The age-indifference principle and equality.

The question of whether or not either elderly people or those whose life expectancy is short have commensurately reduced claims on their fellows, have, in short, fewer or less powerful rights than others, is of vital importance but is one that has seldom been adequately examined. Despite ringing proclamations of justice and equality for all, the fact is that most societies discriminate between citizens on the basis both of age and life expectancy. Simona Giordano’s important paper1 explores the gulf between theory and practice. It examines the support given to theoretical equality by international instruments and conventions, and constitutes a ringing endorsement of a theory of equality that has its origins in Plato and Aristotle but to which contemporary societies are no less bound or committed. In this paper I seek to provide an account complementary to that developed by Dr. Giordano of the moral reasons for age indifference both in ethics and in public policy and incidentally attribute the force of this account to an English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, rather than to his, perhaps more famous, Greek forebears.