1 Lukas H. Meyer The Rights of Future People and Claims to Compensation Owing to Wrongless Harm-Doing By Previous Generations Presentation, May/28/2003: European Center for Ethics, Leuven, Belgium I agree with Axel Gosseries, Johan Eyckman and Erik Schokkaert that currently living people cannot be said to be wronged because of, say, the CO2 emissions of past people if those who caused the emissions were ignorant of and could not have been expected to know their actions’ impact on the well-being of future people. 1 However, we can harm a person without wronging the person. 2 In this paper I address the question whether currently living people can be said to be harmed because of, say, the impact of CO2 emissions of previous generations on their well-being. And my answer is: Yes, but only in accordance to a threshold notion of harm. 3 That currently living people cannot be said to be wronged because of the CO2 emissions of previous generations is an important finding (if and insofar it is correct). Currently living people, e.g., members of ongoing political societies, ought to respond to historical injustices in specific ways. Their responses should reflect the fact that previously living people, e.g., previous members of their ongoing society, acted in ways that were morally wrong. The moral significance of past wrongs should not be interpreted solely in terms of the impact of these injustices on present and future people's well-being. But this is not the topic of my talk today. 4 Rather, I will ask in what sense currently living people can be said to be harmed by wrongless harm-doing of previous generations. For the purpose of this presentation I will assume an interest-based interpretation of rights: A person’s rights reflect his or her interests and harming a person’s interests is a necessary condition for violating the person’s rights. It is in this sense that I refer to future people’s interests and rights. Future people can be said to have rights vis-a-vis currently living people if and only if they can be said to have interests that currently living people can affect. 1. The contingency of future people Intergenerational relations differ from relations among contemporaries. Here, I will concentrate on one difference only: those presently alive can affect the very existence of future people (whether or not future people will exist), the number of future people (how many future people will exist), and the identity of future people (who will exist). A decision taken by present generations could conceivably result in the termination of human life; there is a long tradition of institutionalized population policy whose goal is to control the size of future generations; and, more prosaically, a couple can certainly decide whether or not to have children. Furthermore, many of our decisions have indirect effects on how many people will live and who they are, for many of our decisions affect who meets whom and who decides to have children with whom. To explain such “different people choices”, Parfit adopts the genetic identity view of personal identity: the identity of a person is at least in part constituted by the DNA the person has as a result of which ovum was fertilized by this or that 1 Gosseries (2003); Eickman and Schokkaert (1999). 2 And we can wrong a person without harming the person. See Kumar (2003). 3 And analogously for the claim that currently living people can be benefitted because of, say, the impact of CO2 emissions of previous generations on their well-being. 4 See, e.g., Thompson (2002); Meyer (2003).