When the 19th-century amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and exposed them to sunlight, she uncovered a curious fact. Carbon dioxide became hotter than regular air and took longer to cool down.<\/p>\n
Remarkably, Foote saw what this momentous discovery meant.<\/p>\n
“An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in 1857.<\/p>\n
Though Foote could hardly have been aware at the time, the potential for global warming due to carbon dioxide would have massive implications for the generations that came after her.<\/p>\n
If we ran history over again from that moment, we might hope that this key discovery about carbon’s role in the atmosphere would inform governments’ and industries’ choices in the coming century. They probably shouldn’t have avoided carbon emissions altogether, but they could have prioritised the development of alternatives to fossil fuels much sooner in the 20th century, and we might have prevented much of the destructive climate change that present people are already beginning to live through \u2014 which will affect future generations as well.<\/p>\n
We believe it would’ve been much better if previous generations had acted on Foote’s discovery, especially by the 1970s, when climate models were beginning to reliably show the future course of warming global trends.<\/p>\n
If this seems right, it’s because of a commonsense idea: to the extent that we are able to, we have strong reasons to consider the interests and promote the welfare of future generations.<\/em><\/p>\n That was true in the 1850s, it was true in the 1970s, and it’s true now.<\/p>\n But despite the intuitive appeal of this moral idea, its implications have been underexplored. For instance, if we care about generations 100 years in the future, it’s not clear why we should stop there.<\/p>\n And when we consider how many future generations there might be, and how much better the future could go if we make good decisions in the present, our descendants’ chances to flourish take on great importance. In particular, we think this idea suggests that improving the prospects for This article will lay out the argument for this view, which goes by the name longtermism<\/em>.<\/p>\n We’ll say where we think the argument is strongest and weakest, respond to common objections, and say a bit about what we think this all means for what we should do.<\/p>\n Sign up to our newsletter, and we’ll mail you a free copy of The Precipice<\/em> by philosopher Toby Ord. It gives an overview of the moral importance of future generations, and what we can do to help them today.<\/p>\nPrefer a book?<\/small> Enter your email and we’ll mail you a book<\/h2>\n