Climate change can be interpreted as a unique case of historical injustice involving issues of both intergenerational and global justice. We split the issue into two separate questions. First, how should emission rights be distributed? Second, who should come up for the costs of coping with climate change? We regard the first question as being an issue of pure distributive justice and argue on prioritarian grounds that the developing world should receive higher per capita emission rights than the developed world. (...) This is justified by the fact that the latter already owns a larger share of benefits associated with emission generating activities because of its past record of industrialisation. The second question appears to be an issue of compensatory justice. After defining what we mean by compensation, we show that different kinds of compensatory principles run into problems when used to justify payments by historical emitters of the North to people suffering from climate change in the South. As an alternative, we propose to view payments from wealthy countries for adaptation to climate change in vulnerable countries rather as a measure based on concerns of global distributive justice. (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)

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extends further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is necessary (...) to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice. (shrink)

Was heißt es, sich in unserer globalisierten Welt als eine vollverantwortliche Person zu verstehen und zu verhalten? Einerseits scheint es richtig, dass wir global verantwortlich sind, d.h. dass wir auch gegen entferntes Leid etwas tun sollten; andererseits aber ist wegen vielfacher Überforderungsproblemen unklar ist, wie man diese Verantwortung tatsächlich übernehmen können soll – was wiederum dagegen spricht, dass wir diese Verantwortung berechtigtermaßen zuschreiben können. Um einen Aspekt dieses großen Themas zu behandeln, konzentriere ich mich in diesem Aufsatz auf den Anwendungsbereich (...) von extremer Armut und argumentiere in folgenden Schritten. Zuerst spitze ich das Thema zu auf ein Problem, das Samuel Scheffler in diesem Zusammenhang konstatiert hat, nämlich einen Widerstreit zwischen dem, was Verantwortung unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung bedeutet und dem, wie wir uns grundsätzlich als Handelnde zu verstehen gewohnt sind. Dann zeige ich erstens, dass dem Thema einer epistemischen Überforderung dabei entscheidendes Gewicht zugesprochen wird, zweitens jedoch, dass sich, genauer besehen, dieses Problem gar nicht in dieser Art stellt. Dafür schlage ich eine Analyse des Verantwortungsbegriffs vor, die es ermöglicht, Kriterien zu identifizieren, anhand derer gewisse Grenzen gezogen werden können, so dass die Zuschreibung der Verantwortung gerechtfertigt werden kann. (shrink)

My paper consists of two parts. The first part deals with the fundamental normative standards of domestic social justice on the one hand and global justice on the other, standards that are requisite in order to identify injustices on both levels. On this basis, the second part focuses on the interrelations between domestic social justice and global justice with particular attention to the interdependencies between domestic and global injustices.