Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the kind of questions one has to answer to take position on the question of who owes what to future generations in the context of climate change and discusses several possible answers as well as their upsides and downsides. It first asks whether we have duties of justice to future at all, raising several challenges to the idea of including future generations under the scope of justice. Second, it asks how much we owe to future people: equality, sufficiency, or just basic human rights. Even if there are theoretical reasons to embrace a more demanding account, there may be political or feasibility reasons to endorse a less demanding view. The third question is what we owe to future people: what kind of world, with what kind of goods and opportunities, do we owe to future people? Before concluding, the chapter discusses the distribution of duties to future people among contemporaries, the idea that we might have to limit the amount of future people, and possible institutional responses to challenges of intergenerational justice.
This work was supported by the Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek [VI. Veni.191F.002]. I want to thank Axel Gosseries, Dick Timmer, Gianfranco Pellegrino, and Siba Harb for comments on a draft on this chapter.
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Meijers, T. (2023). Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice. In: Pellegrino, G., Di Paola, M. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16960-2_55-1
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