Part 1: Why secular hope struggles to promote taking responsibility for the long-term future, and how Christian faith can help

by Peter Wygnański, edited by Vesa Hautala; image: Midjourney

In this and the following post, we are sharing a talk given by Peter Wygnański at the EA for Christians Academic Workshop that we have abbreviated for the blog (the editor takes responsibility of any shortcomings that may have resulted from this). A recording of the talk is available here.

Those living in London rarely worry about sanitation because they enjoy the benefits of over 1000 miles of underground drainage designed and built in the second half of the 19th century. However, this rather future-proof sewer system, which was also arguably the most disruptive civil engineering project in London’s history, was not simply a fruit of generosity. We have to recall the great stink of 1858.¹ Waste was dumped into the Thames by the London population that had recently reached 2.5 million, but because the Thames is tidal, the waste was not efficiently carried away from the city. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like, especially on hot summer days. The Houses of Parliament by the river were directly affected, and fear of disease forced parliamentarians to act in their own self-interest.  It motivated a course of action that had a secondary effect of benefits for future generations. Effective reasons to motivate actions that are to benefit humanity’s future, especially the long-term future, are those that impact the experience of today.

If I am to make some sacrifice for the sake of a temporally distant good, I must 

1. acknowledge some moral standard that requires I do so

2. perceive an opportunity to act meaningfully

3. experience motivation to uphold that principle.

Parliamentarians in the 1850s recognised the value of a clean river, were in just the right place to make a difference, and they had plenty of motivation to do so. Action was taken. 

More generally however, these steps are vulnerable to disruption, especially when applied to the future.² Pressure from immediate concerns can cause me to overlook the pertinence of moral values or to exclude future others from my circle of moral care. Feelings of helplessness threaten perceiving an opportunity to act meaningfully. If the first steps are taken, a moral judgement has been made, but this can only indicate an action, not demand it.³ The third step requires motivation, and future-oriented motivation is more demanding because we’re at a distance from future benefits.

I hope to argue that secular hope, based on present-day moral thinking, fails to offer firm grounds for motivating the required sacrifices by which we live out a moral relationship with future generations. This is not a controversial claim. Some of the best-known thinkers who promote increased concern for humanity’s future recognise something is missing. Just two examples: The director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity institute, Nick Bostrom, recognises that applications of strict utilitarianism indicate unacceptable implications, concluding that solutions will require ‘mixed ethical theories that include non-consequentialist side constraints.’⁴ Annette Baier, in her landmark defence of the rights of future people concludes that she is unaware of any moral theory that effectively captures the right reasons for the right attitudes to past and future persons.⁵

First the term "secular hope" must be explained. The hopeful gaze toward the future that is commonly found among longtermists did not spring up out of a philosophical vacuum. The monotheistic revolution of the ancient world broke out of a cyclical conception of time towards an idea that history is pointed to an end – a view which Christians still hold. Later a secular dream of progress replaced faith in providence. 

More recently, though, the inevitability of progress has been called into question. With God and the inevitability of progress removed, optimistic nihilism is the remaining option: Human experience is just cosmic coincidence, so our experience is all that matters; if the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what its purpose is; if the universe has no principles, the only principles relevant are the ones we decide on. There is no reason not to have fun, do what makes us feel good, and there are bonus points if you make the lives of other people better, more bonus points if you help build towards a utopia of a galaxy teeming with blissful human beings.

However, ‘bonus points’ are an ineffective motivator for making sacrifices for the sake of future generations, and the prioritisation of individual freedom undermines connections between future benefits and present day experience that effective motivation requires.

There are challenges for optimistic nihilists, as there are for all secular ethical approaches, in even justifying, in principle, care for humanity’s future: Utilitarians are paralysed by humanity’s potentially vast future; Promoters of duties wrestle to account for corresponding rights amongst people who do not yet exist; Contractualists struggle to strike up hypothetical agreements with future generations.

Good longtermist writing recognises this and seeks creative ways around it. Baier appeals for promoting a sense of a trans-generational community, but admits she relies rather dogmatically on old intuitions that she believes are generally shared. William MacAskill hopes to invoke egoism by suggesting imagining future people looking back in history.⁶ Toby Ord guides his readers to experience the present incapacity of imagining the goods the future might hold.⁷ Whatever people value, they are likely to be positively disposed towards working towards a future which can contain more of that good than they first realised, and to avoid the loss of that potential.

These sorts of efforts point us in the right direction but feel like they are straining against self-imposed limits of method. A second challenge is that relativism accompanies optimistic nihilism. This makes it difficult to determine what a good future would look like, and it is difficult to work towards a flourishing human future without some sense of what that means. There is in fact a great danger: that we abandon our values, fail to pass on the treasures we have received, and the collective wisdom about human flourishing, form an ideological aversion to limiting the self-determination of future people.

The next part will discuss ways Christian faith can help.

1. Ashton, One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858, 2017.

2. Batson, What’s Wrong With Morality?, 2015.

3. Birnbacher, “What Motivates Us to Care for the (Distant) Future,” in Intergenerational Justice, 2012.

4. Bostrom, “Infinite Ethics,” Analysis and Metaphysics 10 (2011).

5. Baier, The Rights of Past and Future Persons, 2010.

6. What We Owe the Future, A Million-Year View, 2022.

7. Ord, The Precipice, 2020.