There exists today in philosophy a question of our ethical obligations to future generations. Several different aspects of this question render it philosophically unusual. For one thing the substantive answer to the question is not in dispute. Were someone to suggest seriously that we have no ethical obligations to future generations and mean by this that we need take no care for what living conditions on the planet will be in a hundred years -that whether there would exist then, say, a lethal level of radioactivity in the atmosphere, it would be no concern of ours -we should regard that individual as lacking one of the most basic of human ethical sensibilities. Of course we have some serious responsibility for the future, though this does not commit us to the more particular position that we have ethical obligations to future generations.
The question does not, thus, require an answer at the general level, nor am I prepared here to demarcate specifically the content of our responsibility for the future, though I shall treat of others' attempts to do so. I am interested rather in why this question should seem so mysterious at this time as to generate a dispute or issue within the philosophical community. Thus my focus will be interior to philosophy. I hope to show how the assumptions involved in raising this question in this way make it difficult for us to address the new realities with which the question is concerned.
Why is this question a current one in philosophy? From a somewhat sociological perspective it is significant that John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most influential ethical treatise of the seventies, is the first person who seems to have dealt with the question in its current form.' I shall examine Rawls' position in detail later, but basically he treats justice among generations as involving each generation's passing on to the next a suitable accumulation of intellectual, economic, and educational "capital" so that the next can have the werewithal to continue or to establish just institutions, as well as support a reasonable standard of living.2 While the immense philosophical popularity of A Theory o f Justice