The Obligation to Conserve Natural Resources for Future People

Over the past few decades, liberal political theorists have become increasingly concerned with the current rate of depletion of the Earth’s natural resources and long-term environmental damage. However, when attempting to utilize liberal theories of justice to analyze these problems, theorists have run up against several obstacles, including doubts about whether future people can currently have rights and troublesome connections between current policies and the identity of future people. I argue that despite these difficulties, liberal justice does obligate us to conserve for future people. First, I argue (utilizing a simple two generation case) that we have justice-based obligations to each other to conserve natural resources for the members of the next generation. Second, I argue that we are obligated to conserve even for those will live in the distant future. Though we will never be directly confronted with their demands, we will indirectly be confronted by their demands through the demands of the next generation which can anticipate being directly confronted with the demands of the next generation and so on through a chain of overlapping generations. Our conservation obligations can be sufficiently strong to ensure that, under certain assumptions, all people (no matter when they are born) can enjoy an equal share of natural resources