What We Owe the Future
On moral imagination and the strangers we will never meet.
There is a peculiar feature of ethics that we rarely confront: most of the people our choices affect do not exist yet. They cannot argue, bargain, or vote. They are the most powerless constituency imaginable, and we make decisions on their behalf every single day.
It is easy to care about the near and the visible. It is hard to care about a stranger separated from you by a century. But the difficulty is a failure of imagination, not of obligation. The future is full of real people with real experiences, and the only thing standing between them and us is time — which has never been a morally relevant distance.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
To take the future seriously is to accept a strange and bracing form of responsibility: to act well toward people who will never thank you, never know your name, and never know they were spared. It is the purest form of giving, because no return is possible. And it may be the truest test of whether a civilization has grown up.