Axel Gosseries

In this chapter, the implications of intergenerational sufficientarianism for health-related issues are discussed. First, the chapter presents intergenerational sufficientarianism and specifies three of its key features: moderate noncleronomicity, a qualified authorization to save and dissave, and two characteristics of its metrics. It also discusses two specific defenses of sufficientarianism in the intergenerational realm. Second, the chapter applies the sufficientarian framework with an isolationist approach to three health-related issues: patent length, eradication versus control, and antibiotic resistance. Finally, it discusses whether isolationism is more defensible in the case of intergenerational sufficientarianism than it could possibly be for other theories of justice.

Est-il moralement acceptable de transmettre aux générations futures des déchets nucléaires ou une biodiversité réduite à une peau de chagrin ? Les personnes futures sauraient-elles être titulaires de droits alors qu'elles n'existent pas ? Est-il juste de revoir à la baisse le montant des retraites pour lesquelles des pensionnés ont cotisé toute leur vie ou de transférer aux générations à venir une dette publique considérable ? Chacune de ces questions a trait à différents domaines de notre existence. Pourtant, un fil rouge les relie : celui de la justice entre les générations. Brûlantes d'actualité, ces interrogations se voient bien souvent offrir pour seule réponse le dénuement relatif de nos théories. Ainsi, des concepts comme ceux de " droit acquis " en matière de pensions ou de " développement durable " ne sauraient faire office d'arguments s'ils ne s'appuient pas sur un solide arrière-fond théorique issu de la philosophie morale et politique. Car l'économie publique ou la biologie des populations ne peuvent suffire à aiguiller les citoyens et leurs représentants sur les choix qui leur incombent en matière intergénérationnelle. La philosophie a aussi son rôle à jouer, à la condition qu'elle ait la modestie d'être à l'écoute d'autres disciplines, l'exigence d'articuler clairement ses présupposés, et le courage de se frotter à la pratique [4ème de couverture ]

Entre les actions judiciaires intentées contre l’inertie des États ou des grandes entreprises, les mouvements sociaux qui revendiquent une transition plus équitable et les sommets climatiques internationaux où elle est sans cesse invoquée pour négocier des accords, la justice climatique s’est installée comme un sujet politique majeur. En complément des analyses juridiques, politiques, sociologiques et économiques, une réflexion éthique est indispensable pour en saisir toute la portée. Comment justifier l’objectif de limiter le réchauffement planétaire à 2 ou 1,5 °C d’ici la fin du siècle? Selon quels principes distribuer les droits d’émission et l’effort de lutte contre le changement climatique à l’échelle mondiale? Seuls les États ou bien aussi les individus ont-ils des responsabilités? Pierre André et Axel Gosseries exposent les concepts, principes et arguments qui structurent aujourd’hui la question de la justice climatique.

Can people alive now have duties to future generations, the unborn millions? If so, what do we owe them? What does “justice” mean in an intergenerational context, both between people who will coexist at some point, and between generations that will never overlap? In this book, Axel Gosseries provides a forensic examination of these issues, comparing and analyzing various views about what we owe our successors. He discusses links between justice and sustainability, and looks at the implications of the fact that our successors’ preferences are heavily influenced by what we will actually leave them and by the education they receive. He also points to how these theoretical considerations apply to real-life issues, ranging from pension reform and Brexit to biodiversity and the climate crisis. He ends by outlining how intergenerational considerations may translate into institutional design. Anyone grappling with the dilemmas of our obligations to the future, from students and scholars to policy makers and active citizens, will find this an invaluable theoretical and practical guide to this moral and political minefield.

In this paper, I begin by introducing the idea of complete-life egalitarianism, pointing at the need to define it, to justify it, and to specify its implications for age-based practices. I then discuss two points of disagreement with Bidadanure’s account of justice between age groups. The first claim is that while it makes sense to add constraints of justice between age groups that are irreducible to complete-life egalitarian concerns, sufficiency constraints should not be as extensive as Bidadanure proposes. I also illustrate the possibility of nonsufficiency constraints, through the idea of revisability. While my first claim accepts the incompleteness of the complete-life view, my second claim defends the potential of the complete-life view itself in relation to efficiency. The idea is that a properly construed complete-life “egalitarian” account is capable of incorporating efficiency considerations without them being an add-on. Such efficiency constraints are essential to the potential justification of some of our key age-based practices. It remains an open question whether such differences in theoretical framing with Bidadanure’s own account are likely to make a difference in practice.

What Makes Age Discrimination Special? A Philosophical Look at the ECJ Case Law This paper provides an account of what makes age discrimination special, going through a set of possible justifications. In the end, it turns out that a full understanding of the specialness of age-based differential treatment requires that we consider together the ‘reliable proxy,’ the ‘complete-life neutrality,’ the ‘sequence efficiency’ and the ‘affirmative egalitarian’ accounts. Depending on the specific age criteria, all four accounts may apply or only some of them. This is the first key message of this paper. The second message of the paper has to do with the age group/birth cohort distinction. All measures that have a differential impact on different cohorts also tend to have a differential impact on various age groups during the transition. The paper points at the practical implications of anti-age-discrimination law for differential treatment between birth cohorts. The whole argument is confronted all along with ECJ cases.

In this paper, we explore the extent to which mountain huts and rules imposed on their users can provide metaphoric inspiration to the exploration of issues of an intergenerational justice. We indicate features made salient by the metaphor. We focus in particular on the content of an intergenerational golden rule and on cleronomic justice (Sect. 1). We also explain why the absence of a warden matters (Sect. 2). Other absent features make salient other dimensions that are central to intergenerational justice. Special attention is granted to two of them: the “genesis” relationship among successive generations and the problem of population change across generations (Sect. 3).

Ageing without Ageism? contributes to the essential and timely discussion of age, ageism, population ageing, and public policy. It demonstrates the breadth of the challenges posed by these issues by covering a wide range of policy areas: from health care to old-age support, from democratic participation to education, and from family to fiscal policy. With contributions from 21 authors the discussion bridges the gap between academia and public life by putting in dialogue fresh philosophical analysis and specific new policy proposals. It approaches familiar issues like age discrimination, justice between age groups, and democratic participation across the ages from novel perspectives.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Enviornment 6.2 (2001) 114-118 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Child versus Childmaker: Future Persons and Present Duties in Ethics and the Law Child versus Childmaker: Future Persons and Present Duties in Ethics and the Law. Melinda A. Roberts. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Pp. 235. ISBN 0-8476-8901-8 (Paperback) This book will provide the reader with a systematic examination of some of the most difficult philosophical issues involved in procreation, and most notably those raised by wrongful life claims and the non-identity problem. Can an action without which a given child would not even exist be simultaneously said to harm this very child? This is the key question addressed in this book. It is relevant not only to bioethicists, but also to those concerned with the possibility of harming members of future generations in general. The author proceeds with remarkable clarity in three steps. First, she unveils the core intuition and unfolds the key implications of what is standardly referred to as the person-affecting view. Second, she focuses on the now famous non-identity problem that is supposed to raise a serious challenge to the plausibility of the person-affecting view. Third, wrongful life and human cloning are taken as illustrations of the problem.The starting point is thus the person-affecting or personalist view. The author argues that what is at stake in such a view is not only a concern for [End Page 114] persons (as opposed to plants or stones), but also for definite persons. The core intuition that "what is bad must be bad for someone" (Derek Parfit) implies a comparison between two states of the same person. As she puts it, "the pairwise comparisons of worlds appealed to within personalism are always in respect of particular people" (6). This does not necessarily imply consequentialism, contrary to what Roberts claims (e.g., 1), at least if we understand the latter, for example, as Philip Pettit does. 1 Moreover, one may very well argue that what is at the heart of the person-affecting intuition is a sense that an action needs to be assessed on the basis of its effect on persons, which would not necessarily imply that such effects require a comparison between two states of the same person. Nevertheless, the extent to which a person-affecting conception--as defined by Roberts--will be in trouble depends on the extent to which comparisons between the same person's states cannot operate. This is precisely where to introduce the idea of a non-identity context, that is, a situation in which not committing an allegedly harmful act would or could also have meant the nonexistence of the allegedly harmed person. For example, had a medical doctor not committed this preconceptional diagnostic mistake (or a father taken a slower or faster means of transportation to come back home), this child would or could not have existed. Can we thus say that the practitioner harmed the child who turned out to be heavily handicapped due, for example, to a genetically transmissible disease (or that the father harmed his child by leaving him with a very polluted environment due to his use of big cars as a means of transportation)?One key feature of Roberts's approach is that she restricts the scope of the non-identity problem to cases where not committing the allegedly harmful action would have made it impossible for this child to have existed ("two-alternative" cases) (26, 319, 325). This entails that whenever this very child could still have come to existence in the allegedly harmful action's absence, whatever the likelihood of such a coming to existence, we would fall outside a non-identity context ("three-alternative" cases) (27; 94-95). What matters to Roberts is whether or not the same child could have been born better than he is, not whether he would, as a matter of fact, have been born at all. The consequence is that in cases where the same child could have been born, say, unhandicapped, the author remains...

This book brings together fifty of today’s finest thinkers. They were asked to let their imaginations run free to advance new ideas on a wide range of social and political issues. They did so as friends, on the occasion of Philippe Van Parijs’s sixtieth birthday. Rather than restricting themselves to comments on his numerous writings, the authors engage with the topics on which he has focused his attention over the years, especially with the various dimensions of justice, its scope, and its demands. They discuss issues ranging from the fair distribution of marriage opportunities to the limits of argumentation in a democracy, the deep roots of inequality, the challenges to basic income and the requirements of linguistic justice. They provide ample food for thought for both academic and general readers.

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.

Should the foreign debt of the world’s poorest countries be cancelled? In this essay, I am concerned with whether a generational perspective makes a difference in answering this question. I will show that it does, and that alternative accounts of repayment obligations are possible. I argue that a distributive theory of justice is not only appropriate to address the challenges to justice raised by long-term sovereign indebtedness, but that it is also superior to the solution offered by the odious debt doctrine.Unlike the odious debt doctrine, a distributive view is capable of taking intoaccount the separateness of generations. More specifically, I also argue thatthe need to preserve creditors’ incentives to lend to the poor in order toensure that the latter keep having access to credit for important development purposes requires the adoption of a narrow, problem-specific view, which focuses on the distributive impact of the loan transaction, rather than a broad distributive view, which looks at the general distributive situation of the two descendent communities.

The A. discusses conditions for the idea of obligations towards the dead, while simultaneously holding the view that dead people have ceased to exist in a morally relevant sense. He examines and rejects three «lateral» strategies (Callahan, Wellman, Partridge) that rest on a notion of obligations concerning, rather than towards the dead. He then goes on to scrutinize Feinberg's «frontal» strategy, that consists in defending the possibility of (pre)posthumous harms, and, as a result, of obligations towards the dead. The A. rejects this standpoint also, especially because of the deterministic view on which it rests, and because of the coexistence it implies between post-mortem properties and ante-mortem harm. Both lateral and frontal strategies thus fail to justify obligations towards the dead. The A. then suggests that if we wish to stick to the latter, we might have to endorse the metaphysical claim that seems to be implied in it (i.e. that dead people do exist in some morally relevant sense), unless we are ready to abandon the idea that a moral obligation towards a person only makes sense if this person is in a position to be harmed.