Our actions and decisions clearly affect future generations. Climate change is the canonical example, but this is also true for social norms, values, levels of economic growth, and many other factors. Indeed, if we give equal weight to future individuals, it is likely that the effect of our actions on the long-term future far outstrip any short-term impacts.
However, future generations do not hold any power – as they do not yet exist – so their interests are often not taken into account to a sufficient degree. To fix this problem, we could introduce some form of representation of future generations1 in our political system. (See e.g. 1,2,3 for previous discussion.) In this post, I will consider different ways to empower future generations and discuss key challenges that arise.
Ah, that makes sense, then.
This is an interesting point, and I think there's something to it. But I also tentatively think that the distinction might be less sharp than you suggest. (The following is again just quick thoughts.)
Firstly, it seems to me that we should currently have a lot of uncertainties about what would be better for animals. And it also seems that, in any case, much of the public probably is uncertain about a lot of relevant things (even if sufficient evidence to resolve those uncertainties does exist somewhere).
There are indeed some relatively obvious low-hanging fruit, but my guess would be that, for all the really big changes (e.g., phasing out factory farming, improving conditions for wild animals), it would be hard to say for sure what would be net-positive. For example, perhaps factory farmed animals have net positive lives, or could have net positive lives given some changes in conditions, in which case developing clean meat, increasing rates of veganism, etc. could be net negative (from a non-suffering-focused perspective), as it removes wellbeing from the world.
Of course, even if facing such uncertainties, expected value reasoning might strongly support one course of action. Relatedly, in reality, I'm quite strongly in favour of phasing out factory farming, and I'm personally a vegetarian-going-on-vegan. But I do think there's room for some uncertainty there. And even if there are already arguments and evidence that should resolve that uncertainty for people, it's possible that those arguments and bits of evidence would be more complex or less convincing than something like "In 2045, people/experts/some metric will be really really sure that animals would've been better off if we'd done X than if we'd done Y." (But that's just a hypothesis; I don't know how convincing people would find such judgements-from-the-future.)
Secondly, it seems that there are several key things where it's quite clear what policies would be better for future moral agents, and the bottleneck is just the lack of political will to do it. (Or at least, where what would be better is about as clear as it is for many animal-related things.) E.g., reducing emissions; doing more technical AI safety research; more pandemic preparedness (i.e., I would've said that last year; maybe now things are more where they should be). Perhaps the reason is that these policies relate to issues where future moral agents won't "be able to decide for themselves what to do", or at least where it'd be much harder for them to do X than it is for us to do X.
Perhaps the summary of these ideas is that: