to people who do not yet exist are difficult in a way that obligations to distant strangers are not.
A distant stranger has interests now, and we may be of them but they are there to be discovered.
A future person has no interests until she exists, and whether she exists depends on what we do.
This produces the problem, which is genuinely awkward rather than merely clever.
A policy that damages the environment also changes which particular people are born.
Different decisions produce different couples meeting at different moments and therefore different children.
The people who the damaged world would not have existed had the damage been avoided.
They cannot therefore complain that they were made worse off, since the alternative was not existing.
Almost nobody accepts this conclusion and the argument leading to it is hard to fault.
The most common response abandons person-affecting ethics for this class of case.
On that view an outcome can be worse without being worse for anyone in particular.
This is and it gives up something most people regard as to morality.
A second response keeps person-affecting ethics and reframes the obligation as one about conditions rather than persons.
We owe it to whoever exists to leave conditions in which a decent life is possible.
The obligation attaches to the state of the world and does not require identifying anybody.
This is the version most environmental law has adopted, without the argument being made.
speak of preserving resources for future generations and not of anybody's rights.
The drafting is looser than a philosopher would like and turns out to be the more defensible formulation.