Almost everyone believes that freedom from deprivation should have significant weight in specifying what justice between generations requires. Some theorists hold that it should always trump other distributive concerns. Other theorists hold that it should have some but not lexical priority. I argue instead that freedom from deprivation should have lexical priority in some cases, yet weighted priority in others. More specifically, I defend semi-strong sufficientarianism. This view posits a deprivation threshold at which people are free from deprivation, and an (...) affluence threshold at which people can live an affluent life, even though their lives may be even further improved beyond that point. I argue that freedom from deprivation in one generation lexically outweighs providing affluence in another generation; in all other cases, freedom from deprivation does not have lexical priority. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that we should limit procreation – for instance, to one child per person or one child per couple – in order to reduce our aggregate carbon footprint. I provide additional support to the claim that population size is a matter of justice, by explaining that we have a duty of justice towards the current generation of children to pass on to them a sustainable population. But instead of, or, more likely, alongside with, having fewer children in in (...) each family, we could also create families with more than two parents. I explore this possibility by pointing out the ways in which multi-parenting can advance children’s interests: in higher levels of well-being, in non-monopolistic child-rearing, and in a future opportunity to become themselves parents. (shrink)

A dominant area of inquiry within intergenerational ethics concerns how goods ought to be justly distributed between noncontemporaries. Contractualist theories of justice that have broached these discussions have often centered on the concepts of mutual advantage and reciprocal cooperation between rational, self‐interested beings. However, another prominent reason that many in the present feel that they have obligations toward future generations is not due to self‐interested reciprocity, but simply because they care about what happens to them. Care ethics promises to be (...) conceptually well‐suited for articulating this latter reason: given that future generations are in a perpetual condition of dependency on present‐day people's actions, this is precisely the kind of relational structure that care theorists should be interested in morally evaluating. Unfortunately, the care literature has been largely silent on intergenerational ethics. This article aims to advance this literature, offering the blueprints of what a care ethic concerning future generations—a “future care ethic”—should look like. The resultant ethic defends a sufficientarian theory of obligation: people in the present ought to ensure the conditions needed to encourage and sustain a world that enables good caring relations to flourish. (shrink)

In this article we argue that duties towards future generations are situated on the collective level and that they should be understood in terms of collective responsibility for structural injustice. In the context of climate change, it seems self‐evident that our moral duties pertain not only to the current generation but to future generations as well. However, conceptualizing this leads to the non‐identity problem: future persons cannot be harmed by present‐day choices because they would not have existed if other choices (...) had been made. Recently, Charlotte Franziska Unruh has proposed a solution that places the duties not on the individual level but on the collective level. The current generation has a responsibility for future generations as a whole. This solution is promising, but we argue that it problematically overlooks the existence of unjust relations within the contemporary collective, as we all contribute differently to bringing future generations into existence. Therefore, we propose to graft Iris Marion Young's Social Connection Model, which is concerned with structural injustice, on to the discussion of responsibility for future generations. Our proposal incorporates the strengths of Unruh's arguments, while also allowing for a differentiated responsibility based on different implications in unjust structures. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that the relationship between a parent and a child is objectively valuable, but few believe that there is any objective value in first creating a child in order to parent her. But if it is indeed true that all of the objective value of procreative-parenting comes from parenting, then it is hard to see how procreative-parenting can overcome two particularly pressing philosophical challenges. A first challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for prospective parents to (...) procreate given that adoption takes us much closer to both environmental and social justice. A second challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for biological parents to parent their biological child given that other prospective parents are willing and able to do a much better job at furthering the child's interests. In this essay, I argue that there is value in procreative-parenting, and that this value is of sufficient magnitude so as to block both the case against procreation and the case in favour of child re-distribution. (shrink)

This article argues that parents have a special, shared duty to organize for collective action on climate change mitigation and adaptation, but not for the reason one might assume. The apparently obvious reason is that climate change threatens life, health and community for the next generation, and parents have a special duty to their children to protect their basic human interests. This argument fails because many parents could protect their children from these central harms without taking more general action to (...) combat climate change, let alone to mitigate it. Instead, subtler reasons are advanced, drawing on children’s relational interests or on their interests as moral agents. It is argued that parents owe it to their children to combat climate change because of the indirect impact on current children of serious threats to their children and grandchildren, and of being required to live in a radically unjust world. It is further argued that parents may owe it directly to their more distant descendants to mitigate climate change because of the role current parents played in bringing them into the world. (shrink)

This paper aims at answering some of the objections to the NIP’s criticism of the idea of rights of future persons. Those objections usually adopt different perspectives depending on how they understand differently the nature of the correlativity between rights and duties – some adopt a present-rights-of-future-persons view, others a future-rights-of-future-persons view, others a transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view, and others still an eternalist view of rights and persons. The paper will try to show that only a non-transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view can survive (...) the challenges posed by the notion of correlativity inherent in the NIP, and thus preserve rights language when discussing the future. This view is proved also more suitable for the legal and political realms, where policies and law-making are usually more concerned with present addressees and short term effects. (shrink)

This paper develops a future-oriented and person-centred normative argument based on expectancies that is immune to most of the problems identified in the rights of future persons. The argument unfolds in four parts. The first draws on the notion of expectancies present in inheritance law and maintains that it is possible to formulate a rule of prospective beneficiaries that correlates with entitlements and legitimate claims without necessarily acquiring the status of rights. The second extends expectancies to future persons and concludes (...) that the latter can be considered present holders of such currently binding entitlements. The third section raises the question of whether democracies are bound to a principle of fidelity towards expectancies in such a way that outweighs current people’s rights in cases of conflicts. The response does not prove particularly future-beneficial in such cases. However, section four clarifies why expectancies still carry a crucial moral weight in democracies, one that is not sufficiently established by depersonalised forms of future-oriented ethics. (shrink)

A theory of intergenerational justice consists in the study of the moral and political status of the relations between present and past or future people, more specifically, of the obligations and entitlements they can potentially generate. The challenges that justify talking about responsibilities between generations are myriad. And the disputes they prompt can focus on the past just as much as on the present, even though the fact that the human species has reached a state of technological progress that enables (...) it to have an irredeemable impact on the planet and perhaps even endanger future human existence tends to make concerns about the future more pressing. Debates on intergenerational justice are twofold. The first revolves around the issue of whether claims of justice across generations whose members' lifetimes do not necessarily overlap could be justified. And the second revolves around the specific conception of justice in play, that is, around the nature of the standard that must be applied as well as around the identification of the contents of the duties that present generations supposedly have vis-à-vis past or future generations. This survey article depicts the conceptual and argumentative framework in which these debates are set. It aims to outline certain of the main features shared by the most influential contemporary theories of intergenerational justice, and the problems inherent in them. It concludes by suggesting that, even though the idea of succeeding generations is merely an abstraction, there are specific empirical states of affairs that require different theoretical responses to intergenerational justice. (shrink)

Conservation biologists agree that humanity is on the verge of causing a mass extinction and that its primary driver is our immense and rapidly expanding global economy. We are replacing Earth’s ten million wild species with more of ourselves, our domesticated species, our economic support systems, and our trash. In the process, we are creating a duller, tamer, and more dangerous world. The moral case for reducing excessive human impacts on the biosphere is strong on both anthropocentric and biocentric ethical (...) grounds. The sine qua non for doing so is reducing human numbers and the size of our economies, while increasing the global acreage set aside in protected areas. We should take these steps as part of comprehensive efforts to create just and sustainable societies in which both humans and other species can flourish. (shrink)