Matthew Wiseman

Research

Publications

• “Just Savings, Compensation, and the First Generation,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, forthcoming.▾

  Abstract. The just savings principle is the centerpiece of John Rawls’s account of intergenerational justice. Yet it’s hard to see why the parties in the original position could accept it, for it imposes net costs on the worst-off first generation. Many have attempted to solve this ‘problem of the first generation’ by offering explanations as to why the parties could accept Rawls’s principle. Here I take a different approach. I show that most of these attempts have neglected a crucial consideration; there is an alternative savings principle that the parties should prefer to Rawls’s own. According to the compensated savings principle, the first generation should be compensated for the cost of their savings by younger generations with whom they overlap. I defend this principle as the most promising explanation yet of why the parties could rationally choose a savings principle that generates the accumulation required for a just basic structure.

• “On Synchronic Direct Intergenerational Reciprocity: A Reply to Corvino,” Economics & Philosophy, 2025 ▾

  Abstract. Fausto Corvino has recently argued in this journal that, given present people’s reasonable expectation of future people’s economic activity, present and future people stand in the relation required by both of the two main camps of justice as reciprocity: justice as self-interested reciprocity and justice as fair reciprocity. In reply, I argue that on neither view is the relation Corvino identifies the relation the view requires and that neither view endorses his principle of intergenerational distributive justice, Transgenerational Sufficiency, in a contract between generations. I show that these concerns generalize to any view of synchronic direct intergenerational reciprocity.

In Progress…

I have an ongoing project interrogating Rawls's defense of his just savings principle.

• A paper identifying and solving a new problem for Rawls’s just savings principle. (Under review)

And I'm currently working on the following papers based on chapters of my thesis defending the case for providing political representation to future citizens.

• A paper claiming that providing such representation satisfies our duties of intergenerational procedural justice.
• A paper showing that representing future people is conceptually coherent.
• A paper arguing that representing future people can be democratically legitimate, even in the absence of authorization and accountability.
• A paper arguing that representing future people can be democratically legitimate, despite the epistemic limitations of such representatives.