Intergenerational Justice and Coercion as a Ground of Justice

In this comment piece, I will pick up on Axel Gosseries’s suggestion in his article Nations, Generations and Climate Justice that it is instructive to investigate parallels and differences between issues of global justice and intergenerational justice for the sake of both a better understanding of the issues and of consistency. I will start from recent developments in the debate on global justice and explore some of their implications for thinking about intergenerational justice. In particular, I start from theories about the grounds of egalitarian justice and ask: if we accept that state-like coercion is the ground of egalitarian justice, can we still accept Gosseries’s proposal for an intergenerational difference principle?