Volume 43, Issue 4, Winter 2021
Igor Eterovi?

Pages 315-337
https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics202211433
Grounding Responsibility to Future Generations from a Kantian Standpoint
The problem of responsibility to future generations is inherently related to responsibility for the environment. Attempting to provide a new grounding for the figuration of such responsibility, Hans Jonas used Immanuel Kant¡¯s ethics as a paradigm of traditional ethics to provide a critique of their limitations in addressing these issues, and he found three crucial problems in Kant¡¯s ethics (formalism, presentism, and individualism). Kant¡¯s philosophy provides enough material for an answer to Jonas by building an account which 1) gives a teleological grounding of responsibility for the environment and consequently responsibility to future generations; 2) enables the establishment of collective responsibility towards the idea of moral progress, which includes future generations; and 3) answers Jonas¡¯s challenge by extending moral concerns to other living and non-living beings and especially to future generations.