From SEP:
Another emerging debate is whether contractualism can deliver plausible verdicts in cases involving risks of human extinction. The prima facie problem for contractualism here is that, because the outcome where we fail to avoid imminent extinction contains no future people at all, there is no (particular or representative) future person who has the standing to reasonably reject principles instructing present people to ignore extinction risks and focus entirely on meeting present needs. (Finneron-Burns 2017, Frick 2017.)
I'm not sure it follows that a contractualist should focus on present needs, though, since I think some contractualists would accept the procreation asymmetry, and so preventing futures with very bad lives could be important.
Rawls was a contractualist and argued for saving for future generations (assuming they will exist) based on the veil of ignorance; see 4.5 Rawls’s Just Savings Principle in the SEP article Intergenerational Justice:
Thus the correct principle is that which the members of any generation (and so all generations) would adopt as the one their generation is to follow and as the principle they would want preceding generations to have followed (and later generations to follow), no matter how far back (or forward) in time. (Rawls 1993: 274; Rawls 2001: 160)
Still, this seems to me to be a basically consequentialist argument, since, from my understanding, Rawls' treatment of the original position behind veil of ignorance is basically consequentialist.
The article also discusses rights-based approaches and other reasons to care for future generations.
Apparently contractualists are basically Kantian deontologists, though. On the other hand, contractarianism attempts to motivate ethical behaviour through rational self-interest without assuming concern for acting morally or taking the interests of others into account. See the SEP article on contractarianism, which contrasts the two in its introduction and in a few other places in the article.
I guess Samuel Scheffler's last book has a little bit of them all (I haven't read it yet). And Korsgaard makes a persuasive Kantian case about the disvalue of human extinction.
Thank you, those both look like exactly what I'm looking for
You're welcome. Plz, write a post (even if a shortform) about it someday.
Something that attracts me in this literature (particularly in Scheffler) is how they can pick different intuitions that often collide with premises / conclusions of reasons based on something like the rational agent model (i.e., VnM decision theory). I think that, even for a philosophical theorist, it could be useful to know more about how prevalent are these intuitions, and what possible (social or psychological) explanations could be offered for them. (I admit that, just like the modus ponens of one philosopher might be the modus tollens of the other, someone's intuition might be someone else's cognitive bias)
For instance, Scheffler mentions we (at least me and him) have a "primitive" preference for humanity's existence (I think by "humanity" he usually means rational agents similar to us - being extinct by trisolarans would be bad, but not as bad as the end of all conscious rational agents); we usually prefer that humanity exists for a long time, rather than a short period, even if both timelines have the same amount of utility - which seems to imply some sort of negative discount rate of the future, so violating usual "pure time preference" reasoning. Besides, we prefer world histories where there's a causal connection between generations / individuals, instead of possible worlds with the same amount of utility (and the same length in time) where communities spring and get extinct without any relation between them - I admit this sounds weird, but I think it might explain my malaise towards discussions on infinite ethics.