Moral Responsibilities to Future Generations: A Comparative Study on Human Rights Theory and Confucianism

In this dissertation I have explored the moral justification for intergenerational responsibilities in the context of climate change. It looks for reasons, from different moral traditions, which may explain why we should accept the idea of moral responsibilities to future generations and what do we owe to them. The inquiry for these questions is conducted in the context of human rights theory and Confucianism. This study shows that both human rights theory and Confucianism could provide adequate justification on intergenerational relationship. For human rights theory, the study defend a personhood/agency-based approach to human rights, which says that human rights are intended to protect the necessary conditions for normative agency, namely the capacity of agents to choose and act upon their own choices. The reason why we have moral responsibility to future generations is because that climate change will jeopardize the future rights of them. It is morally condemnable to deprive the members of future generations of their necessary conditions for normative agency. According to human rights theory our responsibilities to future generations consist of ensuring that the members of future generations will possess adequate conditions and resources to be normative agents. To be more specific, it maintains among all the possible things we could leave to future generations, certain crucial natural capital and adequate natural environment have distinctive meanings for their human rights. Thus, we should accept ecological responsibilities to future generations to respect their human rights. For Confucianism, the concept of moral responsibility fundamentally stems from the cultivation of one’s inner virtue. This concept can be extended beyond current human life, because of the spiritual dimension which implies that moral responsibility is not only about harmonizing social relationships, but is fundamentally related to the realization of one’s own inner moral strength. The intergenerational moral relationships can be made sense from the virtue of ShengSheng (ceaseless life-generation). For Confucianism, the ceaseless life-generating future world and future humanity have moral significances for our present life. Thus, we are responsible for protecting the vitality of the world, and to protect and enable future generations to actualize their nature. This study concluded with the argument that human rights theory and Confucianism share important similarities in their understanding of moral responsibilities. Namely they both justify moral responsibilities by appealing to the idea of personhood. They share the belief that every person should have the opportunity to actualize the distinctive capacities of personhood which define the special moral status of human beings.Therefore, the duties we have toward others should be based on the actualization of personhood. However, due to the different meanings of the concept of personhood, these two approaches justify responsibility and the enforceability of responsibility in decidedly different ways