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Debate

Climate, Anthropocene and Responsibility to the Future

That humans are heating the planet, and that the damage falls hardest on those who did least to cause it, is settled. So what do we owe to people not yet born – and who must bear the cost of protecting them?

This is settled: human activity has “unequivocally” warmed the planet, says the IPCC – by 1.1 °C in 2011–2020 over 1850–1900 – and 2024 was probably the first year above 1.5 °C. The consequences fall hardest on those who did least to cause them: poorer countries, marginalised communities and generations not yet born. Disputed is what follows: how to act responsibly when effects are spread over centuries and billions of actors, how to count people who do not yet exist, whether the old split between nature and society still holds, and whose experience of environmental upheaval counts. Geologists declined in 2024 to make the “Anthropocene” an epoch, yet the term names what is new: humanity as a geological force.

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Positions

An imperative of responsibility

Jonas argued in 1979 that technology has given human action a reach that traditional ethics never anticipated. He proposed a new imperative: act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on earth. Where so much is at stake, he recommended a “heuristics of fear” – giving the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss.

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Humans as a geological force

Chakrabarty argues that climate change collapses the old distinction between natural history and human history: by burning fossil fuels, humans have become a geological agent. Historians and philosophers must therefore think at once in terms of capitalism and its injustices and in terms of the human species and the planet – a scale on which human concerns are not the measure of everything. His later work contrasts the “globe” of human markets and politics with the “planet” of Earth systems that runs on its own timescales.

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Beyond nature versus society

Latour holds that modern thought split the world into passive nature and active society, and that this split now leaves us unable to respond to an Earth – he called it Gaia, after James Lovelock – that reacts to what we do; politics must touch ground in the territories on which we depend. Haraway likewise rejects human exceptionalism and questions the label “Anthropocene”, discussing alternatives such as “Capitalocene”, which points to economic causes, and coining her own, “Chthulucene”. She urges us to “stay with the trouble” by forming kinship across species rather than hoping for technical salvation or giving up in despair.

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Colonial déjà vu

Whyte, a philosopher and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, argues that for many Indigenous peoples climate change is not an unprecedented catastrophe looming in the future but a déjà vu: colonialism already brought forced relocation, dispossession and the destruction of ecosystems they depended on. Climate injustice is thus continuous with colonial injustice, and responses that ignore this repeat it. Indigenous traditions of reciprocal responsibility between people, other beings and lands offer resources for the present – not as a return to the past, but as living knowledge.

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The puzzle of future people

Parfit’s non-identity problem points out that large-scale choices, such as energy policies, change which people will exist in the future. Those born into a depleted world cannot complain that we made them worse off, since under a different policy they would never have existed – so whom have we harmed? Parfit did not conclude that anything goes; he argued that we need moral principles that do not depend on harming particular individuals, and finding them remains an unsolved task.

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As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made

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