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Manuel Valente // Ageing, Equality and Community
May 3, 2024 @ 11:00 - 13:00

The Centre for Ethics Politics and Society (CEPS), University of Minho
CEPS Seminar Meetings, Friday, May 3 at 11h (GMT) – hybrid format
Manuel Valente (CEPS), “Ageing, Equality and Community”
Abstract: How should a just society deal with the fact that the longevity of its members is increasing? The fact that we live to older ages raises a puzzle for egalitarians (Bou-Habib 2023): if a) people who live longer tend to be more fortunate than those who do not, b) how can egalitarian societies justify devoting much of their state budget to the special needs of the more fortunate? In this article, I make two claims. The first, less surprising one, is that distributive and relational equality reply to this challenge differently. The former can easily explain a) but have difficulty answering b); the opposite goes for relational equality. This may explain why many theorists of age-group justice now combine both principles (e.g., Bidadanure 2021). But the second more surprising finding is that the principles remain insufficient to explain some critical cases. I propose filling this gap with G.A. Cohen’s principle of community, which requires caring relations across ages, not just egalitarian ones. Community is a promising but neglected principle of age-group justice that, together with equality, could help enrich the literature on ageing.