PHIL 121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Marginal Utility

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 121
• Professor: Endre Begby

Document Summary

But is it really never morally permissible to shift some of the burden on to people people, inhabiting some distant land. The set of possible future people is vast, virtually infinite: the moral status of future people, problems of non-existence. We tend to speak about (cid:498)future generations(cid:499) as a determinate set of actual. This can"t be right: future generations are, at best, possible people, not actual people to eternal nonexistence (cid:523)you don"t feel bad for the children you don"t. John broome, (cid:498)the ethics of climate change. (cid:499) We are constantly making decisions that consign vast numbers of possible: but pretty much anything we do can or will cause harm to some against our concern for actual people? harm to (innocent) others future people. Any practical approach to burden sharing between us and future generations must involve an account of (cid:498)future discounting(cid:499: related to problem (cid:498)diminishing marginal utility(cid:499)