On Rawls’s Justice Between Generations

With the prominence of environmental problems,justice between generations has become an increasingly important topic in the academic world.How to achieve justice between generations is a problem that many political philosophies want to explore and pursue.As the first philosopher who proposed justice between generations,Rawls extended the theory of justice from the field of justice between generations to general justice,and pointed out that generational relations are different from general relations.This paper focuses on Rawls’ s justice between generations and discusses the distributive justice between the present and the future generations,and tries to integrate them into an organic whole of the theory of justice.Rawls’ s justice between generations is an integral part of his theory of justice,which tries to solve the problem that how to allocate limited resources between the the present and the future generations.The justice between generations also need a specific environment,that is the lack of resources to a certain extent and the absence of interests between people.In order to prove justice between generations,Rawls puts forward the just saving principle.This principle requires the present generations to save resources for future generations according to a certain rate of savings,which involves the problem of saving rate and saving motivation.In order to solve the problem of saving rates and saving motivation,Rawls introduced present time of entry interpretation,the family model of motivation assumption and the difference principle,which triggered criticism from scholars.Critics argue that the saving motivation is unnecessary and that difference principle also leads to tension between justice between generations and general justice.By examining the critics’ criticisms and Rawls’ amendments,the author argues that the present time of entry interpretation is necessary,but that the family model of motivation assumption is a bit far-fetched and needs to be resolved by "the contracting parties expect the previous generations to follow the savings principle they followed".The tension of justice between generations and general justice can be resolved by the idea of reciprocity.In practice,Rawls’ s justice between generations is also closely related to ecological environment problems.Rawls’ s discussion on justice between generations provides many inspirations for the solution of ecological environment problems.