Intergenerational Obligations and the Rope of Lives
Kenneth Taylor

07 June 2005

昨天在节目中，约翰想出了一个很好的比喻。他把一代人比作一根长绳子上的一股小线。每条链都与附近的许多其他链紧密地缠绕在一起，但大多数情况下，这些链彼此之间不会直接接触。如果你认为绳子是随着时间的推移而生长的，这个比喻抓住了一个关于代际关系的很好的事实。例如，没有一根线能持续很长时间。但绳子之所以能坚持下来，是因为在其他绳子断了的地方有了新的绳子。我很喜欢这个比喻，我想用它来进一步探讨我们对代际义务的看法。

我们可以把世代分为三组:完全先于我们的一代，部分与我们重叠的一代，和完全跟随我们的一代。很明显，我们如何看待我们对另一代人的义务部分取决于那一代人所处的环境。我们对完全先于我们的几代人的义务，如果有的话，肯定会不同于我们对重叠或完全继我们之后的几代人的义务。我认为，另一个重要的因素是我们正在谈论的绳索的类型——是否将几代人绑在一起形成一个家庭，一个国家，或一所学校。

人们很容易相信，我们对自己的祖辈没有义务，无论他们是自己的家庭、自己的国家还是自己的学校。毕竟，他们死了，所以，你可能会想，超越所有的伤害和好处。我认为这件事的现状是正确的。

Both Aristotle and Confucius would disagree, I think and not entirely without reason. You can, for example, tarnish someone’s reputation long after they are gone. That plausibly is a kind of harm. Similarly, breaking a promise to one’s dead mother, to preserve a cherished family heirloom, say, seems like a bad thing and maybe even a harm of some sort to the dead mother.

It seems right to say that when you break a promise to a dead person or do something to (unjustly) tarnish the reputation of the dead you may have done something wrong. But what seems less clear to me is that you’ve actually done something wrongtothe dead person. At any rate, it clearly doesn’t follow from the mere fact that you’ve done something wrong, that you’ve done something wrongtothe dead.

To see why it doesn’t follow, consider John’s rope. It seems to me that you can have -- and maybe in some cases ought to have -- an attitude toward the rope as a whole and toward your own present role in “extending” the rope. I don't see why just those atttitudes might not be the source of many obligations, without those obligations having to be obligationstoany past or future generations. By analogy, think of one’s whole life and one’s attitudes toward that life at any given stage of that life. We tend to think of any moment in our lives as one moment in a temporally extended life. Many of our attitudes are attitudes toward our lives as a whole – rather than being attitudes toward particular stages of our lives. To be sure, attitudes toward our lives as wholes may entail various attitudes toward the various stages of our lives. If I want my life as a whole to go well, then at earlier stages I may have to make certain efforts that will only bear fruit at later stages of my life. But my point is that it would be wrong to simply reduce our lives to a sequence of stages and then to insist that our attitudes are all directed at particular life stages, with there being no attitudes that are direct to our lives as wholes.

The analogy strains a little bit when we get to the rope, because the rope is a series of connected butdistinctlives. Still, it seems as though we might sometimes have attitudes toward the rope either as a whole or at least toward large segments of the rope that extend forward and backward beyond our own strands. When we think of our own individual lives as tied up with the history of a family or of a nation or of a school or even of a neighborhood, we are to some extent viewing our lives as part of one strand on a rope of connected lives.

现在假设我确实把自己的生命看成是一系列相互联系的生命中的一个生命，并假设实际上，我给自己的任务是保持和延伸那根把我与过去和未来的生命连接起来的绳子。I thereby commit myself to preserving and extending the rope, but not because Ioweit to anyone to do so -- most especially not because I owe it to the dead and probably not because I owe it to the yet to be born. But the important point is that as long as I am committed to preserving and extending the rope, then it can be wrong not to take certain actions, even if I do no “harm” to any past or future person when I fail to take the requisite actions.

Notice that we may find the rope handed down to us from our ancestors to be in many ways unlovely. We might therefore set ourselves the task of radically altering the future trajectory of the rope. If, for example, our ancestors were a slave-holding, xenophobic, marauding people, who disrupted everything they touched, the rope as we find it might contain division and conflict. We certainly wouldn't owe it to them to continuing weaving the rope together in ways that respect who and what they were. The rope is an inheritance that we may do with as we would, guided by no normative lights save our own. Or so it seems to me. If that is right, it is wrong to think of ourselves as "obligated" to past generations.

I think something similar can be said about future generations. We don’t owe it to future generations to pass on the rope in any particular shape. In a sense, we do not stand in “direct moral community” with not yet existent generations. And the same holds, by the way, for no longer existent ones. By this I mean that neither wholly past nor wholly future generations can make any direct moral claim on us because we are not in direct dialectical engagement with them at all. Nonetheless, in viewing our lives as bound together by John’s rope, both with lives that have already wholly elapsed and with lives still to come, nothing prevents us from commiting ourselves to continuing the rope in ways that honor or respect the past or in ways that will provide an inheritance of a certain sort to those yet to come. Indeed, seeing our lives in this way is one way of endowing our lives with meaning and with a certain narrative coherence.

I’ve gone on way too long about generations that wholly precede or follow our own. So I think I’ll stop now and post this as it stands. I’ll save for another post some thoughts about generations that partly overlap our own. Here things are quite different and quite a bit more complex. That's partly because we are in more or less direct dialectical engagement and moral community with such generations. They do make direct demands on us and we make direct demands on them. It was this kind of thing that Norman Daniels talked about on our show during the time we had him on. But more about that in my next post.

Comments(8)

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Guest

Tuesday, June 7, 2005 -- 5:00 PM

Near the end of the show you were discussing wheth

Near the end of the show you were discussing whether one owed anything to future generations. If one admits to there being something in the individual which goes beyond the purely physical (i.e., can anyone demonstrate the chemical formulas for such things as intention, will, courage, nobility, honor, etc.?, doesn't it stand to reason that one might find himself or herself as another strand of rope in a future generation? To hedge one's bets one could answer the question posed on the show in this context: "If I was going to be another strand of rope in a future generation, in what kind of world would I like to find myself? A toxic waste dump or a sustainable environment? A free society or totalitarian state? Palo Alto or Sadr City?"

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Guest

Wednesday, June 8, 2005 -- 5:00 PM

I agree with Ken that it does not follow simply fr

I agree with Ken that it does not follow simply from the fact that one has done something wrong that one has done something wrong TO a particular person. Still, I think one can harm or do something wrong to a dead person (say) by spoiling their reputation or mutilating their body. It is of course difficult to prove such an assertion.
It is interesting to note that it does not seem better for there to be more and more happy people currently existing. Given this, it also does not seem that it would be wrong for our species simply to go out of existence in virtue of people suddenly becoming infertile (or voluntarily deciding not to have more babies). Why would the situations be asymmetric? If this is correct, then perhaps we have obligations not to harm present and past persons, but not future generations.
The rope can be a noose, especially given the way we are treating the Earth.

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Guest

Wednesday, June 8, 2005 -- 5:00 PM

Regarding the question of why we would feel we hav

Regarding the question of why we would feel we have an obligation to future generations even though they don't yet exist:
It's simply because we feel that we should avoid causing harm or suffering.
我们怎么能伤害或给不存在的人造成痛苦?因为几乎100%的确定它们会存在。如果你的行为导致资源枯竭或环境严重污染，或做出其他自私的行为，你几乎可以100%地确定，有些人在未来会受到伤害和痛苦，直到他们死去。如果不这么想，就好比半夜把一箱钉子倒在空旷的路上，然后借口说:“我现在没有看到有人在这条路上开车，所以我不知道会不会有人在这条路上开车，所以我不知道会不会有人在这些钉子上碾过，把它碾扁。”所以据我所知，我没有造成伤害。如果我不确定我在做伤害，那么我就没有做伤害。"
Or you could close your eyes and drop a bowling ball from a high window of a city building and justify it by saying: "I don't see anyone on the street below [because your eyes are closed], so as far as I know the ball isn't going to hit anyone, so as far as I know I'm not doing harm. And if I'm not 100% certain that I'm doing harm then I'm NOT doing harm." Does that sound reasonable?
一个人可能觉得没有义务考虑后代的福祉的原因之一是，如果他们不觉得造成伤害和痛苦是错误的。所以这不仅仅是他们不关心后代，他们也不关心现在这代人。如果不参考宗教戒律，我不确定我是否能就为什么这种观点从根本上是错误的提出一个论点……所以我就不管它了
人们可能不觉得对后代负有这种义务的另一个原因是，如果他们真的认为世界将在他们的行动产生消极后果之前就不复存在。如果没有受难者，就不会有痛苦。现在，也许我们有理由质疑1000年后是否还有生命会受苦。但是，假设生命的终结会发生在一个人死亡的时候是不合理的。自人类诞生以来，已有几十亿人死亡，但在这些死亡中，没有一个人是伴随着能受苦的人的死亡而死亡的。所以假设一个人的死亡会有任何不同是不合理的。
I agree that it's not possible to harm a dead person. I don't believe that any consequences of my actions can propogate back in time to affect them. That's why, in the USA anyway, you can't be tried for libel or slander against a dead person.
But my actions can have consequences in the future, including the not-so-near future. Well, actually, as far as I know, ALL consequences are in the future (wacky physics aside). So it would be nonsensical for me to say that my actions cannot harm someone in the future.
An "obligation to future generations" is simply an obligation to do good and avoid causing harm in general. Only a rejection of the precept that "it's good to do good and bad to cause harm" would be consistent with rejection of an "obligation to future generations".

Guest's picture

Guest

Wednesday, June 8, 2005 -- 5:00 PM

I believe that my interests can be harmed by event

我相信发生在遥远地方的事件会损害我的利益。所以，如果我的女儿在喜马拉雅山攀岩时意外身亡，我也会立刻受到伤害。她的死亡对我的伤害并不需要任何物理意义上的因果关系——即使我在发现这一点之前就死了，我也受到了伤害。同样，伤害死者也不需要反向因果关系。在我看来，我们不能因为对死者的诽谤或诽谤而受到审判，并不是因为我们不能伤害这样的人;毕竟，有些伤害是法律无法“提起诉讼”的。

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Guest

Wednesday, June 8, 2005 -- 5:00 PM

I owe nothing to the dead except to evolve knowled

I owe nothing to the dead except to evolve knowledge with a generational leap and the preservation of their knowledge, because they are dead. A generation is twenty years. I owe posterity the chance that the dead gave me. Posterity owes me nothing, except what I owed the dead.
I owe dead philosophers and evolution of knowledge with a generational leap. They gave me their books and advanced philosophy a small bit compared to the history of the human race. Some advanced knowledge by decades, some made very great strides making 500 year leaps like Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, and Plato. I owe posterity the preservation of past and current knowledge and the chance for them to make the same leap themselves.

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Guest

Sunday, June 12, 2005 -- 5:00 PM

Two points: 1. On doing something wrong, not TO

Two points:
1. On doing something wrong, not TO someone: I think this might be considered with respect to memes, vis a vis, it seems that our memes surive us and that these memes can then be the object of harm for future generations. This then pushes the question to the relationship between my meme and me, particular along the lines of when you harm my meme, how is it that you harm me, and is there a temportal qualification in order here.
2. When we consider owing generations past, it is hard to see why the fact that they (or some of them) were morally corrupt should be part of the consideration, unless one adopts a radical view of "owes." I might merely owe them where there were "right" (however I define that) but not where they were "wrong."

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Guest

Sunday, June 12, 2005 -- 5:00 PM

One point perhaps to keep in mind. One can (mista

One point perhaps to keep in mind. One can (mistakenly, I believe) conclude that we do not have obligations to dead individuals (or that we cannot harm dead individuals) because one focuses on a sub-class of putative obligations (or persons). But it would not follow from a consideration of these problematic obligations or individuals that we cannot harm dead individuals, or that we have no obligations to the dead. I may not have the obligation to continue a family tradition of being Republicans, but it would not follow that I could not harm my great grandfather by lying about his accomplishments, and so forth.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007 -- 4:00 PM

here is an event to create intergenerational dialo

here is an event to create intergenerational dialogue
www.meditation.com/intergen