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Wallack, Michael --- "Justice between generations: the limits of procedural justice" [2006] ELECD 482; in Tremmel, Chet Joerg (ed), "Handbook of Intergenerational Justice" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Handbook of Intergenerational Justice

Editor(s): Tremmel, Chet Joerg

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845429003

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Justice between generations: the limits of procedural justice

Author(s): Wallack, Michael

Extract:

5 Justice between generations: the limits
of procedural justice
Michael Wallack


`In the long run, we are all dead.'
J. M. Keynes (emphasis added)

`A political system [. . .] is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to
impose itself upon the present [. . .]'
Joseph Brodsky (Uncommon Visage: Grief & Reason)

`The life of a people is conceived as a scheme of cooperation spread out in his-
torical time. It is to be governed by the same conception of justice that regulates
the cooperation of contemporaries.'
John Rawls

Introduction
The most difficult problem in extending liberal theories of justice to justice
between generations arises because we expect the fairness of divisions of
resources between contemporaries to be constrained by the pragmatic
requirement that citizens must be in general agreement about crucial
matters of public concern in order that liberal democratic institutions work
tolerably well. In the case of justice between generations, those not present
are those likely to be offended by purely self-regarding consequences of col-
lective action. Thus, the discount of future consequences is apt to be very
great and the democratic process is unlikely to limit the range of possible
divisions to those which are fair to future generations of citizens. This is the
most important reason that both utilitarian and liberal accounts of justice
fail when applied to the problem of justice between generations. I shall try
to explain how each approach has tried to meet this challenge and shall
offer some suggestions for addressing it.

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