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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Can people alive now have duties to future generations, the unborn millions? If so, what do we owe them? What does “justice” mean in an intergenerational context, both between people who will coexist at some point, and between generations that will never overlap?
In this book, Axel Gosseries provides a forensic examination of these issues, comparing and analyzing various views about what we owe our successors. He discusses links between justice and sustainability, and looks at the implications of the fact that our successors’ preferences are heavily influenced by what we will actually leave them and by the education they receive. He also points to how these theoretical considerations apply to real-life issues, ranging from pension reform and Brexit to biodiversity and the climate crisis. He ends by outlining how intergenerational considerations may translate into institutional design.
Anyone grappling with the dilemmas of our obligations to the future, from students and scholars to policy makers and active citizens, will find this an invaluable theoretical and practical guide to this moral and political minefield.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Silence and diversion
Generation: two meanings (among others)
Four illustrations
Cohortal primacy
The overlap
Is justice really the issue?
Road map
Notes
1 Can we act
unjustly
toward the future?
The non-identity problem
Harm and non-existence
Harm and distributive justice
Strategy 1: new grammar
New grammar’s limitations
Strategy 2: containment and deathbed assessment
Containment’s limitations
Strategy 3: full severance
Conclusion
Notes
2
How much
do we owe the future?
Intergenerational justice: four accounts
Generational (dis-)savings
View 1: non-decline
View 2: better future
View 3: having enough
View 4: narrow path
Should generational inheritance rule?
Who should set the standard? Cleanliness rules
Generational inheritance: standard or constraint?
Justice without sustainability (and conversely)?
Non-decline vs. sufficientarian sustainability
Sustainability without justice
Justice without sustainability
Conclusion
Notes
3
What
do we owe the future?
Metrics for contemporaries
Basic needs, basic capabilities
Dworkinian resourcism
Guessing future talents and tastes
Taking preference dynamics seriously: three proposals
Proposal 1: intangible heritage
Proposal 2: open options
Proposal 3: inculcating frugal preferences
Substitutions
Conclusion
Notes
4 What are our
climate duties
to the future?
Past harms, non-overlap, and special obligations
Does the anthropic nature of pre-1990 emissions matter?
Distributive climate justice: three views
Emissions in the past, duties to the future
Can climate degradation be fair to the future?
Can early efforts be fair to the present?
Can a positive social discount rate be fair to the future?
Conclusion
Notes
5 Can policies be
legitimate
toward the future?
Distributive justice and democratic legitimacy
A voiceless and toothless future
Government
of
the future?
Government
for
the future,
by
the future?
Legitimacy
toward
the future?
Bleak implications?
Future-sensitive institutional design
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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What is Intergenerational Justice?
Axel Gosseries
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Axel Gosseries 2023
The right of Axel Gosseries to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2571-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2572-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941388
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
Philosophy is a collective (and intergenerational) effort. My debt is huge to all those who had the generosity and patience to share their thoughts with me over the years on the issues discussed in this book. This includes the small community of scholars working on intergenerational justice, but also my close colleagues and students at Louvain University and at other academic institutions where I had the chance to go for research or teaching visits. I want to stress that I have been unable to do justice to all the great papers published on the topic, as this would have turned the book into an encyclopedia. I am sure that some of you will feel hurt by this lack of recognition. I hope that you will forgive me and understand that it merely reflects the lack of space allowed by a concise book like this one.
I had the great privilege of receiving insightful feedback on specific issues or full draft chapters from several friends and colleagues. They include Pierre André, Kim Angell, Chris Armstrong, Arshak Balayan, Ludvig Beckman, Greg Bognar, Eric Boot, Eric Brandstedt, John Broome, Paula Casal, Louis Chauvel, Steve Gardiner, Anca Gheaus, Inigo Gonzalez Ricoy, Robert Goodin, Jonathan Hoffmann, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Catriona McKinnon, Tim Meijers, Patrick Meyfroidt, Soren Mitgaard, Andreas Mogensen, Gregory Ponthière, Raffaele Rodogno, Liam Shields, Adam Swift, Vincent Vandenberghe, Christophe Vandeschrick, Philippe Van Parijs, Alexandru Volacu, Nicholas Vrousalis, and Andrew Williams. To some extent, they are the co-authors of this book, even if I’m happy to take full responsibility for the many remaining imperfections.
I also had the chance of presenting earlier versions of some of the chapters over the last few years in front of various audiences at seminars and crash courses, including at Aarhus (AU/AIAS), Amsterdam (UvA), Barcelona (UB), Bayreuth (UB), Bergen (UiB), Braga (UM), Budapest (MTA), Burgos (UBU), Campinho (FPP), Coimbra (UC), Copenhagen (AAU), Frankfurt (Normative Orders), Hamburg (UH), Leuven (KULeuven), Lisbon (Gulbenkian/UNL), London (LSE), Luxembourg (MPI), Manchester (MANCEPT), Marseille (IMéRA), Monaco (AOMF), Oviedo (UO), Paris (UPEC), Pisa (SUSP), Riga (SSE), Rome (LUISS), Stockholm (IFFS), Tbilisi (TSU), Trondheim (NTNU), and Yerevan (YSU). What you will read owes a lot to the minds and hospitality of those audiences too.
Work on this book has benefited from funding from various institutions. The FNRS is definitely the first one to mention, having been my main employer for a quarter of a century. It has always left me an incredible amount of freedom. Let me also mention specific FNRS research grants that allowed me to spend time at Stockholm’s Institute for Future Studies (2016–18) and Aarhus’s Institute of Advanced Studies (2019). In addition, I benefited from research budgets from Louvain University’s ARC “SAS Pensions” project and from various other institutions including Stockholm’s Institute for Future Studies. Thanks to them for their precious support.
At Polity, I would like to thank especially Julia Davies, George Owers, and Fiona Sewell for their support and patience. Also, two anonymous referees wrote invaluable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript. They all gave me the motivation and the space to express myself in the best possible way. Thanks for this!
I owe a last word to my friends and my close family. Writing this book has taken a lot of my energy. Without your support, I would not have managed to complete it. Besides Maria and Alicia, I owe a special mention to my Dad, who was certainly the most impatient among them to see this book come to life. Thanks for your soft and tireless smiling pressure, Dad!
Introduction
Key environmental and social challenges often exhibit a salient generational dimension. Climate change concerns standardly point to our duties to future generations or to those resulting from past emissions. Nuclear waste management requires a long-term perspective, anticipating burdens for centuries ahead. Worries about pension equity and sustainability typically stress questions of fairness across coexisting generations. The 2016 Brexit vote raised concerns of democratic legitimacy framed in generational terms, the young having to live for longer with the consequences of a vote that they disagreed with. As to the 2019–22 COVID crisis, the saliency of the age criterion in access to intensive care units (ICUs) and vaccines, as well as the differential vulnerability across ages to both COVID and anti-COVID measures, led many to wonder whether our youth had been unjustly sacrificed.
Generational concerns cannot simply be swept aside. They are practically significant and often philosophically sticky. They also connect with issues of existential threats, with concerns about the very continuation of humankind. One assumption of this book is that explicit philosophical thinking can help us grasp the conceptual and normative issues at stake and guide us toward fair solutions. We will straddle conceptual and normative territories. This will allow us to formulate and defend normative claims about what we owe each other as members of different generations. Changing society requires lucidity on natural and social facts, inventiveness on means, and a lot of work, courage, and political determination, but also a sense of what our means and goals should be. Spelling out the latter requires mastering a minimally rich repertoire to address the complexity of justice issues that pervade such challenges. Robust policy requires clear directions. Democratic policy requires a citizenry properly equipped to reflect upon and articulate its intuitions about what intergenerational justice is about. Philosophical clarification is one of the necessary steps in that direction.
Hence, this book on generations and justice is intended for philosophers and non-philosophers alike. It builds on work by philosophers over the last decades.1 It focuses on the present and the future, less on our relationship with the past. It will not discuss measurement methods or alternative indicators to gross domestic product (GDP).2 Nor will it provide up-to-date figures about whether the next generations can be expected to be worse off than us or whether some generations among us have been sacrificed. Yet it bears on these questions in important ways. It will explore whether what we owe the future is a matter of justice at all. It will discuss whether justice requires that the next generations be better off than us. It will look into how to assess whether a generation is doing better than another. It will touch on how institutional design may contribute to intergenerational fairness.
Silence and diversion
Engaging with generations reminds us of the fragility of our existence. We navigate between predecessors and successors, like tiny paragraphs of an open narrative in the writing. These relations confront us with philosophical puzzles. We are facing the possibility of strong duties toward beings that we may be unable to harm in a meaningful sense. We are expected to divide cakes without knowing how many guests will join us and what their tastes will be. We owe each other objects and actions along a time dimension that exhibits irreversibility.
In devoting time to philosophical explorations, we should neither lose sight of their real-life relevance, nor be naive about widespread rhetorical uses of the generational framing. Caution is needed on the latter, for two reasons that I will label “silence” and “diversion.” Saying a few words about this from the outset will allow us to proceed without undue skepticism or unnecessary misunderstandings.
The “silence” idea refers to citizens, activists, and politicians invoking absent generations in support of their views, whatever the latter may be. They use phrases such as “we owe x to the future” or “we owe x to our ancestors,” especially in circumstances in which arguments are hard to produce. Expressing concern for currently absent generations tends to signal noble, other-regarding intentions. Yet actual intentions may not always be so. Such phrases might instead be used in some cases to put disagreeing parties in an uncomfortable position. For dissenting may be read by some as a sign of indifference to other generations, rather than as a token of disagreement about what we owe the past or the future. More importantly, absent generations are silent: never do we come across dead or future demonstrators upholding “not in my name” banners. Hence, phrases invoking absent generations may sometimes be taking advantage of the silence of absent people in whose name policies are advocated. And they may also sometimes aim at trying to silence dissenters who disagree on our interpretation of what we owe the future. While intergenerational concerns make sense, we should always remain conscious of perverse uses of such concerns.
The other word of caution has to do with the worry that framing things in generational terms can serve as a “diversion” to reduce pressure on fighting injustice between genders, racial groups, or social classes, or even as a way of justifying furthering such injustices. Diversion may be worrisome in several ways. One can be concerned about the fact that focusing on generational differences may distract us from addressing what some consider to be much larger differences, for instance between social classes. Yet one can also worry about the fact that generational equity may be used to attack social rights – for example, in pension or health care – with the effect of deepening the gap between social classes even further.3
It is likely that generational framing is often used with such a diversionary purpose. Yet I am not prejudging at this stage about the relationship between the generational dimension and other dimensions of justice, such as global justice or gender justice. I will not assume that intergenerational justice concerns should be given more weight than global justice or gender justice concerns, for instance. I will also not assume that intergenerational injustices tend, as a matter of fact, to be larger than, for instance, class or racial injustices. And I will not assume that promoting intergenerational justice in specific policies will automatically contribute to furthering justice along other dimensions. In fact, the possibility of such a convergence depends in part on how we understand generational concerns, an issue to which I now turn.
Generation: two meanings (among others)
What do we mean by “generation”? Focusing on intergenerational justice is undoubtedly driven by an interest in how time relates to justice. It expresses a concern about justice between individuals that are located at different moments in history. It differentiates situations in which their existences overlap from situations in which they don’t. It explores what follows from the fact that investment in technology requires time, or from the fact that the passage of time transforms individuals. And yet the relation between time and intergenerational justice is a complex one, as is that between space/territory and global justice. Some issues of justice for which time is central do not necessarily involve individuals from different generations. This is so when a theory of justice integrates the notion of “fresh starts” or cares about fairness between slow and fast people.4 While justice across time and justice between generations overlap, they do not fully coincide.
Referring to justice “between generations” rather than, for instance, to “justice between individuals across generations” may also suggest that the value of a generation is irreducible to the value of its members, or even that the former trumps the latter. This may echo the independent – and sometimes superior – value ascribed to nations by some philosophical nationalists. Relatedly, referring to justice “between generations” could also suggest that generations should be treated as black boxes, ignoring “intragenerational” – or rather “non-generational” – injustices. It could even be read as focusing on generations that have a strong sense of self-identity and/or demonstrate especially strong vintage effects that distinguish them from one another.
None of this is implied here. I take “intergenerational justice” as meaning “injustices between individuals from different generations.” I do not assume that non-generational injustices are morally less significant – or factually smaller – than intergenerational ones. Nor do I imply that generations matter more than the sum of their members. Nor should intergenerational justice disregard non-generational injustices. Nor do we necessarily need a sociologically rich notion of generation to proceed. The generational dimension is “just” one angle through which to look at injustices between individuals – not an insignificant one at all, yet one among significant others.
Now, to understand what I positively mean by “generation,” we ought to contrast two meanings of the word: “age group” and “birth cohort.”5 While morally significant, this is a tricky distinction to grasp and use for several reasons, confusion pervading both across the social sciences and in public debate. The tight interrelation between the two realities also contributes to rendering intergenerational relations special.
An age group is a group of individuals that includes all the people who fell, fall, or will have fallen within a given age range – for instance being a teenager – when they did, do, or will do. Aristotle – my amazing Greek colleague – and Jeanne Calment – the French supercentenarian – were both part of the age group “teenagers” during ten years of their life. This is true regardless of whether one of them died at 62 whereas the other died at 122, or of the fact that one lived in the fourth century BC whereas the latter lived across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When we focus on the young Aristotle or the young Jeanne Calment, we look at them “as teenagers.”
In contrast, a birth cohort is a group of individuals including all those who were born within a given period of time, typically one or two decades. For instance, the birth cohort “Millennials” includes all those born between 1980 and 2000, all along their lives. “Birth” is key in the phrase “birth cohort” (or “birth-period group”). In a single-generation world in which all would be born on the same date and all would have exactly the same longevity, we all would be part of the same birth cohort and of the same age group at each moment in time. However, our actual world is one of asynchronous births and deaths, a world in which birth cohorts follow one another and in which not all of us reach the same age at the same time.
Hence, the words “young adults” (age group) and “Millennials” (birth cohort) point to distinct ways of dividing up human populations. While the lucky among us will successively belong to several age groups – children, teenagers, adults, elderly – all of us, regardless of how lucky we are after our birth, will be part of a single birth cohort and be stuck with it. Also, the number of live members of an age group may exhibit ups and downs, through fluctuations in natality, longevity, or mobility. In contrast, the number of live members of a birth cohort reaches its peak as soon as we reach the end of the reference birth period. From then on, it starts declining until the birth cohort dies away. From the year 2000 onward, the population size of Millennials started its decline. In contrast with age groups, birth cohorts are mortals.
Four illustrations
The “birth cohort/age group” distinction is difficult to use. Both notions involve the passage of an identically indexed time that runs within an individual’s life (successive age groups) or unfolds along humankind’s journey (successive birth cohorts). Let me clarify the meaning and significance of this distinction for justice through four examples.
Our first example is climate change. Global warming raises clear issues of justice between birth cohorts. Did those that turned adult by 1990 act in a climatically fair manner toward the next generations? Are we putting in the necessary effort to reach a climate that is fair toward those who will come into existence in a century? Besides this cohortal dimension, global warming also raises issues of justice between age groups, for instance to the extent that elderly people tend to be more vulnerable to heat waves.
Consider, then, fairness in retirement pension schemes as a second example. Whenever we express concern about the ability of a pension scheme to adequately cover elderly people’s basic needs, we are defending a certain view about justice between age groups. Similarly, worries about not overburdening the active population as providers of pension benefits imply assumptions about what one age group owes another. In contrast, when we adjust retirement age or the level of pension benefits to the evolution of life expectancy, we may aim at spreading the costs of demographic change across various birth cohorts, assuming perhaps that none of them should bear a larger proportion of the associated burden. Similarly, when some invoke the idea that each cohort should get back in pension benefits no less than it has put into the system through contributions,6 they are concerned about birth cohorts too, albeit with a different idea of justice in mind.
Education policies are our third example. What kind of education we owe our children clearly raises issues of justice between age groups. How much of their budget should adults invest in their children’s education? How far is it acceptable to act paternalistically toward children, imposing on them compulsory education or prohibiting them from working? Should elementary schools be seen primarily as a safe space protecting a precious sphere of childhood or, rather, mostly as an instrument to begin forming future professionals? Or should access to education be cheaper for young people than for adults? These questions are clearly about what we owe age groups.
Yet issues of justice between birth cohorts also arise in education. For instance, we will see in chapter 3 that asking ourselves about the kinds of preferences and values (if any) that should be taught to the next generation is key to justice between birth cohorts. Whether preserving pieces of heritage for the remote future will turn out to be valuable may also depend on whether we make sure to transmit to the future the ability to value such heritage or the technology to understand, use, or fix it. Similarly, if we exhaust easy-to-use natural resources, whether this is morally acceptable depends on “resources–technology” substitutability. And again, transferring substitutive technology to the next birth cohort requires educating its members to make sure they can benefit from it.
Our last example is the COVID-19 crisis. Age played a central role in our initial responses to it. Yet pointing to age does not necessarily entail that we merely care about age groups. We began facing the crisis under the assumption that age was a significant indicator of COVID-19 vulnerability. In many countries, we gave priority to the young in access to intensive care and to the elderly in access to vaccines. Such priorities were in fact driven mostly by efficiency concerns in access to health care across different age groups.
Yet the cohortal dimension was far from absent. Consider the worry that we may have sacrificed our youth. Young people were the least vulnerable to the virus and strongly affected by measures such as lockdowns. The idea of “sacrificing our youth” may primarily reflect a cohortal concern: the fear that they may end up having had a worse destiny than ours by the end of their life, due to scarring effects associated with COVID measures. I am not saying here that the “sacrificing our youth” claim is right. I am simply claiming that it is best understood as one of justice between birth cohorts.
Cohortal primacy
I stressed the need to distinguish “birth cohorts” from “age groups” for the purpose of justice. This book focuses on the former, for reasons of space, but also due to some primacy of justice between birth cohorts over justice between age groups.7 By “primacy,” I do not mean that there is no room for independent concerns of justice between age groups. Rather, I mean that while a theory of intergenerational justice involving no independent concern for age groups is conceivable, the reverse – i.e. a theory of intergenerational justice involving no independent concern for birth cohorts – would be implausible. Here are two considerations supporting such cohortal primacy.
First, there is the idea of justice between “entire lives” – “over lifetimes” – and its implications. The core claim shared by any version of the “entire-life” (or “lifetime”) view – be it radical or moderate – is that fairness between members of two different generations cannot be meaningfully assessed without considering how each of them is likely to fare over her entire life.
The idea is that age-based differential entitlements will frequently remain unproblematic if they do not worsen entire-life inequalities. Some support teenager disenfranchisement in part by stressing that neighboring generations were or will be subject to the same temporary disenfranchisement. In a non-negligible set of cases, age-based differential treatment will not lead to differential treatment over people’s lifetime. Sometimes, age-based differential treatment even reduces inequalities over entire lives. Allocating a vital organ to the young may contribute to reducing the gap between long-lived and short-lived persons. In addition, if we need to choose between reducing unfair inequalities at specific points in time or reducing unfair inequalities over people’s entire lives, the “entire-life” view gives priority to the latter.
Of course, a theory of justice between age groups does not need to reject every synchronic inequality between two age groups either. Such a theory could even give some weight to comparisons over entire lives. However, the latter seem more at home with a cohortal approach because, although it is possible to define what age groups owe each other while endorsing the lifetime view, it seems less meaningful to engage in fairness-inquiring cohortal comparisons without endorsing a lifetime perspective. One will be inclined to compare two cohorts over what they ended up having enjoyed and suffered by the end of their entire lives. One might be less willing to compare two cohorts through the exclusive prism of how they fared during the first ten decades of adulthood, for instance, regardless of the rest of their lives. In addition, if our conception of justice between age groups takes the lifetime intuition on board, the cohortal approach might end up capturing many of the concerns that an independent view on age group justice may express. This is so whenever age-based differential treatment is mainly problematic to the extent that it translates into differential treatment over complete lives.
The second consideration supporting cohortal primacy hinges on the relative magnitude of the intergenerational transfers at stake. Let me define descending transfers as forward-oriented ones, running from us to the next generation(s). In contrast, ascending transfer(s) are backward-oriented ones, running from us to the previous generation(s). While the world of birth cohorts may seem more one-directional at first sight, bi-directionality definitely arises in the world of age groups. Taking care of our elderly parents or teaching our teenagers involves interactions between age groups in both directions.
Now, even if we limit interactions between age groups to the overlap, descending transfers are arguably larger than ascending transfers. Merely looking at state-based social transfers may leave us with the impression that we are living in pro-elderly societies, in which ascending intergenerational transfers between age groups are larger than descending ones. However, once we add cash and care transfers that are family-run, namely those that are not channeled through the state, the magnitude of social investments in children may in fact end up exceeding transfers to the elderly.8 Even then, the extent to which they exceed pro-elderly transfers may not be massive.
This contrasts with birth cohorts. Because of time’s arrow and the inaccessibility associated with the death of our ancestors, we don’t generally have heavy ascending duties of distributive justice. In contrast, if we assume that duties of justice toward birth cohorts located down the line beyond the overlap make sense, they extend far into the future and involve numerous potential beneficiaries. This suggests a stronger asymmetry between ascending and descending duties in the realm of birth cohorts than in that of age groups.
From there, we can move to the final step. We owe respect, care, education, etc. to our children as an age group. Yet we owe them more than that as a birth cohort. We also owe them a “stock” of valuable resources “inherited” from nature – we will come back to this – as well as massive cultural resources resulting from the cumulated work of all our predecessors. It includes mineral resources, natural biodiversity, deep and rich topsoil, institutional solutions, engineering technologies, rich languages, musical styles, etc. Such resources go beyond what we owe our children as an age group, and are arguably of a larger magnitude. We owe more to our children than what we owe them as children. We also owe them resources not just for themselves, but to enable them to pass them on to their own children, grandchildren, and beyond. Descending transfers dominate ascending ones. And descending transfers toward the next generation as a birth cohort include and exceed those that we owe them as an age group. This is why I will focus primarily on birth cohorts.
The overlap
Policy issues often involve dimensions of justice both between birth cohorts and between age groups. I will focus on the cohortal one here. I will now clarify the relationship between the “birth cohort vs. age group” distinction and the “overlapping vs. non-overlapping” distinction, stressing the latter’s significance.
Our lives and those of adjacent generations overlap: they are partly – yet not fully – coextensive in time. One could be tempted to adopt the following starting point: when it comes to overlapping generations, we would be dealing with issues of justice between age groups, whereas in non-overlapping generations contexts, issues would be those of justice between birth cohorts. Yet this would be a misleading starting point, for two reasons.
First, while issues of justice between age groups mainly arise in an overlapping context, they do not exclusively do so. When focusing on justice between age groups, we usually ask what their members owe each other in terms of care or cash, given the different and often complementary characteristics associated with age (physical, affective, intellectual). Yet it is not meaningless to ask, for instance, what current retirees owe children in general, including future children that they will never coexist with. This is so when they vote on issues related to children’s rights, including on resources targeted at children, be it investment in future playgrounds or in future schools. Hence, issues of justice between age groups may arise even beyond the overlap. Second – and more significantly – our four examples above show that serious issues of justice between birth cohorts arise at the overlap too.
In fact, theorizing the role of the overlap in a theory of justice between birth cohorts is essential. Here are four ways in which it matters. The existence of an overlap may offer solutions to serious problems faced by non-overlapping relationships. Our discussion of the non-identity problem in chapter 1 will illustrate this. Moreover, the way we conceive of the coexistence of our duties toward the next generation and our duties toward more remote future generations is also key. We will see in chapters 1 and 2 that our duties toward the remote future can be reframed to some extent as duties toward the next generation, through paying due attention to the latter’s own duties toward its follower generations.
In addition, we depend on intermediary generations, including overlapping ones, to pass on resources to remote future ones, as we find ourselves in a time-locked situation, unable to reach the remote future ourselves. We thus need to articulate the possibility of direct duties to the future with our inability to fully fulfil them ourselves, namely to pass material and immaterial resources directly to the remote future. If we plant a jujube tree meant to live for 3,000 years, we need to count on intermediary generations to take care of it. If we value a culture for the freedom of its poetry, its hospitality, or its self-deprecating sense of humor, and if we manage to capture this as a matter of intergenerational duties, we need to rely on intermediary birth cohorts for such valuable traits to be passed on to remote future generations.
Finally, another angle is provided by public-interest climate litigation. Plaintiffs in court typically face the legal constraint of “standing” when considering taking on board not-yet-born plaintiffs. Yet it has been a key strategy for climate activists to rely instead on young plaintiffs who already coexist with us. They are typically involved as representatives of their age group and of their birth cohort, their additional life expectancy extending much further into the future than that of adult plaintiffs. This stresses the centrality of the overlap for justice between birth cohorts, including – yet not exclusively – through its role in rendering meaningful obligations toward more remote generations.
Having stressed the overlap’s importance for intergenerational justice, let me return to non-overlapping generations, involving persons who will never coexist. Because the latter setting faces several challenges, fixing one will not be enough. This is why the set of “solutions” to the non-identity problem proposed in chapter 1 will not suffice to put non-overlapping generations aside for the rest of the book. In chapter 3, the fact that we do not know today about the preferences of future people is a serious challenge too. In chapter 4, the fact that current people were not present in the past is a real issue for any rectificatory claim grounded on historical injustice. And the uncertainty about whether there will be people in the future matters for the social discount rate debate too. In chapter 5, the current voicelessness and toothlessness of future people will be key to our concerns about the possibility of intergenerationally legitimate decisions.
Hence, while a theory of intergenerational justice should integrate both overlapping and non-overlapping generations settings, one should pay special attention to the following two aspects. On the one hand, philosophical issues raised by the absence of overlap do not reduce to those that drive the non-identity problem. This is why I continue beyond chapter 1 to look into other challenges arising in non-overlap settings. Also, taking non-overlapping generations seriously is not primarily motivated by giving a priority to philosophical puzzlement. It mainly feeds on the observation that the majority of generations to which we potentially owe duties of justice do not overlap with us. This echoes the fact that, in the realm of global justice, only a tiny minority of the countries to which we owe duties are in fact bordering our territory. On the other hand, philosophical issues of justice between cohorts do not become self-evident once we concentrate on overlapping generations. Each and every one of the four chapters following the first one illustrates this.
Is justice really the issue?
We now have a better grasp of the notion of generations. A few words are needed about what I mean by justice. Let me begin with the idea of distributive justice, which will be at the core of this book. Various forms of egalitarianism instantiate this distributive idea. And here, we are interested in distributive justice between generations. How does it differ from related concepts?
Consider first the complex “ethics/justice” distinction. A common view is that obligations of justice refer to a subset of our ethical obligations, namely those that the state is entitled to enforce on its citizens. This is typically how libertarians, being especially sensitive to possible abuses of state power, tend to frame things. For instance, they limit the tax base available to fund redistributive transfers. Even utilitarians may have something to say about duties for which enforceability would be desirable and duties for which it wouldn’t, admittedly on more contingent grounds. Importantly enough, one can only conclude that a set of duties is minimalist or undemanding if one considers the full package of both enforceable and non-enforceable duties. For one might very well endorse the view that legally enforceable duties should be kept to a minimum (because of a certain conception of the role of the state), while defending a very extensive set of non-enforceable duties.
How does this translate into the intergenerational realm? One issue is whether the material inability of a state to enforce something entails that it would not be entitled to enforce it, were it able to do so, and that related duties of justice would simply transform into “merely” ethical ones. This is a situation that we come across in the case of failed states. The intergenerational context beyond the overlap is also challenging in this respect as enforcement tends to require coexistence – an issue to which I return in chapter 5. Hence, future people with whom we will never coexist are unable to enforce duties on us. Does this entail that we don’t have duties of justice toward them? Not if we consider it sufficient that the state is currently able to enforce duties to the future on its current citizens. For the question of whether some duties should be enforceable on citizens arises as soon as there is an authority to enforce them, regardless of whether this authority is future or present. Hence, I will assume that the issue of enforceable duties of intergenerational justice arises within and also beyond the overlap.9 We will see that besides the challenge posed by our inability to enforce duties beyond the overlap, another challenge to the possibility of harm-based duties of justice beyond the overlap arises out of the so-called “non-identity” problem – to which we return extensively in chapter 1.
Consider next the “legitimacy/justice” distinction. Strikingly enough, late-eighteenth-century thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson or Nicolas de Condorcet framed intergenerational concerns in terms other than justice. They were drafting constitutions. Their concern was rather about generational sovereignty or intergenerational legitimacy. Their worry was not so much that we might leave a world to the future that is worse than ours. It rather had to do with the fact that constitutional rigidity may illegitimately limit the free exercise of political power by future generations. This concern about imposing our say on the future somehow echoes the concerns expressed by some about the insufficient voting weight of the young in deciding about 2016 Brexit. Legitimacy is about fair procedures, about democratic decision-making. Distributive justice is about the distribution of well-being, resources, etc. For those who accept this divide and don’t endorse overinclusive definitions of justice and legitimacy, a decision can be distributively just while being democratically illegitimate, and conversely. Both justice and legitimacy face challenges in the intergenerational context. I will focus on the former in this book, even though I will return to the latter in chapter 5.
In a sense, I have first stressed challenges to the possibility of a justice-based account, be it through referring to challenges to enforceability or to the “non-identity” challenge. What the reference to legitimacy brings is a potential attack on the significance of a justice-focused approach. The worry is not so much that justice would not apply. It is rather that it would be missing the main point. Legitimacy-focused people might call for rather rethinking the conditions of legitimate decision-making in a context of massive absenteeism from those in the past and in the future. And they might be joined by sustainability scholars who might want to stress that the core issues we are facing are of sustainability rather than justice. I will return to this in chapter 2
