What do we owe those who come after?
Intergenerational obligation cannot rest on a contract, because there is nobody to sign it with. It rests on something more fragile and more demanding: the decision to see ourselves as part of an institution that outlasts us.
Every long-term policy rests on a promise that whoever makes it will not be able to keep. The one deciding today will not be there when the bill arrives, and the beneficiary does not yet exist. It is a strange arrangement, and yet most of what we call civilisation depends on it.
Modern political philosophy solved the problem of obligation through the fiction of the contract: I obey because, in some sense, I consented. The device works reasonably well among contemporaries. It fails entirely when the other party is a generation not yet born which, by definition, can neither consent nor bargain nor demand.
The institutional way out
There is a way out that requires no metaphysics. It consists in recognising that we do not act as individuals bargaining with the future, but as temporary occupants of institutions with durations of their own. A judge, a head teacher, a career official does not inherit a promise: they inherit an office whose internal logic includes continuity.
“Institutions are the way a society remembers what it decided once those who decided it are gone.”
A practical and somewhat uncomfortable consequence follows for contemporary debate: care for future generations is decided less in declarations of principle than in apparently minor things — the stability of the civil service, the preservation of archives, the continuity of statistical series, the training of those who will hold office twenty years from now.
It is a modest answer. It promises neither redemption nor epic. It offers instead something intergenerational rhetoric rarely provides: a list of things that can be done on Monday.
