ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author hypothesis that future generations do have rights against the present generation and asking what those rights might be. Utilitarianism is a moral position developed originally by two British philosophers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. As a moral view it holds that men are pleasure seekers, that is, that they do seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and that they ought to so act. The right to freedom would prohibit the present generation from performing actions whose consequences would amount to forcible obstruction of the actions of members of future generations. The rights to life and liberty guarantee each individual exclusive control of his or her own body; their function is to ensure that people will not be coerced or misled into pursuing goals which are not their own.
