Picking What Persists: Sociocultural Natural Capital and Intergenerational Justice

Abstract

Attempts to determine the value and intergenerational importance of environmental goods have a difficult time accounting for the non-basic services that ecosystems provide. Discussions of ‘Critical Natural Capital’ deem some ecological goods ‘non-substitutable’: acting justly towards the future requires their preservation. These characterizations, however, often miss a crucial distinction between the type of non-substitutability exhibited by basic CNC and sociocultural CNC: the former is only technologically and practically non-substitutable while the latter is constructed as such by specific groups regarding token natural spaces. In this thesis, I address whether sociocultural natural capital is a required component in the basket of goods we leave for future generations. While the constructed nature of the value of these goods makes their implication in a theory of intergenerational justice subject to a number of objections, I argue—employing the Rawlsian tools of the veil of ignorance and the original position—that they are indeed a required component of a just bequest.