One of the claims Axel Gosseries makes in What is Intergenerational Justice? is that greenhouse gas emissions produced before 1990 are morally unimportant for present climate duties. This article challenges that claim by drawing on the idea that present people may have special duties to combat climate change in virtue of benefiting from past emissions. 

When a misfortune befalls us, it is natural for us to react: “Why me?” This is not just the question: “Why did this unfortunate event occur?” Nor are we simply wondering: “Why do such things happen?” The self-reference implies a comparison we generally manage to keep at the back of our minds: “Why did this happen to me, and not someone else?” Importantly, this is not an expression of idle curiosity. It is an expression of shock, dismay, and disbelief. I am interested in both the moral significance of this natural reaction and the moral significance of our disinclination to acknowledge it. If, as I believe, we are often morally permitted to promote our own interests over the interests of others, if it is our disposition to do so that underlies the “Why me?” reaction, and if we are nonetheless right to think there is something shameful about reacting this way, what does this suggest about the moral significance of our morally permissible self-privileging behavior? How close can we come to reconciling (i) our right to live lives that express very little concern for the fate of others with (ii) an ideal of human solidarity that manifests itself in our self-censuring attitude toward the “Why me?” thought and toward the very self-privileging actions whose moral permissibility we have least reason to challenge?

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Axel Gosseries’s What is Intergenerational Justice? (2023) is a splendid book.  It provides an introduction to the topic of intergenerational justice that is accessible and an excellent guide to someone unfamiliar with the issues.  At the same time it has much of interest to those who are well versed in these debates.  It has rich and illuminating discussions of, among other things, what principles of justice should govern how people treat future generations, environmental sustainability, climate change, and the implications of our impacts on future people for ideals of democratic legitimacy and normative theorizing about institutional design.   In this article I want to focus on Gosseries’s analysis of climate change.  His chapter on climate justice is rich and nuanced and covers a considerable amount of ground.  I shall focus on one issue in particular.  One key feature of climate change is that the problem has, in part, been caused by the actions of previous generations.  Human beings emitted very low quantities of greenhouse gases for centuries.  However, from the 19th century onwards emissions of greenhouse gases started to rise and increased dramatically throughout the 20th century and the first decades of this century.  One question that arises is: When we are considering what duties current generations have to mitigate climate change, what normative significance should we attach to the climate-endangering activities of people in the past?  Should those alive now pay for the ways in which past members of their country have harmed the climate system?  Many climate campaigners appeal to an idea of historical responsibility.  Are they right to do so?  In this article I shall analyse Gosseries’s discussion of these questions.

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This article defends platforms’ moral responsibility to moderate wrongful speech posted by users. Several duties together ground and shape this responsibility. First, platforms have duties to defend others from harm when they can do so at reasonable cost. Second, platforms have a moral duty to avoid complicity with users’ wrongfully harmful or dangerous speech. I will argue that one can be complicit in wrongs committed by others by supplying them with a space in which they will foreseeably commit them. For platforms, proactive content moderation is required to avoid such complicity. Further, platforms have an especially stringent complicity-based duty not to amplify users’ wrongful speech, thereby increasing its harm or danger. Finally, platforms have a duty not to enable new wrongs by amplifying otherwise innocuous speech that becomes wrongfully harmful only through amplification. I close by considering an objection—that content moderation by platforms constitutes an objectionable form of private censorship—explaining how it can be answered.

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The value of a person’s life is not reducible to the satisfaction of one’s desires or interests, including the interest in living longer.  A person who takes pleasure in beach vacations each summer may look forward to another stay at the shore next year, but this is not the kind of interest that gives her a reason to continue living.  Assuming she has lived a normal life, one beach vacation more or less will not affect the value of her life, even in the slightest degree. Similarly, we wouldn’t say of a person who has lived a full life that his life would have been more valuable if he hadn’t suffered that wretched toothache several decades ago. The value of a person’s life is not simply a function of the good and bad experiences it contains. More controversially, neither is it simply an aggregate of a person’s accomplishments. Discovering another great self-portrait by Rembrandt (who created nearly 100 of them, so far as we know) would not affect to any degree our assessment of his greatness as an artist.  Rather, the value of a human life is determined by what adds meaning to life, what – and not simply how much – she achieves, or how well she lived up to her ideals.  If this is right, then for most people who live to a reasonable age, living longer will not add value to their lives. The social value of longevity is a question of whether a society in which the median age is higher or human life over time is packaged in fewer individuals is better than a society in which the median age is lower and the same amount of life is packaged in more individuals living shorter lives.  I see no reason for thinking the former society is better and hence no justification for nations like the United States or Great Britain to spend health care resources on promoting longevity of its citizens by adding to the normal lifespan.

Most parents lie to their children. They do it for fun, as a method of behaviour control, and to protect children from what they consider to be dangerous truths. At the same time, most parents bring their children up with the message that honesty is a virtue and that lying is usually wrong. How should our practice and our preaching be reconciled? In this paper, I examine the ethics of parental lies. Most philosophers who have written on the ethics of deception have focused on deception of and by autonomous adults. I therefore begin by surveying this literature. Contemporary philosophers have given three types of reason to explain what makes lying wrong (when it is wrong): negative consequences, breaches of trust, and interference with autonomy. I briefly analyze what constitutes a breach of trust and identify four factors that affect how bad a breach is. I then explicate how lying can constitute a wrongful interference with autonomy. A long-running debate concerns whether lying is ethically different than other forms of deception. I argue—briefly—that we do not need to resolve this debate in order to evaluate parental deception. Armed with a framework for what makes lying to autonomous adults wrongful, I turn to the special case of parental lying. Since the parent-child relationship is typically very close, lying to one’s child is a relatively serious breach of trust. This is exacerbated in the case of serious lies that implicate the parent-child relationship or the child’s identity. On the other hand, at least for young children, concerns about autonomy are less significant than for autonomous adults. I close by applying my analysis, along with data on the consequences of parental deception, to different types of parental lie. I argue that lying to one’s child is more rarely justified than is commonly thought, and delineate the circumstances in which it can be justified.

Traditionally, the discounting debate has been dominated by those who advocate equality between generational interests and those who think future generations’ interests should be discounted at some positive rate. This paper argues for a novel view: future generations’ interests should be negatively discounted. First I defend the claim that we have greater reason to promote the well-being of those who are more morally deserving. Then I explain why we should expect future people to be more morally deserving than us. Throughout this argument, scepticism about moral desert looms large. Nevertheless, given the context of moral uncertainty under which the discounting decision must be made, a negative discount rate remains a live option even in the face of a moderate degree of scepticism about moral desert.