Traditional accounts of justice hold that we have obligations of justice towards fellow citizens who are our contemporaries. This standard view about the scope of justice has come increasingly under challenge in both its spatial and temporal dimensions. Extending the scope of justice over time by asking what duties we may owe to future generations appears especially pressing today. As the world’s population grows past the present 7 billion, it appears that we will soon run out of the resources needed to sustain so many people. Do we have a duty to limit our use of nonrenewable natural resources for the sake of future generations?

While theorists of intergenerational justice have been primarily concerned with justifying the existence and content of such duties, they have paid less attention to the implications that the remoteness (time-distance) of future people may have on the motivation to act upon the duties of justice we have towards them. This is exemplified by the fact that we may care more about our close relatives than about our distant ones. A focus on the problem of the motivational force of considerations of intergenerational justice emphasizes the challenges posed by human moral psychology to normative theorizing; although we may accept intergenerational duties of justice in principle, we must also be persuaded to act upon them. My postdoctoral research will focus on the question of how best to articulate our theories of intergenerational justice given the need to address the problem of moral motivation. By building on recent arguments in global justice, I hope to show that an account of intergenerational solidarity that includes distant future generations represents the most promising strategy to address it. (Sara Amighetti)