Silent and opaque

Time is on my mind. Both as a theoretical physicist-in-training and a college senior about to enter my last semester of responsibility-free life, I can’t escape contemplating that inexorable force that is the passage of time.

Time, as we all know, is a three-headed monster, and each head menaces us in its own way. The past comes back to us at unexpected times and in unexpected ways—the smell of rain can instantly and vividly evoke the mood palette of freshman year and the very act of sitting on the steps of your favorite building on campus often weaves a new thread into the skein of memories associated with the place. The present, on the other hand, is always running away. But the hardest of the three to grapple with, in my opinion, is the future. The future is an enormous void of uncertainty, and while most of us have only beautiful futures to look forward to, it’s still a daunting void to face.

The conditions at a university are perfect for producing young people that are constantly facing that void. To be honest, I think that, apart from a little bit of procrastination, Duke students do an amazing job of looking out for their future selves. But I think our ethical obligations—and the “we” here is now humankind at large—towards future others are still not entirely clear to us. In general, we place more weight on the lives, happiness and suffering of people alive now than those that will be alive later. And part of this is justified—the future, after all, is an uncertain thing, so it’s not even clear who the future people are. Moreover, suppose we changed our present behavior so as to change the circumstances for future people—by the change of our present actions, we are likely to change the exact group of future people for whom we were changing our actions in the first place. To which of the two groups of people were we morally responsible? It’s hard to say we were morally responsible to the first group since our change of behavior caused it to never come into being. But it doesn’t make sense to say that we were morally responsible to the second group either, since we didn’t change our actions for their sake.

Despite these real objections, I still think that our obligations towards future people exist. Take, as an illustrative and practical example, the issue of climate change. We’re putting off solving the problem precisely because we value the cost to future humans less than we would the same cost to present humans. We figure we’ll wait until we absolutely have to address the situation, whatever the cost will be then. And until the problem is vivid and present, we think nothing of it. But I think it’s unfair to force the next generation to bear that cost when the cost to us if we addressed the problem would be much less. At the very least, if rising water levels and temperatures caused large-scale migrations and the need to rebuild some of the world’s largest cities, wouldn’t it have been a terrible move for present us to impose that need on future us? But the problem is actually even worse—It's looking like, unless we do something now, our present irresponsibility can have severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems. This would be one of the greatest wrongs we could commit, and I think there’s no question that it would be an unacceptable outcome, that we would be making a farce of our obligation to the continued existence and welfare of humanity.

The future is silent and opaque. We can’t hear the cries nor see the suffering of future beings. But that shouldn’t stop us from caring about their general welfare. If we’ve learned anything from the 20th century, it’s that we’re now in a place where the human race holds the power to destroy itself, and if that happened, it would be more than an enormous tragedy. Accordingly, we ought to take the lessons of the past century seriously and apply ourselves to problems threatening our continued existence. If we do that, we’ll have gone a long way towards conquering the void.

Eugene Rabinovich is a Trinity senior. This is his final column of the semester.