Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Rupert Read This paper suggests that future generations are collectively our children. Thus we ought to love them. Not merely to be fair to them. This fatally undermines the fundamental idea of Rawlsian liberalism, that ‘Justice [as fairness] is the first virtue of social institutions’. For if I am right that justice (especially, justice as fairness) is a deeply inadequate basis on which to place our most crucial social responsibility of all, our responsibility to the future, then it can hardly be the first virtue of social institutions. I urge instead that care/love is essential to our responsibility to the future. This, contrary to appearances, is less utopian than Rawlsianism, because it has at least some chance of delivering the safeguarding of future people that is so badly needed. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, where he specialises in Wittgenstein, literature and philosophy, and environmental and political philosophy. His Applying Wittgenstein has recently appeared with Continuum Press, and his There is no such thing as social science with Ashgate.
