Abstract
The most influential political theories of our age, from Rawls and Parfit to Scanlon and Nagel, apply a version of equality to people’s complete lifespans. They discuss the material circumstances and life chances, and/or the well-being, of generations commonly understood as birth cohorts as they grow older together through life. This book’s distinct contribution is to make an additional case for equality between the young and the old at any given point in time. The focus of analysis is the material situation – McKerlie summarily dismisses well-being – of age groups.
McKerlie acknowledges that whole lifespans must remain a morally important unit, but then moves on irrespectively to defend a strong version of egalitarianism between age groups. This boils down to a strong prioritarian argument. Suppose that right now (however the slice of time called ‘now’ is defined) the elderly group A and the younger group B are alive (they share this simultaneous segment of time) and that A is worse off than B. Then there is an overwhelming a priori case for a transfer from B to A.
There are three major weaknesses with this argument. The first is the relevant duration of the time period sliced out for comparing the circumstances of different age groups. Is it this year? Why not this month, or today? Any choice seems arbitrary, and McKerlie’s stance would logically lead him to the absurd rejection of even single-instant inequalities. A second problem is McKerlie’s heavy reliance on ‘our’ presumed agreement with his own purely intuitive responses to hypothetical cases. For instance, he repeatedly assumes that ‘we all’ intuitively join him in objecting to a made-up case of poverty in an overcrowded elderly home within a hypothetical neighbourhood with bourgeois mid-lifers, even though the elderly have enjoyed the same affluent middle ages and even though they did not save for their own old age.
Third, considerations of the foundations of existing age-group inequalities in merit or responsibility are near-absent. McKerlie is committed to redistribute towards equality whenever one age group is very badly off, at the cost not just of better-off age groups but even of the worse-off age group’s lifetime welfare. But the author does not provide any sustained discussion of issues of moral hazard, other incentive effects, fiscal foundations for redistribution and age group or (beyond a brief acknowledgment) individual responsibility. This fatally undermines the theory. In sum, this book fails to convince on the need to complement complete-lives egalitarianism with age-group equality in our political theories of age.