The Make-or-Break Decade for the SDGs has begun

What these terms have in common is that
they invoke the positive utopia of a world
with prosperity for more people without
irreversible environmental degradation
and consider a shift toward emissionminimized
modes of production to be
possible. However, the paths to the goal
are very different: They include a new
social contract, common good economics
instead of capitalist appropriation,
or decoupling economic growth from
environmental consumption.”
“We have to ask ourselves why we live
too much in today and for today,” German
Chancellor Angela Merkel recently
said. She recommended the Brundtland
Report not only as a contract between
generations, but also as a blueprint for
a social contract and a goal of the state.
Merkel believes that this broader view
also provides a good justification for the
current court decisions on climate issues.
Generational justice – from a
factual concept to a controversial
concept
Hans-Jürgen Urban and Christoph Ehlscheid
presented an excellent essay on intergenerational
justice in 2020, excerpts
I quote below: “Intergenerational justice
is a core vocabulary of the contemporary
debate on the present and future of the
welfare state. Terms such as ‘generational
solidarity’ and ‘generational war’ provide
a framework within which a variety of
interpretations of generational relations
operate.
“Welfare state discourses often speak of
‘welfare state generations.’ This refers to
the ‘exchange and interrelationship of
age groups linked by flows of benefits
and funding.’ Accordingly, the employed
from the middle generation finance the
retirement income of the older generation
in the form of pensions and annuities
from their earned income through
contributions and taxes.
“The concept of ‘equity’ is also ambiguous.
The theories of philosophers John
Rawls and Michael Walzer have been
particularly influential. According to
Rawls, the task of justice theory is to
find ‘principles of social justice’ on which
a society can agree .... Best known for
this is his dictum of ‘justice as fairness.’
Constitutive of Rawls’ concept of justice
are two principles: According to the
principle of liberty, everyone has an
equal right to the same endowment of
basic freedoms; and according to the
principle of difference, economic and
social inequalities are permissible only if
they confer the greatest possible benefits
on the least advantaged.”
To whom do we owe solidarity?
Rawls is also one of the most important
representatives of modern contract
theory. The models of fair and
intergenerational justice are based on a
common idea of a social contract. This
is understood as a concept to morally
and institutionally legitimize statal systems.
Every citizen automatically joins
this contract by birth or naturalization.
And therein lies a problem for some:
“Why should we feel bound by a social
contract that we have never actively
signed? To whom do we owe solidarity
in the first place?” asks economist Marcel
Fratzscher provocatively in an interview
in the weekly ZEIT, and he answers this
himself: “We have noticed by now that
we live in a global world. None of the
major challenges today, neither the
climate crisis nor the pandemics, can
be solved nationally; they do not stop
at borders. So we can’t be indifferent
to what people are doing in Asia, for
example. Today, however, two-thirds
of the world’s population live there,
almost 40 percent in China and India.
Climate protection helps them, too; it
helps even more the countries in Africa
that are poorest, and in those countries,
in turn, the very poorest. They’re the
first to be hit by the droughts and the
floods, so we owe them solidarity.”
From the discourse of inequality to
the discourse of generation
Back to Hans-Jürgen Urban and Christoph
Ehlscheid: “The new capitalism is
not only more unequal and individualistic
than its predecessor. It is also in
a systemic ‘economic-ecological pincer
crisis.’ Capitalist economic growth
has mutated from problem solver to
problem driver. While it traditionally
contributes to increasing prosperity and
defusing social distribution conflicts,
today it forces the unequal distribution
of income and wealth and the overexploitation
of nature. It promotes social
division by increasing the wealth of the
rich and at the same time pushing more
and more people into precarious living
conditions. And it takes up so much of
nature’s resources that its regenerative
capacity is overtaxed. Therefore, traditional
strategies to stimulate growth do
not lead out of the crisis, but further
into it.
“Instead of this, the idea of an inclusive
concept of justice includes not only intergenerational
money flows but also
the distribution of other social goods in
any generational balances in the sense
of Michael Walzer, and combines the
justice criteria of the respective spheres
of distribution into an integrated distribution
model with as few contradictions
as possible:
► Securing the standard of living as a
cross-generational promise of benefits
► Generationally fair use of nature
“The planetary limits of utilization at the
same time mark the limits of material
value creation and thus the framework
within which intergenerational distribution
processes must operate.”
8 Global Goals Yearbook 2021