Whether it’s climate change, a concern emphasized by liberals, or increasing national debt, a greater issue for conservatives, people worry about the welfare of future generations. Future people have a right, they say, to a livable environment and a debt-free society.
Where do these rights come from? Some people point to an implicit social contract that requires everyone to abide by rules that create and preserve a society that benefits everyone. I won’t steal from you if you don’t steal from me. I won’t interfere with your religious practice if you won’t interfere with mine. We often summarize this kind of implicit agreement by saying that we all have the human rights to life, property, freedom of religion, and so forth.
It may surprise many people who appeal to such rights that our ancient religious and political traditions contain no reference at all to rights. Instead of rights, the moral requirements of the scriptures in the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – concern obligations, not rights. There’s no complaint in the Book of Job that God violated Job’s rights or those of his children when He impoverished Job and killed his children. Jesus doesn’t complain that his right to life is being violated on the cross. The very meaning of Islam is submission.
Human rights came to dominate moral thinking during the Reformation and the Enlightenment from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries with the increasing emphasis on individualism in faith and commerce. Increasingly, people questioned the dictates of the Catholic Church and asserted their right to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. They also claimed the right to commercial freedom and to the property that resulted from their commercial efforts.
The result is that it’s common today for people to assert their claims in terms of rights – the right of parents to determine if their children wear masks in schools to reduce the spread of Covid-19; the right of worker to retain their income rather than pay higher taxes; the religious right of employers to refuse to pay for health insurance that includes coverage for contraception; the right of cake makers to refuse to provide cakes for same-sex weddings; and the right of same-sex couples to be treated without discrimination.
But the individual rights of future people don’t apply to our relationships with them, whether the issue is climate change, the national debt, or almost any other matter. The reason is that the future existence of particular individuals is dependent on today’s policies. When we take steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, for example, we manufacture and install more batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. We reduce employment opportunities in the coal and gas industries, while increasing opportunities to plant and maintain trees.
The result is that people move to different places than they would live if we didn’t address climate change. They meet and mate with different people than they would have mated with if current patterns of employment were continued. The children they have are therefore different individuals than those who would otherwise have existed. Similar effects on individual existence follow from economic changes needed to reduce the national debt, so I’ll just stick here with the environmental example.
If we confine ourselves to a consideration of rights, future generations aren’t harmed if we fail to address climate change, because after a few generations, none of the individuals who exist and suffer from rising sea levels and reduced crop yields would have existed if we had taken steps to curtail global warming. Their only chance for existence depended on the climate policies that were actually pursued, so the options for them are either suffering with environmental degradation or not existing at all. Assuming that they prefer to exist, that their individual rights were violated. The same is true of future generations if we fail to take the national debt seriously.
What do we learn from this? It’s a mistake to base all our moral concerns on people’s individual rights. We should reach back to our religious traditions and recognize that obligations and reciprocity are more basic to human morality than anyone’s rights. That’s why Garrison Keeler was insightful when he called the Catholic church in Lake Wobegon “Our Lady of Perpetual Obligation,” and Yogi Berra appealed to reciprocity when he said, “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”
Of course we should address climate change and budget deficits, but enough about rights. Obligations are morally more fundamental. Parents should think about their obligations when considering masking their children to curtail the spread of Covid-19. Cake makers should think of their obligations, not their religious rights, when deciding for whom to bake wedding cakes. Trans gender women should consider their obligations to other women, not their rights, when thinking of competing in women’s sports.
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