- The Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice
- Introduction: The Idea of Distributive Justice
- Rawls on Distributive Justice and the Difference Principle
- Dworkin and Luck Egalitarianism: A Comparison
- Equality Versus Priority
- Sufficiency and Needs-Based Approaches
- The Capability Approach
- Libertarianism, Left and Right
- Desert-Based Justice
- Retributive Justice
- The Good Society
- The Ethics of Care
- The Theory and Politics of Recognition
- Distributive Justice and Human Nature
- Political and Distributive Justice
- Consequentialism, Deontology, Contractualism, and Equality
- Ideal Theory
- Constructivism, Intuitionism, and Ecumenism
- Conceptual Analysis and Distributive Justice
- The Family
- Public Goods
- Cultural and Religious Minorities
- Justice Across Borders
- Climate Change
- Future Generations
Abstract and Keywords
The policies concerning, for instance, the mitigation of climate change that the current generation chooses to adopt will have far-reaching implications for the lives of future generations. What policies ought to be chosen depends, in part, on what justice requires with respect to the protection of the interests of those who will live in the further future. This chapter discusses the prospects for extending four prominent ways of thinking about justice within a generation to the intergenerational context—Rawlsian contractualism, Hobbesian contractarianism, the rights-based approach, and luck egalitarianism. It argues that none of them offer a wholly satisfactory approach to intergenerational justice. The final section of the chapter discusses whether obligations to protect the interests of future generations are in fact best understood as obligations of justice.
Rahul Kumar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Ontario. He is the author of several articles on contractualist moral theory. His current research concerns non-consequentialism and intergenerational obligations.
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