Irresponsibility towards future generations

Future generations (persons who are not present today, not even born or conceived) are going to be affected, positively and negatively, by what present generations do.

Effects on future generations are often ignored when decisions about large-scale resource policies and about far-reaching technologies are made. Future discount rates used in economic planning effectively forbid planners from taking much notice of costs and benefits to be felt no more than thirty or fifty years in the future. This is now an anachronism, because it has become quite evident that technologies and environmental activities have reached a point where they have much more far-reaching effects on the future than before.

1. Whatever is right for our grand-children is always uneconomic and almost always impolitical.

2. "Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports life". (Rachel Carson, 1962, Silent Spring).

3. Is it fair to leave for a population that will inevitably be much larger (whatever to be much better off) a natural resource base that has been depleted and rendered significantly less productive than it is today?

1. Why do we care about the future? Our progeny. What are we trying to "sustain"? A healthy habitat 'primarily for them'. If we sought a sustainable habitat for various chemical eating microbes, diverse organisms and plants that thrive on our waste/pollution, we would happily continue our current behaviour. Shrinking biodiversity and killing off many species in our food chain will improve the sustainability for the remaining life forms better adapted to the altered environment.

2. The progress that humanity has experienced during the last two centuries has no precedent. Pessimistic forecasts about human prospects have been repudiated by the reality of material progress. The record of humanity shows that, on average, the people in each generation have created more than they used. This must be true to account for the increase in wealth of numbers of human beings. If it were not true, we would have become extinct.

1. Lack of social conscience
2. Insensitivity to non-immediate hazards to society

1. Vulnerable children
2. Unrecognized future financial commitments
3. Unconstrained exploitation of natural resources
4. Unaccountability of institutions degrading the environment
5. Short-range planning for long-term development
6. Irresponsible policy-making
7. Incompatibility of long-term thinking and financial priorities
8. Inadequate adult guidance
9. Human eugenics
10. Exclusion of pre-adults from family decisions
11. Denial of the rights of foetuses

1. Uncertainty of survival of the human race
2. Placement of the burden of proof on the disempowered
3. Inadequate response to societal needs

1. Unsustainable development
2. Unknowable future patterns of social choice
3. Undervaluation of natural capital
4. Temporal deprivation
5. Pre-millennialism
6. National public debt
7. Limited social guidance by older generations
8. Irresponsible delimitation of policy responsibilities
9. Inaccurate forecasting
10. Imperfect synthesis of concepts of sustainable development
11. Generation communication gap
12. Excessive consumption of resources in industrialized countries
13. Decline of the extended family

1. Sacrifice of present generations for the future

1. Anthropocentrism

1. Violation of the rights of unborn children
2. Uncoordinated expression of needs

1. Reducing inequality between generations
2. Recognizing intergenerational needs
3. Promoting voluntary human extinction
4. Preserving inequality between generations
5. Orienting economic policy toward social need
6. Establishing equal rights
7. Denying rights of posterity
8. Articulating future vision
9. Advocating intergenerational equity
10. Protecting rights of unborn children

1. Irresponsibility
2. Denial
3. Inequality
4. Obscurity