The challenge of scale: toward a world society?

Let me start by turning back to the time dimension for a moment, and to the initial moral step of "seeing" future people as human beings at all. Our children and grandchildren, of course, are not part of the problem. We see them directly enough. It is when looking further in time that it is purely potential people we are dealing with, whom we bring into our presence through an act of mind. These people have no names, they can have no individualized existence for us. They confront us as formless collectives (aggregates) of individuals which constantly renew themselves through time, and which can only be structured as successive "generations" by (temporal or spatial) stipulations on our part. The generations we thus define ourselves can only be described in general terms (probable numbers, territorial location, distance in time etc.) It is clear that although future people thus appear to us in a collective guise, they do so in a very diffuse manner which does not allow to speak of future generations as collective entities in the same sense as clubs, corporations or states. [But they of course can participate, through a mental act of identification on our part, in the fully collective nature of presently existing entities.]  These people still are individuals, though individuals sharing a common condition of structural anonymity. It is individual persons whom we want to reach when showing concern for intergenerational equity. The harms we want to avoid are harms to individual lives. But of necessity our concern must be an indirect one: it must reach future persons through the measures it inspires on behalf of generational collectives as a whole. It is the average life chances of these persons we are concerned with: the problem of numbers therefore is a capital one.

Such concerns presuppose that one can, in effect, make the difference for the future generations in question, providing for them in a special way. By creating a public park in our home town, we are certain to benefit the future inhabitants of that city. By providing for better schools, we can hope to raise our country's cultural level, etc. Quite another picture emerges when we look at the potentially global impact of environmental phenomena. It may be meaningful, in many cases, to consider future generations living on some particular territory (a city, a region, a country) as the object of specific measures taken on their behalf. The future neighbours of a particular nuclear plant will probably have a greater chance of deriving a benefit from security measures taken in that plant than people living at the antipodes. But there is a strong pull in the opposite direction (what populations, by the way, should we consider to be future "neighbours" of the nuclear plant?). Industrial pollution in the UK and the US Midwest causes acid rain damage in Sweden and Canada respectively. The ozone layer and global warming issues concern the world atmosphere as a whole (the atmosphere is a world commons): though we may intend to protect our own future nationals by taking measures against those dangers, this can only be accomplished by participating in global programs which in effect are directed at the future world population as a whole. The further we stretch our time horizon, the more this global spread of environmental disruption is certain to occur. Environmental interdependence is accompanied, moreover, by a growing interdependence on most other fronts of human activity. "Our rapid technological growth ensures that this interdependence will increase. Thus our concern for our own country must, as we extend our concerns into longer time horizons...focus on protecting the planetary quality of our natural and cultural environment." [Edith Brown Weiss, In fairness to future generations, Tokyo/New York 1988, p.27.]

What follows for a realistic appraisal, in terms of social ethics, of our obligations to future generations? I have stressed the public character of the topic: it wants to be made a part of any definition of the common good. "The purpose of human society must be to realize and protect the well-being of every generation." [Ibid. p.23.] This statement certainly sounds ambitious within a global context. Can the society referred to be thought of as a world society? I have suggested that the moral claim of future generations has the strongest cards (by far) when it is supported by a wish for continuity, which naturally concerns particular communities, life forms, values etc. But we now seem to face a paradox. The ecological context does not allow us to stop at any frontier at all. "Community" grows into "mankind," "future generations" become identical with "future humanity." The scale of environmental dangers and of human activities in general, seems to land us in abstractions. Michael Walzer's "union...drawing its strength from history, culture, religion, language and so on" dissolves into an utopian world society we cannot easily identify with.

In any case, we still have a long way to go. The challenge of scale remains formidable. The moral vision which sees future generations in terms of perpetuating all those things that we love seems to become less relevant, in spite of its motivational force, than the other one, which stresses universality and thus, the rights of every individual human being, particular concerns being left behind. According to that wider vision, in caring for the life chances of future generations, we add a time horizon to the protection of human rights to which we already are committed in international relations. The French philosopher Henri Bergson suggested, some time ago, that the world is moving from a "morale close" to a "morale ouverte." In his view, it is the great leaders of mankind, the great prophets (he mentions Christ) who, by their living example, create a new form of moral appeal which transcends the traditional patterns of our emotional life.

We can't "prove" the worth of our continued presence on earth. There is only a form of self-analysis which shows that the meaning of our lives depends, at the deepest level, upon assuming such an indefinite perpetuation. I said that the moral vision which is centred on continuity, on society as an on-going enterprise, is essentially a particularist one. We do not love mankind, nor do we build a "chain of love and concern" linking its successive demographic incarnations. But the open future for mankind as a whole forms a necessary backdrop for our more particular loves. That could be shown in many different ways. "You may understand therefore\ that all our knowledge shall be a dead thing from that moment on\ when the door of the future is shut."*
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*Dante, Inferno, Canto 10, cited by George Steiner, in In Bluebeard's castle (Some notes towards the redefinition of culture), Yale University Press 1971 p.73. Steiner remarks in this connection that we have now lost the "ontological axiom of historical progress." "[The] whole issue of a working theory of culture in the absence of a dogma or genuinely felt metaphoric imperative of progress and perfectibility seems to me one of the most difficult now facing us."

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