The Innocence Project: Future Generations from the Founders to The Village

Abstract:This essay explores the philosophical roots of the idea that Americans have an obligation to future generations, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” In arguing that living people had no right to bind future people (with debts or laws they had no hand in shaping), Jefferson was making one of the earliest versions of the political claim for intergenerational justice. I then examine the way this idea reemerges in our contemporary moment—in the environmental movement, anxieties about parenting, and films, like The Village, The Truman Show, Pleasantville, WALL-E, The Witch, and Captain Fantastic, that fantasize the creation of pristine, sealed-off, pseudo-utopias. I focus throughout on The Village, because its particular version of a vexed utopia reveals not only the logic of intergenerational justice, but also its limitations.