Why should we care what the people living 200 years from now will have to deal with? Why not just live it up now and make life for the people are already alive as good as possible? The people of the future do not exist. They are only possibilies. Why do we owe them anything? Humanity cannot survive forever.
Or as I like to say, “What has posterity ever done for me?”
I have a personal question for you Ammonius Saccus - do you have any children?
No, but if I did they would be dead in 200 years. I say our only obligation is to people that are already alive. So no obligation should go past 120 years (give or take).
Fair enough.
- The current generation has an obligation to help out the next generation. (Seeing as they’re already alive as children.)
- The next generation will eventually have an obligation to help the subsequent generation (by the same reasoning. That is, when the next generation is our age, the subsequent generation will be already alive as children.)
- One way for the current generation to help out the next generation is to ease their burden of caring for the subsequent generation.
- This can be done by directly caring for the wellbeing of the subsequent generation.
And so on, ad infinitum.
Do you have any particular action in mind that will effect humans 120 years from now but not earlier? I can’t think of any. Global warming will probably ravish us within the lifetime of many alive today.
Maybe something such as tax cuts that will allow us to live it up today, but saddle our grandchildren with massive debt.
Screw 'em. The only concern should be that we don’t mess the place up too much for our own use, “our” being used to cover people now living or who will be born to people now living.
Ammonius Saccus, do you think we owe it to future generations to “discontinue” the human race?
You’re gonna be reincarnated into the future that you help create. Any questions?
On the off-chance that the time machine is invented at some point in the future, we’d probably prefer happy tourists and not vengeful terrorists. 
Assuming you’re not joking, how about polio vaccine?
-Joe
What, did future generations invent this and send it back in time with the Terminator? Or does “posterity” have some other meaning?
The way I see it, beings that definitely will exist may exert some pull on us: we’ve got to balance their rights alongside our own. If they never exist, then their rights are similarly never existent. But if I take an act today that will hurt someone ten years from now, I see no reason why it should matter if, ten years from now, the victim of my act is five or 55. And if that’s true, the same logic should hold to prevent acts today that hurt people 200 years from now.
Daniel
Why are the people of the future any less deserving of compassion than you or I?
You are assuming that the OP has “compassion” in his/her/its vocabulary. Sounds fairly unlikely to me.
Because they do not exist.
Can you make a reasonable case that nobody will exist in 200 years? If not, I don’t see disregarding the future generations as being any different from disregarding the people in the next country over, or anybody else you don’t and won’t know personally.
I’m guessing you didn’t exist a hundred years ago, either. Yet, you enjoy the benefits of a modern society that was created by your forebears. You also benefit from conservation and environmental protection laws enacted in the past. Do you feel any gratitude about that, whatsoever?
Why are the people of 200 years from now any less real to me then those in Russia, or for that matter, those on the other side of town, that I haven’t met?
Because they actually exist.