Generaciones futuras: Considerando todas las partes afectadas

Abstract

1. In this essay, I explore an aspect of consequentialism that cannot altogether be ignored by rival theories of normative ethics, namely the range of the parties affected by current actions, and the importance of taking these parties into account. Even those rival theories that discount some interests need a clear understanding of the nature of the interests that they proceed to discount. 2. Affected interests include the future interests of actual people and human foetuses, plus those of actual non-human creatures, and also those of future people and other creatures who cannot yet be identified. Human actions will playa large role in determining not only which humans there will be but also which non-humans; for all of these we can considerably influence the quality of life, and thus have responsibilities for the foreseeable impacts of what we do. 3. Where we make a comparable and discoverable difference to people's quality of life, we are no less responsible if they are situated in the future than in the present. Further, if we accept that the foreseeable costs of a hundred years hence matter as much as costs of the same kind in the present, then the scale of current responsibilities turns out to be vast. Those who grant this are for practical purposes consequentialists already. 4. Donald Brown has shown how there is a strong case from human interests for stabilising greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere, further strengthened by biocentric and/or ecocentric considerations. Pace Brown, a biocentric approach can weigh human interests (such as development ones) against non-human interests, and need not forbid all species extinctions; but in fact this approach still cannot justify increases to GHG concentrations. Emissions required for Third World development need to be matched by reduced emissions in developed countries. Biocentric consequentialism thus generates defensible policies. Also, as Brown holds, developed countries have obligations to support a strict international climate change agreement, with national quotas based on equal per capita emissions entitlements world-wide.