On owing something to people who cannot object

Our vision document commits us to future generations. This reflection examines whether that commitment can be given any philosophical content, or whether it functions mainly as a way of sounding serious.

The problem with our usual accounts

Nearly every framework we have for grounding obligation runs through something that future people cannot supply. Consent requires them to agree. Democratic legitimacy requires them to participate. Contract requires them to bargain. Reciprocity requires them to be able to return something. Even harm-based accounts struggle, because it is unclear that a person can be harmed by a decision that also determines whether they exist at all.

The result is that most invocations of future generations are rhetorical. They function as an intensifier — a way of indicating that a decision is serious — rather than as a constraint that could rule anything out. We include ourselves in this criticism. Our own vision document says we treat their absence as a design problem, and we should be asked what that actually forbids.

What survives the objection

Here is what we think does hold. We cannot know what future people will want. We can know what we are removing from the set of things they could choose.

That distinction does real work. It converts an unanswerable question about their preferences into an answerable question about our own decisions: what does this foreclose? A standard that can be revised forecloses little. A standard embedded in ten thousand deployments, with no documented exit and no surviving record of why it was chosen, forecloses a great deal — not because it is wrong, but because it can no longer be examined by anyone who inherits it.

We cannot represent their preferences. We can decline to spend their options.

The limit of the argument

This is weaker than it first appears, and we should say so. Preserving optionality has a cost, and paid indefinitely it becomes paralysis. A society that never commits to anything irreversible builds nothing durable. Some irreversible commitments — the eradication of a disease, the establishment of a right — are precisely what we would want to leave behind.

So the principle cannot be “preserve all options”. It has to be something closer to: when a decision forecloses options for people who cannot participate in it, that fact should be identified, recorded, and accepted deliberately by someone answerable — rather than arrived at by default because the reversible path cost more and nobody was measuring.

That is a modest conclusion. It is also, as far as we can tell, defensible, and it is more than most invocations of future generations deliver. We would rather hold a small position that survives scrutiny than a large one that does not.