Discursive Justice in and With Future Generations

Most discussions of intergenerational justice focus on distributive justice between generations. Much of contemporary thinking about justice, though, focuses on how people might reason together in a respectful and egalitarian manner—with, that is, justice in political discourse. This chapter seeks to apply this latter sort of theorizing to the intergenerational context. It identifies two ways in which discursive justice might be applicable to that context. First, the present generation might wrong future generations by making discursive justice more difficult in the future; it might, for instance, create a future in which political agents must display greater virtue—both intellectual and moral—than present generations have had to demonstrate. Second, if we accept that agents may have interests that outlive themselves, then one generation might wrong another by failing to listen to the claims that persist through time and across generations. This discussion is compatible with the conclusion that moral claims generally diminish in importance over time; as the world in which a given generation’s moral commitments were made changes, so too does the moral pull of those commitments diminish.