Abstract
This chapter establishes that intergenerational environmental ethics and policy relating to intergenerational environmental ethics tend to privilege a conception of responsibility premised on continuity and resemblance between present and future societies. Such a conception of responsibility operates in the background of many approaches to outlining the ethical stakes of the ongoing fossil-fuel-driven climate crisis. Problems arising out of that conception of responsibility are introduced and considered.
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Notes
- 1.
Jonas (1984, 9).
- 2.
This rather simple formulation will be justified in the pages ahead and takes as its starting point the essential writings of Matthias Fritsch, whose work on establishing the fundamentally intergenerational position of responsibility-bearing subjects informs the entirety of the project that follows. See Fritsch (2018), passim.
- 3.
Birnbacher (2006, 23–38, 23).
- 4.
See Jonas (1984, 8).
- 5.
Ibid, 1.
- 6.
Ibid., ix.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Quoted in Jungk (1958, 17).
- 9.
Gardiner (2006a), passim. For a helpful cataloguing and critical engagement with the definition of a “generation,” see Fritsch (2018, 19–24). We largely follow Fritsch in thinking a “generation” in terms of overlapping groups delimiting certain “commonalities and reciprocities, but also asymmetries and the significant (and partly enigmatic) facts of birth and death” (Fritsch 2018, 20). Taken up as a certain situated group spanning roughly thirty years but overlapping with proximate previous and subsequent groups, thinking a “generation” allows us to think the connections between generations as “chains of concern” which may be non-exhaustive of a series of generations’ make-up but which nonetheless supplies us with material content that distinguishes some generations from others and allows us to think a generation through its mediated responsibilities to both proximate and distant futures. Key to Fritsch’s account is the potentially transitive work that generational overlap can perform for thinking concerns moving on from one generation to the next. Were we to insist on thinking generations discreetly, such inheritances are trickier to parse, as is evident in impoverished contemporary discourses fruitlessly laying out absolute antagonisms of interests between so-called Baby Boomers, Millennials, and the ascendent Generation Z here in North America.
- 10.
van Wyck (2005, 4).
- 11.
Gardiner (2006a, 398).
- 12.
Jungk (1958, 34).
- 13.
See Gardiner (2006a, 398–399). Gardiner has the following to say about his choice of terminology: “The sense of the analogy is then that climate change appears to be a perfect moral storm because it involves the convergence of a number of factors that threaten our ability to behave ethically.” That is to say that there is an amplifying effect when particular factors converge to the extent that certain possibilities for moral action become more difficult to instantiate than if each of these factors had emerged in isolation. The “storms” in question, for Gardiner, are the global storm (we might say the “spatial” storm), the intergenerational storm (a temporal storm that is temporal insofar as this temporality is also always a series of inheritances), and the institutional storm (a necessary third category that includes voluntary associations, thereby distinguishing it from the seemingly ontologically irreducible character of the first two storms). Gardiner argues here and elsewhere that climate change represents a moment of convergence or conjunction that generates novel moral conundrums for the contemporaries of this convergence. It is clear to me that Gardiner’s analogy is helpful in the sense that it picks up the ways in which apparent delimitations of areas of ethical and moral significance (spatial distancing, temporal lag, institutional weakness or disarray, etc.) are capable of modifying one another to potentially disastrous effect if these interconnections are not noticed. But it seems evident that these three storms converge in cases outside the bounds of fossil-fuel-driven climate change in particular. Fortunately, Gardiner’s argument in no way depends on the specificity of climate change in this respect. Rather, his diagnosis hinges precisely on recognizing the difficulties posed by such a convergence—difficulties that are surprisingly easy to pass over when one or the other of these modes of categorizing is privileged.
- 14.
Birnbacher (2006, 25).
- 15.
Descartes (1998, IV.58).
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid, 61.
- 18.
Birnbacher refers to these subjects as “proto-subjects” and, in addition to “the present generation,” includes “mankind” as an example of such a proto-subject. See Birnbacher (2006, 26).
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
IPCC (2014, 13–16).
- 21.
See Gardiner (2006b, 149) and passim.
- 22.
Ibid., 149.
- 23.
See Singer (2010). https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/. Accessed February 7, 2021.
- 24.
Parfit (1984, 381).
- 25.
Fritsch (2018, 37).
- 26.
David Wood refers to this as “temporal externalization—dumping waste in the river of time.” The idea here is that the future functions as an externality in a way analogous to the common habit of thought of thinking of, say, other nations, the deep sea, or outer space as places external to our own environment in which harmful wastes may be jettisoned so as to avoid the nefarious effects of those wastes for ourselves. Wood’s point here is precisely that these externalities are no longer as “outside” as we need them to be—the wastes shunted off to the outside continue to have effects on what is ostensibly “inside.” See Wood (2005, 174).
- 27.
Reichenbach (1992, 207).
- 28.
- 29.
Page (2006). See Chap. 6, 132–160.
- 30.
Fritsch points out that the utilitarian recourse to impersonal metrics or worthwhile lives versus lives of suffering is thought in this context precisely as a way around the problem of indeterminate particular future others. But, of course, what counts as suffering or what counts as a worthwhile life is always going to need to be determined from the position of the present and so involves the projection of present interests onto indeterminate future others who will, it will always turn out, be determined as the kind of beings they are with the kinds of interests they have by our actions in the present. See Fritsch (2018, 36).
- 31.
Jonas (1984, 1).
- 32.
This, incidentally, is the solution to the problem that utilitarian ethics and Kantian deontological ethics both prefer. The utilitarian believes that they can determine what sorts of interests future societies ought to privilege and, as such, often works itself out in arch-conservative fashion, as though structures in the present can be maximized according to efficiency, but not substantially challenged. Kant, for his part, expressed befuddlement that earlier generations might act in order to benefit later generations without benefiting themselves. He concludes that such future-oriented action is rational only on the condition that one’s species possesses reason and that this reason continues to develop beyond the life of any one member of the species. As such, the immortal development of reason acts as a link which ties disparate generations together. Note that without the assumption of shared interests, in the case of the utilitarian, or shared reason, in the case of Kant, acting in the name of future generations is taken as a prima facie absurdity. See Kant (2001, 20).
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Peterson, M. (2024). Acting Before Future Generations. In: Derrida and Inheritance in Environmental Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52143-0_2
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