Book review: Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Gosseries (eds.): Institutions for Future Generations

No abstrac

Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Gosseries (eds.): Institutions for Future Generations

No abstrac

Rezension: Tanja Betz / Wolfgang Gaiser / Liane Pluto (Hrsg.): Partizipation von Kindern und Jugendlichen: Forschungsergebnisse, Bewertungen, Handlungsmöglichkeiten

Wie die Herausgeber/innen in ihrem einleitenden Beitrag darstellen, beansprucht der Band keine umfassende Beschreibung und Erklärung sämtlicher Facetten der Kinder- und Jugendbeteiligung, sondern begnügt sich mit dem – gleichwohl ambitionierten – Ziel, einer interessierten und fachkundigen Öffentlichkeit den aktuellen Stand der Beteiligungsforschung im Hinblick auf die besondere Situation von jungen Menschen als Heranwachsenden nahezubringen. Um es vorwegzunehmen – der selbstgesteckte Anspruch des Sammelbandes wird durchweg überzeugend eingelöst. Die insgesamt 14 Einzelbeiträge beruhen größtenteils, aber nicht ausschließlich, auf Erhebungen des Deutschen Jugendinstituts (München), dem die Herausgeber/innen des Bandes in unterschiedlicher Funktion angehör(t)en und welches unter anderem auch für die von 1989 bis 2007 durchgeführten ‚Jugendsurveys’ verantwortlich zeichnet, in denen die politischen und gesellschaftlichen Orientierungen junger Menschen einer kontinuierlichen Beobachtung unterzogen wurden. Die drei Teile des Bandes vermitteln ein breites Panorama dessen, was die Partizipationsforschung in den letzten Jahren an empirischen Befunden über die Formen und Voraussetzungen gelingender Kinder- und Jugendbeteiligung zusammengetragen hat

Editorial

While the unprecedented lockdown measures were at the heart of the debate in the first year of the pandemic, the focus since then has shifted to vaccination issues. The reason, of course, is that vaccines and vaccinations have become available by now. All experts agree: If mankind had failed to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the death toll would have been much higher. This issue seeks to explore what could be described as a “generational approach to vaccinations”. The question “What can we do to avoid future pandemics?” is related to different aspects of the failures and successes of humanity’s vaccination strategy against SARS-CoV-2. Pathogens are among the existential risks to humanity that could potentially kill a large part of it in a very short time. For all the tragedy and horror it has brought upon the world, the Corona virus has not been lethal on such a large, all-encompassing scale. But it could serve as a wake-up call for more and better prevention in the future, put differently: as a call to build a “preventive society”. When people look back to the year 2022 from the year 2200, will they think of the absence of mandatory vaccination as a dangerous anachronism? And will the unequal global distribution of vaccines be seen as an unbearable vice of our epoch? And will “human infection studies” still be dismissed as unethical if a dangerous new virus boards human bodies? If intergenerational justice means improving the life chances and living conditions of future generations to the largest possible extent, then its link to (the avoidance) of infectious diseases is obvious. We should protect future generations from foreseeable damage if we have the power to do so. “We” is humankind in its entirety. Politically, humanity is divided into many single nations. But biologically, as members of the same species, we share the same vulnerability regardless of ethnicity. The regular reader of this journal might wonder why this issue of IGJR has a different structure. An unprecedented pandemic calls for an unprecedented reaction and therefore IGJR 1/2021 and 2/2021 are special issues that deal with this disruptive event. We have invited several health experts, politicians and scholars alike to share their perspectives in short opinion pieces (instead of regular peer-reviewed articles). And we are exploring something new: the publication of a FRFG policy paper. This policy paper starts off with a historical overview on how pandemics have afflicted humanity in the past. It separates moral from legal duties and formulates “epidemiological imperatives” – the way of thinking of a responsible and solidary individual facing the task of preventing an outbreak of epidemics in a community. With the discovery of vaccines, and their availability, the catalogue of duties is increased by one more: to get the jabs as an act of solidarity with others, including future generations. This would prevent states from being forced to take disease control measures that bring about drastic collateral damage. During the first two years of the Corona pandemic, states have imposed lockdowns. The closure of schools has put a special burden on the youngest members of society. This could have been prevented during the second and the further waves. The policy paper also calls for more government funding for prophylactic vaccine research and for the designation of vaccines as “global public goods”. The issue then moves on to a section dedicated to opinion papers by various different authors. The first paper, written by Agnes Binagwaho and Kedest Mathewos (both from University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda), focuses on the issue of health inequity, a concern which has gained more and more traction during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper examines how vaccine distribution during the pandemic was mainly focused on the global north and how such actions might affect future generations’ perception of what is just, fair and morally correct. The second paper, by Samantha Vanderslott (University of Oxford), focuses on the right and wrongdoings connected to pandemic preparedness and response. The third paper, authored by Rajeev Sadanandan (Health Systems Transformation Platform, India), talks about the lessons that can and should be drawn from child immunisations. The fourth paper, by Adriano Mannino (LMU and Parmenides Foundation, Munich), delves into the question how future generations will assess our actions and our response to the current pandemic. The fifth and final paper, written by Jörg Tremmel (FRFG and University Tübingen), is centered around the question whether human infection studies could have been implemented during the early stages of the pandemic to minimise deaths and severe infections. The issue concludes with two reviews on recent books by Alberto Giubilini and Katie Wright. In his review of Giubilini’s The Ethics of Vaccination, Marius Kunte notes that it contains a “thought-provoking plea” for individual, collective and institutional obligations to reach high vaccination rates. Judith Kausch-Zongo concludes her review of Wright’s Gender, Migration and the Intergenerational Transfer of Human Wellbeing with a special emphasis on the book’s empirical findings, and praises it in its entirety as “undoubtedly important”. Both books serve as poignant reminders of how sustainable societies can only emerge once the challenges revolving around its most vulnerable members have been properly addressed

Editorial

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Editorial

By their very nature, constitutions are intergenerational documents. With rare exceptions, they are meant to endure for many generations. They establish the basic institutions of government, enshrine the fundamental values of a people, and place certain questions beyond the reach of simple majorities. Constitutions, especially written ones, are often intentionally made difficult to modify. Inevitably, constitutions raise important questions of intergenerational justice. When one generation enshrines its values in a constitution, and makes it difficult to amend the constitution, does it deprive future generations of the sovereignty each generation should be able to exercise? It might well not make a difference if those future generations share the values of their ancestors, but what if they do not? What if future generations see some important provisions of the constitution as not merely inconvenient, but as morally wrong, or even as a threat to their well-being? Of course, if enough people share this view, the constitution can be changed – but what if the division falls short of the supermajority needed to amend the constitution? This is the dilemma created by constitutions, particularly written constitutions which require supermajorities to alter their provisions. In our judgment there is no perfect solution to this dilemma. Rather, every solution represents a balancing of interests and risks. On the one hand, constitutions are valuable precisely because they remove some questions from the hands of electoral majorities. The institutions of government and the basic rights of individuals and communities are among the matters commonly protected by constitutions against the impact of day-to-day politics. Future generations benefit to the extent that constitutions establish just and stable institutions which can adapt and change peacefully to changing needs and circumstances. On the other hand, constitutions, like people, can age poorly. The values enshrined in a nation’s constitution can be ethically wrong when adopted (for example, the protection of the slave trade written into the U.S. Constitution). Time can also demonstrate that some provisions of a constitution are unwise. Technological change may also alter the effects of some provisions. (Consider the difference between the right to bear a 1790 firearm, and the right to bear an automatic weapon in 2010.) And the values of a people can change, too. To some extent, all of these sources of discontent with a nation’s constitution may be inevitable. The framers of a nation’s constitution are not all-wise and all-seeing, and even if they were, the constitution that fits a nation in its youth may be quite different from that which fits it two centuries later. The question, then, is how future generations can adapt to their constitution, and how they can adapt their constitution to their needs. This, in essence, is the problem we posed to the authors who submitted articles for this issue of the Intergenerational Justice Review. How do you balance the importance of placing some questions beyond the control of a simple majority in a written constitution, with the need to preserve for future generations the ability to adapt it to their changing needs? The answers our authors give in this issue of the IGJR vary. Two of them take as their starting point the disagreement between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concerning the desirability of revising the U.S. Constitution every generation; and another addresses those concerns in the concluding section. Iñigo González-Ricoy’s opening article focuses on the legitimacy of constitutional provisions aimed at advancing future generations’ interests. He argues that the dilemma of future generations being constrained by the choices of their ancestors can be reduced considerably, at least with respect to those constitutional provisions that seek to advance the needs and interests of future generations. Legitimacy concerns may be addressed further through the use of sunset clauses and regular constitutional conventions. Our second article, by Shai Agmon, argues that Jefferson’s proposal that a constitution be re-authorised every 19 years is unsatisfactory because it fails to fulfil its own normative aspirations. It produces two groups of people who will end up living under laws to which they did not give their consent: (a) citizens who reach the voting age after the re-enactment process; (b) citizens who did not assent to being obliged by the majority vote’s results. In Agmon’s view, the existence of significant numbers of citizens who have not consented to the laws undermines any consent-based rationale for adopting a Jeffersonian approach. In our closing article, Michael Rose rejects the Jeffersonian argument that the self-determination of future generations is impeded by lasting constitutions. Rather, he argues that a demand for future generations’ full self-determination is both self-contradictory, and impossible to achieve. Instead, we should employ an attitude of “reflective paternalism” towards future generations by introducing their interests into today’s decision-making process, and by ensuring that the constitution itself provides for democratic self-determination. No doubt, more research is needed on the best ways to incorporate protections for the rights and interests of future generations into constitutions. Future research should also examine how the lessons we have learned from trying to protect the environment can be applied to the circumstances of future generations. The goal is a very practical one: to discover what constitutional provisions can best protect the rights of future generations. Bruce Auerbach (Albright College) Antony Mason (IF) Markus Rutsche (University of St. Gallen) Jörg Tremmel (University of Tübingen

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