Taking Turns with the Earth

Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice

Matthias Fritsch

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503606968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The environmental crisis, one of the great challenges of our time, tends to disenfranchise those who come after us. Arguing that as temporary inhabitants of the earth, we cannot be indifferent to future generations, this book draws on the resources of phenomenology and poststructuralism to help us conceive of moral relations in connection with human temporality. Demonstrating that moral and political normativity emerge with generational time, the time of birth and death, this book proposes two related models of intergenerational and environmental justice. The first entails a form of indirect reciprocity, in which we owe future people both because of their needs and interests and because we ourselves have been the beneficiaries of peoples past; the second posits a generational taking of turns that Matthias Fritsch applies to both our institutions and our natural environment, in other words, to the earth as a whole. Offering new readings of key philosophers, and emphasizing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, Taking Turns with the Earth disrupts human-centered notions of terrestrial appropriation and sharing to give us a new continental philosophical account of future-oriented justice.

1

Ontological Problems and Methods in Intergenerational Justice

In response to the global ecological crisis, intergenerational and climate ethicists debate whether existing moral-political intuitions and theories suffice to address ongoing environmental damages, especially those affecting the far future (Gardiner 2011b; Jamieson 2014; Myers 2015; Kingston 2014). Grosso modo, “extensionists” argue that extant theories can be tweaked to cover non-overlapping future people, while “revisionists” deny this and call for more radical conceptual changes (for example, with respect to “collectivizing” responsibility and tying it to the probability of long-term outcomes, rather than just to causal connections). Others argue that due to the “internal logical problems” of existing moral theories when applied to future people and, specifically, climate change, we should not wait for better theories but rather argue for action on climate change in view of common interest (Weisbach, in Gardiner and Weisbach 2016, 257). Thus, this debate foregrounds the “logical” or “ontological problems” that beset many extant theories of intergenerational justice. This first chapter argues that these problems suggest a social-ontological as well as normative response that explores the relation between questions of justice and the human time of birth and death.

I begin by offering a reclassifying overview of the special problems affecting moral relations with future people, including the nonexistence challenge, poor epistemic access, and problems affecting interaction and world constitution. I then argue that, to the extent these problems are indeed social-ontological, they call for express investigations of the ontology of moral agents in relation to time and world—investigations that I think have not yet been carried out in the literature to the extent they are needed. Instead of investigating the role time and generations play in social and normative relations, most methodologies in this area extend existing theories of justice, abstract from generational overlap or from historical time, or treat intergenerational relations as a special case. Even when there is an explicit recognition of the need for “revising morality” (Jamieson 2014, 169ff.), the ontological problems thus tend to be exacerbated, avoided, downplayed, or treated in a piecemeal fashion; a guiding assumption remains that a core or nonextensionist theory of justice would not, or not yet, have to treat generational relations.

With the help of phenomenological and feminist literature, I argue by contrast that justice becomes an issue for human beings to the extent we are generational beings. We are beings who are noncontingently subject to birth and death, and are linked through birth and death to previous and subsequent generations in social and moral ways. Thus, if justice, or moral normativity in general, arises with generational time, then justice for future people should be seen neither as a special case nor as a problem of extension. Intergenerational justice is thus implicated in intragenerational justice from the beginning, and its theoretical elaboration should address the nonlinear co-implication of past and future in the present. Further, generational time situates individuals in a historical lifeworld that is not merely contingent but ontologically constitutive of individuals and their relations. Because of this, lifeworlds, in their ecological and terrestrial embeddedness, should be understood as claiming individuals for their maintenance from the beginning, such that we understand world constitution as necessarily involved in ethics.

With this in mind, the question of justice for future people triggers two equally understandable reactions, both of which should be seen as foregrounding the relation between time and ethics. The first is to abstract from time as many do from space, as we would prefer (more or less) timeless criteria for what is just, and time should be seen as morally irrelevant. The second is to take our historical situatedness seriously, for it is through history and time that we become moral beings and are actually connected to future people. Here I will favor the second approach. For time both relates us (the living) to, and separates us from, future people. That is because between “us” and “them,” as the term “the unborn” indicates in part, lies the time of birth and death; we will die and they will be born, but born of us only if we also overlap with some of them so they can give birth to yet others after our death. We may then say that, in a time when theory has undone the primary focus on domestic justice so as to take note of global interconnectedness, it is now time to undo an unreflected priority granted to the living. Reflection on that priority should lead us to conceive of the living as born, giving birth (biologically and nonbiologically), and dying—and thus as intimately connected to the dead and the unborn.

I. Defining “Generation”

As we can perhaps already intimate here, the definition of “generation” we adopt is often crucial in construing sociality: it is a substantive definition. If, for example, we take a generation to only include all those presently living, as opposed to the dead and the unborn, then it may seem a generation is cut off, as if by an abyss, from other generations. On this purely temporal conception (definition 1), there would be only a single generation living at a given time (though of course geographically and politically it may be further divided). The abyss separating different generations—death in the case of previous generations and birth with respect to future people—could seem to divide generations in profound, perhaps even unbridgeable, ways. And on this basis it is only one more step to a conception of generational relations that are marked by the absence of overlap. As we will see, many theories of intergenerational justice (IGJ) interested in modeling the issue in a pure way take this idea of generations coming on the historical stage en bloc to be a legitimate assumption for theoretical purposes. By contrast, if we take generations in the familial sense (definition 2) of grandparents, parents, and children, then overlap of generations, their sharing of the time of the living, is crucial. Generational relations in this sense foreground birth, care during infancy and old age, passing away, bequests, and so on. But as some become parents and others do not, and each does so at different times, this familial and familiar sense makes it hard to see how a generation becomes unified beyond the immediate family.

For this reason, a third definition (definition 3) idealizes the second, familial one, and so gives a particular interpretation to what in macroeconomics is known as the “overlapping generations (OLG)” model (Blanchard and Fischer 1989; Barro and Sala-i-Martin 2004⁴). “Generation” then refers to the totality of all those born in a certain time period whose length is determined by the average time it takes for children to become parents and parents to become grandparents (see Birnbacher 1988, 23–24). This length may be twenty to thirty-five years; Wilhelm Dilthey, the great philosopher of life and history, took it to be thirty, and, for the sake of simplification, so will I in what follows (Dilthey 1990, 37). On this definition, “future people” refers to both nonoverlapping individuals (the “unborn” at that time) and overlapping generations (e.g., from the perspective of an age group roughly sixty years of age and up, children and grandchildren—whether or not individuals in that group have children themselves).

For reasons that will emerge gradually in the course of this chapter and the book as a whole, I largely favor this third definition. Overlap stresses some commonalities and reciprocities, but also asymmetries and the significant (and partly enigmatic) facts of birth and death; in addition I think it important to stress that a generation’s responsibilities to the more distant future are mediated, in some cases more than in others, by overlapping generations. As laid out in subsequent chapters, highlighting overlap promotes a conception of generational connections as “chains of concern” that I think are socio-ontologically more adequate and normatively more contentful. However, I think it is also important to stress the difference between the living and the nonliving (as the first definition does). In some circumstances, it may also make sense to see all those living, at least at a certain age of maturity, as collectively responsible to the unborn, but I think the third definition can account for this in a more layered way (e.g., G1, G2, and G3 at p3 are responsible to G4+n, but in such a way that G4 cannot be bypassed in relating to G5, thus differentiating the vast and abstract category “the unborn”).

It is further imperative to pay attention to the idealizations and abstractions involved not only in the first definition but also in the third definition, for instance, as concerns the starting point of a generation. For of course, at any one time there are individuals who die and new ones who are born. Because of this, decisions about when a “generation” is said to begin, and what justifies thinking it as a unified collective, are contestable and important issues at play in determining, for instance, who is responsible for whom. Overall, my argument—that we are generational beings and the intergenerational relations and the time of birth and death co-constitute who we are—has as a consequence that the division of questions of justice into intra-and intergenerational ones cannot be settled by definition alone, but is itself an eminently moral and political issue that must remain open to contextual specification and political contestation.

FIGURE 1.1. Illustration of idealized familial generations and their overlap. If each generation is taken to live for three time periods (3 x 30 years), there would be three overlapping generations at any one time. The stipulation of a first period and a first generation is of course not necessary, and indeed, problematic.

As for the question of when a generation begins, a fourth definition of generation (definition 4) in terms of shared cultural experiences and a fifth definition (definition 5) in reference to historical markers, such as large-scale crises, may come into play to determine such starting points. These two senses overlap and intermingle. In the Western world we speak of, for example, the “Lost Generation” (Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway’s designation of those who fought in World War I, typically born between 1880 and 1900); the “Baby Boomers” (those born following World War II, roughly from 1946 to 1964, a time that was marked by an increase in birth rates); “Generation X” (born after the baby boomers, so some time from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s / early 1980s); the “Millennials” (also called “Generation Y,” as it follows Generation X, with birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s / early 2000s). Notice, however, that the starting points given by these historical markers (World War I or II, etc.) are still not ideal enough to render definition 3 sufficiently rigorous, and also that the typical length of a cultural generation does not correspond to the length demanded by definition 3 (which defines that length with respect to average turnover from children to parents, which would only by coincidence overlap with the temporal distance marked by significant historical events).

While definitions 4 and 5 do overlap, it is also useful to separate them. Definition 4 stresses that generations share a culture, a world that was bequeathed to them by their previous generations. In this sense, Dilthey speaks of “those who experience the same leading influences at the time of their lives when they are most receptive together” (Dilthey 1990, 37). Anne O’Byrne comments: “[A] generation comes to be in the process by which it inherits a world” (O’Byrne 2010, 63). In this sense, a generation comprises those who, as a birth cohort, share a childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood during which formative years they are subject to similar schooling, culture, and historical experiences. The cohort then comes to assume leading roles in society, in economic, social, political, and intellectual contexts and institutions, at about the same time, in turn shaping society in formative ways for the next generation.

This fourth sense of generation is then not just “cultural” but also includes biological elements (a birth cohort that then gives birth to a new, the next, generation) and social-political life (taking over leading roles in society). If I stress the cultural aspect, it is because, in view of what is to come in this and subsequent chapters, it is helpful to understand relations between generations in terms of a third element in which they take place: a culture, an inheritance, a world or lifeworld, a language, institutions, material infrastructure, nature or earth, and so on. This “world” precedes the generations and their relations, even if it does not exist independently of them and their ongoing processes of transmission, which are also forms of renewal and recontextualization. In passing on an inheritance, there is a subterranean dimension that does not come to full awareness, and in this sense resists calculative tabulations: inheritance exceeds the generations it brings into relation.

I have stressed that extant designations for actually existing generations do not coincide with the time periods demanded by the third, idealized definition. Nonetheless, I believe that some historical markers—those connected to generational responsibilities—should play a significant role in defining a generation for the purposes of a theory of intergenerational justice. The primary reason is that we want to know who (which group) has what kind of responsibilities toward which future grouping, and while some responsibilities may be said to be incumbent upon every generation (infant and old age care, education, passing on of a heritage and material transfers, maintenance and upgrading of infrastructure and political institutions, etc.), others are related to specific “historical” tasks, such as combating the threat of fascism in World War II. Much of the current concern over future people has to do, at least in the first instance, not with widespread worries with respect to the general responsibilities all generations would have—though here too one may worry that fast-paced times lead to failures (see Stiegler 2010)—but with specific crises, such as global poverty, national (and intergenerational) debt, and the environmental crisis, which is sure to have very long impacts affecting many future generations. We would then introduce definition 5, according to which a generation is unified by a crisis that encumbers it with a crisis-related task (see Dilthey 1990).

If, for example, we agree that the connection between greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly worrisome levels of global warming became generally known in responsibility-generating ways around 1990 (see Singer 2002, 34; see also Page 2007; Caney 2010a), then all those old enough to address climate change responsibly (e.g., those who were of voting age at that time) belong to a generation that has intergenerational climate-related obligations. On the third definition, the addressee of these obligations comprises more than one generation, but among these there would also be meaningful distinctions. For example, if thirty years is the average time period demanded by definition 3, then those who are sixty and older (G1 at p3 in the table above, with p3 beginning around 1990) have intergenerational responsibilities to G2 and G3 as well as to subsequent generations, but part of their responsibilities to G4 and up (the “unborn” at that time, with whom G1 will not overlap) are mediated by G2 and G3. While one may thus plausibly argue that G1, G2, and G3 should reduce their emissions, prepare for adaptation, and pay compensation (especially to those more strongly affected but generally less causally responsible—largely, those in the Global South; see Gardiner 2013), I would argue that G1 should also seek to address its responsibility to G4+ (whom they may causally affect in significant ways despite the absence of overlap) by putting G2 and G3 in a better position to act responsibly toward G4+ (with whom G2 and G3 will partially overlap). These commonalities and distinctions should be captured by one’s definition of a generation. Definition 3, supplemented in the ways I have indicated, seems to do this best.

However, before I argue for such a differentiated chain-of-concern model and its attendant conceptions of intergenerational reciprocities and taking turns (in Chapters 3–5), I would like to take the prior but related step of arguing for the importance of generational overlap and for taking seriously the relation between sociality and what I will call “natal mortality”: the human condition that includes birth and death as crucial dimensions. Indeed, overlap is inseparable from natal mortality, and focusing on this connection foregrounds, as we will see in this chapter and the next, the relation between justice and time, what I call the “time of birth and death.” I will seek to do this by reviewing the special and ontological problems that have been identified in the extant literature on IGJ.

II. Special and “Ontological Problems”

In this section, I will review the growing literature on IGJ with respect to the reasons why relations with future people are taken to present general difficulties, in particular so-called ontological problems (Becker 1986, 232). It will be good to keep in mind that not all existing intuitions or IGJ theories are affected by each one of these problems. In addition, I do not suggest that these problems could not be solved by the theories discussed if suitably amended, though I do believe that some of these problems tend to be quite profound and that solutions are not easily had. Nor do I suggest that my approach, as briefly outlined in this chapter and elaborated in those to follow, satisfactorily addresses all of the challenges. Rather, here I merely wish to motivate an “ontological” approach to “ontological problems,” even if this approach, while reorienting our thinking about many of these issues in general ways (see section VI, below), will not offer solutions to all the problems, taken individually. If I then still include problems in the overview (in section II) that I will not solve or even come back to, it is because I believe that the specific motivation for the ontological approach stems precisely from the extent of the problems in their entirety (as well as from broader considerations, as indicated in the Introduction). Further, isolating a particular problem may recommend a non-ontological, normative solution, but at the cost of avoiding other problems or engendering new ones (some examples will be discussed below).

As indicated, then, my claim is not that these problems, to the extent they can be elaborated as counterarguments t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Ontological Problems and Methods in Intergenerational Justice
• 2. Levinas’s “Being-for-Beyond-My-Death”
• 3. Asymmetrical Reciprocity and the Gift in Mauss and Derrida
• 4. Double Turn-Taking among Generations and with Earth
• 5. Interment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index