Intergenerational Challenges and Climate Justice: Setting the Scope of Our Obligations (Routledge Studies in Environmental Justice)
Environment, Philosophy, Science and technology
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
Climate change poses questions of intergenerational justice, but some of its features make it difficult to determine whether we have obligations of climate justice to future generations. This book offers a novel argument, justifying the present generation’s obligations to future… people. Livia Luzzatto shows that we have intergenerational obligations because many of our actions are based on presuppositions about future people. When agents engage in such intergenerational actions, they acquire an obligation to also recognize those future people as agents within their principles of justice, and with that a duty to respect their agency and autonomy. Intergenerational Challenges and Climate Justice also offers a way to circumvent the problems of non-identity and non-existence. Its approach overcomes the intergenerational challenges of climate change by meeting three necessary criteria: providing ways to cope with uncertainty, dealing with the complexity of climate change, and including future people for their own sake. The author meets these criteria by adopting an action-centered methodology that grounds our obligations of justice on the presuppositions of activity. This robust framework can be used to justify increased climate action and the greater inclusion of future-oriented policies in current decision making. This book will be of great interest to academics and students concerned with the issues of climate and intergenerational justice.