This chapter stresses the importance of smart idealism, and outlines how global public opinion – and all of us – can play a crucial role. We cannot simply rely on our politicians to “do the right thing,” as either of the two components of smart idealism may be missing. Ideological bias may result in policies falling short of being smart or failing to be idealist, namely when politicians’ incentives are distorted. Electoral terms typically of four years result in a bias towards short-run policies (at the detriment of the lengthy, but crucial task of building peace), and often there are personal benefits for politician when cutting shady deals with despots. To get the incentives right, public pressure must ensure that the reelection chances of our politicians crucially depend on fostering peace at home and abroad. If voters care about this, then politicians will as well – whether out of intrinsic motivation or just to get reelected. As shown in this chapter, recent evidence highlights that scrutiny and attention from the world press and the public at large is a powerful rampart against repression.

In the context of current environmental crises, which threaten to seriously harm living conditions for future generations, liberal–capitalist democracies have been accused of inherent short-termism, that is, of favouring the currently living at the expense of mid- to long-term sustainability. This chapter reviews some of the reasons for this short-termism as well as proposals as to how best to represent future people in today’s democratic decision-making. It then presents some ideas of the author as to how to reconceive the idea of democracy and the responsibilities of citizenship in the face of increasing obligations to sustain both the environment and democratic institutions for future people. The chapter argues that taking turns between governing and governed is a key dimension of democracy, and that it implies in-principle consent to others governing after our turn, including future generations. Thus, future people must be better represented than they generally are today, in particular when democratic institutions find themselves squeezed between an overburdened environment in which they are embedded, and a fast-paced and short-termist globalising economy.

This chapter investigates the pre-GFC practice of bankers’ remuneration in the UK to discover how bankers’ remuneration affected the sustainability of banks. It starts with an overview of executive remuneration in Anglo-American corporate governance, focusing on its role as both a solution to the agency problem and a mechanism for shareholder interest maximisation. This chapter then examines the practice of bankers’ remuneration in the ‘Big Four’ banks of the UK from 2000 to 2007. It is found that performance-based remuneration, which was aimed at aligning bankers’ wealth with shareholder interest, was the primary remuneration component. Stock options and restricted shares were widely used as performance-based remuneration, and financial indicators oriented by short-term profit and shareholder return were the primary metrics of bankers’ performance. As a result, bankers were incentivised to take excessive risks, which eventually contributed to the vulnerability of banks and their failures.

Economics takes the view from the present. But as people become affluent, they care more for the future, which is what government provides for. In the twentieth century, government has grown faster than the economy, and even Conservative governments have failed to wind it down. The reason is that markets take the short view and cannot provide for the future on their own. Before the nineteenth century, interest was seen as usury, rent as parasitical, and profit as exploitation. In response, the neoclassical economics of the 1870s came to the defence of privilege: property was legitimate, interest and profit were the cost of patience, the reward for capitalist energy and enterprise. Markets were the natural order, government and taxes parasitical. Since the 1980s governments have embraced markets as enterprising, innovative, efficient, superior. But privatisation, deregulation, and outsourcing have not fulfilled their promise. Government has not gone away. An outline of the book concludes.

How can we include the affected interests of future generations and non-humans in deliberations about global justice given that they cannot exercise formative agency themselves? Starting from the role moral imagination plays in moral reasoning, and hence in formative agency concerning the meaning of justice as well, this chapter looks at ways in which deliberations can be enhanced so as to promote inclusion of these neglected interests. Visual and experiential prompts should complement talk-centric deliberative processes. This would expand the deliberators’ moral imagination, enabling them to internalize the interests of future generations, animals, ecosystems, and the Earth system, and reach decisions reflecting all affected interests, even those bound to be silent – though that seeming silence itself may reveal an incapacity to listen. These kinds of considerations can be reflected in institutional design. Currently these frontiers of justice are only weakly present in the Sustainable Development Goals, which look ahead only to 2030, turned down the chance to incorporate planetary boundaries, and say little or nothing about non-humans.

Chapter 2 assesses dominant corporate theories and norms such as shareholder primacy and shareholder wealth maximisation through the lens of climate change. It describes the ascent to dominance of these theories through the historical diversification of shareholder ownership and issue of agency costs. It highlights the three major negative contributions these theories have made to the issue of climate change: the elevation of the interests of shareholders to the detriment of non-shareholders, the fostering on a short-term approach to profit-making and finally the externalization of greenhouse gas emissions. The chapter then assesses competing theories of the corporate form which focus on stakeholder interests and the company as an entity, and how these theories provide a more holistic and appropriate model of the company in the context of climate change. The chapter concludes with the UK enlightened shareholder value approach and the US shareholder-centric approach to company law. While the United States has a more entrenched version of these dominant corporate theories such as shareholder wealth maximisation, even in this jurisdiction recent developments such as the Business Roundtable statement in 2019 illustrate discursive movements away from a shareholder-centric approach in the business world.