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Negative “GHIs,” the Right to Health Protection, and Future Generations

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Abstract

The argument has been made that future generations of human beings are being harmed unjustifiably by the actions individuals commit today. This paper addresses what it might mean to harm future generations, whether we might harm them, and what our duties toward future generations might be. After introducing the “Global Health Impact” (GHI) concept as a unit of measurement that evaluates the effects of human actions on the health of all organisms, an incomplete theory of human justice is proposed. Having shown that the negative GHIs of our current generation cause unfair harm to future generations, I argue that each human being must be allocated a fair threshold of negative GHIs that should not be exceeded. By emphasising the need to consider all the GHIs of human actions, the theory of human justice developed here is highly relevant to evaluate human actions that might affect future generations, for example those related to climate change.

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Notes

  1. One of the dictionary definitions of “to flourish” is “to be in good health” (Hawkins and Allen 1991, 541).

  2. Since Rees and Wackernagel included the areas needed for waste assimilation, emissions of carbon dioxide have been included, yet no other emissions. The relative weight of these emissions within one’s ecological footprint has been determined by the area of forest that would be required to assimilate those emissions, an approach that has been criticized not only because there are other ways in which carbon emissions could be sequestered, but also because subjective opinions might influence the used conversion rates (Van den Bergh and Verbruggen 1999). A similar problem underlies the calculation of the ecological footprint of nuclear energy, which has been “set at par with fossil fuel energy, for lack of a consensus on an alternate methodology” (Moran et al. 2009, 1943). In other words, it has been determined by the amount of land that would be required to offset the CO2-equivalent of nuclear energy.

  3. Rees (2006) refers to Catton (1980) for the concept of “overshoot.”

  4. A similar claim is made by Gerald Gaus, who argues that, “if (1) an accumulation of X-ing sets back other people’s interests, and if (2) the harm is serious enough such that its prevention warrants limiting the liberty to X (either by regulating or prohibiting X-ing), then (3) everyone should carry their fair share of the burden” (1999, 197).

  5. A similar point has been made by Maltais, yet it is my view that his call for “a new global political project” is necessary for a wide range of “global collective actions problems” (2008, 597) rather than just for problems related to climate change.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers of this article.

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  1. Institute of Health and Society, The Medical School, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Jan Deckers

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Deckers, J. Negative “GHIs,” the Right to Health Protection, and Future Generations. Bioethical Inquiry 8, 165–176 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-011-9295-1

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