Making sense of age-group justice: A time for relational equality?

Politics, Philosophy and Economics 15 (3):234-260 (2016)
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Abstract

This article brings together two debates in contemporary political philosophy: on the one hand, the dispute between the distributive and relational approaches to equality and, on the other hand, the field of intergenerational equality. I offer an original contribution to the second domain and by doing so, I inform the first. The aim of this article is thus twofold: shedding some light on an under-researched and yet crucial question – ‘which inequalities between generations matter?’ and contributing to a far-reaching debate that touches upon the nature of egalitarianism. After showing that there are two key problems that fall within the scope of intergenerational equality – questions of justice between age groups and questions of equality between birth cohorts – I argue that, contrary to what the default distributive view states, some inequalities between age groups matter independently of their diachronic impact, and so partly for relational reasons. I argue that, even if we are distributive egalitarians, we must endorse the relational egalitarian conception to successfully make sense of some inequalities between age groups. I infer from this both that the putative view that the ‘relational’ conception of equality can be redescribed as distributive must be rejected and that the distributive view requires supplementation by the relational view.

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Juliana Bidadanure
Stanford University

Citations of this work

Relational egalitarianism.Rekha Nath - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (7):1-12.
Relational Justice: Egalitarian and Sufficientarian.Andreas Bengtson & Lasse Nielsen - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (5):900-918.
Am I Socially Related to Myself?Andreas Bengtson - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-18.
Enfranchising the Youth.Lachlan Montgomery Umbers - 2020 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (6):732-755.

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Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
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What is the point of equality.Elizabeth Anderson - 1999 - Ethics 109 (2):287-337.
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Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.C. L. Ten - 2003 - Mind 112 (447):563-566.

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