Call for Papers: Author Meets Critics: What is Intergenerational Justice?

Certain factors make our moral duties towards the future enigmatic. The future is undecided:  we do not know the number of future generations, the size of future global population, preferences of these people, knowledge and technological capital under their disposal.  Yet, we are drawn to contemplate about our moral relations to future people.  Owing to the sheer (and growing) size and technological prowess of the current generation, the future is partly shaped by current individual and societal choices. Due to actions of current generations future non-overlapping generations might come to a much warmer Earth with depleted non-renewable resources, polluted soil and water basins and severely impoverished fauna and flora. All these may diminish life prospects of future generations and thus have moral significance.  Thus, the future oriented morality seems to be both unfathomable and required. Despite our unawareness of the future, we have to address moral questions pertaining to the future.  Most scholarship addressing our moral attitudes and relations to future people coalesce on intergenerational justice. 

Ethics, Politics & Society delighted to announce call for papers for the special issue dedicated to Axel Gosseries’s 2023 book: What is Intergenerational Justice? published by Polity press. Papers may be on any issue related to intergenerational justice broadly construed but must critically engage with any issue discussed or any idea defended by professor Gosseries. The issue will include Axel Gosseries’s grouped reply to all accepted papers.

Specific topics authors could focus on include but are not limited to the following:
1. Can current people and societies act (un)justly toward future non-overlapping generations and their members?
2. Can current people and societies wrong future generations?
3. What duties do current generations have toward members of non-overlapping future generations?
4. What does the current generation owe to future non-overlapping generations?
5. What are our climate duties toward the future?
6. Who, if anyone, is responsible for past greenhouse emissions?
7. Can discounting future benefits and costs be just?

 

We invite interested researchers to submit their proposals for manuscripts, which should be submitted through the journal’s platform: https://revistas.uminho.pt/index.php/eps/about/submissions

Papers can be up to 3000 words including footnotes and references and must be submitted by April 1, 2025. 

For further information, interested researchers can contact the guest editor  of the issue Arshak Balayan, at: abalayan@aua.am