Suppose the present generation leaves future ones with a world depleted of all the natural resources required for many valuable human pursuits. Has the present generation acted unjustly? According to contemporary theories of liberal egalitarian intragenerational and intergenerational justice, the answer, it appears, is no. The explanation for this verdict lies in the liberal commitment to remaining neutral between different ways of life: many value-laden environ- mental sites and species are not an all-purpose means to any reasonable human end and (...) so their existence is not directly relevant in an assessment of whether justice obtains. Against this view, I argue that a commitment to neutrality and its underlying justification – the idea that individuals should be equipped to live lives of their own design – in fact supports the opposite conclusion. If justice requires that citizens can pursue whatever way of life they do or might value, then it will also demand the continued existence of the natural resources necessary for those pursuits. (shrink)

This paper approaches the choice between the open and closed nuclear fuel cycles as a matter of intergenerational justice, by revealing the value conflicts in the production of nuclear energy. The closed fuel cycle improve sustainability in terms of the supply certainty of uranium and involves less long-term radiological risks and proliferation concerns. However, it compromises short-term public health and safety and security, due to the separation of plutonium. The trade-offs in nuclear energy are reducible to a chief trade-off between (...) the present and the future. To what extent should we take care of our produced nuclear waste and to what extent should we accept additional risks to the present generation, in order to diminish the exposure of future generation to those risks? The advocates of the open fuel cycle should explain why they are willing to transfer all the risks for a very long period of time (200,000 years) to future generations. In addition, supporters of the closed fuel cycle should underpin their acceptance of additional risks to the present generation and make the actual reduction of risk to the future plausible. (shrink)

We should seek to justify, from a moral perspective, policies associated with serious and irreversible risks to the health of human beings, their societies, and the environment for these risks may have great impacts on the autonomy of both existing and future persons. The ideal of discursive democracy provides a way of morally justifying such policies to both existing and future persons. It calls for the inclusive, informed, and uncoerced deliberation toward an agreement of both existing and future persons, which (...) can serve as a justificatory basis for such public policies. This agreement best protects their fundamental interests and basic needs, and garners their general acceptance. It does so by upholding their agency in decision-making processes and, more specifically, by counseling a maxim of precaution in their public reasoning. The aim of this maxim is to protect the social and environmental conditions that will enable members of existing and future generations to review and, if necessary, revise decisions made in the past but that impact upon them in the present. Precautionary public reasoning thus serves to uphold the decisional agency of existing and future persons, which is a necessary condition of their democratic involvement in the policies that affect them and thus of their autonomous existence defined by their conceptions of the good. (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)