142 World politics and the future of politics
to drive today’s decision-makers to give up the present arrangements with global
threats (the nuclear deterrence regime, the regime of voluntary emissions cuts) for
a truly new governance of those threats. Cost-benefit analysis is, for many reasons, a
poor oversimplification of these complex existential questions, but is still prevailing
in the mentality of politicians: applied by people led by (enlightened) self-interest it
would never lead – and it has in fact not led – to costly decisions in favour of a dif-
ferent nuclear and climate governance. Let us see why.
Change is costly in more than one regard. Leaving
the deterrence regime to an
authority capable to oversee disarmament and to keep residual nukes locked up
may be regarded as a sacrifice of one’s own security for an uncertain new regime.
Agreeing on mandatory and enforced emissions reduction, as it may become neces-
sary in the likely case that voluntary reductions fail to slow down the warming of
the atmosphere, means not only losing one point of GDP per year, but restructur-
ing technology and economy in a low-carbon key. Taking upon ourselves these and
other costs is justifiable not out of any version of self-interest, but only if we put the
interest of the
generations of the far future in the lead, since
they would be severely or
tragically damaged if we do not perform a radical change. But why should we do
so? Not out of supererogatory generosity extended to dwellers of future centuries,
but because we the contemporaries (as well as our forefathers since 1850 in the
case of global warming) have, by our very own actions and omissions, prejudiced
the life conditions of those generations in a measure we would by no means accept
for us or our grandchildren, and because we are informed about this causal link.
Between us (or any generation behaving like ours has done so far) and posterity a
relationship like that between plaintiff and defendant in tort law can be assumed to
exist, with the obvious difference that the plaintiff does not yet exist and his or her
interest has to be protected by ourselves as stewards of global commons. Whether
or not we are going to take the step from business-as-usual to the representation of
future generations damaged by our behaviour is a moral
and philosophical ques-
tion we have to decide ourselves; there is no superior judge sentencing us to bear
responsibility for the damages we have possibly inflicted upon the global commons
that will be inhabited by future generations.
Leaving all similarity with legal procedures aside, the reasons for taking that step
require reconnecting politics (an eventual new course addressing global challenges)
with philosophy and morality (which motivations for including future generations
among those whose interests politics is bound to protect?). Politics has, at its best,
come to regard the interests and rights of all present dwellers of the planet as worth
being protected (
space universalism). The step to be taken would recognise the equal
dignity of future dwellers:
time universalism. To do so, two
difficulties are to be hur-
dled: on the
cognitive level, it is difficult to consider persons of the future as similar
and close to us, therefore as possible addressees of either our obligation or empathy.
This is a cultural and psychological question that no persuasion strategy can target;
only good novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road (2006) and good movies
such as Stanley Kramer’s
On the Beach (1959) can stimulate our moral imagination
in that direction.
The globalised world
143
On the
normative level we can choose among various options, which lamentably
I cannot discuss here to a full extent because they involve a complex reasoning in
moral philosophy. Given that the motivation for taking action should be accessible to
informed citizens all around the globe, a first requirement is to avoid ‘thick’ theories
that involve notions and mental procedures open only to professional
elites within a
single cultural realm. A second requirement favours options as transcultural as pos-
sible. This makes philosophical heavyweights from the West, such as the theory of
justice, hardly eligible, even regardless of this theory’s own difficulties with the prob-
lem of future generations.
11
In the choosing of a foundation of our care for future
generations, the options must remain open according to one’s own cultural and
philosophical orientation, and all claims to possess a trump card in this competition
are not productive. It is in this spirit that I am now giving a brief account of my own
choice, which moves from the fact of the transgenerational
chain of parents who at
every turn of the age have generated and raised children, always trying to protect and
improve the conditions for their children to grow up in. Except in cases of genocide
and enslavement, each generation has acknowledged to the following ones the right
to protect and improve those conditions, while the assumption that the chain can be
continued over time is a hidden presupposition of all cultures – a very few nihilistic
thinkers excluded. Now, doing nothing in order to prevent global commons from
being spoiled either by nuclear explosions or catastrophic climate change means
accepting that the chain can be broken up and future generations left on their own
in a life-unfriendly environment causally dependent on our acts and omissions. But
why should we not accept this outcome? For two reasons.
If
we accept it, we would infringe the most elementary and universal obligation:
‘what you hate, do not do to anyone’ (Tobit 4:15). I have quoted this formulation
of the Golden Rule from the Old Testament, but it can be found also in the Gos-
pels as well as in Confucianism and in ancient India; apart from religions, Kant’s
categorical imperative can in rough terms be seen as a secularised reformulation of
it. Further elaborations on the reasons for preserving the transgenerational chain,
which cannot be unfolded here, would include the notions of responsibility, vulner-
ability, trust.
The second reason is that not standing up to our responsibility to
the genera-
tions of the (far) future risks making our own life poor of meaning, which is an
impalpable but essential resource, since if men, women and civilisations were not
able to give their life a meaning, this would much more frequently end up in
self-destruction or aggressiveness and despair. Now, not only raising children, but
counting on the continuation of human reproduction as cultural, not merely bio-
logical perspective is a condition that helps most persons make sense of their lives.
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