Obligations to Unborn

Tommy the Hamburger is in Philosophy Hour. This is where I take the fucking big questions that usually get dressed up in polite little college words, drag them into real life, and see what survives. No fake wisdom, no clean answers, just the hard shit that keeps crawling around in your head after midnight. I once heard a man say, "Why should I care about people who don't exist?" He was not trying to be a villain. He was trying to be practical. That is what made it worse. He was talking about long term environmental planning at some boring public meeting where the coffee tasted like old pennies and every third sentence included the phrase "economic feasibility." Somebody raised the issue of what the project would mean fifty years from now, and he leaned back in his folding chair and said, completely calm, "Fifty years from now I'll be dead. Most of us will. Why should hypothetical people outweigh actual people in this room?" That sentence sounds vulgar when you put it that nakedly. But whole societies are built on cleaner versions of it. That is the question. Do we owe anything to the unborn? Not embryos in the abortion war propaganda sense. I mean future people. People who are not here yet, whose names we do not know, whose faces do not exist, who cannot vote, sue, bargain, protest, or stare at us with the offended look living people get when you are directly screwing them. Do those people have any claim on us at all? The easy answer is no. You cannot owe a debt to a ghost. You cannot harm someone who does not exist. You cannot prioritize the rights of hypothetical future people over actual present needs. That is the hard nosed line, and it has a brutal little appeal to it because it cuts through a lot of moral fog. There are people hungry now. People sick now. People priced out now. People being bombed now. So why get all teary about some future abstraction while real flesh and blood people are already getting fed into the machine? I understand that instinct. I really do. The future can become a convenient moral prop if you are not careful. Politicians love invoking the children and grandchildren while gutting the actual lives of living workers in the present. The unborn can become a sentimental shield behind which all kinds of present cruelty get hidden. So yes, there is something rotten about treating future people as more morally vivid than the people already standing right in front of you. But the opposite answer breaks down almost immediately. Because even if future people are not here yet, our actions are still building the conditions they will walk into. You may not know exactly who they will be. Fine. But you know there will be people. Unless your worldview is that history ends with your dental records, somebody is coming after us. And if we poison water sources, destabilize climate, burn through soils, leave behind waste that lasts centuries, pile up debt, strip institutions for parts, and call all of it present necessity, then the fact that those later people did not yet exist when we did it does not feel morally exonerating. It feels like exactly the kind of trick selfish people would invent. Derek Parfit gets into this in a way that makes everybody's head hurt, because future people are weird philosophically. Different choices now can change which exact people come to exist later, so you cannot always say, "This particular future person was harmed compared to some alternative version of their life." Sometimes without the bad policy, that exact person would never have existed at all. Fine. That is a real problem in moral philosophy. It is also the kind of problem that can become a getaway car for obvious irresponsibility if you let it. Because even if the identity math is complicated, the broad shape is not. Creating a world of dirtier air, meaner heat, more chaos, thinner institutions, and fewer living options is worse than not doing that. You do not need to know which exact child will breathe the smoke to know the smoke is a betrayal. And betrayal is the right word, I think. Fuck me sideways, once you say it that plainly, half the practical talk starts sounding like vandalism with spreadsheets. Not because the unborn have already entered into a contract with us. Because we are temporary beneficiaries of a world we did not build alone and are constantly deciding whether to pass it on in a more livable or less livable state. That introduces stewardship whether we like the word or not. I know people hate that word because it sounds churchy and self congratulatory. Too bad. The basic idea still stands. You inherited stuff. Land. Language. Institutions. Infrastructure. Water systems. Roads. Soils. Libraries. Power grids. Vaccines. Songs. Debts. Pollution. Trauma. All of it. And unless you are planning to take the species down with you, you are also a link in a chain and not some isolated consumer whose only task is to maximize present comfort before the credits roll. The deepest argument for obligations to the unborn, to me, is not sentimentality. It is power. They will be radically vulnerable to decisions they cannot contest. That matters. Vulnerability plus dependence plus our present control over the conditions of later life is enough to create moral pressure even without a handshake across time. If you can alter the background conditions of someone else's life in massive ways while they have zero possibility of resisting you, you do not get moral freedom from that situation. You get more responsibility. That is true with children. It is true with the disabled. It is true with captive populations. And I think it is true across generations, even if the mechanism is stranger. Now, none of that means present people become expendable for the future. That is the other trap. You can do horrible shit in the name of posterity. Sacrifice workers now. Displace Indigenous people now. Impose austerity now. Tell everybody to tighten up for the children while the powerful continue skating over consequence in first class. No. Future duty does not erase present justice. If anything, it should radicalize it. Because the best way to honor future people is not to build some sterilized moral altar to them while crushing the living. It is to stop normalizing the kind of system that treats any disposable population, present or future, as acceptable collateral. That is why I do not trust futurism that is too clean. A lot of it turns into demographic math with no human pulse in it. Save future people by sacrificing these neighborhoods. Save future people by doubling down on extractive infrastructure here. Save future people with sacrifice distributed, mysteriously, downward. That is not responsibility. That is the same old bullshit dressed in long range language. The man in the folding chair was right about one thing, though. Actual people in the room matter. A lot. If your future ethics never cash out in any real concern for the suffering already visible, then your concern for the unborn is probably vanity or abstraction or a way of feeling serious without having to love anybody specific. I do not trust moral vision that leaps tenderly toward 2080 while stepping over a hungry tenant in 2026. Still, the present can also bully the future by sheer emotional vividness. Present needs scream. Future needs whisper. That does not mean the whispers are morally empty. It means humans are biased toward what hurts now, near us, with faces and voices and bodies we can touch. Evolutionarily, fine. Morally, insufficient. Part of ethics is training attention past immediacy. If you cannot care about consequences that arrive after you are gone, then you are basically licensed for elegant vandalism. Take what you can. Burn what you want. Let the next shift mop up. That is not adulthood. That is frat house ethics for civilizations. What the unborn cannot ask us for directly is foresight. Restraint. Preservation of options. A refusal to lock them into obviously worsened conditions because convenience was easier to defend than sacrifice. That may sound thin compared to love or rights or citizenship, but it is not thin at all. Foresight is expensive. Restraint is expensive. And preserving options for people you will never meet runs directly against the cheap animal part of us that always wants to cash out now. Notice I am not saying we owe future people perfection. That is impossible and usually a cover for something authoritarian anyway. We do not owe them a painless world. We do not owe them guarantees. History does not work like that. What we owe them, I think, is not to knowingly rig the board against them for shallow gain. Not to hand them preventable catastrophe with a smug little note that says we were maximizing shareholder value or keeping gas cheap or preserving "lifestyle." There is also a personal version of this that is less global and more intimate. People save for children they have not had yet. People plant trees they know they will never sit under at full size. People preserve family stories for descendants not yet born. Why? Because the human heart already understands time spanning obligation better than our cynical public philosophy pretends. The problem is not that we cannot grasp duty to the unborn. The problem is that we selectively grasp it where it feels beautiful and ignore it where it threatens present appetite. I can save for my future grandkid's education and still support a political order that cooks their world. That split is the problem. So where do I land? Yes, we owe something to people who do not exist yet. Not because they are mystical. Not because the future is holier than the present. But because we are already exercising power over the conditions of their lives while they remain unable to answer back. That creates obligation. Not infinite obligation. Not obligation that erases the living. But real obligation. Enough to say that knowingly worsening the world for the sake of convenience, extraction, or political cowardice is not neutral just because the victims have not arrived yet. We owe future people preserved possibility. We owe them less sabotage. We owe them a world not rigged as brutally against them by our own short horizons. Less arrogance too. Less theft. Less cowardice. And maybe most of all, we owe them the end of that smug little sentence: "Why should I care about people who don't exist?" Because one day, if things go on at all, they will. And when they get here, they will be living inside what we decided not to care about. That's Philosophy Hour. No neat answer, no bow on it, just a question that hits different once you have to carry it back into your actual life.