In this article, I explore the relationship between the supersession thesis and the rights of future people. In particular, I show that changes in circumstances might supersede future people’s rights. I argue that appropriating resources that belong to future people does not necessarily result in a duty to return the resources in full. I explore how these findings are relevant for climate change justice. Assuming future generations of developing countries originally had a right to use a certain amount of the (...) carbon budget, changing circumstances could result in rights-supersession. Consequently, members of future generations of industrialized countries may be allowed to use part of the share of the carbon budget belonging to developing countries. (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)

While anthropogenic species extinctions can be considered morally problematic for a range of reasons, they can also be described as a problem of interspecies justice. That is the focus of this paper in which we argue that human-caused species extinctions can be integrated within a non-anthropocentric account of reparative justice that is significantly similar to how reparation is understood within political theory at large. An account such as this faces a series of difficulties, such as how to make right past (...) injustices against victims that do not exist any longer and which belonged to species now extinct. For that purpose, we offer an argument in favour of symbolic forms of reparation in the form of, amongst other things, the preservation and restoration of habitat to materially repair the interspecies justice relationship; as well as monuments and education to honour the nonhuman dead. (shrink)

La mal llamada “Conquista del Desierto” constituyó una serie de campañas militares ocurridas en el actual territorio patagónico argentino entre los años 1878 y 1885 cuyo resultado fue el asesinato, la violación y sometimiento a la esclavitud de diversos pueblos y comunidades indígenas. Este no fue un caso aislado, sino que se suma a una serie de ataques sistemáticos que han sufrido los indígenas en la Argentina. En los últimos años, a raíz del reclamo y las luchas de los pueblos (...) y comunidades indígenas, así como también de las organizaciones de derechos humanos, se han comenzado a juzgar algunos de estos hechos. En particular, la Masacre de Napalpí (1924) y la Masacre de La Bomba (1947) fueron los primeros que lograron respuestas judiciales favorables. En ambos se determinó que el accionar estatal era constitutivo de un genocidio y, por lo tanto, se debía resarcir a las comunidades actuales. Ahora bien, la Campaña del Desierto, al día de hoy, no tiene respuesta por parte del Estado. Teniendo presente este panorama, nuestro objetivo en este trabajo es reconstruir los diferentes problemas que enfrenta la posibilidad del reclamo judicial. Para ello, comenzaremos describiendo en qué consistió la Campaña del Desierto. Luego, explicaremos la noción de genocidio aplicado a hechos de injusticias históricas. Como tercer paso, reconstruiremos los casos jurisprudenciales que se han preocupado por genocidios indígenas ocurridos en el pasado. Con este panorama revelado, nos enfocaremos en los diferentes problemas jurídicos y políticos que surgen en los reclamos de justicia. (shrink)

La emergencia climática impacta en el derecho humano a la salud, por lo que los Estados y la comunidad internacional deben tomar medidas concertadas y urgentes para enfrentar esta problemática. Este informe tiene como objetivo brindar herramientas desde un enfoque centrado en la relación entre el clima y la salud para abordar algunas de las preguntas sobre las obligaciones de los Estados incluidas en la Opinión Consultiva sobre Emergencia Climática y Derechos Humanos presentada por Colombia y Chile ante la Corte (...) Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. En este contexto, la adaptación de los sistemas de salud emerge como una prioridad para enfrentar los desafíos de la emergencia climática, especialmente para los grupos vulnerables, como mujeres, niños, personas mayores, personas con discapacidad y pueblos indígenas. Se describen facilitadores para una transición justa hacia una sociedad resiliente al cambio climático, incluyendo diversas formas de justicia (reconocimiento, procedimental, distributiva, intergeneracional y epistémica). Así como también, el deber de los Estados de investigar y establecer prioridades de investigación como garantía del derecho a la salud. Se aborda la brecha epistémica en el acceso al conocimiento científico y se enfatiza la importancia de la justicia epistémica para superar desigualdades en el acceso y la utilización del conocimiento. Palabras claves: derechos humanos, salud, cambio climático. (shrink)

I argue that changes in the numerical identity of groups do not necessarily speak in favour of the supersession of some historical injustice. I contend that the correlativity between the perpetrator and the victim of injustices is not broken when the identity of groups changes. I develop this argument by considering indigenous people's claims in Argentina for the injustices suffered during the Conquest of the Desert. I argue that present claimants do not need to be part of the same entity (...) whose members suffered injustices many years ago. For identifying the proper recipients of reparation, all that is necessary is that the group who suffered the historical injustice under consideration has survived into the present. I also support a view upon which present living members of a certain group have reasons to redress those injustices perpetrated by their predecessors if they are relevantly connected with each other. In particular, by relying on the notion of collective inheritance, I argue that if present-day members of a certain group claim that they are the continuation of the group whose past members bequeathed them certain goods, they cannot consistently reject such a membership when the very same people legated them certain evils. (shrink)

This chapter sides with those who believe that a right to stay should be counted among fundamental human rights. However, it also acknowledges that there are good reasons for objecting to the most popular justifications of the right to stay, which are based on the assumption that people have valuable ties to their community of residence and that people’s life plans are located where they live. In response to these qualms, this chapter argues that the best way to make sense (...) of the right to stay is to conceive it as belonging to the category of “control rights”; these are the rights that protect people’s control over their own bodies and personal space, which is an essential condition for personhood and human dignity. This account of the right to stay can overcome the most pressing objections to its recognition as a fundamental human right. (shrink)

This article argues against privileging the expectations of settlers over those of dispossessed peoples. I assume in this article that historical rights to occupancy do not persist through all changes in circumstances, but a theory of justice should reduce perverse incentives to unjustly settle on land in hopes of legitimating occupancy. Margaret Moore, in her 2015 book, A Political Theory of Territory, tries to balance these intuitions through an argument based on legitimate expectations. I argue that Moore’s attempt to reduce (...) perverse incentives (through expectation-altering institutional design) fails. Moore unduly privileges settler expectations, especially over those of indigenous peoples. I criticize United States court decisions resurrecting the expectations of past settlers in the allotment era (which share structural features with Moore’s arguments). Lastly, distinguishing between ‘final’ supersession of historical injustice through changing circumstances, and ‘dormant’ supersession, shows how indigenous claims to land and jurisdiction may revive. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis and compensation. Recently, Waldron has argued that claims for material compensation for the original injustice cannot be superseded. He limits supersession to issues of restitution. Waldron’s supersession thesis is frequently cited by opponents of claims based on historical injustice, so his view of compensation warrants close examination. In our article, we explain the details of Waldron’s ‘simple model’ of compensation, offer an internal critique of it, and try to sympathetically reconstruct (...) it. We contend that a crucial claim about this model does not work; his model would result in many more backward-looking compensatory claims than he realizes. Waldron’s allowing for material compensation claims from historical injustice is in tension with, or incompatible with, his long-expressed view that the spirit of the supersession thesis is that justice should be forward-looking and look to present-day costs. We have argued elsewhere that the abstract possibility that restitution claims may be superseded due to changing circumstances (what we call the ‘supersession thesis proper’) is separable from the question of whether justice has a forward-looking or backward-looking orientation. We argue here that Waldron’s model of compensation can best be made sense of through our distinction of ‘full supersession’ and ‘partial supersession.’ This allows us to show that Waldron’s model relies on a more strongly backward-looking orientation than he seems to endorse in his earlier works on restitution and his most recent article discussing compensation. We conclude by offering external criticisms of Waldron’s model of compensation. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to the people of sinking island states. When their territories inevitably disappear, what, if anything, do the world's remaining territorial st...

Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to the people of sinking island states. When their territories inevitably disappear, what, if anything, do the world's remaining territorial states owe them? According to a prominent ‘nationalist’ approach to territorial rights – which distributes such rights according to the patterns of attachment resulting from people's incorporation of particular territories into their ways of life – the islanders are merely entitled to immigrate, not to reestablish territorial sovereignty. Even GHG-emitting collectives have no reparative (...) duty to cede territory, as the costs of upsetting their territorial attachments are unreasonable to impose, even on wrongdoers. As long as they allow climate refugees to immigrate, receiving countries have done their duty, or so the nationalist argues. In this article, I demonstrate that the nationalist's alleged distributive equilibrium is unstable. When the islanders lay claim to new territory, responsible collectives have a duty to modify their way of life – gradually downsizing their territorial attachments – such that the islanders, in time, may receive a new suitable territory. Importantly, by deriving this duty from the nationalist's own moral commitments, I discard the traditional assumption that nationalist premises imply a restrictive view on what we owe climate refugees. (shrink)