Age Justice in a Globalized World

In Justice Across Ages, Juliana Bidadanure offers us a framework for thinking about social, economic, and political inequalities between young and old. In doing so, Bidadanure aims to provide a theory that is action-guiding for us in a nonideal world. She develops her account for socially unjust societies and shows how implementing her principles of age justice works “within the grain of social justice”. But while her luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism should commit her to global justice, questions of global justice are entirely absent from her account. In fact, in devising and defending her account, Bidadanure seems to idealize away global inequality and transnational migration. In this critical response, I argue that this idealization renders her account non-action-guiding in the relevant way. I suggest that the plausibility of Bidadanure’s principles of age justice hinges on their application to a globally just world. In a globally unjust world, Bidadanure’s principles may be inconsistent with reducing global injustice