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: (1) shedding some light on an under-researched and yet crucial question – ‘which inequalities between generations matter?’ and (2) 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 (complete lives egalitarianism) 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 (but not necessarily displacement) by the relational view.
Imagine a city in which elderly people live in miserable retirement homes while younger people flourish in lovely affluent residences. These elderly people, however, lived in the affluent complex when they were younger. The younger people will also end up in the miserable retirement homes when they age. Over their complete lives, the young and the elderly will therefore have been treated equally. Still, this Unequal City example, which was put forward by Dennis McKerlie in his book Justice between the Young and the Old, feels strongly dystopian. 1 This suggests, McKerlie argues, that there is something wrong with complete lives egalitarianism, the view that states that the relevant time unit of equality is complete lives. This problem belongs to the ‘Equality through Time’ debate and was initiated by philosophers such as Larry Temkin and Dennis McKerlie in the 1980s. 2 Much fewer philosophers have engaged with this debate than with the ‘Equality of What?’ debate, and yet it asks fundamental questions which relate to the foundations of our egalitarian commitments.
In this article, I connect this debate about intergenerational equality to the broader dispute between relational and distributive approaches to equality. I offer an original contribution to the first domain and by doing so, I inform the second. I argue that we must endorse relational egalitarianism to explain adequately our intuitions about some inequalities between age groups. I infer from this that, insofar as we take seriously the strong dystopian feeling the Unequal City example creates, both the putative view that the ‘relational’ approach can be reduced to the distributive conception of equality and the claim that the distributive approach suffices are inadequate.
I proceed as follows. In the first section, I introduce the distinction between distributive and relational conceptions of equality and the debate surrounding it. I express some concern about the reducibility thesis – the view that the two approaches are reducible one to the other. In the following section, I show that there are two key problems that fall within the scope of intergenerational equality: questions of justice between age groups and questions of justice between birth cohorts. I introduce the dominant default distributive approach to equality and time – complete lives egalitarianism – and highlight its implications for the field of intergenerational equality: inequalities between birth cohorts are perceived as prima facie objectionable, while inequalities between age groups are seen as only derivatively objectionable. How then to make sense of what is wrong in some cases of inequalities between age groups like the Unequal City example?
In the section entitled ‘McKerlie’s simultaneous segments approach’, I then introduce McKerlie’s answer to this question. I show that his attempt at making sense of some synchronic inequalities runs into an important problem: insofar as we care about equality because we care about fairness, I argue, complete lives are the least arbitrary segments to apply the value of distributive equality. McKerlie’s temporal segment view, I argue, thus stands on comparatively frail grounds. In the section ‘A relational perspective’, I then propose to step away from the distributive paradigm and draw on the insights of relational egalitarianism to successfully explain what is wrong in some cases of age-group inequalities. In the last section, I consider two alternative explanations of what is wrong in the Unequal City example that come from within the distributive approach: the prudential explanation and the sufficientarian alternative. These two approaches subscribe to complete lives egalitarianism but propose to complement it with an additional distributive principle. I show that, although these two alternatives go a long way in explaining what is wrong in some cases of inequalities between age groups, the relational approach is still needed to fully explain our reasons for objecting to the Unequal City. In the conclusion, I infer from this that the reducibility thesis and the view that the distributive approach is self-sufficient are both inadequate.
The dispute between relational and distributive conceptions of equality
Over the last two decades, a relational egalitarian conception of equality has gradually emerged. 3 Its proponents are concerned with whether people are able to appear in the community without shame, whether they are respected, and whether minority groups are recognized or, on the contrary, whether they are victims of exclusive norms and are marginalized or demonized. 4 Relational egalitarians challenge the widespread and dominant ‘distributive’ understanding of equality, which they believe misrepresents why equality matters. Iris Marion Young, for instance argues that distributive accounts neglect the social structures and relationships that create and reinforce unequal distributions; and Elizabeth Anderson famously argues that the aim of egalitarian justice should be to end relationships of oppression. 5
The distinction between the two conceptions can be formalized this way: while distributive egalitarians believe that it is a moral requirement of justice that people get an equal amount of X (other things being equal), relational egalitarians believe that the point of equality is the realization of a community where people are able to stand in front of each other as equals. Relational egalitarians draw heavily on the badness of oppressive relationships such as exploitation, domination, or exclusion to explain why equality matters. In contrast, distributive egalitarians focus on individuals’ relative levels of goods (however understood) and ask whether the division of these goods is morally justified or whether some individuals should be compensated, for instance for consequences of bad brute luck. According to Christian Schemmel, ‘relational egalitarians present their conception as an alternative to distributive egalitarianism’. 6
Despite the familiar remarks just mentioned, the distinction between the distributive and relational understandings is often unclear, and one may in fact doubt its relevance. There is debate over whether the two approaches should really count as two alternative conceptions of equality or whether one can be redescribed in the language of the other. 7 Arguably, indeed, we could reframe relational egalitarian accounts in distributive terms, where the good X that must be equalized is power or status. Most distributive egalitarians believe that unequal relationships matter to justice but simply object to them in distributive terms. Relationships of domination and oppression, one may argue, are wrong precisely because they are evidence of a fundamentally unequal distribution of opportunities, welfare, income, and resources, or because they directly involve an unfair distribution of power. If the distributive paradigm is so adaptable to various things we value (opportunities, resources, power, respect, etc.) then the relevance of the relational approach seems to wither as an ‘alternative’. Contra Anderson, Lippert-Rasmussen has for instance argued that there was no need for relational egalitarianism since the concerns relational egalitarians express can be redescribed in the distributive language of luck egalitarianism – the view that inequalities that result from brute luck are unfair. 8
Is there any way to salvage the claim that the relational conception of equality is distinctive? How can we make sense of the connections and differences between the two approaches? A first common way to make sense of the distinction is to consider distributive equality as the means and relational equality as the ultimate goal, or as the ground of distributive equality. Dworkin’s notion of equal concern and respect could provide an example of the latter. 9 His distributive account is grounded on the claim that we ought to treat each other ‘as equals’, thus making equal respect a founding justification for equality of resources. Anderson claims that the end point of equality is to realize a community of equals without wrongful relationships of inequality, that is, the ultimate goal egalitarians should pursue is that of a society where people relate as equals. 10 We must distribute resources to meet this goal, and it is likely that equalizing goods will increase our chances of promoting more equal relationships. On this account, distributive equality would be the means of achieving relational equality or the best expression of the demands of treating each other as equals. Distributive and relational egalitarianism would not count as alternative conceptions but as interlinked dimensions of a single conception of equality.
However, this view that distributive equality would merely be a means of achieving relational equality does not work. Relational egalitarians have a thick conception of which kinds of relationships should be criticized on egalitarian grounds (demonization or segregation for instance); and they consider distributions as levers to achieve their substantive goal of a community of equals. Distributive equality is only required when it promotes the goal of a relationally equal community. Distributive egalitarians, however, defend the moral ideal of distributive fairness and consider that inequalities in opportunities, resources, income, or welfare matter noninstrumentally. This means that unfair distributive inequalities that have no connections to domination, rank, and power will be considered irrelevant by the first and unfair by the second.
Think of a very equal society where people enjoy the same opportunities, fairly equal outcomes, have the same standard of living, enjoy a full and equal set of capabilities, and so on. Now some happen to have very luxury cars, and others do not. Those who do not possess luxury cars, however, have no need for them because they have efficient cars of their own. Moreover, let us imagine that luxury cars do not happen to grant a higher status in this specific society. 11 On relational egalitarian grounds, there are no strong reasons to object to this specific distributive inequality. On most distributive egalitarian accounts, however, it may well be unfair. It all depends on the reasons why these individuals have luxury cars: did they work harder; do they have greater needs or more expansive tastes; is it a result of pure brute luck? This society is still problematic for distributive egalitarians, which suggests that relational and distributive accounts can diverge when identifying which specific inequalities are objectionable.
A better interpretation of the distinction thus seems to be that distributive egalitarians believe that distributive equality has intrinsic value and is required by fairness, while relational egalitarians value distributive equality merely instrumentally, to the extent that it contributes to promoting a society of relational equals. Lippert-Rasmussen, for instance, makes sense of the distinction in this manner: The latter [distributive egalitarians] take the distribution of goods to matter, from the point of view of justice, independently of its effect on social relations. The former [relational egalitarians], by contrast, contend that distribution matters only instrumentally in virtue of its impact on social relations and the degree to which these are suitably egalitarian.
12
What I take to be the best way to make sense of the connection between the two approaches is that they simply appeal to different kinds of reasons to care about inequalities. Scanlon theorizes inequalities in this way. We should care about inequalities, he argues, for a range of reasons, including ‘because they create humiliating differences in status’, ‘to prevent those who have more from exercising unacceptable forms of power over those who have less’, and ‘to preserve the equality of starting places that is required if our institutions are to be fair’. 14 On the distributive view, there are reasons of fairness to care about inequalities. Those reasons are grounded on the equal moral worth of individuals, but no essential reference is made to desirable interpersonal relations. On the relational view, there are relation-based reasons to care about inequalities in status and hierarchies, since they generate a variety of social evils like social and political domination, exploitative exchange, social exclusion, and stigma. Reasons of distributive fairness and relational reasons may overlap at times: inequalities very often matter for both kinds of reasons concurrently. But they may also be separate: some inequalities are objectionable in only one respect, like in the Luxury Cars example.
In this article, I want to make a case for a hybrid view. This hybrid view, by definition, is more comprehensive than both the purely relational and the purely distributive view. More precisely, I contribute to this debate by showing that we should prefer an egalitarian framework that integrates a relational dimension to a distributive egalitarianism without appeal to the relational view. In order to show that we should supplement the distributive view with a relational component, I show that there are cases of important inequalities that should offend any egalitarian and yet cannot be adequately explained by reasons of distributive fairness alone. The nonreducibility thesis – that is, the view that the relational view cannot be redescribed as distributive – requires a less marginal illustration than the Luxury Cars example. The car example merely showed that the two views differ in marginal cases. A better illustration would show that there are cases of more fundamentally objectionable inequalities that cannot be adequately explained without appealing to relational reasons. One may then more plausibly infer that the relational view cannot be reduced to the other view and that we should prefer an account that welcomes relational concerns.
As relational egalitarians themselves affirm, it is important for relational theorists to be able to show that their conception is distinct from distributive views in their scope and implications. In the introduction to their edited book on social equality, Carina Fourie et al. claim, ‘for social [or relational] egalitarianism to have major significance it needs to be (somewhat) distinct and cannot merely replicate other claims under a different name’. 15 There is a crucial need for examples that suggest nonreducibility, but there are very few in the literature. In the rest of this article, I take on this challenge by highlighting the case of age-group justice. When we take seriously the debate on how the value of equality applies through time, I argue, we run into difficulties that cannot be settled by exclusive appeal to distributive views. Unlike the Luxury Cars example, the examples that I will discuss are not marginal. They are likely to offend any egalitarian, and yet they cannot be made proper sense of solely by appeal to reasons of distributive fairness. Instead, relation-based reasons play an essential role in explaining why those inequalities are objectionable. I conclude that the distributive view requires supplementation (but not necessarily displacement) by the relational view.
Age groups, birth cohorts, and complete lives egalitarianism
By generation, we may mean ‘age-groups’ or ‘birth cohorts’. Age-groups are groups of people at a certain stage of their lives, for instance children, or the elderly. By contrast, birth cohorts are groups of people born at a specific time and who age together. For instance, the baby boomers form a birth cohort of people born between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s. The difference between age-groups, on the one hand, and birth cohorts, on the other, lies with the fact that birth cohorts are specific groups of people who age together, while age groups are phases through which different cohorts pass as they age: ‘Age groups do not age. Over time, new and different birth cohorts simply move into an age group. In contrast, birth cohorts do age. They pass through the stages of life, and so, at different times, fall into different age groups’. 16
The modified version of the lexis diagram 17 above represents time (on the horizontal axis) and age (on the vertical axis), and helps us visualize what differentiates birth cohorts, represented by arrows, from age groups, represented by boxes. The arrows represent two birth cohorts (A and B), each constituted by a group of people who go through the different stages of aging together. The boxes represent the four age-groups that exist in a society at any given point. At any given time, we have roughly four age groups: children, young people, formed adults, and the elderly. From this diagram, one can see that asking which inequalities between the two birth cohorts (arrows) are unfair will be substantially different from asking which inequalities between two age-groups – say young people and the elderly living at a given time (boxes) matter. The first question is diachronic and requires comparing people over their complete lives, while the second is synchronic and concerns how two age-groups, respectively, fare at a given point in time.
According to Daniels, age-groups and birth cohorts generate two different sets of problems of justice. 18 This is because, since we all age, treating age groups unequally will not necessarily bring about inequalities between people, while treating birth cohorts unequally does bring about inequalities between persons. For instance, if one birth cohort benefits from free higher education and the following cohort must pay for it, then the institutions will have treated two groups of people unequally over their complete lives (other things being equal). However, if a policy subsidizes higher education only for one age-group – say those under 35 – then this differential treatment between age-groups will not necessarily bring about inequalities between persons over time, because it is expected that everyone will be able to benefit from it at the relevant point in their life: ‘An institution that treats the young and the old differently will, over time, still treat people equally’. 19 For Daniels, the age-group problem and the birth cohort problem are thus two different problems of justice. The basic fact that ‘we all age’ underpins the dominant by default normative view on time, age, and justice – namely the complete lives view.
The complete lives view is endorsed, either by default or by choice, by most egalitarian accounts of justice. As McKerlie puts it, ‘philosophical theories of justice tend to assign their distributive principles to the temporal scope of a lifetime’. 20 On the complete lives view, when considering issues of justice through time, the time unit that should concern us is people’s complete lives. John Rawls, for instance, claims that ‘Justice as fairness focuses on inequalities in citizens’ life prospects – their prospects over a complete life’. 21 Complete lives egalitarianism – the egalitarian conception derived from this view – is based on the following idea: what matters to justice is that people get the same amount of what they are entitled to (opportunities, resources, capabilities, etc.) over their complete lives.
At first, it thus seems that the complete lives view does not provide us with prima facie reasons to reject inequalities between age-groups. As Gosseries argues, ‘a society that relentlessly discriminates between people on grounds of age can still treat them equally over their complete lives (…). Everyone’s turn [at being discriminated] comes’. 22 While inequalities between birth cohorts are prima facie problematic, since they are by definition inequalities between people over their complete lives, inequalities between slices of their lives matter insofar as they contribute to creating inequalities between birth cohorts. ‘Pure’ complete lives egalitarianism thus provides good reasons to oppose inequalities between birth cohorts, but at the same time, implies that synchronic equality, including age-group equality, is not an important goal to pursue: Inequalities between age-groups matter derivatively if they create inequalities between birth cohorts. Is this view satisfying at all?
Consider the following two hypothetical examples. First, imagine a feudal society with two castes that swap position every 20 years. 23 The first caste dominates the second for 20 years, then the second dominates the first for the subsequent 20 years, and so on. At the end of their lives, the two castes will have exerted equal amounts of control over each other. Second, imagine an ‘Unequal City’ where elderly people live in miserable, overcrowded retirement homes with little prospect for happiness, while younger people live in lovely affluent residences. 24 The older residents enjoyed the same happy lifestyles in their past, and the younger residents will end up in the same miserable homes themselves when they grow old. The members of the Unequal City, just like the members of the Swapping Castes system, are thus equal over their complete lives.
These two examples are part of a series of cases McKerlie raised against the complete lives view, which came to be referred to as changing places examples. Following from the default view, inequalities between age-groups only matter insofar as they create inequalities between people’s complete lives. In the Unequal City example, each cohort is treated in the same way as they age, and thus the synchronic inequality between young and old does not generate inequalities between people’s complete lives. On the complete lives assumption, there are therefore no egalitarian reasons to care. Yet, most of us do find these cases problematic. This simple synchronic objection, McKerlie claims, shows that complete lives cannot be all we care about, as egalitarians. The complete lives view, in other words, must be replaced or supplemented by another principle to make sense of these cases.
Lippert-Rasmussen recently argued that, although McKerlie has identified ‘important intuitions that need to be explained’, ‘these need not derive from egalitarian justice’. 25 Complete lives, Lippert-Rasmussen insists, are the relevant time unit of egalitarian concern and there is nothing wrong, from the point of view of equality, in the Unequal City or in the Swapping Castes examples. These examples may still be objectionable for other reasons, such as community or freedom, but not for egalitarian reasons. Like Lippert-Rasmussen, egalitarians who endorse the complete lives view as a default often do as part of a broad framework that integrates other principles of justice. 26 For this reason, even when they endorse the complete lives view, some egalitarians will find McKerlie’s examples more manageable than others.
However, I find the view that we need to look outside the paradigm of egalitarian justice to explain what is wrong in those cases implausible. It seems difficult to believe that there is nothing wrong ‘from the point of view of equality’ in the Unequal City and Swapping Castes examples. I do not deny that there are other values that may help in framing the age-group problem like priority, freedom, or community, but I do not consider that Lippert-Rasmussen’s reasons for doubting the egalitarian case against some synchronic inequalities sufficient. Why would we so readily give up on finding an egalitarian explanation for what is wrong in cases of swapping inequalities? As I will show in the next two sections, there are alternative egalitarian reasons available to explain what is wrong in those cases of synchronic inequalities. In the rest of this article, I thus focus on egalitarian attempts to explain what is wrong in the Unequal City example.
McKerlie’s simultaneous segments approach
For McKerlie, we should worry about simultaneous inequalities between people at given points in their lives, even if they are equal over their complete lives. Phases of inequality, like in the Swapping Castes example, do not simply cancel out diachronically. On the contrary, they add up. The fact that people are equal over their complete lives is little consolation when half of the population is miserable and the other half is thriving. If we, as egalitarians, have to bite the bullet and believe that such inequalities are acceptable, we might as well forget that we are egalitarian. In other words, any egalitarian thinker must be able to provide reasons for why such cases are problematic, from the point of view of equality. Yet, McKerlie argues, complete lives egalitarians do not. The fact that some are worse off than others at any given time is morally relevant and gives rise to a special claim of the worse off to various resources. Distributive justice, he insists, not only applies to complete lives, it also concerns temporal parts of lives. This objection has important implications for the field of age-group justice: In morally assessing inequality between age groups we should continue to think of it as inequality between different people, inequality that is objectionable. If the elderly live in poverty while others are affluent, this inequality is wrong in itself. The view does not deny that we are the same people in youth and in old age, but it does ask us to care about equality in a different way than the complete lives view.
27
The following diagram by Temkin represents the levels of well-being of two individuals, A and B, at different moments of their lives. 28
Here, their respective results are compared in two different ways. In the first case, we look at how they fare comparatively over their complete lives: they are perfectly equal. In the second case, we look at how they fare at simultaneous segments: they are in fact unequal at each segment. Depending on the time unit that we select for equality, we will find different answers to the question ‘Are A and B equal?’ In the diagram, the first approach is the dominant view that McKerlie criticizes and the second is the alternative view he himself endorses. On simultaneous segments egalitarianism, when considering people born at different times, we should not solely consider that they should be equal over their complete lives but we should also focus on how they fare in relation to each other at specific moments in time.
However, there is a fundamental problem with McKerlie’s account. He argues that if B is worse off at Tx, then he should be assisted, but how the Tx segment is defined is not so clear. The main problem is that, once we have defined the temporal segment that matters morally (say 20 years), McKerlie offers no justification for why we should consider that inequalities that occur within these smaller units of time cancel out. One could always highlight shorter segments, in which case defining the worse off would become arbitrary. No justification is offered as to why a given segment matters morally more than the previous one.
McKerlie himself points to this problem with the simultaneous segments view: In the case of equality, we seemed forced to choose between an arbitrarily specified stretch of time – arbitrary because any such stretch might contain within itself simultaneous inequality that our principle could not take into account – or making the temporal scope a mere moment, a designation that also seemed to lead to implausibility.
29
In case II, we compare A and B at the simultaneous segments T2, T3, and T4 of approximately 20 years each. At each segment, A is one point better off than B. As Temkin notes on the right, this means that they are unequal (to the value of 3) at these three simultaneous segments. Case III is wholly similar to case II: A is equally well off in cases II and III both over her complete lives and at T2, T3, and T4; and the same for B. However, we compare A and B at the shorter simultaneous segments T2(a), T2(b), T3(a), T3(b), T4(a), and T4(b), of approximately 10 years each.
In case II, A is better off than B at T2(a), T3(a), and T4(a). However, B is better off than A at T2(b), T3(b), and T4(b). This illustrates the problem with McKerlie’s simultaneous segments view. In cases II and III, depending on whether we register simultaneous inequalities every 20 years or every 10 years, we will draw substantially different conclusions as to who is worse off. If we only register inequalities between 20 years segments, we may compensate B and increase inequalities at shorter segments (for instance, increasing the distributive imbalance in favor of B). If we consider 10 years segments, it is not clear who is worse off anymore. The simultaneous segments view is thus objectionably incomplete unless it provides some reasons that explain what distinguishes segments that matter from those that do not.
The complete lives segment, on the other hand, has a lot to say for itself. First, it corresponds to a widespread metaphysical view on persons. If we believe that individuals are one and the same person in youth and old age, then we are more likely to be drawn to the complete life view. Second, the egalitarian commitment to complete lives can be seen as the other side of the coin of the contemporary egalitarian commitment to the separateness of persons. For contemporary egalitarians, the maximization of utility strategy is adequate within a life, but not interpersonally: interpersonal judgments are fundamentally distinct from intrapersonal judgments. As McKerlie argues, however: the price of defending the existence of egalitarian distributional constraints between lives is conceding that there are no such distributional constraints inside lives. This is the price that the egalitarian writers of the 1970s were not at all reluctant to pay.
30
Third, egalitarians are often drawn to the diachronic approach because they value the joint ideal of responsibility and compensation. Luck egalitarians, in particular, believe that the point of egalitarian justice is to ensure bad brute luck has as little impact as possible over people’s lives. 31 For this reason, those who are poor through no fault of their own should be compensated. However, if individuals make free choices that have a negative impact on their lifetime prospects, then they may have to (partly) assume the costs of such choices. A given synchronic inequality between two persons matters if it is the sign of an unequal diachronic distribution of resources. Richard Wagland sums it up this way, ‘luck egalitarianism is based upon two premises: first, that diachronic equality is viewed as the fairest form of distribution; and second, that the cut between choice and circumstance is morally important because it maintains diachronic equality between separate persons’. 32 This rationale of responsibility and compensation is thus fundamentally diachronic.
If the unity of lives and the separateness of persons both contribute to explaining why egalitarians have been drawn to the complete life approach, the compensation and responsibility argument offers an important potential justification for it: fairness. If we want to take into account past choices and unequal endowments, then we must endorse a diachronic approach that establishes what people are owed in the present segment based on what they had, or did, in previous segments. The synchronic approach, by contrast, disregards past distributions and thus neglects these two important egalitarian values. For these reasons, one will find it difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to provide strong distributive reasons to attach moral significance to temporal stages. I believe this suggests that there is a strong nonaccidental connection between distributive approaches to equality and complete lives egalitarianism. In fact, complete lives may be thought as the par excellence time unit of distributive fairness. Or as Lippert-Rasmussen sums up well, ‘insofar as we care about inequality because we care about fairness (…) equality over lifetimes is what we should be interested in’. 33
A relational perspective
I now want to suggest that, if we open up to the broader realm of reasons we have to object to inequalities, we may put forward an alternative nondistributivist explanation of what is wrong in cases of synchronic inequalities like the Swapping Castes system or the Unequal City example. What may be worrying in those cases is not that there is a time-slice inequality in distribution as such, but rather that relationships of inequality may pertain at all times.
In the first example, the relationship between the two castes is fraught with domination and oppression. The masters exert political and personal control over the slaves. For a given time, they are free to exercise their power in arbitrary manners. The fact that the switching phases cancel up over time is largely beside the point, since they are no relational reasons to only care about whole lives (whereas they are strong reasons to focus on whole lives on the distributive fairness paradigm). They are a number of social evils associated with some group of people having full power and control over other people’s lives, in general, and with some castes enjoying a lower status and being demonized and despised, in particular. To adequately explain what is wrong in this example, we need to appeal to nonfairness-based reasons that derive from the relational view. As egalitarians, these reasons are concerning and should be sufficient to give us a strong presumption against the swapping castes example.
The kind of inequalities occurring in the Unequal City example cannot be as easily disqualified on relational grounds. McKerlie’s specification of the example is such that the emphasis is on the inequality in welfare between the miserable elderly and the thriving youngsters. As a welfarist, McKerlie finds the synchronic inequality in level of well-being between the two age-groups to be a key source of concern. On the relational view, one may argue, as long as the elderly are not dominated and enjoy equal status, we should not be concerned by this situation. However, there are ways in which the relationship between old and young in the Unequal City example is problematic. First, the elderly are spatially segregated from the affluent youth – they live in a retirement home separated from the condos of the young. Second, if the elderly are set aside this way, we know that they are likely to become marginalized from the rest of the community. Spatial segregation and differential levels of affluence easily become associated with unequal status and unequal levels of respect. The history and social science of inequality tell us that important inequalities between groups in terms of salary, income, well-being, or respect are likely to create a variety of forms of exclusion and micro-domination. For this reason, a relational egalitarian will be suspicious about the Unequal City examples and will treat it as a dystopian or potentially dystopian city.
Perhaps then our reluctance to accept synchronic inequalities in those cases is best explained by relational dimension of equality understood as a social and political value. On this view, what is problematic in our examples is precisely that these societies may not be communities of relational equals at any point. 34 Phases of domination, marginalization, or segregation cannot be thought to cancel out diachronically. These phases are nonderivatively offensive: they matter to us precisely and directly for the relationships they contain or are likely to contain. In this perspective, the fact that equality over complete lives is granted in both cases is largely beside the point. For relational egalitarians, inequalities in rank, status, and power are to be approached with great suspicion. This does not mean that any relationship involving hierarchies will be found objectionable. But it does mean that, to fully understand the demands of equality, egalitarians must ‘investigate the specific respects in which egalitarian relationships must be free from regimentation by considerations of rank or status’. 35
From this perspective, social inequalities between age-groups – for instance, between the young and formed adults or between formed adults and the elderly – matter insofar as they constitute relationships of inequality, and, at least partly, independently of the fact that the young will end up being old at some point too. Relational egalitarians would ask the following questions to find out whether a given arrangement is satisfactory from the point of view of equality. Are the young and the old equally respected and recognized? Or are the very young demonized and the very old marginalized? Are the very old condescended to and the young patronized? Are the elderly able to appear without shame and the young exploited in the labor market? Do the elderly hold a higher authority and do the middle-aged control and dominate political life? To provide a better illustration of what it means for an age group to be treated in a relationally inegalitarian fashion, let us take the case of young adults.
The Intergenerational Foundation recently published a report on the perception of young people in European countries. The results are quite compelling and account for the poor perception of younger people in the UK: ‘British people in their 20s achieved the lowest scores of any country in relation to being viewed with respect. (…) In terms of contempt, British people in their 20s came first’. 36 Similarly, Maurice Devlin led focus groups with young people in Ireland and concluded that there was strong agreement among young people that they were stereotyped and treated unequally by the population in general. A conclusion of both Devlin’s focus groups and qualitative analysis of media reporting on young people is that the media plays an important negative role in such feelings of exclusion: ‘stereotyping young people in very negative ways, “tarring them with the same brush” by constantly associating “youth” with crime, deviance, delinquency, drug and alcohol problems, sexual promiscuity and general disorderliness’. 37
The persistence of such negative stereotyping of young people in Ireland, but also in England and in the US, Maurice Devlin argues, is itself ‘a diminution of their status’ and is therefore problematic from the point of view of equality. 38 This situation can be challenged from the relational egalitarian perspective: Even if the young of all successive cohorts were less respected than older age groups, the relational egalitarian may argue, we should be concerned about this synchronic inequality in status. This may apply to the way they are represented in the media, the way they are referred to by politicians and treated by the police, social workers, police officers, welfare advisers, trainers, and so on.
Similarly, if we are worried about relational domination, then we should ask whether there is something problematic about the fact that young adults may live under the authority and control of their parents, being potentially infantilized and patronized. The assumption that we can trust parents with their young adult children is understandable, but the fact that young adults are too often expected to depend on their parents’ support for survival has to be questioned. Parental control, authority, and domination in relation to adult children, just like any other relationship of dependency, must meet a certain number of criteria to be unproblematic. Importantly, the political marginalization of young people both through their respectively low voting power and underrepresentation in parliament may also be challenged along relational egalitarian lines. 39
A number of important clarifications are needed here. First, I do not mean to equate too quickly distributive justice with the diachronic approach (which focuses on inequalities between individuals over their whole lives), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, relational equality with the synchronic perspective (which looks at how people fare at any given point). There are ways to partially rephrase both diachronic and synchronic constraints in relational or distributive terms. For instance, the relational conception can also help in establishing the requirements of complete lives egalitarianism and birth cohort justice. Relational egalitarians will worry about relationships of inequality at any point. This means they will worry about those pertaining now, tomorrow, and also over time. For instance, one generation may be said to exploit the next by leaving a gigantic mass of debts as a result of spending on superfluous luxuries. Similarly, at least in theory, a birth cohort may be disrespected or politically marginalized by other birth cohorts, throughout their lives. On this ground, a relational egalitarian may also be able to argue for some form of complete lives relational equality between cohorts.
Similarly, the distributive conception may be able to highlight and provide reasons to reject many forms of synchronic inequalities. First, derivatively, it may be the case that most forms of wrongful synchronic relational inequalities are also likely to contribute to complete lives inequalities. As Gosseries has argued, it is very often the case that inequalities between age-groups result in inequalities between birth cohorts. So in practice, those who care about inequalities between birth cohorts should beware inequalities between age-groups, ‘when we treat age groups differently, we often treat birth cohorts differently’. 40 Second, as I will show in the next section, Gosseries and Daniels, for instance – who both endorse some form of complete lives egalitarianism – also believe that synchronic inequalities are morally objectionable when they are imprudent (Daniels) and when the worse off don’t have enough (Gosseries). 41 On this ground, they have arguments against the Unequal City too, as I will discuss in detail.
However, the significant difference between relational and distributive approaches is that distributive egalitarians are restricted to complete lives as a segment for nonaccidental reasons that derive from the value of fairness. They have to look at the big (diachronic) picture before they set a judgment as to whether a given synchronic inequality may be concerning. At the other end, relational egalitarians do not have compelling reasons (like choice, responsibility, and compensation) to embrace the diachronic temporality as the most relevant. As I have already discussed, there are reasons to believe that institutions treat us fairly when they give us X resources as we start our lives and then Y as we end it. The synchronic inequality between those who have X and those who have Y may seem unfair to those involved at a given time, but they really have no complaints on grounds of distributive fairness, since they will all get their fair share over their complete lives. Outside of the paradigm of fairness, there are no such reasons to believe that phases of domination cancel up. If those who have X are able to dominate those who have Y, there are nonfairness-based and nonderivative egalitarian reasons to care.
As Young puts it, the distributive paradigm is fundamentally static: it measures and compares respective levels of goods being distributed over a set time segment. 42 By contrast, relational egalitarians do not need segments to apply their value to. They are concerned with the kinds of hierarchies that structure a given social arrangement and believe that no one should be in a position to be dominated or exploited at any point. This both seems to suggest that there should be a floor below which no one should ever fall and a ceiling above which no one should rise – this guarantees that synchronic inequalities will not turn into objectionable forms of hierarchies. 43 Because relational egalitarians worry about inequalities within communities at any point, they will be concerned about the Unequal City as a potential counterexample of what a society of relational equals is. The relational explanation for what is problematic in the Unequal City and Swapping Castes examples thus does not suffer from the arbitrariness problem faced by McKerlie’s explanation.
By showing that the focus on complete lives naturally follows from the distributive approach, I would also like to suggest that those who adopt a solely distributive view will be more likely to fail to explain why fundamental synchronic inequalities like the Unequal City example matter. In addition, those who adopt an exclusively relational view may also be more likely to underappreciate the importance of diachronic inequalities. The grip of the relational conception indeed decreases with time distance, just as it decreases with space difference. The focus on relationships makes clear sense when people coexist, live within the same communities, and share the same space. It is much less clear, on relational egalitarian grounds, why we may owe equal opportunities (for instance) to future generations, whereas it is clearer on a distributive egalitarian conception. Similarly, it is less clear if one cares about distributive fairness why it may be wrong in some cases that the elderly have substantially less than younger adults (or vice versa) as long as both groups will receive their fair share over their complete lives, than it is on the relational conception. This pushes in favor of adopting a hybrid view, which takes seriously both diachronic and synchronic temporalities as well as both fairness and relations-based reasons.
In this article, taking seriously the challenge that the relational approach may be inessential to an egalitarian conception of justice, I aim to show that relational concerns cannot be entirely redescribed within the distributive paradigm and that relational egalitarian reasons are distinctive and nonreducible. For this reason, I focus on the shortcomings of distributive accounts in explaining some synchronic inequalities. Complete lives egalitarians, I argue, have overlooked an important test for wrongful inequalities that is fundamentally nonderivatively synchronic. However, as I just suggested, one could also focus on the potential shortcomings of the relational approach in explaining why some inequalities between birth cohorts matter. It is sufficient for my argument to focus on the shortcomings of the distributive paradigm in explaining some synchronic inequalities, and so I restrict my discussion to this aspect.
Distributive alternatives to the relational explanation
In the previous section, I claimed that the Unequal City is objectionable for nonderivatively synchronic relational reasons. I suggested that, even if we are distributive egalitarians, we must adopt the relational conception of equality to make full sense of some cases of synchronic inequalities. In order to fortify this claim, I will now examine alternative distributive ways to explain what is wrong with some synchronic inequalities. I have already shown why McKerlie’s distributive segments account faces critical challenges. Let me now turn to two distributive alternatives: the prudential lifespan account and the sufficiency alternative. Both provide an explanation for what is wrong with synchronic inequalities of the sort we highlighted earlier without appealing to relational reasons. After assessing these alternatives, I will maintain that some synchronic inequalities matter for nonderivatively diachronic reasons. A comprehensive theory of intergenerational equality, I conclude, should integrate a concern for synchronic relational equality, even if it accepts prudent planning and continuous sufficiency as two key principles.
Supplementing complete lives egalitarian principles with prudent planning
The first alternative view states that complete lives egalitarian accounts of equality that integrate a prudential dimension can explain why McKerlie’s examples are problematic without appealing to the relational view. Norman Daniels, for instance, argues that age-group institutions must be designed to make each life go as well as possible. 44 He does not accept the pure view that as long as complete lives are equal, what happens within lives is irrelevant to justice. He complements his view with a prudential procedure: In order to be acceptable, inequalities between age-groups must also be ‘prudent’, in a particular sense.
Daniels appeals to a procedural framework – the prudential lifespan account – to define what prudence requires. Behind a thick veil of ignorance, planners are asked to move from the usual interpersonal perspective we adopt to think about generations to an intrapersonal perspective: ‘We are driven to convert the synchronic or time-slice distribution problem we first raised (…) into a diachronic perspective in which we are concerned with the treatment of the same people through various stages of their lives’. 45 This approach consists in translating questions of justice between different groups of people – for instance, the question of the young’s responsibilities to the old – into questions of transfers within the same life.
Planners are asked to distribute scarce resources between the different stages of their lives. They do not know their age and have access to no other information about their private circumstances. They have to distribute resources prudently: they must make their lives go as well as possible and given that they do not know their age, they do not discount one stage of their life at the expense of another. Veiled prudent planners, Daniels argues, would preserve an age-relative normal range of opportunities throughout the lifespan but create some intrapersonal inequalities so as to promote the best overall lifespan benefits. The prudential lifespan account thus helps in designing cooperative institutions that will be fair to each age group: ‘We will be using what is prudent over a lifespan to determine a result that neither young nor old can object to as unfair to them’. 46 Fair institutions will treat age-groups differently, but in a way that is adapted to and respectful of their age-relative normal range of opportunities. Inequalities between age groups are only appropriate if they pass the test of the prudential lifespan account.
Thus, ‘prudential’ complete lives egalitarians – who do theorize about the quality of whole lives and not only about complete lives equality – are in fact quite well placed to explain why many cases of synchronic inequalities are objectionable. There is no need to appeal to relational equality, they may argue, to make sense of objectionable synchronic inequalities: mere commitment to the quality of lives as a whole suffices. Inequalities of McKerlie’s changing places type are imprudent because they undermine lifespan efficiency in the prudential sense: cases of swapping oppression do not make lives go as well as possible because they do not preserve a normal opportunity range throughout time. Periods of domination, they may argue, represent a strong disutility over complete lives. Swapping domination is certainly not necessary in order for social institutions to enable people to lead the best complete lives. This suggests that prudential complete lives egalitarians would be able to reject many cases of synchronic inequalities of the changing places type by appealing to the derivative effect of such inequalities on people’s quality of lives and thus without referring to the relational approach.
However, examining what the prudential lifespan account has to say about the Unequal City example reveals the limited adequacy of the prudential approach to synchronic inequalities. The diachronic prudential goal of lifespan efficiency – making lives go as well as possible – provides reasons to attach decreasing importance to later years in life than to younger. If we follow the complete life egalitarian and lifespan efficiency commitments, we may in fact be willing to encourage more cases like that of the Unequal City example, where institutions provide an affluent life for younger citizens, at the price of fewer flourishing opportunities for later years.
Furthermore, there is always a risk that we may die young. In the face of uncertainty, we may want institutions to maximize, first, our chances to live a life of normal length that is as fulfilling as possible, and only then to enhance our chances to live well in later life, for instance by investing in expansive health-care resources for the elderly and life-extending technologies. From this perspective, we may argue that if we consider that the worse off are those who will die young, then we might as well allocate most resources to the young. Following this diachronic prudential thinking, we may in fact justify the Unequal City rather than challenge it. At this stage, some will thus perhaps revise their initial aversion to the Unequal City example. If prudence requires that we should maximize lifespan utility and if doing so will indeed require leaving little for later years in life, then the Unequal City might be a fair city.
To be sure, Norman Daniels’s complete lives egalitarian account is still quite generous to the elderly: his theory establishes that trade-offs are only acceptable when they can be said to make lives as a whole go as well as possible, and making a life go well requires that enough be left for elder years too. Behind the veil of ignorance, planners do not know how old they are and are therefore aware that they may be an elderly person, needing care and support to live a decent life. Daniels would object to a society that multiplies cases of synchronic inequalities like the Unequal City case. This society would not make lives as a whole go as well as possible, he would insist.
Yet, even with his careful procedural approach, one may worry that diachronic reasons will always tend to threaten the status of the elderly as fully equal members of their communities. Older people have already had their share of opportunities. Cases of inequalities like the Unequal City would be even more likely to be celebrated if the elderly had accepted this temporal trade-off as their own vision of the good life in their past. 47 For instance, the elderly’s status of equals would be threatened, if they were spatially segregated, constantly denied access to a number of services on grounds of age, politically marginalized, disenfranchised, or shamed as societal burdens. As a result, elderly people would be likely to feel rejected, excluded, and isolated. Yet, it is not evident that Daniels, drawing solely on prudence and complete life equality, could successfully make sense of those critiques. The relational egalitarian, on the contrary, will still have objections to the elderly being left vulnerable to domination. This is not to say that we should reject any distributive inequalities between young and old but that there are egalitarian explanations for our reluctance to accept some synchronic inequalities when they are acceptable on prudential grounds. Those limits are best explained by appeal to relational reasons.
The scope of egalitarian concerns when it comes to age-groups inequalities cannot be fully reduced to their impact on the quality of whole lives. Lifespan prudence does not always provide the right sorts of reasons. Part of what is offensive in the Unequal City example is not that it is an imprudent diachronic distribution; it is that the fundamental egalitarian goal of achieving a community where people relate as equals may be jeopardized. Daniels is very right to argue that diachronic prudence matters to institutional planning. His prudential complement to pure complete lives egalitarianism makes the diachronic perspective relevant to informing the distribution of resources between age-groups to a large extent. But it fails to capture some nondiachronically derivative reasons to be cautious about inequalities between age-groups: that it threatens the relationships that make communities nonhierarchical and nonexclusionary.
The first alternative to my relational explanation was thus that most cases of wrongful synchronic relational equalities can be rejected, based on their impact on the quality of whole lives. On this view, when there are no such derivative reasons to object to synchronic inequalities, we should consider them acceptable. My answer has been that, although prudential reasons are valuable and constitute an important part of the equation, they may in fact justify the Unequal City rather than challenge it. If we still feel the intuitive pull of the Unequal City example, then the fact that this arrangement may create utility over complete lives is, at least partly, beside the point. The examples are also offensive precisely because they create relations that may conflict with the nonderivative relational goal of a community of equals, where no one is at risk of domination. I am not denying that there may also be conflicts once we endorse the relational view: The conflict may then be between complete lives equality and prudent planning, on the one hand, and synchronic relational equality, on the other. But at least, we have identified a conflict that explains our reluctance to concede that Unequal Cities are acceptable from an egalitarian perspective. Daniels’s prudential account, on the other end, risks celebrating the Unequal City rather than providing resources to challenge it. There are relation-based reasons to limit synchronic inequality even if inequality is favored by prudential reasons, and the former are potentially sometimes of sufficient importance to defeat the latter.
Supplementing complete lives egalitarian principles with sufficiency principles
The second potential alternative consists in saying that we should aim to ensure equality over complete lives but that we should also make sure people have enough throughout their lives. Axel Gosseries first coined this sufficiency threshold ‘continuous sufficiency’ in his 2000 unpublished thesis, and then discussed it in his 2011 paper on sufficiency. The reference to this threshold as ‘continuous’ (‘continuiste’ in French) is simply there to note that ‘everyone should have enough at any point, and not only over their life as a whole’. 48 With this concept, Gosseries claims that we can supplement the complete lives egalitarian ideal with a sufficiency threshold. Bringing in this supplemental principle, one may argue that we do not need to appeal to relational reasons to challenge cases of swapping inequalities. The worse off simply do not have enough. Gosseries suggests that we may link this abstract idea of having enough to both human deprivation and the value of human dignity.
Paula Casal interestingly illustrates the potential of the sufficientarian ideal similarly by appealing to the example of two potential recipients of limited resources: an octogenarian woman who has lived extremely well in the past and now finds herself facing hardship and a teenager who faces a whole life of relatively lower quality. 49 We should be concerned with complete lives equality, she argues, but we should also aim to ensure that people have enough at any point: ‘Faced with the choice between benefiting the octogenarian or the teenager, it is not implausible to believe that (…) it would be wrong to allow the octogenarian to fall below some critical threshold during the last segment of her life’. 50 With this example, Casal aims to show that we may endorse a mixed view that leaves space for both distributive equality and sufficiency: ‘If such a conviction [that we ought to help the elderly woman] is sound, then there is still a place for certain types of sufficiency principles within distributive ethics’. 51
The sufficientarian view can thus be phrased as such. The right time unit for equality is complete lives. To make sense of some cases of synchronic inequalities like the Unequal City example, we do not need to appeal to relational reasons, we can simply appeal to the view that ensuring that no one falls below a certain critical threshold at any point is also essential to a just distribution of resources. The suggestion here is that we don’t need to appeal to egalitarian principles to oppose Unequal City, since we can simply appeal to some satiable noncomparative principle. The real concern is not synchronic inequalities; it is the fact that the worse off, in the Swapping Castes or Unequal City examples, do not have enough. This view does not need to appeal to a procedure to decide which inequalities between age-groups matter once the threshold is met. The sufficiency threshold view threatens my relational explanation because it denies that synchronic equality matters nonderivatively in theory, but in practice it can still explain why cases like the Unequal City example are objectionable: the elderly simply do not have enough. Moreover, if we endorse the sufficiency view, once we have defined the sufficiency threshold we can easily argue that when those who are worse off now have enough now and are equal to others over their complete lives, then we should not worry about synchronic inequalities further.
However, this alternative explanation for what is wrong in cases like the Unequal City works only to a point. In the Unequal City example, the problem may be that the elderly do not have enough, but we can envisage the problem from the point of view of at least three sufficiency thresholds: (1) an absolute threshold – defined through an appeal to basic human needs and constituted by the resources necessary to be free from deprivation; (2) a relative threshold – dependent on what others have and set by the resources necessary to function ‘normally’ in a given society at a given time; (3) a relational threshold – sensitive to the wrongful relationships of domination that may prevail when some individuals or groups in a community have more resources, influence, or status than others and constituted by the amount of resources necessary to stand free from domination. Importantly, only the first threshold is noncomparative. The second and third principles are genuinely egalitarian insofar as they support closing the gap between more and less advantaged individuals; unlike principles that favor leveling down, however, they justify taking away from the better off because this will improve the condition of the worse off. In the search for an egalitarian explanation for why some synchronic inequalities matter, only the second and third thresholds threaten my view.
In any case, in the Unequal City example, the elderly may well have enough in terms of their basic needs being met: they have access to basic resources including income, housing, health care, and so on. They may be said not to have access to enough resources or opportunities in the relative sense, depending on whether we consider that what they have is commensurable with what others have. Even though they have fewer opportunities to flourish than younger people, however, what they have is within the normal opportunity range of the elderly in their society, and they have had the opportunity to live a normal lifespan. Therefore, the elderly in the Unequal City case may well be above both the first and second sufficiency thresholds. However, the elderly of the Unequal City risk falling below the third threshold. As we discussed, they are spatially segregated and at risk of becoming marginalized and socially excluded.
Therefore, depending on how the threshold is specified, the sufficientarian may either (1) find it difficult to provide an explanation for what is problematic in the Unequal City example or (2) appeal to the relational conception of equality to explain what is wrong in those cases. Yet, as soon as one appeals to the relational threshold to explain what may be wrong, one commits oneself to the view that synchronic relational inequalities matter. In other words, sufficiency throughout our lives can be a good rule of thumb to design institutions that treat age groups justly, but the best underlying explanation for why ensuring sufficiency matters in cases like the Unequal City example is egalitarian in nature – it derives from the relational egalitarian goal of achieving a community of equals.
Conclusions
In this article, I have shown that there is a strong nonaccidental connection between the complete lives view and distributive fairness. Although the prudential and sufficiency alternatives go a long way in explaining what is wrong in many cases of synchronic inequalities, they cannot fully explain what is wrong in the Unequal City example unless they commit to the relational perspective in one way or another. Some synchronic inequalities carry nonderivative moral weight, and the relational egalitarian approach stands on firm grounds as the most adequate egalitarian explanation for what is wrong in at least some of these cases. We should reject the presumption that inequalities between age-groups are unproblematic if they do not result in cohortal inequalities and diachronic disutility. Instead we should assess each case of intergenerational inequality through at least both diachronic distributive and synchronic relational lenses. Let me end by providing a very brief sketch of such a hybrid account of intergenerational equality and then concluding on the reducibility thesis.
Toward a hybrid account of intergenerational equality
Our discussion of the illuminating case of the Unequal City suggests that we should bring in the insights of relational equality to bear on issues of intergenerational equality. There are a number of ways to combine those requirements, and the aim of this article is not to develop a fully-fledged account of intergenerational equality. 52 The main aim of the article has been to show that relational reasons are essential to make sense of at least some cases of intergenerational equality. However, in the little space that remains, I want to briefly propose a plausible way to articulate those requirements. Institutions should be designed in a way that (1) is diachronically fair – each successive cohorts being guaranteed approximate equality of opportunity; (2) is diachronically prudent – institutions should seek to make people’s whole lives go as well as possible; (3) promotes synchronic relational equality – institutions should ensure that no age-group is excluded, segregated, or politically marginalized.
This mixed answer importantly differs from Daniels’s own mixed answer because his account reduces the discussion to a question of fairness – making sure birth cohorts have access to their fair share (principle 1) and treating age groups fairly by making sure institutions are prudent (principle 2). I am proposing to add principle 3 – which extends the debate to a question about the kinds of relationships we think are acceptable in a community of relational equals. Age-group inequalities, I argued, must also be investigated from a perspective that gives full importance to considerations of rank, status, power, and stigma. For this reason, while Daniels may have to concede that, insofar as its distribution is prudent, the Unequal City is just, the mixed view I endorse here will worry that, even if the distribution was found to be prudent and diachronically fair, it would fail the test of relational inequality at the synchronic level. This is a sufficient concern to reconsider this arrangement as acceptable.
The three principles will often be compatible. For instance, it may be argued that making sure that young adults are not stigmatized, socially included, and politically involved will have a positive impact, or at least be compatible with, the young having access to sufficient resources to live a good complete life. We should try to find compromises that give adequate consideration to all three principles. Unless we provide a lexical ordering of the principles (which I do not propose here), there will inevitably be conflicts, especially in nonideal circumstances. There may be only one way to meet (1), and this may conflict with (3), for instance. I would accept that this means that there will be cases where we should decide to put one concern above others. For instance, we may decide to make people’s lives as a whole a little worse in terms of utility, to ensure that one group does not end up segregated.
One may also ask how this mixed account would handle another kind of conflict: this time between the relational perspective at the diachronic level and the relational perspective at the synchronic level. Is there a priority of the synchronic demands, for instance, over diachronic demands? The relational perspective would be implausible if it considered diachronic inequalities in status irrelevant. After all, relational reasons also apply diachronically. Racial and gender hierarchies, as opposed to some forms of age hierarchies, affect the same groups of people over time. Those inegalitarian relationships are wrong both synchronically (at each point) and diachronically (over time). Relational egalitarians are concerned with relationships of inequality at any point, as I have already suggested, which includes inequalities that enfold over time. But then, one may argue, how would your mixed view deal with conflicts between meeting the demands of relational equality at the diachronic and at the synchronic levels?
There are no reasons to believe that synchronic demands take priority over diachronic demands. Or at least, I have not provided such argument here. However, I have argued that there are no reasons to believe, once we step outside of the distributive fairness paradigm, that switching phases of domination cancel out diachronically. The fact that people are being treated fairly diachronically, in that society, is important to diachronic relational equality because it means that successive birth cohorts are treated with equal concern. But this is not sufficient to conclude that the community in question is equal diachronically on relational grounds. On the contrary, it is a diachronic community that is continuously fraught with relational inequalities. An alternative view that replaces the complete lives egalitarian principle that I have grounded on fairness with a complete lives egalitarian principle grounded on relational equality would be welcome in the literature, but it is not the view that I am endorsing here. This is partly because it seems to me that there is a lot to be said in favor of fairness playing a key role in the expression of the diachronic requirements of intergenerational equality, as I have tried to suggest in sections ‘Age groups, birth cohorts and complete lives egalitarianism’, ‘McKerlie’s simultaneous segments approach’, and ‘Distributive alternatives to the relational explanation’.
In any case, synchronic relational equality is part of the debate that should take place. Not committing to relational reasons obscures this important debate. My argument has not been that an appeal to relational reasons solves conflicts, but that it helps explaining better which kinds of conflicts are at play in the Unequal City example, thus enabling us to propose a fuller understanding of the requirements of intergenerational equality.
Recognizing relational reasons as essential to egalitarian justice
Where does this leave us in terms of our initial objective to assess the view that the relational conception of equality is largely reducible to the distributive approach? My discussion has suggested that the reducibility thesis – which states that the relational approach is not distinctive and can be redescribed as distributive – is unlikely to be true. On the contrary, I have shown that relational reasons are irreducible to reasons of distributive fairness in the nonmarginal case of intergenerational inequalities.
By showing that the focus on complete lives naturally follows from the distributive approach, I have suggested that those who adopt a solely distributive view will be more likely to overlook some of the reasons why fundamental synchronic inequalities like the Unequal City example matter. The topic of age-group justice has not attracted much attention from egalitarians, and this problematic oversight can perhaps be explained by the importance of distributive fairness in egalitarian thought in general. This helps in explaining why the whole life perspective has been endorsed as the default, why very little attention has been paid to the question of synchronic inequalities, why questions of equality between age groups are under researched, and why few philosophical objections to age-based discrimination exist. 53 Once we step away from the paradigm of distributive fairness and endorse the relational egalitarian approach, however, the relevance and objectionable nature of synchronic inequalities becomes clearer. If we accept to take seriously the intuitive dystopian sense that the changing places and Unequal City examples leave us with, then I have argued that, even if we are distributive egalitarians, we must endorse the relational conception of equality to explain it fully and adequately.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to the editors for their invaluable comments. My thanks also go to Martin O’Neill and Matt Matravers who have read and reread earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to my colleagues and friends at the University of York and at the Université Catholique de Louvain and in particular to Axel Gosseries, Tim Meijers and David Axelsen for their support and comments. I also wish to thank the audience of the various conferences I attended in the past few years – in particular the audiences of the Aarhus 2012 Conception of Justice Workshop, the Harvard 2012 Political Theory Workshop, and the 2013 Oxford Political Theory Workshop.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.