Three Problems of Intergenerational Justice

2009

Page 1. Libertarian Theories of Intergenerational Justice Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne in Justice Between Generations, edited by Axel Gosseries and Lukas Meyer (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 50-76. We here discuss and assess various libertarian positions on intergenerational justice. We do not attempt to defend libertarianism. Instead, we work out the most plausible version thereof and identify its implications for intergenerational justice. 1.

The Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 2014

Is it possible to justify the passing of property rights from one generation to the next, and the acquisition of citizenship rights, on the basis of inheritance? This paper raises two considerations which indicate that typical luck egalitarian arguments against the operation of any “hereditary principle” in the intergenerational succession of economic and political rights are not conclusive. Both considerations concern autonomy. The concept of inheritance can be seen to be justified when the social connectedness of individuals is appreciated – inheritance reflects the embeddedness of individuals in the lives and projects of others both in the past and in the future. So while there may be good liberal reasons to reject inheritance as a mode of property succession, for example that it might perpetuate or initiate unequal distributions, these do not begin to suggest that nothing can be said in its favor, morally speaking, if the autonomy of individuals is understood to be situated in p...

Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society, 1(1): 61-71, 2008

In this paper, the author offers a synoptic view of different theories of intergenerational justice, along two dimensions (savings/dissavings) and three modalities (prohibition, authorisation, obligation). After presenting successively the indirect reciprocity, the mutual advantage, the utilitarian and the Lockean approaches, special attention is given to the egalitarian theory of intergenerational justice. Two key differences between the egalitarian view on intergenerational justice and the sufficientarian interpretation of sustainability are highlighted.

Tremmel, Jörg (Ed.) (2006): Handbook of Intergenerational Justice. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. (350 p.; ISBN 1-84542-900-1)

2018

Concern with intergenerational justice has long been a focus of economics. This essay considers the effort, over the last three decades, to quantify generational fiscal burdens using label-free fiscal gap and generational accounting. It also points out that government debt -- the conventional metric for assessing generational fiscal justice,– has no grounding in economic theory. Instead, official debt is the result of economically arbitrary government labelling decisions: whether to call receipts “taxes” rather than “borrowing” and whether to call payments “transfer payments” rather than “debt service”. Via their choice of words, governments decide which obligations to put on, and which to keep off, the books. The essay also looks to the future of generational fiscal-justice analysis. Rapid computational advances are permitting economists to understand not just direct government intergenerational redistribution, but also how such policies impact the economy that future generations w...

1998

In modern political philosophy social contract theory is the most prominent approach to individual rights and fair institutions. According to social contract theory the system of rights in a society ought to be justified by reconstructing its basic features as a contract between the mutually unconcerned members of society. This paper explores whether social contract theory can successfully be applied to justify rights of future generations. Three competing views are analysed: Rawls's theory of justice, Hobbes's radical liberalism and Gauthier's bargaining framework based on the Lockean proviso.

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2017

2007

A key component of global ethics, defined as the systematic study of moral principles and theories that apply to the global realm, concerns the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens across time and space. Until recently, the philosophical literature on global distribution was dominated by the question of how benefits and burdens should be divided amongst contemporaries. Recent years, however, have seen a tremendous increase in research on the scope and content of our obligations to future generations. This has led to a number of innovative attempts to extend principles of distribution beyond the confines of the present generation while retaining a focus on the claims of the existing poor. In this article, I examine a key aspect of intergenerational justice, namely, the appropriate 'pattern' of benefits and burdens that should obtain across generations. With the aid of research into the impacts of global climate change, I compare the merits of rival accounts of the pattern of justice and go on to defend a 'sufficientarian' approach to intergenerational justice, which holds that as many persons as possible should enjoy enough well-being to lead a decent life regardless of when they live.

Human Affairs, 2019

The paper frames the issue of intergenerational justice by addressing an historical source and a theoretical difficulty. In relation to the historical point of view, the paper offers a preliminary re-reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights aimed at revealing the intergenerational commitment that lies behind it (§1). In addressing the second point, it presents the issue of intergenerational justice from a phenomenological perspective (§2). In developing such a perspective, the paper articulates a comprehensive ethical question that is constitutively related to any possible shaping of an intergenerational justice theory (§3). In turn, the explanation of that question presents the opportunity to propose a theory of motivation for the elaboration and implementation of policies explicitly aimed at fulfilling the intergenerational need, beyond any skepticism arising from pragmatic objections. Finally, the paper proposes to address this need by presenting a model of obligation...

The question whether distributive justice is at bottom practice-dependent or practice-independent has received much attention in recent years. I argue that the problem of intergenerational justice resolves this dispute in favour of practice-independence. Many believe that we owe more to our descendants than leaving them a world in which they can merely lead minimally decent lives. This thought is particularly convincing given the fact that it is us who determine to a significant extent what this future world will look like. However, no practices that would trigger distributive obligations exist between distant generations. Thus, if we have to leave more than a minimum for future generations, we cannot conceive of distributive justice in terms of the justification of ongoing social interactions. Rather we have to think of the entire concept as an idea based on persons’ legitimate interests and capacity for well-being, and which abstracts from participation in particular practices.