• DOI:10.3167/004058197783593443
• Corpus ID: 16118713

Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice

@article{Barry1997SustainabilityAI,
  title={Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice},
  author={Brian M. Barry},
  journal={Theoria},
  year={1997},
  volume={44},
  pages={43-64}
}

• B. Barry
• Published 1 June 1997
• Philosophy
• Theoria

As temporary custodians of the planet, those who are alive at any given time can do a better or worse job of handing it on to their successors. I take that simple thought to animate concerns about what we ought to be doing to preserve conditions that will make life worth living (or indeed liveable at all) in the future, and especially in the time after those currently alive will have died (‘future generations’). There are widespread suspicions that we are not doing enough for future generations, but how do we determine what is enough? Putting the question in that way leads us, I suggest, towards a formulation of it in terms of intergenerational justice. A methodological principle to which I shall appeal more systematically in section 2 is that we shall make most headway in asking ethical questions about the future if we start by asking them about the present and then see how the results can be extended to apply to the future. The rationale for this procedure is that we are accustomed to thinking about relations among contemporaries and have developed a quite sophisticated apparatus to help us in doing so. We have no similar apparatus to aid our thoughts about relations between people living at different times. Rather than starting from scratch, then, my proposal is that we