Egalitarian justice, population size and parent's responsibility for the costs of children

Abstract

Theorists of egalitarian justice generally assume that the principles they formulate apply to a group of individuals whose creation and size is taken as given. Yet many of the policies egalitarians favour distribute the costs and benefits of children in different ways, and, by so doing, affect people´s procreative choices and a society´s population size. How do considerations of egalitarian justice bear on how the costs and benefits of children should be distributed and on what the population size should be in a just society? This chapter argues for the importance of addressing these questions within an egalitarian theory of justice and critically examines one revisionary way of answering them.