Climate change and intergenerational justice

Meijers, T. (2023)

Part of book or chapter of book

This chapter provides an overview of the kind of questions one has to answer to take position on the question of who owes what to future generations in the context of climate change and discusses several possible answers as well as their upsides and downsides. It first asks whether we have duties of justice to future at all, raising several challenges to the idea of including future generations under the scope of justice. Second, it asks how much we owe to future people: equality, sufficiency, or just basic human rights. Even if there are theoretical reasons to embrace a more demanding account, there may be political or feasibility reasons to endorse a less demanding view. The third question is what we owe to future people: what kind of world, with what kind of goods and opportunities, do we owe to future people? Before concluding, the chapter discusses the distribution of duties to future people among contemporaries, the idea that we might have to limit the amount of future people, and possible institutional responses to challenges of intergenerational justice.

• Climate change
• Future generations
• Theories of justice
• Discounting
• Global justice
• Non-identity problem
• Intergenerational Justice

• All authors: Meijers, T.
• Editor(s): Pellegrino, G.; Di Paola, M.
• Date: 2023
• Title of host publication: Springer Handbooks; Handbook of philosophy of climate change
• DOI: doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16960-2_55-1
• Sponsorship: NWO
• Grant number: VI Veni.191F.002