Intergenerational Multispecies Justice: No Longer a Leap Elsewhere

Abstract

USTICE IS A LOFTY AND WEIGHTY CONCEPT. LOOKING BACKWARDS, IT PROMISES THE restoration of a moral order heretofore disrespected and violated; looking forward, the establishment of the institutional conditions in which lives might flourish without fear of arbitrary deprivation and harm. This, at least, is the ideal. In practice, under conditions where the logics of colonialism, capitalism, extractivism and human exceptionalism remain hegemonic, the justice mainstream institutions deliver all too often serves to lend legitimacy of the greatest injustices of our age (Davis et al.). Too often, the lens of contemporary institutional justice renders invisible those who are harmed, not by discrete acts that show up as aberrant against the background of fossil-fuelled and extractive forms of life, but by those normalised forms of life themselves. Future generations of humans, but also current and future generations of beings other than humans are chief amongst them.