Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics

C. Groves

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349347612, 9780230358843
• eBook ISBN: 9781137317551
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Our capacity to reshape the future has never been more powerful. Yet our ability to foresee the consequences of what we do has not kept pace. Is the idea that we have responsibilities to future generations therefore meaningful? This book argues that it is, with the aid of a unique reading of the care ethics tradition.

Part I

1

Introduction: Responsibility and Reflexive Uncertainty

Overview

When entering on a discussion of obligations, three questions tend to be asked: to whom are we obliged, what do we owe them, and how do we discharge these obligations? When it comes to future generations, moral and political philosophy has often found itself in a quandary, and indeed has encountered problems in answering all three of these questions. Do we have any obligations to future people at all, to all generations, or to some subset (such as those nearest to us, the next three generations, or thereof)? If we do owe them something, is it merely to avoid harming them? Or do we have an obligation to pass something on to them (a stock of natural and/or technological resources, a ‘better world’)? Finally, do we need to constrain ourselves (through legal or constitutional measures) to ‘put something aside’ for the future, appoint ‘guardians’ who will speak up for future people, or simply trust that posterity will, thanks to technological innovation and economic growth, simply be better off than we are, just as we generally consider ourselves to be better off than our ancestors? If we can settle these questions, there is still another which follows close behind: why should we care anyway about the answers, as whatever future generations enjoy or suffer, they will enjoy or suffer it after we are dead’

It may be the case that many people intuitively believe we do have such obligations. Nonetheless, moral philosophers have often found it difficult to answer coherently these questions – whether obligations exist; if they do, what they might be; and once we accept they are real, how and why we should honour them. One of the reasons moral philosophy encounters difficulties here is because of another problem, obscured behind the three we have mentioned. To understand our obligations to others, it is necessary first to understand the nature of our relationship with them. To reach such an understanding requires both that we know relevant features of the objective situation that we share with these others, whoever they are, and that we also understand key features of our subjective constitution (our interests, capacities, etc.) and to what extent they enable us to understand something about who these others might turn out to be. To what extent, that is, do we share with them a world and a condition of being?

In this book, my argument turns on the proposition that how moral philosophers have typically treated our obligations to future generations suffers from a failure to get behind the first set of questions in order to consider this deeper problem. Further, I will suggest that this stems from a body of assumptions that have their origin in a social imaginary (beliefs and practices that philosophers share with non-philosophers) which reflects historically specific forms of political rationality. These assumptions encourage fundamental misunderstandings both of the objective situation that creates a relationship between present and future generations, and also of our subjective constitution and how our characteristic ways of experiencing the world hold implicated within them an implicit relationship with as-yet-non-existent future generations.

In particular, these assumptions encourage misunderstandings of the uncertainties that, in contemporary technological societies, shape our sense of both our present and the future (near and distant). These misunderstandings appear somewhat ironic, given that, as Carl Mitcham and Piet Strydom have separately noted, it is the emergence of thoroughly technological societies – in which advanced technologies, from synthetic chemicals to information and communication technologies increasingly become necessary to everyday life – that has brought the idea of future-oriented responsibility to the foreground of ethical debates in a way that was not the case in premodern societies (Mitcham 1994, p. 107; Strydom 1999). Moreover, these assumptions encourage us to adopt a narrow view of what human beings can find valuable, and also of how what we value shapes our ability to make sense of the future and render endurable the uncertainties that we face (Sayer 2011). In particular, they tend to define what is ethically and morally significant about people, whether they are alive now or are yet to be conceived and born, as their acquisitive individuality and their need to consume a range of different goods. Consequently, they encourage us to understand how humans realize value as a largely passive process, ignoring along the way the importance of activities and, in particular, active and meaningful relationships, to human lives that go well and flourish.

As a result of these assumptions about our subjective constitution, questions about obligations tend to turn around issues of how goods – and bads, for as the sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) has emphasized, the consequences of our efforts to provide goods sometimes turn out to be unexpectedly harmful – should be distributed between generations, and what we can do in the present to ensure that this is done fairly or justly. In this way, the relationship between generations is often configured, in the course of a developing moral argument, as shaped by an inevitable conflict over distributive schemes.

When turning their attention to future generations, philosophers have often been acutely aware that they face unfamiliar issues and complexities. The temptation has been to assume that responsibilities to future people should be treated as a special case of better understood responsibilities (Gardiner 2011). Brian Barry has, for example, consistently argued that working from the familiar to the unfamiliar, making ‘adjustments along the way’ when encountering conceptual difficulties (1997, pp. 43–4) is both the most practical strategy and a way of producing results that will be ‘stronger’ for the ‘rather strange case of future generations’ if they can be shown to be ‘plausible in more familiar cases’ (1983, p. 18). However, this causes difficulties. The result tends to be that intergenerational relationships start to resemble those within an expanded liberal individualist community, that is, relationships between what have been described as ‘mutually indifferent’ contemporaries (Geras 1999), each concerned to maximize his or her own benefits, while reciprocally acknowledging the right of others to pursue their own vision of the good.

Beginning with ‘familiar cases’ as a template for understanding the unfamiliar may well be problematic, even if one proceeds carefully, as it encourages a kind of preselection of what should be treated as salient, training one’s ‘eye’ to spot certain features and ignore others. This kind of approach is defended as the basis of conceptual analytical approaches to moral and political philosophy (McDermott 2008). Yet, from critical theory to feminist ethics to postcolonial theory, a continual theme in other intellectual traditions for over a century now has been suspicion towards the claimed self-sufficiency of analytical approaches to moral and political philosophy. When we examine a moral theory, such approaches enjoin us to ‘ask what actual community of moral responsibility does this representation of moral thinking purport to represent? Who does it actually represent?’ (Walker 1989, p. 24). Moral theory draws on ethical life in G.W.F. Hegel’s sense of Sittlichkeit, that is, shared forms of life that centre on particular ideas of how the world should be and on concrete social relationships. It can also therefore reflect the inequalities of power that run through such forms of life. Without excavating these dimensions, the unquestioned historical presuppositions of moral theories, we are likely to begin in the wrong place, by assuming things about the ethical, political and moral sphere that should in fact be questioned. This is particularly true where what is at issue is the ethical considerability of others who are oppressed and dominated by existing liberal individualist social relations – and here, there is a case for suggesting that the power of technological societies to transform the future for the benefit of the present represents such a case of domination, in which the preferences of individuals now count more than the needs of future people (Jonas 1984).

In relation to phenomena such as anthropogenic global warming (AGW), emerging technologies, and resource depletion, the threat of the irresponsible shifting of burdens onto future generations to the benefit of the present, together with the wider moral complexities of these issues, have prompted some thinkers to suggest that ‘new values’ are needed to cope with such novel problems (Jamieson 1992). Such shifts are not easy to accomplish, and may moreover represent an instance of the ‘ethicist’s fallacy’, the belief that enunciating new values, rather than changing institutions and practices, is enough to effect change in ethical and political life. I argue in this book that radical surgery approaching something like a ‘transvaluation of all values’ is not, in fact, called for. Instead, I follow Terence Ball in arguing that a philosophically adequate account of responsibilities to future generations but also moral and political change depend on finding ways to

alter the dominant discourses, and particularly that of liberal individualism, from within. What is needed, then, is (in an older philosophical idiom) an immanent critique. (Ball 2001, 100)

I carry out an immanent critique of this kind¹ in two stages, corresponding to the two parts of this book. Beginning in the latter stages of this chapter, I go on to explore in Part I, consisting of Chapters 1–4, central tensions within influential moral and social-theoretical perspectives on intergenerational relationships, before examining the administrative or managerial social imaginary, the presuppositions that underlie these positions and that reflect certain sociological features of the shared ethical life of technological societies and its political rationality.² I do not pretend to provide a comprehensive overview of debates in the topic area of intergenerational justice, only to delineate key aspects of these approaches and central tensions within them that continue to stimulate debate.

The strategy here is to clear the ground from within, as it were, and so provide a place to stand to reconstruct an account of our relationship with future generations that can tackle the questions with which we began this chapter. This standpoint does not sit apart from the social imaginary explored in Part I, but rather emerges from amidst the tensions within it, tensions that become manifest within the moral and social-theoretical perspectives examined in Chapters 2 and 3. The experience of what I will describe later in this Introduction as ‘reflexive uncertainty’ both arises from and reinforces the desire to ‘manage’ the future within technological societies, a desire which is reflected in the administrative or managerial social imaginary, and in the moral positions that take their direction from it. The inability of the moral perspectives I examine in Chapter 2 to make sense of reflexive uncertainty makes it impossible for them to, in turn, make sense of questions about responsibilities to future generations with the aid of the theories of distributive justice they develop. The aim in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 is thus to uncover what it is about assumptions shared by these perspectives that creates such difficulties, so that we can go beyond the limitations imposed by this underlying imaginary.³

The second stage of the critique, in Part II, consists of Chapters 5–7. In Chapter 5, I construct an account of the significance of uncertainty to the human condition that draws on phenomenological philosophy and feminist ethics, together with developmental psychology and object relations theory. From this basis, I go on to argue that futurity in human experience is connected with how we realise value in our dealings with others and the world, and particularly through the production of meaning through attachment relationships and care. We stand, therefore, not in the position of an idealised moral subject or administrator of resources, but as rooted in the vulnerabilities and dependencies that characterise the everyday lifeworld. To treat individuals primarily as passive consumers, as recipients of goods in some sort of distributive scheme, ignores this constitutive role of futurity in human flourishing. By failing to understand individuals as actively relational subjects even in their most ‘mundane’ entanglements, we fail to recognise that people are active creators of meaning (Young 1990) even when they are engaged in ‘mere’ consumption.⁴

In the rest of Part II, I explore how a perspective rooted in the specific ‘imaginary of care’ elaborated in Chapter 5 can help us understand both ethical life and also properly critical moral reflection on ethical life in ways that can avoid the tensions analysed in Part I, and thus respond to the questions at the beginning of this chapter. Care, as well as implying a distinct model of moral psychology, brings with it a distinctive mode of ethical reasoning that is concerned with the critique and construction of practices, rather than the elaboration of principles. Beginning from the role of attachment in individual and collective development, and moving to the contribution it makes to ethical life, Chapter 6 argues that care brings with it specific future-oriented responsibilities that must be fulfilled in passing on a ‘world’ to future generations which bears the imprint of care and preserves within it the potential for renewed care and meaning. Chapter 7 then shows how care for ‘constitutive values’ of various kinds necessarily leads us to care for the preservation of the elements of ethical life that sustain these values. Among these elements, a special role is allotted to the narratives through which we understand the meaning of our lives and of the historical cultures in which they are rooted. Individual and collective virtues, expressed in what are termed (after Peter Marris, 1996) strategies for living with uncertainty, provide us with a moral standpoint for criticising how ethical life, as it exists, conceives of and deals with responsibilities to future generations. The position I develop is therefore in agreement with Dale Jamieson’s (1992) argument that only an ethics rooted in an evaluation of subjective capacities for thought and action (‘virtues’) provides an adequate basis for an ethics of future-oriented responsibility. Finally, in Chapter 8, I review the argument and explore its significance in relation to some attempts to understand the responsibilities of present to future people in the context of AGW. This provides a clear closing contrast between the moral implications of the administrative or managerial imaginary and those of the imaginary of care.

Overall, the argument laid out in the second half of the book is that it is a mistake to believe, as the administrative imaginary enjoins us to do, that our relationship with future generations is something that can be ‘managed’ (cf. Jamieson 1990, p. 83) from a position like that of a member of an idealised bureaucratic organisation, in which is invested specialist expertise that uniquely suits it to take charge of the whole situation it surveys. Rather, just as future people have to be conceived of as active participants in the material and symbolic creation of their world in order that we can fulfil our responsibilities to them, we have to recognise ourselves here in the present as participants in an implicitly solidaristic process of future-building. By including this awareness explicitly into our thinking and acting, uncertainty can be domesticated in ways that seek to build graceful resilience rather than to consolidate an increasingly brittle control over processes, our knowledge of which is subject to deep uncertainty.

While this book certainly does not aspire to be the last word on the subject of what we owe to future generations – it raises, for example, issues regarding the question of what we owe, which need more detailed treatment than I have been able to give to them here – it is hoped that it will at least shift the conceptual coordinates which guide our responses to questions that are becoming ever more central to how we understand ourselves and the significance of what we do.

Constructing uncertainty

By way of introducing the context for the analysis in the rest of Part I, we now turn to consider the changing meaning of uncertainty, by drawing on research in science and technology studies (STS), which may be unfamiliar to readers whose background is chiefly in philosophy. The main contribution of such material is to help us understand how the ways in which the future is dealt with in contemporary societies differ from how it has been dealt with in the past. The uncertainties that surround the activities of inhabitants of these societies are different. The fabric of their everyday lives, their expectations about how actions and plans will turn out, are thoroughly dependent on the pervasive presence of technological artefacts, from synthetic chemicals to nuclear power stations to computers, and social artefacts sustained by technological systems – like bureaucracies that rely on automated record keeping and routinized practices of decision-making. Technological societies are thus characterised by the widespread and increasingly systematized application of reliable knowledge about the social and/or non-human worlds, together with practical ingenuity, to solve social problems with the aid of artificial devices and objects. Technological artefacts, as contrasted with others, are thus ones that bear within them the power to transform, either themselves or in combination with other such artefacts and systems of meaning (which, for example, provide guidance on their use), how human beings act upon the world around them.

As technologies become more complex and advanced, the Baconian dream of the conquest of uncertainty they once promised begins to decay, and is haunted by the spectre of new uncertainties which arise because of these technologies themselves. As we shall see, this has the result that the scientific knowledge on which we rely to predict outcomes is not always a reliable guide to action. The certainty and control which Francis Bacon and those who followed him saw as the promise of scientifically guided action are, ironically, eroded by the success of and increasing social reliance on science. Where the Enlightenment and its 19th century intellectual legacies used scientific knowledge as a standard for making sense of uncertainty, those who live in the 20th and now the 21st century in the societies these legacies helped shape find themselves unable to make sense of uncertainty in the same way.

What does it mean to ‘make sense’ of an intrinsically uncertain future? It implies that, faced with uncertainty, we need, at minimum, some kind of rules or regularized practices for extending ourselves forward, assessing what may be coming our way, and for coming up with a course of action in anticipation of what could happen. It has been suggested that an implicit or explicit concern with uncertainty, ‘with the precarious and perilous character of existence’, has the credentials for being considered a universal aspect of human experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index