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The Political Imaginary of Care: Generic versus Singular Futures

Chris Groves1

Introduction
I argue here that discussions of our responsibilities to future generations must avoid certain
assumptions, which might be usefully described as a political imaginary of managerialism
(taking my cue here from Dale Jamieson and Alasdair Macintyre). These assumptions –
constituting in effect, an outline model of subjectivity – shape the conceptual framework
through which mainstream philosophical reflections have grasped the future as an object of
moral consideration. Barbara Adam and I (Adam and Groves 2007) have proposed that the
future orientation of action, knowledge and ethics is a necessary constitutive ingredient of all
social practice, and that how it is produced shapes the possibilities for thought and action in
the present in often unacknowledged ways. I argue here that the political imaginary of
managerialism provides an inappropriate basis for understanding ex ante responsibility. This
is because it fails to take into account sociological factors, specifically, the evolving social
meaning of uncertainty in late modern technologised societies. A basis for understanding
future-oriented responsibility that follows more intimately the contours of the evolution of
uncertainty may, I suggest, be provided by a political imaginary based upon a
phenomenology of care, where care is interpreted as a practical orientation derived from
experiences of attachment.

The social evolution of uncertainty

A major intersection between the sociology of science and technology on the one hand, and
the philosophy of technology on the other, concerns the connections between technics,
uncertainty, and the coordinates of social conflict. Incorporating authors such as Günther
Anders, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas and more recently
Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Alfred Nordmann, philosophical treatments of the issues are
complemented by the work of sociologists and science and technology studies scholars who
have considered the connections between technology, uncertainty and governance (e.g. Beck
1992, 1995; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990; Ravetz 2004; Wynne 1992; Wynne 2002). Since
WWII, we have seen the emergence of complex societies in which complex technologies
have penetrated deeply into the everyday lives of citizens. A consequence of these
developments is the increasing centrality to these societies of radical uncertainty experienced
as “reflexive” (Beck 1992), that is, as built into the use of technologies themselves. The
widespread reliance on complex technologies, from synthetic chemistry to biotechnology,
creates the systematic possibility for runaway unintended outcomes. In technological
societies, human beings share agency with technological apparatuses whose workings and
causal reach they have no hope of understanding. The vulnerability of scientific and
technological expertise is thus exposed, as its ability to foresee the consequences of its
practical employment are shown to be necessarily limited (Nowotny 2003; Ravetz 1993).

For Ulrich Beck, this evolution of “reflexive” uncertainty displaces the problem of the
scarcity of goods from the centre stage in technologized societies, foregrounding instead the
plenitude of “bads”, that is, risks. New questions of injustice emerge: social antagonisms
open up where divides between those who benefit from technologization and those who bear
1
ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS), Cardiff
University. Email address: grovesc1@cf.ac.uk

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its risks become apparent. In some cases the members of these two classes are the same, a
point which is key to Beck’s proposition, advanced as part of his general risk society thesis,
that technological risks are an equalizing force: “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic”
(Beck 1992, p. 36). More often, however – as when poor communities attract potentially
hazardous industrial facilities and energy infrastructure, creating “faulty environments”
fractured by a range of socio-economic and environmental inequalities (Irwin et al. 1999) –
the distribution of risks and uncertainties can reinforce or exacerbate existing injustices.
Existing inequalities tend to mean that the unintended consequences of technologization are
concentrated along existing social faultlines, rather than being evenly distributed.

Perhaps the most fundamental inequality generated by the evolution of uncertainty lies
between present and future generations. The power of those living now to change the basic
conditions of future humans and non-humans in entirely unforeseeable ways through the use
of technology is undoubtedly great, as Hans Jonas argued in his Imperative of Responsibility
(Jonas 1984). It is here that the “blowback” characteristic of technological society, which
Beck describes with his concept of “reflexivity”, and Alfred Nordmann with the idea of
“naturalised technology” (Nordmann 2005) takes on its most ethically troubling
characteristic. Even anthropogenic global warming (AGW), which might be taken as a prime
exemplar of Beck’s “democratizing” risk, is by its nature an externality of cheap energy that
will primarily have to be dealt with by generations who come after those whose patterns of
consumption have contributed most to it.

Philosophical reflections on future oriented responsibility

The existential condition of technologised societies has been described as one of “post-
normal” uncertainty (e.g. Ravetz 2004). The increasing emergence of this form of uncertainty
as a problem for governance, as described by Beck, Niklas Luhmann and others, comes
roughly at the same time as the appearance of intergenerational justice as a specific topic
within applied ethics and political philosophy. Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, debates on the
subject initially took issues of energy provision and population as their signature foci. At the
risk of some simplification, it can be said therefore that the problems upon which this
generation of ethicists focused largely centred on the prevalent assumptions of neo-classical
economics regarding the allocation of goods between generations. Efficient allocations of
goods were thought of by economists as achievable through e.g. incentives for saving,
continuing technological innovation, and steady economic growth. Going beyond criteria of
efficiency in the direction of other values, such as justice, was held to entail extra
redistributive measures between present and future that were thought to conflict with what
was known about individual motivation, e.g. the pure time preferences of rational economic
agents that served as the justification for practices like future-discounting. John Rawls, Derek
Parfit and others offered critical reflections on these economic assumptions which sought to
defend different interpretations of the normative basis for responsible action towards the
future, based on for example the recognition of the formal equality of present and future
generations.

In general, these debates (e.g. MacLean and Brown 1983; Sikora and Barry 1978) remained
within the coordinates provided by neo-classical welfare economics, even though they
contained many examples of extensive critiques of orthodox economic reasoning.
Philosophers produced critiques of economic approaches to future discounting based on
defences of egalitarianism as applicable to future generations, on the basis that there was no
morally justifiable reason to deny future people an equal status with present ones (e.g. Parfit

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1983). The possibility, for example, that externalities of production and consumption could
(as with AGW) lead to less economic growth did not generally trouble the debates.

We might ask, then, who the subject of and within these debates was: who was the actor
imagined as taking action for the sake of the future? Ethical reflection was imagined as
guidance provided to buttress the range of objective knowledge available to policymakers as
wise technocratic managers of resources, restructuring their efforts to predict and control the
distribution of goods amongst present and future generations. The forms of knowledge
available to planners represented the future as generic and as empty (Adam and Groves 2007,
pp. 71-72), as the aggregate outcome of abstract, mechanistic social processes (making
society the mirror of nature), yet which nonetheless held infinite possibilities for the further
development of the means (such as technological innovation) to continuing economic growth.

What is notable here is that these assumptions close off serious consideration of issues arising
from post-normal uncertainty. The possibility that the global and long-term distribution of
risk might be an equally significant – or even more significant – problem for
intergenerational ethics did not become a central feature of the debates over IgJ. Nor did they
address the theme of how far reflexive uncertainty should be taken as having undermined
assumptions about what could be reliably known of the future, and how far this made it
impossible to control future outcomes. The philosophical critiques of orthodox economic
assumptions about intergenerational justice mounted in the 60s and 70s at most sought to
control the distribution of resources so as to achieve a distribution which reflected a principle
of formal equality, extending out the reach of a liberal, social-contractual polity in which
reciprocal respect for individual rights held sway, to encompass the future. The political
imaginary of future-oriented responsibility that underpins the mainstream reflections on
intergenerational justice to which I have referred reflects a territory of governance laid out by
liberal-democratic post-war political settlements and managerialist interpretations of the role
and reach of disembedded expertise in shaping governance (Macintyre 1981). Philosophical
critiques rooted in it largely failed to dig deep enough to undermine the foundations of the
economic orthodoxy, and of the “future horizons” (Adam and Groves 2007) that shaped it.

Towards a future-oriented “phenomenology of ethical life”

In response to the failure of managerialist assumptions about governance to encompass the
meaning of responsibility in a “post-normal” world, Dale Jamieson has called for a revolution
in our “system of values” in order to help us understand the meaning of responsible action in
such a world (Jamieson 1992, p. 150). What I will now argue is that a revolution of this kind
would imply understanding differently what it means to be responsible ex ante to and for the
future. It implies a deep critique of certain key elements of the action-knowledge-ethics
complex that informs both managerialist governance of our futures and the limited
philosophical critique thereof. This critique, I want to suggest, is in certain key respects
similar to the criticisms made by some feminist philosophers of traditional assumptions about
what it means to do moral philosophy. It takes guidance from the concept of care, as a moral
orientation and, more deeply, a conception of what it means to be human. In this way, my
critique aims to respond to the evolution of uncertainty, and its implications for dominant
accounts of future-oriented responsibility, on the basis of a “phenomenology of ethical life”
(Williams 1993, p. 93). The kind of (in Jamieson’s phrase) “[c]ollective moral change”
needed to deal with the evolution of uncertainty I have described is one which cannot be
brought about by articulating fundamental principles which decisions should respect in order
to be rational. Rather, it is necessary not just to understand why we should act responsibly,

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but to understand how we should act. This implies, therefore, attention to the thickness of
actual ethical practice and how ethical demands present themselves as part of experience.

There is therefore a structural similarity between some key elements of my argument and
those put forward by Fiona Robinson (1999) for the significance of care ethics in
international relations, as distinct from liberal-cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches.
There are differences too, however, and particularly around the ways in which I want to stress
how care, as an element of subjectivity, reveals to us a different tenor of future-orientation, a
new (yet familiar, because deeply rooted) constellation of future-oriented action, knowledge,
and ethics.

First, it is necessary to understand that there is a deep link between the feminist and
phenomenological (especially Heideggerian) elaborations of care. Fundamentally, they both
conceive of human being as self concern which is nevertheless thoroughly relational, that is,
constituted through attachment to concrete others which serve as anchors for the construction
of a self as a narrative identity (Ricoeur 1984; van Hooft 1995). Care in this sense can best be
seen as the typically human form of conatus, the self-concern through which entities seek to
maintain their form over time in relation to other entities (Jonas 1982). Experiences of
attachment are taken to be constitutive of a sense of self. This is because experiences of
attachment, from infancy onward, produce a sense of what can be relied on, of more or less
stable expectation. Attachment, as the basis of expectation, is the means by which we
construct, in concert with our significant others, an uncertain future that nonetheless offers us
the promise of the continuation and development of our selves (Marris 1991).

In this relational model of subjectivity, the subject’s are not simply given to it in some special
quasi-Cartesian mode of introspection, but are discovered through connection and
communication with others. Further, fulfilling and developing interests is not simply a matter
of finding and consuming instrumental goods. It takes place against a background of social
meanings which are constitutive for the identity of the subject, and a set of potential objects
of attachment which are provided by the socio-cultural contexts which the developing
individual inhabits. The most important goods, those to which we develop strong and lasting
attachments, are the strongest contributors to this sense of self, and should therefore be
identified as constitutive values, ingredients of what we take to be a meaningful life. A
paradigmatic example of such a good would be a close friend. Friendship implies a
connection in which the flourishing of the other is seen by us as a condition of our own
flourishing, and vice versa (O'Neill 1993). But other examples of such constitutive values are
others which are not other people, though they are still concrete entities: cultural objects (my
bike, a holy book, an artwork), places (my home, the landscape which surrounds it, other
landscapes and places within them), institutions (clubs, workplaces, unions) and ideals
(justice, fairness, courage). These objects and the connections which develop among them
over time (e.g. suppose I work for the Workers’ Educational Association which embodies for
me virtues of solidarity and learning) are the stuff from which my narrative sense of self are
formed (van Hooft 1995).

In their role as anchors for expectation, it is through attachments that the future takes on
shape and weight for us (insisting, as the past persists). It is by being attached and committed
to concrete others that the future first becomes the source of ethical demands, calling upon us
to act and to extend our knowledge of the world around us, even if these demands are mainly
pre-reflexive. Yet if attachment is a condition of the reliable fulfilment of needs and thus of
our existential security, it also makes us vulnerable, as the constitutive values to which we are

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attached are singular, sui generis, and irreplaceable, rather than being substitutable in the way
that instrumental goods are. Like us, they have singular futures in and through which their
interests will either be furthered or harmed. Ethical life, woven around attachments at a
largely pre-reflexive level of being, is thus first and foremost concerned with exploring and
anticipating the needs of the concrete others who are objects of attachment for us.
Responsibility here orients us to the needs whose fulfilment will underpin the future
flourishing of those diverse human and non-human others for whom we care. Even ideals, on
this analysis, can be said to have needs and interests. Learning how to fulfil the
responsibilities generated by the connection between our self-concern and the well-being of
others is a difficult process, and one which teaches us about the limits of control. With
respect to human and living others, we learn about the need to let others be within the
relationships that connect us to them. In this mode of practical learning, we learn sensitivity
to inequalities of power that obtain between individuals, in trying to understand what needs
should be met and how this can be effectively done in ways which respect the other as other.

Ethics, at this level, is not driven by fully conscious rational reflection, but by attention,
imagination, and empathic perspective taking. Built into it is a model of responsibility which
engages emotion in cognition, and cognition with careful action, one which is alive to the role
within relationships for non-reciprocal and asymmetrical responsibility. Subjectivity, viewed
through the lens of care, is not rational, disinterested and implicitly modelled on the ideal of
an architect who plans, decides and controls the future based on judgements about optimal
outcomes, but is more like an artisan who, working with a plastic material, is attentive to the
concrete potential held within it and coaxes it forth, employing the full gamut of her
capacities (Adam and Groves 2007, pp. 134-135).2

The woodworker is not the architect of the figure she carves, and nor is the mother the
architect of her daughter. Their relation to the future of the objects of their concern is one
of care, in which they seek, through their sensitivity to what might emerge, to accompany
the desired virtual potential of the living present to its full realisation in an awaited future
present, and perhaps beyond.
(Adam and Groves 2007, p. 140)

Because attachment, and care, are so basic to being human, it is possible to understand why
certain common criticisms of care ethics that base themselves on Carol Gilligan’s elaboration
of it as a “different voice” (Gilligan 1982) are based on misconceptions. As Gilligan herself
pointed out, it is not that there are two orientations, justice and care, characteristically
statistically predominant among males and females respectively (Gilligan 1993, p. 209).
Rather, there is a continuous background of attachment that requires certain virtues in order
to be preserved and developed, virtues such as patience, generosity and a willingness to
listen. And there will be developmental dramas surrounding the negotiation and loss of
attachments which lead to the emergence of more explicitly reflective forms of judgement
needed to deal fairly and respectfully with those to whom we are attached. But to view these
forms of reflective judgement as entirely separate from the background within which they are
actually rooted – that is, as gaining their ultimate direction from transcendental principles – is
to reify them.

Care as a form of subjectivity attuned to moral practice therefore does not provide a set of
universal principles through which action can be reflectively justified either before or after
the event. Rather, it serves as the continuous background against which all action takes place,

2
See also John Protevi’s (2001) treatment of this distinction within ancient Greek philosophy.

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and from which, in some circumstances and under the influence of some social practices, we
feel it necessary to separate ourselves. How and why this happens, and how the result is a
different set of practices for dealing with attachments, is an interesting topic in its own right.
Jessica Benjamin (Benjamin 1988) and Peter Marris (e.g. 1996) are two commentators who,
in the fields of psychoanalytic theory and sociology respectively, have analyzed how
attachments to autonomy and separation serve as particular strategies for dealing with
uncertainty by enabling subjects to distance themselves in various ways from other, more
concrete attachments. Part of the significance of Carol Gilligan’s original criticisms of
Lawrence Kohlberg’s developmental schema of moral development in children was perhaps
that detaching oneself from particular attachments in favour of universal ideals of justice was
a strategy mainly yemployed by adolescent boys to deal with their own developmental
turmoil.

Marris’ work traces how the formation of and attachment to ideals of autonomy can serve to
reinforce inequalities of power by effectively exploiting the more extensive attachments and
commitments of others and their consequent vulnerability. A manager tells his secretary just
before the end of the working day he needs her to work late to finish a task, knowing that as a
single mother she needs the job. A company that is the largest employer in a locality
announces it will relocate its production facilities unless its costs, including business rates,
can be reduced – forcing the local authority, concerned for the economic health of the area, to
concur. With autonomy comes flexibility, and with it the need to systematically survey, map
and make more predictable the environment within which one operates from a position of
detached “objectivity”.3 Such a strategy typically requires a managerialist or architectural
stance towards the future, and consequently tends to construct it as an empty future, in which
outcomes of action are measured against generic values like utility and possible outcomes are
distinguished from each other on the basis of comparisons undertaken in terms of such
generic values. As a result, the value of attachments tends to be assessed in terms of their
instrumental value, rather than their constitutive value. Such a forced translation can lead to
serious conflict between those who seek autonomy and flexibility as a way of dealing with
attachment, and those who foreground attachments as anchors in the face of uncertain futures.
The translation of constitutive into instrumental values is an imposition of one social meaning
on top of another (O'Neill 1993, pp. 119-121; Raz 1986, pp. 325, 350-321), revealing the
politics of uncertainty. The managerialist ethics which we saw reflected in mainstream
approaches to intergenerational justice therefore is not free of this political background. If
dominant discourses about intergenerational justice reflect a particular political imaginary,
then the understanding of future-oriented responsibility supported by this imaginary also
implicates within it real political conflict, in addition to conceptual exclusions.

Care as intergenerational ethical orientation

The conflicts which may emerge between (in Marris’ language) strategies of autonomy and
strategies of solidarity support the point made by some feminist philosophers that thinking
about ethics through the lens of care necessitates a political transformation of how we
understand ethical life in general (Tronto 1993). Care, as the focus of a political imaginary,
does not supplant justice, and nor is it a useful addition to is that will make us better people in
our private lives. Rather, understanding better the forms of responsibility to which care calls
us will transform what we think of as justice, fairness, respect and so on. To put it in
Hegelian fashion, the requirement is that we understand justice not as based on Moralität, i.e.
3
This theme in Marris resonates both with Beck’s (2000) “individualization” thesis and the work of Zygmunt
Bauman (2005) on “liquidity”, whilst simultaneously locating the orientation towards autonomy in a broader
political context.

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foundational individualistic values such as autonomy and individual dignity, but as part of a
thicker tissue of Sittlichkeit which begins from social relations. It places the singular futures
of attachments at the forefront of our concern, and questions the self-sufficiency of ideals of
autonomy and individual freedom.

A care orientation does not therefore want to replace universality and impartiality with
particularity and partiality. Rather, it aims to displace certain assumptions about what justice
and the good must necessarily mean, and replace them with other options that grow out of
specific modes of how ethics is practiced. But how useful is such a move for understanding
intergenerational justice? The case for responsibility outlines by Jonas, for example, brings
distant generations as well as proximate ones into the scope of moral concern. Is it true that
care does not seem to “respond well to distance” (Robinson, p. 43), where distance is
temporal as well as spatial? After all, paying attention to the actuality of ethical life is usually
taken in care ethics to provide a better understanding of the motivation for moral action than
that provided by mainstream ethics. But is care for concrete others a good motivation for
attending to responsibilities to distant future generations?

Although there had not been much attention paid within feminist philosophy to the relevance
of care for intergenerational ethics, there is an implicit debate amongst feminist philosophers
on this issue, with some – such as Marilyn Friedman (1993, pp. 87-88) – seeing significant
problems for care ethics here, and others – such as Virginia Held (1993) – have been more
positive. In exploring care’s potential, a point raised by some communitarian approaches to
intergenerational justice about the grounds of motivation for responsibility is relevant. For
some communitarians, the nature of responsibilities towards the future, and the roots of
motivation for fulfilling them, can perhaps best be understood on the basis of our continuous
community with the future. The future is not separated from the present, but connected by
evolving traditions (Callahan 1971; De-Shalit 1995), which should be considered as
continuously woven narratives of meaning.

The elements from which such narratives are woven are the singular futures of objects of
attachment, for which we care and through which our self-understanding develops and is
supported. The future is not simply a generic one, an empty field of possibility. It is
populated with – and indeed constructed from – the latent futures of what we care about. But
communitarian responses to ethical problems bring in issues of parochialism and
conservatism. It does not follow from the existence of commitments and an overarching
tradition or narrative to which they contribute that it would fulfil our responsibilities to future
generations to pass it on, even if it served as an effective motivation for acting. Slavery was
seen by some in the southern states as an inextricable part of their culture, for example.

We cannot rest content with communitarian solutions as a result. Care ethics, however, has an
intimate connection with concepts of flourishing, as I have indicated. Part of the relational
phenomenology of care is the interconnectedness of the flourishing of different individuals. I
have argued elsewhere (Groves 2009, pp. 26-27) that care for concrete others, as part of our
moral development, necessarily extends to include concern for, and reflection on, the general
socio-political and ecological conditions under which needs can best be met. The evolving
interconnectedness, over time, of objects of attachment moves out from our implicit and
explicit commitments to particular others to extend to their general short and long-term needs
and the needs of others in general. Issues of care extend into issues of justice informed by the
need for attachment and the practices by which we care for them (Kittay et al. 2005).

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So care extends into informed reflection on general conditions under which flourishing is
possible. It also requires a general account of flourishing, in relation to attachments, perhaps
along the lines of Nussbaum’s capabilities approach (Nussbaum 2003). The phenomenology
of care supports such an account. As I noted above, living with and through attachments is
how human beings effect their self-concern. Others and self are inextricably and dialectically
linked. The need for reliable attachments is a fundamental need for human beings, which is
always realised through their relationship to a range of particular attachments which their
rootedness within particular socio-cultural contexts make available to them. Through
attention to how particular attachments promote or restrict flourishing, in terms of how they
promote or restrict living securely within contexts of uncertainty.

The general account of flourishing which a care orientation requires – and, I would suggest,
supports – may therefore provide the critical purchase needed to assess ethically and
politically the narratives and traditions which link us, affectively and cognitively, with our
descendants. We therefore care for the future through that which matters to us in the present,
but need to reflexively assess our actions here and now for how far they express forms of
moral practice which are suitably attuned to help fulfil the needs of future people – or at least
to not prevent them from developing the capacities to fulfil their needs. Even the proximate
future is, from a care perspective, pregnant with the distant future. But caring about the
present enlivens within us a sense of humility regarding what we can do to ensure that needs
can be met.

Although the phenomenological investigation of care does not itself yield objective
principles, it does yield some guidelines for practical reasoning. Care means to act so as to
preserve and enhance the potential of what we find valuable, where ‘valuable’ means of value
both to the flourishing of specific individuals living now and to the capacities through which
individuals generally now and in the future will flourish. Here, we must emphasise that acting
to preserve and enhance what we find valuable obligates us to investigate the relationships
that sustain these values, and to act so as to sustain these relationships in turn, as far as
possible. Secondly, we need to ensure that we act so as to preserve and enhance the capacities
of future generations to care as such, an imperative identified by Hans Jonas: ‘never must the
existence or the essence of man as a whole be made a stake in the hazards of action’ (Jonas
1984, p. 37). We need to act towards the future with the aim of sustaining the particular
narratives which make the world meaningful for us, and of sustaining the possibility of
experiencing such narratives at all. We should act not only to preserve our constitutive
values, but also to preserve the capacity of future humans to care about things in their own
way, and to thereby revise the assessments of what is constitutively valuable that they have
inherited from their predecessors (Groves 2009, pp. 27-28). These guidelines are derived
from the experience of care itself, and outline moral limits. Beyond these guidelines, there is
the necessity to develop the skills and virtues required for effective care, and the need to
understand how particular attachments relate to universal needs4.

Conclusions
I have suggested that if the moral subjectivity bound into the mainstream forms of
philosophical reflection we examined above can be imagined as that of a manager or
architect, then that of the phenomenology of ethical life we have described might be
imagined as closer to that of an artisan or parent. We have seen that viewing political thought
and action towards the future through the lens of care introduces the need for guiding

4
On the evolving historical relationship between particular and universal forms of need, see Fraser (1998).

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considerations which are derived from the nature of “thick” ethical practices, rather than
being derived from foundational principles supposedly separate from actual practice.

The global can only be imagined as an arena in which care can operate through the local; the
distant future as such an arena can only be imagined through the near future in which the
fates of our singular objects of attachment, which we encounter as latent futures here within
the passing present, will be played out. The inequalities of power between present and future
people not only make us alive to the need for precaution and humility, they may enliven in us
a commitment to take action now to make sure that certain needs will be fulfilled.

An example of how concrete, future-regarding moral practices in the present can be

developed through close attention to attachments and the narratives in which they are
implicated is called for, in closing. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) opens up the post-
normal condition by forcing us to consider the distant future as a dimension of our actions in
the present. The global and long-term nature of AGW, however, should not distract us from
the fact that its effects will be experienced in specific places, by individuals and collectivities
with singular biographies, histories and futures. This takes us beyond debates focused on
higher-level values such as equity and towards other questions, such as how to live gracefully
and continue to flourish amidst the uncertainties of AGW, providing exemplars of moral
practice in the process for the consideration of future generations. Here, the work of artists
Newton and Helen Harrison is instructive. Their Greenhouse Britain (2007) is built around
scenarios concerning the effects of rising sea levels on the Mersey Estuary and the Lea
Valley in the UK. By working over an extended period of time with local people, planners,
scientists and policy-makers who live and work in these areas, the Harrisons produce near-
term science fiction scenarios that exploit local knowledge of connectedness to imagine how
communities will change their ways of living. Further, it re-injects human agency into this
process through dialogue and collaboration. The goal is both to enable people to give voice
to fears and offer them the opportunity to retrieve concrete hope in the face of uncertainty.

It is also to open up for the present the power of imagination needed to place ourselves in the
future, so as to understand the single power the future has over the present. Whereas actions
here and now will change irrevocably the conditions of life for future generations, the
judgements on these actions will ultimately be passed by others we will not meet, and who
will know as we never will what the outcomes of our actions actually were. But rather than
indicating that our deeds now do not matter, this means that they carry added weight – for
they will contribute to the final assessment of the meaning of our lives here and now, carried
out by those who alone are positioned with the ability and the responsibility to make that
assessment (O'Neill 1993, pp. 32-35).

References
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Benjamin, J. 1988. The bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of
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