Doug MacLean, "A Moral Requirement for Energy Policies"

in Responsibilities to Future Generations: Environmental Ethics, ed. Ernest Partridge (Prometheus, 1980), ch. 11.

Motivating question: What is the source of the moral requirement to try to create the best world possible?

I. Starting puzzle:
"Unless we can find a satisfactory beneficence principle that applies to future generations, the identity problem blocks the first step many of us would be inclined to take to justify or explain our moral intuitions. This step is to appeal, in Feinberg's words, to 'our power now, clearly, to affect the lives of these [future] creatures for better or worse.' If anything is clear from the identity problem, it is that we do not have *that* power at all. but we do have the power to create better or worse future worlds, worlds with better-off people or worlds with worse-off people."


Considers and rejects:
1) The possibility that we are required by some non-person-affecting principle to create the best world possible (E.g. Parfit's Principle A, that it is bad to make people worse off than people--whether themselves or others--might have been.);

2) The possibility that we are required because of the affect on our ancestors' interests; and

3) The possibility that we are required independently of anybody's interests {Note: unclear on difference between arg. in (1) and in (3)}

II. Central argument:
It is in *our* interest to create a "better and more enduring world for future generations".

Distinguish:
1) "Phenomenal values": the "values of experience;" marked by replaceability of their objects; adequately captured by language of consumption and satisfaction; matter primarily for how they make us happy.
2) "Extra-phenomenal" values: objects themselves are valued; we value the experiences these objects cause only to the extent that they establish a proper connection or relationship to the objects; inadequately captured by economic vocabulary; matter primarily for how they make our lives meaningful.

Posterity is an extra-phenomenal value:
>The objects of other extra-phenomenal values typically extend beyond our involvement with them.
>This extension "can be" necessary for conceiving of these objects as having intrinsic value beyond being a source of our own happiness.
>"Our extra-phenomenal interests give us reason to make the world better, which in turn gives us reason to protect the world."

III. Significance for energy policy:
"The objection to making our energy policies reflect only the values of neutral rationality and consumers' sovereignty embodies in the policy sciences is not that we know that things will not work out well for the future. It is, rather, that using these scientific techniques does not leave room to consider measures, large or small, that express our commitment to try, in spite of all our limitations, to pass on a better world."

Tags:

Tags: obligations_to_future_generations

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Tags: environmental_ethics