The Rights of Future People

Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1989 159

The Rights of Future People

ROBERT ELLIOT

ABSTRACT It has been argued by some that the present non-existence of future persons entails that whatever obligations we have towards them are not based on rights which they have or might come to have. This view is refuted. It is argued that the present non- existence offuture persons is no impediment to the attribution of rights to them. It is also argued that, even if the present non-existence of future persons were an impediment to the attribution of rights to them, the rights they will have when they come into existence constitute a constraint on present actions. Both arguments build on a suggestion of Joel Feinberg’s. Next, three arguments are considered which, while they do not highlight the non-existence issue, are related to it. The view that the causal dependence, of (some) future people on present policies, erodes or weakens the claim that rights considerations should constrain our present actions concerning them, is considered and rejected. The view that future people can only have rights to what is available at the time at which these people come into existence is considered and rejected. So too is the view that the attribution of rights to future people involves, in virtue of resource scarciy, an unacceptable arbitrariness.

1. Introduction

The claim that future people, like present people, have rights, including rights which compel the protection and conservation of the natural environment, is not uncontro- versial. Attempts to show that the claim is false are likely to emphasise the present non-existence of future people and to urge that this renders the attribution of rights to future people incoherent. If such attempts are successful then, since at least some obligations follow from considerations concerning rights, our obligations to future people turn out to be less extensive along one dimension than our obligations towards present people. If this is so then arguments for policies such as resource conservation, protection of endangered species and wilderness preservation, which are often de- fended in terms of the rights of future people, are likely to be weakened in a rather significant way. After all, the pattern of rights determines not what it would be good to do or bad to do but what in the strongest sense must be done or must not be done. If future people do have specific rights concerning the environment, which rights would presumably be entailed by more general rights such as the rights to life, liberty, basic welfare and self-development, then we have obligations, rarely if ever overridable, to respect those rights. One way of doing this is through the framing and enforcement of laws which prohibit certain actions towards the environment and compel others. If it can be shown that future people cannot have rights then the permissibility of such legislation becomes controversial, since it begins to look like legislation which pro- motes some particular vision of the good, which is not shared by all citizens [l].

If it is true that future people cannot have rights, then the implication of certain environmentalist policies becomes questionable. If it is false, then we can go on to ask

160 R. Elliot

the normative question whether future people do have rights. This is a question I do not wish to address directly here. However, I would like to note that I take the answer to be in the affirmative and the rights of future people concerning the environment parallel the rights of present people concerning the environment. Removing the meta- ethical barrier to ascribing rights to future people would seem to confer prima facie credibility on the normative view that they do have such rights.

2. Removing the Meta-ethical Barrier

There are two ways of defending the meta-ethical claim that future people can have rights despite their present non-existence. The first is to argue that non-existence does not preclude the possession of rights and that future people are not debarred by their non-existence from being possessors of rights. This involves rejecting a metaphysical claim to the effect that there cannot be rights whose bearers do not yet exist. The second line of reply is to concede the metaphysical claim but to argue that the fact that future people can come to have rights provides the basis for a normative isomorphism between future people and present people. I shall call these lines of reply the Non- concessional View and the Concessional View, respectively. Both have been sketched, although not extensively developed, by Joel Feinberg [2]. I think that each line of reply is defensible, the latter less controversially so than the former. Here I shall develop both lines of reply and defend them against various criticisms.

It is useful to begin with Feinberg’s view of rights. Feinberg ties his analysis of rights to the notion of interests. He suggests that “the sorts of beings who can have rights are precisely those who have (or can have) interests”. He offers two reasons for this claim: “(i) because a right holder must be capable of being represented and it is impossible to represent a being that has no interests, and (ii) because a right holder must be capable of being a beneficiary in his own person, and a being without interests is a being that is incapable of being harmed or benefited, having no good or ‘sake’ of its own” [3]. So, accept for the moment Feinberg’s interest principle and ask whether it invites future people into the ambit of moral rights.

One possible barrier which Feinberg recognises is that of “falling into obscure metaphysics, by granting rights to remote and unidentifiable beings who are not yet even in existence” [4]. He concedes that future people are merely potential people but observes that “our collective posterity is just as certain to come into existence in the normal course of events as any given fetus in its mother’s womb” [ 5 ] . The point is that future people will come into existence and will have interests which are then real. In the future these people will satisfy the interest principle and so will be the kinds of beings who can possess rights. The implication is that the reality of these interests in the future is of normative significance for us now. Feinberg goes on to say that the rights future people have are contingent rights; they are contingent upon future people coming into existence. This is because moral rights require as their basis real interests and future people cannot have real interests unless they come into existence.

Some care is required in stating the exact content of Feinberg’s view. He might be taken as saying that future people have rights, albeit contingent rights, in the present, although we cannot now know who in particular will have these rights unless we know who in particular will come into existence. This is the Non-concessional View. Alternatively, he might be taken as saying that future people will have rights only in the future and of course we could not know who will have such rights unless we know who will come into existence. Nevertheless, so the suggestion might go, the moral

The Rights of Future People 161

status of future people is not diminished relative to what it would be if it were allowed that future people have rights now. This is the Concessional View. There is reason to think that Feinberg prefers the former. He remarks that philosophers “have not helped matters by arguing that animals and future generations are not the kinds of beings who can have rights now, that they don’t presently qualify for membership. . . in our normal community” [6]. The implication, although it is not altogether clear, is that he thinks future people do have rights now.

3. A Defence of the Non-concessional View

This view might be thought incoherent since it seems to commit one to the view that non-existent objects can possess real properties. For example, Richard De George claims that a future person cannot “be the present bearer or subject of anything, including rights” [7] and that “we owe [future people] nothing and they have no legitimate claims on us for the simple reason that they do not exist” [8]. However, the objection must be carefully framed in order not to miss the point. Assume that being the bearer of a right is to have the property of having the right. Unless non-existent individuals can possess real properties, and this seems doubtful, future people cannot be the present bearers of rights. However, there is another way of understanding the suggestion that future people have rights now; namely, that the rights themselves exist now. Feinberg does not have to claim that the future person is the present bearer of the right. He may say that there is no present bearer of the right but that, nevertheless, the right exists now and its present existence is contingent on the future existence of some person who will then be the bearer of the right. This future person will be the subject of the right, the individual whose interests the right would protect. Accepting this requires accepting that there can be present rights which do not have present bearers. This does not seem impossible. They will of course have future bearers and so the rights of future generations will not float free of subjects. They will be the rights of particular people. And whether they exist depends on whether those particular people come to exist. This means that we can mistakenly think that there are present rights of future people. This would be so if we mistakenly believed there will be future people. So, a present right, which is the right of a future person, exists, if it is the case that there will be a person in the future who will then be the bearer of the right.

Any oddness in this suggestion should disappear if we think about what it is to say that a right exists. It is to say two things. First, it is to say that there is a normative principle which specifies or marks out a type of right, for example the right to life. Second, it is to say that the principle has normative application, that it is activated. So, a present right is the right of a future person if it is in virtue of that person’s future existence that the principle specifying the right has application.

Consider this case, which I think parallels cases in which rights are claimed for future people. I propose to test a missile by firing it onto a distant island. It is suggested that I not do this since it may violate the rights of people living on the island. I counter by saying that there might be no people on the island and hence no rights to violate. Whether there are such rights is a contingent matter; it is contingent on there being people on the island. If there are then there are rights of which my proposed missile firing would constitute a violation. There is a difference between the two cases in that the latter involves bearers of rights who presently exist and the former involves bearers of rights who exist in the future. This is not a difference which undermines the attribution of rights to future people. It is rather a difference which

162 R. Elliot

reflects two slightly different sources of the contingency of rights. In the missile case there are rights which are violated if there are people on the island. In the other case there are rights which are violated if there are people in the future.

It is important to note that Feinberg does not think that all possible future people possess contingent rights; it is only those who come into existence who possess them. Merely possible people can have no rights at all, contingent or otherwise. This is because they never exist and so never have interests. The point of saying that the rights of future people are contingent is to signal a particular way in which the people who have them are epistemically inaccessible. However, they are not epistemically very differently placed from the possible islanders in the missile example just now discussed. The degree to which they are differently placed tends to be exaggerated and to be transformed into a deeper difference which undermines the attribution of rights to future people.

On the Non-concessional View, we can be confident that there are present rights of which future people will be the bearers. It is more than a fair bet that there will be people around in the future who do not presently exist. What we do not know is how many of them there will be nor do we know exactly who they will be. However the same is true of the possible islanders in the missile example. What might be thought to complicate matters in the future people case is that precisely who will exist, if anyone, is something which we in the present may be able to determine. Future people can be causally dependent not just for their continued existence in the future on present people but for their coming into existence. This is an issue to which I shall return presently.

4. The Concessional View

There is a simple enough adjustment to the Non-concessional View which preserves its normative implications but which avoids the possibly controversial commitment to the present existence of the rights of future people. The normative implications are lost only if it is assumed that it is presently existing rights alone which properly constrain present action. However, this would not be a sound assumption. After all, what we presumably wish to avoid are violations of rights flowing from our actions and policies. Clearly present actions and policies will affect the interests of people who exist in the future. And the rights people have in the future will be determined by the interests which they have then. So, it would seem that if we can adversely affect their interests, which we can, we can violate their rights. The manifestations of such violations might not occur in the present but the actions or policies which cause them do.

A simple example will illustrate this obvious truth. Imagine that I booby-trap a time capsule such that whoever opens it will be grievously injured. Someone does open it, in fact someone who is not yet born. What I do now plausibly is a violation of a right of that person, albeit not of one presently existing. The manifestation of the violation is in the future, if that is how the future turns out, but it is what I do now, given that that is how the future turns out, which constitutes the violation. All that we need to accept to make this point is that some future event can render a present event a violation of a future right. This seems unproblematic. We do not have to accept that the violation occurs before the right exists, only that an action of ours in the present causes the violation in the future. And if we have a commitment to avoiding and minimising violations of rights we should refrain from performing the action.


5. Non-existence and Causal Dependency

There is a problem related to but not identical with the non-existence problem which is also encountered in framing adequate normative principles for guiding us with respect to future generations [9]. It has to do with the causal dependency of future people on present actions and policies. It is a contingent fact that what we do in the present determines which possible future people become actual. This pattern of dependency follows from a contingent truth about conception and a necessary truth about the determination of an individual’s identity. The contingent truth is that as the time of conception varies so too does the matter and the genotype out of which a person eventually develops. The necessary truth is that as the matter and genotype vary so too does the identity of the developing person. An example will illustrate the point and its normative implications. Consider a policy P1 which, if instituted, will bring about the existence in the future of a particular set of people S1. The members of S1 will have lives which are stunted and impoverished. Consider another policy P2 which, if instituted, will bring about the existence in the future of a particular set of people S2. The members of S2 will have quite wonderful lives. Now P1 and P2 are mutually exclusive and S1 and S2 do not overlap. If we choose P1 no particular person is worse of than he or she would have been had we chosen P2 because no-one who exists if P1 is chosen exists if P2 is chosen. Similarly, no particular person’s rights are violated in the P1 future which are upheld in the P2 future.

Nevertheless it could be true that there are rights violated in the P1 future which are not violated in the P2 future and whether these violations occur is something which we can determine. Here our concern about rights would be in a way impersonal. We are not striving to ensure that the rights of a specific set of people are not violated, rather we are striving to ensure that rights violations do not occur. Whoever comes into existence will have rights and it is the violation of the rights of individuals which we wish to avoid. And in the case of future people one way of doing this is to ensure that that set of future people whose rights can be most extensively upheld be actualised. If P1 leads to a future in which the atmosphere is grossly polluted and massively undermines the welfare of members of S1 and if P2 leads to a future in which the atmosphere is relatively unpolluted, then, ceteris paribus, P2 is to be preferred. Moreover, it is to be preferred for reasons to do with rights. It should be noted that while the concern is not for particular people it is particular people whose rights will be met if we act on the basis of the impersonal concern.

While the fact of causal dependency entails that rights considerations concerning future people will often be impersonal, it is not necessarily the case that they will always be. There might well be cases where, modifying the earlier example, S1 and S2 overlap. Here there will be particular people whose rights are violated in the P1 future but not in the P2 future and the concern will be personal. Indeed some of our actions may have no impact on who exists in the future but may have an impact on how things are for whoever exists. Recall the example of the booby-trapped time capsule. It is easily conceivable that the person who opens it is not causally dependent on anything at all that I do. Here the rights consideration which counts against my booby-trapping the time capsule is personal. It is a concern that the right to life of a particular person not be violated. Who that person is, or will be, is not something I can in fact know but this does not mean that the concern is not personal in the relevant sense. It is personal in the same way that my concern for the possible islanders in the missile example is

164 R. Elliot

personal. There too I have no idea who in particular might be harmed. What I do know is that there might be particular people there who would be harmed.

There is another kind of case where the concern will be personal. Imagine that in the P1 future conditions will be so bad that life is uniformly not worth living. Assume also, not implausibly, that there is a right not to be born if the life one is born into is not worth living. Here the choice in favour of P2 has its basis in both an impersonal concern to minimise rights violations and in a personal concern to that members of S1 not have their right not to be born violated. I shall say more later about the coherence of the right not to be born in responding to another objection.

A shadow of the causal dependency problem remains. It turns out not to threaten the Feinberg view but it is useful to describe it and to point out just why it is not problematic. There may be some rights which plausibly people possess only if there are sufficient resources available for the satisfaction of all demands based on the right. The right to a tertiary education might be an example of such a right. Concede all this. We can now imagine the following choice situation. We can adopt policies now which bring S1 into existence in a future in which there are sufficient resources to provide universal tertiary education. Alternatively, we can adopt policies now which bring S2 into existence in a future lacking sufficient resources to provide universal tertiary education.

If we adopt the latter the right to education is not violated (although whether the right to equal opportunity to secure a tertiary education is violated is a distinct question). Now it might be thought that we should adopt the former and this might be taken to suggest that rights-based considerations are somehow deficient in the context of delineating and explaining obligations to future generations. There are three replies in response to this. First, not all rights are of this kind; not all rights depend for their existence on the possibility of their satisfaction. The rights to life and liberty are examples. So, there is a class of significant rights for which the problem of manipula- tion with respect to future populations does not arise. Second, there are other resources available to a moral theory which takes rights seriously for explaining why the first option is the preferable option. Most obviously one could appeal to some perfectionist principle which emphasises the desirability of tertiary education and its contribution to human flourishing. The perfectionist principle tells us very generally what kind of future we should aim for and the rights considerations more precisely specify the detail. The third reply is the topic of the next section.

6. The Availability Objection

De George claims that “only once a being exists does it have needs or wants or interests. It has a right only to the kind of treatment or to the goods available to it at the time of its conception” [lo]. If the second sentence is true then rights considerations would seem to do significantly less in protecting future people that in protecting present people. For example, the right to clean air would not be a right which future people have unless clean air is available at the time of their coming into existence. Moreover we can, as we have seen, guarantee that the air is then not clean by pursuing policies of large scale pollution. This seems wrong and, plausibly, in part because of rights considerations akin to those which would contribute to the wrongness of polluting the air breathed by present people.

The argument is developed from some examples which are supposed to highlight the vacuousness, if not the incoherence, of attributing rights to future people. The first


example concerns a couple who are so constituted that if the woman conceives then the child will have some painful, genetically based affliction. We are told that the child cannot have a right not to have the disease [ 111. This is for two reasons. First, before it comes into existence there was no entity which could be the bearer of the right. Second, once it is conceived it has a determinate genetic makeup the alteration of which would alter its identity. Freedom from the affliction is something that the child cannot have because freedom from the affliction would be to have a different identity, which is to say it would not be the same child. So it is vacuous, if not incoherent, to say that it has a right to be free from the affliction.

Two more examples are offered: . . . prehistoric cave man had no right to electric lights or artificial lungs since they were not available in their times, and we have no right to enjoy the sight of extinct animals. To claim that there is a right to what is not available and cannot be made available is to speak vacuously. Some future people therefore will have no right to the use of gas, or oil, or coal, if, when they come into existence such goods no longer exist. [ 121

Suppose we assume that all future generations have the same right to oil as we do: and suppose that since it is a non-renewable resource, it is used up by some future generation. What of the next generation that follows it? Should we say that since that generation cannot be produced without violating its rights to oil it has a right not to be produced? Surely not. Or should we say that if it is produced one of its rights is necessarily infringed, and that the rights of all succeeding generations will similarly necessarily be infringed? It is possible to speak that way; but to do so is at least confusing and at worst undermines the whole concept of rights by making rights claims vacuous.

There are two distinct arguments to deal with. First, there is the argument that an individual cannot be coherently said to have a right to something if a condition of meeting the right would be that the individual would never exist. Second, there is the argument that an individual cannot be coherently said to have a right to something if that right cannot be met. Both arguments fail. Before showing this there is an observation worth making. Where De George’s arguments are persuasive it is at least partly because he trivialises the environmentalists’ case by his selection of the putative rights. Take the right to oil for instance. Now it is obvious that there can be worthwhile social arrangements which are not dependent on oil. The real thrust of the environmentalists’ arguments is that our present energy policies undermine the chances of any transition to a worthwhile social arrangement independent of oil. It is less trivial to assume a right to a worthwhile social life and it is something like this that the environmentalist would wish to ascribe to future people. Having said this I shall switch back to De George’s examples since the conceptual points can be made easily enough using them.

Consider the first. We know that the couple in the earlier example will have an afflicted child unless that are treated. Assume also that if they have such a child its life will be not worth living. We treat the parents, thereby ensuring that they give birth to a different child. It is open to us to defend our actions in the following way. We can argue that people have a right to lives which are worth living and that there is a strong prima facie obligation to avoid violations of the right. In the case at hand we act so as

De George elaborates:

~ 3 1

166 R. Elliot

to prevent one specific violation of the right. There is a particular, although epistemically indeterminate, possible person whose right to a life worth living would have been violated had he or she become actual. We are moved by the personal concern that a particular person not have his or her right violated and by the impersonal concern that rights violations of that kind be minimised. Unfortunately the only way in which we can avoid violation of the right is by ensuring that the person whose right it would be does not come into existence. One thing that is interesting here is that a contingent right, in the sense of a right which a particular person would have were he or she to come into existence, of a possible future person is morally motivating even though it never becomes actual: indeed it never could become actual [14].

This style of defence has relevance to environmental concerns. Imagine that we have adopted a policy of toxic waste storage which is likely to make life in the future not worth living. (The example could also be spelt out in terms of a, not implausible, right to decent health.) We know that if there are people in that future then their rights to a life worth living are violated. There are two things we can do in response. First, we can ensure that there are no people in that future and so no rights violations. Second, we can ensure that the people who inhabit that future have lives worth living and thus that the right to a life worth living is not violated in that future.

One thing that must be noted is that the right to a life worth living would not be violated in any cases provided the life in question achieved some minimally decent level of value. We might often be so placed that we might bring into existence either a person who merely reaches this minimal level or a person who clearly exceeds it. The degree to which our policies embrace resource conservation might make this kind of difference. We might think that it would be better to produce the second person than the first. However, on this matter rights considerations might well be silent. In fact I think they are. What intrudes to make the difference are axiological or perfectionist principles. This is no argument against the need to employ rights considerations in deciding how we may act with respect to future people. It is merely to make the point that rights considerations themselves will not be enough. This is equally true in cases involving present people.

Consider now the caveman example. It is true that the caveman does not have a right to electric lights and it is true because the attribution of that right is vacuous. However, this example and others like it do not relevantly parallel the claims about the rights of future people, such as the right to see species which we have caused to become extinct. (Note that vacuousness of the caveman’s right to electric lights does not entail the vacuousness of certain positive rights which his impoverished circum- stances prevent from being met.)

There are two ways of understanding the right to see extinct species. First, we might take it to be a right to enjoy the sight of species which have become extinct and concerning which there is no real possibility that they should not have become extinct. As De George suggest, it would be absurd to claim that we have a right to see the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs have become extinct independently of human action: their extinction is in a special sense a natural phenomenon. While there might be some reason to say that it would be prima facie good if there were dinosaurs around for us to see, perhaps because we would enjoy seeing them, it is mistaken to say that some right of ours is violated in virtue of their absence. However, this is not because the right in question, if it were allowable, could not be met. Rather it has to do with the reasons it could not be met. To see this, consider the second way in which the right in question might be read; that is as a right to enjoy species which have become extinct but


concerning which there is a real possibility that they would still be extinct had humans acted otherwise.

Thus imagine that the blue whale is hunted to extinction. This extinction would be a direct result of human actions and could have been avoided by adoption of conserva- tionist policies. Here it is not absurd to suggest that we have a right to see the blue whale, which right is violated by the extinction. This is because there is something we can do now which ensures that this particular right is not violated in the future. The resource, which in the future allows the satisfaction of the right, is available to future people in the sense that it is within our power to conserve it.

Compare the extinct species case with a case in which some provision is made in a person’s will for a material reward to the person who proves Fermat’s last theorem. Several decades thereafter it is proven. Meantime the estate has been embezzled and squandered. It is not implausible or incoherent or (morally) vacuous to suggest that the theorem prover has a right to the award despite the fact that the right cannot be met. This person can legitimately say that the embezzler has violated his or her right.

Or again, imagine a group of people with such limited resources that not all can survive. Does this mean that it is vacuous to ascribe to each of them a right to life on the grounds that not all of the putative rights can be met? Of course it is true of each person that his or her life could be saved, provided that the life of some other is not saved. However, once the resources are allocated there are some whose lives cannot be saved. Should we say that these people do not have the right to life because that right cannot be met in their case? We should not. (It might be argued by some that two or more people can have rights that cannot both be fulfilled and met. For them, this last counter-example will has no force. However, the preceding one is not affected and is sufficient to make the point against De George.)

Recall that De George used the notion of availability to make his argument against rights for future generations. His argument only succeeds, if at all, for one of two distinct readings of availability, namely that which marks out those cases in which the putative right cannot be satisfied irrespective of what we do. This leaves most cases of appeals to the rights of future generations untouched since they are typically appealed to in the context of futures which do not come about irrespective of what we do.

7. The Arbitrariness Objection

There is a further argument which De George offers which merits consideration. This argument seeks to show that attributing rights to future people introduces an unacceptable arbitrariness into any normative system which permits it. So:

. . . consider oil once again. It is a non-renewable resource and is limited in quantity. How many generations in the future are we to allow to have present claim to it? Obviously if we push the generations into the unlimited future and divide the oil deposits by the number of people, we each end up with the right to a gallon or a quart or a thimble full. So we must reconstrue the claim to refer to the practical use of oil. But this means that we inevitably preclude some future generation from having oil. And if all future generations have an equal claim, then we necessarily violate the rights of some future generations. It is clear, then, that we do not wish to let unending future claims have equal weight with present claims. The alternative, if we do not consistently treat future rights differently from the rights of presently existing persons, is

168 R. Elliot

arbitrarily to treat some rights, those of sufficiently distant generations, as less demanding of consideration than the same claims of generations closer to us. [15]

This argument echoes an argument already dismissed to the effect that it is vacuous to ascribe rights which cannot be met. However, there is another strand to the argument. The suggestion is that the ascription of rights to future generations results in an unacceptable arbitrariness.

The alleged arbitrariness is presumably thought to emerge because we choose to satisfy the rights of some generations, perhaps including our own, but not of future generations. De George thinks the arbitrariness can be avoided by declining to make the move of ascribing rights to any future generation at all. The implication is that even if some right ascribed to a future generation can be met, it is even so improper to make the ascription because to satisfy the rights of some without satisfying the rights of all is arbitrary.

It is possible to show that favouring some future generations while ascribing rights to all is not unacceptably arbitrary. As far as their rights are concerned the generations are equally placed and if there are no other moral reasons for favouring some but not others, then we might plausibly differentiate on prudential grounds. (Indeed De George makes a similar observation himself: “If there is to be a peak followed by a decline in the standard of living.. . there is no reason why the present rather than a future generation cannot enjoy that peak” [16].) If this is thought to be inappropriate then we can treat temporal location as a balloting device for determining which generations do not have their rights met [ 171. Alternatively, we might adopt some other balloting device. Whichever way we go there is no inconsistency with the ascription of equal rights to all generations. There is of course another, supererogatory, option we might take; viz. make an heroic sacrifice for some future generations by waiving our own rights.

7. Conclusion

None of the arguments considered above concerning or associated with the non- existence of future people, and which seek to show that it is incoherent or vacuous to attribute rights to them, is successful. Future people can have contingent rights and the interests of future people generate obligations which are binding on us now.

Robert Elliot, Department of Philosophy, University of New England, Armidale, N.S. W., 2351, Australia.

NOTES

I would like to thank an anonymous referee for the Journal for comments and suggestions. [ l ] For an account of why this matters within liberal theory see JOHN RAWLS (1988) The priority of right

[2] JOEL FEINBERG (1974) The rights of animals and unborn generations, in: WILLIAM BLACKSTONE (Ed.)

[3] Ibid., p. 51. [4] Ibid., p. 65. [5] Ibid., p. 65.

and ideas of the good, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 17, pp. 251-276.

Philosophy and Enaironmental Crisis (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press).


[6] Ibid., p. 67. [7] RICHARD T. DE GEORGE (1979) The environment, rights and future generations, in: KENNETH

GOODPASTER & K. M. SAYRE (Eds) Ethics and Problems ofthe 21st Century (Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press), p.95.

[8] RICHARD T. DE GEORGE (1984) Do we owe the future anything?, in: JAMES P. STERBA (Ed.) Morality in Practice (Belmont, CA, Wadsworth). See also RUTH MACKLIN (1984) Can future generations correctly be said to have rights?, in: STERBA, p. 152, for similar claims. This argument is also outlined in JEFFERSON MCMAHAM (1981) Problems of population theory, Ethics, 92, pp. 96-127, who says that he believes that the argument can be met but does not say how.

[9] The difficulties raised by causal dependency are discussed in JEFFERSON M C W N (1981), DEREK PARHT (1982) Future generations: further problems, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11, pp. 13-72 and ROBERT SCHWARZ (1978) Obligations to posterity, in: R . I. SIKORA & BRIAN BARRY (Eds) Obligations to Future Generations (Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press).

[lo] DE GEORGE (1979), op. cit., p. 96. [ l l ] Ibid., p. 96. [12] Ibid., p. 97. [13] Ibid., p. 97. [14] JOEL FEINBERG (1980) Is there a right to be born? in his Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty

(Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). Pages 215-216 argue for the coherence of a right not to be born.

[15] DE GEORGE (1979), op. cit., pp. 97-98. [16] Ibid., p. 98. [17] ROBERT J. YANAL (1982) Queue line earth: Locke’s proviso and energy conservation, Metaphilosophy,

13, pp. 15-30, defends this view.

Documents

The Rights of Future People