Literature Review

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.

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria has been inundated with oil pollution since the beginning of oil exploitation in the 1960s. The pollution has led to environmental degradation, which has adversely affected the lives of the inhabitants and ruined the local economy of the region. This Article discusses the condition of the Niger Delta environment and its inhabitants from the perspective of intergenerational rights, equity, and justice. It analyzes the role of domestic and foreign legal norms—both statutory and case law—in the quest to balance economic development with environmental sustainability, equity, and justice in Nigeria’s petroleum sector. This Article argues that while Nigeria has enacted much legislation to protect the Niger Delta environment and its inhabitants from the impact of petroleum exploitation, the legislation remained largely unenforced until the recent decisions of courts at the domestic, foreign, and subregional levels that moved to enforce the laws. It concludes that these judicial decisions and more recent legislation have unlocked new ways of enforcing intergenerational rights and ensuring environmental justice and equity in the Niger Delta.

Due to the increasing rate of human’s economic activity and rapid population growth, twenty first century has seen an unprecedented environmental change. These changes have an unprecedented impact on climate, life-sustaining systems on the earth. Future generations are exposed to great harm by the way in which humans exploit environmental resources of the earth. There is a call among environmental ethicists to review human ethical relationship with the environment as to attain sustainable development for the now and the future generations. Hence, the essence of this paper is to discuss the anthropoholistic environmental ethics, sustainable development and the future Generations. This paper argues that humans need to strive for a new and more respectful relationship with the natural environment in other to attain sustainable development. Also, human obligations towards sustainable development for the future must find a firm basis in social ethics: those obligations have to do with our conception of a just society. Keywords: Environnemental Ethics, Environnent, S