On the Independence of the Event in the Context of Intergenerational Justice

How should we, the present generation deal with the interests and harms of the future generations? Considering remoteness in time has, in itself, "no more significance than remoteness in space" (Parfit 1984:357), what Cass Sunstein calls "The Principle of Intergenerational Neutrality"(PIN) will provide a good starting point. There is an extensive debate on whether using the social discount rate is against PIN. However using the social discount rate is not the only unfair way of dealing with the interests of the future generation. Even without making any use of the social discount rate, the present generation would behave in an unfair way, in some cases, by assuming the independence of the event, which is the standard assumption in the probability theory. In this paper, we will show how this happens by considering two lotteries, the freedom lottery and the survival lottery. Before revealing the results, we must address two perplexing problems concerning future generations. First, who are the people who comprises the future? The identities of the future generations, as D. Parfit (1984) suggests, will change depending upon the policies we, the present generations, choose (Non-Identity Problem). Second, what are the preferences of the future generations? Because they have not formed any yet, we cannot make use of their preferences as a basis for our decision (Non-Preference Problem). To determine their identity, we treat future generations not as individuals but as species or groups. Instead of individual preferences, we will use freedom and survival as the benchmark of interests for the species. We will then examine two kinds of lotteries: the freedom lottery and the survival lottery. In these lotteries, the independence of the event does not hold, that is, the probabilities of becoming unfree or being extinguished greatly vary from generation to generation. The later a generation's turn to draw the lot, the higher the probability of becoming unfree or extinguished. As this disparity of these probabilities among generations shows, we, as the present generation that draws the lot first and is in the most advantageous position, have a special responsibility toward future generations.