Neil H. Buchanan · September 2009
77 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1237 (2009)
Every decision that we make today can either directly or indirectly affect the interests of future generations, both those generations already born and those to be born in the decades and centuries after we are gone. Even if it is unlikely that many of our decisions (especially the smaller ones) will affect the general course of history, the possibility of doing so imposes a profound obligation on us at least to consider how our policy choices might affect our children, our grandchildren, and those who will follow. Not every policy choice must elevate the concerns of future generations over those of current generations, of course, but a conscious acknowledgement that we are making decisions for people who cannot speak for their own interests creates a moral imperative to give voice to the voiceless.
This Article explores the content of that moral imperative, finding that we currently fall well short of our responsibilities in many areas but—surprisingly—that we might well be overemphasizing the interests of future generations in others. The fundamental problem that we face is not a future with too little prosperity but a future (and a present) in which prosperity is concentrated in far too few hands. This Article thus emphasizes that an obligation to consider future people’s needs and desires can fit within well-known conceptions of distributive justice.
Because of these moral obligations that carry forth from generation to generation, concerns about the well-being of future generations loom large over discussions of public policy. From politicians to pundits, from analysts at serious policy think tanks to scholarly writers, the notion that current generations have obligations to the future—and that we are failing to face up responsibly to those obligations—prominently animates much current policy discussion.
Notwithstanding the shared stated commitment to protecting the interests of our progeny, the precise nature of current generations’ obligations to those who will follow has rarely been explored. The content of current generations’ obligations to future generations—both in kind and in degree—turns out to be a matter of great uncertainty. Indeed, among those who have investigated these questions deeply, the existence of any intergenerational obligations is not universally accepted; and even among those who agree that current generations should consider the needs of those who will follow, little else is certain. What we owe, how we can fulfill our debts, and what we might reasonably weigh against the interests of future generations are all profoundly interesting but also currently open questions.
This Article is intended to serve two purposes. First, in Part II, I frame a range of issues raised by questions of the intergenerational impacts of current policy choices, starting with the fundamental question of whether intergenerational obligations exist at all and proceeding to a discussion of the choices that must be made to make the analysis at least somewhat tractable. As I discuss, the current literature on intergenerational justice is relatively well developed in the areas of philosophy and especially with respect to environmental policy but relatively sparse in the areas of fiscal and economic policy.
Second, this Article moves from the abstract philosophical discussion in Part II to a discussion of a specific policy question in Part III, focusing on a policy choice that profoundly implicates intergenerational tradeoffs: government budget deficits. This has the advantage of allowing us to set aside, for the sake of getting started, several important variables that complicate the philosophical debate about intergenerational justice—variables that can be reintroduced into the analysis in future work. For example, I limit the analysis by focusing only on material living standards (with no environmental tradeoffs), attempting to determine the interests of domestic citizens only rather than all human beings, and setting aside questions such as optimal population levels. Even having confined the analysis in that way, however, it turns out that balancing the interests of current and future generations is surprisingly difficult and leads to unexpected conclusions.
The suggestion that we might want to do more for ourselves and less on behalf of generations to come is, to this author and no doubt to many readers, not only surprising but viscerally unsettling as well. Therefore, Part III concludes with an exploration of two reasons why current generations might well engage in policies that have the effect of enhancing the interests of future generations, even though the policies could be motivated by the purely selfish interests of currently-living generations. As I show, considerations of financial and political stability can induce us to adopt policies that will benefit our children and grandchildren even as the policies benefit us as well. Because of these situations where there is no tradeoff between our interests and those of our grandchildren, we might not need to make decisions that make us worse off now.
The matter of distributive justice—of how to balance the interests of the rich, the poor, and those in the middle—is the analytical focus of Part IV. Given the lack of precise guidance as to how to make fiscal policy choices (and, for that matter, to make other choices in public policy) that require intergenerational balancing, there are helpful formulations drawn from notions of distributive justice that offer insights into how to turn core moral precepts into guidelines for policies that are equitable both within and across generations. Treating questions of intergenerational justice in the same way that we treat questions of intragenerational justice (e.g., committing to a more egalitarian distribution of incomes) is potentially more promising than attempting to treat intergenerational justice as a separate moral inquiry.
