Tag: Intergenerational Justice

How Will Young People Respond to Their Unhappiness?

I recently ran across a piece by one Ron Fournier. Fournier attempts to predict what the young generation might do politically in the face of shrinking economic opportunities. My thoughts on this have provided me with an opportunity to follow up on my unexpectedly popular piece, “Why are Young People Unhappy?”. In that piece, I argued that young people have diminished economic opportunities relative to past generations and as a result are less able to pursue their conceptions of happiness. In recent days, I have run across a variety of views about how young people might respond to this (including Fournier’s), and I’d like to discuss the question further.

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Better Never to Have Been?

I have recently finished reading a fascinating and thought-provoking book by political theorist David Benatar, entitled Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. In this book, Benatar makes a rather unconventional argument–that to bring someone into existence is to harm that person, and that it is consequently generally wrong to have children, because to have children is to harm them. While I found Benatar’s argument most interesting, I ultimately found it unpersuasive. Here’s why.

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Do We Have Obligations to Future People?

Today I would like to attempt to answer one of the most difficult questions in political theory, the question of the extent to which the interests of future people ought to be considered. Why is it so difficult? Because there are many seemingly horrific answers that are unusually easy to get to. That said, I think I have found a workaround.

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