Generational Conflict and Generational Equity in Elderly Care: From the Perspective of Confucian Ethics

From a global perspective, generational equity has long been a core issue in pension reform and medical resource allocation. Indeed, discussion of generational equity involves a financial crisis related to pension deficits and the fairness of the pension system, which is a crisis that threatens the ethical foundation of the social insurance institution, i.e., the intergenerational contract. From an ethical perspective, how to reconstruct the intergenerational contract under the pressure of aging is crucial to the debate on generational equity. This study critically examines the dominant framework of the debate on generational equity and proposes an alternative interpretation framework based on Confucian ethics. Finally, this study argues that Confucian ethics and the interpretation of the intergenerational contract not only shed new light on the issue of generational equity but also provide important policy implications for the current pension system reform in China.