Literature Review

On July 30, 1993, the Supreme Court of the Philippines, granted standing to a group of children who had sued to uphold their environmental rights and those to future generations. The children, represented by the Philippine Ecological Network, a Manila environmental group, sought to stop the logging of the nation's dwindling old-growth rainforests. The children argued that continued deforestation would cause irreparable injury to their generation and succeeding ones, and would violate their constitutional right to a balanced a healthful ecology. The Court held that the children had standing to defend their generation's right to a sound envrionment and to perform their obligation to preserve that right for future generations. The case was noteworthy because it most likley was the first time that a nation's highest court has explicitly granted legal standing to representatives of future generations. The Children's Case reflects an emerging principle of international environmental law that present generations have a duty to pass on a sustainable environment to their successors. Vital to this principle of intergenerational equity are legal mechanisms to ensure the expression and consideration of the interests of future generations. This case comment will discuss how the reasoning and arguments in Oposa could be used to advocate the environmental rights of future generations in the United States. This paper will focus on the United States; with its long tradition of environmental citizen suits and innovative expansion of traditional common law rights, this nation likely would be more hospitable to the representation of future generations that other countries. If recognized by Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, standing for representatives of future generations could be used by environmental groups as a means to bring suits, aimed at preventing long-term damage, that otherwise would be blocked by the injury requirements of current standing doctrine. Part I of this case comment will discuss the facts and argments in the plaintiffs' case and the reasoning of the court. Part II will recount the growing international support for intergenerational equity found in international agreements, foreign constitutions and legislation, cultural traditions, and America law. Part III will note the generational objections raised to legal standing for representatives of future generations and sicuss teh hurdles erected by the U.S. Supreme Court's standing decisions. Finally, Part IV will explore possible mechanisms to promote the environmental interests of future generations in the United States.

The purpose of this note is to examine the notion of obligations to future generations, a notion that finds increasing use in discussions of social policies and programs, particularly as concerns population distribution and control and environment control. Thus, it may be claimed, the solution of problems in these areas is not merely a matter of enhancing our own good, improving our own conditions of life, but is also a matter of discharging an obligation to future generations. Before I turn to the question of the basis of such obligations the necessity of the plural is actually doubtful-there are three general points to be considered: (1) Who are the individuals in whose regard it is maintained that we have such obligations, to whom do we owe such obligations? (2) What, essentially, do obligations to future generations oblige us to do, what are they aimed at? and (3), To what class of obligation do such obligations belong, what kind of obligation are they? Needless to say, in examining a notion of this sort, which is used in everyday discussion and polemic, one must be mindful of the danger of taking it-or making it out-to be more precise than it is in reality.

Despite widespread agreement that we have moral responsibilities to future generations, many are reluctant to frame the issues in terms of justice and rights. There are indeed philosophical challenges here, particularly concerning nonoverlapping generations. They can, however, be met. For example, talk of justice and rights for future generations in connection with climate change is both appropriate and important, although it requires revising some common theoretical assumptions about the nature of justice and rights. We can, in fact, be bound by the rights of future people, despite the “non-identity problem,” and the force of these rights cannot be diluted by “discounting” future costs. Moreover, a rights-based approach provides an effective answer to political arguments against taking mandatory measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions when these are unpopular with a democratic populace.

This paper promotes the idea of Rights for Future Generations as one of the ethical principles on which politics, economics and justice in the 21st century should be based. It argues that environmental damage caused by current generations has already impaired the ability of future generations to meet their basic needs. As a result of this, it argues that the concept of Sustainable Development is now flawed and should be augmented by the concept of Restorative Development. This paper highlights areas where restoration can be effected and some of the mechanisms that will be required in economics, law and politics to support this restoration.

It is widely recognised that we hold certain moral obligations to future generations. Robert Elliot argues that we can base these obligations on the rights of future people. I accept his argument that future people are moral agents who possess rights. However, I argue that the main question for political and moral philosophers is whether it is possible to find the balance between the obligations to, and the rights of, contemporaries, and the obligations to, and the rights of, future people. By analysing the notions of ‘human rights’and ‘welfare rights’of future people, I argue that this question can be tackled only in terms of welfare rights. But the latter make sense only in the context of community of provision. This implies that we must first examine the ‘trans-generational’community that includes contemporaries and future generations. Thus a theory of justice between generations cannot be purely ‘rights-based’. However, by describing the ‘trans-generational community’I argue that it can serve as the moral grounds for our obligations to future generations.

The American Philosophical Association, in the February 1973 issue of its Bulletin (No. 14), :requested contributions on the topic: Can it be asserted that future generations have rights, for example, to pure air? The response raised two second-order questions: (a) why did the participants find so little explicit discussion of the problem to work upon? (b) why did they find so much interest in it now? The paradox in the conjunction of these two questions is not very difficult to resolve:the problem has only become real recently. The reasons for its late emergence, however, may well deserve stating.

Do appeals to rights and/or interests of the members of future generations provide an adequate basis for an environmental ethic? Assuming that rights and interests are, semantically, individualistic concepts, I present an argument following Derek Parfit which shows that a policy of depletion may harm no existing individuals, present or future. Although this argument has, initially, an air of paradox, I show that the argument has two intuitive analogues-the problem of generating a morally justified and environmentally sound population policy and the problem of temporal distance. These problems are shown both to resist solutions in individualistic terms and to embody difficulties similar to those raised by Parfit. Since utilitarianism and modem deontology are individualistic in nature, they cannot provide the basis for an adequate environmental ethic and they do not rule out policies such as that of depletion, which is clearly unacceptable environmentally. I dose with an exploratory but generally pessimistic assessment of the possibility that rights and interests can be reconstrued as nonindividualistic.

It has been argued by some that the present non-existence of future persons entails that whatever obligations we have towards them are not based on rights which they have or might come to have. This view is refuted. It is argued that the present non-existence of future persons is no impediment to the attribution of rights to them. It is also argued that, even if the present non-existence of future persons were an impediment to the attribution of rights to them, the rights they will have when they come into existence constitute a constraint on present actions. Both arguments build on a suggestion of Joel Feinberg's. Next, three arguments are considered which, while they do not highlight the non-existence issue, are related to it. The view that the causal dependence, of (some) future people on present policies, erodes or weakens the claim that rights considerations should constrain our present actions concerning them, is considered and rejected. The view that future people can only have rights to what is available at the time at which these people come into existence is considered and rejected. So too is the view that the attribution of rights to future people involves, in virtue of resource scarcity, an unacceptable arbitrariness.

In recent years, lawyers have begun to join ecologists in debating whether there are—or should be—obligations to protect the interests of future generations. This legal debate was preceded by a philosophical one, dating back to the early 1970s, on the emergence of a new or “ecological” ethic redefining the relationship between man and nature in such a way as to ensure the survival of the human species on earth. The background to the various ethical approaches has been the indisputable fact that humanity has accumulated a monstrous potential to destroy life on earth, and that it is using natural resources and the environment in a way that threatens the survival of future generations—at least, at a standard that we today consider worthy of human beings.

Many people believe that we have obligations with respect to future generations concerning the state of the environment that we pass on to them. Apart from the practical problem of people not really acting on such beliefs, there are also conceptual or philosophical issues that make these obligations problematic. The so-called non-identity problem is especially difficult: depending on which courses of action we adopt, different people will be born in the future, which means that even future people who due to our behavior will live under fairly poor circumstances might not have any ground for complaint. Had we not behaved as we did, they would not even have existed. It is argued here that, at least within a rights-theoretical approach, the non-identity problem can be solved by moving from considering individual rights to generational rights, rights which future generations hold qua generations.

In recognition of the intrinsic links between climate change and human rights, many have argued that human rights should play a leading role in guiding state responses to climate change. A group whose human rights will inevitably be affected by climate action (or inaction) today are the members of future generations. Yet, despite their particular vulnerability, future generations so far have gone largely unnoticed in human rights analyses. An adequate response to climate change requires that we recognize and address the human rights consequences for future generations, and consider the legal, practical and theoretical questions involved. This article attempts to answer these questions with a particular focus on the Paris Agreement. It argues that the recognition of state obligations towards future generations is compatible with human rights theory, and that these obligations must be balanced against the duties owed to current generations. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for how this balance could be pursued.