Luca Hemmerich (Goethe University Frankfurt), "Intergenerational Domination"
The Journal of Ethics, online first
Imagine two groups of people living side by side. On the one hand, we have the Wastelands, in which a large number of human beings inhabit an environment of pollution, mass extinction, and destroyed ecosystems, ravaged by diseases, pandemics and natural disasters. On the other hand, we see a small minority living in the Citadel, enjoying relatively privileged conditions at the expense of the people living in the Wastelands. Imagine, furthermore, that the powerful members of the Citadel have the capacity to control the living conditions in the Wastelands to a large extent, actively keeping its population in their deprived situation.
On the face of it, this looks not only like a relationship of inequality or injustice, but also like one of domination. My paper argues that we, or at least those of us who wield significant economic and political power, stand in a fundamentally analogous relation to future generations. That is, not only do members of the current generation harm future generations or treat them unjustly, but we also dominate them. The intergenerational case, I argue, exhibits the same features that we find in typical instances of domination.
What are those features? First of all, there is a large power asymmetry between members of the current generation and members of future generations. We can affect their lives, but they cannot affect ours. Some world leaders, for instance, have the power to make the planet uninhabitable for generations to come by launching nuclear weapons and causing a catastrophic nuclear winter. Future people, by contrast, have no such capacity to destroy our living conditions. The same goes for global warming: Powerful members of the current generation shape the climate in which future generations will live on a planetary scale, while future people have no such power over us.
A power asymmetry alone, however, does not necessarily amount to domination. The leader of an ideally democratic government, for instance, will have more power than ordinary citizens, but she will not dominate them. According to a leading theory of domination – the neo-republican view developed by philosophers like Philip Pettit –, this is because her decisions are externally constrained by rules and procedures that track the interests of citizens. Power only grows into domination if it is unchecked by the interests of those who are subject to that power. Democratic procedures and the rule of law, the thought goes, effectively constrain the decisions of the democratic leader and thereby secure non-domination.
Future people, however, cannot vote in the present. Nor are there any other mechanisms in current political and economic institutions that ensure that future people’s interests are even heard, let alone adhered to. Taken together with the power asymmetry between present and future people, this means that both criteria that (according to neo-republicans) constitute domination are met in the intergenerational case.
Several objections can be mounted to this case for intergenerational domination. One might wonder, taking the perspective of dominated agents in the future, how it could be at all possible to be dominated by dead people. Or, relatedly, one might ask whether it is really plausible to say that we ourselves are dominated by, say, Cold War leaders engaging in nuclear brinksmanship. Conversely, one might argue that intergenerational domination is inevitable and therefore practically irrelevant for our decisions.
I respond to these and other objections in the article. Here, I want to focus instead on the practical implications of intergenerational domination. Why should we care about it? What does it add to existing accounts of intergenerational relations that focus on harm or injustice?
First, unlike harm or injustice, domination is a possibilist concept. This means that it focuses on what powerful agents can do, not just what they actually do. On a domination framework, the mere fact that, say, a large fossil-fuel company has the structural capacity to make decisions that shape the living conditions of future people enormously without taking their interests into account is problematic. This would hold even if this power were never used and future people were never harmed.
Second, a domination framework recommends particular courses of action that might be neglected by other accounts of intergenerational relations. On the one hand, we may be able to decrease – though not entirely eliminate – the power asymmetry between generations by taking away some of the most wide-ranging powers of members of the present generation. One candidate for this type of intervention might be to reduce the nuclear stockpile below the threshold sufficient to trigger a nuclear winter, taking away the capacity of current leaders to cause planetary-scale destruction. On the other hand, we can introduce political and economic institutions like constitutional provisions or dedicated citizens’ assemblies that represent the interests of future generations and effectively constrain the power of members of the current generation over future people. A domination framework therefore pushes us to change not just our substantive policies affecting future generations, but rather our entire institutional arrangement.
Third, a domination framework potentially enables us to see how different power structures overlap. This is because the power to affect future generations is asymmetrically distributed within a single generation. Consider, again, the example of climate change. A multinational fossil-fuel corporation has overwhelmingly more structural power than a random individual in the Global South to contribute to the acceleration or mitigation of global warming. This is because intergenerational domination is intertwined with other political, economic, and international structures of domination. The concept of intergenerational domination can contribute to an analysis of this entanglement of these intra- and intergenerational structures of domination.
In our current political and economic systems, future people are structurally voiceless. As long as this is the case, they are at the mercy of the decisions of members of the present generation. In this respect, intergenerational relations are fundamentally analogous to – and, at the same time, overlap with – structures of domination based on class, race, gender, and other dimensions. Just as we should aim to dismantle these structures of domination over human beings alive today, we should also strive to liberate future generations from domination.