Date: Wednesday 13 August
Time Lecture: 6-7pm
Venue: B201-440
On resisting the intergenerationally jealous virtues
There is a pressing need for a global, intergenerational & ecological ethic. Typically, philosophers pay less attention to the intergenerational aspect, since they assume that intergenerational ethics involves only a modest extension of ethics for contemporaries. By contrast, I argue that intergenerational ethics has the potential to play a transformative role. One reason for concern is that modelling for the future based on the norms of ethics for contemporaries may facilitate intergenerational tyranny. In particular, there is a clear risk that focusing on ethics for contemporaries will lead to an embracing of "intergenerationally jealous virtues” that come into conflict with central touchstones for intergenerational ethics. In this paper, I elaborate on the touchstones and on the challenge of the jealous “virtues” and explore what this diagnosis reveals about potential solutions.
Stephen M. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (2011), and co-author of Debating Climate Ethics (2016) and Dialogues on Climate Justice (2023). His edited books include: The Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics (2025); The Ethics of "Geoengineering" the Global Climate (2020); The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (2016); Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (2010); and Virtue Ethics: Old and New (2005).
