Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 73
and mostly well understood. We cannot plead ignorance about the
facts of climate change or argue that time will heal the damages
we cause. And, given the large and well-documented evidence of
the potential for energy effi ciency and renewable energy, neither
can we make a plausible case that we had no other choices. We will
stand before whoever is able and willing to judge, or perhaps the
silence of extinction, as a generation that willfully and unnecessarily
imposed egregious wrongs on all future generations, depriving
them of liberty, property, and life. We are culpable, but the law as
presently constituted conveniently lets us off the hook because it
says nothing about the rights of posterity.
Harms perpetrated across generations or actions that could lead
to the extinction of humankind are perhaps the most baffl ing, as well
as most important, issues of ethics and policy. In the latter case, for
instance, the unborn are harmed only in the sense that they were not
brought into existence, which raises many perplexities. Pondering
self-infl icted extinction, Jonathan Schell, for example, writes:
How are we to comprehend the life or death of the infi nite number
of possible people who do not yet exist at all? How are we,
who are a part of human life, to step back from life and see it
whole, in order to assess the meaning of its disappearance? To kill
a human being is murder. . . . but what crime is it to cancel the
numberless multitude of unconceived people? In what court is
such a crime to be judged? Against whom is it committed? And
what law does it violate? (Schell, 2000, p. 116)
Regarding the rights of future generations, Schell asks, “What
standing should they have among us?” They exist nowhere except
in prospect, and the law presently affords no protection or consideration
to humans “unconceived.” Schell was writing about the
case of extinction by nuclear weapons, but extinction by climate
change poses virtually the same diffi cult issues, albeit less quickly.
At a slightly less vexatious level, the case against abortion is
perhaps instructive. Whatever one’s opinion about the rights of a
fetus, might the same kind of arguments apply to the right to life