Present Risks, Future Lives: Social Freedom and Environmental Sustainability Policies

One topic of growing interest in the debate on intergenerational justice is the duty to respect the freedom of future generations. One consideration in favor of such a duty is that the decisions of present generations will affect the range of decisions that will be available to future people. As a consequence, future generations' freedom to direct their lives may be importantly restricted such that present generations can be seen as taking future people's lives into their hands and disempowering them. This article defends the idea that present generations have an obligation to sustain a certain threshold of freedom for members of present and future generations alike. It argues that we should regard sustainability policies as a way to redistribute freedom across members of different generations. It starts by explaining the centrality of social freedom to the way we conceive of moral persons, then explains how freedom can be understood as an object of redistribution. It then argues that by imposing some risks-such as that of resource depletion or destruction of the ecosystem-on future generations, present generations push future generations' freedom below an acceptable threshold. The paper concludes with examples of how this focus on freedom can offer guidance in selecting and justifying sustainability policies-for example, measures for conserving biodiverse environments-even when it is not clear how they will directly contribute to the well-being of future persons.