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Bargaining with the future: generational overlap and the
threat of punishment
Earlier generations have an incentive to act justly with
respect to future generations. Anticipating dependence
on younger generations, it is not only reasonably
self-interested to respect the needs of future
generations – it is also just.
Hugh McCormick
During the last fifty years, intergenerational concerns
have moved steadily towards centre-stage in policy
spheres with the rapid growth of social security and
environmental concerns. The study of this “third
dimension” of justice has great capacity to generate
significant insights into, and to influence, key topical
policy issues such as the environment, healthcare,
social security, education, and the regulation of
inheritance. Conflicts between duties owed to future
persons and duties owed to those now living are a lively
part of the modern contemporary policy arena. In sum,
intertemporal justice lies at the heart of social
justice.
The field of intertemporal justice is concerned with the
fair treatment of persons removed in time. This
apparently straightforward concept is complicated
tremendously by the time arrow: power is unevenly
distributed over time, so that we are unable to exert
influence over past actions, whether our own or others’.
Therefore, all social actions are time asymmetric.
Ageing is an irreversible process: old cannot become
younger. Social reform cannot be enacted in past
societies, though it is possible to bring about social
change in future societies.
The time arrow produces asymmetries of information, too, so
while actions of the present have a significant role in
shaping the future, details of the causal chain are not
well known. Our knowledge of the past is imperfect,
hindering our ability to understand our present
situation; and our knowledge of the future is at least
as imperfect, based on predictions and hypotheses rather
than empirical evidence. Efforts to right the wrongs of
the past and to treat justly people yet to live,
therefore, are prone to failure.
Generational overlap and anticipated dependence
Due to the demands of brevity, my central purpose in this
article is very modest: to demonstrate how, contrary to
the arguments of Gustaf Arrhenius, ideal contract theory
can function profitably in the intertemporal context.
[1] Two facts – generational overlap and anticipated
dependence – contribute much to the appeal of ideal
contract theory. Generational overlap recognises that
each generation cohabits certain periods of time with
other generations; anticipated dependence is the
estimation that one will be dependent on others in the
future. The former has received very limited attention
in the literature, and I believe the latter to be an
entirely original contribution to this debate.
The time arrow means that we cannot affect the actions of
the past. Therefore, if generations are conceived as
separate entities that do not exist contemporaneously,
[2] earlier generations will have complete power over
later generations. And since ideal contract theory works
best when it founds interpersonal duties on an
assumption of mutual disinterest rather than ties of
sentiment, it faces this challenge: where an earlier
agent exerts complete power over a later agent, and the
two will never interact, there would seem to be no
reason based in mutual disinterest for the earlier agent
to refrain from consuming all the resources he can. If
economic benefits can only flow in one direction, ideal
contract theory will have to couch duties to future
persons in the weaker terms of charity.
Fortunately, generations are not distinct entities that
occupy separate locations in time; rather they overlap
and commingle. [3] Multiple generations are alive at any
time, and more than one of these are simultaneously in
adulthood. Just as lines of familial descent exist
contemporaneously – parents often living to become
grand-parents – so will many of those now alive share
adulthood with people not yet born.
So generations have no discrete existence at the societal
level: this is an important and general aspect of human
social existence. Therefore this aspect of life should
be available to agents reasoning in the
original
position, the theoretical standpoint prior to individual
and social endowments from which one can conceptually
consider issues of justice. I can return at least some
of what I owe to my parents’ generation, and this is
more feasible the greater their life-expectancy.
Temporally reversed saving – spending now in the
expectation of saving for it in the future – is also
possible through governmental deficit spending, allowing
generations to redistribute by bringing consumption
forwards in time.
Generational overlap makes benefit flows backwards and
forwards between two generations both possible and
realistic. If savings can be bidirectional, then
inequalities at one point in time can be mitigated by
redistribution at a later date. However, although we
have shown that cooperation between generations is
feasible, the problem of cooperation is far from
resolved.
The original position over the generations
Parties in Rawls’ conception of the ‘original position’ are
mutually unconcerned: from this position prior to
‘discovering’ one’s place in society and one’s personal
endowment, parties to the social contract coming out of
the original position will choose principles so that
they can accept the strains of commitment once the veil
of ignorance is lifted. Rawls states: ‘the parties avoid
imposing very high rates at earlier stages of
accumulation, for even though they would benefit from
this if they come later, they must be able to accept
these rates in good faith should their society turn out
to be poor.’ [4] Gustaf Arrhenius shows that this
problem will be greater than Rawls envisages, pointing
out that – even with an overlap – generations will adopt
policies causing more depletion and less saving than
would be considered efficient or just in an
intergenerational context. [5] He concludes that it is
‘somewhat bizarre to apply the contractarian metaphor to
children and those yet unborn and other beings to whom
we can only stand in an asymmetric relation of
benevolence’.
[6]
An important ingredient is missing from Arrhenius’
argument: the asymmetry of power between the youthful
and the aged. The human dependency intrinsic in infancy
and early childhood is matched in the fragility of
advanced old age. Anticipated dependence means that
every person in the present generation can expect to
depend on the generations that immediately follow. I
call this dependence anticipated because it is a
probability rather than a certainty, since I may not
live to old age, but nevertheless the chance of being
dependent will still be taken into account by the
rational agent when she is selecting principles in the
original position. The aged are physically frail, have
little or no earnings capacity and are therefore more
vulnerable to risk.
This fact of anticipated dependence ensures that among
temporally adjacent generations, mutually advantageous
cooperation will take place. Thus, not only does
generational overlap ensure that the circumstances of
justice obtain; it also provides us with an incentive to
adopt just attitudes to future generations – even those
that may as yet be unborn. Like the intergenerational
overlap, this feature of human life is general enough to
justify its being made available to agents in the
original position.
The power of youth
It could be objected that, in modern society, the old are
not dependent on the young to any significant extent. It
is true that many senior citizens do not rely on their
offspring for care in later life. They can make
in-period contracts (with doctors and nurses, for
example) for the services they require, funding them out
of their savings: for this they do not need the
cooperation or aid of the young. [7]
Such an argument relies on the availability of services and
savings, and in so doing overlooks the risk aversion
that provides anticipated dependence with its
argumentative force. This force lies in four factors.
Firstly, the old have no guarantee that the young will
not tax their savings, so as to reduce the resource
asymmetry between the young and the old who have
accumulated.
Secondly, there are many services that the old cannot
provide unilaterally either by not earning enough, not
saving enough, or because the services have high fixed
costs. In most modern societies, these services, for
example, policing, transport and healthcare, are
provided collectively as public goods, and often with a
bias towards the elderly. The young potentially can
restrict access to these public services. This
constitutes a further threat advantage or bargaining
chip for the young within anticipated dependence, since
at this point – physically frail and with reduced
earnings capacity – the old are limited in their ability
to react to any such restriction.
The young also possess the more radical threat of breaking
cooperation entirely. In selecting principles, agents in
the original position will take into account the need,
when the veil of ignorance is lifted, for present people
to cooperate with people not yet born. Such
consideration is ensured by my reading of Rawls: I need
to decide what I will accept given that I may be alive
at any point in the future. It is contrary to the
Rawlsian project to choose principles that turn out to
make the strains of commitment unbearable in the future,
and the possibility of these strains being too great
will bear on the decisions of earlier generations.
People who are born later possess the threat over older
people that if cooperation with their frail and
dependent elders becomes too onerous, they – the young –
can defect. It is reasonable to suppose that the costs
of such a defection, potentially causing society to
degenerate into a state of nature, will weigh more
heavily on the old due to their greater physical
frailty.
Finally, the aged are open to uncertainty that does not
concern the actions of the young, but rather nature. The
possibility of a natural disaster increases the risk of
relying in the long term on the availability of savings
and services. Climate change or a hurricane may decrease
the value of an asset held and relied upon by a senior,
for example, a rental property on the coast. Again, the
old are less able to react to such disasters because of
physical frailty and reduced earning-capacity.
These risks increase human vulnerability in later life and
enhance the benefits of cooperation by treating it as an
insurance scheme. Earlier generations have an incentive
to act justly with respect to future generations because
the former may come to rely on the greater productive
capacity of the latter, and because the latter will come
to have the power to tax savings and withdraw services
needed by the former.
Although they are not contemporaries and cannot have
reciprocal relations, two people occupying different
places in time can adopt mutually beneficial and
agreeable principles of justice, even in the absence of
actual mutual cooperation, and by taking into account
only the needs and wants of their own contemporaries and
the facts of generational overlap and anticipated
dependence.
Principled generations
Future generations will overlap with at least one of the
generations presently alive and the youngsters currently
alive will come to depend on workers not yet born.
Members of the original position know that they may be
one of the youngest once the veil is lifted, and thus
depend on at least one future generation. Irresponsible
resource use will diminish the supply of resources
available for distribution later in time, and future
generations are likely to activate their threat
advantage and to disfavour, in the distribution of
resources, those responsible for the scarcity. With this
in mind the present generation from the original
position will choose principles and institutions that
equip the next generation with the resources and
inclination to care for them when they become dependent.
The asymmetric relation of power pointed to by Arrhenius,
between those alive now and those who will be alive in
the future, is therefore matched by the asymmetry of
power between, on the one hand, the young and
able-bodied, and the old and infirm on the other, so
that each generation is equipped with a defection
threat. The result is that defecting – ignoring the
needs of future generations – will always be offset by
the threat of those future generations ignoring our
needs when we are dependent on them. [8]
The requirement that present people account for the needs
of future people, as contributing to the fulfilment of
their own eventual and inevitable needs, will be
repeated for future people, who will make the same
calculation concerning their futures. To treat them
respectfully, their worries as to their inevitably
dependent future must be answered, thereby necessitating
the extension of just institutions, which secure
intergenerational justice, into the future.
Conclusion
The overlap of successive generations stabilises ideal
contractual bargaining in an intertemporal context by
alleviating the disconnection between present and
future. John Rawls appears to assume that generations do
not overlap, aggravating the intertemporal asymmetry of
power, but in reality generations overlap continuously.
Not only are we able to exert a direct influence on the
lives of future people but, due to a feature of the
overlap, and contrary to Arrhenius’ assertions, we have
an incentive to do so: in our old age we are
increasingly frail and vulnerable, and we come to rely
on the young for cooperative benefits. Since we can
anticipate this reliance, our motives in the original
position – and after the veil of ignorance has lifted –
are fundamentally altered.
The anticipated dependence of old age introduces a second
asymmetry of power, of youthful over aged, which works
with the overlap to counteract the widely recognised
inequality between present and future and promotes the
cause of justice over time. Relations between
generations are based on more than mere altruism. It is
disconcerting to think that future generations may want
to, and will be able to punish us for the resource
decisions we have made. Hopefully this possibility will
prompt positive rather than defensive action.
References
[1] G. Arrhenius Future generations: a challenge for moral
theory (Uppsala University, 1999), pp. 29-34.
[6] Ibid, 34.
[7] This point was put to me by Geoff Brennan.
The defection decision will involve intertemporal
optimisation. If we assume that agents aim to smooth
their consumption under conditions of diminishing
marginal utility, defection is less likely to be chosen.
The present generation may, however, find it optimal
from a selfish viewpoint to indulge early in life and
suffer poverty later. If parties care less for their
welfare in old age, relative to their welfare when
younger, they will be less threatened by the possible
defection threat wielded by the next generation, and so
will be less constrained by a given savings principle.
This will impact upon the value and effectiveness of the
younger generation’s defection threat. |
