Journal of Applied Philosophy,Vol. 28, No.

4, 2011
doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2011.00541.x

Is Age Special? Justice, Complete Lives and the Prudential

Lifespan Account

HUGH LAZENBY

abstract This article explores the problem of justice between age-groups. Specifically, it
presents a challenge to a leading theory in this field, Norman Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan
Account. The challenge relates to a key assumption that underlies this theory, namely the
assumption that all individuals live complete lives of equal length. Having identified the roles
that this assumption plays, the article argues that the justifications Daniels offers for it are
unsatisfactory and that this threatens the foundation of his position, undermining his claim
that ‘the fact that we all age’ makes age a special problem of distributive justice. This shows
that the problem of justice between age-groups is not special in the way Daniels proposes;
rather it involves the same irreducibly interpersonal distributive decisions as other problems of
justice. The consequences of this argument are several-fold. Most importantly, it shows that the
Rawlsian account of justice to which Daniels hopes to attach his theory to requires signifi-
cantly greater benefits to be conferred on those in earlier age-groups relative to those in later
age-group, not a distribution similar to simultaneous equality as Daniels proposes.

What, if any, relative or absolute entitlement does justice grant a person by virtue of
their membership of a certain age-group? Three prominent egalitarian answers have
been offered to this question. First, the ‘simultaneous equality’ view states that justice
requires equality between different people in different age-groups at simultaneous tem-
poral moments.1 For example, this view considers it unjust if those in later age-groups
at time t are worse-off than those in earlier age-groups at time t. Second, the ‘whole
lives’ view claims that justice confers an equal entitlement to each individual over the
course of their life.2 This view allows that those in different age-groups, and even those
within the same age-group, may fare differently at a particular temporal moment pro-
vided that the sum of some good in each life is the same.3 Third, proceduralist views
state that justice requires a distribution between age-groups in accordance with how
some appropriately situated deliberative agent would choose to distribute a fair share
of some good over their own life.4 Views of this type are compatible with inequalities
between those in different age-groups provided they would have been agreed upon in
the appropriate procedure.
In this article I will present a challenge to the leading proceduralist view, Norman
Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account.5 My challenge relates to a key assumption that
underlies his theory, namely, the assumption that all individuals live complete lives of
equal length.6 Having identified the roles that this assumption plays, I argue that the
justifications Daniels offers for it are unsatisfactory and that this threatens the foun-
dation of his position, undermining his claim that ‘the fact that we all age’ makes age

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2011, Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
328 Hugh Lazenby

a special problem of distributive justice. As I aim to show, the problem of justice

between age-groups is not special in the way Daniels proposes; it involves the same
irreducibly interpersonal distributive decisions as other problems of justice. The con-
sequences of this argument are several-fold. Most importantly, it shows that the Rawl-
sian account of justice, to which Daniels hopes to attach his theory, requires
significantly greater benefits to be conferred on those in earlier age-groups relative to
those in later age-group, not a distribution similar to simultaneous equality as Daniels
proposes.7
The essay is divided into four sections. The first characterizes the problem of justice
between age-groups. The second provides an exegesis of the Prudential Lifespan
Account, establishing the roles of the complete lives assumption. The third provides a
critique of the assumption, while the fourth concludes by drawing out the theoretical and
practical implications of the critique.

1. Justice Between Age-Groups

Even if the practical relevance of the age-group problem is clear — we want to know what
entitlements the young and old hold — it is not immediately obvious what exactly an
age-group is, or whether how to distribute benefits and burdens between them is really
a distinct problem of justice and not simply an area where some more general principle
of justice needs to be applied.
With respect to the first question, it is important to distinguish age-groups from
birth cohorts. A birth cohort is a distinct group of people born at a particular chro-
nological moment; for example, all people born in 1982. An age-group is a particular
part of the lifespan; for example, all people between 25 and 30 years old. While birth
cohorts are born and perish, age-groups continue to exist through time with different
cohorts inhabiting them. The distinction allows us to separate the problem of inter-
generational justice, which relates to how burdens and benefits ought to be distributed
between cohorts, from the problem of justice between age-groups. When we investigate
what is due to those in different age-groups we assume away differences between
cohorts, giving clear focus on how, if at all, membership in an age-group can be
relevant to justice.
With respect to the second question, what general conception of justice one endorses
clearly does have implications for what may be due to those in different age-groups. For
example, a libertarian conception of justice sees the problem of how to distribute
between the young and the old in terms ensuring that each individual’s property rights
are protected through time, while egalitarian conceptions see the problem in terms of
what is required for the equal attainment of, or opportunity for, some good between
people. Part of what is interesting about Daniels’ position is that he claims the age-group
problem demands a specific answer that can form one distinct component of a complete
theory of justice and is not, therefore, merely reducible to a more general justice
principle. As I will now explain, the Prudential Lifespan Account is a response to what
Daniels believes is the special problem of justice between age-groups and he claims his
response is free standing, with the capacity to attach to any more general ‘frame’ theory
of distributive justice.8

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2. The Prudential Lifespan Account

The Specialness of Age

In setting out to identify principles of justice between age-groups, Daniels begins from
the contention that, unlike other problems of distributive justice, the apparently inter-
personal challenge of distributing between those in different age-groups ‘naturally
reduces’ to the intrapersonal challenge of how to distribute within a single life. This
reduction is made possible, Daniels believes, because of the purchase that the fact ‘we
each age’ has on the age-group problem.9
Let me expand. At first glance the age-group problem appears irreducibly interper-
sonal. That is, it appears that solving the age-group problem must require balancing
the competing interests of two or more opposed groups of people, namely, those that
fall into different age brackets. Daniels’ claim is that the age-group problem appears
irreducibly interpersonal only because we view it from a perspective rooted in the
immediate present. Viewing the problem only ‘from now’ leads us to ask how much
those who are currently old owe those who are currently young and vice-versa, making
distributive transfers appear as additional gains for one distinct group of people at the
expense of another. However, the fact that we each age means that those who are now
young may one day also be old. Daniels’ innovative proposition is that, when we
recognize this fact, we are able to adopt the intrapersonal perspective: we can view
each age-group as representing a stage that we will have to go through in our own life
and so reduce the distributive challenge of how to allocate between people to the
question of how some ideally situated agent would choose to have benefits distributed
over the different stages of his or her own life. In order to determine how much any
individual is entitled to from their membership of a particular age-group, we can
simply ask how much of their total fair distributive share it would have been prudent
for them to leave for that age-group had they been choosing ex ante under certain
knowledge restrictions.
The contrast with Rawlsian Constructivism is illuminative. Constructivism claims that
principles are correct when they are the outcome of a deliberative procedure that
incorporates all relevant criteria of correct reasoning.10 Rawls claims his constructivist
model is appropriate because either (early Rawls) it is built from the true Kantian
account of the nature of persons or (later Rawls) it reflects a shared ideal about
democratic citizens implicit in the public culture of liberal democratic societies. Daniels
claims his model is appropriate specifically because the purchase that facts about ageing
have on the age-group problem makes it possible to reduce the interpersonal to the
intrapersonal without further justification. Thus, Daniels believes he can, ‘avoid appeal
to [Rawls’] robust Kantian account of the nature of persons when trying to solve the
limited problem of justice between age-groups.’11
Note, however, that the proposed reduction is only possible when we abstract from the
problem of premature death and assume lives of equal length — complete lives — are
lived by all. If we allow for the fact of premature death, transfers from those who are
young to those who are old will again appear as transfers to distinct people, given that
those who are young may not live into old age. Indeed, Daniels explicitly recognizes his
reliance on the assumption stating that he will ‘abstract from the obvious problem of
early death and continue to work with this assumption throughout.’12

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330 Hugh Lazenby

We have, then, the first instance of the complete lives assumption entering into
Daniels’ argument; the assumption underlies his proposal that there is a natural reduc-
tion from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal perspective. In the following section I
will explain further Daniels’ claim that the Prudential Lifespan Account must be
‘framed’ by a more general theory of justice, showing how the complete lives assumption
also enters this part of the theory.

The Scope of the Prudential Lifespan Account

Daniels cites four restrictions under which his prudential agents must reason in order to
determine the correct principles of justice between age groups:
First, our rational deliberators must seek principles to govern the design of
institution that distribute basic resources over the lifespan. Second, these delib-
erators must already know that the basic goods being distributed constitute a
fair or just share, that is that more general principles of distributive justice
already solve problems of distributions between persons.Third, the deliberators
must assume that they will live through each stage of life under the institutions
that they are designing, thus avoiding the conversion of the problem into one
that involves transfers between persons or between birth cohorts. Fourth, the
deliberators must also not know their plan of life or conception of the good;
instead they must measure their well-being by reference to a Rawlsian index of
primary goods.13
In Rawlsian constructivism, the justification for the restrictions on reasoning in the
Original Position comes directly from the conception of the person with the two moral
powers. As Daniels hopes to avoid committing himself to a substantive conception of the
person he cannot use the Rawlsian justification for the restrictions he places his delib-
erative agents under. Instead, Daniels justifies his restrictions with reference to two
sources: first, the fact that his theory is intended to be limited in scope — it is intended
to be ‘framed’ by some more general theory of justice that solves the interpersonal justice
problem of what constitutes a fair share for each person — and, second, the demands
prudence itself places on the deliberative agents.14
To see why Daniels believes his theory must be framed, consider the following
difficulty: even if we accept the intrapersonal perspective as the proper solution to the
age-group problem, how many resources is each person entitled to for the purpose of
making their prudential distribution? A satisfactory answer to this question seems to
require an interpersonal judgment because it must say how to distribute between, rather
than within, lives.Yet, given its limited subject-specific foundation in the fact that ‘we all
age’, the Prudential Lifespan Account cannot attempt to resolve the general interper-
sonal question of what constitutes ‘fair shares’ generally. This is what leads Daniels to
limit the proposed scope of his account; the Prudential Lifespan Account must be
framed by a more general theory of justice in order to fix the distributive share each
individual is entitled to; it does not tell us what a fair share for each person over a lifetime
is, it merely tells us how justice requires a fair share should be distributed across time.15
If the frame theory fixes the distributive share each individual is entitled to, the choices
of the agents in his deliberative procedure must not have interpersonal distributive
implications lest the frame theory be disturbed and the age-group problem become once

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again interpersonal. Accordingly, when Daniels states that the third restriction — ‘that
individuals must assume they will live through each stage of life under the institutions
they are designing’ — is there to ‘avoid the conversion of the problem into one that
involves transfers between persons’, he is proposing that the presence of the restriction
protects the distribution laid down by the frame theory of distributive justice.16 This gives
us the second appearance of the complete lives assumption in Daniels account: the
complete lives assumption operates as a restriction on agents in the deliberative proce-
dure, apparently ensuring that the frame theory is maintained despite the distributive
decision of the hypothetical deliberators.17
That concludes my exegesis of Daniels’ account. I have identified two instances where
the complete lives assumption enters the Prudential Lifespan Account: it underlies the
claim that there is a natural reduction from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal
perspective and it acts as a restriction on the agents in the deliberative procedure. We
have also seen that Daniels offers two different justifications for the assumption. First,
when discussing the possibility of a natural reduction from the interpersonal to the
intrapersonal, Daniels suggests the assumption is an abstracting or idealizing assump-
tion. Second, in his discussion of the deliberative procedure he intends to employ, he
suggests the assumption is appropriate because interpersonal questions have already
been resolved via the frame theory. In the following section I will assess each of these
justifications in turn.

3. The Complete Lives Assumption18

Complete Lives as an Idealizing Assumption

Daniels’ claim that he will ‘abstract from the obvious problem of early death and
continue to work with this assumption throughout’ suggests that he views the complete
lives assumption as an idealizing assumption. Idealizing assumptions are used to simplify
a problem to make it more manageable. They abstract from reality to allow us to
conceptualize and solve more fundamental problems, delaying the complications of extra
information until a more manageable moment. A good example of an idealizing assump-
tion is Rawls’ claim that society is a closed system, with individuals leaving by death and
entering by birth. As Rawls says when describing his project,
I shall be satisfied if it is possible to formulate a reasonable conception of justice
for the basic structure of society conceived for the time being as a closed system
isolated from other societies . . . It is natural to conjecture that once we have a
sound theory for this case, the remaining problems of justice will prove more
tractable in the light of it. With suitable modifications such a theory should
provide the key for some of these other questions.19
Rawls is fully aware that in practice individuals will migrate between societies and that
this will raise questions of distributive justice, but he employs the closed society assump-
tion to isolate the problem of what a just basic structure would be, delaying the problem
of migration until this more fundamental problem is solved.
If we read Daniels complete lives assumption as an idealizing assumption then, at the
least, we can accept that Daniels’ theory is appropriate for determining what justice
would require in a world where all individuals live complete lives of equal length.

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However, one may also question whether the presence of this idealizing assumption
distorts the problem of justice between age-groups, as we face it, to such a degree that
it can no longer yield an action-guiding theory of justice in our world. After all, not all
idealizing assumptions are appropriate: we could provide an idealized account of the
problem of gender justice by assuming that all individuals were of one gender, but to do
so would be at the expense of missing the fundamental problem of gender justice and so
would not constitute an appropriate idealizing assumption.
When is an idealizing assumption appropriate? Recent literature on ‘ideal theory’ can
be employed to shed light on this question. Specifically, Laura Valentini states that a
theory is inappropriately ideal, because it cannot be action-guiding, if ‘it entails an
idealised account of the subject to which it is meant to apply’.20 Expanding on this
thought Valentini writes,
. . . all idealisations are false statements which make the world simpler . . . good
ones do so only ‘temporarily’, at the stage of theory construction, while bad
ones do so ‘permanently’, as they are an integral part of a theory’s fundamental
principles.21
The intended distinction is visible if we contrast the earlier example of Rawls’ assump-
tion of a closed society with the imagined case of a theory of gender justice that employed
the assumption that all individuals are male.22 In the gender case, the question of how to
distribute between the sexes is the fundamental problem we set out to answer. When we
assume a single-sex universe, we distort the subject that our theory is meant to address,
and we can no longer expect the theory to provide us with just action-guiding prescrip-
tions for how to distribute between the sexes. In the Rawlsian case, the subject being
addressed is how the basic institutions of society should be ordered in order to achieve
a just distribution for members of a particular society. Whether society is open or closed
is not a necessary feature of the original moral question that we set out to answer. If we
include the idealization that society is closed, we do not fundamentally alter the moral
question we set out to resolve and we may, having answered the central question,
elaborate on our results by relaxing the assumption. I propose that Daniels’ Prudential
Lifespan Account is an instance of bad idealization, relevantly similar to the cited gender
case, in so far as it relies upon the complete lives assumption.
In support of this claim note, first, that the denial of the fact premature death is
presupposed by Daniels as a condition for the applicability of his theory.That is, Daniels
supposes his method is appropriate precisely because, on the condition that we assume
persons live complete lives of equal length, we can shift seamlessly from the interpersonal
to the intrapersonal perspective.Yet if that assumption is false it is no longer true that it
will be appropriate for individuals to adopt the intrapersonal perspective given that they
may not reach the later age-groups. Rather, those who cannot expect to be in later
age-groups will rightly see any transfer from them to later age-groups as interpersonal
redistributions. The very applicability of Daniels’ account relies on a false assumption
about the subject it addresses.
Second, note that how long a person lives has huge significance for the distributive
share they will receive over a lifetime. Those who live into the later stages of life will,
ceteris paribus, gain more of the goods life has to offer than those who die young. Indeed,
not only will they have had a greater quantity of experiences and pursuits available to
them over their lifetime, they will have had the opportunity to complete those particu-

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 Is Age Special? 333

larly challenging and rewarding undertakings that require a lifetime’s attention.23 Given
these considerations, what life-expectancy one has is quite plausibly the single most
relevant consideration to what one’s overall life prospects are, and those in the later
age-groups are not merely better off but much better off than those in the younger groups
who cannot expect to make it into the later groups.24 Therefore, in so far as Daniels’
theory dismisses the problem of premature death via an idealizing assumption, he not
only changes the nature of the subject he addresses, he changes it in a way that has
potentially radical distributive implications. Viewed this way, solving the age-group
problem after simplifying by including the complete lives assumption does appear equiva-
lent to solving the problem of gender justice after simplifying by homogenizing gender,
since it is in central part the fact that people die at different times that motivates us to
ask the question what justice requires between age-groups. Daniels’ solution appears
successful only because it has avoided the central problem it set out to answer.

Complete Lives as Justified Via the Frame Theory

If the complete lives assumption cannot be justified as an idealizing assumption, we
might still hope that it can be justified on the second grounds offered by Daniels; his
proposal that the complete lives assumption is appropriate because his theory is to be
framed by a more general theory of justice. On this justification, the complete lives
assumption is designed to reflect the fact that all inequalities between whole lives,
including those resulting from premature death, have already been removed by the frame
theory. This explains why the assumption acts as a constraint on deliberators; if all
inequalities between persons have been accounted for, their different life expectancies
have already been factored into their distributive shares, and so the assumption is
necessary to avoid double counting, preventing the decisions of the hypothetical agents
upsetting the interpersonal frame theory distribution.
There are two problems with assuming away the fact of premature death at the level
of the frame theory. First, this move begs the question regarding how the fact of premature
death is relevant to justice. In asking what justice between age-groups requires, part of
what we want to know is how premature death bears on justice. We want to know, for
example, whether those who die young are entitled to greater quantity of goods while
they are alive; but, if Daniels’ account presupposes a frame theory that answers this
question, this is something his account cannot tell us. This objection would be less
pertinent if candidate frame theories of justice paid proper attention to the problem of
premature death, but it is precisely this neglect that makes questions of justice between
age-groups interesting and pressing. Still, perhaps this objection is uncharitable. If we
assume with Daniels that the frame theory already takes adequate account of the fact of
premature death then, so long as the frame is protected by the complete lives assump-
tion, his account may offer a useful addition to any particular frame theory.
The second and more serious problem is that the subsidiary procedure with the
complete lives assumption threatens to violate the distribution laid down by the frame
theory.To see this, suppose, for example, that the frame theory requires an equal division
of resources between the whole lives of all individuals, such that each individual is
entitled to X resources over a lifetime. If some individual, Alpha, lives under institutions
designed in line with the aforementioned frame theory and Daniels’ subsidiary proce-
dure, X will be distributed according to the outcome of a decision procedure where

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334 Hugh Lazenby

Alpha has assumed he will live a complete life. Should Alpha then die prematurely he will
receive some amount less than X: call it Y. By contrast, were Alpha to have lived under
institutions with the aforementioned frame theory and a subsidiary procedure in which
agents chose under risk regarding the possibility of premature death he would have
received a different amount also less than X, call it Z. The important point is that the
presence or absence of the assumption as a restriction on reasoning has implications for
the burdens and benefits experienced by Alpha. Indeed, we can also deduce from this
that the presence or absence of the assumption as a restriction on reasoning has
implications for the relative burdens and benefits Alpha would experience compared to
some individual, Beta, who lived a complete life. Specifically, Beta would fare better
relative to Alpha in a distributive system organized according to a hypothetical choice
made with the complete lives assumption than in a distributive system organized accord-
ing to a hypothetical choice made under risk, as the choice made under risk would be
more youth heavy reflecting the fact that deliberative agents would discount future
benefits according to their probability of receiving them.25 The problem for Daniels is
how these differences are to be justified given that they are not justified by the frame
theory, which requires strict equality of X over a whole life. Given that the subsidiary
procedure has interpersonal implications beyond what is justified via the frame theory,
Alpha appears to have a complaint from justice when he gets less than the frame theory
demands he should have had because that share has been temporally distributed under
the complete lives assumption rather than some alternative.
At this point it may be objected that disturbing the frame theory is unavoidable when
we accept the fact of premature death.Whether we employ the complete lives restriction
or distribute under risk or uncertainty, some individuals will still not receive an equal
share of goods over their whole lives and, if we do not know when people will die, it may
be impossible to distribute goods equally between them. This objection fails for two
reasons. First, disturbing the suggested frame theory — giving each individual X
resources — is not unavoidable, for we might give each individual all of their resources
in one go at the start of their lives.26 Second, the objection misses the point. The point
of the example is simply that, in light of the fact of premature death, Daniels’ theory has
interpersonal implications that will disturb the frame theory and Daniels lacks a justi-
fication for these particular interpersonal distributive implications.
A contrast with one of Dennis McKerlie’s critiques may be illuminative. McKerlie has
objected that if all interpersonal decisions and questions of fair shares are already settled
by the frame theory, Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account cannot properly be consid-
ered an account of justice since only interpersonal distributive decisions are properly
decisions of justice.27 My objection is effectively the opposite of McKerlie’s; it is that
Daniels’ procedure has interpersonal distributive implications additional to the frame
theory and, in virtue of that, needs some more substantial reason to include the complete
lives assumption as a restriction on deliberators. As it stands, the restriction will bias how
resources are distributed between people in favour of those who are already the most
fortunate — those who end up living a complete life.28

Modifying the Complete Lives Assumption

I have objected that Daniels’ subsidiary procedure will conflict with the frame theory of
justice, at least when we choose a particular egalitarian account of the frame theory and

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when that subsidiary procedure includes the complete lives assumption. Two responses
to this critique would be to argue either, first, that it is only for that particular account
of the frame theory that the subsidiary procedure has implications or, second, that the
complete lives restriction could be relaxed or modified to prevent conflict with any given
frame theory. I will begin by examining the second response, but will in the course of that
examination provide an answer to the first.
In Justice and Justification, Daniels suggests he is sympathetic to the idea that the
complete lives restriction might be moderated to accommodate problems arising from
premature death. He states,
. . . the rationale for adopting the prudential model of the age-group problem is
that we can assume that intralife transfers will be an appropriate model for
interage-group transfers, but if different demographic groups age differently,
then the model breaks down. For example, raising the age of eligibility for
income support benefits under social security might leave African Americans
who have a lower life-expectancy, worse off than either whites or Asians . . .
where such effects take place they may constitute good reasons for not adopting
such a rationing policy, or they might give us reasons to link the rationing to
facts about group life-expectancy. The general point is that the Prudential
Lifespan account presupposes that solutions to the age-group problem will not
disturb more general requirements of justice.29
Accordingly, to link rationing to facts about life-expectancy, we might either 1) re-run
Daniels’ deliberative procedure many times for different groups with different amounts
of resources and different complete lives assumptions allowing that, where there is
conflict between the frame theory and the subsidiary procedure, the frame theory should
take precedence, or 2) drop the complete lives assumption allowing the individuals to
deliberate under uncertainty or risk. While these may seem like promising revisions to the
theory, neither suffices to rescue Daniels’ theory; neither revision ameliorates the
problem that how we structure the subsidiary procedure(s) has implications for how
benefits and burdens will be distributed interpersonally.30
To make this point vivid, consider the Rawlsian frame theory. In the Original Position
the hypothetical deliberators are asked to abstract from specific knowledge about them-
selves including, for example, to which racial group they actually belong. With a distri-
bution between groups given by the outcome of the Original Position procedure, we then
face the question of how different groups should have their resources distributed across
time. Suppose, then, that we accept, in line with the first of the proposed revision, that
those with different life expectancies should undertake different subsidiary deliberative
procedures. The question still remains as to what structure those subsidiary procedures
should take. The problem that reappears for Daniels’ theory is: why should the delib-
erators, imagining themselves as members of a particular group, choose how they would
distribute resources across time under one assumption rather than another? After all,
which informational restriction is employed as part of the subsidiary procedure(s) still
has significant implications for the outcome of that distributive procedure. But then, if
which restriction is employed has such a significant effect on the intertemporal distri-
bution and so also, given the fact of premature death, on the interpersonal distribution,
which restriction is employed must surely be a matter to be decided by the frame theory.
The crucial point is that since the fact of premature death makes the question of how to

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distribute intertemporally an irreducibly interpersonal decision there can be no justifi-

cation for an additional procedure(s) with theoretical assumptions that are not justified
with reference to the frame theory. Indeed, there is no conceptual space for a distinct
free-standing age-group theory.
The problem I have highlighted is not, then, with the fact that Daniels employs the
complete lives assumption as a restriction on the deliberators information per se, it is the
more general problem that any subsidiary procedure(s), whatever the informational
restrictions, or absence thereof, will have irreducibly interpersonal implications. Thus,
the precise way the subsidiary procedure ought to be structured, or even whether a
subsidiary procedure is appropriate, is wholly determined by the frame theory. This was
clear in the first example — where the frame theory demanded that each individual was
given X resources over a lifetime — since to achieve the just distribution each individual
had to be given his bundle in an initial lump sum, voiding the possibility of a subsidiary
procedure. It is equally clear in the case of the Rawlsian frame theory that Daniels
endorses.
That concludes my critique of Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account. I have examined
two different justifications for the complete lives assumption and considered whether
Daniels’ theory might be made more plausible by dropping or adjusting that assumption.
I have argued that Daniels can neither provide an adequate justification of the complete
lives assumption, nor provide an alternative that resolves the tension between his sub-
sidiary procedure and the frame theory. I will now conclude the article by drawing out
the implications of this critique for Daniels’ project and the problem of justice between
age-groups more generally.

4. Implications

Implications for the Prudential Lifespan Account

What practical consequence does the foregoing criticism have for Daniels’ account? This
is a large topic and I will restrict myself to three observations.
First, I have not denied that we might include some subsidiary procedure as an
elaboration of the Rawlsian theory. Indeed, I agree that in drawing attention to the
age-group problem Daniels has identified a useful expansion to the Rawlsian theory.
What I challenge is the claim that any subsidiary procedure can separate itself from the
frame theory of justice or use restrictions not congruent with it. At best, the salvageable
elements of the Prudential Lifespan Account must be a reflection on what Rawlsian
justice as fairness implies in terms of the treatment of different people as they age, not
an independent theory attachable to any more general account of justice, as Daniels
originally suggested.
Second, in the course of his writing, Daniels has wobbled between different defi-
nitions of what constitutes prudential reasoning. In his early work he suggested what
he called the ‘standard rule’. This prescribed expected utility maximization. In later
work he moved to what he called ‘accountability for reasonableness’. The precise
nature of this proposal is more complicated.31 Given the previous argument, it is
evident that neither the standard rule nor accountability for reasonableness is appro-
priate as a part, even a subsidiary part, of Rawlsian theory. Rather, in order for the

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subsidiary procedure to be congruent with the frame theory, Daniels’ agents should
use standard Rawlsian reasoning, that is, maximin reasoning.
Third, one of Daniels’ practical propositions regards the distribution of income over
a lifetime. Specifically, Daniels argues that his theory implies the adoption of an income
preservation principle, which ensures that each individual has available at each stage of
life an adequate income to pursue whatever plan of life he may have at that stage. He
claims that this principle would lead to a distribution of resources that ‘would remain
roughly equal over the lifespan’ and so would come close to McKerlie’s preferred ideal
of strict temporal equality.32 However, when we abandon the complete lives assump-
tion, we have reason to doubt that such a temporally even distribution would be
selected. Of course, deliberators would want to protect themselves in old age. There
would be strains of commitments considerations prohibiting leaving anyone unbearably
badly off at particular moments, and individuals would want to allow themselves some
opportunity to revise their conception of the good at later stages in life. But, so long
as we accept that those who have short life expectancies are in the worst-off group
measured in terms of the primary social goods available to them, the difference prin-
ciple clearly demands that any whole lives inequality must be to their benefit. The
proper Rawlsian conclusion with respect to the difference principle is then, pace
Daniels, a temporally unequal distribution that is weighted towards earlier age-groups
relative to temporal equality. Daniels’ employment of the complete lives assumption
obscures this important point.33

Implications for Justice between Age-Groups

Daniels built his account from the claim that the fact that we each age makes the
age-group problem importantly different from other problems of justice. In one impor-
tant way, that claim was overstated. The fact of premature death means that many of us
will not live to enter the later age-groups, even if we all must, as a matter of definition,
be members of the first. Consequently, it will be a mistake for those in the younger
age-groups to see the later-age groups as stages they will themselves certainly go
through. The first point that follows from this is that the age-group problem is in an
important respect the same as other problems of justice, such as gender or race; there are
inequalities and interpersonal issues of justice that arise when considering how to
distribute resources between people and across age-groups.
However, there was also a kernel of truth in Daniels’ claim that age was special; when
we take the whole lives perspective, redistribution from the elderly to the young is consistent
with equality, at least given certain assumptions. That is, provided we assume that
additional life lived is a gain in terms of the relevant metric then, ceteris paribus,
redistributions from the elderly to the young will often be consistent with whole lives
equality. The elderly may legitimately view the younger age-groups as stage they them-
selves once went through. The point Daniels failed to recognize is that the fact of
premature death makes the intrapersonal perspective a one way street; while the elderly
may view youth as stages of life that they themselves went through, the young may only
hope they will be lucky enough to reach the later stages.
Finally, the above point suggests a slightly different way of looking at the problem, at
least when we consider whole lives. From the whole lives perspective, which age-group
one is in is not intrinsically important but, rather, is relevant as an indicator of how much

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338 Hugh Lazenby

good one has had over the course of one’s whole life. Those with longer lives can, ceteris
paribus, be considered to be in the most fortunate group. From this perspective, we might
say that the truly relevant categories are not age-groups but longevity groups; the fact
that one is a member of a certain age-group is relevant largely because it is an indicator
of the amount of good one has had over a lifetime. Indeed, if we accept this, it will seem
that part of what is special about the age-group problem is that it involves limited
uncertainty regarding who is in a disadvantaged group. By limited uncertainty I mean that
we have some information, but not complete information, about how long an individual
is likely to live and, correspondingly, how much good they will receive. For example,
certain people carry genetic conditions that give them a very limited life expectancy. In
these types of cases we can gain an approximation as to which age-group the individual
is likely to live into and so how well-off they are likely to be over a lifetime. However,
since people also die unexpectedly, this can only ever be an approximation. This uncer-
tainty about how long any particular individual will live sets the problem of what justice
requires us to give the young and the old apart from other problems of justice where
which group one falls into is more clear.

Conclusion

In identifying the problem of justice between age-groups and developing the Prudential
Lifespan Account, Daniels laid the foundation for a new subject area in political phi-
losophy. I have argued that the answer he developed ignored a consideration crucially
relevant to the age-group problem: the fact of premature death. His neglect of this
problem led him to make the over-ambitious claim that he could present a free-standing
theory, attachable to any more general theory of justice. It also shifted his practical
prescriptions more towards temporal equality than was congruent with his desired frame
theory. The problem of what justice or equality requires in the context of age-groups
cannot be settled without confronting it as an interpersonal distributive challenge with
winners and losers. The age-group problem is not special or, at least, it is not special in
the way Daniels proposes.34

Hugh Lazenby, Graduate Student, Politics and International Relations, The Queen’s College,
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. hugh.lazenby@gmail.com

NOTES

1 Dennis McKerlie, ‘Equality between age-groups’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 21,3 (1992): 275–295; ‘Justice
between the Young and the Old’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 30,2 (2001): 152–177.
2 Prominent defenders of this view include Thomas Nagel, Robert Veatch, and Alan Williams. Thomas Nagel,
Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 120. Robert Veatch, ‘How age should
matter: Justice as the basis for limiting care to the elderly’, in H. Kuse & P. Singer (eds) Bioethics: An
Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), pp. 437–446. Alan Williams, ‘Intergenerational equity: An
exploration of the “fair innings” argument’, Health Economics 6,2 (1997): 117–132.
3 I use ‘good’ here as a general term for the metric that justice is to be measured in terms of. The question of
how that good ought to be specified is beyond the scope of this article.
4 Norman Daniels, Am I My Parents’ Keeper? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); ‘Am I my parents’
keeper?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7,1 (1981): 517–540; ‘Justice between adjacent generations: Further
thoughts’, Journal of Political Philosophy 16,4 (2008): 475–494. Ronald Dworkin, SovereignVirtue (Cambridge

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 Is Age Special? 339

MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Peter Singer, John McKie, Helga Kuhse & Jeff Richardson. ‘Double
jeopardy and the use of QALYs in health care education’, Journal of Medical Ethics 21,3 (1995): 144–150.
5 I will leave aside Dworkin’s and Singer’s proceduralist views.
6 Hereafter, simply the ‘complete lives assumption’.
7 Daniels states that ‘It is also possible that my view ends up closer to some of McKerlie’s concerns than I led
him to think it was.’ However, note that Daniels is not endorsing simultaneous equality at the level of ethical
principle. What Daniels now believes is that his view may have similar practical implications to McKerlie’s
view. Daniels’ principled position remains that a person’s whole life is the proper object of concern even
though he denies, what whole lives egalitarians assert, that a strict equality in the distribution of goods, or
opportunities for goods, is required to treat people as equals. At the level of principle we may view the three
egalitarian views as mutually exclusive (Daniels 2008 op cit., p. 486).
8 See Daniels 1988 op. cit., pp. 47–52.
9 Ibid., p. 45.
10 Paraphrase, Samuel Freeman, Rawls (Oxford: Routledge Philosophers, 2007), p. 292. See also John Rawls,
Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 102.
11 Daniels 1988 op. cit., p. 66.
12 Daniels 2008 op. cit., fn. 2, p. 475.
13 Daniels 1988 op. cit., p. 67.
14 Ibid., p. 67.
15 Ibid., pp. 47–52.
16 Daniels also states this restriction in his most recent characterisation of his position, saying, ‘I further require
that prudent allocators not know their age and must assume they will live through each part of the life, accepting
any tradeoffs they make’ (Daniels 2008 op. cit., p. 475 [emphasis added]).
17 Daniels is unclear regarding which source(s) explain the first and second restrictions. However, he is explicit
that the fourth restriction, familiar as Rawls’ veil of ignorance, is justified with reference to the demands of
prudence. In essence, Daniels’ supposition is that if people were to enter the deliberative procedure with a
particular life plan, the structure of that plan would be coloured by their particular stage in life, potentially
biasing some stages of life over other. This contradicts a part of Daniels conception of prudence called the
requirement of equal concern, which demands well-being be given equal weight in one’s decisions regardless of
its temporal location in ones lifetime. See Daniels 1988 op. cit., pp. 158–169.
18 The complete lives assumption demands that, ‘the agents do not know their age and must design a scheme
through which they assume they will live at all stages of their lives — they cannot bet on not living a full life’.
One question Daniels never answers, however, is how a complete life is to be construed. Is a complete life
the mean or median average life, the shortest life, or the longest possible life? I think that the best answer
Daniels can give in response to this problem is that a complete life is the longest possible life. Any construal
other than the longest possible life would entirely discount the interests of those living beyond the complete
life from the deliberative procedure and so leave Daniels account vulnerable to what Paul Bou-Habib calls
the callousness objection — leaving the elderly very badly-off. If we accept that this is an unpalatable conclusion
for Daniels, the longest possible life specification of the complete lives assumption is the most charitable to
his position (Daniels 2008 op. cit., p. 484).
19 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 8.
20 Laura Valentini, ‘On the apparent paradox of ideal theory’, Journal of Political Philosophy 17,3 (2009):
332–355, at p. 334.
21 Valentini op. cit., p. 334.
22 Ingrid Robeyns also holds a similar position on when idealizing assumptions are problematic: Ingrid
Robeyns, ‘Ideal theory in theory and practice’, Social Theory and Practice 34,3 (2008): 341–362.
23 Although I have employed broadly welfarist terms here, the same general points apply equally well to other
metrics.
24 It is worth stressing that I am considering age as an indicator of underlying benefit, not as something that
is intrinsically beneficial. To illustrate the point, were someone to be in a coma for many years of their life,
they might well be worse-off on the relevant underlying metric than someone who lived fewer chronological
years but spent more conscious ones. My thanks to Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen for this example.
25 Note that this does not contradict the requirement of equal concern, which demands well-being be given equal
weight in one’s decisions regardless of its temporal location in ones lifetime. When choosing under risk
individuals are not discounting the intrinsic value of future benefits, they are discounting them only against
the probability of their receipt.

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340 Hugh Lazenby

26 Note that I employ this simple frame theory because it most clearly illuminates the problem, not because I
endorse it.
27 See McKerlie 1992 op. cit., p. 283.
28 Note again that Daniels believes his view is consistent with whole lives distributivism (i.e. taking a persons
whole life as the relevant unit of distributive concern). In his discussion of what he calls the ‘Inequality
Objection’, he rejects the proposal that ‘differential treatment of people according to age, like differential
treatment by race or sex, always generates inequalities between persons.’ He continues by elaborating on a
dilemma: ‘Are we primarily concerned about unequal treatment at a moment or over a life time? For most
historically important traits, such as race, religion, or sex, it does not matter how we answer this question.
A pattern of differential treatment by race or sex at a moment will lead to differential treatment over a
lifetime, for these are fixed traits of individuals. Where these characteristics are at issue, then, there are
definite inequalities and, therefore, problems of justice to be confronted. But a consistent pattern of
differential treatment by age, overtime, will erase the inequality it seems to entail, as long as that differential
treatment is consistently administered’ (Daniels 1988 op. cit., pp. 41–42).
29 Daniels 1996 op. cit., p. 263.
30 Note that the proposed revision is not in fact intended to address the central concern underlying my critique.
Daniels cites racial groups because he is concerned that existing material injustices, either due to active racial
discrimination in the present or the trickle-down of historical injustice, might spill over to affect the longevity
of certain groups. Thus, Daniels is concerned with making rationing sensitive to group longevity only
because he is concerned with the practical and immediate issue of spill-over from contemporary injustice,
while my critique is motivated in part by the idea that, at least on some conceptions of justice, the issue of
longevity will itself be relevant. Even if we assume such racial inequalities are resolved, there may be
independent questions of justice to be answered with respect to people in different longevity groups. In short,
if we ought to be concerned about how different groups are affected by the subsidiary procedure, it is
longevity groups, not racial groups, that might be our primary concern.
31 For his account of the standard rule and accountability for reasonability see, respectively, Daniels 1988
op. cit., pp. 83–103, and, Norman Daniels & James Sabin, Setting Limits Fairly: Learning to Share Resources
for Health (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
32 Daniels 1988 op. cit., p. 121. See also Daniels 2008 op. cit., p. 486.
33 Under Rawls’ ‘special conception of justice’, the difference principle is intended to apply only to social and
economic primary goods. One further interesting question is, if we are to assume whole lives distributivism,
whether or not the basic liberties should also be distributed so as to achieve equality between whole lives, in
accordance with Rawls’ first principle of justice; this would potentially imply giving greater liberties to those
who would die younger in order for the basic liberties enjoyed by each person to be equal overall. Here one
might hazard that, for reasons connecting to strains of commitment considerations and the higher-order
interest individuals have in being able to form and revise their conception of the good over time, those
deliberating in the Original Position would select a temporally constant amount of the basic liberties.
However, a fuller investigation of this proposition is beyond the scope of this article.
34 For comments on earlier drafts of this article I would like to thank Paul Bou-Habib, Ian Carroll, Geoffrey
Cupit, John Filling, Sarah Hannan, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Dennis McKerlie, Roland Pierik, Ingrid
Robeyns, Adam Swift, Laura Valentini, Juri Viehoff and members of the Oxford Graduate Political Theory
Workshop. For funding during the time this article was written I would like to thanks the Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2011