A chemical company’s legal team drafts a defense against fut…
A chemical company’s legal team drafts a defense against future liability claims: “Even if our industrial emissions cause health problems 200 years from now, we bear no responsibility. Our economic activity affects local employment, migration patterns, and birth timing across multiple generations. The specific individuals who will exist in 200 years depend on the entire chain of historical events, including our operations. Those future people wouldn’t exist at all if we had shut down operations today. You cannot claim we harmed people whose very existence depends on our continued operations.”Our author suggests this reasoning is poor because: