Analysis Of Annette Baier's Essay For The Sake Of Future Generation

1323 Words6 Pages

An increasing number of people believed that we owned many responsibilities towards future generation. Any action we take in present will affect the upcoming generation in a bad or good way. One of the obvious reason we should considered future generation is simply because they are human too. As a human, we have moral right towards other human- being, and should act in a way that maximize their benefits. Although lot of people believes in a concept that future generations are human and human worth, many philosophers like Annette Baier question their existence with the problem called Futurity problem. In this paper, I will summarized one of the essays "For the Sake of Future Generation" by Annette Baier where she mentioned this issue, and …show more content…

From here, she further explained her problematic standpoint for No obligation theory. She gives number of reason to care about future people and clarifies her doubted theory. She argue that as a human, we are able to know up to some extend about the consequences for the action we take. In her essay, she explained this by giving metaphors of sour grapes. She say "we think we know just how our great-great-grandchildren's teeth will be set on edge by the sour grapes we eat". Also, as a human, it is our natural wish not to get curse by our predecessors, but rather get blessed. She furthered distinguished consequentialists' view and religious view. Consequentialists believe that action's goodness is depend on its effects. If action can increase the happiness for more people than it is considered good action. However, most of religious challenge this saying it is upon god to decide whether an action is wrong or right. Human should leave it to god to worry about future consequences of the actions. Furthermore, Baier explained Kant's view are consequentialist. It holds that even though we can't help future people, we can still care about them and considered them indirectly when making decisions that will affect them. Although he believed that humans have to care about future people, he did not spell out any particular Obligations we have for them (page