When we think beyond comparison we may suddenly find how familiar ideas, structures, and approaches change. What is taken for granted may no longer be taken as a given. Other avenues of thought might crystallize that move around previously unnoticed obstacles. Martin Schönfeld shows how such new insights take shape in his essay on climate change and posterity. Western thought, he argues, has difficultly framing such problems in a coherent structure because “wrong requires victims.” When future generations do not exist, or are “non-beings,” it is hard to explain our obligations to them. The Confucianism role ethics by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont offers a way out. If we are our roles and we become persons through roles, and good persons through living our roles well, we can side-step the difficulties posed by the non-presence of victims. In role ethics “relations can be consummated regardless of whether the relata presently exist.” In other words, the idea of consummating roles is unlike the claiming of rights. For instance,, one is still her mother’s daughter after her mother dies, just as the mother remains a mother if the daughter dies first. In this way we can develop connections with posterity and tackle the ethics of climate change in consideration of our present bonds with future generations.