CLIMATE ETHICS AND INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE

The course aims to introduce the contemporary philosophical debate, both moral and political, on intergenerational justice, with a particular focus on climate justice. A first part of the course will be devoted to the issue of responsibility for historical injustice, particularly relevant to the problem of historical emissions and the ethical and metaphysical complexities involved in assigning compensatory duties for unequal past emissions. The main issues revolves around the intergenerational transfer of compensatory duties for actions committed by people who are no longer with us. The second part of the course will be devoted to responsibility towards future generations, which of course has direct application in climate mitigation and adaptation policies. The course will illustrate the main answers that have been provided in the literature to the question of why we should care about future generations and how the duties of justice towards contemporaries are reconciled with those towards people who do not yet exist. The course will examine how the main moral and political theories have answered (and/or can answer) these questions and what institutional solutions can implement intergenerational duties of justice. Moreover, in accordance with the participants, the course foresees the possibility to integrate the scientific path, by inserting a further module devoted to the applications of the same contents to the educational context, in the Italian and other European educational systems.