People sometimes quote the old cliché; why should I worry about posterity, what’s posterity ever done for me. And I think what we have to come to terms with first of all is recognising that here and now, we are taking decisions that whether we like it or not have effects long beyond our own lifespan.
Those decisions may be conscious decisions; we know what values they are based on, we know where we want to get. Or they may be short term, narrow decisions whose effects we don’t understand or control and don’t very much care about.
So the very first thing I’d want to say is that it is important for us here and now to wake up to the fact that what we decide, what we simply accept or let by, the habits we value, the behaviours we reward; these things create the world of the next generation. And we can’t get away from that, whether we like it or not.
If it’s important then for human beings to live as if they were intelligent, as if they were capable of understanding themselves, it’s important for human beings to be aware of the consequences of their actions.