Duties to Future Generations Within A Single Society
Most of us think that we owe some concern for the well-being of future generations as a whole, not merely to our own children. The central intuition is expressed in commonplace statements about duties we have to leave the world a better place or to make sacrifices for the sake of a better life for the next generation.
However, it turns out that there are deep philosophical puzzles that arise when we attempt to spell out our duties to future generations and the grounds upon which judgments regarding their fulfillment or breach are predicated.
Justice and Reciprocity
One puzzle arises in the context of thinking about the demands of distributive justice within a single society. John Rawls developed his arguments in A Theory of Justice (revised edition, 1999) (TOJ) and later in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (JAF). Rawls argues that issues of social justice raise a discrete philosophical problem on the assumption that society is a kind of compact between the generations within an ongoing co-operative scheme. On this view, the aim of a theory of justice is to work out fair terms of distribution of benefits and burdens and rights and duties among the members of a morally distinctive kind of cooperative scheme found within nation-states. We need fair terms of association within each generation - the intragenerational problem - and across generations - the intergenerational problem.
Let's begin with the intragenerational problem. The heart of Rawls's cooperative conception of justice is an idea of fairness among people who stand in reciprocal relationships to one another as members of a mutually beneficial form of association. Indeed, much of the emphasis in Rawls’s later work reinforces the prominence of this strand of argument, suggesting that an ideal of social cooperation is the “most fundamental idea” or “central organizing idea” of his theory (JAF, pp. 5 and 25).
Rawls argues that distributive principles are needed for determining the proper division of economic gains within a society for two related reasons. It is because a satisfactory life for anyone is possible only through complex and enduring processes of social cooperation (TOJ, pp. 88, 109), and because social cooperation enables the production of a greater sum of benefits than would be possible for persons acting on their own (TOJ, pp. 4, 53). Distributive justice, then, is not a simple allocation problem where the task is to divvy up some good (division of a cake) that no potential recipient has a claim on in virtue of her productive contribution. We need principles of distribution that would be judged fair by all contributing members to a cooperative scheme.
The commitment of each member to an ideal of fair participation in a nationally established cooperative scheme is characterized as a norm of reciprocity: "[t]hose who gain more are to do so on terms acceptable to those who gained less" (JAF 36.2). More precisely, Rawls supposes that the parties to his hypothetical social contract would endorse an ideal of reciprocity “in the deepest sense” (JAF § 21.4).The deep norm of reciprocity is embodied in Rawls's Difference Principle. It requires that the distributive share of income and wealth available to the better-off members of society should be limited by social arrangements that maximize the distributive share to the worst-off. Rawls concedes that the worst-off might accept less than what the Difference Principle requires (i.e., less than reciprocity in the deepest sense), but he insists on some robust notion of reciprocity as a guide to the distributive share due to the worst-off members of society on at least two grounds.
First, each citizen needs enough income and wealth to form and pursue a personal conception of a worthwhile life, and necessary for such a life is the guarantee of the social bases for self-respect. An assumption is that self-respect can be eroded by extreme inequalities. Second, each citizen needs enough (and that no one should have too much) so that each can interact with others as free and equal citizens, with none under the political domination of others. The concern identified in this second ground is the prospect that the rich might use their vastly superior economic ability to tailor the outcomes of democratic processes to their own advantage. Much more could be said, but this quick snapshot captures the core social functions served by just institutions within an intragenerational context.
The issue of intergenerational justice cannot be ignored within the framework of Rawls's argument. The reason is that the outcome of the hypothetical agreement must be fair to everyone, including future generations. The pursuit of maximal distributive shares for the worst-off members of the current generation can lead to very little savings, and that would mean insufficient resources necessary to fund whatever distributive shares are due to members of future generations. That is not a result that Rawls's theory can accept, given the assumption that everyone, including future generations, should be treated impartially. In the final statement of his distributive principles, Rawls makes clear the importance of the just savings principle as a constraint on the Difference Principle: “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle” (TOJ, 266, emphasis added).
How, then, should we think about what impartiality across generations demands? Intergenerational justice - duties to generations in the further future with whom no living member of the cooperative scheme will interact or cooperate - poses a problem for a reciprocity-based conception of justice. Current members of a society are not really involved in genuine reciprocal relationships with future members. They will be born well after current members are dead. Existing generations can act in ways that may improve or reduce the life prospects of future generations, reduce their options, or make various options more costly. By contrast, future generations can do nothing in return to affect the life prospects of prior generations. They cannot bargain, and they are powerless to command sacrifice from past generations for the sake of their own well-being. Moreover, inequalities that Rawls takes to be objectionable - because of their corrosive effects on the relationships among citizens whose lives are intertwined - supply no rationale for something like an intergenerational Difference Principle. The reason is straightforward. Reciprocity in the deepest sense is necessary in order to compress extreme inequalities that are corrosive of ideals of equal citizenship and the integrity of democratic political processes.However, there is no analogous "relational" rationale for reducing inequalities across generations, where by definition, there is no interaction.
The model of society as a kind of social contract spanning the generations would appear to have serious limitations. What then are the obligations of distributive justice, if any, that present generations bear toward future generations with whom they will never interact and will never have a truly reciprocal relationship of the sort that the social contract metaphor implies? Whatever the right answer is, it must satisfy the demands of impartiality, and we know that will not be the application of the Difference Principle within and across generations.
Perhaps we should aim for overall resource consumption levels that represent a comparable standard of living across the generations. That's one way to think about treating everyone equally or impartially. But Rawls resists that notion. That sort of solution seems intractable because we neither know the size of future generational cohorts nor the resource requirements that would result in comparable levels of well-being. We have many reasons to suppose that the planet's population will grow massively. Trying to ensure a comparable standard of living for successive, larger generational cohorts would be too demanding for current generations. Perhaps generations far into the future will have few options but to burn fossil fuels in order to preserve current standards of living. Perhaps they will not. There is considerable uncertainty about what is required to meet future need.
Moreover, Rawls does not suppose that intergenerational impartiality requires either equality of resources or even a guarantee of enough resources for a high standard of living. His assumption is that once a certain stage of capital accumulation is reached, saving for future generations becomes supererogatory. The purpose of the Just Savings Principle is not to make future generations wealthier, and indeed, Rawls thinks that we would be mistaken “to believe that a just and good society must wait upon a high material standard of life” (TOJ, 257). In addition, he is circumspect about too much emphasis upon the saving of wealth, noting that it may become a “meaningless distraction” or even a “temptation to indulgence or emptiness” (TOJ, 258)
Just Savings Principle
Rawls opts for a different way of thinking about the requirements intergenerational distributive justice. He argues for a Just Savings Principle that would be sufficient to guarantee enough economic and other resources for just institutions for future generations of citizens. Their shares are insufficient only if they are not enough to sustain just institutions and permit citizens within each generation to interact with one another on terms that satisfy the demands of reciprocity in the deepest sense. All that is required, then, is that future generations have enough resources to carry on as a just society. Enough to sustain the ongoing cooperative enterprise of a just society does not require any precise level of resources or any specific bundle of resources (e.g., coal, copper, rare earths). Considerably lower levels of economic prosperity than many societies now enjoy might be sufficient. Just as very high levels of prosperity among current members of society are not required for the existence of just institutions, there is no moral imperative to see to it that the future generations are better-off or even as well-off as current generations.
Reciprocity in the deepest sense is a requirement of intragenerational justice, and preserving the underlying conditions necessary for intragenerational reciprocity for future generations is a requirement of intergenerational justice. In a sense, both current and future generations are treated impartially: they are due the conditions necessary to live under distributive principles that make intragenerational justice possible. What intragenerational justice demands on Rawls's account is reciprocity in the deepest sense, and what intergenerational justice therefore requires is that each generation has what is necessary for intragenerational justice.
Can we say anything more specific about the Just Savings Principle? Rawls says that he does not think it is possible “to define precise limits on what the rate of savings should be” (TOJ, 253). We do know that intergenerational reciprocity at minimum requires that an intergenerational principle must be to everyone’s advantage. One way to satisfy this minimal demand of reciprocity is to choose a rate of savings for any generation that achieves what they feel entitled to have received from their predecessors. As Rawls puts it, “the parties are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations have saved, or will save, in accordance with the same criterion” (TOJ, 255). This does not require that each generation is entitled to the same rate of savings. Each is entitled to a rate of savings in accordance with the same criterion,” and the criterion, as we have seen, is whatever is required as a precondition for a just society.
International, Intergenerational Justice?
Rawls's account of reciprocity within and across generations within a single society does not offer any direct guidance regarding duties toward future generations beyond national boundaries. Intergenerational requirements of justice that are international in scope, if there are any, are not derivable from Rawls's premises, namely, the importance of securing the fair basis of reciprocal relations among members within each generational cohort.
We can speculate about possible ways in which global intergenerational justice might be addressed within Rawls's theory by examining what he says about international justice. In Law of Peoples, Rawls claims that all states (peoples in his technical language) have some duties to other nations generally and affluent states have duties to "burdened societies." Both figure in his theory of a "reasonably just society of peoples." There are general duties of mutual forbearance embodied in his lexical priority to a principle of national self-determination, and duties of mutual aid, particularly to burdened societies that lack the means to become fully cooperating members of the society of peoples.
The nature and extent of the duties to burdened societies are quite narrowly defined. The duty is to aid such societies in order that they can join the global "society of peoples," either as a just democratic society, or at the very least, as a "decent hierarchical society." There is no duty to reduce global inequalities between societies, and no direct and specific duty of affluent states to ensure some decent level of well-being for the individual members of other societies. There is only a general and unspecific duty (e.g., it does not necessarily require transfer of resources) to aid burdened states, and that duty ceases when each society has enough material resources and favorable social conditions for membership in the society of peoples.
The international normative framework thus differs from the normative framework applicable within states, but it embodies its own notions of reciprocity. Duties of mutual forbearance and mutual assistance are forms of reciprocity between nations, though far weaker than embodied in either the Difference Principle or the Just Savings Principle. If the duty of assistance kicks in whenever burdened societies fall below the minimum material requirements for membership in the society of peoples, then arguably affluent states are under a continuing obligation to assist peoples to become and remain members in good standing within the society of peoples. In effect, some modest measure of concern for global intergenerational justice might slip in through the theoretical backdoor.
This is an admittedly speculative extension of Rawls's theory of just relations among free and equal peoples. But it raises two interesting questions. First, does the duty to currently burdened societies constrain duties to the current citizens of one's own society? Given the lack of specificity of the former duties within Rawls's account, it's not easy see how any firm limits might be set. The same issues apply to the second question: do ongoing, prospective duties to future generations of members of burdened societies also constrain the extent to which affluent societies can favor future generations of their own citizens?
In order to address questions of this sort we need a more contentful conception of a requirement of global reciprocity among nation-states than the one I speculatively attribute to Rawls. More on that later...
Environmental Challenges as Inherently Intergenerational and International
As we have seen, Rawls discusses duties to future generations exclusively in the context of a single society, one that is conceived as an ongoing form of cooperation spanning the generations within one politically unified geographic territory. However, as we have seen as well, problems of intergenerational justice can arise in a global context. Indeed, it is often noted that the most pressing environmental challenges are both international and intergenerational in origin, and so too is their likely solution.
Climate change is an obvious example. The production of dangerous climate change is a function of the accumulated greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the Earth's atmosphere produced from all sources. No single nation can avoid climate change on its own, and even a radical reduction of GHG production of a handful of the planet's largest producers will not make a large enough dent in the accumulation process to forestall dangerous climate change and prevent harm to the rest of the nations of the world. The problem as well as the solution is inherently international.
Climate change is a problem that is often presented as an issue that resembles a classic Tragedy of the Commons. A paradigm environmental example is the problem of overfishing. Unless there is a universal (and perhaps enforceable or at least an assurable) agreement to reduce the catch of any fisherman there will soon be no more fish in the ocean for anyone. But absent some sort of agreement that offers assurance to all participants that others will reciprocate in restraining his catch, it is in the self-interest of each to catch as much as possible, thus guaranteeing that the collective interest in preserving the commons is thwarted, and in the long run, the self-interest of each individual fisherman (if he's still around) is frustrated.
As helpful as "tragedy of the commons" analogies often are, they mask some of the deeper practical challenges posed by climate change. Climate change is presented as a type of game-theoretic problem, typically formulated as a variant of the prisoner's dilemma, in which absence of a scheme of enforceable (or mutually assurable) global cooperation means that the separate interests of each nation are not secured. And so we see the pressing urgency of some sort of international climate change agreement. However, the nature of the incentive structures of the parties is not captured in that familiar narrative.
The further problem resides in the lack of intergenerational reciprocity. Future generations can do nothing to affect the well-being of current generations, but what current generations do will have enormous impact on future generations. We can imagine some sort of game-theoretic solution to purely international problems where parties can be brought to see the need for reciprocity - where the self-interested calculations of rational sacrifice necessary for the sake of one's own good can be made clear to all parties who interact over time and can reach stable, reciprocal agreements.
But it is in principle impossible for a current generation to ensure that the sacrifices they make for the sake of slowing global warming will be matched by sacrifices by subsequent generations. Future generations have nothing to offer the current generation in exchange for their (un-assurable) cooperation. As Stephen Gardiner notes, the intergenerational aspect of the problem makes climate change more resistant to solution. "...the usual appeals to broad self-interests rely on there being repeated interactions between the parties where mutually beneficial behavior is possible. But between present and future generations there is neither repeated interaction... nor mutual benefit." ("The Real Tragedy of the Commons," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2002, 30: 387-416, at p. 405).
The intergenerational aspect of the problem makes the international bargaining situation far more complicated in further ways. For one thing, as much as 90% of the harmful effects of climate change are expected to occur after 2200. Not only are "we not all in it together" internationally: the worst effects will land on some parts of the world even as some parts of the world experience some medium-term benefit. It's also the case that generations do not have symmetrical risk-benefit profiles. Let me explain.
Think of the interests likely to figure centrally in the minds of representatives of developing nations that see a substantial near-term increase in fossil fuel consumption as the only feasible path for reducing the poverty of current citizens. Current generations have enormous incentive to continue emitting GHGs for their own benefit, and indeed, strong incentives to emit even more in order to raise the standard of living for themselves and several (interacting) generations to come. As much as 25% of the world experiences energy poverty, or insufficient energy resources to secure adequate levels of food, water, transportation and medical care. As a result, those who are charged today with the task of bargaining over the terms of a climate change treaty on behalf of the citizens of their own nations are not necessarily suitable fiduciaries of the interests of future generations of citizens.
This moral focus on the current poor is in fact a significant element of the Framework Convention now in place for pursuing a climate change treaty. Because economists often assume that future generations will be much better off, it is often claimed that it would be wrong to favor them over current generations who are comparatively worse off. (See the Social Discount entry below on this page). In effect, the problem is one in which the interests of future generations are not only grossly underrepresented in international negotiations, but widely believed to have interests that are morally less urgent than the interests of the current poor.
One more consideration makes climate change different from the particular sort of tragedy of the commons that Garrett Hardin made famous. His argument was a kind of neo-Malthusian view of the demand pressures that a growing global population places on finite and dwindling resources necessary to support human life. His bleak conclusion was that we need something like an enforceable Hobbsian solution, one that coercively limits the size of the Earth's population. But as Gardiner and many other observers note, the climate change problem is not strictly a function of how many people there are, but a function of how many rich people there are. What matters overwhelmingly is how many heavy fossil-fuel based, resource consumers there are. For example, one study calculated that the richest 7% of the world's population is responsible for 50% of the annual global emissions, while the poorest 50% of the world's population is responsible for only 7%. (Chakravarty et al 2009). This fact should not come as a great surprise given that 1% of the world's population owns 50% of the world's wealth.
The brute fact of the climate change challenge is that any currently feasible solution is likely to require the global rich to give up quite a lot for the sake of the global poor, and require current generations to sacrifice for the benefit of generations in the distant future. Of course, worries of both sorts will melt away if the technological optimists are right: that some magic bullet is just around the corner and a no-sacrifice solution is within timely reach.
For an extended technical treatment of climate change as a kind of game-theoretic problem not fully fleshed out, when presented as a kind of tragedy of the commons, and not readily resolvable by application of the logic of standard prisoner dilemma models or some of the more sophisticated variants of multi-party game theoretic models, see Stephen Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.
Climate change is an obvious example. The production of dangerous climate change is a function of the accumulated greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the Earth's atmosphere produced from all sources. No single nation can avoid climate change on its own, and even a radical reduction of GHG production of a handful of the planet's largest producers will not make a large enough dent in the accumulation process to forestall dangerous climate change and prevent harm to the rest of the nations of the world. The problem as well as the solution is inherently international.
Climate change is a problem that is often presented as an issue that resembles a classic Tragedy of the Commons. A paradigm environmental example is the problem of overfishing. Unless there is a universal (and perhaps enforceable or at least an assurable) agreement to reduce the catch of any fisherman there will soon be no more fish in the ocean for anyone. But absent some sort of agreement that offers assurance to all participants that others will reciprocate in restraining his catch, it is in the self-interest of each to catch as much as possible, thus guaranteeing that the collective interest in preserving the commons is thwarted, and in the long run, the self-interest of each individual fisherman (if he's still around) is frustrated.
As helpful as "tragedy of the commons" analogies often are, they mask some of the deeper practical challenges posed by climate change. Climate change is presented as a type of game-theoretic problem, typically formulated as a variant of the prisoner's dilemma, in which absence of a scheme of enforceable (or mutually assurable) global cooperation means that the separate interests of each nation are not secured. And so we see the pressing urgency of some sort of international climate change agreement. However, the nature of the incentive structures of the parties is not captured in that familiar narrative.
The further problem resides in the lack of intergenerational reciprocity. Future generations can do nothing to affect the well-being of current generations, but what current generations do will have enormous impact on future generations. We can imagine some sort of game-theoretic solution to purely international problems where parties can be brought to see the need for reciprocity - where the self-interested calculations of rational sacrifice necessary for the sake of one's own good can be made clear to all parties who interact over time and can reach stable, reciprocal agreements.
But it is in principle impossible for a current generation to ensure that the sacrifices they make for the sake of slowing global warming will be matched by sacrifices by subsequent generations. Future generations have nothing to offer the current generation in exchange for their (un-assurable) cooperation. As Stephen Gardiner notes, the intergenerational aspect of the problem makes climate change more resistant to solution. "...the usual appeals to broad self-interests rely on there being repeated interactions between the parties where mutually beneficial behavior is possible. But between present and future generations there is neither repeated interaction... nor mutual benefit." ("The Real Tragedy of the Commons," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2002, 30: 387-416, at p. 405).
The intergenerational aspect of the problem makes the international bargaining situation far more complicated in further ways. For one thing, as much as 90% of the harmful effects of climate change are expected to occur after 2200. Not only are "we not all in it together" internationally: the worst effects will land on some parts of the world even as some parts of the world experience some medium-term benefit. It's also the case that generations do not have symmetrical risk-benefit profiles. Let me explain.
Think of the interests likely to figure centrally in the minds of representatives of developing nations that see a substantial near-term increase in fossil fuel consumption as the only feasible path for reducing the poverty of current citizens. Current generations have enormous incentive to continue emitting GHGs for their own benefit, and indeed, strong incentives to emit even more in order to raise the standard of living for themselves and several (interacting) generations to come. As much as 25% of the world experiences energy poverty, or insufficient energy resources to secure adequate levels of food, water, transportation and medical care. As a result, those who are charged today with the task of bargaining over the terms of a climate change treaty on behalf of the citizens of their own nations are not necessarily suitable fiduciaries of the interests of future generations of citizens.
This moral focus on the current poor is in fact a significant element of the Framework Convention now in place for pursuing a climate change treaty. Because economists often assume that future generations will be much better off, it is often claimed that it would be wrong to favor them over current generations who are comparatively worse off. (See the Social Discount entry below on this page). In effect, the problem is one in which the interests of future generations are not only grossly underrepresented in international negotiations, but widely believed to have interests that are morally less urgent than the interests of the current poor.
One more consideration makes climate change different from the particular sort of tragedy of the commons that Garrett Hardin made famous. His argument was a kind of neo-Malthusian view of the demand pressures that a growing global population places on finite and dwindling resources necessary to support human life. His bleak conclusion was that we need something like an enforceable Hobbsian solution, one that coercively limits the size of the Earth's population. But as Gardiner and many other observers note, the climate change problem is not strictly a function of how many people there are, but a function of how many rich people there are. What matters overwhelmingly is how many heavy fossil-fuel based, resource consumers there are. For example, one study calculated that the richest 7% of the world's population is responsible for 50% of the annual global emissions, while the poorest 50% of the world's population is responsible for only 7%. (Chakravarty et al 2009). This fact should not come as a great surprise given that 1% of the world's population owns 50% of the world's wealth.
The brute fact of the climate change challenge is that any currently feasible solution is likely to require the global rich to give up quite a lot for the sake of the global poor, and require current generations to sacrifice for the benefit of generations in the distant future. Of course, worries of both sorts will melt away if the technological optimists are right: that some magic bullet is just around the corner and a no-sacrifice solution is within timely reach.
For an extended technical treatment of climate change as a kind of game-theoretic problem not fully fleshed out, when presented as a kind of tragedy of the commons, and not readily resolvable by application of the logic of standard prisoner dilemma models or some of the more sophisticated variants of multi-party game theoretic models, see Stephen Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.
The Non-Identity Problem: A Challenge to the Idea of Duties to Future Generations
The Non-identity Problem
One problematic feature of intergenerational justice is the non-identity problem. Although the name is relatively new – dating to Derek Parfit's 1976 article ‘On Doing the Best for Our Children’ – it is a problem that has been recognized at least as far back as the 17th century discussion of rights by Hugo Grotius. But it is Parfit’s 1984 book, Reasons and Persons that is the initial source of its fullest and most influential development. The heart of his argument is found in chapters 16 and 17.
The material is dense, even though it is rich with examples. He approaches the material like a driver heading down the street, but pulling into every driveway along the route. We are going to simplify matters somewhat by staying on the main street.
The non-identity problem is motivated by the thought that two views about morality are widely held, difficult to renounce, and yet both cannot be true.
1st, many of us think that future generations can be harmed, wronged, treated unjustly, or have their rights violated, even though members of future generations have not yet come into existence, and even though the identities of future generations depend upon things we do now.
Comment: Parfit employs a genetic criterion of identity. TD2 (the time dependence claim): If any particular person had not been conceived within a month of the time when he was in fact conceived, he would in fact never have existed. (p. 352).
2nd, many of us are drawn also to a version of the “person-affecting intuition”—the idea, that is, that “bad” acts must be “bad for” someone (p. 363). A wrong action or policy is one that harms someone, or makes someone worse-off.
Comment: Parfit explicates the notion of harm as a reduction in “quality of life.” Quality of life is a placeholder term; it’s meant to be ecumenical among various theories of what makes life go well. It might be pleasure, happiness, some pluralist conception of the constituents of well-being, or whatever. The idea is that nothing substantive should turn on how well-being is conceptualized. In addition, in order to assess whether someone has been harmed Parfit employs a historical counterfactual test: we ask whether but for some action or policy someone is worse off (i.e., has a lower quality of life) at time t2 than she was at time t1.
A Simple Case
Start with a simple case. Two people plan to have a child. They will either conceive on Monday or a Tuesday, say, a little over a month from now (as per TD2). There will in fact exist some child in the near future as a result of their joint actions. But suppose that conception on Monday exposes the fetus to a terrible life-long malady, while waiting until a Tuesday a month or so later will avoid that fate.
Many, if not most of us think it would be wrong not to delay conception. But what exactly is the nature of the wrong? If we accept Parfit's person-affecting principle, then we must be able to identify someone who has been harmed in order to say that the failure to delay conception was wrong. The question then is: Who has been wronged if the couple does not wait? Monday’s child and Tuesday’s child are not genetically the same person. They are genetically non-identical. Waiting until Tuesday would produce an entirely different child. Waiting might have produced a better world, or one with higher levels of overall well-being, and the level of well-being of Tuesday's Child would be higher than what's possible for Monday's Child. But waiting would not have produced a world that is better for Monday’s Child. Monday's Child then has not been wronged: she has not been made worse-off than she would have been but for the decision not to delay conception. She would not existed had her parents waited.
The Further Future: the problem pertains to policies, having impact many generations later
The non-identity puzzle is not limited to specific actions such as those we find in reproductive decision cases. Policies as well as individual actions have consequences for how well future generations fare and who is born. When we opt for technological innovations – building highways and railroads, for example, we affect who will be born. Parfit asks rhetorically: who can say she would have been born absent her mother’s train ride from Surrey to Sussex?
Resource policies are another example. Consider the Depletion Policy. If we choose to use up non-renewable resources at a rapid pace we (arguably) improve the quality of life for several generations, but over time, we may leave insufficient resources necessary to support a similar quality of life for generations several hundred years out, and we will likely alter how many children there are as a consequence.
Or consider the Risky Policy case. We improve quality of life for a few generations, say, by generating electric power from nuclear reactors, but at some point a few hundred years from now, future generations will face problems of safe storage of radioactive waste that poses a risk of catastrophic consequences.
In some respects the policy cases are even more problematic for the way we think about what we owe to future generations. In Technological Innovation cases, Resource Depletion cases, and Risky Policy cases, we not only affect the quality of life for and identity of the members of future generations: we affect the number of people who will be born. This effect on identity and number of people who will be born might be a bit difficult to grasp at first glance. It seems a bit abstract. Think of some familiar examples that have had enormous impact on mating patterns.
Large-scale wars result in fewer births from parents drawn from opposing sides, and periods of economic uncertainty and wartime crisis tend to produce smaller birth cohorts, followed by larger cohorts once the crisis has subsided. Cold snowy winters, readily available quantities of alcohol, and all sorts of things affect identity and number of persons who are born. Over several hundred years, it is nearly impossible to suppose that any living person would be genetically identical to any person who would have existed as a result of alternative policies. But for these policies, none of the particular people alive would have existed, and a different number of people would exist.
Given that several generations out – the “further future” – there is literally no one whose quality of life that is lower than it would have been, there are no persons who can say that they have been harmed by policies in the way that Parfit's person-affecting principle requires. This is so even if the quality of life of future generations is quite low. If we accept this version of the person-affecting principle, we cannot say that anyone has been wronged because we cannot point to anyone who has been harmed.
Theory X: Utilitarianism and the Repugnant Conclusion
At this point, Parfit says we need Theory X. What we need is a theory that will explain what makes a wrong act wrong, other than one that says that it is the harm – counterfactually judged - done to some identifiable person. We need a theory of beneficence, on Parfit’s view, but it must be an impersonal theory. An impersonal theory is one that views wrong acts as wrong for reasons other than someone’s having been made worse off than she would have been but for the action of another or some policy.
There are other available standards of right and wrong in the philosophical literature, but they have their own theoretical problems. Some utilitarians, for example, think that morality requires acting for the impersonal aggregate good. It’s a better world, they might argue, in which people have Tuesday babies than a world in which people have Monday babies. Thus, even if no Monday babies are harmed, it is wrong to produce a world in which there is less overall human well-being.
This is an impersonal account in the sense that right and wrong are not dependent upon the act being bad for some person. Right and wrong are judged impersonally, viz., by reference to net goodness of states of affairs, not by reference to the harm to any identifiable person.
Parfit is attracted to some variant of the utilitarian solution, but he makes much of the fact that it has serious problems. One problem is the Repugnant Conclusion. If we are required to produce the best world overall, then if by having a very large number of children whose lives are barely worth living we could produce more aggregate good by than producing a small number of children with very high quality of life, it would be wrong not to opt for producing a larger number of mostly miserable human beings. Utilitarianism thus seems to give us the wrong answer about right and wrong.
Even variants of average utilitarian theories (including proxy measures of average well-being favored by some economists) offer no promising way out. There are many other problems with various forms of utilitarianism, but I leave these worries aside. What matters to this discussion is that none offers an obvious solution to the non-identity problem.
Other Impersonal Standards
Let’s continue our search for Theory X by looking for other candidates for an impersonal standard. Again, what we need is a theory that does not depend upon actual harm to any identifiable person, but we want to avoid the problems of utilitarianism. An alternative is to look for some threshold quality of life, below which it is wrong to bring people into the world. Instead of aiming for the best, maybe we can define what’s good enough. By setting such a benchmark we can conclude that only a reproductive outcome that falls below that threshold counts as a relevant sort of harm that we are prepared to count as a wrong.
There are several prominent candidates found in the literature. They try to specify a threshold level of well-being that is sufficient, such that a wide range of differences in well-being above the line are permissible (reproductive) outcomes. These ‘sufficientarian’ solutions may circumvent the non-identity problem by dispensing with Parfit's person-affecting principle, but they are problematic for other reasons. Any effort to define such a threshold seems prone to charges of arbitrariness. And, of course it has the potential for invidious comparative judgments about quality of life.
We might suppose that we can avoid a fatal charge of arbitrariness by adopting a very weak, uncontroversial threshold. Perhaps we might say that bringing someone into the world would be wrong if that life would be worse than non-existence. The benchmark is an impersonal one inasmuch as it does not employ a historical counterfactual involving the well-being of a person at time t1 and t2. A ponderous matter, indeed. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. In fact, in his book, Better Never to Have Been, he argues for the 'anti-natal' view---that it is always wrong to have children.
If nothing else, this discussion shows how difficult the search for theory X is. The search for Theory X goes on. Alternatively, we might search for an account of what makes wrong acts/policies wrong, other than (i) harm to an identifiable person, judged counterfactually, or (ii) the purely outcome-oriented approaches of impersonal beneficence theories.
A survey of a number of proposed solutions to the non-identity problem can be found in the entry "The Non-Identity Problem," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Dismissive Responses to the Non-Identity Problem
Not everyone shares Parfit's enthusiasm for the presumed importance of his version of the person-affecting principle. There are a number of reasons for doubt. One source of doubt is a worry about the plausibility of the tight linkage between wronging and harming. The linkage is an artifact of a broadly consequentialist moral perspective. Some critics are dismissive of the challenge posed by the non-identity problem because they think that examples of wronging without harming are abundant in everyday life.
One widely cited counterexample involves a person who is denied a ticket on an airplane on racially motivated grounds, but the flight then crashes, killing all of the passengers. If we assume that the person who was denied a ticket did not know the grounds for the denial (and so experienced no psychological harm), then most of us are inclined to say that this is an instance of wronging without harming.
There are just too many imaginable types of wronging without harm to think that actual harm is the only way to understand wronging. It is wrong for me to shoot at passersby in the park, even if I am a bad shot and always miss my target (and no one sees a thing because they are starring at their smart phones and no one hears anything because they are wearing earbuds). Some deeply disadvantaging social structures are unjust, because unfair, even if some persons manage to escape the typical harsh consequences through heroic hard work and extraordinary good luck. We think that certain expressions of invidious prejudice and social stigma are unjust even if the objects of disrespect are thick skinned, undaunted by the judgments of bigots, and manage to overcome the obstacles to success that such prejudice brings. We could go on indefinitely.
One concrete suggestion for solving the non-identity problem, in part, by breaking the linkage between harming and wronging is based in Scanlon's contractualist theory. (Rahul Kumar in "Who Can Be Wronged?" Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 31, 2003, pp. 99-118). Kumar argues that we might think that wronging is a matter of violating a norm that no one could reasonably reject as the basis for interpersonal relations. If this is a plausible way of understanding what explains what makes wrong acts wrong, there is no harming of a person required in order to understand the wrongness of an action. We can then speak of wronging future generations without having to pass the counterfactual test of whether there is anyone who has been harmed.
But there's more that can be gleaned from Kumar's argument, apart from its role in liberating the notion of wronging from the grips of a purely consequentialist mode of thinking. More significantly perhaps, Kumar's argument allows us to break the link between wronging and having any effect on a specific person. The lack of an effect on an identifiable person or their interest - a harm to a person, a violation of a person's rights, disrespecting or disadvantaging a person, whatever - does not matter because the test of right and wrong is a matter of compliance or violation of a general norm.
Instead of asking, as Kumar does, "Who can be wronged?" the Scanlonian model effectively reformulates the question to ask "what makes a wrong action (policy) wrong?" However we go about identifying some species of wronging, in every case, it's nothing personal. Sure, it matters to each person who can say that because of some action or policy she has been wronged. She has a special standing to complain, but the wrong she experiences is not a function of the fact that she in particular has been wronged - more on why that matters below, quite independently of whether we adopt the Scanlonian strategy.
Human Rights, the Non-identity Problem, and More
Henry Shue is a human rights theorist who adopts a dismissive posture toward the non-identity problem. He denies that it poses an objection to the existence of rights of future generations. The failure to undertake changes necessary to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change "constitutes a violation of basic rights" and "[i]ndeed, we wrong the people of tomorrow by doggedly persisting in contributing to conditions in which they will be unable to fulfill their basic rights." (Shue, "Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton" pp. 292, 293). Shue acknowledges the fact that "many philosophers have been much taken with what is known as the non-identity problem" (Shue, 293, fn 6), but "[w]hile the identities of future individuals are not determined and are thus not knowable, we know that as humans they will all be entitled to human rights." (Shue, p. 293).
Shue's approach has to come to grips with problems of two sorts: the failure to get to the bottom of Parfit's non-identity objection and the way it threatens the very idea of rights of future generations; and difficulties that arise from thinking of contributions to dangerous climate change as violations of human rights.
The first worry is that Shue understates the significance of the non-identity problem. He observes that the identities of rights-bearers might be unknown or unknowable, but that the rights of future generations can be violated by government policies and individual actions undertaken now. This misses the mark of what Parfit relies upon in claiming that a rights-based approach cannot circumvent the non-identity problem. The problem is not simply that identities are not known or knowable. That's often the case in many commonplace rights violations: shooting my assault rifle in the town square, for example.
What Shue's comment fails to notice is that some version of the person-affecting requirement is in play in Parfit's critique of the notion of rights of future generations. Because there are no rights-bearers in existence (and what we do will determine who comes into existence in the further future), there are no persons whose rights have been affected or violated at the time of our actions. Instead of using a historical counterfactual, person-affecting test to determine if someone has been harmed (and thus wronged), Parfit uses a historical counterfactual, person-affecting test to determine if someone's rights have been violated.
This is where the larger take-away point from Kumar's argument gets traction. A counterargument that is responsive to Parfit's extension of the non-identity problem to the realm of rights has to do more than merely break the consequentialist link between harming and wronging. It has to break the more basic link between wronging and affecting a person - whether the effect is harming a person or violating a person's rights.
Kumar's use of Scanlon's contractualist model breaks both links. It makes wronging a function of violating a norm that no one could reasonably reject as the basis for interpersonal relations. So if human rights theory has any chance of success as an account of what is wrong with putting future generations at grave risk for dangerous anthropogenic climate change, then human rights have to be understood as general norms of interpersonal conduct, and human rights violations have to be understood as failures to comply with those norms, not as actions that are wrong because they affect any specific person's rights.
This suggestion for how we should view human rights norms will be resisted. It seems to run counter to some deeply entrenched intuitions. Human rights violators don't merely do wrong; they wrong people who are rights bearers, and the victims of such violations have personal complaints that they are entitled to address to the violators.
The intuitions in favor of this version of the person-affecting account has roots, I think, in an influential picture of what it means to be the bearer of a right. Rights-bearers stand in a particular posture toward others. As Joel Feinberg put it, having rights enables us to "stand up like men" to demand what is our due. It is to assert exclusive normative authority over some matter, or to act (as H.L.A. Hart put it, Essays on Bentham, p. 183) "as small scale sovereigns," to make preemptive claims on others regarding some aspect of the way our relationship is structured.
This "stand and demand" model has obvious attraction. It allows us to make claims against others, not merely as supplicants, or even as persons prepared to enter into further negotiation. The "stand and demand model" has much of its intuitive appeal, I think, because it is rooted a deeply entrenched property metaphor. To be the bearer of rights is (i) to possess an entitlement to the performance of some duty; (ii) to experience a diminishment of the value of something one possesses when one's rights are violated; and (iii) to have a special standing to make a claim against another as a result of possessing a right.
I'm skeptical about our continued fascination with the property metaphor. Even if my moral standing to complain is tied to the fact that the right violated is mine, the rationale for my complaint has nothing to do with the fact that the right violated was mine. Nor is it the case that all that we should care about in a scheme of rights is making sure that the powerless have a say in what happens to them. It seems implausible to insist, by mere definitional fiat, that the exclusive function of rights is the proper allocation of control. That's important, but in some instances, it seems that protection of the vulnerable (who cannot "stand up like a man") matters, even if the generally preferred means of protecting the vulnerable is empowering the powerless or disempowering the powerful.
Tim Hayward makes what I take to be a similar point. He notes that it is not clear what the idea of a (directed) duty to a particular person adds to our understanding of human rights (though maybe for some other kinds of rights). No fact peculiar to specific right-holders provides grounds for such rights. The grounds are "general facts about what is good for humans." (Heyward, at 280). To be sure, my complaint is personal when the human rights violation affects me or mine, but the fact that it is me or mine is not what explains the wrongness of a human rights violation. It merely explains the personal character of my complaint.
My suggestion, and what I take to be central to Heyward's suggestion, is that we should abandon the possessory model of human rights as grounded in anything that a right-holder has, and also, that we should reject the idea that exclusive function of human rights (why assume there is just one?) is to enable people to stand their ground and demand what's theirs. This shift frees us from grip that the rights-based version of the person-affecting requirement has on the way we think about the rights of future generations. The upshot is that it lets Shue's climate change rights argument go forward to take on the next set of challenges.
Human Rights: The Content of Duties and their Assignment
Shue has much more to consider even if the non-identity objection no longer sticks. The notion of human rights as the best way of understanding the morality of climate change faces further challenges. There are two closely related problems: (i) specifying the content of rights and their associated duties and (ii) identifying the locus of moral responsibility for fulfillment of rights and identifying the failures of responsibility that count as human rights violations.
Let's start with the matter of content. Parfit thinks that the application of rights theory to future generations poses insuperable problems apart from the non-identity objection. There seems to be no plausible way to specify determinant content of such rights as we ponder the further future. He offers the example of someone who leaves broken glass in the woods as a possible counterexample to his claim. It might be said that while we do not know who might came along and be injured by stepping on the broken glass, it is within the realm of imagination that someone might be injured, even if generations later. Parfit's response is that we cannot build a credible theory of rights that depends upon a view of moral responsibility for speculative "remoter effects." There is no ready way to determine what future generations have sufficient reason to expect as a matter of right. In fact, broken glass in the woods may be a threat for a few years at most, but centuries later?
Moreover, a well-established tradition within the human rights literature is resistant to the idea that human rights violations arise from quotidian activities of individuals (burning fossil fuels, breaking glass in the woods) or even the idea that responsibility for fulfilling or protecting human rights generally is assignable to individuals. James Nickel, for example, notes that “human rights are political norms dealing mainly with how people should be treated by their governments and institutions. They are not ordinary moral norms applying mainly to interpersonal conduct (such as prohibitions of lying and violence).”
Dale Jamieson presses a similar point. He sees the links between GHG emissions and the harm they cause as fundamentally different from links between paradigmatic instances of human rights violations such as torture. He argues that our understanding what is at stake morally in climate change cannot be elucidated in terms of human rights. The harms from climate change are not like what we think of under the traditional model. There are many causal contributors, spanning generations past, present, and future. The harm is a function of the cumulative effect of these contributions. No single contribution is the necessary or sufficient cause of the harm. Some contributors to the adverse consequences that will arise in the distant future are dead. Because the emissions that any of us produce today will dissipate over 200-300 years we cannot even say that our emissions in 2000 contribute to the problem in 2300.
In addition, because the process is ongoing there is no clear rationale for apportioning the correlative duties for fulfillment of rights of every future generation to specific generational cohorts. We end up with a process of generational buck-passing, leaving to each subsequent generation the responsibility for protection of all of those who come later. Moreover, many people have and continue to emit greenhouse gases for morally benign or socially useful purposes. Surely, all contributions to GHG stocks are not on a moral par.
Henry Shue, Simon Caney, and others are seemingly unmoved by objections of this sort. Many of the most prominent contributors to the climate justice literature frame the debate in terms of human rights. They focus on the least controversial of rights: rights to life, health, and a minimally decent standard of living. And in many instances, they focus on the least controversial of duties associated with these human rights: stringent duties not to cause grave harm to the underlying interests that ground these rights.
We might strengthen the case for a human rights approach by following the lead of one of Shue's observations. What is centrally at stake is this: "to inherit from past generations an environment that is neither radically inhospitable nor radically unpredictable" (Shue 293).
The right to a functioning planetary environment seems as basic as any sort of right we might imagine. Indeed, the moral uniqueness of this way of expressing environmental concerns figures in recent arguments for how we should prioritize sustainable development goals. Some Earth scientists similarly conclude that what is at stake in climate change is different in kind from all of the rest of what matters in the standard debates about the trade-offs between the environment and other values. They argue that the "stable functioning of Earth systems — including the atmosphere, oceans, forests, waterways, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles — is a prerequisite" of all else. These are environmental concerns that are not of equal importance, as the standard Brundtland three-pillar model of environmental, social, and economic sustainability assumes.
If the Earth sciences argument is correct, as I think it is, the "remoter effects" objection from Parfit's broken glass example seems misplaced. Call this concern with inheriting stable functioning of Earth systems (one that is "neither radically inhospitable nor radically unpredictable") a right to a sustainable human habitat. Structurally, it is very similar to the way that Rawls defends what he thinks is owed to future generations of citizens within one nation. No particular quality of life or bundle of resources figures in the specification of either guarantee; both are formulated in terms of conditions that are the pre-requisites for more general considerations (intragenerational domestic justice in Rawls's theory, and the requirements of life itself in the climate change context) that any generation has reason to value highly and to expect as its legacy from prior generations.
Perhaps construing the right to a sustainable human habitat as the centerpiece of climate change rights offers a clearer and more persuasive picture of the content of human rights that ground duties to future generations, but this makes the already complicated tasks of specifying and assigning associated duties even more complicated. It's a plausible specification of the content a right, but figuring out the associated duties is daunting.
The problem of how to make sense of the duties that correspond to human rights implicated by anthropogenic climate change can be illustrated by contrasting them with standard sorts of examples relied upon by defenders of the "Correlativity Thesis": there is no right at all unless there is a directed duty owed by a duty-bearer to a right-holder. This picture is a good fit with symmetrical content cases. For example: my right against you is a right not to be assaulted (the content of my right) and the duty you have toward me is the duty not to assault me (the content of the duty). The standard picture offers little guidance for thinking about climate change. If there is a right to a sustainable human habitat, to whom is it addressed? And if it is addressed to individuals, what is the specific content of their duty? After all, no individual can guarantee a sustainable habit.
Remarks by Shue, Caney, and others often provide fodder for just these kinds of objections. At times, Shue seems to cast the net widely. His human rights approach appears quite general when he says that "we wrong the people of tomorrow by doggedly persisting in contributing to conditions in which they will be unable to fulfill their basic human rights" (Shue 293). If he intends to say that individuals are wronging others by their individual contributions, then this is the sort of dragnet approach to human rights violations that Jamieson and others find problematic.
However, quite a few philosophers have abandoned the standard picture exemplified in the Correlativity Thesis. They argue in favor of a fractured picture of human rights and their associated duties. Here are a few illustrative examples of how the human rights approach might gain plausibility in the climate change context.
Shue, for example, argues elsewhere (Basic Rights, p. 16) that a basic human "right is ordinarily a justified demand that some other people make some arrangements so that one will still be able to enjoy the substance of the right even if — actually, especially if — it is not within one’s own power to arrange on one’s own to enjoy the substance of the right." A right to subsistence, then, is not a right for which the primary corresponding duty is an individual duty of provision, but a right that others see to it that the appropriate institutional structures are in place for its satisfaction. The symmetry of content of rights and duties is thus abandoned, and the duties of the individual no longer take center stage in a theory of human rights. Given this way of viewing the linkage between human rights and the assignment of duties, there are reasons to back away from the dragnet approach to human rights violations. General statements that suggest that individuals, in their everyday activities, are human rights violators seem strained.
Fortunately, we need not place individuals at the center of how we think about human rights and their associated duties. Others also assume that the primary duty-bearer for the fulfillment of human rights lies elsewhere than with individuals. For some, the locus of responsibility is the nation-state (e.g., Thomas Pogge). We know that's not going to help much with the climate change problem, for nation-states on their own can't solve it.
We might look elsewhere for suggestions. Lief Wenar (Freedom form Poverty, p 271) argues that the assignment of responsibility for such things as global poverty relief should be governed by the "least cost principle" (assignment on the basis of consideration of the party best positioned to solve a problem at the least cost). Concretely, this means that just as there are moral requirements to ascend to the "next level" by creating state institutions to address problems that individuals cannot (or should not) address on their own, there are moral requirements to ascend to the next level by creating institutional arrangements beyond the nation-state whenever nation-states (for a variety of reasons) fail to be adequate to the task. Arguments for ascending to the next level beyond the nation-state gain plausibility when the causal story behind the problem is unlikely to be sorted out (Wenar thinks that this is the case with global poverty, where explanations of why some nations are rich while others are poor are both plentiful and unconvincing).
More generally, Elizabeth Ashford (Global Ethics: The Inadequacy of Traditional conceptions of duties imposed by human rights") argues for the existence of duties to set up institutions that specify the allocation of unassigned moral responsibilities and make the content of rights more determinate. In a similar vein, Amartya Sen ("Elements of a Theory of Human Rights") argues that human rights generate a portfolio of differentiated duties applicable to a diversity of addressees to do what each can to prevent rights violations or fulfill rights rights guarantees. (Cf. Shue, Basic Rights, chapter 2). [The UN Framework Convention adopts the language of differentiated duties as well].
The point of these suggestions is simply that there are powerful arguments for replacing the traditional picture of the symmetrical content of rights and duties, and its one-to-one assignment of duties, with a fractured, constructivist model. The fractured picture, with its moral division of labor among bearers of responsibility, remains messy, and we are right to want more and better accounts of the content of duties and their assignment, especially when the content of a human right is as general as a sustainable human habitat. The problem of assignment of duties, in any case, remains the Achilles Heel of human rights theory.
That said, even if we cannot provide a comprehensive account of assignment of duties, perhaps we can say something useful and more specific that allows us to fill out a part of the story about human rights and climate change, while avoiding the objections that Jamieson and others raise against a dragnet approach to climate change rights.
A requirement of global reciprocity?
Consider what we might say about the ongoing international negotiations designed to produce a treaty on climate change. Of course, it is possible that changes in individual behavior without any global institutional mechanism will solve the problem. But if we make the reasonable assumption that cooperative, collective action is the best hope for averting dangerous anthropogenic climate change, what might we say about that situation from the perspective of human rights theory if nothing is done?
One thing that we know is that we are not all in this together. Some of the poorest, most vulnerable nations will be hurt first and worst. Climate change poses an existential threat to everyone, sooner or later, but for some, the threat is much sooner and it involves loss of the means to survival and even the loss of territory for island nations and low-lying countries if action is not forthcoming soon. The urgency of response is reflected in the growing global resistance movement (e.g., Blockadia, the Pacific Climate Warriors) and the arguments for direct action are grounded in the idea that governmental inaction, and the failure to create institutions that can solve the collective problem, constitute human rights violations.
My suggestion is that the injustice identified by these resistance movements resides in a failure of global reciprocity among nations. At minimum, we should endorse a requirement of global reciprocity that imposes limits on advantage-seeking in climate change treaty negotiations (and negotiations on other human rights-affecting rules of the global economic order).
A requirement of global reciprocity prohibits a nation from pressing for advantage for its own citizens when (i) its own citizens’s basic human rights are not thereby put at substantial risk, and (ii) the pursuit of national advantage seriously undermines the human rights of citizens of other nations.
This global reciprocity requirement is not a cosmopolitan or impartial concern for the overall welfare of all human beings. It does not rule out a nation’s special concern for the overall welfare of its own citizens in pressing for favorable bargains. In fact, it presupposes the acceptability of self-interested international bargaining, but only within reciprocally recognized limits. Indeed, it takes for granted the widespread assumption that all nations, whether rich or poor, have a special, primary duty to ensure the satisfaction of the human rights of their own citizens.
Global reciprocity merely rules out forms of bargaining in which the morally non-negotiable interests of the citizens of less powerful countries – namely, their basic human rights – are not treated on a par with the morally non-negotiable interests that citizens of developed nations possess. No nation should acquiesce in such a sacrifice if required by such a bargain, and no nation should demand that kind of sacrifice from other, less powerful nations simply to preserve a vastly higher standard of living for its own citizens.
Characterizing our failed response to the threat of climate change as implicating human rights ups the moral ante. Human rights are especially stringent moral demands that warrant some sort of enforcement, by coercion if necessary, to protect against their violation. Suppose that the developed nations fail to reach agreement that does enough, soon enough. Imagine the formation of a Global Environmental Resistance Movement (GERM) - a kind of Greenpeace on steroids. What moral warrant would carbon-intensive nations have in using coercion to suppress efforts to stop what resisters see as a massive human rights catastrophe?
This is, of course, a complicated question, but one familiar approach to the question holds that whether state coercion of any sort is justified depends upon a state’s political legitimacy. There are various theories of political legitimacy, and I won’t try to mount a defense of any particular one here. Instead I will note one prominent view. It that argues that state use of coercion is justified only when it meets certain minimum standards of justice: it must respect the human rights of its citizens and all other human beings (e.g., Altman and Wellman).
Such theories do not argue for the absurd claim that no state use of coercion is justified unless there is perfect compliance with every last human right. This is because it is not necessary to assume that political legitimacy is an all-or-nothing matter. A state would be justified, say, in using coercion to prevent and punish rape, but arguably not justified in using coercion simply to secure the economic benefits derived from human rights violations associated with GHG overproduction. Of course, the permissibility of the actions of a resistance movement would have to be judged in light of standard caveats. These include exhaustion of other remedies, taking actions that target only those who are human rights violators, avoid harm to the innocent, taking action that is proportionate to the harm prevented, and much more.
These are truly difficult issues, and I have just begun to consider them. Resistance movements of the sort I have imagined are growing around the world, and their direct action techniques involve blockades, obstructive encampments, and destruction of carbon-intensive infrastructure projects that are underway. The very suggestion that there is a genuine moral issue about justified resistance of any form is likely to make many comfortable people uncomfortable. But not as uncomfortable as some of the world’s poorest, most disadvantaged, most vulnerable will be if global collective action is not taken.
One widely cited counterexample involves a person who is denied a ticket on an airplane on racially motivated grounds, but the flight then crashes, killing all of the passengers. If we assume that the person who was denied a ticket did not know the grounds for the denial (and so experienced no psychological harm), then most of us are inclined to say that this is an instance of wronging without harming.
There are just too many imaginable types of wronging without harm to think that actual harm is the only way to understand wronging. It is wrong for me to shoot at passersby in the park, even if I am a bad shot and always miss my target (and no one sees a thing because they are starring at their smart phones and no one hears anything because they are wearing earbuds). Some deeply disadvantaging social structures are unjust, because unfair, even if some persons manage to escape the typical harsh consequences through heroic hard work and extraordinary good luck. We think that certain expressions of invidious prejudice and social stigma are unjust even if the objects of disrespect are thick skinned, undaunted by the judgments of bigots, and manage to overcome the obstacles to success that such prejudice brings. We could go on indefinitely.
One concrete suggestion for solving the non-identity problem, in part, by breaking the linkage between harming and wronging is based in Scanlon's contractualist theory. (Rahul Kumar in "Who Can Be Wronged?" Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 31, 2003, pp. 99-118). Kumar argues that we might think that wronging is a matter of violating a norm that no one could reasonably reject as the basis for interpersonal relations. If this is a plausible way of understanding what explains what makes wrong acts wrong, there is no harming of a person required in order to understand the wrongness of an action. We can then speak of wronging future generations without having to pass the counterfactual test of whether there is anyone who has been harmed.
But there's more that can be gleaned from Kumar's argument, apart from its role in liberating the notion of wronging from the grips of a purely consequentialist mode of thinking. More significantly perhaps, Kumar's argument allows us to break the link between wronging and having any effect on a specific person. The lack of an effect on an identifiable person or their interest - a harm to a person, a violation of a person's rights, disrespecting or disadvantaging a person, whatever - does not matter because the test of right and wrong is a matter of compliance or violation of a general norm.
Instead of asking, as Kumar does, "Who can be wronged?" the Scanlonian model effectively reformulates the question to ask "what makes a wrong action (policy) wrong?" However we go about identifying some species of wronging, in every case, it's nothing personal. Sure, it matters to each person who can say that because of some action or policy she has been wronged. She has a special standing to complain, but the wrong she experiences is not a function of the fact that she in particular has been wronged - more on why that matters below, quite independently of whether we adopt the Scanlonian strategy.
Human Rights, the Non-identity Problem, and More
Henry Shue is a human rights theorist who adopts a dismissive posture toward the non-identity problem. He denies that it poses an objection to the existence of rights of future generations. The failure to undertake changes necessary to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change "constitutes a violation of basic rights" and "[i]ndeed, we wrong the people of tomorrow by doggedly persisting in contributing to conditions in which they will be unable to fulfill their basic rights." (Shue, "Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton" pp. 292, 293). Shue acknowledges the fact that "many philosophers have been much taken with what is known as the non-identity problem" (Shue, 293, fn 6), but "[w]hile the identities of future individuals are not determined and are thus not knowable, we know that as humans they will all be entitled to human rights." (Shue, p. 293).
Shue's approach has to come to grips with problems of two sorts: the failure to get to the bottom of Parfit's non-identity objection and the way it threatens the very idea of rights of future generations; and difficulties that arise from thinking of contributions to dangerous climate change as violations of human rights.
The first worry is that Shue understates the significance of the non-identity problem. He observes that the identities of rights-bearers might be unknown or unknowable, but that the rights of future generations can be violated by government policies and individual actions undertaken now. This misses the mark of what Parfit relies upon in claiming that a rights-based approach cannot circumvent the non-identity problem. The problem is not simply that identities are not known or knowable. That's often the case in many commonplace rights violations: shooting my assault rifle in the town square, for example.
What Shue's comment fails to notice is that some version of the person-affecting requirement is in play in Parfit's critique of the notion of rights of future generations. Because there are no rights-bearers in existence (and what we do will determine who comes into existence in the further future), there are no persons whose rights have been affected or violated at the time of our actions. Instead of using a historical counterfactual, person-affecting test to determine if someone has been harmed (and thus wronged), Parfit uses a historical counterfactual, person-affecting test to determine if someone's rights have been violated.
This is where the larger take-away point from Kumar's argument gets traction. A counterargument that is responsive to Parfit's extension of the non-identity problem to the realm of rights has to do more than merely break the consequentialist link between harming and wronging. It has to break the more basic link between wronging and affecting a person - whether the effect is harming a person or violating a person's rights.
Kumar's use of Scanlon's contractualist model breaks both links. It makes wronging a function of violating a norm that no one could reasonably reject as the basis for interpersonal relations. So if human rights theory has any chance of success as an account of what is wrong with putting future generations at grave risk for dangerous anthropogenic climate change, then human rights have to be understood as general norms of interpersonal conduct, and human rights violations have to be understood as failures to comply with those norms, not as actions that are wrong because they affect any specific person's rights.
This suggestion for how we should view human rights norms will be resisted. It seems to run counter to some deeply entrenched intuitions. Human rights violators don't merely do wrong; they wrong people who are rights bearers, and the victims of such violations have personal complaints that they are entitled to address to the violators.
The intuitions in favor of this version of the person-affecting account has roots, I think, in an influential picture of what it means to be the bearer of a right. Rights-bearers stand in a particular posture toward others. As Joel Feinberg put it, having rights enables us to "stand up like men" to demand what is our due. It is to assert exclusive normative authority over some matter, or to act (as H.L.A. Hart put it, Essays on Bentham, p. 183) "as small scale sovereigns," to make preemptive claims on others regarding some aspect of the way our relationship is structured.
This "stand and demand" model has obvious attraction. It allows us to make claims against others, not merely as supplicants, or even as persons prepared to enter into further negotiation. The "stand and demand model" has much of its intuitive appeal, I think, because it is rooted a deeply entrenched property metaphor. To be the bearer of rights is (i) to possess an entitlement to the performance of some duty; (ii) to experience a diminishment of the value of something one possesses when one's rights are violated; and (iii) to have a special standing to make a claim against another as a result of possessing a right.
I'm skeptical about our continued fascination with the property metaphor. Even if my moral standing to complain is tied to the fact that the right violated is mine, the rationale for my complaint has nothing to do with the fact that the right violated was mine. Nor is it the case that all that we should care about in a scheme of rights is making sure that the powerless have a say in what happens to them. It seems implausible to insist, by mere definitional fiat, that the exclusive function of rights is the proper allocation of control. That's important, but in some instances, it seems that protection of the vulnerable (who cannot "stand up like a man") matters, even if the generally preferred means of protecting the vulnerable is empowering the powerless or disempowering the powerful.
Tim Hayward makes what I take to be a similar point. He notes that it is not clear what the idea of a (directed) duty to a particular person adds to our understanding of human rights (though maybe for some other kinds of rights). No fact peculiar to specific right-holders provides grounds for such rights. The grounds are "general facts about what is good for humans." (Heyward, at 280). To be sure, my complaint is personal when the human rights violation affects me or mine, but the fact that it is me or mine is not what explains the wrongness of a human rights violation. It merely explains the personal character of my complaint.
My suggestion, and what I take to be central to Heyward's suggestion, is that we should abandon the possessory model of human rights as grounded in anything that a right-holder has, and also, that we should reject the idea that exclusive function of human rights (why assume there is just one?) is to enable people to stand their ground and demand what's theirs. This shift frees us from grip that the rights-based version of the person-affecting requirement has on the way we think about the rights of future generations. The upshot is that it lets Shue's climate change rights argument go forward to take on the next set of challenges.
Human Rights: The Content of Duties and their Assignment
Shue has much more to consider even if the non-identity objection no longer sticks. The notion of human rights as the best way of understanding the morality of climate change faces further challenges. There are two closely related problems: (i) specifying the content of rights and their associated duties and (ii) identifying the locus of moral responsibility for fulfillment of rights and identifying the failures of responsibility that count as human rights violations.
Let's start with the matter of content. Parfit thinks that the application of rights theory to future generations poses insuperable problems apart from the non-identity objection. There seems to be no plausible way to specify determinant content of such rights as we ponder the further future. He offers the example of someone who leaves broken glass in the woods as a possible counterexample to his claim. It might be said that while we do not know who might came along and be injured by stepping on the broken glass, it is within the realm of imagination that someone might be injured, even if generations later. Parfit's response is that we cannot build a credible theory of rights that depends upon a view of moral responsibility for speculative "remoter effects." There is no ready way to determine what future generations have sufficient reason to expect as a matter of right. In fact, broken glass in the woods may be a threat for a few years at most, but centuries later?
Moreover, a well-established tradition within the human rights literature is resistant to the idea that human rights violations arise from quotidian activities of individuals (burning fossil fuels, breaking glass in the woods) or even the idea that responsibility for fulfilling or protecting human rights generally is assignable to individuals. James Nickel, for example, notes that “human rights are political norms dealing mainly with how people should be treated by their governments and institutions. They are not ordinary moral norms applying mainly to interpersonal conduct (such as prohibitions of lying and violence).”
Dale Jamieson presses a similar point. He sees the links between GHG emissions and the harm they cause as fundamentally different from links between paradigmatic instances of human rights violations such as torture. He argues that our understanding what is at stake morally in climate change cannot be elucidated in terms of human rights. The harms from climate change are not like what we think of under the traditional model. There are many causal contributors, spanning generations past, present, and future. The harm is a function of the cumulative effect of these contributions. No single contribution is the necessary or sufficient cause of the harm. Some contributors to the adverse consequences that will arise in the distant future are dead. Because the emissions that any of us produce today will dissipate over 200-300 years we cannot even say that our emissions in 2000 contribute to the problem in 2300.
In addition, because the process is ongoing there is no clear rationale for apportioning the correlative duties for fulfillment of rights of every future generation to specific generational cohorts. We end up with a process of generational buck-passing, leaving to each subsequent generation the responsibility for protection of all of those who come later. Moreover, many people have and continue to emit greenhouse gases for morally benign or socially useful purposes. Surely, all contributions to GHG stocks are not on a moral par.
Henry Shue, Simon Caney, and others are seemingly unmoved by objections of this sort. Many of the most prominent contributors to the climate justice literature frame the debate in terms of human rights. They focus on the least controversial of rights: rights to life, health, and a minimally decent standard of living. And in many instances, they focus on the least controversial of duties associated with these human rights: stringent duties not to cause grave harm to the underlying interests that ground these rights.
We might strengthen the case for a human rights approach by following the lead of one of Shue's observations. What is centrally at stake is this: "to inherit from past generations an environment that is neither radically inhospitable nor radically unpredictable" (Shue 293).
The right to a functioning planetary environment seems as basic as any sort of right we might imagine. Indeed, the moral uniqueness of this way of expressing environmental concerns figures in recent arguments for how we should prioritize sustainable development goals. Some Earth scientists similarly conclude that what is at stake in climate change is different in kind from all of the rest of what matters in the standard debates about the trade-offs between the environment and other values. They argue that the "stable functioning of Earth systems — including the atmosphere, oceans, forests, waterways, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles — is a prerequisite" of all else. These are environmental concerns that are not of equal importance, as the standard Brundtland three-pillar model of environmental, social, and economic sustainability assumes.
If the Earth sciences argument is correct, as I think it is, the "remoter effects" objection from Parfit's broken glass example seems misplaced. Call this concern with inheriting stable functioning of Earth systems (one that is "neither radically inhospitable nor radically unpredictable") a right to a sustainable human habitat. Structurally, it is very similar to the way that Rawls defends what he thinks is owed to future generations of citizens within one nation. No particular quality of life or bundle of resources figures in the specification of either guarantee; both are formulated in terms of conditions that are the pre-requisites for more general considerations (intragenerational domestic justice in Rawls's theory, and the requirements of life itself in the climate change context) that any generation has reason to value highly and to expect as its legacy from prior generations.
Perhaps construing the right to a sustainable human habitat as the centerpiece of climate change rights offers a clearer and more persuasive picture of the content of human rights that ground duties to future generations, but this makes the already complicated tasks of specifying and assigning associated duties even more complicated. It's a plausible specification of the content a right, but figuring out the associated duties is daunting.
The problem of how to make sense of the duties that correspond to human rights implicated by anthropogenic climate change can be illustrated by contrasting them with standard sorts of examples relied upon by defenders of the "Correlativity Thesis": there is no right at all unless there is a directed duty owed by a duty-bearer to a right-holder. This picture is a good fit with symmetrical content cases. For example: my right against you is a right not to be assaulted (the content of my right) and the duty you have toward me is the duty not to assault me (the content of the duty). The standard picture offers little guidance for thinking about climate change. If there is a right to a sustainable human habitat, to whom is it addressed? And if it is addressed to individuals, what is the specific content of their duty? After all, no individual can guarantee a sustainable habit.
Remarks by Shue, Caney, and others often provide fodder for just these kinds of objections. At times, Shue seems to cast the net widely. His human rights approach appears quite general when he says that "we wrong the people of tomorrow by doggedly persisting in contributing to conditions in which they will be unable to fulfill their basic human rights" (Shue 293). If he intends to say that individuals are wronging others by their individual contributions, then this is the sort of dragnet approach to human rights violations that Jamieson and others find problematic.
However, quite a few philosophers have abandoned the standard picture exemplified in the Correlativity Thesis. They argue in favor of a fractured picture of human rights and their associated duties. Here are a few illustrative examples of how the human rights approach might gain plausibility in the climate change context.
Shue, for example, argues elsewhere (Basic Rights, p. 16) that a basic human "right is ordinarily a justified demand that some other people make some arrangements so that one will still be able to enjoy the substance of the right even if — actually, especially if — it is not within one’s own power to arrange on one’s own to enjoy the substance of the right." A right to subsistence, then, is not a right for which the primary corresponding duty is an individual duty of provision, but a right that others see to it that the appropriate institutional structures are in place for its satisfaction. The symmetry of content of rights and duties is thus abandoned, and the duties of the individual no longer take center stage in a theory of human rights. Given this way of viewing the linkage between human rights and the assignment of duties, there are reasons to back away from the dragnet approach to human rights violations. General statements that suggest that individuals, in their everyday activities, are human rights violators seem strained.
Fortunately, we need not place individuals at the center of how we think about human rights and their associated duties. Others also assume that the primary duty-bearer for the fulfillment of human rights lies elsewhere than with individuals. For some, the locus of responsibility is the nation-state (e.g., Thomas Pogge). We know that's not going to help much with the climate change problem, for nation-states on their own can't solve it.
We might look elsewhere for suggestions. Lief Wenar (Freedom form Poverty, p 271) argues that the assignment of responsibility for such things as global poverty relief should be governed by the "least cost principle" (assignment on the basis of consideration of the party best positioned to solve a problem at the least cost). Concretely, this means that just as there are moral requirements to ascend to the "next level" by creating state institutions to address problems that individuals cannot (or should not) address on their own, there are moral requirements to ascend to the next level by creating institutional arrangements beyond the nation-state whenever nation-states (for a variety of reasons) fail to be adequate to the task. Arguments for ascending to the next level beyond the nation-state gain plausibility when the causal story behind the problem is unlikely to be sorted out (Wenar thinks that this is the case with global poverty, where explanations of why some nations are rich while others are poor are both plentiful and unconvincing).
More generally, Elizabeth Ashford (Global Ethics: The Inadequacy of Traditional conceptions of duties imposed by human rights") argues for the existence of duties to set up institutions that specify the allocation of unassigned moral responsibilities and make the content of rights more determinate. In a similar vein, Amartya Sen ("Elements of a Theory of Human Rights") argues that human rights generate a portfolio of differentiated duties applicable to a diversity of addressees to do what each can to prevent rights violations or fulfill rights rights guarantees. (Cf. Shue, Basic Rights, chapter 2). [The UN Framework Convention adopts the language of differentiated duties as well].
The point of these suggestions is simply that there are powerful arguments for replacing the traditional picture of the symmetrical content of rights and duties, and its one-to-one assignment of duties, with a fractured, constructivist model. The fractured picture, with its moral division of labor among bearers of responsibility, remains messy, and we are right to want more and better accounts of the content of duties and their assignment, especially when the content of a human right is as general as a sustainable human habitat. The problem of assignment of duties, in any case, remains the Achilles Heel of human rights theory.
That said, even if we cannot provide a comprehensive account of assignment of duties, perhaps we can say something useful and more specific that allows us to fill out a part of the story about human rights and climate change, while avoiding the objections that Jamieson and others raise against a dragnet approach to climate change rights.
A requirement of global reciprocity?
Consider what we might say about the ongoing international negotiations designed to produce a treaty on climate change. Of course, it is possible that changes in individual behavior without any global institutional mechanism will solve the problem. But if we make the reasonable assumption that cooperative, collective action is the best hope for averting dangerous anthropogenic climate change, what might we say about that situation from the perspective of human rights theory if nothing is done?
One thing that we know is that we are not all in this together. Some of the poorest, most vulnerable nations will be hurt first and worst. Climate change poses an existential threat to everyone, sooner or later, but for some, the threat is much sooner and it involves loss of the means to survival and even the loss of territory for island nations and low-lying countries if action is not forthcoming soon. The urgency of response is reflected in the growing global resistance movement (e.g., Blockadia, the Pacific Climate Warriors) and the arguments for direct action are grounded in the idea that governmental inaction, and the failure to create institutions that can solve the collective problem, constitute human rights violations.
My suggestion is that the injustice identified by these resistance movements resides in a failure of global reciprocity among nations. At minimum, we should endorse a requirement of global reciprocity that imposes limits on advantage-seeking in climate change treaty negotiations (and negotiations on other human rights-affecting rules of the global economic order).
A requirement of global reciprocity prohibits a nation from pressing for advantage for its own citizens when (i) its own citizens’s basic human rights are not thereby put at substantial risk, and (ii) the pursuit of national advantage seriously undermines the human rights of citizens of other nations.
This global reciprocity requirement is not a cosmopolitan or impartial concern for the overall welfare of all human beings. It does not rule out a nation’s special concern for the overall welfare of its own citizens in pressing for favorable bargains. In fact, it presupposes the acceptability of self-interested international bargaining, but only within reciprocally recognized limits. Indeed, it takes for granted the widespread assumption that all nations, whether rich or poor, have a special, primary duty to ensure the satisfaction of the human rights of their own citizens.
Global reciprocity merely rules out forms of bargaining in which the morally non-negotiable interests of the citizens of less powerful countries – namely, their basic human rights – are not treated on a par with the morally non-negotiable interests that citizens of developed nations possess. No nation should acquiesce in such a sacrifice if required by such a bargain, and no nation should demand that kind of sacrifice from other, less powerful nations simply to preserve a vastly higher standard of living for its own citizens.
Characterizing our failed response to the threat of climate change as implicating human rights ups the moral ante. Human rights are especially stringent moral demands that warrant some sort of enforcement, by coercion if necessary, to protect against their violation. Suppose that the developed nations fail to reach agreement that does enough, soon enough. Imagine the formation of a Global Environmental Resistance Movement (GERM) - a kind of Greenpeace on steroids. What moral warrant would carbon-intensive nations have in using coercion to suppress efforts to stop what resisters see as a massive human rights catastrophe?
This is, of course, a complicated question, but one familiar approach to the question holds that whether state coercion of any sort is justified depends upon a state’s political legitimacy. There are various theories of political legitimacy, and I won’t try to mount a defense of any particular one here. Instead I will note one prominent view. It that argues that state use of coercion is justified only when it meets certain minimum standards of justice: it must respect the human rights of its citizens and all other human beings (e.g., Altman and Wellman).
Such theories do not argue for the absurd claim that no state use of coercion is justified unless there is perfect compliance with every last human right. This is because it is not necessary to assume that political legitimacy is an all-or-nothing matter. A state would be justified, say, in using coercion to prevent and punish rape, but arguably not justified in using coercion simply to secure the economic benefits derived from human rights violations associated with GHG overproduction. Of course, the permissibility of the actions of a resistance movement would have to be judged in light of standard caveats. These include exhaustion of other remedies, taking actions that target only those who are human rights violators, avoid harm to the innocent, taking action that is proportionate to the harm prevented, and much more.
These are truly difficult issues, and I have just begun to consider them. Resistance movements of the sort I have imagined are growing around the world, and their direct action techniques involve blockades, obstructive encampments, and destruction of carbon-intensive infrastructure projects that are underway. The very suggestion that there is a genuine moral issue about justified resistance of any form is likely to make many comfortable people uncomfortable. But not as uncomfortable as some of the world’s poorest, most disadvantaged, most vulnerable will be if global collective action is not taken.
Social Discounting and Economic Estimates of Future Well-Being
Our efforts to think concretely about our minimum obligations with respect to the life prospects for later generations within a single society (or more generally) are vexed by many epistemic and practical problems. Some of these problems underlie Rawls's reluctance to specify a minimum standard of living apart from the instrumental value that some standard of living might have for sustaining just institutions across the generations.
For example, we do not know what resources subsequent generations might need. It may be that what we need now for a good life, given our current technological capacities, will not remain the same a few generations out. Husbanding non-renewable fossil fuels for the sake of later generations makes sense only on the assumption that future energy needs will be met in more or less the same way they are now.
A famous example from the sustainability literature points to the difficulties in predicting future resource needs. It involves the 17th century English initiative to plant massive quantities of yew trees. The stocks of the wood were dwindling fast and it was a cause of alarm because of its seemingly irreplaceable importance for ship building, archery, wagon wheels, and other goods necessary for national security. Of course, most of these items were no longer in widespread military use a few decades later.
Another assumption that often informs the way many people (especially economists) think about the human condition is that the future will follow the trajectory of technological progress and economic growth that we have seen for several centuries. Things will only get better for future generations. Economists, for example, often assume that the life prospects of future generations will surpass greatly those of present generations, and they can cite quite a lot of empirical data in support of the trend lines thus far. With that assumption in hand then it would seem that an impartial concern for the well-being of all persons would mean that the currently living global poor should not be asked to forego consumption for the sake of later generations. Accordingly, were we thinking about how to allocate current resources that might benefit current generations or later generations, we should apply a steep discount to our estimates of the amount we shall be required to save.
Such arguments are central to economic discussions of climate change. Some argue that future generations are likely to be so much better off, all things considered, than present generations that it would be deeply unfair to the global poor were they to make significant sacrifices for the sake of reducing climate changing greenhouse gas accumulations that will cause the bulk of the harm to much further future generations. The normative core of the empirically-driven argument is the thought that we should assign at least some priority to the worst-off, and definitely not assign priority to the better-off when so much of the world's current population is doing so badly.
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was published in late 2006. It concluded that the world should commit to investing 1 percent of global GDP to reduce the impact of global warming. In order to arrive at that figure some assumptions were made about the choice of an appropriate "social time discount rate." The social time discount rate is the rate used to compare the well-being of future generations to the well-being of those alive today. The Stern Review followed the standard economic assumption that future generations will be much wealthier than the current generation, but it argued for a low discount rate to be used in calculating how much to save now for the sake of the welfare of future generations. The Review argued in favor of a 1 percent reduction in current consumption.
A 1% discount rate means that a current reduction or increase in expenditures $1 is deemed equivalent to $270 in 100 years. A 10% discount rate means that spending that same dollar today is justified only if it provides benefits equivalent to $13,786 for those living 100 years from now. [Source: Tyler Cowan and Derek Parfit, 1992.]
Prominent critics, including William Nordhaus, argued that the model was unfair to current generations because it failed to provide enough discount the interests of future generations. Critics of the Stern report argued for higher discount rates, including many who argued for something in the range of a 3-4%. A higher figure would weight the interests of present generations more heavily and demand less sacrifice of current consumption by those who we should expect to be comparatively much worse off economically overall than subsequent generations. Nordhaus estimated that those living in 2200 would be 12.3 times richer.
For example, we do not know what resources subsequent generations might need. It may be that what we need now for a good life, given our current technological capacities, will not remain the same a few generations out. Husbanding non-renewable fossil fuels for the sake of later generations makes sense only on the assumption that future energy needs will be met in more or less the same way they are now.
A famous example from the sustainability literature points to the difficulties in predicting future resource needs. It involves the 17th century English initiative to plant massive quantities of yew trees. The stocks of the wood were dwindling fast and it was a cause of alarm because of its seemingly irreplaceable importance for ship building, archery, wagon wheels, and other goods necessary for national security. Of course, most of these items were no longer in widespread military use a few decades later.
Another assumption that often informs the way many people (especially economists) think about the human condition is that the future will follow the trajectory of technological progress and economic growth that we have seen for several centuries. Things will only get better for future generations. Economists, for example, often assume that the life prospects of future generations will surpass greatly those of present generations, and they can cite quite a lot of empirical data in support of the trend lines thus far. With that assumption in hand then it would seem that an impartial concern for the well-being of all persons would mean that the currently living global poor should not be asked to forego consumption for the sake of later generations. Accordingly, were we thinking about how to allocate current resources that might benefit current generations or later generations, we should apply a steep discount to our estimates of the amount we shall be required to save.
Such arguments are central to economic discussions of climate change. Some argue that future generations are likely to be so much better off, all things considered, than present generations that it would be deeply unfair to the global poor were they to make significant sacrifices for the sake of reducing climate changing greenhouse gas accumulations that will cause the bulk of the harm to much further future generations. The normative core of the empirically-driven argument is the thought that we should assign at least some priority to the worst-off, and definitely not assign priority to the better-off when so much of the world's current population is doing so badly.
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was published in late 2006. It concluded that the world should commit to investing 1 percent of global GDP to reduce the impact of global warming. In order to arrive at that figure some assumptions were made about the choice of an appropriate "social time discount rate." The social time discount rate is the rate used to compare the well-being of future generations to the well-being of those alive today. The Stern Review followed the standard economic assumption that future generations will be much wealthier than the current generation, but it argued for a low discount rate to be used in calculating how much to save now for the sake of the welfare of future generations. The Review argued in favor of a 1 percent reduction in current consumption.
A 1% discount rate means that a current reduction or increase in expenditures $1 is deemed equivalent to $270 in 100 years. A 10% discount rate means that spending that same dollar today is justified only if it provides benefits equivalent to $13,786 for those living 100 years from now. [Source: Tyler Cowan and Derek Parfit, 1992.]
Prominent critics, including William Nordhaus, argued that the model was unfair to current generations because it failed to provide enough discount the interests of future generations. Critics of the Stern report argued for higher discount rates, including many who argued for something in the range of a 3-4%. A higher figure would weight the interests of present generations more heavily and demand less sacrifice of current consumption by those who we should expect to be comparatively much worse off economically overall than subsequent generations. Nordhaus estimated that those living in 2200 would be 12.3 times richer.
UNICEF Report on the State of the World's Children 2012: Children in an Urban Worldquanti
click image to get the report
2012 UNICEF report, Children in an Urban World offers a striking picture of the future of many children in the increasingly inhospitable urban environments of the world's mega-cities and other large urban areas.
A couple of its findings are especially noteworthy. By 2050 more than 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas, more than a third of them in slum conditions. This unprecedented concentration of the global poor in slums poses significant new challenges for those committed to eradicating the scourge of crushing poverty in childhood, and the negative impact on well being in adulthood that accompanies it.
Historically, health outcomes as well as other measures of well-being such as educational attainment, access to clean water, improved sanitation, and better nutrition have tended to accompany urbanization. However, the UNICEF report suggests that in the future the developmental prospects and lives of children in urban slums may be far worse than the those of children in impoverished rural inhabitants of low income nations today.
Among the more hopeful observations in the UNICEF report, however, are clues to what can be done. For example, there are estimates of the impact of water and sanitation improvements that can produce as much as $28 US dollars in health and economic benefits for every US dollar invested. Much of that benefit will accrue to the world’s youngest, poorest, most vulnerable people.
A couple of its findings are especially noteworthy. By 2050 more than 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas, more than a third of them in slum conditions. This unprecedented concentration of the global poor in slums poses significant new challenges for those committed to eradicating the scourge of crushing poverty in childhood, and the negative impact on well being in adulthood that accompanies it.
Historically, health outcomes as well as other measures of well-being such as educational attainment, access to clean water, improved sanitation, and better nutrition have tended to accompany urbanization. However, the UNICEF report suggests that in the future the developmental prospects and lives of children in urban slums may be far worse than the those of children in impoverished rural inhabitants of low income nations today.
Among the more hopeful observations in the UNICEF report, however, are clues to what can be done. For example, there are estimates of the impact of water and sanitation improvements that can produce as much as $28 US dollars in health and economic benefits for every US dollar invested. Much of that benefit will accrue to the world’s youngest, poorest, most vulnerable people.
Child Poverty in the Developed World
click image for a larger view
A new 2012 report, Measuring Child Poverty from the Office of Research at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), shows the relative poverty rates for the 35 most developed countries. Only Romania has a child poverty rate higher than the 23 percent rate in the U.S.
The report defines the relative poverty as used by the OECD study as follows: a child is deemed to be living in relative poverty if he or she is growing up in a household where disposable income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the median disposable household income for the country concerned. By this standard, more than 15% of the 200 million children in the 35 countries listed in Figure 1b are judged to be living in relative poverty.
The report also provides a portrait of child deprivation in 29 economically advanced countries. Contrast the figure on the left with Figure 1a in the report, which shows the percentage of children (aged 1 to 16) who lack two or more of 14 items considered normal and necessary for a child in an economically advanced country. The report provides an illuminating discussion of these two measures, why they differ, and how each reveals something of moral and public policy importance.
The report defines the relative poverty as used by the OECD study as follows: a child is deemed to be living in relative poverty if he or she is growing up in a household where disposable income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the median disposable household income for the country concerned. By this standard, more than 15% of the 200 million children in the 35 countries listed in Figure 1b are judged to be living in relative poverty.
The report also provides a portrait of child deprivation in 29 economically advanced countries. Contrast the figure on the left with Figure 1a in the report, which shows the percentage of children (aged 1 to 16) who lack two or more of 14 items considered normal and necessary for a child in an economically advanced country. The report provides an illuminating discussion of these two measures, why they differ, and how each reveals something of moral and public policy importance.
Measuring Intergenerational Social Mobility
click image for larger view
A 2010 assessment of intergenerational social mobility offers another snapshot of social justice in various societies. The OECD report, A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility Across OECD Countries, assesses recent cross-country patterns and examines the role that public policies play in affecting mobility. Intergenerational earning, wage and educational mobility vary widely across OECD countries. In the language of the report:
"Intergenerational social mobility refers to the relationship between the socioeconomic status of parents and the status their children will attain as adults. Put differently, mobility reflects the extent to which individuals move up (or down) the socialladder compared with their parents. A society can be deemed more or less mobile depending on whether the link between parents’ and childrens’ social status as adults is looser or tighter. In a relatively immobile society an individual’s wage, education or occupation tends to be strongly related to those of his/her parents. Intergenerational mobility depends on a host of factors that determine individual economic success, some related to the inheritability of traits (such as innate abilities), others related to the family and social environment in which individuals develop. Among environmental factors, some are only loosely related to public policy (such as social norms, work ethics, attitude towards risk and social networks), while others can be heavily affected by policies."
While the report cites many factors that explain levels of mobility in OECD countries, the key piece of the equation appears to be education, and how much your parents' education affects your education. For example, see the graph on the left for the strength of the link between individual earnings and parental earnings. Mobility in earnings, wages and education across generations is relatively low in France, southern European countries, the United Kingdom and the United States. By contrast, such mobility tends to be higher in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries.
"Intergenerational social mobility refers to the relationship between the socioeconomic status of parents and the status their children will attain as adults. Put differently, mobility reflects the extent to which individuals move up (or down) the socialladder compared with their parents. A society can be deemed more or less mobile depending on whether the link between parents’ and childrens’ social status as adults is looser or tighter. In a relatively immobile society an individual’s wage, education or occupation tends to be strongly related to those of his/her parents. Intergenerational mobility depends on a host of factors that determine individual economic success, some related to the inheritability of traits (such as innate abilities), others related to the family and social environment in which individuals develop. Among environmental factors, some are only loosely related to public policy (such as social norms, work ethics, attitude towards risk and social networks), while others can be heavily affected by policies."
While the report cites many factors that explain levels of mobility in OECD countries, the key piece of the equation appears to be education, and how much your parents' education affects your education. For example, see the graph on the left for the strength of the link between individual earnings and parental earnings. Mobility in earnings, wages and education across generations is relatively low in France, southern European countries, the United Kingdom and the United States. By contrast, such mobility tends to be higher in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries.
World Comparisons of Infant Mortality Rates
The CIA World Fact Book is a great source for all sorts of information. You can see their 2012 estimates of infant mortality rates for 223 nations and territories here. The number 1 slot, of course, is the highest and the worst, but the US comes in at 174. The World Health Organization map on the left provides a quick visual profile of the world distribution of deaths under the age of 5 for 2003.