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Contingency, Community and Intergenerational Justice
Book chapter

Contingency, Community and Intergenerational Justice

Robert Elliot
Contingent Future Persons: On the Ethics of Deciding Who Will Live, or Not, in the Future, pp.157-170
Theology and Medicine book series (THAM), 9, Springer London, Ltd.
1997
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5566-3_12
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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5566-3_12View
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Abstract

Applied Ethics community
This volume is concerned with how we ought to evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend - discussed here as the `problem of contingent future persons'. For it seems that those future persons who are brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by them in any conventional sense. This is a relatively novel problem in ethics and as yet there is simply no consensus on how we ought to evaluate such actions or, indeed, on whether we can. However, the pursuit of a solution to the problem has been interestingly employed by moral philosophers to press the limits of ethics and to urge a reconsideration of the nature and source of value at its most fundamental level. Intended for professional ethicists, policy researchers, and graduate students, this volume explores the theological implications of the problem and advances the investigation of it both in philosophical and in theological terms. [Book Synopsis]

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