Intergenerational Justice and the Right to the Future: Reflections from the Legal-Philosophical Thought of Jesús Ballesteros

SW 88- Intergenerational Justice and the Right to the Future: Reflections from the Legal-Philosophical Thought of Jesús Ballesteros

Convenors: Lucía Aparicio; Ana Colomer Segura

Ana Paz Garibo Peyro; Ana Strineka Bande; Blanca Lirio Asensio; Julio LLop Tordera; Vicente; Emilia Bea Pérez;Pedro Talavera Fernández; Hugo Ramírez García 

Contact: lucia.aparicio@uv.es; Ana.Colomer@uv.es

Intergenerational justice constitutes one of the most crucial and pressing topics in contemporary philosophy of law. This workshop proposes to explore it in a critical and systematic manner through the philosophical framework developed in the work of Jesús Ballesteros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Valencia. The aim is to create a space for interdisciplinary dialogue that integrates perspectives from political and legal philosophy, human rights theory, philosophy of technology, and political ecology, in order to advance the conceptualization of intergenerational justice in the twenty-first century.

Ballesteros’ thought offers a rigorous and distinctive alternative to dominant liberal and utilitarian approaches. His personalist anthropology, combined with a sustained critical engagement with modernity, technocracy, and ecological crisis, provides a productive standpoint from which to reassess the legal and moral conditions for obligations between generations. His insistence on human dignity as the irreducible foundation of legal order — and his critique of reductionist conceptions of progress and juridical temporality — makes his framework particularly well-suited to address the normative challenges that intergenerational justice poses to contemporary legal systems.

The workshop is structured around four interconnected lines of inquiry:

1. Philosophical foundations of intergenerational justice. This line examines the anthropological, philosophical, and normative foundations of intergenerational justice as articulated in Ballesteros’ work on justice, human rights, and juridical temporality. It aims to clarify the criteria that justify obligations toward future generations and present responsibilities for past actions, as well as their articulation with classical theories of distributive and procedural justice.
2. Rights of future generations: justice or beneficence? Progressivity or trivialization? Taking as its starting point the recognition of challenges such as the ecological crisis, the habitability of the planet, and the effects of technological solutionism, this line proposes to reflect on the distinction between justice and beneficence in intergenerational terms — specifying what transforms a moral expectation into an enforceable right. It also examines the moral and juridical conditions for human rights to remain the axis of a theory of justice with both synchronic and diachronic reach, attending to the twin risks of rights inflation and rights dilution when the framework is extended across generations.
3. Personalist environmentalism and intergenerational justice. Jesús Ballesteros has developed a sustained critique of contemporary environmentalism from a personalist perspective that emphasizes human dignity and the protection of the environment as part of juridical and ethical responsibility. This workshop seeks to integrate that personalist perspective with intergenerational justice, exploring how ecological concerns can reformulate juridical obligations toward the future without losing sight of the centrality of the person. The goal is to resist both anthropocentric reductionism and the dissolution of the person into purely ecological variables.
4. Justice among coexisting generations. The premise of this line is that the acceleration of time — largely caused by processes of technological innovation — demands that distributive justice be informed and strengthened from and through a temporal perspective. Such a perspective must revise the rights and duties between generations that coexist in the present, addressing how compressed temporal horizons intensify conflicts between generational interests and what legal frameworks are adequate to that pace of change.

The workshop brings together scholars from philosophy of law, political philosophy, and human rights theory. It aims to produce conceptually precise contributions to the debate on intergenerational justice — grounded in a coherent and well-defined philosophical tradition, rather than in purely policy-driven or eclectic interdisciplinarity.

The congress theme — “Law in the Face of the Changing Problems of the World” — provides an ideal institutional context for this initiative. The ecological crisis, poverty, migration, and the governance of digital technologies are not only technical or political challenges: they are also profoundly ethical ones, with an irreducibly intergenerational dimension. By engaging these questions through the work of Ballesteros, this workshop contributes a philosophically rigorous perspective that foregrounds human dignity, juridical temporality, and the normative foundations of responsibility across generations — a perspective that has not yet received sufficient attention in the international literature on philosophy of law.