I've never understood the reasoning, except maybe as nerd-sniping.
If there is any technological progress, then future people collectively will be much richer than us, and so they will be able to solve their problems much more easily than we can. Even problems they inherited from us - those should be trivially cheap for them to solve in a few hundred years.
I see it as "they owe us" (for enabling their existence at all) rather than "we owe them".
And if there isn't any more technological progress, then there won't be many future people.
Our obligations to present people, to enable them to have their own self-determined futures, seem far more important to me.
This comment seems to assume that technological progress is cumulative in nature and that we can't go backwards -- it's either the same level as now or will increase. There will be future collapses, dark ages, etc. The question is when, not if. History is already full of so many examples of this.
If there is any technological progress, then future people collectively will be much richer than us, and so they will be able to solve their problems much more easily than we can. Even problems they inherited from us - those should be trivially cheap for them to solve in a few hundred years.
I see it as "they owe us" (for enabling their existence at all) rather than "we owe them".
And if there isn't any more technological progress, then there won't be many future people.
Our obligations to present people, to enable them to have their own self-determined futures, seem far more important to me.