Intergenerational occupational justice: Ethically reflecting on climate crisis

ABSTRACT

The current climate crisis is linked to the negative impacts of human occupations, as enacted historically and currently, on the world’s ecosystems. Such impacts raise the questions: Are all occupational desires legitimate if their realization is incompatible with the preservation of ecosystems? How do the occupational choices we make today impact the occupational rights of future generations? Can we, and if so how do we, enable people to engage in sustainable occupations? This article seeks answers to these questions through an ethical reflection on the notion of intergenerational occupational justice and the conceptual clarification of five concepts: occupational needs, occupational desires, occupational choices, occupational rights, and occupational duties. Drawing on the thinking of Martha Nussbaum, we argue that while the basic occupational needs of human beings demand to be satisfied in order to ensure survival and fulfillment, to ensure the occupational rights of future generations of human beings, and thus meet their basic occupational needs, we have a duty to reconsider our occupational desires and choices. Thus, we propose an ecosystem approach to ensure the occupational rights and duties of all—present and future—humans.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational science
• Sustainability
• Occupational justice
• Occupational rights
• Climate change
• Ecosystem

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers and editor of our paper who helped clarify and refine our thinking. We also thank all the philosophers and thinkers who have influenced and inspired this ethical reflection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, we discuss the occupational needs, occupational desires, occupational choices, and occupational rights and duties of human beings in particular, without discussing the occupational needs, occupational desires, occupational choices, rights, and duties of all living beings. That being said, it is by no means excluded that all living beings may have such needs, desires, choices, rights and/or duties, but that is not the purpose of this article and could lead to further philosophical debates.

2 Several families of ethical theories exist. In general, three major families are recognized: the deontological ethical theories that originate with the philosopher Kant, the consequentialist ethical theories that appear with the philosopher Bentham, and the ethics of virtue that date back to Aristotle and Plato (Provencher, 2008).

3 This philosopher proposes an encounter between the philosopher Rawls’s ethical and political deontological approach, whom she criticizes, and the ethics of care of Aristotle, which can be considered as an ethics that belongs to the family of ethics of virtues (Drolet, 2014, 2018).

4 Here we have taken over the occupational categories from Wilcock (2006).