Key Takeaways
- Compassion loop: Interdependence between climate risk awareness and emotional response
- Poverty of persuasion: Behavioral bias against investing in motivation over technology
- Future Earth ethics: Justice for generations we cannot touch
- Behavioral barriers: Overcoming short-term comfort for long-term moral action
The Abstract Reality of Future Earth
The final ring in the universe of bioethics is Future Earth—everything that lives and dies in the future. Though we cannot touch future generations, they loom large in the present imagination, particularly in the context of climate risk. As the planet warms, we envision future lives becoming increasingly difficult, plagued by more severe calamities and food shortages. This imagination generates feelings of responsibility and, crucially, compassion.
Compassion is defined not merely as “suffering with,” but as an emotion associated with an active desire to alleviate the suffering of its object. It acts as a “commitment device,” providing the will to take action even when we lack the immediate means. Our relationship with future generations is thus defined by an intense interdependence: their anticipated suffering influences our compassion, and our compassion drives our actions to reduce climate risk. This crucial interaction, where ethics and climate have “simultaneous importance,” forms the compassion loop. The ultimate question for intergenerational justice is how effectively we manage this loop, particularly given our behavioral tendency to prioritize short-term comfort over long-term moral obligations.
The Mechanics of the Compassion Loop
The compassion loop exists because both our internal state (compassion) and the external threat (climate risk) are dynamic and interdependent.
The Persuasion Link: This link suggests that we must be persuaded of the climate risk to develop compassion. Persuasion involves translating statistical estimates of catastrophe into compelling images of misery, which then fuels compassionate action. This is achieved when more scientists articulate global warming, when activists demonstrate, and when leaders speak up for the future. However, like any emotion, compassion fades, requiring continuous renewal.
The Mitigation Link: This link represents the active efforts—the mitigation—driven by our compassion to reduce climate risk. These actions are balanced against “business as usual,” which reflects our bifurcated mind. On any given day, we drive SUVs and fly to conferences while simultaneously urging senators to regulate carbon emissions.
Without both links, the loop fails. Without effective action (mitigation), the strongest persuasion is useless; without active persuasion, the best technology remains idle for lack of motivation. When the loop achieves a stable condition, or a steady state, the levels of compassion and climate risk are balanced, contingent entirely upon the strength of persuasion and mitigation efforts. An increase in persuasion strength raises compassion while lowering climate risk, whereas an increase in mitigation strength lowers both compassion and climate risk.
The Behavioral Bias Against Moral Action
The key ethical dilemma is resource allocation: when provided a sum of money to reduce climate risk, how should society proportion it between technological mitigation and emotional persuasion? The analysis suggests a strong behavioral bias against investing in persuasion, resulting in the poverty of persuasion.
This bias stems from two deeply ingrained psychological factors:
Compassion as a Negative Emotion: Compassion is an unpleasant state, feeling akin to guilt and shame because it springs from the perception of others’ suffering and misery. When given a choice between two actions that reduce climate risk equally, individuals are behaviorally inclined to choose the one that results in lower overall compassion because it relieves the negative feeling. This means people are more likely to fund a technology that quietly makes the problem go away (mitigation) than to fund activism that heightens their awareness of the problem (persuasion).
The Free-Rider Problem: Mitigation, often involving green technology, yields tangible financial benefits today via patents and licenses. Persuasion, provided by activists and ethicists, is treated as a free good. Individuals assume someone else will bear the cost of the activism necessary to maintain collective consciousness, causing persuasion to decline as a viable social force.
If persuasion falters, society easily defaults to willful blindness. The art and science of persuasion—through storytelling, emphasizing positive rewards rather than negative consequences, and encouraging scientists to become public advocates—requires greater attention to overcome these psychological and economic obstacles.
Intergenerational Justice as a State of Mind
The behavioral approach contrasts sharply with the traditional treatment of future people in economics. Historically, economists have approached long-term issues like climate change as an exercise in benefit-cost analysis, seeking the “right” discount rate with which to weigh the well-being of future generations against the well-being of the present. This mathematical abstraction assumes future people will think like us and enjoy an increasingly higher standard of living, treating Future Earth “like investing in a shopping mall”. Many economists acknowledge this failing, wondering if this approach is appropriate for distant future effects about which we “can now know hardly anything”.
The bioethical journey finds that intergenerational justice is, fundamentally, a state of our mind; future generations are an abstraction that exists only in our consciousness. Justice is not found in an optimizing calculation, but in managing the feedback between our present empathy and the future’s risk. The risk we face today is not merely environmental, but ethical: if we prioritize the mitigation link solely because it allows us to avoid the painful emotion generated by the persuasion link, we ensure the poverty of persuasion and weaken the very mechanism—compassion—that gives us the will to act in the first place. We must accept the discomfort of compassion if we are to successfully negotiate a just future.