Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this volume sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the authors look (...) more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices. (shrink)

This paper proposes a sufficientarian theory with an interval of sufficiency levels. I assume that there are upper and lower bounds of sufficiency and that all well-being levels in between can be considered sufficiency levels. This interval reflects the vagueness of the concept of sufficiency. According to the proposed principle, a distribution is morally better than another if and only if, for each threshold within the interval, the headcount of those below the threshold under the former distribution is smaller than (...) that under the latter distribution. This necessarily leads to incommensurability in moral relations. I argue that such incommensurability makes sufficientarian principles invulnerable to some fundamental objections. (shrink)

When Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons, examined whether the Non-Identity Problem could be solved with the Impersonal Total Principle, he assumed perfect equality in the future population outcomes under his consideration. His thinking was that this assumption could not distort his reasoning, but would make it more simple and clear. He then reasoned that the best future population outcome, according to the Impersonal Total Principle, would be an enormous population, whose members have lives only barely worth living, as a (...) slight lowering in quality of life, according to the principle, can always be more than compensated for by an increase in the number of future people. He found this result impossible to believe and dubbed it the Repugnant Conclusion, concluding that his attempts had ended in failures and that the Non-Identity Problem continues to undermine our beliefs of our obligations to the future. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of the Impersonal Total Principle in real-world circumstances where the inevitability of inequality is taken into account. What, if anything, will this imply regarding the Repugnant Conclusion, the indirect version of the Non-Identity Problem and our abilities to ground our moral responsibilities to posterity in an ethical theory? (shrink)

In this paper I address the objection to sufficientarianism posed by Paula Casal and Richard Arneson, that it is hard to conceive of a sufficiency threshold such that distribution is highly important just below it, and not required at all just above it. In order to address this objection, I elaborate on the idea that sufficientarianism structurally can be seen to require two separate thresholds, which may or may not overlap. I then argue that a version of such a view (...) is plausible. Lastly, I distinguish this view from related proposals in the literature. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.