Expanding our moral circles

How can we collectively focus more attention on the wellbeing of future generations, and of those who are distant from us in both time and space?

Last September, at the Summit of the Future, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on Future Generations as part of the Pact for the Future. The Pact marked a renewed commitment to multilateralism in the face of a complex and rapidly changing global risk landscape:

We are at a time of profound global transformation. We are confronted by rising catastrophic and existential risks, many caused by the choices we make. Fellow human beings are enduring terrible suffering. If we do not change course, we risk tipping into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown.

The Declaration, in line with previous international agreements, commits to protecting the welfare of today’s children and generations to come. In 1972, the Brundtland Commission argued that states should aim to promote sustainable development - in other words, development that allows us to meet the needs of people in the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. This commitment to intergenerational fairness implies that future generations are worthy of at least some level of moral concern, or we would not be motivated to ensure social and ecological stability for their benefit.

Usually, when we talk about future generations, we think about our own kin and social groups. We think of our children and grandchildren, or the futures of children in our country, rather than, say, younger and unborn children in other countries. However, considering the interconnectedness of our global system, we have to consider how our actions in the UK affect people in other countries, both in the present and in the future. We can cut our use of fossil fuels in the UK, but if we then rely on supplies of gas and oil from other countries, we simply shift the ecological and social damage further out sight. We might protect our children but cut short the lives of children elsewhere, exacerbating global instability and inequalities. Commitments to intergenerational fairness and sustainable development require us to consider the welfare of people both across social and temporal distance.

However, we often struggle to do this, devaluing outcomes that affect future people. This bias is known as intergenerational discounting. A review of the literature on both social discounting (devaluing outcomes that benefit others instead of oneself) and temporal discounting (devaluing outcomes that occur in the future rather than in the present) suggests that several factors contribute to intergenerational discounting. These include feelings of social responsibility, perceived power asymmetries, and the level of uncertainty about the outcome. Where we feel less responsible, less powerful, and more uncertain about the outcomes of future people, we discount more, which does not bode well for future generations.

When it comes to protecting the welfare of future generations, we must consider both human and environmental wellbeing. The former depends on the latter. Focusing on human welfare, at the expense of ecological welfare, also risks perpetuating Western ideas of human relations with nature based on power and mastery.

Perhaps this is where research on moral expansiveness can be most informative. This refers to the breadth and depth of one’s moral circle - the range of others to whom we feel some level of moral responsibility or obligation to protect. We can consider moral circles as having breadth in terms of the range of entities (e.g. humans, animals, nature) we deem worthy of concern, and depth in terms of how much concern we feel towards them (e.g. considering an entity as worth of rights and protection). Where we consider entities as more worthy of concern, we may be more likely to help them - whether with donations of money or time, or even a willingness to self-sacrifice.

A recent study found that we tend to demonstrate a present-oriented bias in our moral concern. In other words, we consider those in the present worthy of concern than those in the future, and this effect is greater for those who are also socially close to us. Looking fifty or a hundred years into the future, participants reported less moral concern and obligation towards a range of human and non-human entities. Humans were considered more worthy of concern than non-humans.

Another study compared levels of intergenerational concern across 34 countries, and found that people in poorer and more unequal countries were less concerned than people in richer, more equal countries.

These findings are consistent with previous literature on the effects of poverty and inequality on prosocial behaviour and thinking. Poverty forces people to focus on meeting their immediate needs, inhibiting long-term thinking, while inequality can erode trust, increase perceptions of competition, decrease prosocial behaviour, and reduce the size of individuals’ moral circles.

We need to find ways to promote intergenerational solidarity and consideration, and to overcome both social and temporal distance. Addressing socio-economic inequalities that can undermine this solidarity is a good place to start. Promoting greater identification between present and future generations as part of the same ‘group’ could also reduce discounting, as well as highlighting power asymmetries between those alive today and future generations, and emphasising people’s ability to leave a positive legacy. Encouraging people to more vividly imagine future people and their potential suffering can reduce the decline in empathy that many of us experience when thinking morally across temporal distance.

I will be continuing to explore ways to promote intergenerational concern in our upcoming report on long-termism, future generations, and socio-economic inequalities, due to be published in late April. We have also co-authored a joint declaration on intergenerational solidarity with the School of International Futures. If you are doing work in this area and have thoughts about the psychological barriers to increasing concern for future generations, please get in touch here.