In Justice Across Generations: Equality, Opportunity, and the Social Contract, Ryan Reed and Christopher R. Hallenbrook open with a question: ‘do we owe anything to future generations of people?’ The authors answer that ‘For most of us, the intuitive answer to that question is likely to be “yes”’ (p. 1). Some might disagree, asserting that the living owe nothing to the unborn or the dead. Thomas Jefferson, for example, famously declared ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it’. The dead, like the unborn, are not living, and so cannot commit or receive wrongs, and thus may not be stakeholders in questions of justice. In response, Reed and Hallenbrook build a framework for intergenerational justice, drawing on social contract theory. Their first chapter recounts the historical development of social contract theory. The authors review theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls. To Reed and Hallenbrook, Rawls is most useful, imposing a veil of ignorance that blinds contracting individuals to morally arbitrary considerations, including their age or generational cohort. In this ‘original position’, these contracting individuals will design fair or just institutions that favor individuals equally. The task for Reed and Hallenbrook is to describe Rawlsian institutions that secure fairness across generations. They admit this is a tall task. Reed and Hallenbrook next review common critiques of social contract theory. They summarize criticism by David Hume, C.B. Macpherson, Carole Pateman, and Charles Mills, concluding that ‘the social contract tradition fails to address questions of intergenerational justice’ (p. 8). In the second chapter, Reed and Hallenbrook detail three further obstacles to an intergenerational social contract. First is the non-identity problem. A social contract must benefit contracting parties. Unborn, future parties cannot contract for their own benefit, such that under an intergenerational contract, it is unclear ‘which persons would be helped or harmed by our current actions’ (p. 15). Further, an intergenerational contract can affect which future persons will come to exist. Second is the problem of unidirectional time. Social contracts are prospective agreements for mutual advantage or reciprocal benefit. But current persons cannot affect past persons, preventing mutually advantageous or reciprocal actions across time (pp. 16–17). Third is the uncertainty problem. Social contracts require an accurate prediction of mutual gain. But benefit is difficult to predict for future persons, especially those in the distant future, impeding contract (pp. 17–18). The authors answer these three objections by borrowing from Rawls. They adopt Rawls' proposition that in the hypothetical original position, persons are unaware of their social position, including their age (p. 25), and so would favor an institutional arrangement that allowed fair equality of opportunity regardless of age or generational cohort (pp. 26–31). To this point, Rawls' savings principle requires that current persons must save capital for future generations, and particularly for future disadvantaged persons, provided that some minimum capital is provided for current disadvantaged persons (p. 19). This suggests that Rawls would favor institutions that secure fairness in allocating capital across generations, supporting Reed and Hallenbrook's adoption of Rawls in building a framework for intergenerational justice. With a Rawlsian framework established, the authors return to the three obstacles to an intergenerational contract. First, in response to the non-identity problem, they admit that a contract may prevent the existence of particular persons, but not persons as a whole, or even particular groups or types of persons. A contract therefore can protect the interests of future groups of persons (pp. 34–35). A just Rawlsian institutional framework would favor groups equally, including generational groups. Second, to address the unidirectional time problem, Reed and Hallenbrook define a generation as a cohort of persons born within a 20-year span, such that multiple generations exist contemporaneously (pp. 21–25). Contemporaneous but different generations can develop a contract, which can be renewed for future generations, addressing the unidirectionality problem (pp. 31–33). Finally, Reed and Hallenbrook view the uncertainty problem as a greater hurdle (pp. 33–34), and so advocate epistemic humility and caution in contracting, lest current contracts fail to anticipate and address future problems. Subsequent chapters apply this Rawlsian approach to contemporary policy problems. The third chapter considers climate change. The authors document how current carbon emissions cause global temperature increase, sea level rise, and increased precipitation, drought, and wildfires. These issues will get worse, such that ‘younger and future generations will … pay the bill for the full costs. Further, the choices to incur these costs, whether correct or incorrect, were made by previous generations without those who will bear the costs having any participation in the choice-making. Here, then, is the intergenerational injustice of the climate crisis’ (p. 47). How to fix this? The authors use Rawls' savings principle and principle of fair equality of opportunity. The savings principle requires leaving adequate capital for future generations. As the authors note, leaving a depleted planet fails Rawls' savings requirement. But, as they add, the planet is not clearly a type of good or capital (p. 50). The authors thus turn to Rawls' requirement that institutions preserve fair opportunity. A person born to an ailing planet has fewer opportunities – some cities and regions will become unsafe or uninhabitable, curtailing choices for those born there. Further, climate change strains political institutions, spurring budget, migration, and public health crises. The duty to rectify this falls on the living, particularly on those who disproportionately cause carbon emissions from fossil fuel use. The authors briefly explain emissions mitigation strategies (pp. 57–61), including changes to renewable energy, reforestation, and agriculture, that can secure intergenerational climate justice. In the fourth chapter, the authors consider threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI). AI can decrease employment, manipulate political media, and, the authors suggest, may obviate human creative work entirely. As AI develops, these problems may fall harder on the younger and on future generations. The authors propose remedying unemployment through universal basic income and addressing misinformation through transnational regulation, both admittedly difficult. They stop short of explaining how to prevent AI from eclipsing human creative work, a task perhaps beyond the scope of their project (pp. 76–85). The fifth chapter addresses education. Adults fund and direct youth education. This imbalance in agency between adults and the youth poses problems for fairness. Reed and Hallenbrook offer several proposals to ensure that adults treat young students justly. First, they address primary and secondary schooling, proposing keeping funding level over time to ensure adequate facilities and curricula (pp. 93–97). Similarly, in higher education, fairness requires stable funding, particularly in deindustrializing places with a declining population, and also requires low-priced, accessible tuition (pp. 98–108). In the sixth chapter, Reed and Hallenbrook answer concerns around public debt. By incurring public debt, current persons shift the burden of repayment to future persons, unfairly limiting their opportunities. What level of debt is fair? The authors disagree with fiscal hawks who warn against incurring any public debt, which stymie salutary growth. Reed and Hallenbrook also warn against deficit spending, which can overburden future generations with interest repayments (pp. 117–27). They therefore take a middle path, allowing debt only to fund infrastructure and public works with long-term benefits (pp. 132–6). The seventh chapter addresses rectifying intergenerational injustices. The authors advocate for rectification for the injustice of Black slavery in the United States. One argument for rectification calls for reparations, and, as proposed by Bernard Boxill in ‘A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations’ (Journal of Ethics, 2003), asserts that the descendants of Black American slaves face contemporary social and economic disabilities that can be righted by material reparations from white Americans. The authors reply that some white Americans were not responsible for slavery or for contemporary racial injustice, and so cannot be forced to make reparations (pp. 145–52). Instead, to secure Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity, the authors propose public commemoration and acknowledgement, equal political and voting rights, and redressing unequal housing and healthcare access (pp. 156–63). Like many Rawlsian solutions, working within a liberal legal order, this one is narrow in scope. The book does many things well. The authors offer a novel, clear account of how Rawls can help us address pressing long-term social issues. They reason carefully and remain faithful to Rawls' logic. I am curious about two of the authors' contentions. First, Reed and Hallenbrook describe an ‘inability of existing social contract theories to provide a thorough accounting of justice between generations’ (p. 8). I think they sell these theories short. As the authors note, Rawls gestures in this direction. Locke is even more promising in addressing intergenerational justice. Reed and Hallenbrook suggest this when addressing Locke's limits on accumulation of private property in The Second Treatise. In particular, the authors highlight ‘John Locke's enough-and-as-good proviso as a proto-principle of intergenerational justice’ (p. 170). This proviso prevents individuals from acquiring so much capital as to prevent others from providing for themselves. Such a deprivation would violate Locke's stipulation that God created the earth for man in common. Similarly, Locke's spoilage principle, preventing individuals from acquiring so much capital as would go to waste unused, suggests an eye toward saving capital for others, including future generations. Locke's theory of the commons could have been productively deployed to answer questions on climate justice. Locke's work on transgression, reparation, paternal power, and conquest offers an even more promising avenue for building a framework for intergenerational justice, one that serves as a useful foil to the authors' Rawlsian approach. Locke is especially well positioned to address questions of intergenerational justice around reparations. Specifically, in The Second Treatise, Locke notes that individuals are all equally the workmanship of God, such that in the state of nature, no individual has the right to harm the body or private property or to restrain the liberty of another, a provision of natural law (Chapter 2, Sections 4–6). But as Locke notes, the ‘quarrelsome and contentious’ fail to use reason, instead transgressing natural law by harming the life, liberty, and property of others. Victims of such transgression are entitled under natural law to preserve themselves by restraining the transgressor and seeking reparations from the transgressor in proportion to the transgression. This reparation can extend to despotical or absolute power over the life and property of a transgressor who threatens the victim's life (Second Treatise, Chapter 2, Sections 7–12). Locke expands this into an intergenerational framework when discussing paternal power and conquest. Locke notes that despotical power does not extend to the offspring of the transgressor – one cannot punish or take the life of the offspring for the transgressions of their parent. But one can seek reparation from the estate of a transgressor, if that estate includes property taken through transgression, so long as the reparation does not take so much as to threaten the survival of the offspring (Second Treatise, Chapter 16, Sections 181–5). A Lockean social contract framework for intergenerational justice, emphasizing fairness in punishment, differs from a Rawlsian framework that emphasizes fair institutional design. The Lockean framework is expressly built to redress prior, violent wrongs, including deprivation of liberty through enslavement (Second Treatise, Chapter 4, Sections 21–24). As such, Locke's Second Treatise has been a guide for those trying to find a normative grounding for reparations for Black Americans. Locke, in attaching a duty to reparations to any inherited property, and a right to reparations to the descendants of victims, builds a framework that answers the thorny questions of intergenerational justice that Reed and Hallenbrook outline. Reed and Hallenbrook even use Bernard Boxill and Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent work on Lockean intergenerational reparations in building their own theory (pp. 146–9, 160). For reparations and redressing past violent wrongs, Locke might be a more natural starting point than Rawls. This digression on Lockean reparations demonstrates that some social contract thinkers better address certain types of intergenerational wrongs. I wonder what an alternative approach, using particular thinkers to address particular problems of intergenerational justice, might have looked like. As the authors note, in addressing the problem of individual defection from the contract, ‘one direction for future research could fully consider an answer to this quandary, or propose an entirely novel contractarian intergenerational justice alternative, perhaps based on Hobbes’ work’ (p. 172). Given Hallenbrook is an accomplished Hobbes scholar, I think the authors would be well positioned for such a project. Other concerns are minor. Reed and Hallenbrook, for example, note in passing that AI can break guardrails against harming humans (p. 81) – I would have liked them to expand this insight. Given AI companies are taking an interest in ethics and justice questions, Reed and Hallenbrook's contribution would be a welcome one. I also wonder whether generations are themselves social contrivances, as age cohorts tend to shade into each other, and I wonder how contractors in Rawls' original position might account for or come to have knowledge of such flexible, post-facto social constructs. But these are small objections. The book deserves much praise. Aware of Hume's critique that social contract theory is often abstract, perhaps abstract to the point of irrelevance, Reed and Hallenbrook keep their institutional design rooted in existing public policy, offering plausible solutions to tough political problems. Reed and Hallenbrook are often admirably restrained and simple in their policy proposals, exhibiting epistemic humility, avoiding the sort of complex or overwrought proposals that would be more likely to violate the yet unknown preferences of those not yet born. The beginning theoretical chapters are also excellent. Reed and Hallenbrook show a firm command of Rawls. They make a compelling case that Rawls can address problems of intergenerational justice, and in doing so, help answer longstanding questions – the non-identity, unidirectional time, and uncertainty problems – that have stymied theorists of intergenerational justice. Finally, the book was a pleasure to read. Reed and Hallenbrook reveal in the acknowledgements that they are old classmates, and the seamlessness of their prose demonstrates as much. The two write well together and have produced a remarkable book. Such a book would be useful to those teaching social contract theory to undergraduate or graduate students, or to researchers concerned with justice across time. In short, the authors rightly note that social contract theory is ripe for further reinterpretation around questions of intergenerational justice (p. 172). Their book uses Rawls to address longstanding conceptual obstacles to forming a framework for justice across generations. The authors then use this Rawlsian framework to tackle pressing contemporary problems, including climate change, AI, education, public debt, and racial reparations. The convincingly demonstrate that social contract theory can answer questions of intergenerational justice.
Robinson Woodward‐Burns (Fri,) studied this question.