Overcoming the motivational gap: A preliminary path to rethinking intergenerational justice

First concentric circle: Human rights as “timeless rights”

Throughout 2018, a number of events and an important series of scientific contributions were organized in celebration of the 70^th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Within a number of studies devoted to this event, at least one of several aspects of the continued significance and goal of this important document has been underestimated and less addressed. I am referring here to the intrinsically intergenerational nature of the UDHR, and specifically to the fact that the Declaration, as intended by its authors, is a point of reference for protecting basic rights and promoting the collective wellbeing of future generations of human beings. ^[1]

Starting from this premise, the first aim of the paper is to show that the UDHR is intrinsically intergenerational in character and nature. The aim here is to link the genuine commitment to articulating and developing the theoretical issue of intergenerational justice to the UDHR, as a source of continual inspiration and normative content that has yet to be fully developed.

In order to understand this commitment, it may be useful to summarize the most common view of human rights (HR). It holds that HRs are rights that must be upheld and implemented beyond the (physical, political and administrative) borders of the state. In other words, we could say that HRs are rights that are unlimited in space: in a sense, they may be considered “spaceless rights”.

This commonly shared feature is a fundamental part of a sort of “horizontal dimension” and correlative understanding of HRs. Within this framework, respect for human rights makes it possible for this commitment to be universally recognized; that is, valid and legitimate everywhere.

Beside this common understanding, there lies a further, integrative understanding, which I would like to include here before attempting the re-reading above announced. Since human rights are rights for humankind as a whole, there is implicit acknowledgment of humankind’s enduring core. If the very idea of HRs constitutes and embodies a project in which the ambition is to ensure they are valid for all of humankind, it would be self-contradictory to think of HRs as rights that are only available to the present generation. In this sense, we need to integrate the common understanding of HRs by adding an “everywhere-perspective” and “every-time-perspective”. Ultimately, this means we have to start considering HRs “timeless rights”.

In order to grasp the extent of the timeless, and therefore intergenerational, character of the UDHR, it may be useful to take a step back and re-read, in a sense, “the sacred charters” which form the starting point of the discussion about human rights as a whole. I’m referring here to the constitutive Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945 and, specifically, to the Preamble.

WE, THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS, DETERMINED

– to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, […];

– to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

– to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom […] (emphasis added).

The commitment to “succeeding generations”, in other words the intergenerational perspective, is strong and explicit from the very beginning. It is first and foremost about protecting those generations “from the scourge of war” (a sort of negative duty, duty of protection or of prevention), but it is also about “promot[ing] social progress and better standards of life” by explicitly embracing the notion of a positive and proactive duty: we have to leave succeeding generations with more than we received from preceding ones.

The same basic and fundamental framework becomes central once we start re-reading the UDHR. A paradigmatic example could be derived by a sort of “intergenerationally driven reading exercise” that could start from Art. 22, which explicitly deals with the guarantee that every individual is able to develop her own personality. ^[2] The same exercise can be applied to Art. 25, concerning the right to an appropriate standard of well-being and for oneself and one’s family, ^[3] which has to be further reconciled with and fitted into a “social and international order” centered around the same freedoms and rights the Declaration claims as its own (Art. 28). ^[4]

At least two other key articles should be taken into account to complete the picture: Articles 29 ^[5] and 30, ^[6] which establish clear boundaries limiting the individual liberties that states or governmental entities can set out.

The normative and intergenerational orientation is again emphasized in another, more recent “Declaration”, in which the normative and intergenerational commitment and the goal of improving conditions for better, comprehensive development are explicitly contemplated. Here I am referring to the Premise and Art. 1 of the “Declaration on the Right to Development”. ^[7]

It was adopted some years later (the Declaration was adopted on 4 December 1986) and contains within it a sort of “additional” human right, a right that was neither explicitly affirmed nor sufficiently articulated in the UDHR, and that is a further element in the picture of a constitutive and inseparable “block” of human rights that must be guaranteed, promoted and protected by every state, the UN and all other international authorities. That right is the right to development. It is another individual right that is to be protected from any state attempt to undermine and misrecognize it. In this article the right to development is conceived of as a sort of container for all other individual inalienable human rights; in that sense, it is a right “[with]in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized”.

Following this interpretative line, the Declaration on the Right to Development constitutes both a sort of theoretical enforcement and confirmation of the UDHR and a structural enforcement of its intrinsic dynamic and diachronical task: the fact that they are “timeless rights”, or rights whose validity must be maintained over time and across different generations of persons who could—in their own present—legitimately ask for the full implementation of such rights (Kavka, 1982; Meyer, 2015; Meyer & Sanklecha, 2016).

Framing the issue of intergenerational justice

Starting from this premise and considering the intergenerational character of the UDHR and some of the main related documents, we need to consider how to frame the theoretical issue of intergenerational justice. In other words, what theoretical toolbox would be adequate for this relevant and ambitious task?

We could frame the core issue phenomenologically by asking a two-pronged methodological question: What should be protected and promoted for the future generations and how can we pursue, that is, ground and realize this task?

The methodological issue could be subdivided into two constituent parts. The first part, “the substantive part”, gives rise to what we could call “the what question” about what is involved in the intergenerational process: at a first glance, are we speaking about economic or environmental resources? Which ones? What is the minimal, guaranteed level of resources required? (Barry, 1999; Page, 2007; Pellegrini-Masini, Corvino, & Löfquist, 2019; Pellegrini-Masini, Corvino, & Pirni, 2019).

The second, “modal part”, focuses on another basic issue (“the how question”): How can we ground the intergenerational task? That is, how can we move from the rhetoric to a pragmatics related to intergenerational justice’s claim? How can we lend this claim efficacy and specific, shared content?

In turn, this fundamental issue could be divided into two further “how sub-questions”: a juridical question—“How can we secure and ground the entitlement for intergenerational rights?”—and an ethical one—“How can we enforce the (moral and political) motivation for pursuing that task?”

While both questions fall under a unique theoretical umbrella related to the modal aspect of our main issue, the first question must be distinguished from the second, at least by considering a particular aspect. That aspect is the different usage of the normative commitment. Let me try to be more explicit.

The first issue is related to what could be termed the “negative path”, an attempt at interpreting the normative commitment as focused around the universal claim for “respect”, which is in turn delivered as respect for individuals and groups belonging to the present and subsequent generations. What is important here is a twofold task: grounding the entitlement to the specific group of duties that have to be understood as rights; and framing the specific subjects of rights who do not yet exist—the members of generations yet to be born and live among us. Here, respect should involve a minimalistic—albeit extremely strong—normative commitment, which is related to extending the “prevention of damage” principle from the present generation to future generations by understanding them as a collective entity and—in more demanding normative terms – as the sum of individuals holding individual rights—and legitimately asking for them (Brännmark, 2016; Palombella, 2007).

The second issue can be summarized as the specific normative commitment that it embodies as the “positive path”. What is important here is not just the “saving move”, the negative attempt at extending the prevention of the damage principle, but also the positive and proactive effort to promote a specific agency for that task. ^[8] The normative commitment articulates and endorses a gradual but constant—quantitative and qualitative—increase in the obligations towards future generations. And this dynamic path has to be understood as being directed at a comprehensive goal: overcoming the motivational gap in the political domain.

Having this comprehensive framework in mind in our new stipulative attempt—we are going to propose two limits to the theoretical field outlined: first, we shall limit our attention to the modal aspect (the how question) and, second and more specifically, we shall focus on a (preliminarily) zooming into the ethical sub-question—the question about enforcing a motivational path leading to the implementation of a comprehensive political option for justice between and among generations.

Modal-ethical path to consolidating intergenerational justice

In the previous framing, some of the difficulties related to the goal of “giving voice” and effectivity to the intergenerational task were listed. These difficulties are not exclusively related to the what-question, namely, to the actual content of what is to be rooted in the intergenerational process of compensative or distributive justice—even if this point surely represents a relevant part of the overall issue. Rather, there are a number of modal difficulties (thus related to the how-question)—concerning the vagueness of the intergenerational claims and skepticism about the degree of (ethical and political) willingness in pursuing those claims over the years and using specific plans.

A paradigmatic modality that could be considered is that offered by the internal dialectics put forward in the Declaration of the Right of Development considered above. If we recall, in order to add pleno jure et titulo the right to development (RtD) to the list of human (namely timeless) rights, in the first paragraph of Art. 1 is stated that:

The right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.

Nonetheless, in the second paragraph, the issue in favor of an individual claim for RtD is reconsidered and the claim is rephrased in those terms:

The human right to development also implies the full realization of the right of peoples to self-determination, which includes, subject to the relevant provisions of both International Covenants on Human Rights, the exercise of their inalienable right to full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and resources. ^[9]

It is evident here that the emphasis on the “right of peoples to self-determination” and “full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and resources” could seriously restrict the RtD and the correlative entitlement to it from a diachronical point of view. In other words, the resulting message seems to be a compromise favoring states as political subjects: in principle, we all think humans have a legitimate RtD, but ultimately it is the state and government of that state that decides priorities in accomplishing and ensuring this right, together with all other legitimate priorities and with no external limitations.

It is clear that this is the problem that lies at the core of every attempt to establish a logics of intergenerational justice within any possible human rights discourse: if intergenerational justice (or a sort of intergenerational right to justice) can be considered an additional human right, then its implementation follows and suffer for the same difficulties of that typology of rights.

In other terms, when we try to engage with the modal-ethical aspect of intergenerational justice, we are immediately faced with the dialectics between the fair, conscious and expected implementation of human rights on the one hand, and the limitations and distortion of such an agenda prompted by politics at state or sub-state/local level on the other.

This then leads to what we might call the pragmatic objection to any possible path to implementing the intergenerational commitment. Put basically: “Today, in our present situation, we can’t take care of or afford to think about those who will come to live here in the future”. There are too many practical problems and people who are suffering. There is a lack of key structures and opportunities for the present generation (these are the same people, incidentally, who established the political constituency for the government) to find further political willingness and a desire to share as well as integrative resources for future generations. But, if we are not able to look after the present generation, those that follow could be severely harmed by our political inadequacy and administrative inefficacy. It is unachievable in the present context, but, as we know, the list of possible pragmatic objections is long and could easily grow. The pragmatic objection could be summed up as the intragenerational need for development that is evidently accompanied by a relevant number of supporting arguments. ^[10]

This pragmatic objection contains a normative assumption, or a counterfactual claim. It can be formulated as: “We must create, maintain and leave to those who will come after us at least the same development capabilities we had”. This statement is of course based on a reference to the capability approach elaborated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum & Sen, 1993), but at its core is the recommendation that we should embrace an agency path for which we have no particular inclination or cannot see as having immediate ethical or political utility (Pirni, 2018b).

Nonetheless, it is path that is grounded in the universalistic argument that members of future generations are also humans and therefore have the same dignity as members of the present generation. The universal duty to protect and promote human dignity is one that should belong to all these people too. In affirming this, the normative assumption contains another basic claim and implication: if we can do something for the person before us and we simultaneously cognitively understand that “doing something” for a person that may still be here when we are no longer alive is part of our real possibility to act, we have the same normative duty to actually “do something”. In turn, the normative assumption can be summed up as the intergenerational need for development.

Let’s look at this need in more depth. In the end, the core of the pragmatic objection is the lack of sufficient motivation to adopt patterns of action explicitly devoted to future generations. This situation exacerbates tendencies towards a static behavior, that is, it exacerbates the twofold difficulty regarding objective complexity: a sort of theoretical immobilism that gives rise to a pragmatic (and political) occasionalism. ^[11]

Framed differently, we could maintain that this core constitutes a relevant theoretical problem because of two different albeit convergent points. On the one hand, we have to deal with the objective strength and appeal of the pragmatic arguments for the intragenerational need for development which constitutively distract attention from the intergenerational one. On the other hand, we have to deal with the objective misrecognition and undervaluing of the need to construct a more robust theory of motivation related to the intergenerational commitment.

In what follows, I would like to focus on the latter point, trying to synthetically delineate a piece of a larger research on the motivational question related to the adoption of the intergenerational commitment. The research as a whole aims to answer to the modal question raised above.

Obligations ranking – a preliminary framing

This attempt to articulate a new counterpoint to the motivational gap starts from what we shall call the obligations ranking. In articulating the argument, W. A. Galston’s (2005) The Practice of Liberal Pluralism is used as the point of reference. ^[12] First we have to alter Galston’s (2005, p. 95) preliminary definition of cosmopolitan altruism, “the motivationally effective desire to assist needy or endangered strangers”, to produce a new one—“the motivationally effective desire to assist needy and endangered future generations”—by assuming that future generations, should they exist, will be needy and potentially endangered or at least limited in their own capacity to act by patterns of agency we are in charge for having assumed or having avoided. ^[13]

In his work, Galston proposes three main variants of altruism, starting from the object or person the altruism is directed at.

To begin with, altruism can vary in its objects. Three main variants may be discerned. Personal altruism is directed toward individuals near at hand, such as family members and friends. Communal altruism is directed toward groups of individuals possessing some shared characteristics: members of an ethnic group, coreligionists, and fellow citizens, among others. Cosmopolitan altruism, by contrast, is directed toward the human race as a whole, and hence toward individuals to whom one has no special ties (Galston, 2005, p. 101).

The main idea is that for each form of altruism there is a correlative implication in terms of obligation. At a preliminary level, we might be oriented at affirming that we feel the urgency and experience the maximum obligation possible towards our family and friends and, correspondingly, we experience decreasing obligations towards the individuals and groups that constitute the communal and cosmopolitan altruism. However, as Galston (2005, p. 101) shows, this is only partially true, since there is the potential for many conflicting obligations to occur among the correlative forms of altruism. ^[14]

To adjust this for our purposes, we can draw an analogy between these kinds of conflict and the conflicts between intra-generational need (by reconsidering personal and the communal forms of altruism) and intergenerational need (by considering cosmopolitan form of altruism). ^[15] But what is relevant here is that at the cosmopolitan level, in analogy with the intergenerational domain, there arises the need to deal (or imagine dealing) with individuals and people we will never know or meet. At this point an analogy can be made in relation to managing issues related to future generations, within a timeless perspective (by specifically referring to future generations), within a spaceless one (this time by referring to the cosmopolitan altruism).

If we wish to understand the core of such conflicts, we find the common option between self-interest and altruism does not seem to provide a sufficiently robust explanation of the motivation to exclude cosmopolitan altruism—or the intergenerational need for development—from the obligations to be pursued in full.

Of course, conflicting values and obligations cannot simply be placed on a unique ranking or scale of increasing or decreasing obligations. In other words, in trying to articulate a more robust theory of motivation, we must be aware of the implicit risk of paternalism. That point was first framed in paradigmatic terms by Isaiah Berlin (1969, p. 169):

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social.

That means that we cannot simply establish a universal ranking of obligations relating to the intergenerational need of development and justice. But we could aim to elaborate a contextual one instead. However, there is an implicit risk embedded in this: that we once again jump at one of the infinite variants of the same dialectic between the first and the second paragraphs of the Declaration of the Right to Development. On the one hand, the right to (intergenerational) development is an individual human right; on the other, every state maintains the right to include this right on a comprehensive list of goals, where the priority is ipso facto legitimated by the self-determination argument.

A possible theoretical path that could be followed to avoid this risk or, at least, to mitigate it, could be provided by Immanuel Kant’s theory of obligation, following the quotation in the Metaphysics of Morals. What we are attempting here is to articulate a motivational structure that is strong enough to motivate people into adhering to their obligations at all levels, by including the intergenerational level, but that retains sufficient flexibility so people can contemplate different possible mixes or scales of priority as regards their obligations, and thereby avoid the risk of paternalism or of the illiberal imposition of limitations and constraints on the present generation.

If we re-read paragraphs VI and VII of Kant’s Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals, we encounter a point of interest that has relevance to our goal. The title of paragraph VI posits that “Ethics Does Not Give Laws for Actions (Ius does that), But Only for Maxims of Actions” (Kant, 2005, p. 152). Paragraph VII specifies that “Ethical Duties are of Wide Obligation, Whereas Duties of Right Are of Narrow Obligation”. Nonetheless, this does not mean that, being of wide obligation, the ethical duties may be considered non-duties. This point is immediately made clear by Kant (2005, p. 153):

But a wide duty is not to be taken as permission to make exceptions to the maxim of actions but only as permission to limit one maxim’s of duty by another (e.g. love of one’s neighbor in general by love of one’s parents), by which in fact the field for the practice of virtue is widened (emphasis added).

Here he is suggesting that we have a unique normative tie that contemplates all our possibilities for acting in the ethical domain and that we can use to evaluate and weigh the alternatives but, in the end, all duties have to be undertaken with no exceptions: we can methodologically limit the pursuing of a duty by referring to the urgency of pursuing another one, first, but we can’t simply eliminate a duty, nor can we postpone fulfilment of it sine die. The model proposed here by Kant seems to offer a possible path towards the motivational structure we seek, which should remain both strong and flexible.

Let’s try to articulate this by referring again to the forms of altruism developed by Galston. Even in the more common and basic understanding of altruism our obligations decrease as we increase the number of possible recipients of our action. Kant’s contribution both extends and enforces the same normative bond between different obligations. More explicitly, we could say that we have to consider the obligation towards the recipient closest to the agent’s perspective as the priority, whilst considering it one of many other inescapable obligations.

All obligations have to be met—and to the same level of unavoidability. Of course, we have the legitimate possibility to rank the obligations. Nonetheless, we have a sort of metaduty to ensure that all the obligations we have to deal with are fully compatible and feasible to all the present and future recipients of our agency.

The obligation ranking, we have tried to sketch out could also constitute a sort of trigger of the potential consequences of the policies to be adopted. Following the reasoning so far, we should in fact open the way to a combined orientative principle for any possible future political agenda: we could suggest that when designing policy we have to consider right from the beginning our pursuit of the intragenerational need for development as well as the intergenerational one. This leads to a sort of innovative normative outcome, which is the sharing and legitimation of the ethical-modal meta-principle of intergenerational justice. This principle could be, a restrictive clausola, that stipulates that “only policies that include an answer to both needs can be considered legitimate”. Here the understandable and pragmatic point that we have to pursue the present generations’ need for development is and continues to be linked to the understandable and normative point that we have to ensure other generations are left with the same opportunities or capabilities for development that we have had. This linkage is not a duty of wide or narrow obligation: it is a duty that comes from the same root that allows us to affirm that we are members of humanity, in the present and for the future.