Masterclass on “Justice and Demographic Replacement” with Professor Serena Olsaretti (ICREA - Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

The family as an institution that contributes to demographic replacement is mostly ignored by theorists of justice, who formulate principles for regulating societies made up by individuals whose creation, care and numbers are taken as given. Yet important questions of justice arise once we acknowledge and keep in view two facts: first, that the existence and maintenance of society (including a just society) depend on people´s having and raising new persons; and second, that bringing into existence and raising new persons involves substantial benefits and costs for all parties involved, i.e. those who engage in these activities (mainly, procreative parents), the newcomers (both while they are children, and across their lifetimes), and society at large, both now and in the future.
This class addresses some of these questions. In particular, it asks: does justice require distributing equally among all citizens the financial costs of raising children, as generous welfare programmes that fund childcare and schools do, or are these programmes unfair, on inspection, towards individuals who are childless? If justice requires sharing these costs of children equally, is this only true if and because sharing them is a demand of gender justice, or are there distinctive claims of parental justice? Do considerations about the environmental costs of children in highly consumerist societies change the balance against sharing the financial costs of children? Does the possibility, for some societies, of relying on migration as a source of demographic replacement mean that local parents’ choice to have and raise children should, by the lights of justice, be considered as a costly personal project whose costs they should internalise? Addressing these questions is important both in order to formulate principles for guiding important public policies, and to examine the plausibility of some foundational commitments of theories of justice, such as the commitment to holding people responsible for the consequences of their choices and to not favour some life projects over others.