Ord - The Precipice
The same is true at the personal level. In the months after my daughter was born, the magnitude of everything my parents did for me was fully revealed. I was shocked. I told them; thanked them; apologized for the impossibility of ever repaying them. And they smiled, telling me that this wasn’t how it worked—that one doesn’t repay one’s parents. One passes it on.
My parents aren’t philosophers. But their remarks suggest another way in which the past could ground our duties to the future. Because the arrow of time makes it so much easier to help people who come after you than people who come before, the best way of understanding the partnership of the generations may be asymmetrical, with duties all flowing forwards in time—paying it forwards. On this view, our duties to future generations may thus be grounded in the work our ancestors did for us when we were future generations.