Clarifying the Issue

Abstract

An important characteristic of our subject is that the environmental context is essential to it. The international developments referred to, and the moral intuition they reflect, have made justice to future generations a global issue because of the risk of long-term environmental damage, and it is those risks justice to future generations is meant to avoid or to minimize. So no general account of rights and duties between generations is aimed at by the present book. I suspect that no such account could be given. According to John Rawls, “(how) the burden of capital accumulation and of raising the standard of civilization and culture is to be shared between generations seems to admit of no definite answer”¹⁸. We shall see while discussing Rawls that his argument on justice, which deals with savings in a general way, does not aim at defining particular burdens: it merely requires their impartial determination as between one generation and another on the basis of relative levels of welfare. I think it is a weakness of utilitarian theory to suggest that our relations with future people can be conceived in terms of a global and positive point of view, i.e. the principle of maximizing happiness¹⁹. No definite or at least no publicly ratified conceptions seem to fix the measure of intergenerational beneficence (except, partly, in totalitarian societies striving for maximum industrial growth). The only thing that can be said in a general way is that most people would probably agree with the statement that the world should be left to our children in a better state than we have received it in. This is an important point, of course, but it hardly provides us with clear directives for common action; the prior and more precise issue surely is, to what duties of justice we are held in a particular context such as the environment.