INTRODUCTION

Domination takes many forms: tribe over tribe, faith over faith, nation over nation, class over class, race over race, gender over gender. This chapter concerns a novel form: the present generation's domination of posterity via the medium of greenhouse gas emissions. I contend that our emissions of greenhouse gases constitute unjust domination, analogous in many morally significant respects to certain historic instances of domination that are now almost universally condemned, and, further, that no benefits that we may bequeath to the future can nullify that injustice.

DEFINITION OF DOMINATION

There is a substantial literature on domination, much of it devoted to sociological or anthropological analyses of the forms of domination and resistance to it. When domination occurs among contemporaries, it often exhibits features that will be irrelevant to our discussion: the dominated are compelled to obey the dominators or are humiliated by them; the dominated resist with various subterfuges; the dominated may exhibit false consciousness; and so on. Such features, however prominent in certain contexts, are nevertheless inessential to domination itself.

Iris Marion Young (whose account of domination is concerned exclusively with its political and institutional forms) defines domination as “institutional conditions which inhibit or prevent people from participating in determining their actions or the conditions of their actions.” “Persons,” she adds, “live within structures of domination if other persons or groups can determine without reciprocation the conditions of their action.”