SMU – PHIL 3379 – ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS – FALL 2023 – JEAN KAZEZ – eesmu.blogspot.com

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

MODULE 3: Future People

 AGENDA

  1. The big picture
  2. Broome....duties to future people...the social discount rate
  3. Next time: Peter Singer, how do divide up duty to mitigate among nations



Future People Ethics
  1. William MacAskill: huge obligations to future people because so numerous; but they're not our relatives and can't reciprocate
  2. John Broome (Climate Matters, ch. 4): we have duties of justice and duties of goodness; our climate change duties to the people of 2200 are duties of goodness, NOT duties of justice
  3. John Broome ("The Ethics of Climate Change"): the social discount rate

How much should we spend on climate change prevention when the benefits are received in the future?
  1. Social Discount Rate -- reduction in amount that should be paid for a good received in the future, for each year in the future.
  2. Examples: 0% (red line), 1.4% (blue curve), 6% red line




Does discounting make sense? 
  • Think about your own personal discount rate on clothing. 
  • You are shopping for clothes.  You would pay $100 for a nice sweater.  
  • What would you pay for a sweater that will be delivered in 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc?



WORKBOOK


What are the considerations that enter into different economists' climate change social discount rates?

Considerations that support more discounting
  1. Future people will be richer than us (everyone assumes)
  2. The same goods will be worth less to them
  3. Prioritarianism--we should give priority to the worse off (us!) not the better off (future people)
  4. Pure temporal distance--events in the future just matter less, period
    • what if everyone counted the same? then trillions and trillions of people would have to matter equally to us--including people in a million years! (MacAskill thinks that's fine)
  5. Market considerations--alternative investment opportunities
  6. WHAT ELSE?
Considerations that support less discounting
  1. Utilitarianism--we should maximize total happiness, whether extra units of wellbeing are given to the worse off or the better off.
  2. Temporal impartiality -- future counts just as much
  3. "If not now, never!"
  4. WHAT ELSE?
Broome's main points: 
  • some of these are ethical consideration
  • his own view: lower discount rate, based on utilitarianism and temporal impartiality