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What motivates us to care for the (distant) future?
| By Dieter Birnbacher | | 21st of February 2006 |
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Future ethics poses more stringent problems of motivation than other branches of practical philosophy because there is a more striking discrepancy between the motivation to accept principles of future ethics and the motivation to act in accordance with them than in other areas of ethics. However well-established such future ethical principles are, they compete with other, more present-oriented motivations. Empirical data strongly support the "low cost hypothesis" according to which moral principles concerning nature conservation will be the more easily observed the less this creates costs or opportunity costs for the individual. Furthermore, future ethics poses special difficulties in rightly identifying situations to which its principles are relevant.
Against this background, the paper considers a number of models of how indirect motivations might support conformity with future ethical norms: "chain of love", "eternal values", and "self-transcendence" and judges their merits and demerits in the context of mechanisms of internal and external self-binding. |
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