• No results found

4. FUTURE GENERATIONS

4.1. D O WE HAVE ANY DUTIES TO FUTURE GENERATIONS ?

4.1.7. Opportunity loss

A common reason for discounting the future is based on the issue of opportunity loss.

A thing that (like money) represents an instrumental value has value because of what you can get out of it (in the form of intrinsic value or of another instrumental value – like more money). The earlier you get something, the more utility you can extract from it. If you get it later, you will not be able to use it while you wait, and you will therefore lose opportunities.409 This is an important reason for economic discounting, but is it applicable to the question of whether and to what extent we should consider the interests of future generations?

Alan Randall does not think so. He points out that market economy has a tendency to handle questions of resource use over time as investment problems, but he is not convinced

409 Parfit 1987 p.482f

that this is a possible approach in situations like extinction that has effects for a very long time and are irreversible.410

Parfit points out in the same way as we have seen above that it is important to keep in mind the reason for discounting. If we think it reasonable to discount for opportunity losses, we should be clear that it really is a matter of opportunity discounting, not temporal discounting as such. Parfit stresses the importance of being clear about this both in order for us not to be led astray in our moral reasoning and because he does not believe that opportunities always decrease over time. For instance, some investments do not bring any return, and things we consume do not decrease in opportunity value if we receive them later (we still only consume them once). Furthermore, when we deal with trade-off-situations, we will continue to get value out of what we started with until we trade it in. This will compensate for the value we should have extracted from the thing we are going to trade it for. Assume that we are going to exploit a beautiful landscape in order to build an airport, but the exploitation is delayed. We will then lose opportunity value because we cannot use the airport but we will also gain opportunity value because the landscape will be intact and can be used for other things like recreation.411

Parfit’s reasoning seems reasonable up to a certain degree, and I think his last point is well worth pointing out since it is often forgotten. We also have to admit however that if we find the trade-off worth doing in the first place, i.e. if we value the airport higher than the unspoiled landscape, we have presumably decided that there is more value in the airport than in the unspoiled landscape. We will therefore lose net-opportunity-value by delaying the exploitation even if we can get some value from the unspoiled landscape while we wait.

What does it mean for our investigation? Let us assume that building the airport in the example above will lead to the extinction of a species that has its last refuge in the area. Let us also assume that the species supplies some kind of good but that the airport will be more valuable for us than the species. Let us finally assume that by the time the last contemporary human has died, the airport has become obsolete but that the species would have continued to produce the good had it been allowed to survive. That would mean that even though its value for us is smaller than the value for the airport, its value for future generations will be larger than that of the airport. These are the assumptions. The reason for the last assumption is to create an intergenerational conflict. The question would then be: Does opportunity value in cases like this tell us to build the airport?

410 Randall 1986 p.83,96

An aspect that seems to be important when we apply the question of opportunity value on intergenerational relations is that the receivers of the value will change during the process. If we build the airport, we will receive a higher opportunity value. Future generations will not get anything and since they will not have the species either, they will lose out on the deal. It therefore looks like discounting on the basis of opportunity value assumes that future generations do not have any moral standing or at least a lower moral standing.412 There might be another explanation however. It may be that we do count future generations but realise that we will get more out of the airport if we build it than they would get from the species. I.e. we will win more than they will lose. In that case, we do not have to assume that future generations are without moral status in order get the result that it is better all things considered to build the airport. In fact, we have not even reached the conclusion that the interests of future generations do not count. We have considered their interests but concluded that it will be more in our interest to drive the species extinct than it is in their interest that we preserve it. That way, opportunity value is not really a basis for discounting the interests of future generations, but in practice it will at least in some cases still make references to the interests of future generations less useful for those who claim that we should protect species for anthropocentric instrumental reasons.

The reasoning above presupposes a strictly utilitarian outlook. It might be that we hold a moral conviction about what is to count as a just distribution of harms and benefits between moral object, or any type of principle with the effect that there are limits to what we can subject a moral objects to in order to benefit someone else. Then we cannot dismiss the fact that we will get the benefits of the higher opportunity value while future generations will not get anything, as easily as we did above. I.e. we cannot get rid of the problem that we get all the benefits from the airport and they get none of the benefits (since they have no use for the airport and the species is gone), by referring to the fact (when it is a fact) that the total sum of good will be larger that way.

In cases like this, it therefore seems that a deontological approach would mean larger consideration of future generations, and also a stronger reason to avoid extinction.

Even from a utilitarian perspective however we have to remember that it is not necessarily always the case that the total value will be higher from decisions like the one above. Not even the opportunity value would always be higher that way, and even when it is higher, it can in many cases be outweighed by a higher total value over time if we utilise the

411 Parfit 1987 p.483f

species in a sustainable way. The important point here is however that there will probably be some cases where a utilitarian anthropocentric instrumental approach – even if we accept moral standing for future generations – will accept that we drive a species to extinction even when the moral intuition we are investigating in this book tell us that it would be wrong. I do not know how often this will happen in reality, but it still weakens the position for anthropocentric instrumentalism in our investigation.