Responsibility and the Future

July 18th, 2006

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Posted by ChrisG at 10:01 am

(reposted from 28 March 2006)

Rowan Williams pointed out this morning on the Today programme that the failure of the Government to meet its carbon emissions reduction targets is a failure to take responsibility for future generations. The question of responsibility, though, cuts much deeper: as Colin Challen points out in the Independent, the true danger of the government’s position is its commitment to ‘balancing’ the needs of ‘international competitiveness’ and unrestricted growth with the need to tackle global warming. ‘More growth’ is the overall imperative, less carbon and less badness in the environment generally the afterthought. In fact, the desire for more growth now demonstrates how the issue of responsibility never quite really manages to make it onto the agenda, leaving us outside the ethical sphere that Dr Williams is keen we operate in. So long as the issue is posed in these terms, we won’t even be able to fully understand what responsibility for the future might mean.

Broadly speaking, we’re in a situation now where, thanks to technologies that intervene (intentionally or not) in natural processes at a structurally very basic level, we have an enormous capacity for altering the future through our actions in the present. But we have a very low capacity for predicting what the outcomes of these interventions will be – mainly due to the complexity of the processes in which we’re intervening, and the emergent effects of these at higher levels of structure: think for example of BSE/CJD, genetic modification and so forth. This lack of knowledge forces us into a double-bind where the only way to conceive of responsibility is to cede it to the same experts whose research is behind the interventions, and who are just as clueless as the rest of us (and indeed, because of their specialisation and their funding structures, perhaps even more clueless) as to the long-term effects of their work. In addition, the institutions that remove responsibility from us for so many areas of our lives (health, education, happiness…) are institutions that in doing so always extend control over the possibilities for individual and collective self-determination at the same time. But that’s a story for Andre Gorz and Ivan Illich, and for another day.

The problem of responsibility could be said to be conceptual, as lying in shortsightedness, in fact a kind of temporal myopia. This is a topic I’ll be giving its own category. For now, I want to briefly consider alongside each other the idea of growth and that of rights as the basis for understanding responsibility.

One root of this temporal myopia is the goal of development, or growth if you prefer, whether this is growth for its own sake, or growth just conceived of as a means of satisfying preferences. For instance, consider the practice of discounting the future, as is common in economic thinking about cost-benefit analyses that include time as a factor. Growth demands that opportunities to profit be pursued in the present, or at least as soon as possible, as a benefit obtained sooner is worth more than one obtained later, just as an opportunity cost endured in the present is typically considered to be worse than the same cost endured in the future. Even when growth is pursued ‘for the sake of’ the future (as when growth now is thought of as providing a better inheritance for future generations) the imperative is to accumulate as many benefits as possible as soon as possible, including in cases where this accumulation of benefits requires the sacrifice of huge amounts of non-renewable resources, the destruction of common goods, and so forth. As Derek Parfit has argued, the effect here is to introduce an entirely illegitimate moral distinction between individuals who live at distinct times: the rights of the individual alive in the present always trump any obligation she may have towards her great-great-great-great granddaughter.

And here is the root of the issue: the question of rights. The idea of natural rights as applying vertically (as it were) as a defence against misuses of power is one that is obviously attractive, and if institutionally enforced, very effective. But the idea of rights as horizontal, that is, as holding between individuals and groups in the here and now, is highly problematic once the temporal dimension comes in, mainly because the relationship between past and future is the ultimate asymmetry of power. The processes that we kick off in the present in the pursuit of growth (and by this we could include all attempts at improving the present by seeking to maximise benefits a.s.a.p.) are effectively a colonisation of the future, and so absolutely demand the exercise of responsibility. But what tools are there for thinking this kind of obligation? Rights are grounded in horizontal reciprocity here in the present. I respect your rights because you are a fellow moral agent, and you respect mine right back. So long as this mutual isolation of individuals within the safe zone created by their legally-enforced rights is maintained, no problem. But future humans cannot enter into relationships of reciprocity, because there is no possibility of mutual harm and so none of mutual respect. How, then, can they have rights? They cannot ask claims to be fulfilled, and nor can they legally appoint someone to look after their claims.

More soon.

(reposted from 28 March 2006)

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