[Cross-posted on the parent blog]
The conclusion that
we cannot infringe upon future people’s right by causing climate change may not
appeal to individuals who see injustice in the fact that by causing climate
change, the world we leave behind for future people could be substantially less
hospitable than it would have been if presently existing people had not caused
climate change. One might argue that
perhaps we do not infringe the rights of individual people by creating
dangerous or otherwise undesirable circumstances which are necessary conditions
for their existence, but we infringe the rights of their generation by leaving behind a “spoiled” Earth.
The appeal of this
notion is in the fact that a generation is simply the group of people who come
into existence during a particular period of time, and there is no requirement
for who exactly those people are. So,
for example, we may say that a woman, Charlene, is a member of some generation
A. If Charlene’s mother had conceived a
child with a different man than Charlene’s father, Charlene would never have
existed. But so long as the child was
conceived around the same time as Charlene was, that child would have also been
a member of generation A. Because the
identity of the generation does not depend on the identities of its members,
one might see an opportunity for getting around the Non-Identity Problem by
focusing on what happens to generations instead of individuals under different
policy choices.
So do future
generations have a right to inherit an unspoiled Earth? For that matter, do future generations have
rights at all? We may once again recall
that rights represent the respect to which we are due as individuals and as
ends-in-ourselves. Because of the
inclusion of individuality as a part of our conception of rights, it might be
said that generations cannot possibly have rights, because they are not
individuals. But it seems reasonable to
say that to talk about respecting the individuality of a generation is only so
suggest that it should not be sacrificed for the interests of others—namely,
other generations.
One might point out
that other groups, like corporations or organized communities, can be seen as
“individuals” and “ends-in-themselves” in the sense that they are entities
which utilize means in the pursuit of their own distinct ends. These entities can be “benefited” and
“harmed” in a meaningful sense by impairing their ability to pursue their own
goods, and so it would not be inconceivable
to suppose that these entities had rights of their own which were not simply
the sums of the rights of their members (whether they can truly be disrespected is a separate and
controversial issue, which we will not address here).
It may be noted,
however, that generations do not seem to have an analogous “good of their own,”
and do not pursue their own distinct ends in any recognizable sense. Any discussion of “the good of a generation”
seems like it could be nothing more than a vague statistical statement about
the good of its members. Indeed, the
aforementioned groups can be seen as ends-in-themselves only through an
understanding of the way that they are organized. In the way that a body is composed of organs
which have functions in terms of the
good of the body, a corporation’s constituent parts are organized to promote the ends of the corporation. The members of a generation, on the other
hand, have no identifiable function in terms of the good of the generation
itself. Temporal coexistence does not
seem to illustrate the sort of structure
which could make it meaningful to talk about a generation as an abstract entity
with a good of its own. And if a
generation does not have a good of its own, then it is difficult to imagine how
we could disrespect it. Accordingly, we
may conclude that generations cannot have rights, and so cannot have a right to
inherit an unspoiled Earth.