We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field by exploring the case for, and the implications of, ‘institutional longtermism’: the view that, when evaluating institutions, we should give significant weight to their very long-term effects. We begin by arguing that the standard case for longtermism may be more robust when applied to institutions than to individual actions or policies, both because institutions have large, broad, and long-term effects, and because institutional longtermism can plausibly sidestep various objections to individual (...) longtermism. We then address points of contact between longtermism and some central values of mainstream political philosophy, focusing on justice, equality, freedom, legitimacy, and democracy. While each value initially seems to conflict with institutional longtermism, we find that these conflicts are less clear-cut upon closer inspection, and that some political values might even provide independent support for institutional longtermism. We end with a grab bag of related questions that we lack space to explore here. (shrink)

This paper examines the intergenerational justice theory of obligations to future generations. I refer to queer temporality theory and highly evaluate its radical questioning. However, I argue that its destructive conclusions need not be accepted. Proper divisions of time spans according to the nature of the problem is important in order to reach a moderate conclusion.

This paper argues that the Lockean proviso can be utilized as a relevant principle of justice for food security under global climate change. Since reducing GHG emissions is key to enhancing food security, we suggest a global food security scheme that systematically allots, among all people, access to GHG sinks in food systems impacted by global climate change. For consideration of the scheme, it is important to have a principle of justice. Furthermore, it should incorporate the value of fairness. A (...) relevant principle of climate justice for food security should meet the following criteria: (1) the parties concerned under the scheme are states; (2) fairness does not undermine the requirement that the basic needs of all people must be met; (3) when determining fair burdens, a fair distribution of the rights to use GHG sinks should be sensitive both to each state’s responsibility for its GHG emissions and to (4) each state’s effort to reduce such emissions. With them in mind, first, we argue that the Lockean proviso can provide legitimate guidance for each state. Second, the Lockean proviso reasonably enjoins that a state has a right to a food system that secures its citizens’ basic needs, and a duty to meet the basic needs of other people. Third, the Lockean proviso can be deployed as a principle of both global justice and intergenerational justice for food security. Finally, the Lockean proviso enables us to count the reduction of GHG emissions by each state as “the fruits of its labors”. (shrink)

Despite being increasingly available to us all, retirement pensions remain unequally distributed: between rich and poor, young and old, men and women, and possibly different generations. As this topic receives little attention in moral and political philosophy, the articles in this thesis aim to deliver an original account of justice in retirement pensions along liberal egalitarian lines. The first part defends retirement pensions as a distribution of free time. It shows that including free time in the list of goods that (...) liberal egalitarians prioritise is plausible and avoids problems that would otherwise arise with other candidates, most notably leisure. Retirement as free time is an essential feature of liberal egalitarian societies by (re)distributing the means to pursue any life project, and especially valuable for the poor who work and contribute the longest. The second part makes a case for 'libertirement', a proposal to increase the freedom to enjoy free time across life, as a matter of justice between those who live long and those who die early. Specifically, I propose adding reverse pensions and sabbaticals on top of old-age retirement. Besides showing the importance of longevity for age-group justice, I also draw implications for distributing unconditional basic income and income taxes across life, which I suggest may offer alternative paths to libertirement. Finally, the third part discusses the cases of pension inequality between genders and generations, pushing us to refine our account further. I conclude that there is often a mismatch between liberal egalitarian justice and the design of retirement schemes. The solution is often but not always to reform these systems. Sometimes, we have reasons to revise our very own principles of justice. (shrink)

Burke suggests that we should view society as a partnership between the past, the present, and the future. I defend this idea by outlining how we can understand the interests of the past and future people and the obligations that they have towards each other. I argue that we have forward-looking obligations to leave the world a decent place, and backward-looking obligations to respect the legacy of the past. The latter obligation requires an understanding of the role that traditions and (...) meta-traditions should (and should not) play in tying together societies—especially national societies—over time. (shrink)

It is common practice in intergenerational justice to set fixed thresholds determining what qualifies as justice. Static definitions of how much and what to save for future generations, however, overestimate human epistemological limits and predictive capacity in regard to uncertainty in social- and ecosystems. Long-term predictions cannot account for the inherent range of contingent variables at play, especially according to contemporary theories of punctuated equilibrium. It is argued that policies deliberately testing ecological limits as currently conceived must be excluded from (...) political calculations to minimize current actions from foreclosing future life quality and options. To better reduce harms to present and future generations and support the stability of just institutions (and the stable environments they depend on) as Rawls and others demand, polities can overcompensate resource allocation to environmental sustainability. Focus on reducing environmental harms benefits both current and future generations, reconciling distributive versus intergenerational justice trade-offs. (shrink)

The common conception of justice as reciprocity seemingly is inapplicable to relations between non-overlapping generations. This is a challenge also to John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. This text responds to this by way of reinterpreting and developing Rawls’s theory. First, by examining the original position as a model, some revisions of it are shown to be wanting. Second, by drawing on the methodology of constructivism, an alternative solution is proposed: an amendment to the primary goods named ‘sustainability of (...) values’. This revised original position lends support to intergenerational justice as fairness. (shrink)

This dissertation is a contribution to the debate about ‘climate justice’, i.e. a call for a just and feasible distribution of responsibility for addressing climate change. The main argument is a proposal for a cautious, practicable, and necessary step in the right direction: given the set of theoretical and practical obstacles to climate justice, we must begin by making contemporary development practices sustainable. In times of climate change, this is done by recognising and responding to the fact that emissions of (...) greenhouse gases, with climate change as their result, are an immanent threat to any reflectively embraced development project. In the universal pursuit of progress, basic needs of both present and future people are put at risk. Even so, a political stalemate and business-as-usual prevail. The situation is locked up by an uncertainty about the exact impacts of choices made and by the reasonable disagreement of modern societies. The result is passiveness, and the passing on of a slowly and indiscernibly growing problem to future generations. This dissertation brings out a crucial message about the need to make our development sustainable. Instead of delaying action through trying to resolve the intractable epistemic and normative uncertainty fully, the focus should be on vindicating already shared points of practical convergence. On the constructivist method here adopted, the task is to characterise the agent and the situation faced from a practical and first-person point of view. More specifically, to specify the practical problem climate change gives rise to; the moral importance of needs (chapter three); how a principled priority of basic needs can be defended (chapter four), intergenerationally (chapter five) and internationally (chapter six); and what natural and social limits there are to development (chapter seven). These conceptions narrows the practice of development in the present context: it can be concluded that development must not risk the basic needs of anyone implicated. This common ground brackets off disagreement irrelevant to the urgent need to act, and so brings together otherwise deeply divided agents. A sufficientarian basic needs-principle, as the focus of an overlapping consensus, is practicable and anticipatory in the disuniting moral conundrum of climate change. (shrink)

Some key political challenges today, e.g. climate change, are future oriented. The intergenerational setting differs in some notable ways from the intragenerational one, creating obstacles to theorizing about intergenerational justice. One concern is that as the circumstances of justice do not pertain intergenerationally, intergenerational justice is not meaningful. In this paper, I scrutinize this worry by analysing the presentations of the doctrine of the circumstances of justice by David Hume and John Rawls. I argue that we should accept the upshot (...) of their idea, that justice is context sensitive, even if this at first sight seems to invalidate intergenerational justice. On the basis of moral constructivism, I subsequently provide a fresh reading of the doctrine according to which it conveys the idea that justice is the solution to a practical problem. However, as the problem background is evolving, we need to properly characterize the relevant practical problem in order to make ethical theorizing relevant. Contrary to what has been claimed, the circumstances of justice do not then clash with intergenerational justice, but are the necessary presuppositions for its advancement. (shrink)

Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this volume sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the authors look (...) more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices. (shrink)

A recent trend in bioethics has highlighted the decisive role that solidarity plays in global health. However, given the impact and extent of the effects of climate change, which reach beyond present generations, it is important to consider whether this concept can be applied intergenerationally. Does it make sense to talk about solidarity with future generations? The objective of this article is to explore ‘amplified solidarity’, a new concept of solidarity that explains our obligations towards the health and quality of (...) life of future generations. The analysis of this concept is structured as follows: I first establish the moral relevance of future people and then investigate the traits of amplified solidarity, its challenges, and its relationship with other key principles. I propose that amplified solidarity needs both a critical imagination to be projected towards the future and an institutional framework to correct health injustices across an intergenerational timescale. Solidarity forms a potent triangular constellation with responsibility and justice to fight against global and intergenerational injustices. (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)

This paper responds to five critics (Eva Buddeberg, Scott Marratto, Michael Naas, Janna Thompson, and Jason Wirth) and their commentaries on my Taking Turns with the Earth. Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice (Stanford University Press, 2018). In relation to the book’s argument, my response seeks to clarify and elaborate the role of indigenous philosophies; the meaning and value of the concept of earth; the ontology-ethics interface and the emergence of normativity with birth and death; the practical feasibility and motivational force (...) of the book’s proposals for conceptualizing justice for future generations, namely asymmetrical reciprocity and taking turns; and the role of democratic institutions for justice between generations in view of the global capitalist economy. (shrink)

While different worries about population size are present in public debates, political philosophers often take population size as given. This paper is an attempt to formulate a Rawlsian liberal egalitarian approach to population size: does it make sense to speak of ‘too few’ or ‘too many’ people from the point of view of justice? It argues that, drawing on key features of liberal egalitarian theory, several clear constraints on demographic developments – to the extent that they are under our control (...) – can be formulated. Based on these claims, we can clarify both the grounds and content of our obligations to future generations. (shrink)

Hitherto, ethics has barely addressed the normative significance of time and timeliness themselves. This contribution first distinguishes between four elementary respects in which time is normatively significant. This is followed by an investigation into the temporal dimension of distributive, restitutive, and retributive justice. It is shown that aspects of temporal duration and intervals are every bit as relevant for a theory of justice as are the finiteness of human life and of interpersonal relations.

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of (...) the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life. (shrink)

After introducing some of the many issues raised by intergenerational justice, the paper will focus in particular on the motivational problem: Why should we be motivated to act in favor of others when sacrifices on our behalf are required? And more specifically, how can such sacrifices be justified when those we act for are neither born nor easily unidentifiable? While many accounts of moral motivation exist, most scholars will grant that emotional engagement is a strong motivational drive. Hence, the paper (...) will focus on such a drive. I will, first, argue that immediate emotions and empathy – understood uniquely as a form of emotional attunement – are insufficient to grant that the acts they motivate are morally acceptable. The case of future generations is a perfect example of such insufficiency. Second, I will discuss the possibility of regulated emotions and sympathy playing such a role. In fact, by regulating and educating emotions, a conscious or “rational” component is added, which could help avoid the biases and limitations immediate affective phenomena show. Such a “rational” component would also enable us to provide a criterion to distinguish cases in which emotions drive us in morally acceptable or unacceptable directions. In the second part of the paper, the sentimentalist tradition will be reconsidered, with particular attention to Adam Smith’s moral proposal – since the sympathetic engagement of an impartial spectator could be an excellent example of a regulated and educated emotional attunement of the kind required to deal with some of the many moral issues future generations raise and, in particular, with the motivational problem itself. (shrink)