Can we be bring the future into the present? Sustainability, motivations and valuing

Stijn Neuteleers

Environmental Values, 2026, vol. 35, issue 2, 134-149

Abstract: Sustainability is about the future; it is embedded in the concept itself: we want things to sustain into the future. However, it less clear why we are motivated for that future and whether we can be motivated for the future in practice. If we look around us, there seems a wide-spread short-termism and there are many structural impediments to abandon such short-termism. A logical reply would be to promote long-term thinking, for instance by long-term projects such as the 10.000 Years clock. However, it is unclear whether this affects us personally. There is no personal connection and it is vague how this relates to our motivations. Thinking about motivations for the future is often limited to a purely moral frame, for the obvious reason that purely instrumental arguments about the future are not available. Scheffler's afterlife thesis, in line with earlier work of O’Neill and de-Shalit, shows there is a future-oriented dimension in the values we currently hold, namely that if we want our values to flourish, we should also care about their future beyond own life span. This provides another way of thinking about the future, somewhat in between a moral and instrumental way, one that has been pushed aside by modernity's individualization process. I argue that, in order to waken our future-oriented motivations, the personal dimension – the values we are attached to – need to be connected more explicitly with the future, both with regard to these values themselves as with the broader future that can sustain them.

Keywords: integenerational justice; motivations; longtermism; environmental values; short-termism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09632719251387479 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envval:v:35:y:2026:i:2:p:134-149

DOI: 10.1177/09632719251387479

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environmental Values
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().