The pre-circulated PEPA paper introduces some of the arguments developed in the early chapters of the book Bidadanure is working on, provisionally titled: Justice Across Ages: An essay on what it means to treat young adults as equals. In particular, Bidadanure argues that, contrary to what the default distributive view (complete lives egalitarianism) states, some inequalities between age groups matter independently of their diachronic impact, and so partly for relational reasons. She argues that, even if we are distributive egalitarians, we must endorse the relational egalitarian conception to successfully make sense of some inequalities between age groups. From this, Bidadanure infers both that the putative view that the ‘relational’ conception of equality can be re-described as distributive must be rejected and that the distributive view requires supplementation by the relational view. In the process, she discusses some important implications of the relational view for how we should treat people of different ages. 

Juliana Bidadanure is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department of Stanford University, with an affiliation to the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society. Before coming to Stanford, she completed her Ph.D. in Political Philosophy within the School of Politics, Economics and Philosophy at the University of York (UK), and was then a 2014-2015 Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute (Italy). Bidadanure's interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and public policy. She writes on social justice in general, and in particular, on social egalitarianism, inequalities between age groups, and what it means to treat young people as equals. She has also written on youth unemployment, poverty and exclusion, and on the policy proposals of unconditional basic income, basic capital, and the introduction of youth quotas in parliaments.