ABSTRACT
Ethical issues concerning future people are usually conceived of as problems of future generations. But this practice requites defence. For it makes two important assumptions: first, that it is both possible and useful to divide all those who will exist into groups of contemporaries; and second, that this is the morally salient way of conceiving of them. The Pure Intergenerational Problem’ (PIP) is a problem of a particularly challenging kind. For it has a particularly harsh structure, and one which makes it unusually difficult to resolve. These facts can be brought out by comparison with a more familiar kind of problem, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, or Tragedy of the Commons. The PIP envisages groups of people who can be represented as a sequence of temporally distinct classes. Categorization in terms of such groups grounds the use of the term ‘generations’ in the PIP.
