Am I My Parents' Keeper?: An Essay on Justice Between the Young and the Old

In today's society, the young and the old compete fiercely for an essential yet scarce resource--public funds for human services. With the rapidly increasing number of people over the age of sixty-five, we face a wide range of new dilemmas, including how to distribute social resources among the different age groups competing for them, and how to determine the exact relationship between filial obligations and social obligations to care for the elderly.
In Am I My Parents' Keeper?, Norman Daniels seeks a principled way, rooted in a theory of justice, to resolve disputes about how to allocate income support, health care, and other such resources to different age groups in our society. Daniels argues that since all people age, we all pass through institutions which distribute social goods over the whole lifespan. If we can determine what to give ourselves at each stage of life, we can discover what justice requires between age groups. This first systematic discussion of the problems of distributive justice which arise between the young and the old offers refreshingly innovative ideas and a unified perspective on the subject.