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Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Gosseries (eds.): Institutions for Future Generations

Oxford University Press, 2016, xv + 432 pp, £65.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-874695-9 (Hardback)

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Notes

  1. They apply even more obviously to prominent answers in the debate over institutional short-termism that have been defended elsewhere: Kavka and Warren (1983), Dobson (1996), and Ekeli (2005) have argued that a certain proportion of the legislature should be made up of representatives of future generations.

  2. Waldron (2006).

  3. Cf. Parfit (1984, ch. 16).

  4. Tännsjö (2007) explains in more detail how the non-identity problem renders the idea of a democratic representation of future people void. On many proposed solutions to the non-identity problem and their shortcomings, see Boonin (2014).

    Surprisingly, the non-identity problem is not really addressed in Institutions for Future Generations. One might have expected a discussion of the problem in the context of Karnein’s chapter, but there it is only mentioned in a footnote on page 87.

  5. See, e.g., Mill (1861, ch. 3).

  6. The ‘wholesale’ needs to be qualified, as some sectors, such as healthcare and education, are not suitable for for-profit provision and/or private ownership, as Pérotin explains.

  7. I omitted a footnote in which López-Guerra explains that he is not arguing for specific items on the list but for the general idea.

References

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  • Dobson, A. (1996). Representative democracy and the environment. In W. M. Lafferty & J. Meadowcroft (Eds.), Democracy and the environment: Problems and prospects (pp. 124–139). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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  • Ekeli, K. S. (2005). Giving a voice to posterity: Deliberative democracy and representation of future people. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 18(5), 429–450.

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  • Kavka, G., & Warren, V. (1983). Political representation of future generations. In R. Elliot & A. Gare (Eds.), Environmental philosophy: A collection of readings (pp. 21–39). Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

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  • Mill, J. S. (1861). Considerations of representative government. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

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  • Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  • Tännsjö, T. (2007). Future people, the all affected principle, and the limits of the aggregation model of democracy. In T. Rønnow-Rasmussen, B. Petersson, J. Josefsson, & D. Egonsson (Eds.), Hommage à Wlodek. Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz. Lund: Department of Philosophy, Lund University.

  • Waldron, J. (2006). The core of the case against judicial review. The Yale Law Journal, 115, 1346–1406.

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Acknowledgements

For very helpful comments on an earlier draft I am grateful to Maya Feldman and Fabian Wendt. I also wish to thank Bernward Gesang and Sebastian Köhler for their feedback.

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Correspondence to Vuko Andrić.

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Andrić, V. Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Gosseries (eds.): Institutions for Future Generations. Erkenn 84, 481–486 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9964-5

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