Datum: 4 mars 2026
Tid: 10:00-11:45
Venue: Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13 in Stockholm or online
Research seminar with Nicola Mulkeen. Nicola is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Newcastle University. Her research interests are in contemporary political philosophy. At the moment, her focus is primarily on intergenerational justice. She is currently working on two book projects one entitled Exploitation & Time which develops an account of how exploitation is reproduced over time and across age groups including between present and future generations and a second on climate debt and future debt relations. Alongside her academic work, Nicola collaborates with Save the Children on research policy and impact concerning children in future generations. Prior to joining Newcastle University, she was a Teaching Fellow in PAIS at the University of Warwick and a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Recently, she has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford and the University of Gothenburg.
Abstract
This paper presents a chapter from my draft manuscript entitled Exploitation & Time and asks whether and how future generations can be exploited given that they do not yet exist and cannot interact with us. It argues that existing accounts of exploitation struggle with this problem because they rely on interaction reciprocity counterfactual comparisons or collective generational agency all of which break down across time. In response the paper develops a structural role-based model of intergenerational exploitation that shifts the focus away from generations as homogeneous moral agents and toward enduring social roles authorised and sustained by state and institutional frameworks. On this view exploitation across non overlapping generations occurs when earlier generations design and entrench roles such as creditor, regulator, policymaker, corporate executive or caregiver in ways that systematically position future individuals in structurally vulnerable roles from which value can be extracted. Future people are therefore often exploited not by the dead but by their own contemporaries who inherit and occupy these empowered roles. The model avoids the non-identity problem by locating injustice in the structure of roles rather than in welfare comparisons allows for fine grained attribution of moral responsibility within generations and captures the uneven impacts of exploitation across different future groups. The paper illustrates the account through cases involving climate policy, resource extraction, public debt, and unpaid care work and concludes that protecting future generations requires institutional reform aimed at dismantling exploitative roles before they are inherited.
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