Can a theory of intergenerational justice make any sense? This is the key question addressed by Beckerman and Pasek’s new book. In the first section, they claim that since future people do not currently exist, they cannot have moral rights now. Moreover, the fact that they could have rights in the future does not suffice to justify imposing on us obligations toward them. Thus, whatever moral obligations we may have to future people cannot rest on correlative rights. Admittedly, Beckerman and Pasek do not deny that “we have a moral obligation to take account of the interests of future generations in our policies”. However, since future generations’ interests cannot be protected by rights, they do “not possess ‘trumping value’ over those of the present generations”. Moreover, given their view that obligations of justice are necessarily right-based, our moral duties to future people can only be of a humanitarian nature. Their argument is problematic in at least two respects. First, if future interests can command current obligations, why not future rights? Second, because they are concerned with “what are our moral obligations to future generations, not what we would like to do for them anyway”, Beckerman and Pasek claim that we need to abstract from the case of overlapping generations. But if we disagree with their reason for focusing on non-overlapping generations, the fact that members of the next generation might have rights against us while we still exist changes the picture. For it allows us to develop a full right-based theory of justice between generations relying on a chain of overlapping cohorts of rights – and obligations holders.
