Enabling future access. Nations, generations, institutions and opportunity costs

Abstract

The following paper is a response to Axel Gosseries’s “Nations, Generations and Climate Justice.” The core argument in Gosseries’s sharp and challenging text states that (1) we can understand intergenerational justice as transit duties between countries; that (2) impartial global planners should realize these duties through an intergenerational global leximin principle; and (3) that the right implementation of this principle implies strictly equivalent intergenerational transfers. In this text I will address the evaluative perspective of the impartial global planner and its institutional interpretation; then I will briefly present an “opportunistic” reply to the vagueness objection to rectificatory justice; finally I briefly examine the development of the right of transit in the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and the limits to its intergenerational extension.