ABSTRACT
Population ethics – also known as intergenerational justice or obligations to future people – brings together abstract value theory, practical ethics, economics and public policy. Population ethics is a fast-moving field, and any summary of empirical or policy-oriented literature would date quickly. Accordingly, this chapter focuses not on practical policy debates, but on the philosophical issues behind them. Many of these underlying issues have implications elsewhere in global ethics – and in moral philosophy more broadly. This chapter is in eight sections. The first asks why philosophers have been so slow to focus
their attention on intergenerational issues. The next four sections deal with broad philosophical issues: the social discount rate, Parfit’s non-identity problem, utilitarian aggregation and the possibility of an intergenerational social contract. The final three sections cover the connections between population policy and other issues in global ethics, namely reproductive freedom, development aid and environmental ethics.
