Keywords
Sustainability
Ethics
Islam
Indonesia
How to Cite
Abstract
The idea of “future generations” is fundamental to discussions of sustainability, climate and “ecotheology.” However, it also poses a philosophical problem of “nonidentity”: i.e., future people do not really exist. Applied issues regarding intergenerational responsibility, risk and justice in climate policy and practice complicate the nonidentity problem beyond the abstract to the realm of the material. Trends in Anglophone philosophy as well as emerging national ecotheology within the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs increasingly view such empirical problems to be grounded in moral and ethical systems. The Qur’anic idea of ummah (community) renders legible what are otherwise intractable problems in climate and sustainability ethics in regard to justice for future “nonidentities,” that is, generations who are yet to face climate danger. With this come wider implications for morality regarding communities that are invisible and erased in human and more-than-human worlds in Southeast Asia and beyond.References
Caney, Simon. 2010. “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change.” In Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. Edited by Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue, 122–45. New York: Oxford University Press.
Carter, Alan. 2001. “Can We Harm Future People?” Environmental Values 10(4): 429–54.
Carter, Alan. 2002. “On Harming Others: A Response to Partridge.” Environmental Values 11(1): 87–96.
Chakrabharty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197–222.
Chittick, William C. 1989. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-`Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Coward, Harold, and Thomas Hurka, eds. 1993. Ethics and Climate Change: The Greenhouse Effect. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Cripps, Elizabeth. 2013. Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cripps, Elizabeth. 2017. “Population, Climate Change, and Global Justice: A Moral Framework for Debate.” Journal of Population and Sustainability 1(2): 23–36.
Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1: 7–23.
De Shalit, Avner. 1995. Why Posterity Matters: Environmental Politics and Future Generations. London: Routledge.
Denny, Frederick Methewson. 2001. “Community and Society in the Qur’an.” In Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, ed. Jane Damen McAuliffe. Leiden: Brill, 367–86.
Elliot, Robert. 1989. “The Rights of Future People.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 6(2): 159–69.
Elliot, Robert. 1997. “Contingency, Community and Intergenerational Justice.” In Contingent Future Persons, eds. N. Fotion and J. Heller. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 157–70.
Gade, A. 2019. Front Matter. In Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gade, Anna M. 2010. The Qur’an: An Introduction. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.
Gade, Anna M. 2023. “Muslim Environmentalisms and Environmental Ethics: Theory and Practice for Rights and Justice.” The Muslim World 113(3): 242–59.
Gade, Anna M. 2025. “Environment, Sustainability, and the Work of Constructive Muslim Theology.” The Muslim World 115(1): 31–36.
Gardiner, Stephen M. 2004. “Ethics and Global Climate Change (Survey Article).” Ethics 114: 555–600.
Gardiner, Stephen M. 2006. “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption.” Environmental Values 15(3): 397–413.
Gardiner, Stephen M. 2010. “Overview.” In Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, eds. Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue. New York: Oxford University Press, 3–35.
Gardiner, Stephen M. 2011. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. Oxford Academic.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gul, Parveen, Bahadar Ali, and Arshad Nawaz Khan. 2023. “Legal Foundations of Intergenerational Equity: An Islamic Approach to Environmental Justice.” Pakistan Journal of International Affairs 6(4): 442–49.
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, United Nations). “FAQ 3: How Will Climate Change Affect the Lives of Today’s Children Tomorrow, If No Immediate Action Is Taken?” https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/about/frequently-asked-questions/keyfaq3/ (August 20, 2025).
Jamieson, Dale. 2010. “Climate Change, Responsibility and Justice.” Science and Engineering Ethics 16: 431–45.
Johnson, Lawrence E. 2003. “Future Generations and Environmental Ethics.” Environmental Values 12(4): 471–87.
Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Light, Andrew. 2002. “Contemporary Environmental Ethics from Metaethics to Public Philosophy.” Metaphilosophy 33(4): 426–49.
Little, David, and Sumner B. Twiss, eds. 1978. Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Ministry of Religious Affairs, Republic of Indonesia. 2025. “Ekoteologi [Ecotheology].” https://kemenag.go.id/tag/ekoteologi (August 20, 2025).
Moosa, Ebrahim. 2005. Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Nguyen, Martin. 2018. Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination. New York: Bloomsbury / Rowman & Littefield.
Nixon, Rob. 2014. “The Anthropocene: Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea.”
Paden, Roger. 1997. “Rawls’s Just Savings Principle and the Sense of Justice.” Social Theory and Practice 23(1): 27–51.
Parfit, Derek. 1982. “Future Generations: Further Problems.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11(2): 113–72.
Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Partridge, Ernest. 2001. “Future Generations.” In A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, ed. Dale Jamieson. New York: Blackwell, 377–89.
Partridge, Ernest. 2002. “The Future – For Better or Worse.” Environmental Values 11(1): 75–85.
Paterson, Matthew. 1996. “International Justice and Global Warming.” In The Ethical Dimensions of Global Change, ed. Barry Holden. London: MacMillin, 181–201.
Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Roberts, J. Timmons, and Bradley C. Parks. 2007. A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Roberts, M. A. 2024a. “The Nonidentity Problem” eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/nonidentity-problem (August 20, 2025).
Roberts, M.A. 2024b. The Existence Puzzles: An Introduction to Population Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schweiker, William, and David A. Clairmont. 2019. Religious Ethics: Mening and Method. New York: Wiley.
Shue, Henry. 1999. “Bequeathing Hazards: Security Rights and Property Rights of Future Humans.” In Global Environmental Economics: Equity and the Limits to Markets, eds. Mohammed H. I. Dore and Timothy D. Mount. Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell, 40–43.
Shue, Henry. 2001. “Climate.” In A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, ed. Dale Jamieson. New York: Blackwell, 449–59.
Shue, Henry. 2010. “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities: Creating a More Dangerous World?” In Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, eds. Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue. New York: Oxford University Press, 146–62.
Shue, Henry. 2014. “Changing Images of Climate Change: Human Rights and Future Generations.” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 5: 50–64.
Sikora, R.I., and Brian Barry, eds. 2012. Obligations to Future Generations. Cambridgeshire, UK: White Horse Press.
Singer, Peter. 1979. Practical Ethics. 1st ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Paul. 2011. Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
The Vatican. 2015. “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.” https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html (August 20, 2025).
Twiss, Sumner B., and Bruce Grelle. 1988. Explorations in Global Ethics: Comparative Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press.
UIII (Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia). 2025. “Minister Nasaruddin Umar: Re-Imagining Religious Views through Ecotheology.” https://uiii.ac.id/minister-nasaruddin-umar-reimagining-religious-views-through-eco-theology-2/ (August 20, 2025).
United Nations. 2015. “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).” https://sdgs.un.org/goals (August 20, 2025).
Warde, Paul, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin. 2018. The Environment: A History of the Idea. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2020. “Against Crisis Epistemology.” In Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, eds. Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Steve Larkin, and Chris Andersen. New York: Routledge, 52–64.
Woodward, James. 1986. “The Non-Identity Problem.” Ethics 96: 804–31.
World Commission on Environmental Development. 1987. “Our Common Future [‘Brundtland Report’].” https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf.
Ysa, Osman. 2006. The Cham Rebellion: Survivors’ Stories from the Villages. ed. Anna M. Gade. Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.