Intergenerational Justice

The term intergenerational justice refers to the ethical problem of distributing scarce resources between different age groups in a society. For example, intergenerational justice is at stake when societies debate how much of their scarce resources should be devoted to areas such as education that primarily benefit the young, versus programs such as social security or Medicare that benefit older members of the population. Similarly, the problem of justice between generations arises when societies consider limiting health care resources to the elderly in order to increase health care resources available to the young.