Basic Positive Duties of Justice and Narveson's Libertarian Challenge

Are positive duties to help others in need mere informal duties of virtue or can they also be enforceable duties of justice? In this paper I defend the claim that some positive duties (which I call basic positive duties) can be duties of justice against one of the most important principled objections to it. This is the libertarian challenge, according to which only negative duties to avoid harming others can be duties of justice, whereas positive duties (basic or nonbasic) must be seen, at best, as informal moral requirements or recommendations. I focus on the contractarian version of the libertarian challenge as recently presented by Jan Narveson. I claim that Narveson's contractarian construal of libertarianism is not only intuitively weak, but is also subject to decisive internal problems. I argue, in particular, that it does not provide a clear rationale for distinguishing between informal duties of virtue and enforceable duties of justice, that it can neither successfully justify libertarianism's protection of negative rights nor its denial of positive ones, and that it fails to undermine the claim that basic positive duties are duties of global justice.     

Responsibility for Future Climate Justice: The Direct Responsibility to Mitigate Structural Injustice for Future Generations

In this article we argue that duties towards future generations are situated on the collective level and that they should be understood in terms of collective responsibility for structural injustice. In the context of climate change, it seems self-evident that our moral duties pertain not only to the current generation but to future generations as well. However, conceptualizing this leads to the non-identity problem: future persons cannot be harmed by present-day choices because they would not have existed if other choices had been made. Recently, Charlotte Franziska Unruh has proposed a solution that places the duties not on the individual level but on the collective level. The current generation has a responsibility for future generations as a whole. This solution is promising, but we argue that it problematically overlooks the existence of unjust relations within the contemporary collective, as we all contribute differently to bringing future generations into existence. Therefore, we propose to graft Iris Marion Young's Social Connection Model, which is concerned with structural injustice, on to the discussion of responsibility for future generations. Our proposal incorporates the strengths of Unruh's arguments, while also allowing for a differentiated responsibility based on different implications in unjust structures.     

Risking Future Generations

Many of the policy choices we face that have implications for the lives of future generations involve creating a risk that they will live lives that are significantly compromised. I argue that we can fruitfully make use of the resources of Scanlon’s contractualist account of moral reasoning to make sense of the intuitive idea that, in many cases, the objection to adopting a policy that puts the interest of future generations at risk is that doing so wrongs those who will live in the further future.     

Conservation,Foresight, and the Future Generations Problem

The practice of conservation assumes that current persons have some obligations to future generations, but these obligations are complicated by a number of philosophical problems, chief among which is what Derek Parfit calls the Non‐Identity Problem. Because our actions now will affect the identities of persons to be born in the distant future, we cannot say that those actions either benefit or harm those persons. Thus, a causal link between our acts and their consequences for particular persons is severed, and the justification for conservation duties toward future generations undermined. I argue for an alternative justification for conservation in the capacity of foresight, which requires us to act not only upon duties that we have now, but also upon those that we will predictably have in the future. In this way, the future generations problem, at least as applied to conservation issues, is overcome.     

洛克但书及其解释:一种当代财产正义观

在当代讨论财产正义的英语文献中,一个引人注目的现象是,洛克的财产理论处于争论的中心.其中,洛克但书(Loekean proviso)为左翼和右翼学者广泛接受,但是解释却歧义纷出,相互冲突.这并不能说明左右翼的立场趋同,而是意味着洛克但书蕴含着多种解释的可能.从更广泛的意义来看,学者们如此热衷于援引洛克但书,只能解释为,它隐含了一种为大多数人所接受的正义观念,并且这一观念的解释关涉到现实的制度与政策评价.因此,如何解释洛克但书构成当代讨论财产正义的重要主题之一.鉴于中文文献对该主题的相对忽视,本文将首先简要追溯洛克的财产理论以及洛克但书提出的情境;然后对左右翼学者在该问题上的对立解释做出评述;在此基础上,本文提出一种最低限度的解释,这种解释不是对左右翼的折衷,而是任何一种对洛克但书的解释所必须包含的最低要求.     

Care Ethics and Obligations to Future Generations

A dominant area of inquiry within intergenerational ethics concerns how goods (and bads) ought to be justly distributed between noncontemporaries. Contractualist theories of justice that have broached these discussions have often centered on the concepts of mutual advantage and (indirect) reciprocal cooperation between rational, self‐interested beings. However, another prominent reason that many in the present feel that they have obligations toward future generations is not due to self‐interested reciprocity, but simply because they care about what happens to them. Care ethics promises to be conceptually well‐suited for articulating this latter reason: given that future generations are in a perpetual condition of dependency on present‐day people's actions, this is precisely the kind of relational structure that care theorists should be interested in morally evaluating. Unfortunately, the care literature has been largely silent on intergenerational ethics. This article aims to advance this literature, offering the blueprints of what a care ethic concerning future generations—a “future care ethic”—should look like. The resultant ethic defends a sufficientarian theory of obligation: people in the present ought to ensure the conditions needed to encourage and sustain a world that enables good caring relations to flourish.     

罗尔斯代际正义理论与其一般正义论的矛盾与冲突

罗尔斯自己说过,“将正义延伸到包括我们对未来各代人的义务(包括正义储存的问题)”,是他的正义理论所遇到的四个难题之一。正义的储存原则是代际正义的主要内容,但是,“至少在目前我们不可能对应当有多高的储存率制定出精确的标准。资金积累和提高文明、文化水准的费用如何在代际之间被分担的问题看来不容有明确的回答”。所以,代际正义问题“使伦理学理论受到了即使不是不可忍受也是极严重的考验”[1]。通过对罗尔斯的代际正义理论与其一般正义论的对比分析,我们将会发现,罗尔斯的这一意味深长、耐人寻味的表白或许主要源于这样一个事实,…     

Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian Approach

A key concern of global ethics is the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens amongst persons belonging to different populations. Until recently, the philosophical literature on global distribution was dominated by the question of how benefits and burdens should be divided amongst contemporaries. Recent years, however, have seen an increase in research on the scope and content of our duties to future generations. This has led to a number of innovative attempts to extend principles of distribution across time while retaining a focus on the entitlements of the existing poor. In this article, I examine a key aspect of intergenerational justice, namely, the appropriate ‘pattern’ of well-being that should be obtained across generations. With the aid of research into the impacts of global climate change, I evaluate a number of rival accounts of the pattern of justice and go on to explore the merits of a ‘global sufficientarian’ ethic, which holds that as many persons as possible should enjoy a satisfactory level of well-being regardless of when or where they live.     

Cultivating Community Psychology for Future Generations: Symbiosis,Synergy, and Separation

As we near the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of a community psychology division of the American Psychological Association, there are reasons to be concerned about the sustainability of the field. This commentary proposes a need for deliberate, systematic efforts to cultivate settings that can sustain the field. A framework for outreach to build symbiotic relationships and synergistic collaborations with persons who do not identify as community psychologists is proposed. Simultaneously, a strategy of separation from other disciplines may be needed in some circumstances to conserve settings that sustain the field. Finding a balance in these strategies is necessary to cultivate community psychology for future generations.     

罗尔斯代际正义思想及其意蕴

罗尔斯的代际正义思想作为他的正义理论的重要组成部分,体现了对传统正义观的超越与发展,为人类可持续发展所进行的国际合作和国内法律、政策的制定提供了有力的理论支撑和评价标准。     

类伦理与环境代际正义的实现

在个体道德、群体道德与类道德三种道德样态中,类道德体现了人类实践行为的整体性,它蕴含着人与自然以及当代人与后代人的双重伦理规定,既表达了人对自然的关怀意识,又体现了当代人对后代人的责任品质,它以一种整体性的道德品格促进环境代际正义的实现。     

Idolatry and Future Generations: the Persistence of Molech

Drawing on the work of Jewish text scholars and the philosophy of Levinas and Rosenzweig, this article uses the biblical texts on Molech, and issues in their interpretation, as the starting‐point for an analysis of the intergenerational structure of idolatry. In the context of attention to this structure, and to the particular implications of this for Christians as “Gentiles”, the death of Jesus can be read in ways that subvert the patterns of the Molech cult.     

推进代际公正 建设和谐社会

和谐社会是公平、正义的公正社会。代际公正理念强调对于每一代人（包括老年人）基本贡献的肯定和尊严的维护。在现阶段,公正对待老年人的问题正逐渐凸现,这个问题的解决直接关系到整个社会的公平正义能否实现。为此,除了社会的保障体系的建立和不断完善外,还必须继续弘扬尊老、敬老的中华民族传统美德,在社会、社区乃至每一个家庭中形成尊老敬老的良好风气,以代际和谐、家庭和谐推动社会和谐。     

Ecological Refugees,States Borders,and the Lockean Proviso

Ecological refugees are expected to make up an increasing percentage of overall refugees in the coming decades as predicted climate change related disasters will displace millions of people. In this essay, I focus on those rights ecological refugees may claim on the basis of collective self‐determination. To this end, I will focus on a few specific cases that I call cases of ‘ecological refugee states’. Tuvalu, the Maldives, and to a certain extent, Bangladesh are predicted to be ecological refugee states in the near future. These are states whose entire (or close to it) geographical territory is predicted to be lost to rising sea levels; the collective body of the people will itself become an ecological refugee. The question is: what may the people of an ecological refugee state legitimately claim on the basis of their right to self‐determination? Should we redraw state borders to accommodate a New Tuvalu? I argue that a plausible position regarding territorial rights is that when (1) a people clearly is (or recently was) self‐determining and has a legitimate claim to continue to be self‐determining, and (2) the self‐determination of a people is existentially threatened because the people lacks territorial rights, that (3) the people becomes a candidate for sovereign over a new territory. The result is that existing state borders may need to change to accommodate something like a New Tuvalu. To generate these results on behalf of ecological refugee states, I examine the principles of the system of territorial states. Because the system of territorial states is a system of exclusive rights over goods, especially land, it is possible that it is subject to the conditions of a Lockean proviso mechanism. This paper is dedicated mainly to adapting a version of the Lockean proviso for use in territorial rights theory.