Rahul Kumar has been awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant for his project, "What We Owe to Future Generations".
The project will examine questions about the foundations and content of our obligations to future generations. It will advance an understanding of these obligations as interpersonal, or relational, obligations that are owed to other people. It will, in particular, focus on the implications of this way of thinking on both how we ought to reason about obligations to mitigate the effects of climate change and about what, in substance, we are required to do. Questions to be considered include whether the fact that some of the most serious effects of climate change will be felt by those who will live many, many generations from now justifies discounting the badness of those effects in moral reasoning, how tail-end risks of human extinction as a result of climate change ought to be taken into account, how to reason about the balance between climate-related obligations and other obligations to living individuals, and whether climate-related obligations demand sacrifices of us that are unreasonably demanding.