Intergenerational Justice

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.

1 - Identity and Obligation in a Transgenerational Polity
2 - Libertarian Theories of Intergenerational Justice
3 - A Contract on Future Generations?
4 - Three Models of Intergenerational Reciprocity
5 - Exploitation and Future Generations
6 - A Value or an Obligation? Rawls on Justice to Future Generations
7 - A Trans-Generational Difference Principle
8 - Enough for the Future
9 - Wronging Future People
10 - What Motivates Us to Care for the (Distant) Future?
11 - Preference Formation and Intergenerational Justice
12 - Egalitarianism and Population Change
13 - Intergenerational Justice, Human Needs, and Climate Policy
14 - The Problem of a Perpetual Constitution

Axel Gosseries is a Permanent Research Fellow at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FRS), based at the Chaire Hoover d'éthique économique et sociale (Université catholique de Louvain). He also lectures at the universities of Louvain and St-Louis (Brussels).; Lukas Meyer is Assistenzprofessor für Praktische Philosophie at the University of Bern, Switzerland.