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PART TWO APPLIED ETHICS 6 FutureGenerations I nowturn to ethical considerations, and in this chapter in particular to the nature and grounding of our obligations towards future people. This will require a change of method, away from a historical approach to a more traditionallyphilosophical one. Thus in order to consider the basis of our obligations, I shall be reviewingvarious theories of normative ethics, theories about the criteria of right action and of obligation. But I shall also be concerned withparticular obligations, ones attested by widespread intuitivejudgements or by moral reflection on them, even where they do not tally with the predictions or the yield of the theories. The issue of obligations to future generations proves to bring out the inadequacyof several such theories, and a method is accordingly in place which allows theories to be revised or even rejected where they fail to account for deeply held reflective moral intuitions, rather than one which requires judgements to be uniformly tailored to fit one or another theory. Reflective judgementsare, after all, the principal data from which theories in normative ethics are constructed, with the manifest proviso that judgements which are inconsistent must be revised with the help of theory, rather than being sustained at the expense of inconsistency. One of my aims, then, is to arrive at a 'reflective equilibrium' between judgements and theory, and between normative principles and their application. In my own view, in fact, there are recognizable limits and a recognizable scope to moral reasoning, discernible from a priori considerations such as the meaningof the very concept ofmorality, as well as from the aposterioristudyof particularjudgements; but I shall not be arguing the matter here, and mention it mainlyto avoid giving the misleading impression that the methodology of reasoning in ethics is limited to a consideration of the interplay ofintuitions and normative theories, the kind of interplay presented just now. 88 FUTURE GENERATIONS 89 Nevertheless the present chapter is a study of just such aninterplay. Readers, however, may well feel entitled to know what view is here assumed of the status of moral talk and moral claims. My view, argued elsewhere,1 is that moral discourse is not concerned merely with prescriptions or expressions of attitude or commitment; it aspires to truth and actually admits of knowledge. This view has recently been ably defended by Renford Bambrough,2 though I should add that I am more sympathetic than he is to naturalism, the view that moral judgements can be validly derived exclusively from facts (e.g. facts about harms or benefits) and conceptual truths. But my naturalism does not prevent me from finding common ground with anti-naturalist writers such ais K. S. Shrader-Frechette,3 at any rate in the area of applied ethics. The current enterprise, then, is aimed at discovering the truth about some of our obligations: and to this enterprise writers of various meta-ethical persuasions seem to have contributed, even if they do not acknowledge that there issuch a truth.4 But as I am not defendingmoral objectivism here, I cannot complain if some readers treat the chapters which follow as simply a search for the best available consistent and defensible ethical position. The issue of obligations to future generations is a good startingpoint for a discussion of ecological ethics. There are other distinct issues, important examples of which (the status of animals; the value of life) will be discussed in subsequent chapters. The current issue has been chosen because it allows (and indeed requires) normative theories to be assessed, because of its key role in ecological issues, and because it can be tackled without a comprehensive valuetheory being elaborated. To keep the present chapter within reasonable limits, I have as far as possible postponed the issues of the obligation to perpetuate the human population and of the intrinsic value of future people, though it has not been possible at all points to avoid related matters, particularly where the question arises of the representation of the interests of possible people who on some plans will exist and on others will not. For the most part, however, I shall be concerned with obligations to people who, for one reason or another, will exist, irrespective of whether there should have been less (or more) of them, and whether earlier generations should have acted earlier to modify their numbers. The importance of posterity in the beliefs of Enlightenment thinkers has already been discussed in chapter 5; indeed their recognition that it is increasingly within the power of...

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