Jonathan M. Hoffmann

Michael Rose’s Zukünftige Generationen in der heutigen Demokratie: Theorie und Praxis der Proxy-Repräsentation (Future Generations in Today’s Democracy: Theory and Practice of Proxy Representation) is an ambitious and fascinating work. It provides a new conceptualisation of the representation of future generations and it also delivers the most extensive empirical study of institutions for the representation of future generations available to date. The book is based on Rose’s PhD thesis at the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany, and is 516 pages long (excluding an extensive bibliography, list of sources and appendices). A third of the thesis is devoted to short case studies of a total of 29 institutions which are presented in a catalogue format, allowing this section to be used as an encyclopaedia. The book is written concisely and is well documented throughout.

My students tend to rank Parfit’s Energy Policy and the Further Future1 among their favourite pieces. It is a marvellously argued, eye-opening paper. One of the most interesting passages comes right at the end, when Parfit suggests that we should act as if we had never realised that the non-identity problem exists: “When we are discussing social policies, should we ignore the point about personal identity? Should we allow ourselves to say that a choice like that of the Risky Policy or of Depletion might be against the interests of people in the further future? This is not true. Should we pretend that it is? […] I would not want people to conclude that we can be less concerned about the more remote effects of our social policies. So I would be tempted to suppress the argument for this conclusion.” (2010 [1983], 119) In the paper, Parfit continuously stresses the implications of our views on personal identity. He differentiates between what he later, in his Reasons and Persons, calls a “narrow” and a “wide” person-affecting view (1984, ch. 18).2 On a narrow person-affecting view, we take seriously each person’s identity and assume that it is determined by its genome which is a product of a certain ovum and a certain sperm cell (112-113). On this view, we may then evaluate an action by considering its impact on each individual that is affected. An action is, thus, better or worse because it is better or worse for someone. Consequently, there may be alternative actions available to perform that seem better or worse, but aren’t really, as they are not better or worse for someone. One example that illustrates this point is the case of a 14 year-old who decides to have a child and, due to her age, gives the boy she conceives a bad start in life (113). In response, one may want to argue that she should have had a child later and that that child would have had a better start in life. This, however, overlooks that the boy that has been born to the young mother could not have been born later: the child she actually had could only come into existence because she decided to become a mother when she was 14. Hence, Parfit argues, we can “not claim that, in having this child, what she did was worse for him” (113, italics in the original).

In the early 1980s, Derek Parfit used the example of a 14-year-old girl to illustrate the "non-identity problem". The girl was about to decide whether or not to conceive a child at her age, and Parfit argued that she would not make that particular child worse off by conceiving now as opposed to waiting a few years and heaving a child as a grown-up. Since the girl’s child would not exist if it had not been born at that time, it could not blame its mother for its bad start in life, as long as it has a life worth living. The NIP has been part of the philosophical debate on intergenerational justice ever since. Does the NIP also apply beyond the biomedical? For this IGJR special issue, scholars were invited to assess the scope and relevance of the NIP in questions of climate change. Can future persons blame us for our climate policies? In three contributions, Parfit’s 14-year-old girl is still discussed, and this question remains hotly disputed. For this controversial topic, we have been trying something new: In addition to regular peer-reviewed articles and reviews of selected new publications, we asked several researchers to share their perspectives regarding the C-NIP debate in a short opinion piece. Although we provided feedback on the submitted manuscripts, these opinions did not undergo a regular peer-review process. Being opinions, we have left it to the authors' judgment whether or not they revise their manuscripts. The IGJR editorial team would be very pleased to receive feedback from the inclined reader on this new format. The issue begins with six opinion pieces on the C-NIP, followed by two research articles by Thomas Bontly and Jasmina Nedevska, respectively, and two book reviews. In the first opinion piece, Ramon Das applies the C-NIP to historic injustice and argues that employing intragenerational counterfactuals – as opposed to intergenerational ones – can avoid the NIP and in some cases sustain harm claims. In the second opinion piece, Charlotte Unruh maintains that the C-NIP does not only apply to questions of harm, but also to questions of benefit. She suggests that solutions to the C-NIP will have to take both harm and benefit into account. The next two opinion pieces are concerned with whether remote acts and effects are causally and/or morally relevant for the identity of future humans. Jörg Tremmel maintains that Parfit’s concept of causality is distinct from conceptions of causality employed in legal studies as well as in the sciences and argues that the non-identity effect of climate policies is overstated, once alternative conceptions of causality are employed. Contrarily, Jonas Harney argues that indeed virtually every small single act may affect the identity of distant future individuals. However, he points out that the C-NIP is only a problem to moral theories that employ a comparative personal view. Referring to Rawls’s veil of ignorance, Jonathan M. Hoffmann suggests employing a wide person-affecting view to questions of intergenerational justice. In contrast to the narrow person-affecting view that is linked to the NIP, it disregards the very identity of future individuals and emphasises the moral relevance of their human and citizen status. In the final opinion piece, Michael Rose shares a story of the lack of appreciation of the C-NIP outside of philosophical circles and argues that this is for a good reason. He introduces the “arbitrary status quo argument” that renders the C-NIP morally useless. Moreover – sounding the same horn as Hoffmann – he points out that in political practice, the citizens’ interests brought into political decision-making are not individualised anyway. The relevance of the C-NIP is debated in greater depth in two research articles. Discussing different arguments and methods of causal inference, Thomas Bontly employs a difference-making perspective and shows that there is indeed a highly significant non-identity effect of climate change policies. Jasmina Nedevska analyses the differences between the NIP in bioethics and the C-NIP and – drawing a parallel to a case of climate change litigation in California – argues that the C-NIP might indeed have practical political implications. To sum up, at least two questions are to be asked regarding the C-NIP: First, do climate policies affect distant future peoples’ identities in a significant way? And second, is this morally and politically relevant? Addressing the first question, several contributions in this issue discuss the kind of causal reasoning the C-NIP is based upon. Whereas Bontly, Das and Harney affirm the non-identity effect and emphasise the crucial role of comparisons of alternative worlds for the NIP and its concept of causation, Tremmel holds to his claim that the causal influence of a certain identity-affecting policy is often insignificant from a legal or scientific perspective. Regarding the second question, most authors seem to grant the NIP a certain moral and political relevance within the narrow person-affecting view. At the same time, several authors seem to allow for or even emphasise alternative ways of dealing with the C-NIP that uphold the moral relevance of the current generation’s actions with regard to future generations, among them Das, Hoffmann and Rose. What does all of this mean for Parfit’s 14-year-old girl? After all, only one thing is for sure: now in her early 50s, that woman still is a troublemaker. And most probably, she will continue to be. This special issue ends with two book reviews. First, Nicky van Dijk reviews “Intergenerational Equity”, edited by Thomas Cottier et al.. The book, provided with a foreword by Edith Brown Weiss, offers a variety of authors and interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic, focusing on juridical, philosophical, historical and economic dimensions of environmental, cultural and political intergenerational equity. Second, Melissa Ihlow and Maria Lenk review “Humans in the Global Ecosystem”, edited by Pierre L. Ibisch et al.. The book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and solution-oriented introduction to sustainable development. Michael Rose and Jonathan M. Hoffmann, Guest Editors