Should Politicians Consider Future Generations in Policy?

The question is usually heard as a test of compassion, but the serious version is about legitimacy. No sane politician denies that we should avoid bequeathing a ruined planet or an unpayable debt. The real issue is who authorises a policy and who is answerable for it. Framed that way, I will argue that politicians should answer primarily to current voters, and that the interests of future generations are best protected indirectly, through the institutions the living electorate chooses, rather than by representatives claiming a direct mandate from people who do not yet exist.

The foundation is consent. On a Lockean account, government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and only living citizens can grant or withdraw that consent. To legislate in the name of the unborn is to invoke a constituency that can neither authorise a decision nor punish a representative who betrays it, which severs the link between power and accountability that makes democracy legitimate in the first place. The obvious objection is that we already legislate for those who cannot vote, such as children and the severely disabled, so the franchise is plainly not the limit of moral concern. This is true and important, but it proves less than it seems. Children are present members of the political community with identifiable interests that adults can observe and represent; the unborn are hypothetical, and to treat the two as equivalent is to dissolve accountability into speculation. Democracy is a contract among the living, not a seance with the unborn.

The deeper trouble is epistemic. A politician cannot know what people not yet born will value, and a confident appeal to posterity slides easily into a cloak for present agendas. Popper's critique of historicism warned that claiming to read the inevitable course of history is a standing temptation to authoritarian overreach. One can answer that some needs are predictable, since future citizens will surely want a habitable planet. Granted, but needs are not means: that goal might be pursued through nuclear power, renewables or radical de-growth, and to collapse those contestable choices into a single supposed inevitability is to suppress the very debate democracy exists to conduct. Invoking the unborn too readily becomes political ventriloquism.

This connects to accountability. A representative answerable to a diffuse and unvotable 'future' is, in practice, answerable to no one, because almost any policy can be rationalised as serving posterity and no future elector can ever check the claim. Manifestos are contracts with current voters; adding a constituency that cannot sanction dilutes responsibility rather than deepening it. The honest counterweight to short-termism is not a fictional electorate but a more demanding real one.

That points to the decisive move. Long-term interests do not need a separate mandate, because the living already carry them. Current voters are parents and savers who care what they leave behind, and when they care enough they entrench it. The Climate Change Act 2008 set a binding emissions target, since strengthened to net zero by 2050, and the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 makes the interests of future generations a statutory consideration for public bodies and even creates a commissioner to guard them. Both were enacted by living voters, not dictated by the unborn. Even the boldest courts work this way: in KlimaSeniorinnen v Switzerland the Strasbourg Grand Chamber, and the Ontario Court of Appeal in Mathur, treated long-term climate harm as engaging the rights of present claimants, not of abstract posterity. The future already has a voice, and it speaks through the ballots and the courts of the living.

There is, admittedly, a real pathology here. Turnout skews old, with Ipsos estimating only 37 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds voted in 2024, so the present electorate underweights its own younger members, let alone the unborn. But the remedy is to widen and energise present participation, not to invent a constituency that can never be held to account. Politicians should therefore serve current voters, who can and should bind themselves to the future through law and constitution. That channels our genuine duty to posterity through the only thing that keeps power honest: accountable consent among the living.