Context
On 2026-10-29 the owner noted that Johnston’s Surviving Death opens the angle of legacy, and the record filed ten works on it with QUESTION-301. The owner then asked for that line to be extended “to broader questions about obligations towards the future, e.g. longtermism”. Sixteen further works were filed with QUESTION-299: the case for longtermism and its critics, existential risk, intergenerational justice, the non-identity problem, person-affecting views, discounting, and the psychology of judgements about extinction and future generations.
The vocabulary had nowhere to put them together. ethics is all of moral
philosophy. altruism asks whose good an action aims at, which is one
question about the future but not the question of what is owed to people
who do not yet exist. motivation and self hold the psychology of legacy
but not the ethics. The record’s only earlier work in the area, Parfit’s
Reasons and Persons (LIT-469), sits under personhood and altruism.
ADR-062 records the owner’s word that the vocabulary may be expanded where merited.
Decision
Add one topic, future-generations (Future generations): what the
living owe, and why they care about, people who will live after them.
- Normative: longtermism, existential risk, intergenerational justice, the non-identity problem and person-affecting views, population ethics, discounting of future welfare.
- Descriptive: legacy motivation, generativity, symbolic immortality, continuity with one’s future self, moral judgements about extinction and about future people.
How it is applied:
- First, on the works filed with QUESTION-299, where it is the subject.
- Beside the existing tags on the legacy works filed earlier in this contribution whose subject it is: Scheffler 2013, Wade-Benzoni 2006 and 2012, Zaval et al. 2015, McAdams and de St. Aubin 1992 and Hershfield 2011. Nothing is removed and primaries are unchanged.
- Beside the existing tags on Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (LIT-469), whose Part IV is the source of the non-identity problem. It takes a version bump.
- Not added to the terror management works (Burke et al., Castano et al., Lifton) or to Pitcher. Their subject is one’s own death and its aftermath, not people who come after.
Alternatives
- Leave the works under
ethics,altruismandmotivation. The normative and the psychological halves of one question would not meet, andethicswould hide them among all of moral philosophy. - Name the word
longtermism. That names one position, the one in dispute, and leaves out person-affecting views, intergenerational justice and the psychology of legacy. “Future generations” names the subject and not a side. - Fold it into
altruism. Concern for people in the far future is a hard case for the owner’s thesis, but the obligations question arises whatever motivates concern, and much of it (non-identity, discounting, population ethics) is not about motive.
Consequences
- The vocabulary gains a word the owner can rename. A rename is a decision that supersedes this one.
- One merged work, LIT-469, takes a version bump for the added tag.
- The legacy question (QUESTION-301) and the obligations question (QUESTION-299) share a topic page.