ABSTRACT
Can people living in the future have rights against people living at present? According to the Non-Existence Objection, the answer must be negative. The objection denies that people not yet living can have rights that guide the behaviour of people living at present exactly because they do not yet live. Even though this objection has been brought forward quite early in the debate on future people’s rights, it has astonishingly seldom been addressed carefully. After introducing the Non-Existence Objection, the paper thoroughly discusses its predominant refutation. This refutation of the Non-Existence Objection criticises it for missing its mark by presupposing that the rights at stake must be conceived of as present rights. Instead, it is the future rights of people living in the future that must be respected at present. This defence of rights-talk in intergenerational contexts faces serious problems. Either it gets tangled up in internal difficulties or it is forced to depart from the standard view on the structure of rights. It will be argued that this approach gives the Non-Existence Objection too much credit by trying to come to terms with its ontological presuppositions. Rights talk in intergenerational contexts can smoothly be defended on the basis of a plausible general theory of rights ascriptions that escapes notoriously contested ontological commitments.
