Centre for Political Thought Online Workshop: Two new problems of intergenerational justice

Catriona MacKinnon (Exeter) and Stephen Gardiner (University of Washington, Seattle) will present two joint papers on which they are currently working, followed by discussion.

10-11am: Generationally Parochial Geoengineering? Early Warning Signs and a Standing Threat

11am-12pm:  On Blinding Future Generations to the Injustices We Inflict on Them: Manufactured Generational Forgetting

Abstracts

Generationally Parochial Geoengineering: Early Warning Signs and a Standing Threat

'Geoengineering' has come to refer to massive technological interventions into fundamental earth systems on a planetary scale, often with the aim of counteracting human-induced climate change. Despite a burgeoning literature, some ethical issues surrounding geoengineering remain under-analysed, barely identified, or in effect ignored. In this paper, we explore one such issue, the threat of generationally parochial geoengineering (GPG). GPG is dominated by the narrow, generation-relative concerns of a given generation engaging in the intervention, without due consideration for wider concerns, including especially the interests of later generations of human and nonhuman life over the longer term. In this paper, we introduce the basic idea of GPG, provide general reasons to think the threat is a live one and identify some early warning signs in the current discourse. Our focus will be on motivating the claim that generationally parochial geoengineering is a threat that should be taken seriously at all levels of work on geoengineering, including research, development, and deployment. We will also propose some initial guidelines and recommendations for future research and governance.

On Blinding Future Generations to the Injustices We Inflict on Them: Manufactured Generational Forgetting

In this paper we highlight an unexplored domain of intergenerational ethics: generational environmental amnesia. This phenomenon - whereby one generation fails to recognise deterioration in its environmental circumstances compared to those of previous generations - has been well documented by conservation biologists and psychologists, but moral and political philosophers have so far ignored it. We pay particular attention to what we call ‘manufactured intergenerational forgetting’ as a wrong one generation can do to another. This wrong - and the broader context of generational amnesia - raises ethically grave questions in the face of accelerating climate change.

Stephen M. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also Director of the Program on Ethics. His research focuses on global environmental problems, future generations and virtue ethics. He is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford, 2011), and co-author of Debating Climate Ethics (Oxford, 2016). He has edited or co-edited several books, including most recently Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics (Oxford, in press), the Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (Oxford, 2016), and The Ethics of “Geoengineering” the Global Climate: Justice, Legitimacy and Governance (Routledge, 2020).

Catriona MacKinnon is a Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics at Exeter. She works on climate justice and intergenerational ethics, with more recent interests in geoengineering and the renewal of biodiversity.

If you would like to receive the Zoom link, please, contact: d.castiglione@exeter.ac.uk