Climate Change and Justice Between Nonoverlapping Generations

Flashcards on Climate Change and Justice Between Nonoverlapping Generations

The No Rights Challenge

Argues that future persons do not currently exist, therefore they can have no rights and thus no claims of justice against us.

Bomb-Planter Scenario

Even if the bomb does not go off, the bomb-planter will have arguably have done something seriously wrong because they are violating a right closely associated with the right to life, namely the right not to have another person avoidably act so as to create a severe risk to one’s life

The Non-Identity Challenge

Refers to the difficulty that it will frequently be impossible to show that we can harm future persons in the sense of making particular individuals worse off than they would have been had we acted otherwise.

Rights Violation

Every person, independently of her particular identity and of whether she would have existed otherwise, has a right not to be killed by a deliberately planted bomb.

The Epistemic Challenge

There are serious epistemic limitations when it comes to determining the content of any obligation we might have to future generations.

Three Aspects of the Epistemic Challenge

We do not know how many future generations there will be, it is unclear what anyone can know about future generations’ values and preferences because there is no chance of directly exchanging our views with theirs, and it is difficult to tell what the precise consequences of our actions will be, especially when it comes to the further future.

Intergenerational Obligations

Duties of justice to future generations have been recognized in most if not all cultures since at least biblical times, and there is no good reason to feel any less obliged toward persons just because they are temporarily removed from us.