Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics [Hardcover]

Our capacity to reshape the future has never been more powerful. Yet our ability to foresee the consequences of what we do has not kept pace. Is the idea that we have responsibilities to future generations therefore meaningful? This book argues that it is, with the aid of a unique reading of the care ethics tradition.Preface Acknowledgements PART I 1. Introduction: Responsibility and Reflexive Uncertainty 2. The Limits of Intergenerational Justice 3. The Limits of Precaution 4. Administrative Imaginaries and Intergenerational Ethics PART II 5. Care and Uncertain Futures 6. Normative Implications of Care 7. Towards a Political Morality of Uncertainty 8. Horizons of Care

Christopher Groves' Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics is that rarest of academic books, one that challenges existing dominant thinking from within, and offers a fresh and refreshing alternative based on the creative integration of seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge from outside the dominant paradigm and moral imaginary.

It challenges the dominant philosophical (and political) framing of obligations and rights between current and future people/generations as how to manage or think about inevitable distributional conflicts over goods and services we in the present pass on, or not, to future people. This dominant framing is also often informed by a liberal, individualist moral idiom, or as Groves puts it a 'managerial-cum-administrative' rationality, that is historically specific to contemporary technological societies. Groves, marshalling an impressive range of normative voices (from Hans Jonas, Hannah Ardent, Ulrich Beck, Alasdair MacIntyre to Brian Wynne), and disciplinary perspectives (phenomenology, science technological studies, moral psychology to post-normal science) challenges this liberal-distributive moral and social imaginary and presents an immanent critique and alternative. This alternative focuses on the ineliminable uncertainty that is constitutl³!