Contractarians argue while current generations have the power to heap benefits (and burdens) on future generations, future generations are unable to ‘repay’ or reciprocate to current generations (Weston, 2012). The burdens might be shared, but not benefits. To give up a possible benefit in the present for the future pleasure of an unidentifiable future other, a future other who may not exist if we act thus seems to such theorists unjust (Parfit, 1984). In this section, I will review some of the implications of this impasse.
Under both Thompson’s and Page’s definitions the living should be acting to curb major threats to coming generations. And this seems well accepted by many on an intuitive level, as they campaign and advocate for curbed destruction and comprehensive environmental protections. Yet many in government and the community are unwilling to ‘do their fair share’ as Thompson would have it. Stephen Gardiner describes IJ as a component of the ‘perfect moral storm’ we face as we attempt to deal with climate change (Gardiner, 2004; 2009; 2011b).
John Rawls suggested, ‘the question of justice between generations […] subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests’ (Rawls, 2009: 251). Contractarian justice is based in contract—albeit at times implicit—between individual people. The living, ‘put aside in each period of time a suitable amount of real capital accumulation’ (ibid: 252) for future
generations. He suggests ‘the contract doctrine looks at the problem from the standpoint of the original position and requires the parties to adopt an appropriate savings principle’ (ibid: 253). However, he concludes, even if IJ dictates each generation inherits from previous generations, and in turn saves for future ones,
[t]here is no way for later generations to help the situation of the least fortunate earlier generation. Thus the difference principle does not hold for the question of justice between generations and the problem of saving must be treated in some other manner (ibid: 254).
The calculation of IJ is based, he suggests, in a transgenerational project, in which we imagine what is fair to contribute forward based in what we (ideally) received from past generations. The contract between generations is unusually structured: future generations can make (hypothetical) contractual claims on current generations based in the (idealised) contractual claims the living made on past generations. That is, he suggests, ‘[t]he life of a people is conceived as a scheme of cooperation spread out in historical time. It is to be governed by the same conception of justice that regulates the cooperation of contemporaries’
(ibid: 257). The duties and obligations of different generations to each other are similar to those of contemporaries based in virtual contractual arrangements.
This chapter opened with Burke’s vision of an intergenerational society. And Rawls argues similarly, that we have obligations to ensure sufficient resources are available for future generations to maintain social and cultural gains. Avner de Shalit (de-Shalit, 1995) also suggests IJ is rooted in the persistence of community, and that we have responsibilities to future generations as members of an organic flow of social continuity. Rather than a social contract between individuals, IJ is generated from communities of people—the unit of justice is not the individual but rather the community. Within just intergenerational communities individual needs can be sustained. While mutations, progressions, and change are a feature of communities, the sense of society itself is sustained he says. The projects of the living continue at least into the near future, where we hope they will be picked up and continued by the generations who outlive us. There are connections. And with those connections come obligations and duties, he argues, for the living to ensure there are sufficient resources for future generations’ wellbeing. IJ on de Shalit’s account is not an individual but a
communitarian project.
Other contractarians argue that justice between generations is rendered impossible, as current generations can receive no reciprocal benefits from future generations. While Thompson, Page, Rawls and de Shalit may argue that we owe future generations fair and equitable treatment there are others for whom IJ is itself, while intuitively reasonable, a philosophically flawed concept (Ball, 1985; 2008; Weston, 2012). For Derek Parfit, the unit of justice is the individual. While acknowledging that moral relevance does not diminish with time, he claims we encounter a significant obstacle in arguing for IJ because justice is relevant only to persons, humans must have identity to qualify as persons, and future
persons are yet to have such an identity. He calls this the ‘non-identity problem’ (Parfit, 1984) and argues that how we act now (what we do, who lives, who does not, where populations settle, etc.) in relation to IJ or not, will alter the identities of future persons.25 Thus, as the persons who will comprise future generations have no identity, and we, the living, cannot have any duties or obligations to non-identities, there can be no IJ.
25
Terrance Ball argues that we cannot know what will be perceived as just by future
generations since justice is a highly mutable concept (Ball, 2008). Each moral community, he suggests, particularly those separated by time, understands justice differently. For instance, to a slave owner of the antebellum south, to abolish slavery was to unset the natural order and to act unjustly towards future generations. Therefore, the very notion of IJ is, he says, incoherent. It is impossible on this account to be intergenerational just as we cannot know what will be of value to future generations.
While expansive definitions of IJ are ‘incoherent’ to Ball, he does not reject the need for IJ (and nor does Parfit). Ball states unequivocally;
…[n]o single generation may, morally speaking, act as it pleases and without regard to the welfare of future generations, simply because it does not constitute the whole of a temporally extended (though historically ‘local’) moral community. (Ball, 2008: 334)
The proviso is that we are ill-equipped to conceive or implement a justice framework that can create a coherent definition. Justice (and political practices) he argues have temporally mutable meanings, and given there is no trans-historical meaning for justice, there can be no valid theory of IJ. It is on his account not possible for current generations to act justly towards future generations as they cannot know what future generations will regard as just when human accounts of justice change over time. How can we, he asks, predict what future generations will perceive as their needs? What things will they value as enjoyable? This is knowledge we cannot have beforehand. And without this knowledge, Ball argues, we cannot define IJ, we are stuck with terminological incoherence.
Ball bases much of his argument in the dynamics of social constructions of the concept of justice. What may appear just at one juncture, will seem unjust at another. So while Rawls calls for IJ to ensure future generations can ‘preserve and maintain social, political and cultural gains’ (Watene, 2013: 23), Ball suggests the social and cultural fabric is too ephemeral to contain a coherent theory of IJ.
We are left here with a theory from Parfit claiming there can be no valid subjects of IJ and with Ball saying the essence and values of the community are so mutable there can be no clearly valid theories of justice that will work for the future. The subjects of justice, the identifiable individual for Parfit, and the individual constructed within unknown social values for Ball are beyond IJ theorising.