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The environmental crisis, one of the great challenges of our time, tends to disenfranchise those who come after us. Arguing that as temporary inhabitants of the earth, we cannot be indifferent to future generations, this book draws on the resources of phenomenology and poststructuralism to help us conceive of moral relations in connection with human temporality. Demonstrating that moral and political normativity emerge with generational time, the time of birth and death, this book proposes two related models of intergenerational and environmental justice. The first entails a form of indirect reciprocity, in which we owe future people both because of their needs and interests and because we ourselves have been the beneficiaries of peoples past; the second posits a generational taking of turns that Matthias Fritsch applies to both our institutions and our natural environment, in other words, to the earth as a whole. Offering new readings of key philosophers, and emphasizing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, Taking Turns with the Earth disrupts human-centered notions of terrestrial appropriation and sharing to give us a new continental philosophical account of future-oriented justice.
— Lisa Guenther
"With characteristic precision and rigor, Matthias Fritsch has produced an original contribution to thinking about intergenerational justice and our relationship to the planet. Taking Turns with the Earth is an exemplary model for how to theorize pressing ethical and political issues through a creative inheritance of the philosophical tradition."
— Samir Haddad
"Intergenerational ethics is at the heart of many of the biggest problems facing humanity today, yet our theories, institutions, and practices remain inadequate to the challenge. This admirable book offers us an ontological approach that is distinctive, innovative, and an important contribution to our ethical self-understanding."
— Stephen M. Gardiner
"Fritsch makes a convincing case for thinking of intergenerational and ecological relationships not as additional features or theoretical extensions of intragenerational and humanistic models of justice, but as constitutive features of justice...[His] style of cogent argumentation appears quite prudent, as it makes phenomenology and deconstruction directly relevant and applicable to those discourses and accessible to other scholars and professionals who are interested in justice and the future of the humanly habitable earth."
— Sam Mickey
"Fritsch argues that our moral obligation to tackle and respond to climate change is grounded in intergenerational justice...The key notion here is asymmetrical intergenerational reciprocity; the author's explication of this notion, and his discussion of potential objections to it, is especially useful and thought provoking...Recommended."
— M. A. Michael
"Taking Turns With the Earthoffers to the reader a rich and incisive analysis of intergenerational justice, especially as it relates to issues pertaining to the environment. With intergenerational ethics being relevant to so many issues that we face today, this book offers a timely theoretical analysis of the nature of our obligations to non-contemporary others."
— Christopher Black
"Matthias Fritsch has written a supremely challenging and timely book about the ontological-normative dimensions of our intergenerational being....[I am] fully on board with the notion that we require ontological thinking in this area, and as far as I know, nobody has attempted this on the same scale or with as much boldness of philosophical vision as Fritsch. His book is a major contribution to our thinking about the philosophical foundations of our intergenerational being. I predict that it will have a profound effect on environmental philosophy, in both analytic and continental circles, for decades to come."
— Byron Williston
"Taking Turns with the Earth is a model of scholarship in continental philosophy. Written in a clear argumentative style that never sacrifices depth or complexity, it shows how central ideas found in Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida—ideas often dismissed as obtuse—can be put to work to help us rethink some of the most pressing ethical issues of our times."
— Marie-Eve Morin
"Matthias Fritsch's Taking Turns with the Earth is a significant, illuminating, and timely—just in time, perhaps—phenomenological and deconstructive ontology and 'hauntology' of the problem of intergenerational justice. To my mind, it is the widest ranging and most profound work on this problem that I have so far encountered."
— Jason M. Wirth
"[How] is one to respond in a meaningful and responsible way to a book that is this meticulously researched, this powerfully argued, this broad in its scope and implications, and, of course, this urgent not just for philosophy but for all of us who have inherited the earth and who have some responsibility for passing it on?[A] uniquely powerful work."
— Michael Naas
"The cogency of [Fritsch's] proposals and, notwithstanding the complexity of the philosophical arguments supporting of them, the impressive clarity of their presentation, make the book a significant contribution to the field of environmental ethics."
— Scott Marratto
This chapter begins by reviewing the so-called ontological problems that affect relations with future people, from the nonexistence challenge and poor epistemic access to problems affecting interaction and world constitution. It is then argued that ontological problems call for ontological solutions—here, investigations of moral agents' being in relation to time and world. Drawing on phenomenological sources, the chapter provides a first sketch of the book's overarching claim that justice becomes an issue for human beings to the extent we are generational beings who are noncontingently subject to birth and death. Birth and death, the argument continues, link us to previous and subsequent generations in ways that are socially and morally relevant. If we take this into account, the dead and the unborn will appear less absent and more (albeit "spectrally") present. The chapter ends by outlining possible responses to many of the ontological problems.
The second chapter elaborates the constitutive role of natality and mortality, sketched in the previous chapter, in much greater detail, with particular focus on Levinas. In the wake of Heidegger and others, Levinas argues that, in accessing the finite time that is co-disclosive of agency, I necessarily encounter the mortal, vulnerable other whose face demands that I let the other live. Agency is co-constituted by a futural demand to let others have possibilities for life beyond my death. Thus, the demand from actual future people on the living comes to be seen as exemplary of moral normativity. However, Levinas insufficiently links this futural responsibility to debts to previous others (including mothers), drawing legitimate feminist and Derridean critiques of his "fecundity" and "paternity." The chapter concludes that the moral demand cannot just be futural but must also be related to gifts from predecessors.
Taking off from the insight offered at the end of the previous chapter, this chapter elaborates indirect, asymmetrical reciprocity as a model of intergenerational justice. This notion is meant to capture the idea that indebtedness to preceding others plays a role in giving to future others, no matter how asymmetrical and altruistic the gift to future people is taken to be. With this goal in view, the chapter connects Derrida's critical reading of Levinas to economic literature on intergenerational transfers, specifically economists who draw on the premodern, indigenous notion of the gift, as famously elaborated by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss. The chapter distinguishes four (ideal) types of intergenerational three-party reciprocities and concludes that the notion of the gift points to the enabling conditions of economic activity. Both gifts of nature and benefits from nonpresent generations belong to these conditions, conditions that are too often "externalized" by market economies.
With this topic of collectively shared goods in mind, the fourth chapter presents turn-taking as the second model of intergenerational justice that elaborates the "spectral" presence of nonpresent generations. Taking turns is more appropriate than reciprocity when the "object" of intergenerational sharing, in particular the natural environment and democratic institutions, is quasi-holistic and organically interrelated, such that it cannot easily be divided into parts nor can parts be substituted for one another. Drawing on Derrida's work on time and democracy, this model's distinct advantages are discussed in view of answering the question as to what a fair turn with earth and future people might be. The chapter concludes by showing that quasi-holistic objects such as earth and climate necessarily precede and outlive generations, and thus are not indifferent to, but co-constitutive of, the very being of generations, the subjects of sharing by turn-taking.
To avoid the humanism that takes the earth to be an indifferent object of intergenerational sharing, the final chapter complicates taking turns by arguing that the earth, understood as the history and habitat of life, for its part turns human beings about. We do not only have human generations taking turns with the earth, but individuals being born of the earth into a generation, while returning to the earth upon death. Humans are both "interred'" (agonistically belonging to a larger time and space here called the earth) and "interring" (responsible for returning others to the earth, as in burial).