Abstract
Discounting future costs and benefits is often defended on the ground that our descendants will be richer. Simply to treat the future as better off, however, is to commit an ecological fallacy. Eve...
Highlights
Discounting future costs and benefits is often defended on the ground that our descendants will be richer
In recent years concern has grown that runaway climate change could mean disaster
Martin Weitzman estimates a roughly 5 percent chance of a rise in global temperatures of more than ten degrees Celsius over the two centuries in the absence of energetic intervention, with a chance of roughly 1 percent that it could go over twenty—changes which would pose “an extreme threat to human civilization and global ecology as we know it, even if it might not necessarily mean the end of Homo sapiens as a species.”[1]. Provided that they did not lead to our extinction, these losses would burden many generations of future people
Summary
Jones has had an accident in a TV station that is currently broadcasting the World Cup and is suffering agonizing pain. Samuel Scheffler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2:246. Chocolates for the Well-off is based on an example in Roger Crisp, “Equality, Priority, and Compassion,” Ethics 113 (2003): 745 –63, 754. I have borrowed Yitzak Benbaji’s term for the case Blue and the Many is a composite of examples in Alistair Norcross, “Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 135 – 67; John Broome, “All Goods Are Relevant,” in Summary Measures of Population Health: Concepts, Ethics, Measurement, and Applications, ed. L. Murray et al (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002), 727–29, 728; and Parfit, On What Matters, 2:246 – 47.
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