Balter Distinguished Lecture: Juliana Bidadanure

Location: Caldwell 105 AND Zoom – https://unc.zoom.us/j/2788443805

Justice Across Ages: What Does it Mean to Treat Young and Old as Equals?

Age structures our lives and societies. It shapes social institutions, roles, and relationships, as well as how we assign obligations and entitlements within them. Each life-stage also brings its characteristic opportunities and vulnerabilities, which spawn multidimensional inequalities between young and old. How should we respond to these age-related inequalities? Are they unfair in the same way gender or racial inequalities are? Or is there something distinctive about age that mitigates ethical concern?

In her talk, Juliana Bidadanure will address these and related questions, presenting the theory of justice between age groups that she developed in her book Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and old as Equals (OUP 2021). The book advances ethical principles to guide a fair distribution of goods like jobs, healthcare, income, and political power among persons at different stages of their life. If we are ever to live in a society where people are treated as equals, she argues, we must pay vigilant attention to how age membership can alter our social standing, and we must regard with suspicion commonplace forms of age-based social hierarchy. This position carries important implications for how we should think about the value of equality, design our social and political institutions, and conduct ourselves in a range of contexts including families, workplaces, and schools.

Juliana Bidadanure is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, of Political Science, at Stanford University, and the Faculty Director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab. Her work is at the intersection of Political Philosophy and Public Policy. She has been working on how we should conceptualize the value of equality, in general, and on inequalities between age groups and generations in particular. She has published extensively on this topic, most notably the article “Making Sense of Age Group Justice: A Time for Relational Equality?” for the journal Politics, Philosophy & Economics and the book manuscript Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and Old as Equals forthcoming with Oxford University Press. The book manuscript provides a framework that serves to distinguish between acceptable and objectionable inequalities between co-existing generations. It investigates two overlapping questions: (1) how should resources like jobs, income, and political positions be distributed across the lifespan – and thus, between people of different age; and (2) what does it mean for younger and older members of a community to relate to one another as equals. The book also evaluates a range of age-specific policies including the introduction of youth quotas in parliaments, the youth job guarantee, mandatory retirement, and basic capital.

Read more about Juliana here: https://philosophy.stanford.edu/people/juliana-bidadanure