Phil 646: Environmental Ethics

January 31, 2001

Reading Summary: de-Shalit, Why Posterity Matters

Chapter 1, pp. 31-50

Avner de-Shalit spends the first half of this chapter laying out what he sees as the constitutive elements of a transgenerational community: cultural interaction, moral similarity, and a public, participative process of reflection. In addition, he rejects a historical view of community membership and argues that each member of the community must at some point freely and rationally choose to join or remain in the community. Now that he has described what he believes a transgenerational community should look like, de-Shalit begins his argument for why we should care about the future members of our transgenerational community. He begins by demonstrating why a fraternity model cannot properly connect present and future generations; he then proposes a rational model for transgenerational community. This model has two major components: a psychological view of the unity of the self and an account of the cultural interaction and moral similarity present in a healthy transgenerational community.

The second half of the chapter begins with de-Shalit considering the view that we are connected to future generations by emotional bonds; he specifically names the work of John Passmore. This fraternity model suggests that we share a bond with future generations because we love and care about them. Tangibly, we love our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren; it is not too much of a stretch to think that a "chain of love" would extend past them to what they love—their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and so on. Future generations are considered somewhat like a very large extended family. de-Shalit rejects this view for three reasons.

First, he says, a wide-ranging obligation such as a duty to future generations cannot be based on a sentiment like love. Love, on de-Shalit’s view, should be an exclusive emotion, reserved for family and close friends. If it is used to justify a large scale obligation, it loses much of its exclusive meaning and thereby its distinctiveness. Secondly, de-Shalit sees problems with the chain of love; it does not necessarily follow that I should love the object(s) of my beloved’s love. He gives the example of Jim, Ruth, and John. John loves Ruth, but Ruth is in love with Jim. Should John therefore love Jim as well just because Ruth loves him? Of course not. Finally, de-Shalit argues that love is not a sufficient criterion to constitute a community. While this last argument may or may not be particularly sound, it is largely irrelevant to the point under discussion. de-Shalit has shifted the discussion from constitutive elements of a transgenerational community to reasons why we should care for future members of that community, so this last argument is off base.

The class discussion revealed that some thought de-Shalit was too quick to reject a sentiment-based model to connect present and future generations. Any link we feel with those who will come after us may very well need to be based at least in part on an emotional connection between ourselves and them, even if we cannot know them in person. Love may also admit of more degrees than de-Shalit accounts for; the intense, intimate love shared by friends and family is stronger than the general connection we feel with our fellow man based simply on our common humanness, but it is still the same emotion. This line of discussion also brings up the larger question of whether a theory of obligation to future generations can be based on a self-interested, rather than altruistic, motivation. But that question will be dealt with later; right now, let us examine whether de-Shalit tries to sneak a role for emotion into his theory through the back door.

In place of a fraternity model to motivate our connection to future generations, de-Shalit offers what he calls a rational model to justify our obligations to future persons. This is a psychological argument; it begins with Ernest Partridge’s purely empirical, rather than moral, claim that we all have an innate human need to transcend our own deaths. de-Shalit expands on this base by arguing for the narrative unity of the self. The future selves of a person A are directly related to A’s present intentions and plans; those intentions and plans are partly dependent on A’s past self. It is this web of interrelationships, rather than the existence of something like a soul or a physical body’s spatiotemporal continuity, that makes a person a unified whole. Because future selves are directly connected to the present and past self, the self does not necessarily end with the death of the body. My projects and plans may well come to fruition after my death, providing something by which future generations will remember me. Thus we should care about the future because our selves may be part of the future; it is in some sense constitutive of us.

Passmore’s "chain of love" is seemingly replaced by a rational argument that it is some part of our very selves, not just our descendants, that will live on in the future. One might say, however, that de-Shalit is still making a sentimental argument; he merely changes the object of our affection from others (i.e., my descendants) to ourselves. Self-love is apparently an acceptable sentiment on which to build a theory. This is consistent with de-Shalit’s general aim to provide a pragmatic argument for why we should care about future generations, but is it convincing? Is everyone really that concerned about his or her legacy? After all, most of us will not be Aristotles or Einsteins. Even if we are concerned about our personal projects being completed, this concern may not last much beyond one or two generations, and may not last beyond our probate hearing. This seems like a rather weak motivation for a theory of obligation to future generations that are ten or fifteen generations distant.

In the final section of the chapter, de-Shalit attempts to further justify obligations to future generations by moving away from individual psychology and returning to the moral and political sphere. (The question of how to balance obligations to present and future generations is discussed in the next chapter.) He begins by attempting to establish that cultural interaction takes place across generations using the example of the Israeli nation. At the beginning of the 20^th century, it was nothing more than a political movement, according to de-Shalit largely Eastern European and socialist. At the time the nation of Israel was established in 1948, moral similarity was very strong; there was no need to pass a law mandating armed forces services as young men willingly volunteered. But this unity broke down as American political and cultural influence gained strength in Israel; by the 1970s, the political shift was complete, as the first right-wing, pro-American coalition took control of the Israeli government. By that point, moral similarity had declined greatly from its original peak; some had become so dissatisfied that they had left Israel for other countries.

The Israeli example, de-Shalit believes, is typical of the process of change in communities over time; the strong unity of the original generation is often lost. The key, however, is that the process of rational debate continues, no matter where it may lead. On de-Shalit’s view, the values of a community will and should change as the community’s needs change; his main normative requirement for a community’s continued existence is that its members continue to debate about its traditions. This raises the question of how much a community’s values can change without the community losing its identity. de-Shalit notes that the answer may depend on a person’s perspective; a member of the community in question may feel that the community has completely lost its values, while the outsider still considers it the same community, even if some individual members have become alienated enough to leave the community. One might infer that de-Shalit believes there is no limit to how much the community’s values can change, but de-Shalit never makes his position on the issue clear.

A final issue raised in this section had to do with the directionality of transgenerational cultural interaction. While cultural interaction is primarily a backwards-looking phenomenon (i.e., we study the works of Plato, Galileo, Beethoven, and other major historical figures), de-Shalit believes that it can also be forward-looking. When a contemporary community makes major decisions, one of its considerations is what future generations will think of it when they study it in history class. This claim is simply asserted, rather than defended. Nevertheless, some members of the class thought it had value, that we should consider how we will be judged by future generations. An argument for this position is still needed, however.

Overall, this section of the chapter was rather unconvincing. First, de-Shalit attempts to use the unity of the self and the psychological need for self-transcendence to motivate our concern for future generations. Such concern, however, at best would not seem to last past a few generations. He then tries to justify that concern by describing the cultural interaction and moral similarity that takes place in a healthy transgenerational community. This section of the chapter is primarily descriptive, however; he never ties it back into his main argument. Neither section of the second half of the chapter, then, does the work de-Shalit wants it to do.

Comments by John Nolt

Lara's summary is helpful and accurate, and her criticisms are valid and acute. I have only a few things to add:

De-Shalit considers his account of the self's transcendence of death to be "psychological" and not "metaphysical." What does this mean? If it is merely psychological than how can it engender obligations? Does it mean merely that I feel connected to the future via my intellectual contribution to it? That might be a source of motivation, but hardly a source of the sort of constitution of the self that engenders obligations on de-Shalit's view.

In the bottom of page 33, de-Shalit suggests one more argument against basing integenerational ethics on sentiment: some sentiments (his example is rejection of the stranger or nonconformist) are bad. This is a straw person argument, since no one who wants to base intergenerational ethics on sentiment has ever suggested that just any old sentiment would do.

On page 38 de-Shalit argues that mental activity is what we really value about life, his point being that the mental activity that we begin while alive may be carried on by others after our death and so provide a kind of transcendence of death. But the argument for this is awful: