Intergenerational Communities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Property and the Obligation to Support the Conditions of Human Flourishing
Law and Social Inquiry-journal of The American Bar Foundation, 2020
American rights discourse makes it difficult to generate responsibilities for the well-being of the communities within which human personhood is formed. Gregory S. Alexander's Property and Human Flourishing (2018) focuses on the obligations that property owners owe to the communities in which they are embedded. Drawing on a communitarian ontology-as opposed to atomist ontology-and writing in the spirit of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and thinkers of the liberalism of flourishing, Alexander endorses human flourishing as the central ideal of the good life, and argues that ownership of property is justified insofar as it facilitates the opportunity of persons to live flourishing lives.
The Monist, 2023
The transgenerational community is based on moral similarity between contemporary and future people, referring to an ongoing moral deliberation across generations. It justifies obligations of justice towards the not yet born. Prioritarianism gives extra weight to the wellbeing of the least advantaged. I argue that both sentiments are egalitarian, and ask whether there is any tension between them. If we assume economic growth, and/or technological improvements and/or inflation, then prioritarianism prima facie implies that we should prefer to spend any dollar on today's disadvantaged than on future generations, hence is in tension with the demands of the transgenerational community. Analyzing four ways of meeting this challenge, I argue that the two principles are not in tension.
Giving in Time: Temporal Considerations in Philanthropy, 2023
Intergenerational transfers are a core feature of the practice of private philanthropy. A substantial portion of the resources committed to charitable causes comes from transfers (either during life or at death) that continue to pay out after death. Indeed, much of the power of the charitable foundation lies in its ability to extend the life of an enterprise beyond the mortal existence of its initiating agents. Despite their prevalence, whether and in what way the instruments of intergenerational philanthropy can be justified is controversial. Many have argued that these instruments unfairly privilege the interests of the dead at the expense of the living and unborn. More recently, others have argued that intergenerational charitable transfers comport with the demands of distributive justice and are therefore legitimate. This paper contends that both of these perspectives fail to see the problem for what it is. Intergenerational charitable transfers may indeed promote justice in certain respects, but they do so at the cost of imposing the judgments of the dead onto the living. Respecting the wishes of the past conflicts with an interest in “generational sovereignty.” The paper concludes that properly accounting for this interest in generational sovereignty doesn’t require the abolition of intergenerational philanthropy. But it does tell in favor of a different regulatory orientation than most legal systems currently adopt.
Intergenerational Justice and the “Hereditary Principle”
The Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 2014
Is it possible to justify the passing of property rights from one generation to the next, and the acquisition of citizenship rights, on the basis of inheritance? This paper raises two considerations which indicate that typical luck egalitarian arguments against the operation of any “hereditary principle” in the intergenerational succession of economic and political rights are not conclusive. Both considerations concern autonomy. The concept of inheritance can be seen to be justified when the social connectedness of individuals is appreciated – inheritance reflects the embeddedness of individuals in the lives and projects of others both in the past and in the future. So while there may be good liberal reasons to reject inheritance as a mode of property succession, for example that it might perpetuate or initiate unequal distributions, these do not begin to suggest that nothing can be said in its favor, morally speaking, if the autonomy of individuals is understood to be situated in p...
Ownership and Obligations: The Human Flourishing Theory of Property
2013
The thesis of this brief paper is straightforward, although not uncontroversial: The moral foundation of property, both as a concept and as an institution, is human flourishing. In the remainder of my remarks I will explain what I mean by human flourishing, as I use the term, and I will distinguish human flourishing from welfare as that term is commonly used today by economists and legal analysts. I will then briefly illustrate the approach through an example. Private property ordinarily triggers notions of individual rights, not social obligations. After all, the core function of private property, at least according to conventional lore, is to insulate individuals from the demands of society both in its organised political form and its nonpolitical collective form. Of course, the common law has long recognised limits on the exercise of property rights, limits that grow out of the needs of others in cases of conflicting land uses. The obvious example is the common law of nuisance, which courts developed using the ancient maxim sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas ("use your land in such a way as not to injure the land of others") as their guiding principle. But such limits on property rights are considered the exception, not the rule, the periphery rather than the core. 2 The core image of property rights, in the minds of many people, is that the owner has a right to exclude others and owes no further obligation to them. 3 On this view trespass is the paradigmatic cause of action in the law of property. Hence if another intentionally commits trespass upon my land after I have refused permission to pass across it, the trespasser is properly liable for punitive damages even though only trivial damage was done to my property. 4 That image is highly misleading. The right to exclude itself, thought by many to be the most important twig in the so-called bundle of rights, 5 is subject to many exceptions, both at common law and by virtue of statutory or constitutional provisions. For example, the common 1 A. Robert Noll Professor of Law, Cornell University. This paper was originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. I am grateful to the Faculty for the invitation and especially to Professor Guanghua Yu for making the arrangements and for his hospitality. 2 This is essentially the thesis of Henry E. Smith, "Mind the Gap: The Indirect Relation Between Ends and Means in American Property Law" (2009) 94 Cornell Law Review 959. Indeed Smith uses the very imagery of core and periphery.
A Contract on Future Generations
Contract theories seek to justify (and sometimes to explain) moral and political ideals and principles through the notion of "mutually agreeable reciprocity or cooperation between equals". 2 Let us call this ambition 'the basic idea' of contract theory. The purpose of this chapter is to explore a fundamental difficulty that faces the basic idea in the intergenerational setting.
Intergenerational Equity of Wealth - an exploitative framework
2022
Extractive mining provides resources that are socio-economically deemed essential to the basic needs of civilisation, a technology industry, and a 'developed' and 'urbanised' world that most of us labour and live within. Across the globe, mining contributes to erosion, sinkholes, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, significant use of water resources, dammed rivers and ponded waters, wastewater disposal issues, acid mine drainage and contamination of soil, ground and surface water, all of which can lead to health issues in local populations. Overall, erosion, flooding, deforestation and the contamination and consumption of ground and surface waters all act as stressors on the health of local communities, depleting food production capacities and delivering harmful elements into the food chain. In addition, industrial mining displaces local communities rendering them displaced, deskilled, and devalued thereby constructing poverty and raw material towards exploited and urbanised labour. 'Intergenerational equity of wealth' is a concept endorsed, advocated and propagated by 'The Goenchi Mati Movement' and 'Goa Foundation' in Goa (as a pilot case study) with its proposed impact across the extractive mining regions of India. This proposition is a concerted invidious strategy to undermine the entire philosophy of indigenous and ecological movements. Not only is this a socially dangerous, inequality-propagating proposition and Brahmanised greenwash. This premise threatens the livelihoods of tribal and other dispossessed and displaced, further perpetuating an increased marginalisation and impoverishing communities through its proposed five-point agenda. This is an attempt to fix a legacy hierarchy, ownership of land and maintain caste tradition. Thus this Goenchi Mati and Goa Foundation agenda remains a perversion and distortion of the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) seventh-generation principle and philosophy. This essay will attempt to understand and gauge the primary propositions, the possibilities of intent and the impact of this proposed resolution of 'intergenerational equity of wealth'. To understand this conceptual proposition it is important to deconstruct this, to its individual thread of ideas with a critical intimacy, as a construction, to offer us a way out of the closure and erasure of knowledge.
Transgenerational actions and responsibility
Journal of Critical Realism
The German philosopher Hans Jonas aspires to a provide a re-foundation of ethics based on an analysis of the contemporary world as well as on a prediction about the fate of globalized humanity. Through a discussion of the fundamental concepts of Jonas' work, the essay shows that the central themes of his research, which are still very relevant today, should be addressed by moving from the ethical level to that of ontology-and social ontology in particular. To this end, the paper offers a definition of transgenerational action that aims to replace Jonas' use of prevision. The transgenerational action is here considered as a particular type of social action: that which enables societies to exist over time. Finally, the essay proposes an essential taxonomy of transgenerational actions, showing how working on this notion might lead to a consciously utopian and positive social model, as opposed to the deflationary one Jonas wished for
Responsibility and intergenerational equity
2012
Intergenerational equity refers to the need for a just distribution of rewards and burdens between generations and fair and impartial treatment towards future generations. It is based on the idea that a person's value shouldn't depend on when they are born anymore than it should depend on place of birth, nationality or gender. However, unless substantial change occurs, the present generation is unlikely to pass on a healthy and diverse environment to future generations due to harm that current generations are doing to the environment, including climate change as well as loss of animals and plant species, water quality, and habitat including forests. Achieving intergenerational equity, therefore, requires significant changes. But why care about the future? As cynics have said: "What has posterity ever done for me?" After all the people of the far off future are strangers, they are only potential people who do not yet exist and may not exist. They will be in no position to reward us for what we do for them, to punish us for our lack of care or responsibility, nor to demand