Janna Thompson’s Argument for Climate Obligations

To understand the escalating climate crisis from a critical bioethical perspective it is essential to view it as a relationship of injustice between generations. However, future generations are not an abstract cohort of yet-to-exist people. Instead, sequentially overlapping generations coexist at all times in generative intergenerational relationships. Polities are intergenerational communities that involve childbearing, parenting, caregiving, and shared responsibility for the wellbeing and flourishing of younger people, who, in turn, will care for their own descendants. Janna Thompson’s philosophical work on intergenerational justice helps us grasp the moral significance of redefining intergenerational relations in terms of moral obligations that extend both backward and forward in time.