by Todd May
I don’t think there’s a ready answer to questions like these. I’m tempted to say that if we always pass up the homeless person we risk becoming more callous generally, but I don’t have any evidence for this. However, I don’t think that moral decency requires us to decide on this. If it were generally known that donating to a homeless organization was better than giving to individual homeless people (or vice versa), it would probably be best to act on that knowledge. But our goal here is simply one of decency. Giving to the homeless person and donating to a charity are likely both worth doing, and we’re better off if we can feel good about doing one or the other (or a bit of both) rather than berating ourselves for our ignorance of the most efficient forms of charity.
Thinking about Benevolence
What does benevolence toward those distant from us consist in, and how far does it extend? Regarding the first question, benevolence is likely to take one (or both) of two forms: time and resources. Time involves the effort we put in to assist those who would benefit from our help. Its classic expression is in certain types of volunteer work. When someone helps make phone calls or stuff envelopes for Oxfam (does anybody stuff envelopes anymore?), when they hold fund-raising parties or do an annual CROP walk, when they bag groceries for homeless people in other neighborhoods or go door to door soliciting donations for refugee assistance, they are engaged in acts of benevolence on behalf of people they will likely never see.
None of this, of course, requires that they engage in continuous study of those on whose behalf they act. However, it is important that before committing to such efforts, a person becomes aware of what they are committing to, if for no other reason to ensure that they aren’t the victim of a scam or that they agree with the particular issue they are dedicating their time to. Moreover, as we have seen, some ongoing familiarity with the issue is likely to make a person feel more connected to the people to whose benefit they are working. It will help integrate their work into their own life and will make it more likely that they will remain consistent in their own work.
Consistency is one of the hallmarks of good volunteer work. I do a lot of political organizing, an activity which we will return to in a couple of chapters but has some application here in the fact that I often tell people that consistency is the key to effectiveness. However much time a person dedicates toward their benevolence, doing it on a consistent basis—treating it like a part of their ongoing life—will result in both a more useful contribution and a greater sense that this work is part of who one is. It may, like physical exercise, start off as an effort that feels external and burdensome, but as it becomes integrated into a person’s routine it becomes a source of identification rather than mere drudgery. Of course there can be drudgery involved—who, after all, looks forward to physical exercise every day of one’s life?—but that drudgery is no longer a pointless grind. Instead it is part of a larger, more meaningful commitment. It is morality as expressive engagement of who a person is rather than simply an obligation or a duty.
Consistency is often more difficult when it comes to giving resources rather than time, although for people who are very busy it may be the other way around. Of course, the most common resource to offer is money, although it isn’t the only one. Food drives, for instance, ask that we donate excess food rather than dollars. But money is most often, well, the currency of resource donation. People don’t naturally give money on a regular basis, mostly because we often feel moved to donate when we are faced with the urgency of an issue, a natural disaster like an earthquake or tsunami or a humanitarian crisis provoked by political unrest. However, there is no reason that one cannot give money consistently to a specific cause, particularly if one retains an ongoing familiarity with that cause. In places like Palestine, Appalachia, or the indigenous areas of Canada, donating money for education or food or cultural expression can be an ongoing effort, one that is reinforced as the donator becomes familiar with the challenges faced by those who live in the regions receiving the donations. Also, many organizations are now set up for regular donations that can be taken from a bank account.
If time and money are the standard forms of benevolence toward those distant in space, how much of each should we offer? What is the proper level of benevolence or at least how can it be calculated? What is required is not so much a grid or a formula (although for those who like grids and formulas, there is nothing wrong with that) but rather a sincerity with oneself. What resources and time do I have to offer? What am I reasonably capable of? How can I integrate my efforts into my life in a way that will make them not only helpful to others but also lend meaningfulness to my own life? Where might my dedication to decency—and to others’ lives—lead me? To answer these questions does not require the application of a theory but a reflection on our particular lives and the role benevolence might play in them. In this reflection, the most significant element is honesty, honesty about who we are, what we are capable of, and what draws us toward certain issues as opposed to others.
Before turning to those who are distant in time from us, let me flag an issue to which we will return in the fifth chapter. There are those who will argue that in many, perhaps most, situations where there are people in need, benevolence is not to the point. What is demanded is not benevolence but political change. The problems, it is argued, are not rooted in scarcity but rather in unjust political structures and what must be done involves political resistance rather than benevolent action. After all, unless unjust political structures are overturned, those who receive assistance will only be replaced by those who come to need it, because the situation will not have changed.
There are others who hold the opposite position. Political resistance, they say, is often utopian and ineffective. Rather than focusing on some distant future change, why not offer support or relief to those who exist here and now? Concrete change that benefits particular individuals is likely to be more effective than tilting at the windmills of many of the oppressive regimes and structures that currently exist and will likely continue to exist in the future.
I have been involved in a number of political campaigns and so am sympathetic to the first view. But I also recognize that the second view has merits. My own take, one that I don’t expect necessarily to be shared, is that this debate cannot be decided on a general basis but perhaps only in particular situations. Near the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, support for political resistance seemed very likely to be—and turned out to be—an effective route for positive involvement. In other cases, say the plight of indigenous people in northern Canada, benevolence may be the most effective form of assistance. In any event, the debate over benevolence versus resistance remains a live one. It is an issue that divides people and displays their orientation and particular hopes for the world. I cannot resolve it here; perhaps, as I said, it cannot be resolved at a general level. But it is worth recognizing, particularly for those of us who might find ourselves committed to one side or the other without reflecting seriously on the merits of those who disagree with us (perhaps because of the niche culture we occupy).
Distance in Time
When we think of people who will exist in the future and ask about our moral relationship to them, it can feel a bit vague or disorienting. The idea of a moral relationship with those distant from us in space, as long as we widen our lens regarding the term relationship, is not so difficult. It isn’t even that difficult to think of a moral relationship with people that we have known but who have died. Most of us, for instance, would feel ashamed to do something that desecrated the memory of a deceased grandparent or aunt. If I imagine mocking my maternal grandfather in front of friends, it makes me uneasy. Even, or perhaps especially, a parent with whom one has had an ambivalent or uncomfortable relationship can’t be a source of public hilarity without uneasiness. But if we turn our attention to future people, the idea of a moral relationship gets a bit murkier.
This lack of clarity occurs for an obvious reason: future people aren’t here
yet. Strictly speaking, there are no future people. There will be at least some unless the world suddenly disappears as you are reading this sentence. But now that you have read it some people who were not there before have come into existence. So there are people, but not yet future people. But if future people do not exist, how can we have some sort of moral relationship with them? How can we express ourselves morally to people who are not there?
This question, unsurprisingly, involves complications. To approach them, let’s start with a second obvious fact. Just as there are no future people yet, we can also be sure that things we do now can—in fact will—have an effect on whoever shows up down the road. It might be a small effect, but our actions today do have consequences for those who will be born after we act and in fact after we die. This is true not only of those with whom we will have face-to-face relationships, but also of people we will never meet and even never hear of.
The inescapability of our effects on those anonymous people (well, anonymous to us) who will proceed us becomes clear if we reflect on one of the most important issues—some, including me, would call it the most important issue—of our day: human effects on the environment. That human activity has a profound effect on the environment is an undeniable fact among those who take science seriously. Also undeniably, that effect will have an impact on the lives of those who come after us. And therein lies perhaps the most important aspect of our moral relationship to those distant from us in time. While they cannot directly affect our lives (they can do so only indirectly, that is, by our taking them into account in constructing our own lives), we can affect theirs, and profoundly so. Because of this, it is not an abuse of the language to say that we have a moral relationship to them, even if that relationship is more or less one way—more a relationship to them rather than with them. After all, benevolence can also be a one-way relationship, and yet we would not be hesitant to call it a relationship for all that. What seems different about our relationship with future people from that of benevolence toward the currently living is that those future people don’t exist yet. But if we hold on to the two obvious facts that there will be future people and that what we do affects how their lives will go then at least some of that sense of difference begins to dissipate.
If we attend to our effects on the environment and the impacts these might have on those who come after us, there are three effects in particular that should concern us: depletion, pollution, and climate change. We will focus on the third as perhaps the most urgent, but it is worth pausing a moment over the other two, which are in fact related to the third. Depletion occurs when we use nonrenewable environmental resources. There is, for instance, only a certain amount of fossil fuel on the planet. And there are only certain areas that have rain forests and the multiplicity of species that live in them. To the extent that we use these up or destroy them in our own living, there will be that much less left over for those who will inhabit the planet after we die. Alternatively, to the extent to which we conserve those resources we leave them to future generations to enjoy.
Depletion does not concern resources that can be replaced in one way or another. If we cut down a section of a managed forest, for instance, it can be replaced by planting new seeds of the same type. If we hunt deer, then we can foster the renewal of the deer population by setting limits on hunting seasons or creating sanctuaries where hunting is prohibited. But if we destroy large areas of a rain forest, we are likely to eliminate species of plants or animals that do not exist elsewhere and that therefore cannot be brought back into existence. This is why efforts to conserve nonrenewable resources are important. With depletion, we do not get do-overs. And so we need to be cognizant of which among our resources must be preserved because they cannot be replaced, not only for the sake of those beings who must live in those resources (an issue we will return to in the next chapter), but for the sake of those human beings who will live on the planet when we are gone.
Pollution occurs when people damage the environment by introducing harmful substances into it. Pollution is not entirely distinct from depletion—if a harmful substance destroys a limited resource, then pollution can lead to depletion—but it is not the same thing. For instance, we in the West use far too much plastic, and I understand that there are growing islands of plastic floating in our oceans, harming the aquatic life in those areas. Companies that spill chemicals into our waterways or befoul our air with their emissions are engaged in pollution. To address these issues requires not only individual moral engagement but also concerted political action, a point we will return to later. However, we know that even as individuals we can be cognizant of the waste we generate and seek to limit it. That would leave a cleaner planet for the generations that follow us and even those who are among us and still young.
My focus here though is on a different environmental issue, one that is more deeply threatening than either depletion or pollution: the challenge of what is alternately called global warming or climate change. I will use the latter term since the warming of the planet will induce a number of effects and perhaps among them a radical cooling of certain areas. For instance, warming of the oceans could impact thermohaline circulation (the circulation of salt water) by adding fresh water to the oceans. This, in turn, could lead to colder temperatures in some northern climates such as Great Britain.
We have already seen some of the effects of climate change, from lethal drought to increasingly destructive storms. Of course, it is difficult to ascribe any particular weather event to climate change, since there have been numerous weather variations over the course of history. However, I will assume two uncontroversial truths in the discussion that follows. First, the planet is gradually warming; second, this warming is related to human activity. Since these truths are obvious to all who follow the issue of climate change with any degree of commitment (by, for example, reading the newspaper), it seems pointless to defend them. This leaves us, though, with the question of how to understand our individual moral roles in climate change.
The philosopher Stephen Gardiner, in his book The Perfect Moral Storm (echoing Sebastian Junger’s popular book The Perfect Storm, a book about the 1991 collusion of several meteorological events to create an enormous storm off the coast of the US and Canada), details three converging facts about climate change that make it so difficult to confront. The first is that while the rich contribute the most to climate change, they also gain from it and so have little immediate motive to address it. Moreover, the poor, who suffer the most from it, do not have the power to change it. The second goes directly to the issue that concerns us here. While the beneficiaries of climate change are in the present generation, those who will pay the price are in future or beginning generations, and thus many of them have not yet been born. Most of those who will have to endure the effects of climate change are anonymous to those who are creating it. Finally, current moral theories are unprepared to deal with climate change because they are weak on issues of intergenerational justice and how to deal with uncertainty. So in addition to lack of motive among those who benefit from climate change, there are theoretical barriers to reflecting on how to deal with it.7
If we are seeking decency, we should be sensitive to the effects of climate change, imagining how it might affect other people, even if those people don’t exist yet. Just as we can imagine the lives of others who are distant from us in space, so we can imagine lives that will come after us, and we can empathize with those who would find themselves flooded out of their homes or dealing with severe and sustained drought or, at the limit, not having enough to eat because of a lack of arable land. This would give us at least some motivation to act to prevent further damages from climate change. But before we turn more specifically to how to think about our moral relations to those who come after us in the shadow of climate change, we should linger over a complication that shows us how deep our effects are on future generations.
The problem was first posed by the recently deceased philosopher Derek Parfit. To
see it, let’s start with his initial example.8 A fourteen-year-old girl is thinking of having a child. She’s advised that this would be a bad idea. After all, wouldn’t a child be better off if she waited until she was older and could offer it a better life? If she has a child when she’s in middle school, she will more than likely drop out of school, never get a good job, and severely limit her access to a partner that could help raise the child. It would just seem unfair to bring a child into the world under those circumstances when waiting would provide a much healthier environment.
However, against all advice, the girl goes ahead and gets pregnant. And indeed, just as expected, the child has a difficult life. However, if you asked the child as he grew older whether he would rather not have been born, his answer would be no. For sure, his life is difficult, but nevertheless it is a life worth living. He would not have ceded it to another person.
And here’s the rub. If the girl had waited to get pregnant, the child she eventually gave birth to would undoubtedly have had a better life—but it would not have been this child. It would have been a different one. And this child, since his life, however difficult, is worth his living, would prefer the decision that was actually made. Moreover, the child that would have been born had the girl waited is not there to complain. In fact, there is no such thing as the child that would have been born—that child does not exist anywhere. So the only person affected by the girl’s decision is the child who was actually born. (Well, the other person who is affected is the girl, now mother. But it’s hard to imagine a mother looking at her child and regretting that he was born.) And if that’s true, then why was the decision to get pregnant the wrong one?
