Combining Intergenerational and International Justice

Abstract

The exigencies of intergenerational and of international justice seem to conflict. This paper discusses this problem and develops a solution to it. After criticising several alternative justifications from the literature, a fully universalistic (i.e. universalistic in the temporal as well as spatial dimension) prioritarian welfare-ethic is developed and justified on the basis of our sympathy: first a criterion of moral value is proposed, followed by a conception of moral duties, which relies on socially binding norms and requires to strive for moral efficiency (most moral value for a given effort). Finally, these ideas are applied to determining priorities between several big social agendas. It turns out that, in practice, dimensional conflicts are less prevalent than initially thought.