• No results found

4. FUTURE GENERATIONS

4.5. U NCERTAINTY

According to the Brundtland report, sustainable development is a development that “ensures that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”466 To be able to live up to that, we need to know what the needs of future generations are. This looks like a very difficult task. There is a large degree of uncertainty regarding the needs or the interests of future generations,467 and this problem is also accompanied with some other problems. Avner de-Shalit, for instance, points out that even if it was possible to foresee the interests of future generations (which he does not believe it is) it would be complicated to compare and weigh their interests against the interests of our contemporaries.468

Another problem is that we do not know for sure what life will be like in the future, how the technology will develop, or even how long the human species will survive.

This inability to make reliable forecasts not just about the preferences of future generations, but also about the future in general is commented by G. I.

Simmons who argues:

There is time for caution here: if we define justice to include future generations, but cannot forecast the nature of that future at all accurately, then how do we know what to avoid?469

Simmons does not want to see this as an excuse for a laissez-fair attitude in relation to future generations, but how do we avoid such an attitude? When we look at the problems presented here, one might be tempted to limit our concerns to the present, and possibly to the immediately following generations while leaving the rest to their destiny. Another approach would be to discount our concern for the future at a rate representing the degree of uncertainty. This last approach is used by many economists and some philosophers.470 One thing that talks in favour of successive discounting rather than a more abrupt cut-off point,

466 World Commission on Environment and Development 1987 p.8

467 Anderberg 1994 p.110, Farber 2000 p.s495, Stenmark 2000 pp.68ff. Farber, as most philosophers, talks about ‘ïnterests’ rather than ‘needs’. Since neither term is exactly defined it is difficult to pinpoint where they differ other than that ‘interests’ is probably a wider term than ‘needs’. In order to follow the standard philosophical terminology I will use the term interests.

468 de-Shalit 1995 p.5, Melin 2001 p.128

469 Simmons 1995 p.71

470 See Gower 1995 p.57, Kavka 1996 pp.190,202 note 8, Martinez-Alier 1994 p.164, Parfit 1987 p.481

is that we are dealing with predictions that tend to get more uncertain the further into the future we stretch them. Discounting would make it possible to lessen our concern successively in proportion to the increasing uncertainty.

Another possibility is put forward by Jan Narveson who suggests that our almost total lack of knowledge of the future can be seen as an argument for confining our concern for the future to approximately the next 50 years.471 His argument is that since we are next to totally ignorant, “no rational consideration of the problem is possible …”.472

One might point out here that if “no rational consideration of the problem is possible” how can he then conclude that confining our concerns to 50 years is better than any other solution? I think Narveson is too pessimistic, however. In the previous chapter we noted that inertia is not always the best way of handling uncertainty. We found that in situations where for instance important values are at stake, it is more rational to take precautionary measures such as demanding extra high degrees of certainty in order to go through with a project that might threaten the value in question. If we have a situation where our decision may threaten important future interests although we do not know if they will, the conclusion must be the opposite of what Narveson recommends. I.e. in order to be justified to ignore future generations, we should demand a high degree of certainty that future generations will not be harmed by the project in question.

Lack of knowledge should count against ignoring them, not the other way around. The degree of certainty we demand should of course as argued earlier stand in proportion to how important we suspect the interest to be. This is complicated since that is one of the things we do not know. This too seems to talk in favour of being extra careful with what we subject them to.

Parfit is in general negative to discounting the interests of future generations, and he makes no exception when it comes to discounting because of uncertainty. He follows the same strategy as before and points out that we have to distinguish between (1) the fact that our predictions get less certain over time, and (2) whether, given the assumption that a prediction is correct, we are entitled to discount the weight of the effect just because it takes place in the distant future. He admits that (1) is often the case, but does not believe that this can answer (2).473

According to Parfit, this is important for two reasons: Both because we should be careful not to “miss-state our moral view”, and because there are situations when predictions do not get less certain over time.474

I agree with the first reason: We should be more cautious about the terminology we use and not claim that we discount on the basis of time as such when we are actually discounting on the basis of diminishing certainty. Never the less, if we clearly state that we discount because of diminishing certainty and our prognoses as a matter of fact do get less certain over time, the result will still, in

471 Narveson 1996 p.40f

472 Narveson 1996 p.41

473 Parfit 1987 p.481f

474 Parfit 1987 p.482,486

practice, be that the interests of future generations will get less attention further into the future.

How about Parfit’s second reason? Even if he is correct and there actually are such cases, we still have to admit that most prognoses do get less certain over time. That there are a few instances when prognoses do not get more uncertain over time shows us that uncertainty is not always a good reason for discounting the future, but maybe the reliability of our prognoses declines with time often enough for discounting a good general rule? If that is the case, duties to future generations might in general not be a good basis for claiming that it is immoral to contribute to the extinction of species.

On the other hand, it might be that the few things we can predict with a higher degree of certainty are important enough to make a difference even if the uncertainty is great in the general case. Several authors point out cases where our knowledge about future generations is not so bad.475 Kavka, for example, points out that we do know that future generations will need “enough food to eat, air to breathe, space to move in, and fuel to run machines”.476 Fenner in turn states that we can know that future people will need air and water, etc. but we cannot know anything about their aesthetic preferences.477 Rolston goes a step further and argues that we cannot doubt that they will need “water, soil, rain, photosynthesis, or enjoy sunsets, mountains, seashores – or bird watching”,478 and that some resources like water, air etc cannot be substituted – which means that contrary to oil, for example, we can be sure that future generations will need them.479

I believe that Fenner is more correct than Rolston regarding the uncertainty of the preferences of future humans, but the statement that all three agree upon, viz. that there are certain basic things that future generations will need to the same extent as we do seems very plausible. The question is: What does this tell us? Even if we agree that they will need fuel for their machines, we do not know what kind of fuel. While I write this, a large variety of alternatives are being developed, and I would not like to bet much money on which of these will be the fuel of the future. Maybe a combination? Maybe something completely different that no one has yet thought of? Our need for things like food, air and water on the other hand is biologically determined and we can assume that these things will not change substantially in the future. All life forms on the planet need water and nutrients, and all “higher” life forms need oxygen. This may not seem like much information to base our concern on, but for this investigation it is very central.

These interests are very basic and they are directly related to some of the ways in which we have already found that other species are most important to us. In order to have food, a working water cycle, sufficient levels of oxygen, suitable climate, etc. we need working ecosystems and we need other species. This means that the

475 See e.g. Attfield 1998 pp.211,213, Fenner 2006 p.334, Kavka 1996 p.189, Melin 2001 p.129, Munthe 1997, Rolston 1988 p.278, Rolston 1994 p.232, Stenmark 2000 p.69

476 Kavka 1996 p.189

477 Fenner 2006 p.334

478 Rolston 1994 p.232

479 Rolston 1988 p.278

few things we do know about the needs of future generations are still very important for our investigation.

The conclusion seems to be that we are not justified in using the lack of certainty concerning future generations as an excuse for discounting their interests concerning other species. We only have some knowledge about a few things but these things are on the other hand very important – and directly relevant for our investigation since they imply that species that have a high instrumental value for us will also have a high instrumental value for future generations of human beings. When it comes to the things we do not know, it seems most reasonable to invoke the precautionary principle. We do not know whether a particular species will be important for future generations, but we have a strong suspicion based on historical evidence that many species will turn out to be important for future generations – probably in ways we cannot yet imagine.480 We should therefore be very restrictive when it comes to doing things that risk leading to extinction, and the burden of proof should lay on the shoulders of those in favour of exploitation.