Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb - cehum - Universidade do Minho

TIME PREFERENCE AND INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE
dimensions of individual behaviour, especially in an intertemporal context.
Individual choices and behaviour are in part the result of objective
factors and circumstances. Th e individual freedom depends on individual
access to social primary goods: the possibility for individuals to conceive
and develop conception of the good life depends also on the possession of
suffi cient social conditions. [8] In Political Liberalism, Rawls himself developed
a “needs principle” (Wolf, 2009), that is to say the necessity to assure
suffi cient social conditions for all, in order to guarantee equal liberty for all.
He recognized then that individuals need to benefi t from suffi cient social
conditions to have the capacity to be free:
the fi rst principle covering the equal basic rights and liberties may easily
be preceded by a lexically prior principle requiring that citizen’s basic needs be
met, at least insofar as their being met is necessary for citizens to understand
and to be able fruitfully to exercise those rights and liberties. Certainly any
such principle must be assumed in applying the fi rst principle (Rawls, 1993).
As the same, the individual capacity to project himself in time, to
think about future, to make plans, are both conditioned and allowed by his
present possibilities. [9] One of the main aspects of individual precariousness
is the diffi culty to make plans for future, to have long-term projects. [10] We
are able to conceive and develop our conception of good life for our future
only if we have now an access to social primary goods.
In parallel, capacity of the members of future generations to conceive
and develop their own conception of good life depends on social conditions
they will inherit. Traditionally, sustainable development is thought
through an implicit opposition between present and future interests and
needs. Th e research of a just allocation of resources in time through the
determination of a just saving rate illustrates such a thing. A just saving
rate is assumed to require from individuals a minimal sacrifi ce to insure to
next generations suffi cient conditions of life. Introducing then a social time
preference in this research of a just allocation of resources in time appears
8 By social primary goods, we mean all resources necessary to conceive and develop his own
conception of good life (access to health, education, etc.).
9 We have to notice that according to Rawls, conceptions of the good are by hypothesis long-term
projects (Rawls, 1999: 408).
10 Many studies show a correlation between social precariousness and the capacity to have longterm
projects. See per example the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu about Algerian workers (Bourdieu,
1963) or the economist Emily Lawrence and her experimentation about the correlation
between poverty and time horizon (Lawrence, 1991).
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