Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics (PDF)

Christopher Groves' work focuses on how people and institutions negotiate and deal with an intrinsically uncertain future. He has published widely on intergenerational ethics, the regulation of emerging technologies, and the sociology and politics of risk and uncertainty. He is co-author with Barbara Adam of Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (2007).

Christopher Groves' Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics is that rarest of academic books, one that challenges existing dominant thinking from within, and offers a fresh and refreshing alternative based on the creative integration of seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge from outside the dominant paradigm and moral imaginary.

It challenges the dominant philosophical (and political) framing of obligations and rights between current and future people/generations as how to manage or think about inevitable distributional conflicts over goods and services we in the present pass on, or not, to future people. This dominant framing is also often informed by a liberal, individualist moral idiom, or as Groves puts it a 'managerial-cum-administrative' rationality, that is historically specific to contemporary technological societies. Groves, marshalling an impressive range of normative voices (from Hans Jonas, Hannah Ardent, Ulrich Beck, Alasdair MacIntyre to Brian Wynne), and disciplinary perspectives (phenomenology, science technological studies, moral psychology to post-normal science) challenges this liberal-distributive moral and social imaginary and presents an immanent critique and alternative. This alternative focuses on the ineliminable uncertainty that is constitutive of the human condition, the production of meaning through relations of care responding to vulnerability and dependency. These key ideas of uncertainty, care, vulnerability and dependency do not figure highly in liberal individualist thinking, and yet as eloquently expressed in Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics, rethinking and imagining our ethical obligations to those yet to be born is precisely what we need to do as our technological prowess as a society increases and our knowledge and control about its impacts in and on the future declines.

The future is already here from the care perspective outlined in this fascinating book, in terms of the qualities of