What motivates us to care for the (distant) future?

Conférence donnée par Dieter Birnbacher dans le cadre du Séminaire Développement durable et économie de l'environnement, le 21 février 2006.

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.