Ultimately this book provides a theory of intergenerational justice that is both intellectually robust and practical with wide applicability to law and policy.

I defend the claim that life-suspending technologies can constitute a catastrophic and existential security factor for risks structurally similar to those related to climate change. The gist of the argument is that, under certain conditions, life-suspending technologies such as cryonics can provide self-interested actors with incentives to efficiently tackle such risks—in particular, they provide reasons to overcome certain manifestations of generational egoism, a risk factor of several catastrophic and existential risks. Provided we have reasons to decrease catastrophic and existential risks (...) such as climate change, we also have a (defeasible) reason for investing in developing and making life-suspending technologies (more) widespread. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the non-reciprocity problem does not apply to intergenerational justice. Future generations impact, here and now, on the well-being of people now living. I firstly illustrate the economic-synchronic model of direct intergenerational reciprocity (DIR): future generations allow people now living to maintain the economic system future-oriented and capital-preserving. The rational choice for people now living is to guarantee transgenerational sufficiency to future generations. I then analyse the axiological-synchronic model of DIR: future generations give meaning and (...) value to many of the activities that people now living carry out, and this is a compelling reason for the latter to worry about the former. I argue that only the economic-synchronic model of DIR can consistently explain why we need future generations. I conclude by discussing the limits of indirect intergenerational reciprocity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creating the Conditions for Intergenerational Justice: Social Capital and ComplianceAdelin-Costin DumitruIntroductionSuppose philosophers succeeded in putting forward two equally desirable theories of intergenerational justice. Both of them fare extremely well in regard to either a case-implication critique or a prior-principle strategy of argumentation (with the former requiring us to check the implications of a principle in counterfactual cases, and the latter testing the compatibility of a principle with certain more (...) fundamental values, according to Sen [197]). How are we to decide between them? To the extent that we believe that one of the purposes of political philosophy is to issue achievable and desirable recommendations (Stemplowska 319) or to be action-guiding (Swift 363), we might compare the two by applying a feasibility criterion. Such a criterion indicates that a state of affairs could be realized “if we were to summon sufficient practical will and direct our (individual or collective) efforts in the right direction” (Gheaus 450). In our case, the decision is a relatively easy one: both theories pass a threshold of acceptability and thus we would be morally justified in attempting to bring them about. Furthermore, by stipulation, world A in which theory x were implemented would be equally desirable as world B, in which theory y were implemented. The only distinction would be one concerning their feasibility.Nonetheless, this scenario is usually not one that is available to us. If theories differ based on their desirability as well as their feasibility, how are we to choose? One option would be to choose that moral theory which best satisfies the criteria mentioned by Buchanan, of moral accessibility, feasibility, and accessibility (Justice, Legitimacy). However, feasibility entails not only a static conception of duties, but a dynamic one, in which we postulate that agents have “duties that do not focus merely on what can be done in given [End Page 20] circumstances, but also on how to change circumstances so that new things can be done” (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 812). In the present article, I argue that taking the idea of dynamic duties seriously requires that we redirect our efforts and resources toward those actions that would maximize the probability of achieving a successful transition from a non-ideal to an ideal state of the world. The argument is that, in the specific context of intergenerational justice, we ought to pay more attention to the matter of social capital extant in a society, if we want to achieve the ends of an intergenerational theory of justice. The concept of social capital puts under the same umbrella distinct features of social life such as networks and civic engagement, the role of reciprocity and trust in building institutions, and the effects that informal rules and institutions have on formal ones (Ostrom and Ahn, “Social Science Perspective” 4). Intuitively, these aspects are relevant for an account of intergenerational justice. The particular way in which they are relevant will be detailed later in this article.The claim that I defend is that the higher the level of social capital in a community, the more probable it will be that individuals are willing to redistribute resources to future generations. The underlying assumption that holds throughout the article is that public justification is important in construing a defense of a conception of justice. I proceed as follows. In the first section, I present an account of social capital. In the second section, I present the literature connecting social capital to political philosophy. In the third section, I argue why developing social capital is a worthwhile goal to pursue if we want to achieve intergenerational justice. The fourth section presents a series of measures that can increase the level of social capital. The fifth section responds to a series of potential objections that could be raised and concludes the paper.The Many Faces of Social CapitalMuch of the intellectual history of the twentieth century was dedicated to institutions and their function in shaping the social, economic, cultural, and political order. In a comprehensive definition put forward by March and Olsen, institutions represent “routines, procedures, conventions, roles, strategies, organizational forms, technologies..., beliefs, paradigms, codes, cultures and knowledge that surround, support, elaborate, and... (shrink)

If our moral beliefs rest on a mistake, as moral error theorists claim, what should we do with them? According to Richard Joyce’s revolutionary moral fictionalism, error theorists should pretend to believe moral propositions in order to keep the benefits moral thinking has for their preference satisfaction. This, he claims, frees error theory from radical practical implications. In response, I argue that implementing fictionalism would not preserve our moral practices, but disrupt them. The change from moral belief to make-belief yields (...) an unintended second revolution: a revolution in the content of morality. I show that fictionalism necessarily relies on a similar justification of moral practices as David Gauthier’s contractarianism, and consequently has similar implications for moral content. Because fictionalists engage in moral thinking purely for its instrumental value, they should only accept moral obligations that are useful to them into their fiction. This restriction is important: the most useful moral fiction departs substantially from conventional moral views. Revolutionary moral fictionalism is therefore more radical than it is promised to be. (shrink)

The question whether distributive justice is at bottom practice-dependent or practice-independent has received much attention in recent years. I argue that the problem of intergenerational justice resolves this dispute in favor of practice-independence. Many believe that we owe more to our descendants than leaving them a world in which they can merely lead minimally decent lives. This thought is particularly convincing given the fact that it is us who determine to a significant extent what this future world will look like. (...) However, no practices that would trigger distributive obligations exist between distant generations. Thus, if we have to leave more than a minimum for future generations, we cannot conceive of distributive justice in terms of the justification of ongoing social interactions. Rather we have to think of the entire concept as an idea based on persons’ legitimate interests and capacity for well-being, and which abstracts from participation in particular practices. (shrink)

While in the realm of scholarly debate on intergenerational justice the mechanism of a transgenerational intertwinement has been often adopted as a chief conceptual device in view of overcoming ethical short-termism and legitimizing duties towards future generations, this paper aims at showing that there are good reasons for considering the opposite outcome. Drawing on three paradigmatic examples taken from three mainstream approaches in the debate—Rawls’s contractualism, Gauthier’s contractarianism, and indirect reciprocity—I will show how the grammar of presentism is still largely (...) operative under the surface of theories explicitly recurring to such a device and thereby advocating a chain of duties capable to reach the remote future. A short closing section will be devoted to endorsing a radical reorientation in ethics, such that a direct link to future invocations will be considered as a promising strategy for genuinely justifying intergenerational obligations. (shrink)