Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Agius, Emmanuel --- "Intergenerational justice" [2006] ELECD 493; 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 16

Section Title: Intergenerational justice

Author(s): Agius, Emmanuel

Extract:

16 Intergenerational justice
Emmanuel Agius


At the close of the fifteenth century, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola proph-
esied that in the coming modern age, through science and technology,
human beings would determine their fate. This well-known Italian philoso-
pher of culture envisaged humanity's deepest aspirations to improve the
quality of life by the new vistas opened up by science and technology.
After so many centuries of science and technology, during the last few
decades we have learned that our unrestrained economic and technological
expansion, based on the nineteenth-century myth of progress, has in many
ways impoverished rather than improved the quality of human life. It is not
science and technology as such which are to be blamed for environmental
degradation, but rather those in whose hands these powers have fallen and
the way they were used short-sightedly. For many years science and tech-
nology were used for personal, national, regional and continental profit to
the detriment of many born and unborn people. It is a shame that for many
centuries science and technology were used as an instrument of rule over
nature and of power over society and human beings, both living now and
in the future.
Indeed, we are facing an irony that the cultural forces of science and tech-
nology, rather than `liberating' humankind, are now the greatest threat to
the quality of life of both present and future generations. Science and tech-
nology, which were expected to improve considerably the quality of human
...