Ageing and Identity as a Problem for Social Justice

Abstract

This article highlights a problem with social justice criticism in the humanities that treats age inequalities as if they were analogous to inequalities between different races or genders. It claims that what is missing from such criticism is an awareness of the peculiar temporality of age and its implications with regard to the distribution of goods. After outlining the problem with reference to the most sophisticated liberal account of social justice—namely John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness—the article discusses three ways of addressing the problem and concludes with a preliminary evaluation of these.