Obligations to Future Generations

Man, as he seems bent on proving, has it within his power to render the earth a barren and hostile environment for posterity. The increasing awareness of this fact has led many to argue that we have a moral duty to conserve in unpolluted form the earth's resources for the benefit of future generations. I shall assume that morally sensitive people find this claim to have some cogency. I intend to examine a nonutilitarian foundation for such a moral requirement.

Derek Parfit originally formulated the Repugnant Conclusion as follows: " For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living " (1984: 388). The blocks in Figure 1 represent two populations, A and Z. The width of each block shows the number of people in the corresponding population, the height shows their lifetime quality of life. All the people in Figure 1 enjoy positive welfare or, as we also could put it, have lives worth living (see well-being). People's welfare is much lower in Z than in A, but since there are many more people in Z, there is a greater quantity of welfare in Z as compared to A. Consequently, although the people in A lead very good lives and the people in Z have lives only barely worth living, Z is nevertheless better than A according to, for example, classical Utilitarianism (see utilitarianism). The Repugnant Conclusion highlights a problem in an area of ethics which has become known as population ethics. The last decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in questions such as " Is it possible to make the world a better place by creating more people? " and " Is there a moral obligation to have children? " The main problem is to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, their welfare, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take such aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population ethics is of general import for moral theory (see also intergenerational ethics; population; potential persons). As the name indicates, Parfit finds the Repugnant Conclusion unacceptable, and most philosophers seem to agree. It has been surprisingly difficult, however, to find a theory that avoids it without implying other counterintuitive conclusions. Thus,

Climate change raises a number of questions of intergenerational equity. One – and the one that attracts the most attention – is the question of what obligations people have to future generations not to engage in activities that will trigger dangerous climate change, and thereby impose harms on people in the near and distant future. The question of what we owe to future people is of critical importance when determining mitigation policy for it bears on when any generation should mitigate and by how much. The economic literature on this issue has tended to approach these questions by drawing on the idea of a 'social discount rate'. My aim in this paper is to examine the normative force of the considerations that are employed to determine the social discount rate. To do so, I will distinguish between three kinds of consideration invoked in analyses of discounting, assessing in each case their plausibility and their implications for climate change policy. The three kinds are, respectively, Pure Time Discounting, Growth Discounting and Opportunity Cost Discounting. I shall defend the following three claims: A. Pure Time Discounting gives us no reason to delay taking action to mitigate climate change (or for adopting a more gradual approach when implementing mitigation policies). B. Growth Discounting and Opportunity Cost Discounting can only justify very limited justification for delaying action to mitigate climate change. However, C. Growth Discounting-might (subject to two conditions), give us reason to pass on some of the costs of mitigating climate change (and adapting to climate change) to future generations.

This article examines the view that the interests of future generations should be taken into consideration in decisions likely to affect them. In particular, it has been argued that the interests of future generations should be represented in local, national or international political decisions. This view is analyzed in terms of justice-seeking and democracy-seeking arguments and the extent to which the representation of future generations will promote the respective values of justice and democracy. In order to promote democracy, such representation must be consistent with the criterion of democratic inclusion. Assuming that democratic inclusion is conceptualized in legal terms, the representation of future generations is consistent with democracy only to the extent that they are likely to be bound by the decisions made today. It is shown here that future generations are not bound by the decisions made today. Thus, it follows that representing the interests of future generations in political decisions is not consistent with securing democracy for the living generation. The intergenerational problem is therefore one where the demands of justice and democracy may conflict.

The absence of meaningfulness in life is meaninglessness. But what is the polar opposite of meaningfulness? In recent and ongoing work together with Stephen Campbell and Marcello di Paola respectively, I have explored what we dub 'anti-meaning': the negative counterpart of positive meaning in life. Here, I relate this idea of 'anti-meaningful' actions, activities, and projects to the topic of death, and in particular the deaths or suffering of those who will live after our own deaths. Connecting this idea of anti

Traditional ethical theories have paradoxical implications in regards to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future people. It has been suggested that the crux of the problem resides in an all too 'impersonal' axiology and that the problems of population axiology can be solved by adopting a 'Person Affecting Restriction' which in its slogan form states that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for people. This move has been especially popular in the context of medical ethics where many of the problems of population axiology are actualized. Examples are embryo or egg selection, pre-implantation genetic testing, assisted reproduction programmes, abortion, just to mention a few. I discuss a number of different interpretations of the Restriction and in particular one interpretation which I call Comparativism. According to this view, we should draw a distinction between uniquely and non-uniquely realizable people. The former people only exist in one out of two possible outcomes, whereas the latter exist in both of the compared outcomes. The idea is that we should give more weight to the well-being of non-uniquely realizable people or take it into account in a different way as compared to the well-being of uniquely realizable people. I argue that the different versions of the Person Affecting Restriction and Comparativism either have counterintuitive implications of their own or are compatible with traditional theories such as Utilitarianism.

Can we wrong individuals whose lives are worth living by taking actions that result in their very existence? The problem of justifying an answer to this question has come to be known as the non-identity problem. While the literature contains an array of strategies for solving the problem, in this paper I will take what I call the harm-based approach, and I will defend an account of harming—which I call the existence account of harming—that can vindicate this approach.

This paper argues that T.M. Scanlon's contractualism can provide a solution to the nonidentity problem. It first argues that there is no reason not to include future people in the realm of those to whom we owe justification, but that merely possible people are not included. It then goes on to argue that a person could reasonably reject a principle that left them with a barely worth living life even though that principle caused them to exist, and that current people could not justify creating people with barely worth living lives on the grounds that it caused those people to exist.

This contribution discusses the emergent field of Intergenerational Justice (IJ) with an aim to drawing new light upon issues in conservation. Several key issues in IJ are discussed that allow heritage conservation to be contextualised. Methods and debates from IJ are described and related to conservation practice. The paper is not an exhaustive review, but identifies links to pertinent issues in conservation.

While it is plausible that we should take the possible negative dynamics of healthcare allocation decisions into account, we may not need a principle of sustainability for this. Munthe, Furmagelli, and Malmqvist are correct that luck egalitarianism focuses on the past, however, this prominent theory of distributive justice can still take into account the interests of those who will be affected by our allocation decisions. This is the case because present allocation may unjustly affect people in the future. Indeed luck egalitarianism may plausibly consider it unjust if we do not take future people's interests into account.

As the title of this paper indicates, I’m going to discuss what we ought to do in situations where our actions affect future generations. More specifically, I shall focus on the moral problems raised by cases where our actions affect who’s going to live, their number and their-well being. I’ll start, however, with population axiology. Most discussion in population ethics

Environmental Values is an international peer-reviewed journal that brings together contributions from philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, geography, anthropology, ecology and other disciplines, which relate to the present and future environment of human beings and other species. In doing so we aim to clarify the relationship between practical policy issues and more fundamental underlying principles or assumptions.

Future generations, wildlife, and natural resources – collectively referred to as “the voiceless” in this book – are the most vulnerable and least equipped populations to protect themselves from the impacts of global climate change. Domestic and international law protections are beginning to recognize rights and responsibilities that apply to the voiceless community; however, these legal developments have yet to be pursued in a collective manner and have not been considered together in the context of climate change and climate justice. This book first identifies the common vulnerabilities of the voiceless in the Anthropocene era. It then proposes how the law can evolve to protect their interests more effectively through a stewardship-focused and rights-based system derived from the mandate inherent in the concept of sustainable development.

Politikwissenschaftliche Analyse demokratischer Nachhaltigkeitsinnovationen für zukünftige Generationen | Political science analysis of democratic sustainability innovations for future generations
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Purchase the book as softcover or ebook at springer.com/9783658188450 or in your local book store or library.
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Zukünftige Generationen werden von den Folgen heutiger Politik betroffen sein, sind aber in der Regel von den institutionalisierten Formen demokratischer Willensbildung ausgeschlossen. Aus Sicht des demokratietheoretisch wirkmächtigen Betroffenheitsprinzips, demzufolge alle, die von politischen Entscheidungen betroffen sind oder sein werden, in diesen repräsentiert werden sollen, erscheint dies als problematisch. Die in der Literatur daher vielfach erhobene Forderung, zukünftige Generationen heute politisch zu repräsentieren, führt die moderne Demokratie geradewegs in eine Aporie. Dies liegt zum einen an der sog. demokratischen Gegenwartspräferenz, die, angetrieben durch den Wahlzyklus, den Fokus der Politik auf kurzfristig vorzeigbaren Nutzen für die Wähler lenkt und die genuinen Interessen noch nicht existierender zukünftiger Generationen weitgehend ignoriert. Zum anderen liegt die Ursa-che hierfür in den Standardkonzepten politischer Repräsentation, die mit ihren Kategorien wie ‚Wahlen‘, ‚Autorisierung‘ und ‚Verantwortlichhalten‘ kontemporär nicht existierende Konstituenten wie zukünftige Generationen nicht erfassen können. Zukünftige Generationen können heute nicht politisch partizipieren.
Nichtsdestotrotz existieren ab den 1990er Jahren zahlreiche Institutionen, die die Interessen zukünftiger Generationen in den demokratischen politischen Entscheidungsprozess einbringen. Als Beispiele wären hier der Zukünftige-Generationen-Kommissar für Wales, die parlamentarische Kommission für zukünftige Generationen in Israel, der Ombudsmann für zukünftige Generationen in Ungarn und einige Nachhaltigkeitsinstitutionen zu nennen. Ihre Existenz überrascht und ist ein erklärungsbedürftiges Puzzle, da die Akteure des politisch-administrativen Systems (PAS) nach der These der demokratischen Gegenwartspräferenz keinen Anreiz haben, die Institutionalisierung solcher potenziell die Gegenwartspräferenz reduzierenden Institutionen zu unterstützen. Kates (2015) geht sogar davon aus, dass solche Institutionalisierungen nur dann möglich sind, wenn vorher über eine Modifikation der Rahmenbedingungen derselben die Gegenwartspräferenz des demokratischen Anreizsystems deutlich reduziert wurde.
Die Aporie, das Puzzle sowie der Befund, dass die politische Repräsentation zukünftiger Generationen zwar bisher in der Philosophie, kaum aber in der Politikwissenschaft erforscht wurde, motivieren die Fragestellung der Arbeit: Wie können zukünftige Generationen in der heutigen Demokratie politisch repräsentiert und wie kann die Aporie der Demokratie bezüglich zukünftiger Generationen reduziert werden? Zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage werden zunächst die Ausgangspunkte der Aporie genauer untersucht. Anschließend wird, aufbauend auf Rehfelds (2006) allgemeiner Repräsentationstheorie, das Konzept der Proxy-Repräsentation entwickelt. Der Begriff lehnt sich an den statistischen Proxy-Begriff an und hebt die Eigenschaft der Konstituenten der Proxy-Repräsentation hervor, selbst nicht mess- bzw. ansprechbar und zugänglich zu sein. Proxys sind als Vertreter zukünftiger Generationen dann alle Institutionen, die Proxy-Repräsentation betreiben, also deren Interessen in den politischen Entscheidungsprozess einbringen. Mithilfe der im Zuge der Konzeptbildung entwickelten Kriterien wird das Feld nach Institutionen durchsucht, die sich als Proxys verstehen lassen. Die 29 so identifizierten Proxys werden in Kurzfallstudien mithilfe von Dokumentenanalysen analysiert und nach der Höhe ihres Wirkungspotenzials in eine deduktiv entwickelte Typologie eingeordnet. Es stellt sich heraus, dass nur sechs der 29 Proxys über ein (eher, sehr) hohes Wirkungspotenzial verfügen. Um das Puzzle ihrer Institutionalisierung näherungsweise auflösen zu können, werden mithilfe einer modifizierten Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) die Rahmenbedingungen der Proxys mit hohem Wirkungspotenzial untersucht. Die Figur der demokratischen Selbstbindung sowie verschiedene modifizierte theoretische Ansätze der vergleichenden Policy-Analyse dienen hierfür vor dem Hintergrund der demokratischen Gegenwartspräferenz als theoretische Anker. Der überraschende Befund der fs/QCA ist, dass hin-sichtlich der Rahmenbedingungen keine systematischen Kausalitätsmuster identifiziert werden können und keine systematischen Unterschiede zur Institutionalisierung von Proxys mit niedrigem Wirkungspotenzial vorliegen. Kates These wird daher in Zweifel gezogen: Die Institutionalisierung von Proxys, die potenziell die demokratische Gegenwartspräferenz zugunsten zukünftiger Generationen und zuungunsten der Handlungsfreiheit heutiger Politiker reduzieren könnten, ist auch unter ungünstigen, gegenwartspräferenzinduzierenden Rahmenbedingungen möglich. Insgesamt liefert die Arbeit zahlreiche theoretische und empirische Erkenntnisse zu der Frage, wie die Aporie bearbeitet und zukünftige Generationen heute politisch repräsentiert werden können.

This article analyses the philosophical status and ground of biomimicry's most distinctive principle: nature as measure. Starting with the argument that this principle is ethically normative, I go on to compare the ecological ethic it embodies with Aldo Leopold's land ethic. In so doing, I argue that the ultimate measure against which the ethical rightness of our actions should be judged is the way of being of Gaia: letting be her present inhabitants. I then explore the idea that taking as measure Gaia's way of being provides powerful responses to a number of longstanding problems in environmental ethics, including the question of its 'centre', duties to preserve and restore nature, and duties to present and future beings.

There is a vast number of people who will live in the centuries and millennia to come. In all probability, future generations will outnumber us by thousands or millions to one; of all the people who we might affect with our actions, the overwhelming majority are yet to come. In the aggregate, their interests matter enormously. So anything we can do to steer the future of civilization onto a better trajectory, making the world a better place for those generations who are still to come, is of tremendous moral importance. Political science tells us that the practices of most governments are at stark odds with longtermism. In addition to the ordinary causes of human short-termism, which are substantial, politics brings unique challenges of coordination, polarization, short-term institutional incentives, and more. Despite the relatively grim picture of political time horizons offered by political science, the problems of political short-termism are neither necessary nor inevitable. In principle, the State could serve as a powerful tool for positively shaping the long-term future. In this chapter, we make some suggestions about how we should best undertake this project. We begin by explaining the root causes of political short-termism. Then, we propose and defend four institutional reforms that we think would be promising ways to increase the time horizons of governments: 1) government research institutions and archivists; 2) posterity impact assessments; 3) futures assemblies; and 4) legislative houses for future generations. We conclude with five additional reforms that are promising but require further research. To fully resolve the problem of political short-termism we must develop a comprehensive research program on effective longtermist political institutions.

Is the self-determination of future generations impeded by lasting constitutions, as Thomas Jefferson suggests? In this article it is not only argued that the opposite is true, but also that the question misses the point. It is demonstrated that the very demand for future generations’ full self-determination is self-contradictory, and that it is impossible to achieve. Applying the all-affected principle to future generations, it is shown that we will always affect them, and that we should employ an attitude of ‘reflective paternalism’ towards them. With the help of new institutions reviewed in this article, the interests of future generations could be introduced into today’s political decision-making process. The role of constitutions is to provide the prerequisites for democratic self-determination and potentially also to facilitate the institutional empowerment of future generations.

The author examines the problem of motivation about future generations. He argues that though many philosophers think that direct motivations are problematic for future generations only, they are not unproblematic for the current generations too, and that the motivation problem can be solved if we consider the idea of “leaving the earth no worse.” He also shows why such an idea should be promoted and can motivate us to work in the best interests of current and future generations. The author also contends that prioritizing the idea of “leaving the earth no worse” is not exclusively anthropocentric.

My students tend to rank Parfit’s 'Energy Policy and the
Further Future' among their favourite pieces. It is
a marvellously argued, eye-opening paper. One of
the most interesting passages comes right at the end, when Parfit
suggests that we should act as if we had never realised that the
non-identity problem exists:
“When we are discussing social policies, should we ignore the
point about personal identity? Should we allow ourselves to say
that a choice like that of the Risky Policy or of Depletion might
be against the interests of people in the further future? This is not
true. Should we pretend that it is? […] I would not want people
to conclude that we can be less concerned about the more remote
effects of our social policies. So I would be tempted to suppress the
argument for this conclusion.” (2010 [1983], 119)
In the paper, Parfit continuously stresses the implications of our
views on personal identity.

There is a tension between democracy and sustainable development: While democracies are jurisdictionally limited by national borders and are committed to the current interests of voters, the concept of sustainable development transcends these spatial and temporal boundaries. Regarding the intertemporal dimension of sustainability, the urgent issue of intergenerational justice is philosophically well-addressed. But what is still missing is an elaborated conceptual and argumentative link both to political science and to real-world democratic politics. Adapting concepts of democratic theory, this paper establishes the conceptual foundation for analysing how to consider the interests of future generations in our present-day democratic institutions.

First, it is laid out what is meant by future generations, and why it is so difficult to take their interests into account today. Second, the so-called non-identity problem is discussed and rejected. Third, it is demonstrated that future generations will be causally and legally affected by the political decisions of today, and therefore, that ignoring the respective policy impacts violates the democratic all-affected principle. Fourth, with this it is shown that the issue of future generations is an issue of deficient political representation. Therefore, the concept of proxy representation is being developed to encompass not yet present constituents such as future generations. Based on this, a list of real-world “proxy representatives” of future generations is presented.

Prospective parents are sometimes partial towards their future children, engaging in what I call ‘pre-parental partiality’. Common sense morality is as permissive of pre-parental partiality as it is of ordinary parental partiality—partiality towards one’s existing children. But I argue that existing justifications for partiality typically establish weaker reasons in support of pre-parental partiality than in support of parental partiality. Thus, either these existing justifications do not fully account for our reasons of parental partiality, or our reasons to engage in pre-parental partiality are indeed typically weaker than our reasons to engage in parental partiality.

Michael Rose’s Zukünftige Generationen in der heutigen Demokratie: Theorie und Praxis der Proxy-Repräsentation (Future Generations in Today’s Democracy: Theory and Practice of Proxy Representation) is an ambitious and fascinating work. It provides a new conceptualisation of the representation of future generations and it also delivers the most extensive empirical study of institutions for the representation of future generations available to date.

Role of Lala Har Dayal in the Ghadar Movement has not been property analyzed and determined. Some historians simply state that he was the founder of the Movement while others suggest it otherwise, but none of these was conclusively finalized based on facts. Ghadar Movement was started by the Indian immigrant in 1907 on the West (Pacific) Coast of North America. Within a span of 7 years, at the beginning of First World War, about 8,000 of them left their homes and hearths came to India to free it from the British rule. The Ghadar Movement did not succeed but it sowed the seeds for the future generations of revolutionaries to get motivation from its plans and deeds.

The paper, in dialogue with Ferdinando Menga's book, is devoted to discussing some problems about the issue of responsibility towards future generations. Especially, starting from a few points about the danger of the " bomb " , one wonders how it is possible to be responsible for an act that, among its consequences, will have the one of entirely extinguishing the very future human beings as those to whom one is supposed to respond. The paradox will be that we never could answer for the most criminal act, the one that will destroy humanity. For solving this illogicality, it is necessary to think a new concept of responsibility.

In recent years, scholars have deployed fiduciary concepts to explain or illuminate a dizzying array of public law regimes and institutions. To name but a few, this array includes constitutional law, administrative law, common law constitutionalism, international law, international human rights law, the law of judging, the law governing legislators, the law governing indigenous peoples, the law of armed conflict, national security and emergencies law, and international refugee law. The sheer range of topics treated may give the impression that there are few, if any, new frontiers in public fiduciary law. I argue that quite the opposite is true: the frontiers of public fiduciary law are vast and open. They are so because public fiduciary theory, within its domain (the domain of public law), is an interpretive theory of everything. I suggest that the theory underlying public fiduciary law is a theory of everything with respect to public law because the theory illuminates the salient features of the representative structure of public fiduciary relations. The most general normative implication of this representative conceptual structure is that office holders are under an obligation to exercise their power in a manner that can be understood as in the name of or on behalf of the persons subject to it. With this theory in place, we can explain why the frontiers are wide open in every sphere of public law—national, international, cosmopolitan, and transnational—and why they are just as expansive with respect to public fiduciary law and its relation to democracy, future generations, alternative theoretical frameworks, and jurisprudential inquiry. Indeed, the new frontiers of public fiduciary law are not simply open and expansive. They are also inviting.

The political representation of future generations would change the relationship between public decisions and the members of democratic political systems. In this paper we examine the implication of these changes on the responsibility of the living members for the future effects of current polices with special reference to climate change. The claim defended is that the collective responsibility of the living members for future outcomes diminishes when public decisions are made less responsive to them. In order to explain why this is the case a ‘participatory account' of collective responsibility is developed according to which collective responsibility is premised on the extent to which public decisions depend on their members. The paper concludes with a discussion on the grounds for valuing collective outcome responsibility and why the conflict between this norm and the claim that future generations should be granted political representation poses fundamental questions about the value of democracy.

In diesem Beitrag argumentiere ich für die folgenden
Schlussfolgerungen: Erstens, Quoten stellen keinen normativen Selbstzweck dar. Sie sind lediglich ein Mittel, um nicht-diskriminierende Auswahlverfahren sicherzustellen.
Zweitens, in einer Demokratie sind Quoten vor allem dann plausibel, wenn sie für die Besetzung derjenigen Ämter eingesetzt werden, die den größten Einfluss auf politische Entscheidungen haben. Drittens, Quoten für junge Bürgerinnen und Bürger lassen sich rechtfertigen, weil die Diskurse der Jungen aufgrund der demografischen Entwicklung Gefahr
laufen, vernachlässigt zu werden. Dessen ungeachtet
bin ich aufgrund der demografischen Entwicklung aber skeptisch, dass die politische Einflussnahme der Jungen durch im Rahmen der Demokratie rechtfertigbare Quoten entscheidend verbessert werden kann.

Proteger los derechos, los intereses o las necesidades de las generaciones futuras es hoy un estatuto desde el que somos poderosamente interpelados y que exige severos reajustes en nuestra civilización. Antes de decidir la medida en que atenderemos su llamado, ya sea en la forma de una ética responsable o en términos de justicia, valdría la pena revisar los discursos fundamentales, así como su desarrollo actual, para considerar algunos conflictos que surgen en su seno: desde las posibles ambigüedades -que nos conducen a fáusticos "malentendidos"-, a los reduccionismos -que facilitan la exclusión de ciertas partes inestimables de nuestro ecosistema. A (casi) todos estos trataremos aquí de responder, con la ayuda de algunas propuestas desde la ecología política.

In this paper I am going to talk about the “philosophy of life” project, which my colleagues and I have attempted over the last few years at our college. I believe research into the philosophy of life should contribute much to our discussion about many issues, such as democracy and war and peace in contemporary society. (......) In English, the words “philosophy of life” might sound like a personal philosophical view of one’s own life. However, we want to redefine it as an academic research field that covers:

1) Cross-cultural, comparative, historical research on philosophies of life, death, and nature,
2) Philosophical investigations on contemporary problems surrounding human & non-human life, and
3) Theoretical discussions of “life” and “philosophy of life” itself.