III-Ethics for Possible Futures

Mulgan, Tim

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9264.2014.00364.x

“…Drawing on my own earlier work (Mulgan 2011(Mulgan , 2014(Mulgan , 2015a(Mulgan , 2015b(Mulgan , 2016a(Mulgan , 2016b(Mulgan , 2017(Mulgan , 2018, I now briefly sketch five key ways that the ethical outlook of a broken future society might differ from our own.…”

Section: Ethics In Broken Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Blackford and Broderick 2014;Bostrom 2014;Chalmers 2010;Hauskeller 2013, p. 115-132;Mulgan 2014Mulgan , 2016bMulgan , 2018. This is another credible future.…”

Section: Digital Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Corporate Agency and Possible Futures

Mulgan

¹

2018

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We need an account of corporate agency that is temporally robust-one that will help future people to cope with challenges posed by corporate groups in a range of credible futures. In particular, we need to bequeath moral resources that enable future people to avoid futures dominated by corporate groups that have no regard for human beings. This paper asks how future philosophers living in broken or digital futures might re-imagine contemporary debates about corporate agency. It argues that the only temporally robust account is moralised extreme collectivism, where full moral personhood is accorded (only) to those corporate groups that are reliably disposed to respond appropriately to moral reasons.

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“…Furthermore, any feasible proposal to minimize the harmful effects of climate change will involve a major reduction in the standard of living of affluent people in developed countries. The pessimistic model raises many difficult and novel ethical and political questions -and brings a new urgency to the search for foundations and principles in intergenerational ethics (Gardiner 2011;Jamieson 2014;Mulgan 2011Mulgan , 2014.…”

Section: Why Did Philosophers Ignore the Future?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Others argue that unprecedented threats such as climate change require a radical rethinking of both intergenerational ethics and relations between contemporaries (Gardiner 2011;Jamieson 2014;Mulgan 2011Mulgan , 2014.…”

Section: Intergenerational Social Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intergenerational Ethics

Mulgan¹

2016

The International Encyclopedia of Ethics

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Unless something goes drastically wrong in the next few centuries, most of the people who will ever live are yet to be born. Our actions have little impact on those who are dead, considerable impact on those currently alive, and potentially enormous impact on those who will live in the future. Our decisions affect who those future people will be, and even if there will be any future people at all. The threat of environmental crisis gives us some inkling of the magnitude of our impact on future generations. Only in the last few decades have moral philosophers really begun to grapple with the complexities of intergenerational ethics. Underlying their often technical debates are some of the deepest moral questions. What makes life worth living? What do we owe to our descendants? How do we balance their needs against our own?Philosophical discussion of intergenerational ethics focuses on ways that our relations with future people differ from relations between contemporaries. There is only a distinct subject if there is a distinctive subject matter. One difference is that, while everyday decisions impact on other people, only in intergenerational ethics do our decisions affect who will begin to exist -and how many people will begin to exist. Different population or family planning policies bring different sets of people -and different numbers of people -into existence.A related feature of intergenerational ethics is a stark lack of reciprocity. While our decisions affect the lives of future people, their actions have no impact on us. We can do a great deal for (or to) posterity, but posterity cannot do anything for (or to) us. If we think of morality as a bargain or contract, then it seems we have no obligations to future people at all.These distinctive features of intergenerational ethics raise three central questions: (1) Do we have any obligations to future people? (2) If so, what grounds those obligations? (3) Finally, what obligations do we have? While the third question is clearly the most urgent from a practical point of view, most philosophical attention has focused on the first two questions. This essay examines the two dominant traditions: utilitarianism and social contract. It first asks why intergenerational ethics is such a recent subject. Why Did Philosophers Ignore the Future?Until very recently, moral philosophy concentrated on interactions between contemporaries. Future generations were only ever an afterthought. To see why, we first distinguish three general sets of background assumptions one might bring to the study of intergenerational ethics.

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Intergenerational Ethics

Mulgan¹

2020

The International Encyclopedia of Ethics

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Unless something goes drastically wrong in the next few centuries, most of the people who will ever live are yet to be born. Our actions have little impact on those who are dead, considerable impact on those currently alive, and potentially enormous impact on those who will live in the future. Our decisions affect who those future people will be, and even if there will be any future people at all. The threat of environmental crisis gives us some inkling of the magnitude of our impact on future generations. Only in the last few decades have moral philosophers really begun to grapple with the complexities of intergenerational ethics. Underlying their often technical debates are some of the deepest moral questions. What makes life worth living? What do we owe to our descendants? How do we balance their needs against our own? This entry focuses on three central questions in contemporary intergenerational ethics: (1) Do we have any obligations to future people? (2) If so, what grounds those obligations? (3) Finally, what obligations do we have? While the third question is clearly the most urgent from a practical point of view, most philosophical attention has focused on the first two questions. This entry examines the two dominant traditions: utilitarianism and social contract.

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III-Ethics for Possible Futures

Cited by 29 publications

References 12 publications

Corporate Agency and Possible Futures

Corporate Agency and Possible Futures

Intergenerational Ethics

Intergenerational Ethics

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