The ethics of intergenerational relationships

Abstract

According to the relational approach we have obligations to members of future generations not because of their interests or properties but because, and only because, they are our descendants or successors. Common accounts of relational duties do not explain how we can have obligations to people who do not yet exist. In this defence of the relational approach I examine three sources of intergenerational obligations: the concern of parents for their children, including their future children; the desire of community members to pass on a heritage to their descendants; and the relationship of citizens in an intergenerational polity.

Keywords:

• Intergenerational ethics
• intergenerational justice
• parental obligations
• non-identity
• partiality
• heritage

Notes

1. Most philosophers who discuss intergenerational duties are individualists. They include Page (2006), Mulgan (2006), Dobson (1999), Feinberg (2013).

2. Those philosophers who take a relational approach include Passmore (1980), chap. 4) and Golding (1972), John Rawls’s treatment of intergenerational justice in both A Theory of Justice (1972, 128) and Political Liberalism (1996, 273–275) can also be so interpreted, as I explain below. My approach (Thompson 2009) is also relational.

3. An example of this position is in Goodin (1985). Vulnerable individuals ought to be protected from harm, he says. Being in a relationship to others that makes them vulnerable is a good reason for assigning us a duty to prevent the harm. He extends this reasoning to our relationship to future generations. ‘The vulnerability of succeeding generations to our actions and choices seems to be the strongest basis for assigning to present ones strong responsibilities for providing for them’ (177).

4. Kumar’s account of how the non-identity problem can be avoided puts an emphasis on the distinction between wronging a person and doing him harm. In my view the crux is the distinction between a relational and an individualist account of obligations and entitlements.

5. Parents can, of course, give their children to others if they cannot care for them themselves, but this too is a way of fulfilling their responsibility. It should be noted that consent or commitment as an explanation for why relational duties exist is often inappropriate in the case of intergenerational relationships. Duties of children to ageing parents is an obvious case where consent is irrelevant.

6. In classical accounts the social contract is made by representatives of families, who presumably have obligations as representatives. But in the process of making the contract they mysteriously change into individuals concerned only with their interests as individuals.

7. Rawls’s later (1996, Lecture 4) view that requirements of justice are an overlapping consensus reached by individuals from different perspectives is close to the position I am advocating.

8. For discussions about how to adjudicate between the partiality required by special relationships and impartial moral requirements see, for example, Wolf (1992), Archard (1995).