Half-Lives of Responsibility: Gramsci, Derrida, and Inheritance in Environmental Ethics

This dissertation investigates conceptions of responsibility at work in contemporary intergenerational nuclear waste policy. It argues that articulations of responsibility at work in current policy unduly privileges resemblance to the present as a condition for that responsibility holding as an intergenerational relation. The dissertation begins by arguing that current waste disposal practices depend on a view of responsibility contingent on the presumption that future generations will be minimally epistemologically, socially, and politically continuous with present generations. Extant policy is therefore found to place an asymmetric and unjust burden on future generations. The dissertation thus concludes that responsibilities to future generations require that responsibility be thought prior to particular determinations of the possible identity of our inheritors.