Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Future generations — what the living owe, and why they care about, people who will live after them — longtermism and existential risk, intergenerational justice, the non-identity problem and person-affecting views, population ethics, discounting of future welfare, and the psychology of concern for the future: legacy motivation, generativity, symbolic immortality and continuity with one’s future self (ADR-063).
36 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-469 v3 | Reasons and Persons | Parfit (1984), Clarendon Press; DOI-10.1093/019824908X.001.0001 is the 1986 reprint online. Four loosely connected parts, per the author’s abstract: self-defeating theories of rationality and morality; what one person can rationally want at different times, and attitudes to time; personal identity, where “most of us … have certain beliefs about this subject that are false, but hard to give up”; and obligations to future generations, with the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. By the chapter abstracts, Part III defends a reductionist view on which identity is not what matters and draws consequences for self-interest and distributive justice. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, its chapter abstracts and the table of contents; the book is in copyright and no lawful full text was reachable (the Internet Archive copies are lending-only and were not opened), so it is unread and no NOTE is filed. By its publisher’s account, Part III argues that most of us hold false beliefs about personal identity, that psychological continuity and connectedness, not identity, is what matters, and that this should change our attitudes to our own future, to rationality and to morality. The record already leans on it at second hand: Birch’s Relation R, Velleman’s reading of Frankfurt and the identity-and-ethics survey all cite it. |
| LIT-1678 | The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity | Ord (2020). Estimates the risk of an existential catastrophe this century at about one in six, mostly from human sources such as unaligned artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics, and argues that safeguarding humanity’s potential is a defining priority, with reasons drawn from the future, from what we owe the past, and from the present. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-29, not read; set Unfetched the same day under ADR-053: the author offers a free chapter at theprecipice.com behind a newsletter sign-up, which this client did not complete, and Bloomsbury’s chapter preview on Issuu answered HTTP 403. A human reader can likely open the free chapter. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Ord’s “The Precipice Revisited” (2024) (LIT-1720) and Ord’s “Shaping humanity’s longterm trajectory” (LIT-1761). |
| LIT-1681 | A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption | Gardiner (2006). Climate change is a “perfect moral storm”: three problems that threaten ethical action converge in it. The global storm is the familiar reading, a tragedy of the commons between states with no effective global governance, worsened by uncertainty about national impacts, a status quo bias and skewed vulnerabilities. The intergenerational storm is worse. Carbon dioxide’s long life makes climate change resilient, backloaded and deferred, so the benefits of emitting fall to the present and the costs to later generations. That is a Pure Intergenerational Problem, in which every generation rationally overpollutes and the usual remedies are unavailable, because the generations do not coexist. The theoretical storm is that our theories handle uncertainty, intergenerational equity and contingent persons badly. Together they invite moral corruption: by selective attention, each generation can seem to act while exploiting its position in time, and need not admit it, even to itself. Even the prominence of the global model may be such a convenience, since it assumes states represent their citizens “in perpetuity”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1252) from the publisher’s PDF, republished with White Horse Press’s permission on the Rachel Carson Center’s Environment & Society Portal (environmentandsociety.org/node/5976); worth reading as the short statement of why concern for future generations fails in practice: a self-interest that is generation-relative, and a moral motive that can be corrupted without being given up. |
| LIT-1684 | The Case for Strong Longtermism | Greaves & MacAskill. Argue for axiological and deontic strong longtermism: in the most important decisions facing agents today (how a society or an individual spends resources without restriction to a cause, and career choice), every near-best option is near-best for the far future and delivers much larger benefits there than in the near future, and one ought to choose such an option. The argument rests on an expected number of future beings of at least 10^24 (10^14 on a restricted, Earth-only estimate), and on interventions (asteroid detection, pandemic preparedness, AI safety) whose expected far-future benefit per $100 beats the 0.025 lives that bednets save. The deontic thesis follows by a stakes-sensitivity argument that any plausible non-consequentialism should accept. The authors take cluelessness, ambiguity aversion and imprecise credences to fail as objections. They name fanaticism about tiny probabilities as one of the most plausible ways the case could fail. They concede that a positive pure rate of time preference would defeat it. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1302) from the authors’ working paper (GPI Working Paper No. 5-2021, June 2021) on the Global Priorities Institute’s site, an earlier version of the 2025 chapter; worth reading as the precise statement of strong longtermism and of exactly which assumptions it needs (zero pure time preference, expected value at small probabilities); it says nothing about why anyone would act on it. |
| LIT-1688 | High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation | Thorstad (2023). Argues, inside expected-value reasoning and with no special ethical premises, that pessimism about existential risk weakens the case for mitigating it. On Ord’s simple model, cutting this century’s risk by a fraction is worth that fraction of one century, whatever the risk; with absolute cuts, value growth or cuts in every century, higher risk makes mitigation worth less. Astronomical value returns only on a “time of perils” hypothesis in which risk falls soon and stays very low, and he argues that appeals to growing wisdom, an existential risk Kuznets curve and space settlement do not support it. Mitigation may still be valuable, “but perhaps not astronomically so”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1308) from the author’s penultimate draft (GPI Working Paper No. 6-2023, July 2023) on the Global Priorities Institute’s site; worth reading as a demonstration, inside the longtermist’s own expected-value framework, that high existential risk lowers the value of reducing it unless risk soon falls and stays low. |
| LIT-1691 | Generativity as a Route to Active Ageing | A gerontological essay with a report of the authors’ own studies. It reads Erikson’s generativity, as McAdams models it, as the psychological form of an ethical category of “joint responsibility”, and argues it is a lifelong concern, not a midlife task. It restates McAdams’ model: generativity springs from cultural demand and from an inner desire made of a “need to be needed” and a need for symbolic immortality, and passes through concern, commitment and belief in the species to action and a life-story script. It distinguishes generativity from altruism and says generative engagement can be selfish or altruistic in motive. Studies of 3,308 people aged 59 to 108 in Mexico, Spain and Germany found generativity predicted optimism and life satisfaction beyond health, money and family status. An intervention of intergenerational dialogue projects in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine raised Loyola Generativity Scale scores in old and young participants. No test statistics are reported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1261), in place of LIT-1777, which could not be reached; worth reading as a compact restatement of McAdams’ model of generativity, with symbolic immortality as one of its motives, and for its claim that generativity serves the well-being of the old. |
| LIT-1693 | Psychometric validation of the Loyola Generativity Scale in Chilean teachers: evidence for a three factor structure | A validation of McAdams and de St. Aubin’s 20-item Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS) in Spanish, with 430 Chilean elementary teachers. Four items were dropped for low sampling adequacy, and a three-factor solution on 14 items was retained (RMSEA = 0.043, CFI = 0.989): Generative Inefficacy (three reverse-scored items), Generative Action (eight items on teaching, creativity and community work) and Generative Legacy (three items on symbolic continuity and contribution to future generations). Action and Legacy correlated .45; Inefficacy correlated −.34 and −.30 with them. Factor-score reliabilities were .80 to .86. The authors read the three factors as an extension of the original two (positive generativity and generative doubts) produced by the teaching context. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1260), in place of LIT-1777, which could not be reached; worth reading as evidence that legacy motivation can be measured apart from generative action within McAdams’ scale, with the caution that the analysis is exploratory and two items vanish unexplained. |
| LIT-1702 | Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice | Hershfield (2011). A review, mostly of the author’s own studies, of “future self-continuity”: following Parfit, people who feel their future self is less connected to them treat it more like a stranger and save less for it. Three components are proposed. Similarity, measured by choosing overlapping circles (adapted from Aron et al.’s inclusion-of-other-in-self scale) for one’s self in ten years, predicted patient choices and accumulated assets, controlling for age; neural activity for the future self that looked more like activity for another person predicted steeper discounting (r = .47). Vividness: seeing an age-progressed image of oneself raised hypothetical retirement saving. Positivity: respect for the elderly tracked national saving rates and, when induced, raised patient choices. Asking directly how much people liked and cared for their future selves did not predict choice, though those answers were near ceiling. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1259) from the NIH author manuscript (PMC3764505), served by NCBI’s PMC OAI-PMH service after Europe PMC refused this client; worth reading as the short statement of the future self-continuity programme, and as the record’s clearest case of a measured extent of the self predicting concern-like behaviour where directly reported caring did not. Read it knowing that the review gives almost no statistics, that the caring null comes from a ceiling, and that the circles are framed as similarity. |
| LIT-1712 | Why Worry About Future Generations? | Scheffler (2018), the Uehiro Lectures. Argues that our reasons to care about future generations are not only reasons of beneficence toward their welfare: they also come from our valuing, our attachments to people, practices and traditions, and our stake in the human story’s going on, so that caring about the future is partly a matter of caring about what we value now. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher, and NYU’s repository lists it without a file. Scheffler’s 2015 Uehiro Lectures, which presented draft material for the book, are open as audio at Oxford’s Practical Ethics site (practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/node/2950046); they were not transcribed, so no work was read in its place. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). |
| LIT-1713 | Responsibility to Future Generations: A Moral Reframing Strategy for Combatting Climate Change | Syropoulos, Kraft-Todd, Mah, Markowitz & Young (2023). Thirteen studies (six main, seven supplementary; N = 161,633) on felt responsibility to future generations (RFG). In Eurobarometer data from 34 European countries (N = 109,513), a majority in 33 agreed “We need to reform to benefit future generations even if that means making some sacrifices now”; agreement barely related to ideology, age or gender (meta-r .03 to .07) and weakly to subjective status (.13). In US samples RFG was endorsed more than responsibility to reduce one’s own contribution to climate change (RCC), correlated with conservatism half as strongly (meta-r −.21 against −.45), and predicted self-reported proenvironmental behaviour, concern and policy support. In a preregistered experiment (N = 3,175), five brief interventions (a letter to a person born today, legacy reflection, reflection on past generations’ sacrifices, a park video, a 385-word excerpt of What We Owe the Future) each raised RFG and proenvironmental intentions by small amounts (d = .14 to .54); only the letter raised donations. Reflection on past sacrifices raised RFG but not RCC. All outcomes are self-reports or a small donation. status_note: worth reading as the largest study of felt responsibility to future generations, its spread and its political neutrality, and as the record’s only experiment comparing legacy, reciprocity, a particular future person and an impersonal longtermist text as routes to it; read in place of Syropoulos and Markowitz 2021. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1293), in place of LIT-1741, which could not be reached; worth reading as the largest study of felt responsibility to future generations, its spread and its political neutrality, and as the record’s only experiment comparing legacy, reciprocity, a particular future person and an impersonal longtermist text as routes to it; read in place of Syropoulos and Markowitz 2021. |
| LIT-1716 | Legacies, Immortality, and the Future: The Psychology of Intergenerational Altruism | Wade-Benzoni (2006). Argues that intergenerational beneficence, sacrifice now for people who will live later and cannot reciprocate, is motivated in part by the desire to leave a legacy, a route to symbolic immortality, and that this motive can be engaged to promote decisions that favour future generations. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; Scholars@Duke and Duke’s faculty pages list it without a file. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Wade-Benzoni, Sondak and Galinsky 2010 (LIT-1717). |
| LIT-1717 | Leaving a Legacy: Intergenerational Allocations of Benefits and Burdens | Six experiments (N = 76, 101, 64, 32, 131, 92; U.S. undergraduates, MBA students and university staff) on how the valence of what is passed on affects concern for one’s legacy and generosity to future others. Framing climate change as leaving burdens, rather than using up benefits, raised a generativity scale built from items about being remembered and living on (4.90 vs 4.10), direct concern with one’s legacy, felt responsibility and affinity toward future generations, and ethical concern; recalling one’s own past burden allocation raised moral emotions. In allocation tasks people favoured themselves more with benefits than with burdens. The difference appeared only when the recipient was in the future (not in a dictator-game version with a present recipient), and only when the allocator was a party to the trade-off (not when allocating between two other people). One item on ethical considerations statistically accounted for the first of these. The authors read the pattern as legacy concern, which they define as the wish to extend the self beyond death, engaged more by leaving burdens than by withholding benefits. Legacy concern was measured only in the attitude studies, never in the allocation studies. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1273), in place of LIT-1716, which could not be reached; worth reading as the legacy programme’s fullest experimental statement before the 2012 mortality studies, and as the record’s only second-hand source for Wade-Benzoni 2006 (LIT-1716). Read it knowing that legacy concern and generosity are never measured in the same study, and that the generosity effects sit in one cell: people keep more benefits for themselves when the other person will receive them later. |
| LIT-1720 | The Precipice Revisited | Ord (2024), a talk revisiting the four largest risks of The Precipice about five years after its text was fixed. Existential risk from climate change is down: emissions now track between the two lower RCP pathways, not RCP 8.5, and the IPCC has narrowed the likely climate sensitivity from 1.5–4.5°C to 2.5–4°C. Nuclear risk is up: the invasion of Ukraine, the coming expiry of New START with a likely new arms race, and the halving of funding for the field when the MacArthur Foundation, about 45% of it, withdrew. Pandemic and AI risk are mixed. Covid showed weak institutions and a unity against a common threat that lasted months, but vaccines came within a year; language models replaced game-playing agents as the frontier, which weakens the classic threat model, while racing between the largest companies and new government attention pull opposite ways. The book’s per-century estimates (climate and nuclear 1 in 1,000, pandemics 1 in 30, unaligned AI 1 in 10) have not moved at their rounding. The world is starting to build existential security. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1317), in place of LIT-1678, which could not be fetched here; worth reading as the author’s own update of The Precipice’s risk estimates, and as the only open text that restates the book’s four headline numbers and its notion of existential security; it does not carry the book’s moral argument. |
| LIT-1724 | How Will I Be Remembered? Conserving the Environment for the Sake of One’s Legacy | Zaval, Markowitz & Weber (2015). Legacy motivation, wanting to be remembered well, predicted pro-environmental intentions and donations, and writing about how one wants to be remembered increased donations to an environmental charity and pro-environmental intentions. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. A PDF on the Wharton marketing department’s site was not used, since none of the authors is there; the authors’ own deposits at Columbia Academic Commons hold the study materials and data, not the article. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Wickersham et al. 2020 (LIT-1750). |
| LIT-1733 | A Mathematical Theory of Saving | Ramsey (1928). Asks how much of its income a nation should save, for a community that lives for ever with fixed numbers, tastes and motives, summing utility over time without discounting it, a practice he calls “ethically indefensible” and the product of “the weakness of the imagination”. The answer, credited in its simple form to Keynes: the rate of saving times the marginal utility of consumption equals the shortfall of present net enjoyment from Bliss, the maximum obtainable rate. The rule is independent of the production function except through Bliss, and of the interest rate. It asks far more saving than usual: on an illustrative scale, £300 out of a family income of £500. With a constant discount rate ρ below the interest rate r, the same solution holds with a “modified utility” that discounts high incomes instead of the future; with ρ above r, consumption runs down to subsistence. A constant rate is argued to be the only one consistent with successive generations sharing one system of preferences. The last section turns to the rate of interest. Out of equilibrium it is set by capital’s demand price and can far exceed the reward needed to induce abstinence. With families discounting at different rates, equilibrium divides society into “the thrifty enjoying bliss and the improvident at the subsistence level”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1287) from the published article, public domain in the US, from the Internet Archive’s scan of the issue (sim_economic-journal_1928-12_38_152); worth reading as the source of the zero-discount view and of the optimal-saving rule, knowing that the refusal to discount is a one-line assertion with a psychological diagnosis, and that the paper itself models discounting as how people actually save. |
| LIT-1739 | Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development | Bostrom (2003). On an aggregative, undiscounted view, each second’s delay in settling the Virgo Supercluster loses the potential for about 10^29 human lives if minds can run on computers, or 10^13 if they must be biological. Yet the same arithmetic makes safety, not speed, the total utilitarian’s priority: a one-percentage-point cut in existential risk is worth a delay of over 10 million years, so “Maximize expected aggregate utility!” becomes “Minimize existential risk!”. On a person-affecting view, which counts only people who exist or will exist, extinction is bad for what it does to people now alive. Then, given a non-negligible chance that some of them live to share the cosmic benefits through life extension, existential safety is very important but must be balanced against speed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1314) from the text on Bostrom’s own site; worth reading as the original form of the argument from the size of the possible future, and for its statement of how a person-affecting view changes it: toward the interests of people now alive. |
| LIT-1741 | Perceived responsibility towards future generations and environmental concern: Convergent evidence across multiple outcomes in a large, nationally representative sample | Syropoulos & Markowitz (2021). In a large, nationally representative US sample, perceived responsibility towards future generations predicted environmental concern and pro-environmental intentions across several outcomes, beyond demographics and political ideology. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; it is Elsevier subscription content, and OSF holds no preprint of it. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Syropoulos et al.’s 2023 preprint (LIT-1713). |
| LIT-1747 | What We Owe the Future | MacAskill (2022). The book-length case for longtermism for a general audience: future people count, there may be vastly many of them, and we can affect how their lives go, by influencing which values become entrenched and by reducing the risks of extinction, collapse and stagnation. It defends the view that a larger population of good lives is better. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; the book’s own site posts its endnotes and supplementary materials, not its chapters. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: MacAskill, Thomas and Vallinder’s SPC framework (LIT-1778). |
| LIT-1748 | The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction | Schubert, Caviola & Faber (2019). Five studies (N = 2,507 as stated) of Parfit’s three outcomes: no catastrophe, 80% of humanity killed, 100% killed. Most laypeople judge extinction bad and say it must be prevented, but only 19–37% of those ranking the outcomes in the expected order judge the step from 80% to 100% worse than the step from none to 80%. More do when the victims are zebras, when the catastrophe sterilizes rather than kills, or when told to consider the long-term future (39–50%). A majority (67–77%) do only when told the surviving future would be long and utopian. People recruited as existential-risk mitigators do so unprompted (86%). The authors conclude that laypeople attend to immediate harm to fellow humans and neglect the long-term consequences. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1270) from the publisher’s PDF (CC BY), without the supplementary materials; worth reading as the first experiment on how far lay moral concern reaches past the living, and what makes it reach further: salience of the future, its quality, and less sympathy with the victims. |
| LIT-1749 | Population ethical intuitions | Caviola, Althaus, Mogensen & Goodwin (preprint 2021; Cognition 2022). Nine experiments (N = 5,776 as stated) on lay population axiology. For a fixed population to be better existing than not, people require more happiness than suffering: about 75% happy people, still about 61% when the two are stated to be exactly equally intense. Yet adding one extremely happy person to a world is judged as good as adding one extremely unhappy person is bad, so people reject neutrality and the procreation asymmetry. They prefer larger happy and smaller unhappy populations when averages are fixed, but the preference for more happy people fades and reverses at a billion. With totals fixed they prefer higher averages, and in conflicts averagism tends to win, even favouring adding near-maximally unhappy people who raise the average. Prompts to reflect move judgements toward totalism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1267) from the authors’ PsyArXiv preprint (osf.io/wdbr8, OSF file of 2021-04-01); worth reading as the main experimental evidence on whether ordinary judgement is person-affecting or impersonal about merely possible people, and on how weak its totalism is at large numbers. |
| LIT-1750 | The impact of place and legacy framing on climate action: A lifespan approach | Wickersham et al. (2020). An online experiment with 988 American adults aged 18 to 87, sampled evenly by age. Writing about what one wants future generations to remember one for (adapted from Zaval et al. 2015), or about a beloved place and climate change, raised pro-environmental intentions (η² = .030) and hypothetical donations to a tree-planting charity (η² = .009) against a scrambled-eggs control. Age did not moderate either effect. The legacy writing raised scores on an eight-item Legacy Motivation Scale, which statistically mediated part of its effect; but the place writing raised legacy motivation too, the legacy writing raised love of nature, and in a model with both mediators love of nature carried as much of the donation effect. The scale mixes wanting to be remembered with self-regard and felt responsibility to future generations, so the study does not show that wanting to be remembered is what moves people. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1316), in place of LIT-1724, which could not be reached; worth reading as the one open use of Zaval et al.’s legacy induction and Legacy Motivation Scale, with the scale’s items in print; it shows the scale bundles the wish to be remembered with caring about future generations. |
| LIT-1753 | The epistemic challenge to longtermism | Tarsney (2023). The epistemic challenge to longtermism: our ability to predictably affect the future may fade fast enough that far-future effects do not dominate. He models a $1 million longtermist intervention (existential risk reduction) whose effect lasts until an “exogenous nullifying event”, arriving at a constant rate r, and compares it with a global-health benchmark. With deliberately conservative inputs, longtermism wins only if r is below about 0.000135 per year when humanity settles the stars, or about 0.000000012 per year when it stays on Earth. Mixing in small credences in space settlement, a low r, fast settlement or very efficient conversion of stars into value makes longtermism win by orders of magnitude. But on some plausible views that win rests on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, so the case depends either on non-obvious empirical claims or on tolerating Pascalian fanaticism. Even where longtermism wins, most of its expected value may fall within thousands or millions of years. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1247) from the author’s working paper (GPI Working Paper No. 3-2022, version 4, April 2022) on the Global Priorities Institute’s site; worth reading as the most careful quantitative statement of the epistemic objection to longtermism, and as a demonstration that the expected-value reply to it comes to rest on very small probabilities. |
| LIT-1754 | Death and the Afterlife | Scheffler (2013), his 2012 Tanner Lectures with replies. The afterlife conjecture: much of what we value depends on our confidence that humanity will go on after our deaths (a “collective afterlife”), as the doomsday and infertility scenarios show, so we care about people who will live after us, whom we will never know. He also argues that personal immortality would drain value of its point. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Open Library lists the book for print-disabled readers only. Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures, the book’s first two chapters, are open at tannerlectures.org. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures (LIT-1779) and Cottingham’s NDPR review (LIT-1784). |
| LIT-1756 | Intergenerational Justice | Meyer (2003; revised 2026). The SEP entry on what present people owe future and past people, which argues a position as well as surveying. Future people’s contingency on our choices, the non-identity problem, defeats harm understood as making someone worse off than before or than otherwise. It does not defeat a threshold notion of harm, on which we harm a person by causing her to exist, or to be, below a normatively set threshold. Combined with the counterfactual notion, this gives a “disjunctive” harm. The threshold is best read as sufficientarian, in basic needs or capabilities, rather than egalitarian or prioritarian; Rawls’s just savings principle is one version. The entry is weakly person-affecting, so it owes merely possible people nothing, and it grants that this gives no reason to prefer a flourishing future to none. That gap is filled by concerns that are not rights: Scheffler’s afterlife conjecture, and an obligation owed to present and past people not to destroy the goods and practices on which future-oriented projects depend. Historical injustice is treated with the same notions of harm. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1304) from the SEP entry, substantive revision of 17 July 2026, with its notes; worth reading as the standard map of the person-affecting side of the obligations question, by an author who argues for a threshold, sufficientarian reading of it and says where rights run out. |
| LIT-1760 | It’s Only a Matter of Time: Death, Legacies, and Intergenerational Decisions | Wade-Benzoni, Tost, Hernandez & Larrick (2012). In experiments, reminders of death increased people’s allocations of resources to future generations, an effect the authors attribute to the desire to leave a positive legacy. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; Scholars@Duke and the co-authors’ Duke pages list it without a file. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Hurlstone et al. 2020 (LIT-1785). |
| LIT-1761 | ”Shaping Humanity’s Longterm Trajectory” | Ord (2025). A framework for comparing ways present action could change humanity’s long-run future. Humanity’s “instantaneous value” over time is a curve; the future’s value is the area under it, and an intervention’s value is the area between the default and the altered curve. Value must be roughly quantitative and separable across time, with no pure time preference. Four idealised changes have values that do not depend on the curve’s shape: an advancement (the future reached δt sooner) is worth about (v_τ − v_0)δt, independent of the future’s duration τ, and about −v_0δt if the end comes sooner too; a speed-up scales with (v_τ − v̄)τ; a gain (a fixed rise in value) with τ; an enhancement (a proportional rise) with v̄τ. Raising the chance of surviving near-term existential risk by a factor γ_p is worth (γ_p − 1)v̄τ, like an enhancement, and meets the bar of contingency more easily. So it is hard for advancing progress to rival existential risk reduction: on a million-year future, a year’s advancement is worth about a one-in-a-million gain in survival chance. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1269), in place of LIT-1678, which could not be fetched here; worth reading as Ord’s own formal statement of why reducing existential risk dominates other ways of shaping the future, and of the evaluative assumptions (time-separable value, no pure time preference) that this needs. |
| LIT-1763 | Population and Having Children Now | Narveson (2017). Returns to his 1967 and 1973 theme, that utilitarianism commits one to making people happy and not to making happy people, after abandoning utilitarianism. He holds that creating a person neither benefits nor harms them: before conception there is no one to confer life on, and without a prior person harm and benefit lack a comparator. Yet, “contrary, perhaps” to how he was read, the existence of people with good lives is normally a good thing and a reason to create them. It matters to us because parents and the benevolent like it, and because more people benefit those around them. Morality’s enforceable part, though, licenses interfering with procreation only when it would harm actual persons, “alive, breathing, and acting now (or at any rate in their lifetimes)”, never for possible ones. Not helping the poor instead of having a child is not harming them. Against Benatar, a life’s goods can outweigh its harms. The second half argues, with little evidence, that resources are created rather than fixed, that current climate policy is inefficient, and that no general conflict between present and future people exists. Parents may have as many children as they want and can afford. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1318), in place of LIT-1769, which could not be reached; worth reading as the founder of the person-affecting slogan restating it late: creating happy people is good but owed to no one, and only harm to actual people can bind; read in place of the 1973 paper (LIT-1769), which it summarizes in one sentence. Its second half is a polemic on resources and climate, not argument. |
| LIT-1768 | Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles | Parfit (2017), his last paper, submitted unfinished the day before his death. Most of our choices of policy change who will exist, so a policy that makes later lives much worse may be worse for no one who ever lives: the non-identity problem. Narrow person-affecting principles, on which nothing can be worse, or wrong, if it is worse for no one, then imply that such policies, and even ending human history by all choosing childlessness, are not wrong. Parfit rejects them, and rejects solutions that appeal to rights, wronging or Boonin’s acceptance of the implausible conclusions. He also retracts his own earlier appeal to an impersonal principle. Instead, being caused to exist with a life worth living is an intrinsic, existential benefit, and on a Wide Person-Affecting Principle one outcome is worse if it benefits people less. That solves the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms and keeps “better than” transitive, where the Weak Narrow Principle and the Two-Tier View do not. For different numbers he proposes a Wide Dual Principle, counting both the benefits to each and the benefits to all. It does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion, though Parfit grants that this alone does not let us avoid it. He allows that we may be permitted, or required, to favour present people over greater benefits to future people, but warns that done by every generation this could “wreck the Earth”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1263) from the publisher’s PDF as reprinted in The Philosophers’ Annual vol. 37 (philosophersannual.org); worth reading as Parfit’s final answer to his own non-identity problem, which puts obligations to future people on a person-affecting footing without making them owed to anyone in particular. |
| LIT-1769 | Moral Problems of Population | Narveson (1973). Argues that utilitarian concern is for the welfare of people who exist or will exist, so it gives reason to make people happy but none to bring happy people into existence: the founding statement of the person-affecting view in population ethics. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Oxford Academic and PhilArchive answered with Cloudflare challenges, and PhilArchive’s record lists no file. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Narveson 2017 (LIT-1763). |
| LIT-1773 | Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority | Bostrom (2013). Defines existential risk as a threat of premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or of the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable development: risks of at least crushing severity and pan-generational scope. Gives four classes (human extinction, permanent stagnation, flawed realisation, subsequent ruination), the last two defined normatively. On an aggregative, time-neutral view even Earth alone could hold 10^16 future lives, so cutting the risk by a millionth of a percentage point is worth a hundred million lives. Hence the maxipok rule of thumb for impersonal moral action: maximise the probability of an outcome that avoids existential catastrophe. Other ethical views (Adams’ shared project of humanity, preference satisfaction, custodial duties to ancestors and descendants) concur to differing degrees. Under moral uncertainty, keeping options open recasts sustainability as a trajectory. The risk is neglected: in Scopus, papers on “human extinction” number fewer than those on dung beetles. It is also undersupplied, as a pan-generational public good that even a world state could only partly capture. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1321) from the published version posted on Bostrom’s existential-risk site; worth reading as the standard definition and typology of existential risk, and for the record’s purposes as the one longtermist source that discusses motivation: it diagnoses a “deficit of motivation” and gives, through Adams, a ground in humanity’s shared project. |
| LIT-1777 | A theory of generativity and its assessment through self-report, behavioral acts, and narrative themes in autobiography | McAdams & de St. Aubin (1992). Models Erikson’s generativity, concern for and commitment to the next generation, as seven features: cultural demand, inner desire (for symbolic immortality and to be needed), concern, belief in the species, commitment, action and narration. Introduces the Loyola Generativity Scale and a checklist of generative acts, with evidence from adult samples and autobiographies. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; a summary on a Notre Dame page was unreachable, Northwestern’s Foley Center pages return 404, and copies on Scribd and a commercial site were not used. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Kruse and Schmitt 2012 (LIT-1691) and Sandoval-Obando et al. 2026 (LIT-1693). |
| LIT-1778 | The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework | MacAskill, Thomas & Vallinder (2022). A short technical note that formalises the heuristic of What We Owe the Future, chapter 2. The value an originating event E contributes through a feature F of the world factors exactly as significance (ΔV/ΔT, value per unit of the extra time), persistence (T, how long F lasts) and contingency (ΔT/T, the share of F’s duration due to E), with marginal and expected-value forms in which the factors are ex ante quantities, not expectations of the factors. An alternative makes significance independent of the counterfactual (V/T) and contingency the sum of the semi-elasticities of significance, persistence and the probability that F is present. The SPC estimate feeds the “importance” factor of the importance–tractability–neglectedness framework, and the note proposes reading tractability as overall easiness times “leverage”. It assumes expected-value maximisation and makes no ethical argument. status_note: worth reading as the formal statement of how What We Owe the Future values an act’s effect on the long-run future, read in place of the book; it gives the book’s accounting, not its argument that future people count. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1300), in place of LIT-1747, which could not be reached; worth reading as the formal statement of how What We Owe the Future values an act’s effect on the long-run future, read in place of the book; it gives the book’s accounting, not its argument that future people count. |
| LIT-1779 | The Afterlife (Tanner Lectures I and II) | Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures, the source of the first two chapters of Death and the Afterlife. By “the afterlife” he means that other people will live on after one’s own death. Imagined reactions to a doomsday scenario (the earth destroyed thirty days after one’s death) and to P. D. James’s infertility scenario (no one dies early, but no one more is born) show that this matters to us in its own right and as a condition of other things mattering. Without it many projects, and perhaps even reading and eating well, would lose their point (the “afterlife conjecture”). So, in one respect, humanity’s survival matters more to us than our own or our loved ones’. Scheffler reads this as dependence on future people, not as unsuspected altruism toward them, and as showing that individual valuing presupposes humanity as an ongoing historical project. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1298), in place of LIT-1754, which could not be reached; worth reading as the exact statement of the afterlife conjecture and of what Scheffler does and does not infer from it: our dependence on future people, not altruism toward them. The third essay, the commentaries and the replies are in the book only. |
| LIT-1784 | Review of Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife | A short NDPR review of Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife. It summarizes the afterlife conjecture and the conclusion that “our own survival is less important to us than the survival of the human race” in one specific sense. It reports the third lecture: life must be temporally bounded, so personal immortality is no remedy, yet confidence in our values depends on others living on. It reports Frankfurt’s Darwinian doubt that the concern is altruistic, and Wolf’s argument that people facing extinction could and should “snap out of it”. It faults all parties for ignoring religious thought on finitude. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1306), in place of LIT-1754, which could not be reached; worth reading as the only account the record holds of the book’s third lecture and of Wolf’s and Frankfurt’s commentaries; read its “more altruistic construal” against Scheffler’s own denial of altruism. |
| LIT-1785 | Activating the legacy motive mitigates intergenerational discounting in the climate game | A laboratory climate game: 180 people in 30 groups of six, each with 0, 4 into a climate account. If the group reaches 45 endowment is saved; if not, it is lost with 90% probability. When the saved endowments were paid to the players the next day, 9 of 10 groups reached the target. When they went instead to planting trees for future generations, 2 of 10 did. When players in the tree-planting game also read three short messages meant to activate the legacy motive (death awareness, the powerlessness of future generations, and paying forward a past generation’s sacrifice), 7 of 10 did, and group investment rose from 105.20. All three messages raised investment over the matched rounds of the plain tree-planting game. Legacy induction made fair shares, not extra giving, the norm. There were no manipulation checks and no control message. The authors say people invest in legacies “for largely—although not entirely—selfish reasons”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1279), in place of LIT-1760, which could not be reached; worth reading as a conceptual extension of the 2012 mortality-and-legacy result to group cooperation, and as the record’s nearest substitute for Wade-Benzoni et al. 2012 (LIT-1760). Read it knowing that its legacy induction bundles three mechanisms, one of them identification with past and future generations, so it cannot say which did the work. |
| LIT-1874 | Corporate Agency and Possible Futures | Mulgan (2018), Journal of Business Ethics 154(4). Unread; from the abstract only. It asks for an account of corporate agency that is “temporally robust”, helping future people in broken or digital futures to resist domination by corporate groups with no regard for human beings, and argues that the only such account is “moralised extreme collectivism”: full moral personhood for those corporate groups, and only those, that are reliably disposed to respond appropriately to moral reasons. Expected to report Velasquez’s denial of corporate agency, which the record holds unread. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-30, not read. The publisher’s open-access copy (CC BY 4.0) is at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. On 2026-10-30 that address, and the article page link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1, answered HTTP 200 with a 3 kB “Client Challenge” page that needs JavaScript, not the PDF, on two tries. The St Andrews repository copy that OpenAlex lists (hdl.handle.net/10023/13302, resolving to research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/13302) timed out twice with no bytes received, and a Wayback capture of the Springer PDF was refused (connection reset). No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. |