Après moi, le deluge: How the Future Came (Not) to Matter

Scott Robinson

Join Zoom meeting:

https://monash.zoom.us/j/86351045263?pwd=1gHMLhmDnXiFJIV0Jl8s6GxhgBgylb.1 

Meeting ID: 863 5104 5263 // Passcode: 184791

Abstract: Climate change has produced the latest, and perhaps most plausible, predictions of the end of the world. In non-apocalyptic terms (although apocalyptic ones are widespread), climate change urgently challenges the notion that we pass a better world onto the next generation. It is natural to ask in this context what we owe future generations (or as some commentators put it, ‘What has posterity ever done for us?’). Yet the novelty and – I wager – absurdity of the question does not sufficiently strike us. By approaching the philosophical question of the value of the future first historically, then genealogically, I seek to cast light on the question of the value of the future. Modernity broke the assumption of continuity between past and future with an idea of progress that imagined unceasing improvement in the lives of future people. This position, I propose, persisted up until the post-war period when the looming prospect of nuclear annihilation and then environmental degradation eroded the confidence in such an assumption. It is in this context that philosophers formalised the question of the value of the future, in particular in terms of our responsibilities to future generations. I develop a historical perspective on this philosophical question in order to cast doubt on the methods by which philosophers have attempted to answer it, through calculation (allocation or distribution of resources, say) or metaphysical problems (like the non-identity problem). Through a genealogical method, I contest the question of the value of the future. I propose some alternative frameworks for the significance of posterity and aim to formulate a conception of intergenerational justice that is non-calculative and does not depend on an assumption of endless progress.