Are Generational Welfare Trades Always Unjust?

A few days ago, I have published a paper with a number of other bioethicists spread across a number of institutions (Oxford, Yale, Sydney, among others). In it, we reply to a recent article by Mal and Navin in which they made an exceedingly strong claim that we could not agree with.

[W]e maintain that it is always unethical to adopt a policy that necessitates that children become worse off, in order that the vulnerable elderly become better off, even if doing so saves money or advances aggregate well-being. – (Malm and Navin 2020, 54)

Are Generational Welfare Trades Always Unjust?

Source: Isaac Quesada On Unsplash: Free Use

Our response is titled "Are Generational Welfare Trades Always Unjust?" Thus the title of this blog post.

Let us give you a brief glimpse into our paper:

The principle that seems to underly the reasoning of Malm and Navin is a sort of ‘no child disadvantaging intergenerational trading principle’ (NCDIT).

We have argued that this principle "while it may at first seem intuitively appealing, is never defended in the article. But it is a strong claim, and it does need defending. Malm and Navin (2020) seem to hold an exceedingly strong view on what justice entails. In taking an absolutist position on NCDIT, they could be seen as adopting a view analogous to that of Browning and Veit (2020a) who redefine the concept of humaneness from minimizing unnecessary harms to something much stronger: “for a practice to be truly humane, it must not cause any (or minimal) harm to welfare, which includes harms of deprivation” (2). Browning and Veit argue that because animal slaughter incurs a loss of (future) welfare, it can never be truly humane.

Similar to children, animals lack political representation and deserve to be treated humanely. Yet, this alone cannot make animal slaughter always impermissible, for it would disallow the actions of, say, a stranded sailor who has to kill doves to survive. Many ethically defensible policies will undoubtedly involve tradeoffs such as the presence of roads that leads to roadkill, and yet, this “is not taken to be sufficient reason to cease driving” (Browning and Veit 2020b, 2). None of this stops us from recognizing that there are better and worse ways of treating animals or protecting their welfare. Malm and Navin, however, seem to imply that NCDIT makes all tradeoffs that disadvantage children impermissible.

It is this strong view we cannot agree with. In our view, it is untenable to hold that wherever there is a tradeoff between the well-being of children and the elderly (or adults for that matter), a sacrifice toward the interest of the older generation must always be unethical. Imagine a world where a single child was forced to forgo one lollipop as a necessary means to extending the life of hundreds of elderly people for several years.

The NCIDT principle would forbid this trade–but it seems intuitively clear that this is absurd. However, we do not need to reach for bizarre thought experiments to illustrate why we should reject the principle. We can take two simple real-world examples to illustrate our point."

Indeed, we think that one doesn't have to be a bioethicists to understand our problem with this idea. There are numerous examples that would illustrate this and we chose to discuss influenza vaccinations, animal welfare, and COVID-19. I will discuss each of these examples in turn in future posts (see here). Nevertheless, what I can offer here is our conclusion:

There are many reasons to prioritize the interests of children. But tradeoffs are inevitable. We disagree with the authors that such policies are “always unethical,” a principle that would make many intuitively unproblematic policies unjust. Rather than ruling out certain tradeoffs by fiat, careful argumentation is needed to establish different limits in different contexts. Inter-generational tradeoffs can be justified on both utilitarian and contractarian grounds, and even dyed-in-the-wool Kantians will usually recognize threshold cases or limits to categorical rules when the welfare tradeoffs are sufficiently asymmetrical. In order to ensure that children are treated ethically, we need to ground their rights and interests in stable principles that do not force us accept untenable conclusions. (Veit et al. 2020)

Short: We always engage in trade-offs. They are inevitable and not necessarily problematic. There is thus little sense to demand that doing so is immoral.