Fair Innings

In many societies, the aging of the population is becoming a major problem. This raises difficult issues for ethics and public policy. On what is known as the fair innings view , it is not impermissible to give lower priority to policies that primarily benefit the elderly. Philosophers have tried to justify this view on various grounds. In this article, I look at a consequentialist, a fairness‐based, and a contractarian justification. I argue that all of them have implausible implications and fail to correspond to our moral intuitions. I end by outlining a different kind of consequentialist justification that avoids those implications and corresponds better to our considered moral judgments.