Conceptualizing Politics

a change and the counterforces and counterarguments that may oppose it. Every 
change, even the exit from a no-longer manageable situation, entails material costs 
and mental efforts that not everybody is ready to pay, in particular not the social 
groups entrenched in the pre-existing power structure. There must be good argu-
ments for convincing the people affected by change to accept and proactively pur-
sue and govern it. One could otherwise determine what would be just or ethical to 
do with regards to certain values and relying on a view of human beings as subject 
to Reason, call it ‘ideal theory’, while leaving to practitioners (‘non-ideal theory’) 
to come to terms with non-compliance. This is not the method followed in this 
book, as Chapter 10 will make more clear.
* * *
The usual motivation for political action is the self-interest of a nation, a social class, a 
generation; in the best case the self-interest is ‘enlightened’, detached from the imme-
diate preferences of the living generation and taking into account its future and the 
future of its children and its children’s children. Both shortsighted and enlightened 
self-interests are indeed among the main motivators of political behaviour, either in 
opposition or in a mix. But not even the most enlightened self-interest would suffice 

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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.

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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.