenged assumptions, at some point people need to make their best guesses.  Pyrrhonic skepticism has some value. It reminds us that the human condition includes a limited range of sense data, fallible perception, and a vulnerability to skewed reasoning. Skepticism seems better at promoting epistemic humility when it isn’t used as a cudgel to undermine productive attempts to gain understanding of the world.

IMHO, skepticism is a negative kind of mysticism. Not only does it posit an unseen and unknowable reality underlying the world as we apprehend it, it asserts that knowledge of the unseen realities are inaccessible. It does this by simultaneously exaggerating human limitations (both cognitive and perceptual) and demanding absolute certainty, which of course is unobtainable. The right and proper response to someone doggedly presenting skeptical arguments, like Agrippa’s trilemma, is “whatever.” Doubt is not an automatic defeater. If the human condition is to navigate through a life without uncertainty, then it seems wise to leave aside debilitating forms of skepticism and embrace the fact that what we consider knowledge is not “justified true belief”; but rather, earnest conjecture. In other words, if the best we can do is guess, how can we assure that we are making the best guess?

I would not discount value of intuition in attaining philosophical insight any more than I would discount the role of beauty in mathematics. Any moral philosophy, including nihilism, which fails to condemn the slaughter of innocents, be they children on the cusp of birth or Amalekites, deserves extra scrutiny, does it not?

I think as it relates to the OP, the intuition that moral obligations are real can be taken as a given, as vulcanlogic does below.

…Assuming moral realism, I think we can say something about a moral commitment to future generations.

Our actions affect future generations whether we want them to or not. The fact that they don't exist yet doesn't change the fact that our actions will affect people in the future. We ought to feel the same obligation to them as we do with people in the here and now.

Far too much moral reasoning is based on speculations about the future. The trolley car problem, for example, relies on comparing two possible futures and the dilemma of having to choose one over the other. Rather than judging the choice on either utilitarian or deontological grounds, I want know how the moral agent at the crux of the dilemma made his or her decision. Maybe the rightness or wrongness of the moral agent’s action isn’t in the action itself or its outcome; but rather embedded in the nature of the moral agent. Did he or she act in his or her fullest capacity as a human being attempting to exercise sound judgement?

With respect to future generations, I would like to see a moral justification based on the notion that the people alive today are not necessarily obligated to speculate about possible events in the far future but can be obligated to live virtuous lives with the incidentally effect of benefiting future generations. For example, the moral dilemma of the ancient world was not about whether to abolish slavery, which was inconceivable; but rather how to best accommodate an apparent necessary evil. IMHO, we cannot fault the ancients for failing to imagine a world in which industrial-technology replaced forced-labor, whether it be chattel slaves, serfs, or in-debted servants. But we can reflect on whether they did the best they could overall, which I think is all anyone can ask.