Saving Rawls Two: Chains of Claims

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Continued from a previous post.

If neither pre-existing obligations towards third parties, nor the motivational assumption, not some sort of "inter-generational categorical imperative" can provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of savings, are we left with no obligations towards future generations?

We are, I think, left without any grounding for duties of justice to future persons, but we may still have duties of justice with regards to them. The distinction between the two has been made famous (or infamous, whatever is your fancy) by Kant's dismissal of direct moral duties towards animals in the Lectures on Ethics.

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If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, translated and edited by P. Heath and J.B. Schneewind (Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 240 quoted in Lori Gruen, "The Moral Status of Animals"

Similarly, we may have no obligations to persons who will not be alive within our lifetime, but have duties towards our contemporaries that necessarily take those future persons into account. As Robert figures out, this calls up a concept of transitive obligation. Thomas Pogge has argued for something like transitive obligations in his elucidation of Kant's theory of perpetual peace: "it is enough that [any two persons A and Z] be interdependent, i.e. that there be a chain of persons between them, such that all persons in the chain have intercourse with their respective neighbors." Thomas Pogge, "Kant's Theory of Justice", Kant-Studien 4 (79): 427 (1988)

But for transitive obligation to produce the relevant principles across time as well as across space we need to add certain "general facts" to the store of knowledge that the parties in the original position posess. Rawls wants those parties to come up with principles of justice knowing little more than that the circumstances of justice, especially the conditions of moderate scarcity and conflict of interests (TJ 119; see also §22 for the circumstances of justice). But these conditions alone don't give us principles across generations.

Fortunately (at least for those of us who want to find some such principles), these are not the only conditions that apply to all of human existence. I propose considering at least two other "general facts": The first is the fact of overlapping generational succession; at any given moment many persons born at different times coincide in a given society; they have different life expectancies; some of them will have coexisted with persons now dead, others will coexist with persons not yet born. The second is the fact of inevitable dependency; infants and the very old are inevitably dependent on other members of society (as are those who become disabled) and a measure of reciprocity would allow them to demand some support from the general society to which, in all fairness, they have, or will have, contributed. Persons in the original position would not be hard pressed to conclude that they will eventually come to rely on their younger contemporaries, who will in turn come to rely on those not yet born. And those not yet born will face the same predicament: they will be contemporaries with—and thus have direct obligations to—some of the younger persons now alive, who themselves will be contemporaries with others still further in the future. As persons in the original position don't know the age cohort to which they'll belong, they'll be sure to make reasonable provisions for the institutions of a just society to not only extend into the future, but be able to perpetuate itself under conditions at least as satisfactory as those currently in place.

Those situated further in the future could claim the same savings of those who immediately preceded them. But they could demand something further: that the previous generation had itself made a claim on those who, in turn, had come before, not only to secure its own (present) well being, but also the well being of those who would proximately follow them. If a generation threatened to disregard its obligations towards its remote descendants, it would disown not only those far in the future, but also the younger among its contemporaries, as these would suffer the proximate consequence of their negligence. As every generation can expect to occupy positions of dependency and production at different stages in its life history (and doesn't know which stage it presently occupies), each would choose principles acceptable to all citizens at every stage. (I believe that Norman Daniels recognized something like this in Am I my Parents' Keeper? An Essay on Justice between the Young and Old [Oxford University Press; 1988] Pp. 64-65.)

What this approach doesn't do is make intergenerational justice dependent on the decisions of previous generations. That, I believe, is a non-starter. In the first place, because it leads us into the Pleistocene, as Will complained; Rawls himself noted that "[p]revious generations have saved or they have not; there is nothing the parties can now do to affect that" (TJ 121). In the second, because it doesn't solve the problem of the inaplicability of the circumstances of justice, which makes the whole enterprise morally meaningful.

At the moment of choosing the principles of justice we look towards the future: what will future generations expect us to have taken into account by the time we come to rely on them. To some extent we look to the past disposition of our older contemporaries—did they take us into account when discussing public policy with older generations now departed?—but the actual rate of savings that they set is much less relevant to us than the reasonable expectations of the younger contemporaries of our younger contemporaries. That rate needn't be too high at all, depending on the economic institutions in place; but "saving" the institutions of a just society must involve, at least, not nuking half the world into oblivion.