Titles and Abstracts

 

Hiroshi Abe, “Hans Jonas, Tetsuro Watsuji and Intergenerational Responsibility”

 

                   

 

 

Joseph C. A. Agbakoba, “Reasonabilism and the Socio-centric Foundations of Intergenerational Justice in African Thought”

 

This paper revisits the concept of reasonabilism which subsumes a form of reconfiguration and recasting of an integrated and  holistic conception of consciousness  (the conscious being of humans) in a manner that ties contingent rational expressions or the principle of consistency (possible rational capabilities and actualities) to corresponding enabling sets of affectivities and conatus (degrees of beneficence or their negation as contained in, or associated with, the will or volitional states) and vice versa such that they become two sides of the same coin. The paper explores the basis of reasonability and reasonabilism, so defined, in African thought, showing among other things that African thought is not as long on the formal radial scale  as it is deep on the substantive relational scale including the relationalities and sociality of pure consciousness (self-reflecting intensionality, its representations and levels of reality); and, the implications of these for the scale and depth of conceptions of justice, especially intergenerational justice as it relates to the environment and development generally. Contemporary Africa faces the challenge of retaining and deepening the conatal depth of beneficence in its indigenous philosophical resources and heritage while expanding its radial of consistency to meet the modern global challenges of the looming environmental disaster and the question of environmental sustainability, poverty, disease, etc. This paper also tries to point to the path of the necessary reconceptualization and reinvigorations, drawing on global philosophical resources, that would further enrich African thought along the required lines above.

 

 

Timothy Connolly, “Confucian Approaches to Intergenerational Ethics”

Since Confucianism is an intergenerational phenomenon, it should have unique insights into ethical issues concerning our relationships with past and future generations. In the first part of this discussion, I examine two contemporary Confucian approaches to intergenerational ethics. The Chinese thinker Jiang Qing argues for a political constitution in which the state depends not just on the will of presently existing citizens, but also serves to preserve and transmit the values of the past for the sake of future generations. Proponents of Confucian Role Ethics in turn have focused on intergenerational relationships that bind the community together over time. In the second half of the discussion, I develop an alternative Confucian approach that is aligned with virtue ethics. On this view, our present virtue is the point of departure for understanding our relations with the past and future. I examine passages in early Confucian texts that suggest a notion of intergenerational virtue, which brings together various dispositions that contribute to seeing our own flourishing as linked with both past and future generations.

 

 

Matthias Fritsch, “Indirect Intergenerational Reciprocity in Indigenous Philosophies and its Relevance to Climate Ethics”

 

The talk proposes a concept of justice for future people that is mindful of Indigenous critiques of the ‘Anthropocene’ and associated climate horror scenarios. I first review these critiques, which suggest that motivating pro-futural care by dreading an impending climate crisis tends to betray a privileged, often settler-colonial perspective. The beneficiaries of colonialism now have the dubious luxury of viewing the environmental crisis as one that lies wholly in the future, even if that future starts here, while many Indigenous communities have been living with such a crisis for a long time. On this basis, I then review various Indigenous account of intergenerational relations, in which I find one fundamental and common idea in the claim that present generations owe to descendants because they received a gift from ancestors. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s work on the premodern and Indigenous notion of the gift, I seek to model and defend this view and its social ontology (I call it ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’). I then seek to show how the gift and AR can help to demarginalize the future: above all, by disallowing a linear view of time according to which a focus on the future permits the neglect of the past. Hence, climate ethics and intergenerational justice must face the history of colonialism.

 

 

Stephen Gardiner, “Representing Future Generations in a Global Constitutional Convention”

 

Recently, I have been arguing for a global constitutional convention for future generations, akin to the American constitutional convention of 1787, which gave rise to the present structure of government in the United States. This body would confront the serious “governance gap” that currently exists surrounding concern for future generations. The driving idea is that current institutions tend to ignore and crowd out intergenerational concern, and thereby facilitate a “tyranny of the contemporary”. They not only fail to address a basic standing threat to humanity and other species, but also help that threat to become manifest. Climate change is a prime example. In this paper, I explore the issue of how future generations should be appropriately represented within such a constitutional convention, and what implications this has for the shape of the proposals likely to emerge.

 

 

Marion Hourdequin, “Confucianism and Intergenerational Ethics”

 

In this talk, I explain how early Confucianism can ground a distinctly relational perspective on intergenerational ethics. The Analects of Confucius foregrounds intergenerational relations by rooting ethics in relationships between parents and children, and by presenting ancient sage-kings as moral exemplars.  From a Confucian point of view, persons are understood as persons-in-relation, embedded in networks of connection across space and time. Self-cultivation thus involves taking one’s place in a community where one’s own identity and welfare are deeply bound to those of others. In this view, gratitude and reciprocity emerge as central values. A Confucian understanding of gratitude and reciprocity involves not only dyadic relations, but broader connections within a temporally-extended social web. Thus, Confucian reciprocity might involve honoring one’s parents by nurturing one’s own children in turn, or expressing gratitude for what past generations have provided by ensuring that future generations can flourish. Genuine ethical relations between current and future generations reflect care and concern for ongoing human communities; for the triad of heaven, earth, and humanity; and for realization of the Dao in the world.

 

 

Jing Hu, “Moral Progress and Moral Emotions for the Next Generation”

 

Does morality change and progress (e.g. discovering that slavery is wrong, or that it is impermissible to limit educational opportunities by gender)? If so, how do they happen? The moral realists believe objective moral facts causes moral progress while the constructivist ethicists believe social constitution and our emotional propensity (such as empathy) are the real contributors. In this paper, I argue that through the development of moral emotions such as empathy, we can facilitate moral progress towards a system that gives adequate moral consideration to the future generation’s plight. Drawing insights from the Confucian tradition, especially the moral theory of Mencius (372BCE-289BCE), I demonstrate how empathy (or ceyi zhixin 恻隐之心) when well guided and cultivated, helps us to go beyond the here and now. While many factors are significant in this much needed moral progress towards a more inclusive and forward looking morality, empathy is a critical component.

 

 

Workineh Kelbessa, “Intergenerational Justice and the Environment in Africa”

 

In this paper I will examine how Africans envision their futures and promote intergenerational justice. In African worldviews, a community is comprised of three generations: the living dead, the living and the yet to be born. The three generations are interconnected. The current generation should owe a debt of gratitude to its forbears for leaving the usable environment behind, and fulfil its moral obligation towards future generations. Successive generations share the environment (the land) in the African worldview. According to African intergenerational ethics, natural resources ought not to be exploited beyond the limit, and that the land ought to be taken care of for the benefit of present and future human generations, as well as for the good of non-human species. The Oromo of Ethiopia and other cultural groups in Africa do not simply consider justice, integrity, and respect as human virtues applicable to human beings but they extend them to nonhuman species and mother Earth. Thus, I argue that intergenerational thinking can help humanity to address both local and global environmental problems.

 

Keywords: Africa, Gadaa, future generations, intergenerational justice, handhuuraa, Oromo

 

 

 

Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò (Georgetown University) & Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Georgetown University), “More Solidarity More Problems: Land-Based Intergenerational Justice”

 

Both within and outside of academia, battles rage about who the proper targets of solidarity are among the living. Are we rooting for everybody Black? Are we rallying around “First People First?” If we primarily or even exclusively center or recognize our ethnic group, Tribe, First Nation, country, caste, or geopolitical region, what kind of politics, study, and practices of community are we committed to? Climate change, and the ongoing massive global displacement of communities of color, exacerbates the salience of solidarity discourse. In virtue of the philosophical traditions we have inherited, we add to these longstanding discourses about the nature of our political commitments: the long dead and the yet unborn -- our ancestors and our descendants. At first blush, prioritizing the cultivation of ancestor and descendant relationships may seem like a constraint on our political possibilities; however, we aim to motivate the view that the cultivation of ancestor and descendant relationships is itself an area of political responsibility, rather than an unmovable constraint on our political possibilities.

 

This view: 1. provides the opportunity for a critique of the silo-ing of selfish theorizing and 2. lends itself to better engagement with land-based decolonial imaginary.  Here, we take the silo-ing of selfish theorizing to refer to presentist, non-intersectional, non-coalitional theory-building that only attends to the implications of injustice for one arbitrarily segmented social group (e.g. the currently living, the corporeal, the human, the “first world.”) By land-based decolonial imaginary we mean a futurity-focused form of imagination that attends to the consistent and rapid redrawing of the human-habitable map of the planet (i.e. a form of theorizing that takes seriously that for every one degree of global temperature change, roughly one billion people will be displaced (Xu et al. 2020, “Future of the Human Climate Niche”); a form of theorizing that recognizes the ongoing colonial/climate apocalypse experienced by Indigenous communities (Whyte 2017; “Ancestors’ Dystopia Now”). Ultimately we hope to motivate theory, science, and politics that engage more of our ancestors and build for more of our descendants.

 

 

James Miller, “Nature Time Responsibility and the Porous Body in Chinese Thought”

 

China’s indigenous religious tradition, Daoism, offers an important theory of the porous body predicated on the mutual interpenetration of the body and the world. Such a vision of interpenetration raises important moral questions about the notion of responsibility of human beings for future generations and for the earth itself. Arising from this sense of interpenetration, Daoism also stresses the importance of synchronous correlations between phenomena as well as more conventional sequential causation. The notions of interpenetration and correlation thus combine to produce a vision of how exactly the body is situated in space and time that is fundamentally different from Kantian understandings of the transcendent qualities of space/time. This theory of the porous body points to a paradoxical understanding of agency (do nothing and nothing is not done) that lies at the heart of the Daoist tradition.

 

 

Tim Mulgan, “Philosophy for an Ending World”

 

I explore a thought experiment where humanity faces unavoidable extinction two hundred years from now. I ask how philosophers in this ending world might reimagine current debates about the meaning of life, the relative value of virtual and real environments, the permissibility of procreation, the relative merits of various forms of utilitarianism, and the credibility of traditional arguments for and against the existence of God. I argue that reflection on the ending world raises troubling questions for contemporary philosophers, especially regarding our connections with future people.

 

 

Krushil Watene, “Toward an Indigenous Intergenerational Ethic: Manaakitanga and Kaitiakitanga”

 

At the heart of the sustainable development agenda is a concern for future generations. Development is framed as that which 'meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' and which works toward 'building an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet'. This paper concerns itself with the extent to which indigenous communities provide some useful ways of grounding these future-oriented and sustainable concerns. Drawing on Maori narratives, I outline a number of insights for our relationships with and our responsibilities to past and future generations. In so doing, this presentation begins to articulate an approach to intergenerational justice embedded in the ideas of manaakitanga and kaitiakitanga in ways that demonstrate the contributions of indigenous (and particularly Maori) concepts to some of the most pressing global challenges that we face.

 

 

Roni Leung and Mario Wenning (University of Macau), “Ghosts and Intergenerational Justice: a Confucian Perspective”

 

Confucius famously asks: “Not yet being able to serve others, how can you serve ghosts?” This paper discusses the role of ghosts and ancestor spirits in human lives. While there is agreement among Confucians and Mohists that supernatural forces exist, their nature and place in human lives raises questions: what can ghosts and spirits do for - and do to - humans?; What, if anything, do humans owe in return?; What are the similarities and differences between human-human and human-ghost bonds? This paper reconstructs the metaphysics and ethics of human-ghost relationships by focusing on the Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi 朱熹. Zhu discusses complex processes of mutual and unilateral transference (感格) between ghosts and humans. For the classical Chinese authors, we argue, the mechanisms linking the different elements of the spiritual cosmos is ultimately beyond human comprehension while righteous action among humans (義) and respectful distancing（遠之towards ghosts is a wise path to pursue.

 

 

Organizers and Presenters

 

·      Dr. Hiroshi Abe, Kyoto University, Japan

·      Dr. Matthias Fritsch, Concordia University, Canada

·      Dr. Jing Hu, Concordia University, Canada

·      Dr. Mario Wenning, University of Macau, SAR China

 

 

Confirmed Presenters (in alphabetical order)

 

Joseph C. A. Agbakoba, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

 

Joseph C. A. Agbakoba is a professor of philosophy at the University of Nigeria. He has been a Volkswagen Foundation grantee and fellow, an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, an alumnus of Budapest’s Central European University, SUN program, a visiting scholar at Cape Coast and Frankfurt. He was Head of Department of Philosophy at the University of Nigeria from 2007-2010 and Dean, School of General Studies, 2012-2013; from 2013 to 2017, he was Deputy Vice Chancellor (Vice President) at Madonna University Nigeria. He is a former president of the Nigerian Philosophical Association. Agbakoba is also the Regional Coordinator for Africa for the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (CRVP), Washington DC; the Vice President for Africa for COMIUCAP (Conférence Mondiale des Institutions Universitaires Catholiques de Philosophie) and a member of the Steering Committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP). His current research interest is in the field of development philosophy and ethics in relation to Africa and intercultural philosophy. He has published widely locally and internationally; his most recent publication is the book, Development and Modernity in Africa: An Intercultural Philosophical Perspective, published in June/July 2019 by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Köln.

 

https://www.bayreuth-academy.uni-bayreuth.de/en/people/Fellows-2019/Prof_-Dr_-Joseph-C_-A_-Agbakoba/index.php#tabKontakt

 

 

Tim Connolly, East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania, USA

 

Co-Department Chair Modern Languages, Philosophy, & Religion, Prof. Connolly’s research centers on Ancient Greek philosophy and classical Chinese philosophy. His recent publications include Foundations of Confucian Ethics: Virtues, Roles, and Exemplars (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) and Doing Philosophy Comparatively (Bloomsbury, 2015).

 

http://quantum.esu.edu/faculty/tconnolly/

 

 

Stephen M. Gardiner, University of Washington, USA

 

Prof. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment and an internationally renowned expert in climate ethics and intergenerational justice. His main areas of interest are ethical theory, political philosophy and environmental ethics. His research focuses on global environmental problems (especially climate change), future generations, and virtue ethics. He has published A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford, 2011), co-edited Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford, 2010), and edited Virtue Ethics: Old and New (Cornell, 2005). His articles have appeared in journals such as Ethics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, and Philosophy and Public Affairs. Steve has published on a diverse range of topics including intergenerational justice, the ethics of geoengineering, the precautionary principle, climate justice, Aristotle's account of the reciprocity of the virtues, Seneca's approach to virtuous moral rules, and Socrates' political philosophy. His most recent books are Debating Climate Ethics (Oxford, 2016), a "for and against" book on climate justice, with David Weisbach, and the Oxford Handbook on Environmental Ethics (Oxford, 2016), co-edited with Allen Thompson.

 

https://phil.washington.edu/people/stephen-gardiner

 

 

Marion Hourdequin, Colorado College, USA

 

Chair of the Philosophy Department, Prof. Hourdequin specializes in environmental philosophy, ethics, comparative philosophy (esp. Chinese Daoism), animal studies, and philosophy of science. Prof. Hourdequin's current research focuses on climate ethics, climate justice, and the social and ethical dimensions of ecological restoration.

 

https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/dept/philosophy/people/profile.html?person=hourdequin_marion_elizabeth

 

 

Workineh Kelbessa, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy, Prof. Kelbessa has published widely in Environmental Philosophy, African Philosophy, Indigenous Philosophy, Climate Ethics, Comparative Philosophy.

 

http://www.aau.edu.et/css/workineh-kelbessa/

 

 

Roni Leung, University of Macau, SAR China

 

Dr. Leung received his PhD in Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018 with a dissertation entitled “Wang Yangming’s Way to Sagehood: A Neo-Confucian Defense of Virtue Ethics against Situationism.” At present, he is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Philosophy Department at the University of Macau. His research interests are Chinese Philosophy, Ethics, and Comparative Philosophy. Dr. Leung has published a number of articles in scholarly journals, chiefly on Confucian and virtue ethics.

 

 

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Georgetown University, USA

 

Assistant Professor in Philosophy, Dr. Meissner’s areas of specialization are American Indian and Indigenous philosophy, feminist epistemology, and philosophy of language. Meissner’s primary research concerns Indigenous language revitalization and questions about the relationships between Indigenous languages, knowledge systems, and power. In addition to these foci, Meissner also works on and has presented projects concerning Indigenous issues in health care policy, data sovereignty, Indigenous feminisms and research methodologies, Indigenous conceptions of kinship and identity, and Indigenous pedagogies.

 

https://georgetown.academia.edu/ShelbiNahwiletMeissner

 

 

James Miller, Duke Kunshan University, China

 

Prof. Miller is the inaugural Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University, Chair of the Arts and Humanities Division, and co-director of the DKU Humanities Research Center. Prior to his appointment at Duke Kunshan, Dr. Miller served as the director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in cultural studies, and as the director of the School of Religion, at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Miller's research is based in the study of Chinese philosophy, theology, and religion, with an emphasis on philosophy of nature, environmental ethics, and the intersection of religion and ecology in China. He is known worldwide as a scholar of Daoism, China's indigenous religion, and especially its relation to ecology. He has published six books including, most recently, China's Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (Columbia 2017).

 

https://scholars.duke.edu/person/James.Miller

 

 

Tim Mulgan, University of Auckland, NZ/University of St Andrews, Scotland

 

Prof. Mulgan has published widely on intergenerational ethics and utilitarianism. His many monographs include Utilitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Purpose in the Universe: The moral and metaphysical case for ananthropocentric purposivism (Oxford University Press, 2015); Ethics for a Broken World (Acumen 2011); Future People (Oxford University Press 2006); The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford University Press, 2001).

 

 

Olufemi Taiwo, Georgetown University, USA

 

Prof. Taiwo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, and BAs in Philosophy and Political Science at Indiana University. His theoretical work draws liberally from German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, histories of activism and activist thinkers, and the Black radical tradition. He is currently writing a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations that considers a novel philosophical argument for reparations and explores links with environmental justice. He also is committed to public engagement and is publishing articles in popular outlets with general readership (e.g. Slate, Pacific Standard) exploring intersections between climate justice and colonialism.

 

 

Krushil Watene, Massey University, New Zealand

 

Prof. Watene’s primary areas of expertise are mainstream theories of well-being and justice (particularly the capability approach), obligations to future generations, and indigenous (particularly Māori) philosophies. A Māori scholar, her research pioneers high-level discussions of indigenous concepts in global justice theorising, grounded in research that demonstrates the central role of local indigenous communities. 

 

http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/expertise/profile.cfm?stref=615350