FORTHCOMING SEMINAR
Thursday 14th July 2011, 1300-1400
45B AZ 04
University of Surrey
Dr Rupert Read
UEA (Philosophy)
A policy proposal to take future generations seriously:
Strong guardians
Plato said that, if we are to have a just society, we should be ruled by guardians. Habermas and
other deliberative-democratic philosophers of course abhor such autocracy. But: what if the
guardians were selected democratically, by sortition? And what if their deliberations became in turn
a high-profile model of what deliberation in a democratic society could be?
Still, there seems little case for substituting guardians for normal elected representatives, for
decisions which can be made about us, by us ourselves or by people who represent us. But: what
about cases where the people who ought to be heard in or even to be making the decisions have
no voice -- even over matters which are life or death matters for them?
Future people are the most obvious case of such people. I present therefore a broadly
Habermasian case for powerful guardians for future people, not only to act so as to give future
people standing in the political system, but, and more importantly, to take the formal place
occupied in our current political system by the royal assent, and make something meaningful and
major out of it: to give future people a real veto (as our kings and queens used to have) over
legislation. This would be likely to produce outcomes a lot closer to perfect, or at least a lot further
from impending apocalypse, than those provided by our current institutions. For it would give future
people not just a proxy voice, but the closest approximation we can give them to a vote, indeed a
casting vote, that where necessary comprehensively outvotes us, the people alive today. And after
all, this is surely appropriate; for, so long as we bequeath to future people a decent and survivable
inheritance, there will over time be a lot more of them than there are of us…
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