An Aging Population as a Question of Justice

The aging population is often reduced to numbers: rising life expectancy, falling birth rates, pension sustainability, pressure on health systems. Yet behind the figures sits a question that public budgets and demographic indicators never ask directly: who has a right to the future?

That is the question we explored with Proff. Roberta Sala, Roberto Mordacci, Francesca Forlé and Alessandro Volpe, researchers at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (UniSR) who contributed to Age-It, a project funded under Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, dedicated to studying the ageing of the Italian population.

Justice and aging: a philosophical question

As Sala and Forlé argue, philosophy’s contribution is foundational. Before measuring an inequality, we need to establish what makes it genuinely unjust, a normative question grounded in a realistic reading of the world. Equally, before gathering data or building indicators, it is necessary to clarify which principles should guide the distribution of resources and opportunities within a society. Philosophy constructs the conceptual framework within which data acquire meaning.

A quiet revolution

From this standpoint, the ageing of society ceases to be merely a demographic phenomenon and becomes a question of justice.

According to ISTAT data, nearly one Italian in four is now over 65, and those aged over 80 have passed the 4.5 million marks. For the first time, people aged over 80 outnumber children under 10. The figures make visible, with immediate clarity, how profoundly the structure of the Italian population is changing – and how far that transformation is set to affect the country’s social, economic and political life.

Mordacci and Volpe are clear on one point: an aging population concerns everyone, not only the elderly. It concerns the young people entering the labour market today, the adults sustaining the welfare system, and even those not yet born.

The demographic question immediately becomes political. Who benefits from public resources? Who makes the decisions? Who is represented? And, above all, who risks remaining invisible?

When a difference becomes an injustice

Philosophical reflection on justice draws a distinction worth holding on to. Not every difference between generations is necessarily unjust. Young people and older people have different needs, and a different allocation of resources can be perfectly legitimate. A society that invests more in elder care or in children’s education is not automatically producing an inequitable inequality.

Sala and Forlé ask a different question: do those differences reflect different needs, or do they generate systematic advantages and disadvantages for some generations over others?

If a young person today has fewer educational, professional and economic opportunities than the generations that preceded them, the problem is not confined to the present. Disadvantages accumulated in the early stages of life tend to produce effects that persist for decades: an initial inequality can become a more fragile and precarious life trajectory.

From this perspective, an aging population raises an uncomfortable question: are contemporary societies distributing opportunities and resources equitably across generations?

Who speaks for those with no voice?

Among the most pressing philosophical questions raised by aging is that of representation. Every generation takes decisions that extend well beyond its own time. It builds infrastructure, accumulates debt, consumes natural resources, and shapes institutions meant to last for decades. The problem is that the effects of those choices fall above all on those who come after.

This is where the question of future generations arises. How do we protect those who will inherit the consequences of today’s decisions without having had any possibility of participating in the process that produced them?

People born twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now will live with the consequences of decisions being made today. Yet they cannot participate in the processes through which those decisions are taken. They do not vote, they do not protest, they do not sit in parliaments.

The greatest challenge posed by an aging population

For Mordacci and Volpe, this is far from a marginal concern. It is one of the great normative challenges of our time. A theory of justice that ignores the interests of those without a voice risk betraying its own fundamental purpose: protecting those in a position of vulnerability relative to stronger, better-represented groups.

This is the ground from which intergenerational justice grows. «If we do not begin from a criterion of equal rights for all human beings, present and future, any idea of justice is literally meaningless» Mordacci and Volpe argue.

Sala and Forlé approach the question from a different but complementary angle. Rather than attributing rights to people who do not yet exist, they invite us to ask which kind of society we would choose if we did not know which generation we would be born into. It is a thought experiment that leads to imagining institutions capable of guaranteeing sufficient opportunities to anyone, regardless of the historical moment in which they come into the world.

Welfare and the intergenerational compact

The question becomes particularly sharp when we look at welfare systems. Pensions, healthcare and social care rest on a form of deferred reciprocity: those working today support those in retirement, trusting that succeeding generations will do the same.

For a long time, this balance appeared relatively stable. Today, the growth of the older population and the contraction of the working-age population are putting pressure on the very principle underlying many systems of social protection.

The question is not simply how to fund welfare, but how to preserve the solidarity compact between generations without transferring a disproportionate share of costs and sacrifices onto younger people.

Sala and Forlé see a possible answer in strengthening redistributive mechanisms, considering economic and social differences within each generation, and not only age.

Mordacci and Volpe press for deeper transformations, capable of redefining the relationship between welfare, work and social justice.

In both cases, the underlying point is the same: an aging society is compelled to rethink how it distributes responsibilities and opportunities between those here today and those who will come tomorrow.

From philosophy to collective choices

The demographic question cannot be reduced to a problem of public finances or pension sustainability. It requires a conceptual framework that establishes which principles should guide the distribution of resources and opportunities between those alive today and those who will follow. This is where philosophy enters public policy: not as abstract reflection, but as a tool for making visible the normative implications of choices that would otherwise appear purely technical.

Age-It, with its eleven thematic “spokes” and €114 million in PNRR funding, has produced among its first concrete results an index of intergenerational justice: a tool for measuring the imbalance between generations across economic, social and political systems. It is an example of how research on aging is learning to ask not only how people grow old, but who bears the cost of that transformation.