Jewish and Christian Religious Tradition As a Source of Values for Intergenerational Equity Concerns. W. W. Becker, Salutary Technology, Inc., Moorestown, NJ
The over-lapping understandings of Jewish and Christian traditions, both influencing and reincorporating Western culture from the Greeks to the present, underpin many of the ethical constructs of our present society, in ways both obvious and subtle. These Traditions influence where many of our personal values are rooted (without regard to whether one adheres to either) and have a profound influence on our society’s systems of understanding, law and political organization. In themselves, they span great periods of time and, through time, various national, cultural, and economic divisions, broadly defining what it is to "do right," and offering the potential for insight into the question of intergenerational equity, as might be encountered in analyses of choices for safeguards for radioactive wastes or proposals to ameliorate global warming. The paper is one of a special SRA collection on the question of intra- vs. intergenerational risk to be published in 2000. It looks at these religious Traditions as sources of values, focusing on this question. In the process, it explores the defining features of the Traditions and develops some methods of accessing their content. This offers a mixed approach to an important option for deliberately confronting the values which are often determinative (but unexamined) starting points of our analyses.
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