Philanthropy and Intergenerational Justice: Laying the Foundations

Description

The PhiLab partnership research program seeks to analyze the role and function of philanthropic grantmaking in advancing social equity and environmental sustainability in Canada. This project begins to address a related question: to what extent, and in what ways, should principles of intergenerational justice influence the regulation of philanthropic grantmaking?

Whether and how principles of intergenerational justice should affect the regulation of philanthropy is an important issue with political, moral and legal implications. This preliminary project aims to lay some of the legal and philosophical groundwork for this inquiry. It is a stage-setting project with four primary aims:

1. To summarize, in a preliminary way, the leading literature and key contemporary debates on intergenerational justice;
2. To identify doctrines and instruments within the common law tradition that engage principles of intergenerational justice;
3. To identify doctrines and instruments within Indigenous legal orders that engage principles of intergenerational justice;
4. To begin considering how those doctrines and instruments, and the debates associated with them, might inform our consideration of whether and how principles of intergenerational justice should affect the regulation of philanthropy.