Book Review of Elizabeth Finneron-Burns’s What We Owe to Future People

What We Owe to Each Other has provided a most influential impartial account of morality.Parallel to this, perhaps fuelled by the growing awareness of the long-term ramifications of climate change, there has been a surge of philosophical interest in intergenerational ethics.It is therefore surprising that, more than a quarter century later, no systematic monograph has yet integrated Scanlonian moral theory into the field of intergenerational justice.It is in this sense, Elizabeth Finneron-Burns's What We Owe to Future People (2024) stands as a major contribution to contemporary moral and political philosophy, offering a most comprehensive contractualist treatment of intergenerational ethics to date.Friends of contractualism will feel immediately at home with this text.As What We Owe to Future People unfolds from a simple but powerful claim: if Scanlonian contractualism can explain what we owe to one another here and now, it can also explain what we owe to those who will exist in the future.Building on this reworked claim, Finneron-Burns argues that Scanlonian contractualism-understood as the requirement that moral principles be justifiable to persons affected by that principleoffers a more coherent and normatively attractive account of intergenerational obligation than the Rawlsian or utilitarian alternatives that have long dominated the field.The book is organised into eight chapters and an introduction that guides the reader through the conceptual and practical challenges of extending moral reasoning across generations.Since future people neither exist nor can reciprocate or interact with us, Finneron-Burns notes that this creates a fundamental problem.Theories that rely on reciprocity, equality of power, or affective ties are therefore ill-equipped to handle intergenerational ethics, which she shows to be uniquely challenging.From this, the text addresses two fundamental questions: the scope question, whether moral theories can or should include future people within