Intergenerational equity

Intergenerational equity is the principle that people across generations deserve fair consideration in decisions affecting their lives. It concerns how present benefits, burdens, resources, and risks are distributed over time.

Climate justice: Climate justice addresses the unequal causes, impacts, and responsibilities associated with climate change. It links present emissions and adaptation choices to harms borne by future generations.
Rawlsian just savings principle: Rawls's just savings principle specifies what each generation must preserve or accumulate to sustain just institutions over time. It offers a prominent account of what one generation owes its successors.
Intragenerational equity: Intragenerational equity concerns the fair distribution of benefits and burdens among people living at the same time. It focuses on present-day fairness rather than distribution between generations.
Nonidentity problem: The nonidentity problem concerns cases where a choice changes which people will exist, making it difficult to say that those people were harmed by that choice. It challenges familiar comparisons between a future person's welfare and the alternative in which that person never existed.
Sustainable development: Sustainable development meets present needs while preserving the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Its widely used definition makes fairness between generations central to development policy.
Sustainable yield: Sustainable yield is the rate at which a renewable resource can be used without reducing its long-term availability. It translates concern for future users into limits on present resource extraction.
Discounted utilitarianism: Discounted utilitarianism evaluates outcomes by aggregating utility over time while assigning lower weight to later utility. Pure time discounting can reduce the apparent importance of harms affecting distant generations.
Person-affecting view: A person-affecting view holds that an outcome is better or worse only insofar as it is better or worse for particular people. It tests whether duties to future people require identifying individuals who are made worse off.
Public debt: Public debt is the money a government owes to lenders, accumulated through borrowing. Borrowing can shift costs to future taxpayers, though it can also finance assets they inherit.
Future generations commissioner: A future generations commissioner is a public official tasked with assessing how policies affect people in the long term. Such offices give long-term interests an institutional advocate in present decision-making.

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