Chapter 85: Future Generations

Obligations do not end at the present. This chapter extends the dignity framework temporally: entities that will have NF addresses have prospective dignity, and admissible policies must account for them. Intergenerational justice arises as a coherence constraint on temporal loops, not as a preference or discount-rate choice. The chapter argues that temporal discounting of dignity is structurally inadmissible: the label “future” is contingent, and label-independence forbids basing ethical weight on it. The result is a structural account of sustainability as gluing across time.