Abstract
Environmental philosophies concerning our obligations to each other and the natural world too rarely address the aftermath of environmental injustice. Ideally we would never do each other wrong; given that we do, as fallible and imperfect agents, we require non-ideal ethical guidance. Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and Annette Baier’s work on cross-generational communality together provide useful hermeneutical tools for understanding and enacting meaningful responses to intergenerational injustice, and in particular, for anthropogenic climate change. By blending Baier’s cross-generational approach with Walker’s emphasis on victim subjectivity and moral repair, I propose that a reparative model of intergenerational justice can provide some much needed direction on non-ideal moral issues comparatively neglected in climate-ethics debates today.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at meetings of the International Society for Environmental Ethics in February 2015 and the Midwest Political Science Association in April 2016; my gratitude to conference organizers, commentators, and participants, including Allen Thompson, Jonathan Schwartz and John Edward Davidson. Thanks also are owed to Negin Almassi, Karen Emmerman, Kate Norlock, and Joao Salm for productive and challenging conversations on environmental repair and reparative justice. Any and all errors are mine alone.
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Almassi, B. Climate Change and the Need for Intergenerational Reparative Justice. J Agric Environ Ethics 30, 199–212 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9661-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9661-z