Pandemics Remind Us of Our Responsibility to Ourselves, Others and Future Generations: A Time for Intergenerational Justice?

Abstract

Over the past year, the world has experienced colliding pandemics of viral outbreaks and injustice - social and health inequities, gender-based violence, marginalisation of immigrant populations, racial discrimination. All of this was superimposed on an ever - worsening climate crisis. This is not the first viral pandemic neither will it be the last. The collective moral injury experienced by the global community requires recalibrating for life in an interpandemic world, moving beyond self-interest and building trust as an ethical imperative. Central to this recalibration is assumption of responsibility to future generations - intergenerational justice. Not only does such an ethics of responsibility enhance mutuality and reciprocity, it is also synchronous with African philosophical thinking, which supports interdependence in this world and is firmly rooted in ancestral worlds and future worlds.