MICH: Intergenerational Legitimacy

Daniel Callies (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Prior to 1971, debates about justice focused almost exclusively on competing claims within individual generations. Since the publication of A Theory of Justice, there has been prolific discussion surrounding the notion of intergenerational justice, or justice between generations. The purpose of this paper is to begin the parallel discussion on the notion of intergenerational legitimacy. To do so, I begin by exploring a common distinction made in the philosophical literature between concepts and conceptions. I argue that if the notion of intergenerational legitimacy is part of the concept of legitimacy, then any adequate conception of legitimacy ought to be able to accommodate it. I then survey different conceptions of legitimacy, and determine how well they are able to accommodate the intergenerational notion of the concept.