Do future generations have rights? 1

In a post at the end of August I argued that they don't. I said that 'I don't think it makes sense to assert that future people, before they are actual people, have rights.' This has led to an email exchange between my friend Professor Matthew Kramer and me. I'll be running the exchange over the next few days. Below is Matt's first comment on the argument of that post:

Here are a few comments on the following paragraph:

But perhaps a collectivity, future people of as-yet indeterminate individual identities, can jointly hold a right against presently-existing people. I don't think so. For the same style of reasoning as I've just undertaken for the individual case can be repeated for any putative future group. Any future they that you can hypothesize may never come to exist, and it therefore doesn't make sense to say of them that they had a right to be brought into existence - or the right to vote, to freedom of expression, to inherit a decently preserved environment, or what have you. At the limit, since one generation of human beings, this generation, could destroy all human life and with it the preconditions of any human future at all, the existence of all future generations is put in question and therewith the intelligibility of assigning them rights.

I believe that, for several reasons, the case of any future individual and the case of future generations en masse aren't on a par. I'll mention two of those reasons here (and I'll then ask whether nonetheless you're correct in denying that future generations can have any rights at present). First, the sheer fact that someone has knowingly acted in such a way as to preclude the eventual existence of some never-to-be-conceived person is not sufficient to constitute a wrong; by contrast, the sheer fact that we knowingly act collectively in such a way as to preclude the eventual existence of future generations en masse is sufficient to constitute a wrong. Second, whereas any current ascription of rights to some particular future individual will run afoul of Parfitian non-identity problems, a current ascription of rights to future generations en masse will not generate such problems.

Are you nonetheless correct in the passage above when you maintain that the wrong of precluding the existence of future generations en masse would not be committed against those future generations and would therefore not correspond to any rights held by those future generations en masse? Let us note that the sheer fact that the future generations may not exist at some time t+n in the future is not a ground for maintaining that they cannot hold rights now at time t. If John borrows fifty pounds from me and promises to pay me back in two weeks, I currently have a right to be paid by him in two weeks. If I die tomorrow as a result of an automobile crash, it was nonetheless the case on the previous day that I held a right to be paid in two weeks by John. You will of course respond by correctly pointing to a significant difference between the future generations and me. Whereas I exist now, they don't exist now. Hence, the question to be pondered is whether the current non-existence of the future generations en masse is sufficient to exclude them from the class of potential right-holders.

The property of holding a right is the property of being owed a duty, and the property of being owed a duty is unmistakably a relational property. (I'm of course using the phrase 'relational property' in its technical sense.) Now, it is clearly the case that future generations en masse can be endowed with countless relational properties despite the possibility of the ultimate non-existence of those generations (a possibility that might be realized by irresponsible human behavior or by an event such as the collision of an asteroid with the planet Earth). Future generations can currently have the relational property of being discussed by me, being thought about by the two of us, being taken into account by present-day people who adjust their behaviour accordingly, being resented, and so forth. What is special about the relational property of being owed a duty? Why is that relational property such that future generations en masse cannot currently be endowed with it, even though they are currently endowed with countless other relational properties? Your post doesn't supply any answer to these questions. The sheer fact that future generations en masse might somehow never ultimately exist is not an answer to my questions, since that fact does not preclude the future generations en masse from being endowed with the countless other relational properties to which I've referred.

[My response is here.]