The Legacy of Business Leaders

A discussion of the rights of the unrepresented future generations leads me back to the present: in as much as we accept the duty to universalize general rights today, we must extend those rights to others as yet unknown and unborn. I believe this is a matter of logic but also one of the highest expressions of human nature. To paraphrase former Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, humankind “was made for infinite conceptions.” 1 The extension of our moral vision to the right of future generations is one of those exercises in infinite conception that characterizes the uniquely human capacity to transcend the boundaries of time, knowledge and physicality.