In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creating the Conditions for Intergenerational Justice: Social Capital and ComplianceAdelin-Costin DumitruIntroductionSuppose philosophers succeeded in putting forward two equally desirable theories of intergenerational justice. Both of them fare extremely well in regard to either a case-implication critique or a prior-principle strategy of argumentation (with the former requiring us to check the implications of a principle in counterfactual cases, and the latter testing the compatibility of a principle with (...) certain more fundamental values, according to Sen [197]). How are we to decide between them? To the extent that we believe that one of the purposes of political philosophy is to issue achievable and desirable recommendations (Stemplowska 319) or to be action-guiding (Swift 363), we might compare the two by applying a feasibility criterion. Such a criterion indicates that a state of affairs could be realized “if we were to summon sufficient practical will and direct our (individual or collective) efforts in the right direction” (Gheaus 450). In our case, the decision is a relatively easy one: both theories pass a threshold of acceptability and thus we would be morally justified in attempting to bring them about. Furthermore, by stipulation, world A in which theory x were implemented would be equally desirable as world B, in which theory y were implemented. The only distinction would be one concerning their feasibility.Nonetheless, this scenario is usually not one that is available to us. If theories differ based on their desirability as well as their feasibility, how are we to choose? One option would be to choose that moral theory which best satisfies the criteria mentioned by Buchanan, of moral accessibility, feasibility, and accessibility (Justice, Legitimacy). However, feasibility entails not only a static conception of duties, but a dynamic one, in which we postulate that agents have “duties that do not focus merely on what can be done in given [End Page 20] circumstances, but also on how to change circumstances so that new things can be done” (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 812). In the present article, I argue that taking the idea of dynamic duties seriously requires that we redirect our efforts and resources toward those actions that would maximize the probability of achieving a successful transition from a non-ideal to an ideal state of the world. The argument is that, in the specific context of intergenerational justice, we ought to pay more attention to the matter of social capital extant in a society, if we want to achieve the ends of an intergenerational theory of justice. The concept of social capital puts under the same umbrella distinct features of social life such as networks and civic engagement, the role of reciprocity and trust in building institutions, and the effects that informal rules and institutions have on formal ones (Ostrom and Ahn, “Social Science Perspective” 4). Intuitively, these aspects are relevant for an account of intergenerational justice. The particular way in which they are relevant will be detailed later in this article.The claim that I defend is that the higher the level of social capital in a community, the more probable it will be that individuals are willing to redistribute resources to future generations. The underlying assumption that holds throughout the article is that public justification is important in construing a defense of a conception of justice. I proceed as follows. In the first section, I present an account of social capital. In the second section, I present the literature connecting social capital to political philosophy. In the third section, I argue why developing social capital is a worthwhile goal to pursue if we want to achieve intergenerational justice. The fourth section presents a series of measures that can increase the level of social capital. The fifth section responds to a series of potential objections that could be raised and concludes the paper.The Many Faces of Social CapitalMuch of the intellectual history of the twentieth century was dedicated to institutions and their function in shaping the social, economic, cultural, and political order. In a comprehensive definition put forward by March and Olsen, institutions represent “routines, procedures, conventions, roles, strategies, organizational forms, technologies..., beliefs, paradigms, codes, cultures and knowledge that surround, support, elaborate, and... (shrink)

Theories of intergenerational obligations usually take the shape of theories of distributive (social) justice. The complexities involved in intergenerational obligations force theorists to simplify. In this article I unpack two popular simplifications: the inevitability of future generations, and the Hardinesque assumption that future individuals are a burden on society but a benefit to parents. The first assumption obscures the fact that future generations consist of individuals whose existence can be a matter of voluntary choice, implying that there are (...) individuals who are responsible and accountable for that choice and for its consequences. The second assumption ignores the fact that the benefits and burdens of future individuals are complex, and different for different “beneficiaries” or “victims.” Introducing individual responsibility for procreation as a (crucially) relevant variable, and allowing a more sophisticated understanding of the impact of new individuals, generates grounds to prioritize the individual’s interest in responsibility for (creating and equipping) future individuals over any collective intergenerational obligation. I illustrate this by introducing a series of moral duties that take precedence over, and perhaps even void, possible collective redistributive duties. (shrink)

Distributive justice assumes a morally critical judgment of nature, which typically contradicts providential conceptions. Hence, simple conceptions of divine Providence cannot support distributive justice. This essay analyzes and develops a complex strand of theorizing about Providence within Jewish philosophy that is compatible with distributive justice. According to this conception, the actions of divine Providence express different and mutually exclusive considerations of justice. Therefore, the moral value of outcomes is intransitive between the situations of different people. And while each providential action (...) is justified from an ethical perspective, the total outcome is distinct from God's ultimate desire. Human ethics responds to this disparity by redistribution. This conception of Providence also contributes to the additional issue of intergenerational justice through the concomitant idea of life missions. The classical rendering of missions creates problems, however, for distributive justice. I conclude by formulating a conception of life missions that is compatible with both distributive and intergenerational justice. (shrink)

This paper considers issues raised by Elizabeth Anderson’s recent critique of the position she terms ‘luck egalitarianism’. It is maintained that luck egalitarianism, once clarified and elaborated in certain regards, remains the strongest egalitarian stance. Anderson’s arguments that luck egalitarians abandon both the negligent and prudent dependent caretakers fails to account for the moderate positions open to luck egalitarians and overemphasizes their commitment to unregulated market choices. The claim that luck egalitarianism insults citizens by redistributing on the grounds of paternalistic (...) beliefs, pity and envy, and by making intrusive and stigmatizing judgments of responsibility, fails accurately to characterize the luck egalitarian’s rationale for redistribution and relies upon luck egalitarians being insensitive to the danger of stigmatization. The luck egalitarian position is reinforced by the fact that Anderson’s favoured conception of equality, ‘democratic equality’, is counterintuitively indifferent to all unchosen inequalities, including intergenerational inequalities, once bare social minima are met. (shrink)

One topic of growing interest in the debate on intergenerational justice is the duty to respect the freedom of future generations. One consideration in favor of such a duty is that the decisions of present generations will affect the range of decisions that will be available to future people. As a consequence, future generations’ freedom to direct their lives may be importantly restricted such that present generations can be seen as taking future people’s lives into their hands and disempowering (...) them. This article defends the idea that present generations have an obligation to sustain a certain threshold of freedom for members of present and future generations alike. It argues that we should regard sustainability policies as a way to redistribute freedom across members of different generations. It starts by explaining the centrality of social freedom to the way we conceive of moral persons, then explains how freedom can be understood as an object of redistribution. It then argues that by imposing some risks—such as that of resource depletion or destruction of the ecosystem—on future generations, present generations push future generations’ freedom below an acceptable threshold. The paper concludes with examples of how this focus on freedom can offer guidance in selecting and justifying sustainability policies—for example, measures for conserving biodiverse environments—even when it is not clear how they will directly contribute to the well-being of future persons. (shrink)

In this comparative analysis of the UK and Sweden, we consider, if inherited wealth is most deserving of redistributive taxation, then what lessons, if any, may be learned from the difficult paths faced by this tax in these countries. We conclude that the political momentum behind the Swedish family business was distinct, and, possibly, capable of travel to the UK. The research for this article is part of the FairTax EU project, which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (...) research and innovation programme 2014-2018, grant agreement No. FairTax 649439. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule. I claim that internalization is the process of redistributing the burden of instruction from the teacher to the student. The process is complete when instruction is no longer needed, and the rule has reshaped perceptual classification of the circumstances in which it applies. Teaching a rule is the initiation of this process. We internalize rules by simulating instruction coming from someone else. Running (...) these simulations enables us to toggle between the perspective of the instructor and our own perspective. By doing this we coordinate our perspectives with that of the teacher. The account given here provides a deeper explanation of why internalizing a rule involves the dispositions and reactive attitudes proponents of Rule Consequentialism often say it does, why moral reflection is variably demanding, how intergenerational moral progress is made possible by our cognitive architectures, and why the adoption of a rule should be understood in terms of teaching that rule. (shrink)

Investments in mitigating climate change have their greatest environmental impact over the long-term. As a consequence the incentives to invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions today appear to be weak. In response to this challenge there has been increasing attention given to the idea that current generations can be motivated to start financing mitigation at much higher levels today by shifting these costs to the future through national debt. Shifting costs to the future in this way benefits future generations by (...) breaking existing patterns of delaying large-scale investment in low-carbon energy and efficiency. As we will see in this chapter, it does appear to be technically feasible to transfer the costs of investments made today to the future in such a way that people alive today do not incur any net cost (e.g. Foley, 2009; Rendall, 2011; Broome, 2012; Rezai et al., 2012; Rozenberg et al., 2013). The basic idea then is that governments can break current patterns of delaying mitigation investments by ensuring that their existing constituents do not need to make significant sacrifices. -/- The normative argument that we should finance mitigation by ‘borrowing from the future’ can be advanced in two general ways. The first is based on the empirical prediction that we will continue to see a pattern of very weak motivation among current generations to accept short-term mitigation costs. Thus, unless it becomes economically beneficial over the short-term to markedly increase investments in low-carbon energy and efficiency we should not expect to see sufficient investment to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. On this view finding a way to pass on the costs of mitigation to future generations is an imperfect solution to the problem of weak moral motivation today but much better than the status-quo (Broome, 2012, 37-48). On the second view, because we have good reason to expect that people in the future will be wealthier than people today (at least over the next century or so) and because the benefits of mitigation largely benefit people in the future, passing on most of the costs of mitigation to the future is actually a fair way to distribute these costs (Rendall, 2011). Notice that the second view is not dependent on the empirical premise that people today will not be motivated to make sufficient short-term sacrifices, although the problem of motivating the present will give additional support to the argument for redistributing costs to the future. -/- In this chapter I focus on the implications of the first approach. Specifically, the aim of this chapter is to take seriously the possibility that climate change has produced an extremely intractable political problem and that we must now consider strong measures that can break existing patterns of delaying mitigation. I defend the claim that if climate change involves a stark conflict of interests between current and future generations, then borrowing from the future would be both strategically and normatively much better than the status quo. However, I nevertheless challenge the borrowing from the future proposal on the grounds that it is not in fact the powerful tool for motivating existing agents that its proponents imagine it to be. The purpose of developing this critical argument is not, however, simply to throw doubt onto the idea of borrowing from the future. -/- Debt financing climate mitigation is a form of intergenerational buck-passing. In the climate ethics literature this type of buck-passing is usually viewed as deeply objectionable. As a consequence, normative theorising about climate governance tends to focus on institutional reforms that better represent the interests of future generations and inhibit buck-passing. My ultimate concern in this chapter is to argue that we cannot limit prescriptive normative theorising about climate governance to these types of reforms. If we really do find ourselves in a political context where the prospects for effective action are very poor then strategic forms of buck-passing may also make an important positive contribution to avoiding dangerous global climate change. Consequently, if debt financing is not as powerful of a motivational tool as imagined we still have strong reasons, I will argue, to identify other strategies that will change agents’ incentive structures. To this end I propose an alternative form of passing on the costs of mitigation to the future that warrants consideration. (shrink)

In this paper I give some reasons why ‘saving for future generations’ is not as straightforward as it sounds and when we might be skeptical of the permissibility of states saving for future citizens, even though such savings are often seen to be morally praiseworthy. I emerge with an account of when state savings for future citizens through sovereign wealth funds may be morally permissible. I argue that we ought to follow a modified version of Armstrong’s criteria for the moral (...) permissibility of sovereign wealth fund savings. That is, states are entitled to the full proceeds from the sale of a natural resource until their citizens’ basic rights are secured. Once they are, states are entitled only to the improved value of the resource, so long as they have not excluded others from the opportunity also to improve the resource. States may create sovereign wealth funds based on this improved value and, due to justified compatriot partiality, may choose to distribute those funds to current or future members of the state, even if non-citizens may be worse off and/or in greater need. Any residual value of the resource extraction must be redistributed globally. (shrink)

Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this volume sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the authors (...) look more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices. (shrink)

This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to ...

One of the disadvantages of redistributive taxation is that it reduces people’s financial incentives to increase national wealth and benefit others by engaging in productive activities. It is natural to suppose that the severity of this disadvantage will be proportional to the socially prevailing level of human selfishness. Thus several advocates of redistribution (G.A. Cohen, Ha-Joon Chang among others) have argued that this disadvantage of redistribution need not be as severe as critics often suggest, because human beings need (...) not be so selfish. My aim in this paper is to argue that, even in a society entirely composed of unselfish and impartially beneficent individuals, redistributive taxation would still discourage activities that contribute to national wealth, because differing individuals have different views about what counts as benefiting themselves and others. I also relate my discussion to G.A. Cohen’s influential ‘camping trip’ argument for socialism (from Why Not Socialism?). (shrink)

The mechanisms of longevity have been the subject of investigations for a number of years. Although the role of genetic factors is generally acknowledged, important questions persist regarding the relative impact of environmental exposures, lifestyle characteristics, and genes. The BALSAC population register offers a unique opportunity to study longevity from an intergenerational and genealogical point of view. Individuals from the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean population who died at age 90 or older between 1950 and 1974 were selected from this database (n = (...) 576), along with a control group of individuals born in the same period who died between 50 and 75 years of age. For these subjects and controls, spouses’ ages at death and parental ages at death and at their birth were investigated using regression analysis. Genealogical reconstructions were carried out for each individual, and various analyses were performed on both groups. Both fathers’ and mothers’ mean ages at death were significantly higher among the longer-lived cases than among controls whereas spouses’ ages at death and parental ages at birth had no effect. Regression analysis confirmed the positive effect of both fathers’ and mothers’ age at death. Mean kinship coefficients for the parents’ generations displayed significant differences, indicating that kinship was higher among subjects than controls (this effect was stronger among the oldest 10% of the subjects). Frequencies and genetic contributions of ancestors were very similar for the two groups, and none of these ancestors appeared more likely to have introduced genetic variants involved in longevity patterns in this French Canadian population. (shrink)

The topic of the paper is the justness of the so-called global redistributive wars — wars whose prime purpose would be the correction of global economic and power structures that are said to cause suffering in poor countries. My aim is to comment on Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument concerning the implications of Thomas Pogge’s theory of global poverty. Pogge has argued that affluent coun-tries uphold global institutional structures that have a significant causal role in leading to the poverty-related deaths of millions (...) of peo-ple who live in poor countries. According to Pogge, rich countries harm the citizens of poor countries. The argument by Lippert-Rasmussen is important, as it suggests that Pogge’s theory of the causes of global poverty, if correct, has a strange implication, namely, the implication that poor countries are or at least could be entitled to a military attack against rich countries. In this paper I will try to show that Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument is not fully compelling, and I will argue that it is not clear whether a global redistributive war would meet the principle of just cause. (The paper is here: http://www.kantiana.ru/upload/iblock/0ff/2014_12_01_raikka.pdf). (shrink)

An increasingly ageing society together with concerns about sustainability of old-age benefits call for reforming the care structure of many western welfare states. However, finding an acceptable balance between the formal care provided by institutions and informal care provided by family members is a delicate policy choice with profound ethical implications. In this respect, literature on intergenerational familial relationships can offer insights to inform policymaking in this field and help resolve the ethical concerns that excessive reliance on informal caregiving (...) might entail. In this contribution, we start by presenting – with Switzerland as a case study – the challenges of the current care structure and illustrate some of the ethical issues that reshaping the balance between formal and informal care raises. We then review and analyse available theoretical literature on intergenerational familial relationships and present three dimensions that underpin such relationships: ethical, theoretical and practical. Based on our analysis, we provide two recommendations to inform policymaking on how to support care needs of the elderly and set an ethically acceptable balance between formal and informal care when familial generations are involved. (shrink)

This article considers the question of why labor income may be permissibly redistributed to the poor even though non-essential body parts should generally be protected from redistribution to the infirm – the body-income puzzle. It argues that proposed solutions that affirm self-ownership but reject ownership of labor income are unsuccessful. And proposed solutions that grant individuals entitlements to resources based on the centrality of those resources to the individual’s personal identity are also unsuccessful. Instead, this article defends a solution (...) to the body-income puzzle based on a novel conception of respect for the separateness of persons. This conception holds that the sphere of moral authority protected from interference by respect for the separateness of persons includes both the body and labor income. And the strength of the negative rights constituting this sphere vary based on these rights' importance to the personal identity of the right-holder. It is shown that a commitment to helping the disadvantaged tempered by this conception of respect for the separateness of persons can solve the body-income puzzle. (shrink)

Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this volume sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the authors (...) look more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices. (shrink)

Across the applied ethics literatures are a growing number of ethical tools: decision-support methodologies that encourage multi-stakeholder deliberative engagement with the social and moral issues arising from technology assessment and environmental management processes. This article presents a novel ethical tool for deliberation on the issue of environmental justice between current and future generations over long time frames. This ethical tool combines two approaches, linking John Dewey's concept of dramatic rehearsal – an em-pathetic and imaginative ethical deliberation process; with the methodologies (...) of backcasting – a type of scenario planning technique drawn from the future studies literature. The proposed hybrid ‘Deweyan Backcasting’ approach combines a creative process of devising multi-stakeholder visions of potentially desirable futures, with practical evaluation of the technical, social and political networks necessary to make such futures happen. It is suggested that such a model can provide a fruitful means for evaluating intergenerational environmental equity issues in long-range policy and planning. (shrink)

Rawls’ theory is about prudence rather than justice. It is about the kind of political structure on which rational people would agree if they were preparing for the worst. Other strategies, such as confining redistribution to upholding a safety net, might also be plausible. Rawls’ theory is Georgism in persons: the income from individual abilities is regarded as if it is at the disposal of the collective and could be taxed as rent. This goes against the strong moral intuition (...) of self-ownership. However, Rawls’ question, where the worst off are as well off as they can be, is interesting. According to the Index of Economic Freedom, it actually may be under relatively unfettered capitalism. Unlike Rawls, Piketty is chiefly worried about the rich, seeking to impose confiscatory taxes on them. But the rich are not a fixed, unchangeable group of people who can effortlessly watch their capital accumulate. Capital is precarious, as is vividly illustrated in Balzac’s novel Père Goriot which Piketty quotes. Different as the approaches of Rawls and Piketty are, both of them agree that their ideal society has to be closed: It must become ‘socialism in one country.’. (shrink)

This book takes a unique and compreheisve look at intergenerational equity and sustainability.

The first debate in this article has to do with the very possibility of intergenerational justice beyond our obligations towards members of other generations while they coexist with us. Here, we ask ourselves whether we owe anything to people who either have died already, or are not yet born. Differences in temporal location mean that people may not exist at the same time — be it only during part of their life — which raises special ethical challenges. It is (...) one thing to decide whether we owe anything to the next generation(s). It is another to define what we owe them. Most standard theories of justice have tried to answer this difficult question. This article focuses on a comparison between a reciprocity-based and an egalitarian account of justice between generations. It then turns, on the one hand, to a brief discussion of alternative theories and, on the other hand, to implementation issues. (shrink)

Design of clinical trials for germline gene editing stretches current accepted standards for human subjects research. Among the challenges involved is a set of issues concerningintergenerational monitoring—long-term follow-up study of subjects and their descendants. Because changes made at the germline would be heritable, germline gene editing could have adverse effects on individuals’ health that can be passed on to future generations. Determining whether germline gene editing is safe and effective for clinical use thus may require intergenerational monitoring. The aim (...) of this paper is to identify and argue for the significance of a set of ethical issues raised by intergenerational monitoring in future clinical trials of germline gene editing. Though long-term, multigenerational follow-up study of this kind is not without precedent, intergenerational monitoring in this context raises unique ethical challenges, challenges that go beyond existing protocols and standards for human subjects research. These challenges will need to be addressed if clinical trials of germline gene editing are ever pursued. (shrink)

Selection on grandparental investment is more complex than Coall & Hertwig (C&H) propose. Patterns of investment are subject to an intergenerational conflict over how resources should be distributed to maximize fitness. Grandparents may be selected to distribute resources unevenly, while their descendants will be selected to manipulate investment in their own favor. Here we outline the evolutionary basis of this conflict.

Kevin Sauvé has recently argued in this journal that David Gauthier's conception of ‘morals by agreement’ is inimical to the development of long-term productive investment and sustainable levels of resource exploitation. According to Sauvé, this is because society is confronted with an intergenerational interaction problem whose strategic equilibrium is suboptimal. However, unlike the ‘contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma’ that Gauthier analyzes, the intergenerational version cannot be solved by an appeal to constrained maximization. As a result, Sauvé claims, Gauthier cannot effectively (...) address the question of intergenerational justice.The portion of Sauvé's argument that concerns me is the following:Gauthier solves the contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma by ensuring that each person will cooperate only if all others cooperate, and indeed his conception of morality is aimed at ensuring that all individuals incur the costs as well as the benefits of social cooperation. But the contemporaneous solution cannot be applied to the Intergenerational Dilemma: if each generation will save for the next only if the previous generations have also saved, none will ever save. (shrink)

The members of the International Network for the Analysis of Intergenerational Relations (Generationes) proudly present the most recent issue of the jointly produced compendium “Generations, Intergenerational Relations and Generational Policy”. This new version includes seven languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish (New) and Portuguese (New)). Its layout is designed for using it to translate the specific concepts and terminology of research into generations and intergenerational relations from one language into another. -/- .

Many political philosophers accept a view called intergenerational sufficientarianism, according to which we should aim to make sure that future people have enough of whatever is the appropriate currency of distributive justice, such as welfare, capabilities, or need-satisfaction. According to proponents of this view, we have good reasons to accept intergenerational sufficientarianism, even if sufficientarianism is not the right way to think about distributive justice among contemporaries. However, despite its popularity, and the established literature on sufficientarianism in the (...) contemporary context, precise statements of intergenerational sufficientarianism remain relatively rare. In this paper, I first survey the reasons that have been offered for accepting intergenerational sufficientarianism, and then formulate multiple precise interpretations of the view. I argue that there is in fact no precise formulation of intergenerational sufficientarianism that achieves all the benefits attributed to the view in the literature, and all plausible interpretations of the view also face serious further problems. Thus, intergenerational sufficientarianism is not as attractive a view as many have thought. (shrink)

This paper situates the concept of resilience in the context of intergenerational climate justice. It argues that overlooking intergenerational justice questions when it comes to resilience can lead to blind-spots in resilience-building policies. Introducing a sufficientarian basic needs-based conception of justice, it explores the relationship between distributive justice and resilience, linking person-based justice accounts to community- and/or society-based resilience accounts. Based on these discussions, it develops a conception of intergenerational climate resilience and a policy matrix that can (...) assist in assessing policies in terms of intergenerational justice. It argues that taking intergenerational resilience seriously would widen the concept of resilience and lead to difficult trade-offs in terms of mitigation and adaptation. It further discusses a future research agenda into intergenerational climate resilience. (shrink)

I will, in this paper, set out the philosophical foundations and the basic structure of a new theory of justice. I will argue that both these foundations and the theory which is based upon them are intuitively attractive and theoretically sound. Finally, I will argue that both are supported by the fact that they lead to attractive implications such as the following: One can justify at least some governmental redistributive programs which presuppose that those receiving the wealth have a right (...) to it, without being committed to any form of egalitarianism. The justification for these redistributive programs respects property entitlements; it argues, in effect, that property entitlements and rights to some redistribution of wealth presuppose each other, rather than being in conflict with each other. The amount of redistribution to which each indigent person is entitled is directly proportional to the wealth of the society in question and inversely proportional to the number of indigents in the society in question. There are at this stage in the history of Western thought few entirely new ideas in philosophy. Too much has been written about the important issues to allow for entirely new approaches. My theory is no exception to these generalizations, for it draws upon the tradition of John Locke, of the agrarian reforms such as Paine, Spence, and Ogilvie, and of libertarian writers such as Robert Nozick. Nevertheless, I will argue, the resulting theory is a significant advance over the ideas of these earlier writers. (shrink)

“Age of life” is one of the essential characteristics that differentiate people. Age perception is also associated with social justice. The concept of age is defined ambiguously. At the same time, the different age criteria also forms the basis of age differentiation and age discrimination. The population lead to distinctions of age groups, age categories, and generations. Differences between generations also lead to Study in the concepts of intergenerationality, intergenerational justice, and intergenerational policies.

Longtemps objet de prédilection des hitoriens de l'économie européenne, la croissance médiévale n'est plus au centre de leurs préoccupations. En la replaçant dans une perspective de long terme, du XIe au XVe siècle, et en s'interrogeant sur ce qui en elle relève proprement des processus de développement ou des dynamiques conjoncturelles, il est possible de replacer au centre du débat historique un moment essentiel de construction de l'économie-monde européenne. L'article insiste en particulier sur l'importance des processus sociaux de promotion des (...) activités productives et des groupes de travailleurs: ils ont rendu possible une intensification du travail, rémunérée par un ensemble complexe de mécanismes de redistribution des richesses qui sont l'une de créations originales des sociétés médiévales. (shrink)

The question of why helpers help is debated in the cooperative breeding literature. Recent reevaluations of inclusive fitness theory have important implications for traditional populations in which the provisioning of young occurs in the context of intergenerational transfers. These transfers link older and younger generations in an economic relationship that both minimizes the demand for help and the cost of helping.

As a mixed-methods research in economics and psychology, this study aimed to analyze the influence from the intergenerational succession on the financialization level including asset financialization and revenue financialization, and further test the moderating effect of the heirs’ typical growing experience according to The Imprinting Theory, based on the 2009–2020 annual data of listed family enterprises of China. There were two key findings. First, the effect of Chinese family enterprises’ intergenerational succession on asset financialization was positively significant while (...) the effect on revenue financialization was not significant, indicating that the financialization behavior has not brought about effective financial profits. Second, among the heirs’ typical growing experiences, their parents’ entrepreneurial experience during their childhood, oversea study experience, and MBA education experience had the significantly positive moderating effects on the influence from intergeneration succession to asset financialization level of Chinese family enterprises, which was an important internal mechanism for the heirs to promote the financialization process of family enterprises. (shrink)

In this article we examine the association between national welfare regime and the propensity of middle–aged and older individuals with adult children of their own to provide social support to aged parents. Using data from mature adults (50+) in 26 European countries, we examine whether older and younger generations compete for the time resources of the middle “sandwiched” generation, and whether national policy context shapes this competition. Contrary to expectations, we found that sandwich generation members were less likely to provide (...) support to their parents in Conservative–Mediterranean and East European regimes, but more likely to do so in universalistic Social–Democratic regimes. This evidence supports the hypothesis that well–developed welfare states “crowd–in” family support to older individuals. Middle generation members who provided social support to their adult children tended to provide to their older parents as well. This was particularly true in the two regimes where resources and public benefits tend to be more generous and may be interpreted as state benefits that reduce intergenerational competition. Findings are discussed in terms of the capacity of state policies to shape the allocation of family resources to older adults where extended family lineages have become the norm. (shrink)

In this paper intergenerational dimensions of reproductive behavior are studied within the context of the experience of a mid-sized Spanish town just before and during the demographic transition. Different indicators of reproduction are used in bivariate and multivariate approaches. Fertility shows a small, often statistically significant intergenerational dimension, with stronger effects working through women and their mothers than those stemming from the families of their husbands. These effects are materialized mainly through duration-related fertility variables, are singularly absent for (...) variables such as age at first birth or birth intervals, and are much stronger in the case of firstborn daughters than with later siblings. There is a substantial increase in the strength of intergenerational effects during the course of the demographic transition, most visible in age at last birth and duration of reproduction (between women and their mothers), as well as in the effects working through the families of their husbands. These results underscore the on-going importance of biological dimensions of reproduction as well as the way attitudes toward reproduction are taught within the family. The changes identified in this study suggest that the transmission of values and attitudes became more important for reproductive outcomes during this period of demographic modernization. (shrink)

This Introduction tells the story of intergerational justice and how it has influenced philosophers and political thinkers throughout history. The Introduction goes on to discuss the aims of the book, which is to offer a sustained discussion of intergenerational justice as seen by practical philosophers. The first part of the book focuses on the way in which various schools of thought in moral and political philosophy approach the domain of intergenerational justice, while the second part focuses on more (...) specific aspects, such as how these theories address the question of motivation, how they deal with demographic fluctuations, or how they can be applied to real-world issues such as climate change. (shrink)

It has been argued that, in political theory and political practice, a concern with the distribution of economic opportunities and resources has recently been displaced by a preoccupation with the acknowledgement of cultural identities and differences. In their jointly authored book, Redistribution or Recognition?, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth present their very different reactions to this development. While Fraser argues that redistribution and recognition are two mutually irreducible elements of an account of social justice, Honneth contends that a (...) suitably differentiated account of recognition can provide the basis of a theory of justice on its own. This article critically assesses the relative merits of these two positions by focusing on their accounts of the nature of capitalism, the sort of social theories that are needed in light of these accounts, and the moral philosophies associated with these social theories. This assessment leads to a number of conclusions about the proper relationship between recognition and redistribution in a theory of social justice. (shrink)

The actions and decisions taken by the present generation will affect not only the welfare but also the composition of future generations. A number of authors have used this fact to bolster the conclusion that the present is only weakly obligated to provide for future welfare since in choosing between futures of poverty and abundance, we are not deciding the welfare of a well-defined group of future persons but instead deciding which set of potential persons – the poor or the (...) rich – will become actual. Provided that future generations have lives that are worth living, they will be grateful to us for bringing them into existence – or so the argument goes. In this paper, I argue that this position overlooks an important aspect of the intergenerational problem. We are obligated to provide for the actual children of today, who will in turn be obligated to provide for their children, and so forth from generation to generation. A chain of obligation is thus defined that stretches from the present into the indefinite future, and unless we ensure conditions favourable to the welfare of future generations, we wrong our existing children in the sense that they will be unable to fulfill their obligation to their children while enjoying a favourable way of life themselves. (shrink)

Global income inequalities are met with increasing calls for direct supranational redistribution. This article argues that from the perspective of political feasibility, this approach should not be prioritised. We use the example of tax competition to show that supranational regulation that stops short of direct redistribution has better chances of being implemented. Moreover, as the case of tax competition illustrates, such regulation can help to shore up the capacity of nation states to redistribute internally, which indirectly tends to (...) reduce global inequalities, too. Against this background, we formulate the conditional subsidiarity principle of redistribution. It states that when the case for direct supranational redistribution is built on the alleged incapacity of the state to redistribute due to the pressures of globalisation, our first instinct should be regulatory reform in order to restore this capacity. Finally, the article asks whether two prominent proposals for global taxation – the global resource dividend and the financial transaction tax – pass the test of the conditional subsidiarity principle. (shrink)

Contemporary demographic processes forcing increasing attention to the problems of relationships and dependencies between the different age groups. The ageing of the population in each society leads to changes in the contacts between young people, adults and the elderly. It is reasonable to undertake research on the concept of "solidarity of generations". Maintaining relationships without generational conflict requires actions in the field of social policy known as intergenerational policy. Aim of this article is to present some of its models, (...) which allow not only to analyze the changes in the various communities, but also to create recommendations for public intervention. Description will include activities at the international, national, regional and local levels. (shrink)

Libertarians such as Nozick have argued that any redistributive tax scheme intended to achieve and maintain an egalitarian distributive pattern will violate self‐ownership. Furthermore, since self‐ownership is a central component of the idea of freedom, instituting an egalitarian distribution makes a society less rather than more free. All this turns on the claim, accepted by both libertarians and their critics, that a redistributive tax will violate self‐ownership because it must expropriate the fruit of a person’s labour. I show here that (...) there is no reason to accept this claim. The libertarian argument works only if the fruit of one’s labour must be understood to include everything that a person produces through his labour. But there is an alternative reading of the fruit of labour which identifies it with that subset of the total product of one’s labour which is due to his choices rather than luck. I argue that this reading is plausible, that there is nothing in the concept of self‐ownership which disallows it, and that if it is adopted, a redistributive tax need not automatically expropriate the fruit of one’s labour. Consequently there is no necessary inconsistency between redistributive taxation and self‐ownership, and so egalitarians can endorse the latter idea. (shrink)

Intergenerational Equity: Environmental and Cultural Concerns tackles intergenerational equity from various perspectives with a view to understanding what is fair and/or just within and among generations.

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

ABSTRACTThis paper attempts to explore the ways through which the discourse on global justice can be expanded beyond the language of redistribution by utilizing the insights from the theory of recognition as proposed by Honneth. It looks into the potential contributions of recognition theory in the normative analysis of global poverty and inequality. Taking off from the argument that the focus on global redistributive justice is misleading, the paper makes three claims: firstly, any global justice discourse must take as (...) its point of departure the experience of suffering of the poor; secondly, suffering poverty, the global poor experience shame or humiliation, thereby, degrading their sense of self-worth and their capacity for independent agency; thirdly, the goal of global justice is not simply the poor’s equal access to resources but self-realization. In the end, the paper argues that the recognition paradigm is a useful tool in analyzing and theorizing global justice. (shrink)

In this timely study, Thompson presents a theory of intergenerational justice that gives citizens duties to past and future generations, showing why people can make legitimate demands of their successors and explaining what relationships between contemporary generations count as fair. What connects these various responsibilities and entitlements is a view about individual interests that both argues that individuals are motivated by intergenerational concerns, and that a polity that appropriately recognizes these interests must support and accept intergenerational responsibilities. (...) The book ranges over the philosophical, ethical, political and environmental questions raised by intergenerational issues: how we can have duties to non-existent people, whether we can wrong the dead or be held responsible for what they did, what sacrifices we should make for our successors, and whether we have duties to people of the remote future. Encompassing the ethical problems created by demographic change, the ethical issues of population control and intergenerational implications of new technologies for creating people, this book will be of interest to those studying philosophy, politics, legal theory, and environmental studies. (shrink)

have extremely harmful impacts on an individual’s physical, social and mental health throughout their life-span. Recently, it has been reported that maternal ACEs increase the risk of developmental delay in the offspring across generations. This mini review focuses on the direct relationship between maternal ACEs and child developmental delay, and potential mediators/moderators that associate their relationship. Six studies were identified using three search engines. The results indicated that four out of six studies reported at least one significant direct association between (...) maternal ACEs and child development. Additionally, maternal biological, psychological, and social factors were identified as mediators or moderators. In summary, we identified that maternal ACEs increased the risk of developmental delay in children via biological and psychosocial pathways. Future research should examine potential buffering factors and identify when it is crucial to break the intergenerational transmission. (shrink)

This study examines whether Canadian governments have adapted budgets for the ageing population in accordance with norms of intergenerational justice. Public finance data in 2016 are analysed compared to 1976 in light of three constructs: the elderly/non-elderly ratio of social spending change, intergenerational reciprocity, and ability to pay. Findings include that governments increased per capita spending for seniors 4.2 times faster than for those under the age of 45; public finance requires younger Canadians to contribute 22%-62% more in (...) income taxes for the elderly now by comparison with 1976; and the contemporary ageing population has a greater ability to pay than cohorts immediately before and after them. (shrink)