Power and future people’s freedom: intergenerational domination, climate change, and constitutionalism

Abstract

Intergenerational domination is the idea that future people’s freedom is violated insofar as they are vulnerable to the capacity of the people living before them to interfere. This paper explores the extent to which intergenerational domination applies to two familiar phenomena: climate change and constitutionalism. The first part of the paper argues that the emission of greenhouse gases does not amount to intergenerational domination. Being hurt by climate change does not equal subjection to the capacity of previous generations to interfere. The second part argues that intergenerational domination is under certain conditions applicable to the relationship exemplified by political constitutionalism. Hence, this study shows that constitutional provisions introduced in order to protect future generations from climate change is more likely to contribute to rather than to protect them from intergenerational domination.

Keywords:

• intergenerational domination
• freedom as non-domination
• climate change
• constitutionalism
• neo-republicanism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments on earlier versions of this paper from the participants in the 2015 Intergenerational workshop, Stanford University, arranged by Patrick Taylor Smith; the participants in the Political theory seminar at the Political Science Department, Stockholm University; Therese Scavenius and Fabian Schuppert at the 2015 workshop on Domination and climate change, Copenhagen University, as well as from three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. The validity of this claim depends on the ability to harm future people, which is questionable given the fact that choices guided by the future consequences of our actions are likely to be ‘different people choices’. For recent attempts to show that the non-identity problem does not preclude moral assessments of the future consequences of our actions, see Tremmel (2014) and Rendall (2011).

2. I will often speak about generations although individuals or groups, rather than generations themselves, are the relevant agents. Moreover, only when relations of domination extend beyond contemporaries (to non-overlapping generations), are we facing genuinely new challenges. See Gosseries (2008a, 461ff).

3. There can be duties to protect future people’s freedom as non-domination even if there are no duties to respect future people’s freedom as non-domination. For instance, Lovett (2010) defends duties to further the conditions for future generations to achieve freedom as non-domination though he nowhere considers the possibility of intergenerational domination or that there is anything one generation could do that would violate future people’s freedom.

4. The contrast between liberal and republican conceptions of freedom is partly concerned with different readings of the history of ideas (e.g. Larmore 2003, p. 109) and partly with different conceptual and normative understandings of freedom (Laborde and Maynor 2008, p. 2).

5. In recent writings, Pettit (2012, p. 58) prefers ‘uncontrolled interference’ to ‘arbitrary interference’. This terminological shift is intended to avoid definitional quibbles about the meaning of ‘arbitrary’.

6. Is the present critique unfair as it is based on an understanding of domination not shared by these authors? For example, Nolt (2014, p. 61) explicitly rejects Pettit’s definition of domination as unsuitable and adopts a ‘broader’ understanding of that term. In reply, we should acknowledge that this paper does not seek to challenge the possibility of attributing the term domination to inter-generational relationships. The purpose is to explore the applicability of the most influential conception of domination, i.e., the one developed by Philip Pettit. This critique might still be pertinent to some advocates of intergenerational domination. See for example Smith’ (2014, p. 226, n. 20) claim that his account of intergenerational domination does not ‘depend upon adopting one conception [of domination] rather than the other’.

7. The same holds if the doomsday device is programmed to set off randomly. Everyone within the range of harm is actually interfered with as the device removes the option of life without fear. Some people are also actually interfered with when the device randomly goes off. However, no one is subject to potential interference.

8. Psychological reasons, such as the lack of nerve, are explicitly ruled out as irrelevant by Pettit. The eyeball test applies only when ‘individual personalities’ are controlled for (Pettit 2012, p. 85).

9. Pettit often states that the advantage of freedom as non-domination in comparison with freedom as non-interference is that the former covers a broader range of phenomena than the latter because it considers potential interference and not just actual interference as violations of freedom. Yet, in cases where intentionality cannot be ascertained, it seems to be the other way around. Unintended consequences can be considered violations of freedom from the point of view of freedom as non-interference but not from the point of view of freedom as non-domination. On this point, see Van der Rijt (2011, p. 110) and Krause (2013, p. 192).

10. Gosseries (2008b, p. 33) points out that intergenerational rigidity is a side effect of intragenerational rigidity. If constitutional rigidity is justified intragenerationally, we must therefore accept that constitutional rigidity is justified intergenerationally. However, our analysis is concerned with the conceptual question whether constitutional rigidity equals intergenerational domination and not with its normative justifiability.