Crespi, Gregory Scott2019-09-252019-09-252010-11-012008http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/175855"Should we put all of our high-level radioactive wastes into ordinary steel barrels that have perhaps 200-year expected containment capabilities in salt water, and then dump them all into the depths of the Pacific Ocean and forget about them? Such a policy would free the billions of dollars spent annually on radioactive waste storage for other pressing social needs. Despite these benefits, however, most would regard such a radically present-oriented policy as an egregious violation of our ethical obligations to distant future generations. There is broad consensus that we have ethical obligations to undertake policies that benefit distant future generations and to eschew policies that impose significant harms upon them, at least when these choices do not require excessive current sacrifice relative to the magnitude of long-term benefits. However, it proves impossible to articulate a satisfactory rationale for this position solely on the basis of conventional secular and consequentialist ethical premises[1] (“conventional ethical premises”). The long-term consequences of radically present-oriented policies and the ethical questions they present are quite subtle and complicated by what I call the problem of person-altering consequences. The decision whether to undertake such a policy should be regarded as an empirical question and should be made solely on the basis of an assessment of the consequences for existing persons, and not upon any claimed ethical obligations to future generations distant enough from us in time for their members to all have had their genetic identities significantly altered by those person-altering consequences. We have no ethical obligations to these distant future generations based on conventional ethical premises to consider their rights or interests in making environmental or other policy decisions, because virtually nothing that we could possibly do would harm any specific future persons, counter-intuitive as this claim may seem." (p. 1-2)engWith permission of the license/copyright holdernuclear energyclimate ethicspollutionEnvironmental ethicsResources ethicsArticle