In our current moment, at the convergence of climate change and pandemic catastrophes, we have been reminded that the young and the old are disproportionately affected by political, environmental, and economic calamities. Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure’s Justice across Ages: Treating Young and Old as Equals represents one of those rare instances of a book arriving at precisely the right time. Bidadanure’s philosophical exploration of intergenerational justice and equality has a great deal to tell us about how we might think through these enduring problems.
Part I begins with the question of which inequalities between young and old are acceptable and which are unjust. Unlike forms of injustice rooted in immutable characteristics linked to race and sex, individuals are not frozen at a fixed age. Thus, we are all at one age a beneficiary and at another a victim of age-based inequalities. The question, then, is how to judge the justness of these differences that have a uniquely temporal dimension. Bidadanure identifies two approaches. The first, a synchronic approach, attends to the distribution of goods at a snapshot in time and assesses whether the discrepancies within that moment between people of different ages are just or unjust. Sometimes they might be acceptable because it is important that some opportunities are responsive to age, as when elderly folks quite reasonably receive the lion’s share of health care resources. A diachronic approach looks at how people of a certain generation fare over their lifetimes and compares that with other generational cohorts. A commitment to equality seems to demand that no generation should be left worse off than the generation that preceded it. Granted, it might be necessary to treat two people of different ages unequally for a period of time, but their lifetimes ought to mirror one another in terms of generational prospects.
Innovating on the Rawlsian veil of ignorance exercise, Bidadanure argues that a “prudent planner” who is unaware of their age would conclude that resources afforded during one’s lifetime ought to be, at a minimum, sufficient to avoid deprivation and to uphold freedom. The prudent planner would also conclude behind the veil of ignorance that resources ought to be distributed efficiently throughout one’s lifetime so as to maximize opportunities, which typically entails frontloading opportunities so that young people can set themselves up early for success.
Now, there are many defects inherent in distributional models of justice. Bidadanure does not disentangle these snares directly, but she does devote a great deal of analysis to the way distributional arguments fail to capture the whole picture. The problem of unequal standing, esteem, and respect between people of different ages is an issue related to distribution but also one that falls outside its purview. These additional considerations require a synchronic approach, one that looks at particular relations of respect and equality between people of different ages at a discrete moment in time, regardless of whether the injustice is ultimately temporary or will be balanced out by some future (or past) reversal of fortunes. Bidadanure refers to this theorizing of social stigma and marginalization as the “relational egalitarian ideal” (there are an abundance of novel principles and ideals in this book) and shows how it can operate in conjunction with a distributional framework. In the end, justice requires that people be both appropriately provisioned and appropriately respected and included throughout their lifetimes.
The second half of Justice across Ages seeks to demonstrate just what happens when this hybrid diachronic-distributional/synchronic-relational approach to intergenerational justice is applied to issues of labor force exclusion, basic resource allocation, and political marginalization. Judged on the application of concepts set out in the three chapters in part I, Bidadanure does a masterful job of convincingly illustrating how discrimination against young and old people in the labor force, wealth distribution, and political representation violates principles of intergenerational justice by not providing sufficient or efficient allocation of resources and by censoriously diminishing their political visibility and representation. The book ends abruptly after this series of examples and would have benefited from a concluding chapter wherein Bidadanure pressed the theory in new directions and outlined a brief course for future research.
If there is one fault with Justice across Ages, it is that the methodological choices prevent taking on some of the more difficult and interesting cases. There are moments when Bidadanure is clear that suspicion is warranted when it comes to traditionally “normal” conditions and relations between people of different ages. Many norms, customs, and laws considered “normal” might simply reflect forms of generational domination that have sedimented over time. Bidadanure provides a defense of young children against infantilization and other demeaning actions and restrictions, even offering a provocative footnote observing that modern schooling might represent a kind of unjust age-based segregation.
Indeed, this is why an important initial step in theorizing intergenerational equality is placing the perspectives of different generations on equal footing, thereby exposing possible generational prejudgments built into our “normal” concepts and institutions. So, in addition to thinking about the voting age and electing younger people, we might inquire whether the formation of government through mass elections is the kind of thing that children would endorse in the first place. Might children define political agency and inclusion very differently, and advocate for institutions that radically diverge from a system created by adults so that adults could have a space to exercise adult capacities for mutual reasoning? While thinking through one’s right to a job or to a basic income, we might also ask this question: If given a choice, would children choose capitalism and wage labor as the preferred mode of provisioning society with necessary goods and services? Or would they find wage labor inherently unfair, demeaning, and contrary to intergenerational justice?
More to the point is the issue of corporal punishment. The very old might be disadvantaged in many ways compared to the middle-aged, yet it is both illegal and immoral to use fear, intimidation, or physical coercion to compel behavior from any member of these demographics. In most western jurisdictions, however, it is perfectly legal, and in some cases considered morally obligatory, to use these tools of force and coercion against children. Here we have one of the hard cases of intergenerational justice. One gets the sense from the totality of arguments in Justice across Ages that prohibitions on disrespectful and demeaning treatment would prohibit the disciplining of children, but it remains unclear.
Justice across Ages is not unique in admitting of methodological difficulties and missed opportunities, but it is a special piece of scholarship, one that offers a timely and forcefully argued intervention into a discipline that is slowly awakening to the necessity of justice across generations.
