PEA Soup

Justice Across the Generations

This looks like a great conference but I couldn't help feeling irked that here was another conference with no women on the program. I'm never quite sure what to do about this since by the time these are announced it's too late to do much. Still, it's an important issue and the speakers who are on the program are people I'd like to hear.

CONFERENCE ON JUSTICE BETWEEN AGE GROUPS

University of Essex, UK
Wednesday 25 June – Friday 27 June

CONFERENCE THEME

The conference addresses the question: what is a fair distribution of important resources – for example, education, health care, and income support – between different age groups? This question is both of philosophical interest and of great political urgency given the demographic changes taking place within modern democratic states, where declining fertility rates and longer life-expectancy result in ageing populations, and new pressures on standard models of welfare provision.
          The conference papers will fall in two main areas. First, some papers will debate fundamental principles for distributing resources between different age groups. The main research questions in this area are the following. Should the state devote equal amounts of social resources to different age groups – say, on health care for the elderly and the young? Or, perhaps more plausibly, should the state devote unequal amounts of resources to different age-groups, so as to meet equally their unequal needs? The second set of papers will tackle questions of public policy from a principled point of view, including the following: What does a society owe to children with respect to educational provision? Is age-discrimination in the labour market morally defensible? How should the state support the institution of the family given the family’s role in serving the interests of children, parents and third parties? How must the state adjust education and health policy, childcare support, and labour market regulations, so as to facilitate family life?
        The conference is supported by the British Academy, the Mind Association, the Society for Applied Philosophy, and the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex.


SPEAKERS

Richard Arneson, University of California, San Diego
Paul Bou-Habib, University of Essex
Matthew Clayton, University of Warwick
Norman Daniels, Harvard University
Axel Gosseries, Université Catholique de Louvain
Dennis McKerlie, University of Calgary
Adam Swift, University of Oxford
Andrew Williams, University of Warwick

If you are interested in attending the conference, please contact Paul Bou-Habib (pbou@essex.ac.uk) for information about conference fees and booking arrangements. Places can be booked no later than 1 June 2008.

The Goods of Old Age

Since my last post to PEA Soup was on the goods of childhood (on the question of whether some goods of childhood are intrinsically good or whether they are all valued on the basis of their effects on the life of the adult the child becomes), it seems appropriate that this post moves to the discussion in the other direction. I'm interested in a few different questions regarding old age and I'm wondering if anyone else has written on the topic.

Conferences on Kids (and Parents too)

There are three conferences coming up for those of us with interests in the ethics of children and families. The first is one I organized with some fellow Canadians. "Children, Family, and the State" is the wrap up conference of a three year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant of the same name I've held with Shauna Van Praagh (McGill Law), Daniel Weinstock (Philosophy, Universite de Montreal) and Colin Macleod (Philosophy, University of Victoria). The other two both involve the Society for Applied Philosophy, one to be held in Birmingham this June (that's where I'll be talking about the intrinsic goods of childhood) and the other to be held next year in  Cape Town,  South Africa.   Those feminist ethicists who were concerned that the South Africa conference on bearing and rearing children managed to have not one but two male keynote speakers (and no female keynote speakers) should note that the other two conferences have lots of women on the program.

The Intrinsic Goods of Childhood

I'm interested in children's rights but also more generally in the relationship between rights and value.  Many, or most, children's rights are justified in terms of the adult persons that the children may become and the goods those adults lives may contain.  Perhaps the most famous paper on children's rights, "A Child's Right to an Open Future," makes this explicitly clear.  Our focus on children is largely future directed. For the most part, I think this makes sense. But I also think there is a danger in focusing too much on the future and neglecting the goods of childhood. This is especially true if some of the goods of childhood are valuable in their own right, and even more so if some of those goods are incommensurable with the goods of adult life.  (Michael Slote makes this point but doesn't develop it much further.) Suppose, for example, there is no amount of good in the future that could outweigh a childhood of suffering and misery. Let me give two examples to illustrate this point. Both are areas in applied ethics where this point makes a difference.
First, the literature on a child's right to good sex education is entirely adult-directed. Sex education for children is justified entirely in terms of producing mature and competent adult sexual decision makers. There is little or no recognition of the positive role sex plays in the lives of teenagers. We focus on protecting children from adults and on the adult choosers they'll become but largely ignore the positive aspects of teen sexuality.  The dangers here should be obvious. The most important strategic consideration is having one's educational materials dismissed as largely irrelevant. We also fail children if we cannot provide them with the information they need. For philosophers, we also get it wrong if we neglect those aspects of the good life that occur before adult life begins.
Second, the literature on children and sport  likewise focuses on adults. And this cuts both ways. Sometimes an appeal to a balanced childhood is justified in terms of maximizing choices for adult life. This is a common argument against children's involvement in one sport in a serious way. At other times the appeal to the adult athlete the child could become were her potentially fully developed is used to argue for children's participation is seriously demanding sports. Both arguments have in common that they ignore the goods that occur within childhood.

I'm interested both to see whether you can think of other examples and whether you think the general point is correct.