Intergenerational justice

Some ten years ago, I did a bit of work in applied ethics on our moral obligations towards future generations. Among other things, I was able to publish a paper in the journal Organization & Environment on how to reduce the highly asymmetric influence that current generations, in particular through climate change, exercise on the well-being of future generations. Like most academic papers, it has only generated a handful of citations and, in retrospect, I do not think I was able to add much to what others had already said.

Afterwards, I moved on, primarily to work on climate policy but also different notions of environmental citizenship. However, on the 27th of September, I have been invited to serve as opponent for the final seminar of a PhD thesis on the non-identity problem in intergenerational justice at Stockholm University. Despite teaching full-time, this means that I have spent the last days rediscovering a lot of literature and coming back to many of the thoughts I had a decade ago. If I can find the time, I will write a follow-up post on this after the seminar. For now, I am afraid I have to go back to reading...