Seems like great work, and I’ll engage with it more in the future! But I wanted to push back a little on this excerpt:
According to Tonn (2021), only two of the 100 national constitutions he analyzed included specific provisions advocating for future generations. Constitutions could also be amended to establish new institutions, like Tonn’s proposed national anticipatory institutions (NAI), the World Court of Generations (WCG), the InterGenerational Panel on Perpetual Obligations (IPPO), or others. Please refer to his aforementioned book for more information.
You can check a paper I co-authored on the constitutionalization of future generations to see that 81 out of 196 constitutions (41%) explicitly mention future generations, with varied levels of legal protection. In short, one of our takeaways is that constitutions don’t seem like a quite tractable way of protecting future generations, since many of these de jure protections don’t translate into de facto actions – the latter seem to mostly be a product of other factors. I haven’t read Tonn’s work.
Thank you for the update! I will add this to the post as soon as I can.
I find it very exciting that so many constitutions have included legal protections for future generations. Even if it hasn’t influenced policy yet, it could serve as a means of justifying longtermist policy once enough momentum has built up.
Seems like great work, and I’ll engage with it more in the future! But I wanted to push back a little on this excerpt:
You can check a paper I co-authored on the constitutionalization of future generations to see that 81 out of 196 constitutions (41%) explicitly mention future generations, with varied levels of legal protection. In short, one of our takeaways is that constitutions don’t seem like a quite tractable way of protecting future generations, since many of these de jure protections don’t translate into de facto actions – the latter seem to mostly be a product of other factors. I haven’t read Tonn’s work.
Thank you for the update! I will add this to the post as soon as I can. I find it very exciting that so many constitutions have included legal protections for future generations. Even if it hasn’t influenced policy yet, it could serve as a means of justifying longtermist policy once enough momentum has built up.
Edit: changes made.