Anthropogenic climate change raises an array of ethical questions, including questions of justice. A particularly difficult question is how to distribute and manage natural resources intergenerationally.
It is widely known that we nowadays consume resources at a rate which makes it virtually impossible that we leave future generations as much and as good as we inherited from our ancestors. However, it is everything but clear what we actually owe future generations in terms of natural resources and what an intergenerationally just distribution of natural resources would look like. In this paper, I want to address both these questions.
In the first part of the paper I will argue that justice requires us to leave sustainably enough resources of sufficient quality for future generations. While when it comes to intragenerational justice many philosophers argue for equality as a standard, my argument will suggest that intergenerationally a demanding sufficientarianism is preferable.
In the second part of the paper, I will further analyse what intergenerationally sufficientarian resource justice actually entails, since it is rather difficult to agree on what natural resources are and how much would be enough for the future. In so doing, I will argue for treating resources as the outcomes of complex ecosystemic processes, which means that intergenerational resource justice is more about preserving and enabling these fragile ecosystemic processes than specifying an amount X of a resource R we have to save for the future.
