ABSTRACT
The second way in which to deny the duty to mitigate climate change does not dispute that climate change is a moral problem and that something has to be done about it; rather, it disputes that it is we-the present generation of human beings-who have to do something. This doubt is rooted in a much more fundamental doubt about whether one can have any moral obligations toward future human beings at all. You may have heard someone say in a discussion about world poverty: “That’s terrible about the poor and starving children in Africa-but, to be honest, what does it have to do with me? What are these distant people to me?” Just as here the speaker denies that duties exist across spatial distances, so too one can deny that duties exist across temporal distances-that is, that there are duties between diff erent generations: “That’s terrible for the people living 100 years from now-but, to be honest, what does it have to do with me? What are these people in the distant future to me?”
