What is intergenerational responsibility? The present chapter aims at answering this question by demonstrating the following two points. First, future-oriented responsibility essentially requires past-oriented responsibility and vice versa (I call the former the ‘foreseeing-care-prevention’ type and the latter the ‘letting-the-dead-be’ type). Hence, second, intergenerational responsibility is composed of these two different and interdependent types of responsibility. I begin by clarifying what is meant by the foreseeing-care-prevention-type. Interpreting Derek Parfit and Hans Jonas, I try to characterize it in detail. Then I address the letting-the-dead-be type. In this context, I deal with Confucianism and the Japanese philosopher Tetsurô Watsuji. Lastly, I discuss how both of the types of responsibility are interconnected with each other, and conclude that our intergenerational responsibility means that we are responsible for future people and responsible to past generations at the same time.

This chapter assesses priority arguments against intervention in nature. First, on the Exclusion Approach, intervention is not a priority because equality and priority reasons simply do not apply to wild animals. Second, on the Deflation Approach, since nonhuman animals have a lower capacity for well-being, increasing wild animal well-being produces less value than increasing human well-being. Third, on the Perfectionist Approach, increases in nonhuman well-being cannot compensate for the loss of “the best things in life,” only attainable by human activity. We should, thus, give priority to increases in human well-being that ensure the existence of excellent goods. It is argued that all approaches have highly unacceptable results, particularly on the negative scale of well-being. Finally, the chapter considers the Domesticated Animals First objection, according to which priority should be given to alleviating the harms suffered by domesticated animals. It is argued that taken either as a substantive or as a strategic objection, it cannot soundly succeed.

As one becomes older, an increasing proportion of one’s life is in the past. Yet, as Derek Parfit has noted, we have a 'bias towards the future' in that we care more about our future life than we do about our past. Yet our past life does matter to us in various ways. Although, as we become older, our past pleasures provide little solace for our ever-diminishing future prospects, other aspects of our past life may well provide not only consolation but compensation. This seems particularly true of our past accomplishments. We might, for example, rationally prefer to have greater achievements in our past even at the cost of having less pleasure in the future. If true, this could have implications for how we ought to live, particularly in early adulthood and middle age.

In this chapter, I argue for epistemic encroachment, the thesis that, in an important sense, practical rationality depends on epistemic rationality. I argue for this thesis by engaging with several challenges to it. The first one is due to Derek Parfit, who questions that, generally, epistemic failings translate into a failure of practical rationality. Sections 1.1 to 1.4 concern this general challenge to epistemic encroachment on practical rationality. In section 1.5, I argue that we can infer from epistemic encroachment that there is an epistemic norm on practical reasoning. In section 1.6 and 1.7, I turn to the second challenge due to Davide Fassio, who tries to resist a specific form of epistemic encroachment, namely, that there is a genuine epistemic norm for practical reasoning.

A long-standing view holds that animals benefit from the fact that we eat them. So long as the animals in question are well treated, proponents of this view suggest, it is better for them to come into existence than not. If so, then we should embrace some form of meat eating to advance this outcome. The view is known as the Logic of the Larder, or the larder argument for short. In recent decades it has drawn support from arguments in population ethics that maintain that the best state of affairs is one in which well-being is maximized. I challenge the larder argument for creating food animals by defending a new principle applicable to population ethics. It holds that a necessary condition of an outcome being morally good (i.e., morally obligatory or supererogatory) is that failing to bring it about will be bad for someone. If this principle is true, then the Logic of the Larder is drained of its force, as the theory of population ethics on which it depends is not cogent. After defending my principle from objections I briefly discuss a variation of the Logic of the Larder argument put forward by Jeff McMahan.