¹ Mulgan, T., The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; Mulgan, T., Future People (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² For what it is worth, my own (inexpert) reading of the empirical evidence is that we can be confident neither that the future will be as bad as my broken world, nor that it will not be much worse. A particular source of uncertainty is the inability of even the most informed observers to attach meaningful probabilities to outlier possibilities where various feedback loops cause the global climate to spiral out of control once some threshold is passed.

³ Mulgan, T., Ethics for a Broken World: Reimagining Philosophy after Catastrophe (Durham, 2011)Google Scholar. See also Mulgan, T., ‘The Future of Utilitarianism’, The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 32 (2011), pp. 143–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mulgan, T., ‘Theory and Intuition in a Broken World’, Intuition, Theory, and Anti-Theory, ed. Chappell, T. (Oxford, 2015), pp. 151–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mulgan, T., ‘Ethics for Possible Futures’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (2014), pp. 57–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mulgan, T., ‘What is Good for the Distant Future? The Challenge of Climate Change for Utilitarianism’, God, The Good, and Utilitarianism: Perspectives on Peter Singer, ed. Perry, J. (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 141–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; T. Mulgan, ‘Contractualism for a Broken World’, paper presented to workshop on contractualism, Université de Rennes, May 2012, available from author; T. Mulgan, ‘Mill and the Broken World’, Revue International de Philosophie (2015); Mulgan, T., ‘Replies to Critics’, Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series) 4 (2014), pp. 58–92Google Scholar; T. Mulgan, ‘Answering to Future People: Responsibility for Climate Change in a Breaking World’, paper presented to workshop on climate change, CAPPE, Canberra, September 2014, available from author.

⁴ One prominent example is Frank Jackson's identification of moral facts with the ‘mature folk morality’ of some future community of rational inquirers (Jackson, F., From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford, 1999))Google Scholar. I explore the shortcomings of naturalist metaethics further in Mulgan, T., Purpose in the Universe (Oxford, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Think of Peter Singer's busy commuter who walks past a child drowning in a pond, or Judith Thomson's famous trolley case (Singer, P., ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229–43Google Scholar; Thomson, J., ‘Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem’, The Monist 59 (1976), pp. 204–17)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. I discuss these examples further in Mulgan, ‘Theory and Intuition in a Broken World’.

⁶ I discuss the problem of rights in a broken world in Mulgan, Ethics for a Broken World, chs 1−4, and Mulgan, ‘Replies to Critics’; and, in relation to utilitarianism, in section IV.4 below.

⁷ I explore other credible futures in Mulgan, ‘Ethics for Possible Futures’; and T. Mulgan, ‘Moral Philosophy, Superintelligence, and the Singularity’, draft manuscript, available from author.

⁸ Mulgan, Ethics for a broken world, chs 1−4.

⁹ Nozick, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974), pp. 174–82Google Scholar. I discuss the proviso in Mulgan, Ethics for a Broken World, ch. 3. Nozick's proviso is subject to many other objections, but my focus is on those which are introduced or exacerbated by the broken world. Not all libertarians adopt Nozick's own proviso. However, any plausible libertarianism must offer some account of the origin of property rights. And it is hard to see how any such account could deliver robust libertarian rights without making some optimistic assumptions about the future course of events in a libertarian ‘free society’.

¹⁰ Mulgan, Ethics for a Broken World, chs 12−15; Mulgan, ‘Contractualism for a Broken World’. The discussion of Scanlon and aggregation in the text draws on discussion following my presentation at Rennes in May 2012, and was inspired by a question from Nick Southwood.

¹¹ For a variety of recent contractualist accounts, see Intergenerational Justice, ed. A. Gosseries and L. Meyer (Oxford, 2009). I present my own general critique in Mulgan, Future People, ch. 2.

¹² I owe the notion of a time bomb to Gosseries, A., ‘What do we owe the next generation(s)?’, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 35 (2001), pp. 293–354Google Scholar.

¹³ I discuss Kant, Rawls and Gauthier in Future People, ch. 2; and Scanlon in ‘Contractualism for a Broken World’.

¹⁴ Scanlon, T., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See, for instance, Wood, A., ‘Humanity as End in Itself’, in Parfit, D., On What Matters (Oxford, 2011), vol. 2, pp. 58–82CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹⁶ See Mulgan, Future People, ch. 2; and Mulgan, ‘Contractualism for a Broken World’. The lack of reciprocal interaction is especially fatal for one specific popular class of idealized contracts – namely those which assume contractors who are purely self-interested. Despite various desperate and ingenious attempts, no contract between such agents can deliver justice to future people.

¹⁷ Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 2, chs 21 and 22.

¹⁸ Among philosophers, this response is most prominently defended by David Heyd, though not on explicitly contractualist grounds (Heyd, D., Genethics: Moral Issues in the Creation of People (Berkeley, 1992))Google Scholar.

¹⁹ See, for instance, Scheffler, S., ‘Relationships and Responsibilities’, in Scheffler, S., Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford, 2001), pp. 97–110Google Scholar.

²⁰ Mulgan, T., Understanding Utilitarianism (Durham, 2007), ch. 6Google Scholar; Mulgan, Ethics for a Broken World, ch. 6; Mulgan, ‘The Future of Utilitarianism’.

²¹ I discuss this question in Mulgan, Future People, ch. 1.

²² Hooker, B., Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar. I develop my version in Mulgan, The Demands of Consequentialism, esp. ch. 3; Mulgan, Future People, chs 5–6; and in Mulgan, Ethics for a Broken World, ch. 7.

²³ Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World, p. 101.

²⁴ See also Mulgan, ‘What is Good for the Distant Future?’; Mulgan, ‘Contractualism for a Broken World’; Mulgan, ‘Ethics for Possible Futures’.

²⁵ Singer, P., Practical Ethics, 3rd edn (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Singer's own change of heart nicely illustrates my general theme in this article. As a practical ethicist, Singer focuses on first-order moral issues, such as abortion, our treatment of animals, or our obligations to the distant poor. His shift away from a preference theory is driven by the failure of his own attempts to apply his subjective utilitarianism to the newly urgent practical questions posed by climate change.

²⁶ Singer, Practical Ethics, p. 244.

²⁷ The name ‘Objective List Theory’ is from Parfit, D., Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), app. IGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Mulgan, Future People, ch. 3. See also Mulgan, T., ‘Two Parfit Puzzles’, The Repugnant Conclusion: Essays on Population Ethics, ed. Ryberg, J. and Tannsjö, T. (Dordrecht, 2005), pp. 23–45Google Scholar.

²⁹ Parfit, D., ‘Overpopulation and the Quality of Life’, Applied Ethics, ed. Singer, P. (Oxford, 1986), pp. 145–64Google Scholar.

³⁰ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 388.

³¹ Mulgan, Future People, ch. 7.

³² Mulgan, ‘The Future of Utilitarianism’.

³³ I explore survival lotteries throughout Ethics for a Broken World. Any such institution strikes affluent readers as both morally repellent and absurdly impractical. But, in a broken world, it might emerge as the fairest alternative – one that inspires loyalty, even from those who are unsuccessful.

³⁴ The remainder of this section responds to a paper presented by Brad Hooker to a workshop on Ethics for a Broken World in St Andrews in April 2012.

³⁵ This article was originally presented as a plenary lecture at the conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, held at the Stern Business School, New York University, in August 2012. For the invitation to present that lecture, for their generous support of my trip to New York, and for organizing a very stimulating conference, I am very grateful to Autherine Allison, Bruce Buchanan, and especially Rex Mixon. I have also presented work in progress on this research project to audiences in Auckland, Bath, Canberra, Edinburgh, Otago, Princeton, Rennes and St Andrews. I am grateful to all these audiences for helpful comments.