Fair Innings

In many societies, the aging of the population is becoming a major problem. This raises difficult issues for ethics and public policy. On what is known as the fair innings view, it is not impermissible to give lower priority to policies that primarily benefit the elderly. Philosophers have tried to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bioethics
Main Author: Bognar, Greg (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Wiley-Blackwell [2015]
In: Bioethics
RelBib Classification:NCC Social ethics
VA Philosophy
Further subjects:B Prioritarianism
B utilitarian ageism
B Fair play
B Age
B priority setting
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Volltext (doi)
Description
Summary:In many societies, the aging of the population is becoming a major problem. This raises difficult issues for ethics and public policy. On what is known as the fair innings view, it is not impermissible to give lower priority to policies that primarily benefit the elderly. Philosophers have tried to justify this view on various grounds. In this article, I look at a consequentialist, a fairness-based, and a contractarian justification. I argue that all of them have implausible implications and fail to correspond to our moral intuitions. I end by outlining a different kind of consequentialist justification that avoids those implications and corresponds better to our considered moral judgments.
ISSN:1467-8519
Contains:Enthalten in: Bioethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12101