Intergenerational Justice and the Non‐reciprocity Problem

Hugh McCormick

Political Studies, 2009, vol. 57, issue 2, 451-458

Abstract: Many of us share a strong intuitive sense that acts or policies that gravely threaten future people's well‐being violate the requirements of justice. This intuition has proven problematic for theories that found justice on reciprocity because future people are viewed as powerless to reciprocate our actions towards them. The non‐reciprocity problem appears to deliver a decisive blow to reciprocity‐based theories of justice. I wish to dispute this view. I point to two well‐known facts about human existence – generations overlap continuously and the old depend upon the young – to show that future generations are not asymmetrically vulnerable to our actions, and therefore that justice as reciprocity is not vulnerable to the non‐reciprocity problem.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00786.x

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:bla:polstu:v:57:y:2009:i:2:p:451-458

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0032-3217

Access Statistics for this article

Political Studies is currently edited by Matthew Festenstein and Martin Smith

More articles in Political Studies from Political Studies Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().