Should there be future people? A fundamental question for climate change and intergenerational justice

Pranay Sanklecha

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2017, vol. 8, issue 3

Abstract: The effects of climate change will be felt far into the future, long after currently living people have stopped existing. A popular way of understanding what this means ethically is to conceptualize the issue in terms of intergenerational justice: currently living people have duties of justice toward future generations to not wrongfully harm them, or duties to reduce the risk of violating the rights future people will have when they exist. In this article I show that this depends on assumptions about the existence, identity, and number of future people. I argue for the relevance and importance of ethically investigating these assumptions; in particular of asking: should humanity continue to exist? I argue that this ethical investigation is necessary to properly and fully understand the ethical challenges that climate change creates. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e453. doi: 10.1002/wcc.453 This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Human Rights

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.453

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:wirecc:v:8:y:2017:i:3:n:e453

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().