As part of their ongoing research on Present Democracy for Future Generations, the Laboratory of Ethics and Political Philosophy in the Nova University, Lisbon’s Institute of Philosophy, Ifilnova, held a conference on 19-20 September 2022 on Constitutionalizing the long-term future: Establishing intergenerational justice in national constitutions.
This event was designed to discuss the effectiveness and legitimacy of intergenerational clauses which are included in national constitutions. It is part of a wider research project which is running for three years from January 2021 to January 2024 to discuss “the possibility of reconfiguring certain key concepts originated in modern democratic theory, most forcefully by expanding their timescale in favour of the far-off future. This involves exploring the cross-temporal range of the concepts of rights, representation, sovereignty and egalitarianism in such a way as to assess their viability in a world order that must overcome presentism to solve its most pressing problems without being willing to give up its fundamental liberal-democratic culture.”
Their overall focus is to test whether or not: “contemporary democracies’ bias towards the short term is systemic and necessary to the liberal democratic project, or whether they already contain the conceptual and institutional instruments that allow for some sort of long-term strategic decision-making in favour of the far-off future.”
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For details about the event, please see the Ifilnova website.
