1 A Contract on Future Generations? 1 Stephen M. Gardiner Department of Philosophy and Program on Values in Society University of Washington DRAFT (smgard@u.washington.edu) Contract theories seek to justify (and sometimes to explain) moral and political ideals and principles through the notion of “mutually agreeable reciprocity or cooperation between equals”. 2 Let us call this ambition ‘the basic idea’ of contract theory. The purpose of this chapter is to explore a fundamental difficulty that faces the basic idea in the intergenerational setting. The difficulty concerns the understanding of cooperation standardly employed by contract theorists. I will begin by identifying three central challenges facing this understanding in the intergenerational context, and then consider a range of possible solutions. My main claims will be as follows. First, the three challenges constitute a deep and serious problem for contract theory. Second, the most central reason for this is that the intergenerational setting appears to constitute a different kind of collective action problem than that facing contract theory in the traditional, single-generation context. Third, the standard approach contract theorists have adopted to address this challenge - that of attempting to extend the normal single-generation model to the intergenerational context – has thus far proven inadequate. Fourth, this suggests, at the very least, that the standard approach needs to be rethought. But it may also imply that a new kind of contract theory is needed, one that specifically addresses the intergenerational collective action problem. If so, this would be of wider theoretical interest. For such a move appears to have significant ramifications for how contract theory is understood in the usual settings as well. Before we begin, let me emphasize two limitations of the present discussion. First, the chapter aims neither to bury contract theory, nor to save it. Instead, it presents an initial overview of one set of difficulties facing the theory in the intergenerational setting. The hope is that getting clearer on the nature of these difficulties serves as a useful preliminary to finding out whether they can be overcome. Second, the basic idea of contract theory is employed in a variety of ways, and for different purposes. For some contract theorists, the aim of the approach is to offer a fully-fledged account of morality and political philosophy all by itself. But more often the contract device is employed as way of fleshing out other, independent accounts of the foundations of ethics and politics. This raises a problem. For the current discussion aims to assess the prospects of the contract device as such as an approach to questions involving future generations. But, since most actual contract theorists are not “pure” contract theorists – they do not rely solely on the contract device - they have more resources at their disposal than those specific to their use of that device. Since assessing all the possibilities open to such “mixed” theories would require much more than one chapter, and may well be impossible, at least at our present stage of theoretical development, here we must be content with something more restricted. Hence, the current discussion will concern itself only with those aspects of 1 An early draft of this paper was written while I was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. I thank both the Center and the University of Washington for their support. For comments on various drafts, I am grateful to Sandy Askland, Richard Daggar, Nir Eyal, Dale Jamieson, John Meyer, Lukas Meyer, Adam Moore, James Nickel, Angela Smith, Bill Talbott, Michael White, two anonymous reviewers, and especially Axel Gosseries. 2 Darwall 2002, 1.