Future Generations

This chapter argues that there is a collective responsibility to have enough children in order to ensure that people will not, in the future, suffer great harm due to depopulation. Moreover, if people stopped having children voluntarily, it could be legitimate for states to incentivize and maybe even coerce individuals to bear and rear children. Various arguments against the enforceability of an individual duty to bear and rear children are examined. Coercing people to have children would come at significant moral cost; however, none of the arguments against enforceability seem decisive. The existence of a collective responsibility to have children bears on the question of whether parents and non-parents ought to shoulder the costs of childbearing and child rearing together.

L'architettura è un campo in cui l’intervento umano sul mondo provoca conseguenze rilevanti e durature, spesso materialmente persistenti per centinaia e centinaia di anni. Sarebbe quindi naturale aspettarsi che gli architetti riflettano in abbondanza, per abitudine consolidata, su quali siano i propri obblighi morali nei confronti delle generazioni future . È sorprendente constatare che non è così. L'architettura – come disciplina, come area di ricerca scientifica, come cultura professionale, come pensiero consostanziale ad un agire – non prende solitamente in effettiva considerazione il problema dei nostri obblighi verso le generazioni future. Questo articolo cerca di fare il punto sui modi in cui potrebbe farlo, se volesse.

Derek Parfit originally formulated the Repugnant Conclusion as follows: " For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living " (1984: 388). The blocks in Figure 1 represent two populations, A and Z. The width of each block shows the number of people in the corresponding population, the height shows their lifetime quality of life. All the people in Figure 1 enjoy positive welfare or, as we also could put it, have lives worth living (see well-being). People's welfare is much lower in Z than in A, but since there are many more people in Z, there is a greater quantity of welfare in Z as compared to A. Consequently, although the people in A lead very good lives and the people in Z have lives only barely worth living, Z is nevertheless better than A according to, for example, classical Utilitarianism (see utilitarianism). The Repugnant Conclusion highlights a problem in an area of ethics which has become known as population ethics. The last decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in questions such as " Is it possible to make the world a better place by creating more people? " and " Is there a moral obligation to have children? " The main problem is to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, their welfare, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take such aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population ethics is of general import for moral theory (see also intergenerational ethics; population; potential persons). As the name indicates, Parfit finds the Repugnant Conclusion unacceptable, and most philosophers seem to agree. It has been surprisingly difficult, however, to find a theory that avoids it without implying other counterintuitive conclusions. Thus,

The following study will make reference to the research and analysis ofGeneration Z*' profile and to find out how well the industry is prepared to serve the needs and expectations of*GEN Z; both as guests and employees of their establishment. The aim is to help the hotel industry to be a trend setter rather than a follower in the rapidly changing demands and expectations of the people who have started to shape the world in this very moment. Objective of the Research The intention of the study is to list the behavior patterns of GEN Z along with their expectations and interactions in daily activities. The research indicates that GEN Z, with their technological abilities and expectations as guests and/or employees will ultimately dictate services offered by the tourism hotel industry. The study will investigatecurrent services offered by the hotels and the degree of connection between the needs and expectations of GEN Z. Thefindings will be analyzed and recommendations will be shared in the SUGGESTION section. The study is an argumentative research conducted to test a hypothesis of " The Turkish hotel industry is not prepared for the needs and expectations of GEN Z " .

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449626.2012.705786#.U9ZhGkhaO2w
Given the importance of being able to account for moral obligations towards future generations, especially in the light of the problem of global climate change, I argue that there are under-appreciated notions in African thought that are able to significantly contribute to the on-going discourse with respect to inter-generational moral obligations. I identify two related African notions, both springing from the prominent belief that ancestors who have died – but continue to have a presence – are entitled to respect, which upon secular refinement are promising in terms of grounding a claim that we do have moral obligations to future generations. These conceptions are that the environment is a communal resource, shared across generations, and that the present generation should express gratitude to its predecessors for preserving the environment on its behalf, by emulating its predecessors and preserving the environment for future generations. I argue that these two conceptions present plausible grounds for thinking that we have moral obligations to posterity, partly because they go some way towards overcoming some of the theoretical concerns generally associated with the notion of moral obligations towards unidentifiable, contingent future persons.

This Article examines the role of the Philippine Supreme Court in protecting the environment by scrutinizing the Court's record in resolving environmental cases. The Article provides an overview of the framework of Philippine environmental law and analyzes four decisions of the Supreme Court that are representative of Philippine environmental jurisprudence.

La justice distributive est cette justice qui se préoccupe d'identifier les critères et processus de distribution légitime des coûts et bénéfices matériels ou symboliques (revenus, richesses, statuts, etc.) pour des individus ou des groupes d'individus. Or, dans un monde globalisé, où des inégalités distributives criantes se creusent non seulement à l'intérieur des Etats, mais entre les sociétés et les individus de la planète tout entière, il paraît de plus en plus crucial de définir des principes distributifs permettant de répartir plus justement les richesses à l'échelle globale. Il est à noter qu'il ne s'agit pas simplement d'étendre la justice distributive nationale à un territoire plus vaste, comme si le monde n'était qu'un Etat un peu plus grand que les autres : l'échelle globale pose des problèmes spécifiques dont il nous faut tenir compte, et il ne va pas de soi qu'elle soit adéquate pour penser la justice distributive. Il faut donc avant tout définir les circonstances dans lesquelles les considérations de la justice distributive sont pertinentes, et montrer qu'elles existent au niveau global. Une fois réglé ce problème important, deux questions se posent. D'une part, celle de l'objet de la distribution : qu'est-ce qui doit être distribué, et en fonction de quels critères ? D'autre part, qui doit distribuer et à qui : qui sont les acteurs appropriés de la justice distributive (individus, Etats, ONGs, entreprises, organisations internationales?) ? On ne peut répondre à aucune des deux questions sans tenir compte des multiples dimensions des injustices distributives globales, dont la plupart découlent d'une histoire violente faite de mises en esclavage, de colonisation, de guerres et d'oppressions en tous genres. Il est en effet capital d'inscrire les questions de justice distributive dans des contextes spatio-temporels déterminés, où la question de l'identité des agents, aussi bien en termes de nationalité, de genre ou de race, se pose de manière décisive dans les revendications de redistribution à l'échelle globale.

The Colombian Supreme Court in a landmark judgment of 5 April 2018 ordered the government of the same country to stop deforestation and reminding it of its duty to protect nature and the climate on behalf of present and future generations. Another case where the innovative use of constitutional rights obligations serves to combat climate change and protect the younger generations. An emblematic case law that emphasizes both the need to protect the climate and the obligation to do so towards future generations through the writing of an Intergenerational and Inter-social PIVAC- Pact at the expense of the government in the five coming months

Climate change – and its most dangerous consequence, the rapid overheating of the planet – is not the offspring of a natural procedure; instead, it is human-induced. It is only the aftermath of a specific pattern of economic development, one that focuses mainly on economic growth rather than on quality of life and sustainability. Since climate change is a major threat not only to millions of humans, but also to numerous non-human species and other forms of life, as well as to the equilibrium and the viability of the very planet, addressing it is of dire importance. In this chapter it will be argued that addressing the threat of climate change is primarily a task and a challenge
for ethics, since the stabilization and gradual amelioration of the situation requires abandoning an up to now dominant model of life, longestablished customs and a so far cogent system of moral values. It will be further maintained that this for ethics might – or, even, should – become a new categorical imperative, since preserving the viability of the planet is a fundamental moral duty not only towards the existing members of the moral community, but also towards future generations. The chapter provides a glossary of the most important terms used in the text presented in the first
part. It also provides different exercises aiming either to further consolidate student understanding of these terms or / and strengthen student grammatical and syntactical skills.

This article focuses on some very “fundamental threats” to future generations’ leaving, and considers whether most essential interests of future persons not to be harmed can be construed as rights, and in particular as human rights, as much as present persons’. The framework refers essentially to a conceptual grammar of justice. Moreover, it is suggested to articulate rights through the lens of “disposability” and “non-disposability” principles. Finally, the article shows the reasons for separating what we owe to future persons under the challenge of those threats for humanity, i.e. a matter of justice, from our right to hand down our cultural heritage, and eventually from paternalistic imposition upon future generations of our irreversible choices (even eu-genetic pre-design of future persons identity).
Keywords
Law – Justice – Rights – Legal Philosophy – Moral Philosophy

El debate en torno a la fundamentación filosófica de nuestra responsabilidad hacia las generaciones futuras y sus consecuencias para la democracia verde. The debate about the philosophical foundation of our responsibility to future generations and its consequences for green democracy. Laura García-Portela. Universidad de Valencia. Resumen. Los últimos informes del IPCC confirman la hipótesis rectora de todos los desarrollados desde 1990: la intervención del ser humano sobre la Tierra es la responsable del cambio climático global que afecta a las generaciones presentes y cuyos efectos serán devastadores para el futuro de la humanidad y del resto de especies. Este hecho carga a los seres humanos actuales con la responsabilidad de ampliar los límites de la consideración moral tradicionales y, por tanto, de empujar sus sistemas políticos hacia una ampliación de los límites de la comunidad política. Este capítulo está dirigido a analizar el papel que el debate filosófico en torno a la fundamentación de nuestra responsabilidad hacia las generaciones futuras puede jugar en la construcción teórica de la democracia verde. Éste adquiere importancia por su objeto particular (las generaciones futuras), por su carácter de representatividad discursiva en tanto debate filosófico, y por el modo en que podemos evaluar cómo las distintas posiciones filosóficas contribuyen a una concepción democrática del pensamiento verde. Abstract. IPCC's last reports confirm the guiding hypothesis of all of those developed since 1990: human intervention over the earth is responsible for the climate change that affects present generations and whose effects will be devastating to the future of human kind and other species. This fact burdens contemporary human beings with the responsibility of broadening the traditional limits of moral consideration and of pushing their political systems toward spreading the limits of political community. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the role of the philosophical debate in building up the theoretical construction of green democracy. Its importance lies in its particular object (for future generations), in its way of representing discourses as a philosophical debate, and in promoting a way of assessing which philosophical perspectives could contribute to a democratic conception of green thought. INTRODUCCIÓN El desarrollo tecnocientífico del último siglo ha multiplicado exponencialmente la acción dañina del ser humano sobre el medioambiente. Con ello, asistimos a un extraordinario incremento de la influencia que ejerce el presente sobre el futuro, así como las vulnerabilidades y riesgos de éste frente a aquel. Este hecho ha sido ampliamente aceptado por la comunidad científica y política desde el primer informe

Este trabajo examina varias teorías de la justicia intergeneracional y sus implicaciones en el ámbito práctico de los sistemas de pensiones. En este contexto, la sostenibilidad del sistema parece estar comprometida a causa de las proyecciones demográficas. Este hecho tiene una incuestionable relevancia para el futuro de este importante servicio público y el compromiso intergeneracional que implica. En este sentido, si un sistema de pensiones quiere ser justo tiene que mirar en tres direcciones: pensionistas, trabajadores y futuras generaciones. Así, una teoría liberal-igualitaria se vuelve necesaria para compartir los riesgos de shocks demográficos y financieros entre las distintas generaciones y para reducir la desigualdad tanto como sea posible.

Prospective parents are sometimes partial towards their future children, engaging in what I call ‘pre-parental partiality’. Common sense morality is as permissive of pre-parental partiality as it is of ordinary parental partiality—partiality towards one’s existing children. But I argue that existing justifications for partiality typically establish weaker reasons in support of pre-parental partiality than in support of parental partiality. Thus, either these existing justifications do not fully account for our reasons of parental partiality, or our reasons to engage in pre-parental partiality are indeed typically weaker than our reasons to engage in parental partiality.

Que faire et ne pas faire pour les générations futures ? Dans cette entrée, nous identifions les défis centraux que doit relever une pensée se revendiquant de l'écologie politique et prenant au sérieux nos obligations envers les générations futures. Si l'on prend un peu de recul, il y a à la fois rupture et continuité entre nos préoccupations intergénérationnelles et celles de la fin du 18 ème . Un auteur tel que Thomas Jefferson était préoccupé par le poids du passé sur le présent, plutôt que par celui du présent sur le futur. Ce qui l'inquiétait, c'était le fait que le passé soit en mesure de nous lier politiquement (rigidité constitutionnelle, dette extérieure) plutôt que le fait de léguer un environnement dégradé à nos descendants. Il aurait pu formuler son souci en termes de souveraineté générationnelle, un concept absent du débat actuel. Et pourtant, il s'agissait bien comme aujourd'hui de poser la question de la légitimité et de la justice des actes et abstentions d'une génération envers les suivantes, plutôt que celle d'obligations que nous aurions envers nos ancêtres par exemple.

Ensayo que profundiza en los fundamentos éticos que están a la base de la noción de "guardianía de la Tierra" (la percepción del tiempo circular), en tanto expresión de aquella narrativa de la América profunda que constituye un aporte a las discusiones globales sobre la equidad intergeneracional –y los deberes de previsión de las generaciones presentes con las generaciones futuras– en el contexto de la crisis ecológica planetaria (o la crisis del proyecto civilizatorio).

It has become increasingly common legal provisions that expressly deal with future generations and their necessary protection. The combination of issues concerning future generations and agricultural activities, despite their undeniable relevance, has been a gap in scientific research in the legal area. The objective of this article is to discuss the legal consideration of future generations and determine their influence on the Agrarian Law, in particular with regard to land ownership. We conclude that the legal consideration of future generations is imperative observance in the context of sustainability and is able to reframe the notion of land ownership.

Intergenerational justice is a great challenge for internalist universalistic ethics, i.e. ethics which claim that moral convinctions have to be connected to motivation to act morally and which care for everybody (more precisely: for every sentient being), because the double claim requires to find motives to care equally also for people in the far future. The paper discusses this challenge for empathy based ethics. First, the two claims (which are also adequacy conditions for ethics) are explained and justified. Second, the main part of the paper consists of a search for subforms of empathy based motives which are universalistic. The result of this search is positive. However, the motive thereby identified is rather weak.

The urgent issue of intergenerational justice is philosophically well addressed, but what is still missing is an elaborated conceptual and argumentative link both to political science and to real world politics. Adapting several concepts of democratic theory, this paper establishes the conceptual foundation for analysing strategies to implement intergenerational rights of and obligations to future generations in our current political institutional frameworks.
I start with the argument that the issue of future, i.e. yet unborn generations is, after all, an issue of deficient political representation. Political representation is a means to meet the claim of democracy that everyone who will be affected by collectively binding decisions should have a voice in making them. This so called all-affected (interests) principle comes in two versions: it can be interpreted as causally affected or as legally bound. However, both versions are applicable to future generations. Firstly, due to the expanded impact of man, our descendants will be causally affected by what we do. In order to validate this it is not even necessary to evoke extreme cases like the long term effects of climate change or nuclear waste disposal. More precisely, every reasonable political decision will work into the future. Secondly, future people who will be born into a jurisdiction will have to follow the rules that are made or approved there today, at least as long as they are not able to change them. Every law is made to bind the future.
In consequence, democratic theorists call for the political representation of future generations. Unfortunately, the categories of our standard concepts of political representation, like elections, authorisation, accountability, communication, and responsivity are not compatible with contemporarily unapproachable, not yet existent constituents like future generations. Hence, we have to develop a new concept of representation that is consistent with this kind of constituents. I call this new concept ‘proxy representation’, since proxies are surrogates of variables or persons that are per se unmeasurable (see statistical methods), or unapproachable (in our case), respectively.
For concept-building, I draw on Andrew Rehfeld’s general theory of political representation. According to Rehfeld it is necessary to define the function of the specific kind of representation. Deduced from the all-affected principle, the function of proxy representation is to make future generations present in today’s policy making process, i.e. to introduce their interests into the political decision making process. I develop three simple formal necessary conditions that have to be satisfied in order to meet the function and to identify an institutional arrangement as proxy representation: (1) there is an agent who consciously or unconsciously is able to act as future generation’s representative according to the function and who considers the interest of future generations at least as strong as the sum of interests of possible other constituents. (2) The agent is provided with sufficient access to the political decision making process. (3) Finally, the agent accepts the task by taking on his role as a proxy representative of future generations.
Last but not least, I discuss the major philosophical stumbling block towards the political consideration of future generations, the well-known non-identity problem. With regard to proxy representation, I reject this problem as invalid.

Chapter 7 1. INTRODUCTION Multiple Input Multiple Output technology has revolutionized the research in wireless systems. Today, the existence and realization of high capacity communication network backbones motivates researchers to investigate the following two directions, namely, development of new applications that utilize this huge capacity of backbone transport networks and on the other hand, development of reliable and spectrally efficient wireless access networks to take advantage of this huge capacity. The need for developing the high capacity wireless access network to support the emerging high data rate applications requires one to overcome the three fundamental limitations intertwined with each other, namely, bandwidth, power and system

Est-il moralement acceptable de transmettre aux générations futures des déchets nucléaires ou une biodiversité réduite à une peau de chagrin ? Les personnes futures sauraient-elles être titulaires de droits alors qu’elles n’existent pas ? Est-il juste de revoir à la baisse le montant des retraites pour lesquelles des pensionnés ont cotisé toute leur vie ou de transférer aux générations à venir une dette publique considérable ? Chacune de ces questions a trait à différents domaines de notre existence. Pourtant, un fil rouge les relie : celui de la justice entre les générations. Brûlantes d’actualité, ces interrogations se voient bien souvent offrir pour seule réponse le dénuement relatif de nos théories. Ainsi, des concepts comme ceux de «droit acquis» en matière de pensions ou de «développement durable» ne sauraient faire office d’arguments s’ils ne s’appuient pas sur un solide arrière-fond théorique issu de la philosophie morale et politique. Car l’économie publique ou la biologie des populations ne peuvent suffire à aiguiller les citoyens et leurs représentants sur les choix qui leur incombent en matière intergénérationnelle. La philosophie a aussi son rôle à jouer, à la condition qu’elle ait la modestie d’être à l’écoute d’autres disciplines, l’exigence d’articuler clairement ses présupposés, et le courage de se frotter à la pratique

The concept of virtual engineering (VEng) can be understood as a generalization of “multi-disciplinary problem solving”, an ever more used term in scientific computing. An abstract space consisting of the physical, the geometrical, and the cost function directions, called CGP, is introduced. The VEng problem can be seen as a complex manifold embedded in this space. Common standard data formats, unified data access, as well as open, non monolithic systems, are discussed. These contribute to smoothing the sharp edges and closing the gaps of the manifold. The significance of seamless accessibility of data is illustrated by means of the tightly coupled fluid-structure interaction in aero-elasticity.

16 Sentientistic ethics assigns moral standing to all and only sentient beings. 17 Zoocentric ethics assigns moral standing to all and only animals. 18 Biocentric ethics assigns moral standing to all and only living beings. Two other important aspects of the "nutrient-track" deserve to be pointed out: As we said in the beginning of this subsection , all our cultivated species originate from wild species. This means that the larger the biodiversity, the larger the probability that we will find new species that can be useful for us. 34 It also means that in order to find new species to cultivate or to cross breed with our cultivated breeds, or just to transfer genes from, we need a supply of wild species. 35 As an illustration, Norman Myers mentions the great corn blight in the U.S. that destroyed half of their 1970 corn crop. The problem was dealt with by interbreeding the cultivated corn with corn from its original growing place in Mexico. 36 This seems to be a good reason from the point of view of anthropocentric instrumentalism not to do things that might lead to the extinction of wild species, and may to some degree counterbalance the benefits we get from getting rid of competing species. Another thing we have to consider is that we really do not have any way of knowing today which genetic material will be useful in the future. This can be seen as an argument to conserve species "just in case". I will, however, return to this strategy in chapter 3. We should also consider the fact that natural evolution goes on all the time, and "invents" new properties in both plants and animals, properties that can turn out to be very useful for us. In order for this evolutionary process to continue, we need to protect not only the species that are potentially useful, but also the ecosystems in which they live and evolve, and other species that may evolve useful traits in the future or just contribute to the selective pressure that drives the evolutionary process. 37 These last points are of course not just relevant when it comes to food, but also in other cases where nature contributes to human wellbeing. They are examples of so-called ecosystem services. The ecosystem services are important for our supply of food in several different ways. Most pollinators are e.g. wild insects and bats etc. 38 Wild species improve the quality of the soil or help to spread the seeds of plants. 39 A substantial degree of biodiversity is needed to keep the surrounding ecosystems working, to prevent our cultivated species from succumbing to diseases and "pests" etc. 40 Monocultures can be very productive but they cannot sustain themselves for very long without human assistance. They need input of fertilisers and human intervention-generally powered by fossil fuels. 41 The "input" independently of how it is substantiated must come from somewhere and it very often depends on some kind of ecosystem service.

Michael Reder, Nejma Tamoudi und Simon Faets widmen sich in ihrem Überblicksartikel den normativen Grundlagen der Debatte um intergenerationelle Gerechtigkeit sowie deren politikphilosophischen Implikationen. Ziel ist es, einen Querschnitt der gegenwärtigen Debatte zur Repräsentation zukünftiger Generationen vorzulegen und dabei insbesondere die verschiedenen demokratietheoretischen (liberal, radikal, pragmatistisch) und menschenrechtspolitischen Aspekte zu berücksichtigen. Darüber hinaus werden mit dem Bildungsbegriff und dem Utopischen zwei neue Aspekte in den Diskurs eingeführt.

Michael Reder, Nejma Tamoudi und Simon Faets widmen sich in ihrem Überblicksartikel den normativen Grundlagen der Debatte um intergenerationelle Gerechtigkeit sowie deren politikphilosophischen Implikationen. Ziel ist es, einen Querschnitt der gegenwärtigen Debatte zur Repräsentation zukünftiger Generationen vorzulegen und dabei insbesondere die verschiedenen demokratietheoretischen (liberal, radikal, pragmatistisch) und menschenrechtspolitischen Aspekte zu berücksichtigen. Darüber hinaus werden mit dem Bildungsbegriff und dem Utopischen zwei neue Aspekte in den Diskurs eingeführt.

Nachhaltigkeitsberichte gelten als jährliche Fixierung der Maßnahmen und Ziele eines Unternehmens im Bereich Nachhaltigkeit. Der Beitrag stellt den analytischen Wert von Längsschnittbetrachtungen zur Untersuchung von sprachlichen Strategien in Nachhaltigkeitsberichten heraus. Die Serialität der Berichte unterstützt, dass das Besetzen von zentralen Begriffen als semantische Integration und das strategische Integrieren und Elaborieren von prominenten Begriffen als lexikalische Elaboration als sukzessive diachrone Entwicklung nachvollzogen werden kann.

Sustainability reports are the annual records of a company’s measures and goals in the domain of sustainability. This article highlights the analytical value of longitudinal approaches to linguistic strategies in those reports. The seriality of the reports supports that the occupation of central terms can be understood and traced diachronically as semantic integration and the strategic integration and elaboration of terms as lexical elaboration.

O texto suscita-nos questões perturbadas e perturbadoras porque nos força a olhar para além do horizonte estreito, no espaço e no tempo, dos deveres e dos direitos morais e políticos em que nos movemos habitualmente. É que, embora a questão dos deveres para com as gerações futuras encha menos os escaparates das livrarias ou as parangonas dos jornais do que a crise económica que atravessamos, as oportunidades e os perigos da globalização (ou as catástrofes climáticas que nos ameaçam no futuro, para o qual o texto busca uma fundamentação moral), a questão está intimamente relacionado com todos eles e possui portanto uma evidente actualidade e é difícil não sentir a sua natureza perturbada senão angustiada.

Traditional ethical theories have paradoxical implications in regards to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future people. It has been suggested that the crux of the problem resides in an all too 'impersonal' axiology and that the problems of population axiology can be solved by adopting a 'Person Affecting Restriction' which in its slogan form states that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for people. This move has been especially popular in the context of medical ethics where many of the problems of population axiology are actualized. Examples are embryo or egg selection, pre-implantation genetic testing, assisted reproduction programmes, abortion, just to mention a few. I discuss a number of different interpretations of the Restriction and in particular one interpretation which I call Comparativism. According to this view, we should draw a distinction between uniquely and non-uniquely realizable people. The former people only exist in one out of two possible outcomes, whereas the latter exist in both of the compared outcomes. The idea is that we should give more weight to the well-being of non-uniquely realizable people or take it into account in a different way as compared to the well-being of uniquely realizable people. I argue that the different versions of the Person Affecting Restriction and Comparativism either have counterintuitive implications of their own or are compatible with traditional theories such as Utilitarianism.

It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better than creating new happy lives although the total welfare is the same in both cases, and that it may be better even when the total welfare is lower in the outcome with extended lives. I shall discuss two interesting suggestion that seems to support this idea, or so it has been argued.

The concept of virtual engineering (VEng) can be understood as a generalization of "multi-disciplinary problem solving", an ever more used term in scientific computing. An abstract space consisting of the physical, the geometrical, and the cost function directions, called CGP, is introduced. The VEng problem can be seen as a complex manifold embedded in this space. Common standard data formats, unified data access, as well as open, non-monolithic systems, are discussed. These contribute to smoothing the sharp edges and closing the gaps of the manifold. The significance of seamless accessibility of data is illustrated by means of the tightly coupled fluid-structure interaction in aero-elasticity.