The Structure of Intergenerational Cooperation Professor Joseph Heath Department of Philosophy University of Toronto The problem of man-made climate change has generated renewed interest in the issue of intergenerational justice, or more generally, the question of what we owe to future generations. This is primarily because the costs of carbon abatement are upfront, while the most significant benefits (which is to say, the most important costs averted) will begin to be felt only in about a century. Thus the central question we face is how much sacrifice we – all those living now – should be willing to make, in order to improve the quality of life of people, many of whom will be born sometime after we are dead. This question is one that philosophers have found particularly intriguing, not least because the two most important contemporary approaches to normative political theory, viz. utilitarianism and contractualism, appear to produce answers to this question that are completely preposterous. Since future people vastly outnumber those who are living in the present, and since it is possible to make productive investments now that will generate very long, if not infinite streams of future rewards, any simplistic application of the utilitarian calculus suggests that we should be investing pretty much everything we produce; we may not even be entitled to meet our own subsistence requirements. 1 This seems overly demanding. Yet if utilitarianism seems too demanding when applied in an intergenerational context, contractualism seems quite the opposite. Indeed, in some of its formulations contractualism seems to imply that we owe absolutely nothing to future generations. Often this is motivated by the thought that there is no possibility for mutually beneficial cooperation between generations, because reciprocity is impossible, since benefits can flow only forward in time. 2 Thus there is no place for a social contract to determine how the benefits and burdens of cooperation are to be assigned. Since the theory of justice just is the set of principles used to effect this assignment, the implication seems to be that intergenerational relations are not governed by principles of justice. It is this claim concerning the application of contractualist theories that I will be concerned to 1 See Tjalling C. Koopmans, “On the Concept of Optimal Economic Growth,” in The Econometric Approach to Development Planning, Pontif. Acad. Sc. Scripta Varia 28 (1965): 225-300. 2 For a sample, see Brian Barry, A Treatise on Social Justice,Vol. 1: Theories of Justice (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 189; Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 524; Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), p. 177; Edward Page, “Fairness on the Day after Tomorrow: Justice, Reciprocity and Global Climate Change,” Political Studies, 55 (2007): 225–42; Gustaf Arrhenius, “Mutual Advantage Contractarianism and Future Generations,” Theoria, 65 (1999): 25–35; Stephen Gardiner, “A Contract on Future Generations,” in Axel Gosseries and Lukas Meyer, eds. Intergenerational Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For critical survey, see Hugh McCormick, “Intergenerational Justice and the Non-reciprocity Problem,” Political Studies, 57 (2009): 451–458.