ISU Bioethics Outreach--BIB May/June 2004

Is it worthwhile to think about the rights and interests of people who don’t exist? Thomas Jefferson thought that it was. During his time in Paris in September 1789, Jefferson took a moment to write an important letter to James Madison. He was thinking about the interests of people who didn’t exist. In fact, he was thinking about us.

Jefferson’s immediate concern was the issue of national debt. He worried that a profligate generation might mortgage their children’s future by racking up an enormous debt, assigning that debt to the good faith and credit of the American Government, and then passing to their descendants the obligation to pay it off. To do so, according to Jefferson, would be to assign the dead property rights in the living. Later generations, doomed to pay debts for spending enjoyed by their recklessly extravagant forebears, would effectively be indentured to the past. Jefferson regarded this possibility as seriously unjust, and wanted a constitutional provision that would prohibit excessive public debt. He famously wrote that “The earth belongs in usufruct to the generations of the living.” We have no right to pass on debts to our descendants, and if we try to do so, he argued, they have no obligation to pay them off.

What does it mean to say that the earth belongs “in usufruct” to the generations of the living? Usufructuary rights are rights to use and manage, and to earn profit from the fruitfulness of the earth. But such rights also include obligations to manage wisely, to protect the basic resource and pass it on undiminished and undamaged. Jefferson’s concern about debt was based on a deep underlying principle that the present generation has an obligation to pass on to the next generation a world of undiminished opportunities and resources. We fail to meet this obligation if we pass on debts or disadvantages to our children, or if we are wasteful in spending or using up the resources they will need.

US Debt: Are we Meeting our Obligations to the Future?

Are we meeting this obligation? In the US, both as individuals and as a nation, we are spending money much faster than we are making it. As I write this, our current national debt is $7,444,238,707,087.88, rising near 70% of the US GDP. Each American citizen bears an individual share of this debt of more than $25,000. At present, we are only paying the interest on this heavy obligation, and because of government spending and tax relief programs we are adding to the total amount of debt by an average of $1.67 billion every day. Perhaps it will be our children, not ourselves, who will finally face up to the daunting prospect of paying off this enormous burden.

These numbers are so large that they may seem abstract, but the effects of this debt burden will be very concrete indeed. This financial obligation must and will eventually be paid off, but to do so will strain government programs that provide broad public benefits. The rising debt makes it less likely that our children will be able to own the houses they live in, less likely that Iowa farm production will be supported by subsidy programs, less likely that our grandchildren will have the opportunity to attend adequate public schools, and less likely that Americans will be able to afford adequate health care. As we look toward the future of Iowa agriculture and the Iowa economy, heavily dependent as it is on federal support, there is good reason to expect that our children will face diminished opportunities and heavy burdens. Our present spending habits, in which our nation spends much more than we bring in, may undermine their chances to enjoy the way of life we have come to expect. Jefferson would be dismayed.

Agriculture and Environmental Debts

But there is a deeper principle underlying Jefferson’s thought—a principle that has broad implications that stretch beyond the significance of financial obligations. Jefferson’s principle assigns us a basic and very general obligation not to diminish the resources we pass on to subsequent generations. We have an obligation not to consume natural and environmental capital that might provide perpetual benefits; not to spend more than we earn or to damage more than we can hope to repair. In this vein, we may notice that financial burdens are only one kind of debt that we can pass on to the future. If we use our renewable resources faster than they can recover and replenish themselves, it is exactly the same as if we put our children in debt by consuming financial resources faster than we replenish them. In economic terms, we can represent unsustainable resource use in exactly the same way we describe irresponsible consumption and debt acquisition. Jefferson’s principle assigns us a duty to care appropriately for productive renewable resources like soil and water as well as the obligation not to pass on financial debts. Whenever human activities damage agricultural and environmental resources at a rate faster than they can recover, we face the closely linked concept of environmental debt. If our rights in agricultural and environmental resources are rights “in usufruct,” then they come with obligations to conserve and manage these resources wisely so that they can be passed on undiminished to the next group of managers.

We need to ask ourselves whether our activities are consistent with our obligation not to saddle our descendants with financial or environmental debts, and with our obligation to pass on undiminished agricultural and environmental resources to subsequent generations. If contemporary farming practices deplete topsoil faster than it is replenished, if we rely on nonrenewable resources and fail to replace them with appropriate technological substitutes, if our activities gradually undermine the purity of our aquifers and rivers, if we pump carbon into the atmosphere faster than it can be removed by natural processes, if we damage environmental systems faster than they promote recovery, then we are in the process of incurring intergenerational debts.

Financial Conservatism and Constitutional Restraint

The problem, in part, is one of incentives. Since future generations are not here to plead their case, it is easy for us to overlook their interests when they conflict with our own. Jefferson wanted Madison to guard against this incentive problem by including a constitutional requirement of intergenerational financial sustainability. Such a requirement would prohibit us from incurring financial obligations faster than we can pay them off. He had high hopes that a constitutional constraint on unsustainable spending would not only prevent us from mortgaging the prosperity of future generations, but that it would also “bridle the spirit of war" by providing a strong incentive to conserve resources that would otherwise consumed in wars of conquest. According to Jefferson, such a provision would promote international peace by providing a strong incentive against unnecessary engagement in war.

Madison demurred. In his response to Jefferson, Madison pointed out that present spending may sometimes provide enduring benefits for future generations, as it does when debts are incurred in the process of fighting a war necessary to protect our own liberty and the right to political autonomy. This thought would naturally occur to one who had overseen the founding of a new nation after a revolutionary war. Consequently, Madison did not propose a constitutional provision placing restrictions on debt, and may have persuaded Jefferson himself that such a provision would be unwise. But Madison enthusiastically accepted Jefferson’s underlying principle assigning us an obligation to husband our nation’s financial and environmental resources to avoid enriching ourselves at cost to our descendants. As we look at our lives, our agricultural practices, and our public institutions, it would be well to keep this principle in mind. As Jefferson and Madison kept us in mind as they drew up our founding documents, let’s keep in mind the interests of our descendants as we work to achieve sustainable production and generational self-sufficiency.

Upcoming Bioethics-Related Events

Wednesday, November 17, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
3:10 p.m., Gold Room, Memorial Union, "Growing Home: Community Development Strategies for Sustaining Local Agriculture," Duncan Hilchey, Cornell University. Co-sponsored by the Leopold Center's Marketing & Food Systems Initiative and the Regional Food Systems Working Group. More information: http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/news/events.htm

Monday, November 29, Bioethics Program Lecture
3:30 -5:30 p.m., Sun Room, Memorial Union, "Integrating Ethics Across the Curriculum: Teaching Ethical Theory When Neither Paid Nor Trained," Gary Comstock, Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University. Lecture to be followed by reception. Iowa State University is a national leader in the integration of ethics into the sciences and engineering curricula. The objective of this seminar will be to advance ISU's leadership in this area by helping faculty who are committed to teaching ethics--but not necessarily trained in moral philosophy--to understand more fully how the tools of ethical theory can illuminate classroom discussions. Toward this end, Dr. Comstock, professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University, will introduce two popular theories--relativism and divine command--and discuss in detail two tested theories: classical utilitarianism and moral rights. He will show how the latter two theories can figure productively in classroom discussions of agricultural cases, such as the EPA's proposal to allow the testing of pesticides on humans.

Gary Comstock is director of the research ethics program at NC State, author of Vexing Nature? On the Ethical Case Against Agricultural Biotechnology, and editor of Life Science Ethics, Religious Autobiographies, and Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm? From 1982 to 2002, he taught ethics at ISU in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department.

Friday, January 7, Bioethics Winter Retreat
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Memorial Union, “Patenting Life: Implications for Agriculture in Iowa and the World.” Keynote speaker Dr. Daniel Kevles, Professor of History, Yale University. Registration is free. More information:
http://www.bioethics.iastate.edu/retreat.html

Monday, February 21, Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness and the Creative Imagination
8:00 p.m., Sun Room, Memorial Union, "Dwellings: A Reading," Linda Hogan. Hogan is a poet, novelist and nonfiction writer whose books
include Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, The Woman Who Watches Over the World, and Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

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The Bioethics Program of Iowa State University in cooperation with the ISU Office of Biotechnology compiles a list of upcoming Bioethics-related events, which is sent out to interested parties each Monday. If you are interested in receiving this information or if you have events you would like to make known, you are invited to email the list manager, Katy Reader, at bioeth1@iastate.edu

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In the November 2004 Issue:

An Ode to the National Debt

Upcoming Bioethics-Related Events