Our duties towards future generations constitute one of the most contentious areas of debate in contemporary ethics. The debate around this issue has been prompted by climate change and the question of what kind of world will be left to those who will succeed us: worried that our efforts towards mitigating environmental damage will be sabotaged by competing short-term interests, advocates for longtermism argue that we should set our moral scope not on the next generation, or even the one after that, but in a future so far distant that we cannot fathom what the needs or priorities of its inhabitants will be. The monstrous distance in time invoked by longtermism begs an obvious objection: what should, or rather, can we do for generations so far removed from us? Thus, the main spanner in the works of longtermism concerns representation, or its impossibility: if we cannot constitute a picture of our moral relata, what is the point of any philosophical reflection on the subject? Wouldn’t we be engaging in purely unproductive speculation?

This article sets out to offer some reflections on the matter from a Kantian perspective. Section §1 discusses the problem of representation (or lack thereof): on the basis of the Kantian description of Enthusiasmus, it will be proposed that moral duties towards these generations constitute the kind of experience of the sublime that results from the advancement of culture. Therefore, although it does not lead us to any particular representation, it would evidence a moral advancement promoted by culture which, although it does not provide concrete prescriptions for these generations, it reveals a moral substratum and the capacity of culture to unravel it. Furthermore, this regard for all of humanity independently of races and borders fits the Kantian principle of cosmopolitism.

But even if we know we must do something, how can this long-term duty lead to action? Section §2 deals with this matter by arguing that it is problematic to place the discussion about our duty towards distant generations on the level of moral individualism. Section §3 discusses an alternative: as detailed in Pinheiro Walla’s exhaustive research on the response to the challenges of climate change from a Kantian perspective, Kant’s legal theory offers valid and interesting alternatives to the shortcomings of the purely ethical appeal1. It will be concluded that the tools offered by Kantian philosophy to understand and act upon the challenges brought by climate change provide a clear picture of the role co-determination and interrelation play in Kantian thought.

The discussion about longtermism and its possibilities constitutes a lively and interesting debate, given its close relationship to the pressing issue of climate change and its consequences. However, its very premise leads to its main rebuttal: can we truly speak of a moral duty towards non-existing subjects, even we cannot make a representation of them and their needs? In this section, it will be argued that there are good reasons to consider that seriously contemplating our moral duties towards future generations might be considered an experience of the Kantian sublime. To do so, this section will provide a detailed account of an analogous experience of the sublime: that of Enthusiasmus, the feeling shared by spectators of the French Revolution. This analysis will display the elements that constitute an experience of the sublime, with emphasis on the role of reason and the lack of a presentation constructed by imagination (§1.1), the role of culture in bringing about this experience of the sublime (§1.2), and the moral component of disregarding ethic, familiar, or cultural ties in those towards which we have a moral duty (§1.3). If the argumentation is successful, contemplating our duties to future generations would demand an effort of reason that surpasses the limits of imagination, corroborating Kant’s theses on the practical use of reason, and suggesting that the debate about our duties towards far distant generations might even act a sign of moral development. This would also cast a light on the role culture plays in moral advancement and raise relevant implications of the Kantian notion of cosmopolitan right.

The fact that the philosophical community is in the midst of looking for answers regarding how to make the lives of future generations better —or, at the very least, not worse— supports Kant’s point that, contrary to the experience of aesthetic judgement, which elicits restful contemplation, the mind feels agitated and prone to action when experiencing the aesthetically sublime. This point, related to the motivational capacity of moral duties and the feelings that accompany them, has led to analyses on duties towards future generations from a perspective centred on individuals, their motivations and emotions. This section will discuss some of these perspectives, in order to help clarify a few relevant issues, before outlining the reasons why it is appropriate to approach the response to this moral challenge from another section of the Kantian corpus.

In his research on our duties and responsibilities towards future generations, Huda (2019) starts from two premises: firstly, the difference established by Birnbacher (2009) between moral emotions —such as love of humanity— and immediate emotions —such as group solidarity—. Secondly, the thesis by Care (1982), which states that the nonparticularity of future generations does not have the capacity to interest existing generations, whereas we can foster feelings such as solidarity and loyalty to those generations that we can “put a face on”. Huda argues that rationalistic motives, which he identifies at least to some extent with Kantian thought —he refers to the categorical imperative as an example of such—, as too abstract, or too strong to implement, which makes him move towards a proposal that deals with what he calls the motivation problem by including direct motivations towards effectively existing people. Care’s point is that, although the call of duty towards a nonparticular humanity might rank higher in Kant’s scale of moral righteousness, it lacks the motivational power to elicit action.

Following these premises, Huda’s criticism of rationalistic motives is grounded on their lack of capacity for encouraging action: while he does not make any judgment about the moral validity of rationalistic motives, when addressing an example laid out by Partridge (1980) —Russian peasants refusing to eat grain reserved for future generations during the 1921 famine and the Siege of Leningrad—, he finds them as rare and difficult to be used as the basis for our responsibility towards future generations. Huda’s thesis that rationalistic motives towards future generations do not have the sufficient motivational force, and that emotions play a way larger part in this, has been convincingly supported by the work of Díaz (2023), who concludes from his experimental study that moral emotions not only co-occur in moral actions, but that they have a far greater motivational force than moral beliefs, to the point that the latter have very little motivational force, especially when the stakes are high. In addition to this support, Huda’s thesis can be backed by another source, although probably an unexpected one: Kant himself. In §28 of The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant coincides with Birnbacher and Care in their assessment of love towards all of humanity having little motivational force:

The key to a successful moral intervention seems to be having a clear moral goal set by duty, with emotion providing the motivational force to carry out what reason shows us to be the best course of action. Both are required in order for action to take place. It is true that according to Kant it is reason, and reason alone, who can cross the threshold that separates the aesthetically sublime and the sublime, nature and freedom, experience and action. However, it still requires the motivational force of emotions. On the other hand, as explained by Thomason (2017), while emotions do play a role in morality, their cultivation is not enough in order to develop moral behaviour, and reason is always necessary to guide them. Just as the cultivation of emotions can be a noble by misguided task, merely encouraging or increasing the intensity of the emotion does not work either:

Thus, characterizing Kant as categorically opposed to any emotion and their role in motivation is just plain wrong: Kantian scholars have provided good arguments for ideas such as the virtuous element of some moral emotions, such as respect (Cohen 2018). Kant himself only warns about the dangers of emotions if they overcome reason and take its reins, hence becoming passions (Sussman 2001; Sherman 2014; González 2015), and as exposed in Moral Mrongovius II, affections such as sympathy play an active role in moral action by identifying those who need help the most —we have already covered how the universal moral value of individuals does not stripe them of their particular circumstances—. If Kant himself, despite his deontologist principles, still allows for emotions, affections, and feelings —always under the tutelage of reason— to have the roles that have been described throughout this paper, it would be imprudent to disregard them in the name of keeping a Kantian perspective.

Having clarified the necessary role of emotions and reason, and their respective roles, we find ourselves in a compromising situation. We cannot leave emotions without the supervision of reason, but in the case of our duty towards very distant generations, reason places us before a duty with little to no emotional attachment. This apparent contradiction has led some authors, such as Birnbacher, to propose a kind of compromise: if reason impels us to care for the welfare of future generations, but we only feel the necessary attachment to mobilize our actions with our direct descendants, a “chain of love” can be forged, so that each generation cares for the next: thus, generation by generation, we would fulfil the duty entrusted by reason while guaranteeing the motivating power of emotions to promote the necessary actions. However, as argued by Ojanen, “reliance on the chain of love would likely emphasize near-term adaptation policies at the cost of genuine mitigation, leading to exacerbated future damages” (2019, p. 12), trying to confront the current paradigm of short-term actions with an alternative set of short-term actions motivated by affection.

So, after so much consideration, are we at a dead end? Is being aware of our moral duties towards future generations a mere sign of the depth of our moral capacity, but doomed to be sterile when it comes to eliciting action? Does reason sabotage itself by proposing a goal so distant that we are unable to put our emotional and motivational muscles to work on it? Before becoming discouraged, it is worth realizing that so far we have been looking for answers to these questions in the realm of ethics and morals, and focusing on motivation and particular emotions. Perhaps, if the picture looks so bleak, it is because we are looking in the wrong domain of Kantian philosophy. After all, basing the success or failure against climate change on the righteous response to the call of duty by particular individuals sounds dangerously naïve. What, then, is the alternative? One of the best analysis of this matter from a Kantian perspective, while putting forward valid proposals, is Alice Pinheiro Walla, whose thesis in this regard will be the focus of the next point.

In her reading of Kant, Pinheiro Walla rightly observes that the ground of Kant’s legal theory is our condition as spatial beings, corporeal agents sharing a physical space: this notion, succinctly summarised by Huber as “structural significance of embodied agency under conditions of spatial constraint” (2017, p. 1), provides key insights of Kant’s global thinking and cosmopolitism10. In this regard, climate change highlights the necessary interconnectedness between all people on the planet, so that every action has consequences for the agency of others. While freedom and its signs pertain to our noumenal dimension, Kant’s legal theory deals with our phenomenal selves; therefore, “as embodied beings in space, the internal quality of one’s maxim is secondary; what is important is that one’s action can coexist externally with the equal freedom of choice of another; that is, we do not violate another’s authority over her own domain of external freedom” (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 107). The absolute character of freedom, which can be glimpsed in the experience of the sublime, displays our possibilities without telling us in what way to materialize them: that is the reason why it can afford to deal with the indeterminate, to challenge and break imagination, and to work through signs and analogies. The phenomenal sphere on flesh and bones has to deal with how to bring “the external exercise of freedom of a plurality of persons under a system of external freedom, that is, in accordance with universal laws which can regulate these interactions” (Pinheiro Walla 2016, p. 168). In order to support her reading on the matter, Pinheiro Walla quotes Kant, in a passage that deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

Throughout this paper, it has been mentioned in several instances that the literature on our moral duties towards future generations —as a topic deeply related to climate change— has displayed a tendency towards motivations, personal responsibilities, and how an individual should answer to the interpellation of duty. Pinheiro Walla also points at this tendency, describing it as characteristic by Anglophone Kantians not acquainted with Kant’s legal theory (2020, p. 100). The preceding mentions about cosmopolitan right and cosmopolitism were not capricious: as Pinheiro Walla reminds, this notion states that “to deny life-saving occupation of space to another being, who is in principle just as entitled as anyone else to any place of the earth, would be to contradict the very justification for the territorial rights of states” (Pinheiro Walla 2016, p. 175). Man-made climate change and those policies that could close off adaptation possibilities to climate change refugees would therefore “impact on the external freedom of other persons in a way that is incompatible with their equal external freedom” (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 108).

Pinheiro Walla rightly points out that applying a theory of individual duties to a problem of a global character (a tendency she diagnoses as endemic in the English-speaking reception of Kant) is problematic. For the author, the categorical imperative is not such an effective formula for dealing with this challenge, preferring to base it on Kantian legal theory “due to its ability to justify externally enforceable duties and its focus on political-juridical institutions” (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 101). Thus, from her perspective, proposals such as Schönfeld’s (2008), with his naturalistic reading of the categorical imperative, so that moral values reflect natural facts about people, and which leads to the proposition that the Kantian formula of the kingdom of ends must include future generations, is based on a fundamental error: understanding the categorical imperative as a requirement of prudential consistency, rather than as a requirement of principle consistency. A premise such as Schönfeld’s, based on the notion that “if I want my action to be possible in the future, I must adopt only environmentally sustainable maxims” (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 104), can only lead to hypothetical imperatives. But these kinds of imperatives

The author this invites her readers “to reflect about the limitations of a purely ethical, individual approach to a collective, global problem and what individuals and collective agents can be rightfully coerced to do” (2020, p. 105), while pointing out that Kant himself is aware of this distinction, which sets the basis for his differentiation “between the domain of individual virtue and the domain of coercible juridical obligations in his late work The Metaphysics of Morals”. This distancing from moral individualism is aligned with Flikschuh’s reading of cosmopolitism as a matter of right,11 rather than of freedom. As the author points out, “the liberal conception of personal autonomy as rational self-determination – as the capacity to choose and pursue one’s own conception of the good – tends to be conflated with Kant’s principle of moral autonomy as self-legislation” (2009, p. 428); this predominantly Anglophone perspective has been challenged by the conception “of moral autonomy as a constraint upon the pursuit of personal autonomy” (Id., p. 429). In this sense, it is worth noting to what extent Kant raises the necessary combination of aspects: between reason and emotions, between individual virtue and legal obligations, between the noumenal character of freedom and legislation that must be applied to phenomenal entities that share a space. In contrast to the stereotypical image of Kant as an inflexible, almost dogmatic author, this enquiry shows a Kant who understands the necessary character of mutual correspondence, sceptical of universal formulas that only apply to a single sphere or faculty. In the case at hand, throughout the research, the contributions of different authors have been collected on why a moral motivation is doomed to failure, particularly when its account is of an indeterminate nature. Pinheiro Walla rightly detects that this does not mean that we should throw in the towel, but that legal and juridical theory should be directed to where morality points:

It can be summarized that realizing and contemplating our moral duties towards far distant generations can be lived as an experience of the sublime in which reason, in its practical dimension concerning moral duties, and made possible by the intervention of a culture that contemplates the long-term consequences of our actions and our responsibilities for the environment, points to an ideal of freedom and possibility of intervention in the world that exceeds the representational possibilities of the imagination. The absolute character of human freedom leads us to ponder what our moral duties are towards those generations, even if it opens up more questions than it can provide answers for much like philosophy itself, on the other hand. But that is, I believe, the crucial point: the experience of the sublime is not supposed to provide answers, but to serve as a reflection of the scope of (in this case, practical) reason.

In the experience of the sublime that arises from natural phenomena, theoretical reason exceeds our capacity to imagine vast magnitudes. In the experience of events (in the case of Enthusiasmus) or cognitive achievements in which the absolute character of freedom and the vastness of our duties are conceived, practical reason goes beyond what imagination can represent. This does not mean that sensible phenomena are to be discarded when reason intervenes: in fact, both dimensions of the phenomenal and noumenal homo are in play here, as the challenges posed by practical reason are not to be answered by exercising our individual moral fortitude, or by summoning emotional motivation, but by legislating our mutual relations as spatial beings.

The challenge of dealing with the consequences of climate change, of course, is immense. It involves a political, economic, and technical effort which requires a level of coordination, planning and imagination like never before in the history of mankind. However, if the Kantian account of the sublime is to be right, then the magnitude of the task must be followed by an effort of equal magnitude, for “feelings of the sublime precisely activate our determination to withstand these seemingly incommensurate challenges rather than feel dwarfed by them” (Menninghaus et al. 2019). In fact, the experience of the sublime, in order to be described as such, has to leave a trace of resolution and action, of purpose (Menninghaus 1991): if it does not provide awareness of our intervening potential in reality, if it places us as mere passive spectators, we are missing the main element of the experience of the sublime. In this regard, a key difference between the sublime and the beautiful is that the former involves an integration of the unpleasant component of the experience, in a way in which “a counterpurposiveness for imagination turns into a purposiveness for reason” (Wenzel 2009, p. 396). For the sublime to take place, reason must be capable of aiming towards an idea that forces imagination into the aforementioned limit-straining effort. The ought, as pointed out by Hyde, need to imply a can.

Literature on the topic which accepts as a starting point that something needs to be done has also asked pertinent questions regarding what should be done: even if numerous factors might lead to freeze in stupor over the magnitude of the task, the proposals arising from this moral challenge keep happening, and pointing at new and promising directions. For Kant, the realization of these duties and the subsequent discussion could constitute proof of our innate moral character and the tendency towards the good. From my more modest perspective, and in accordance with Lyotard’s diagnosis, it might be too bold to state that they constitute a schema of moral progression. However, it does constitute an affirmation of the absolute character of human freedom, and the fact that its appeals to duty can occur even in the absence of concrete representations. This discussion, consequently, can be considered a moral progress as a better understanding of morality, according to the definition provided by Nussbaum (2007). On the other hand, the fact that those future generations do not replicate our characteristics, that we have nothing “at stake” in that distant future, meet the Kantian principle of disinterestedness, inherent in the genuine experience of the sublime, and cosmopolitanism right, which becomes the cornerstone for possible solutions based on the Kantian theory of law, as developed by Pinheiro Walla.

What, then, can be done? What is proposed here, in the light of what has been researched and in order to respond to this immense challenge, involves several considerations. Firstly, to bear in mind that the unrepresentable, those generations far distant from us, are part of the experience of the sublime that opens up in the consideration of our moral duties, while at the same time challenging our capacity to imagine in what way can we envision their needs and provide for them. Secondly, to base the possible answers and proposals not on Kantian moral theory, but on legal theory: if Kant was perceptive enough to contemplate the need for a duality between emotions and reasons, between ethical and legal principles, between noun and phenomenon, how much less should we contemplate it today. Research into Kantian legal theory presents itself as a fruitful philosophical terrain from which to articulate concrete proposals to the legal and political challenges of climate change.

In this sense, the idea of a “chain of love” is based on the motivating component of emotions for our immediate generations in order to successively take advantage of their mobilising capacity, greater than that of reason and any feelings that we might have for generations far away, and thus maintain over time a care for the planet that is bequeathed to our descendants. Given how problematic it is to bet on morality and emotions in this matter, and given the need to constitute a structured legislative framework, perhaps it would be better to speak of a chain of laws, or legislative principles. Love cannot be legislated, but legal frameworks that determine the effects of our spheres of liberty on the spheres of liberty of the people with whom we share planet and consequences can.

Finally, this research shows, in many instances, the dynamic character of Kantian philosophy. This dynamism involves aspects such as the necessary mutual determination between cognitive faculties, the active nature of conceptualization and knowledge in the attuning role of culture, and the interrelation between the noumenal and the phenomenal, contrary to the belief that the Kantian noumenon is but a negative instance with nothing to tell us and nothing to provide but a limit. On an epistemological level, Kant regards experimental science as a discipline in progress, and this nuclear idea has been taken up by Sellars (1963) and his successors to underline that the scientific project, built on empirical concepts, is always a work in perpetual and dialectal progress (Gironi 2015, 2017; O’Shea 1997, 2017). The mutual imbrication of epistemology and morality comes to light in the possibility of our moral decisions and legal frameworks being guided by a better understanding of climate change and its consequences. Therefore, it is worth inviting a reading of Kant that is sensitive to this dynamism: as has been seen throughout this paper, there is no one key ingredient in Kant that can provide the solution to all problems. Co-determination, the mutual influence between spheres of freedom, or the realisation of morality on the basis of empirical knowledge and legislation are just three instances of the dynamic character of the critical programme.