Eva Katharina Boser¹, Lena Dörmann¹(joint first authorship)

¹ Division of Medical Ethics, Department of Health Services Research, University of Oldenburg

The COVID-19 pandemic has put intergenerational solidarity to the test in liberal welfare states such as Germany by pitting different age groups against one another in public debates. This trend continues, for example in discourses on care, demography and the allocation of limited healthcare resources. However, there is a lack of a time-critical perspective to understand these conflicts not merely as issues of distribution, but as negotiations between different time horizons, life stages and (future) responsibilities amidst overlapping crises.

This paper examines how social attributions of responsibility are negotiated in intergenerational processes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. The empirical basis consists of eight focus groups with participants from five age groups and diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Using qualitative content analysis, the paper identifies patterns of meaning underlying intergenerational cohesion during times of crisis and analyses them comparatively using the categories of responsibility, care and solidarity, which were developed from the data. The results show that the attribution of intergenerational responsibility is negotiated along two interpretative patterns of structural injustice: gerontocracy and presentism. Whilst the former aligns health and care decisions – such as the prioritisation of protective measures, care services or care arrangements – with the current needs of older generations and disregards long-term consequences, the latter prioritises current crises at the expense of future burdens on health and care provision. Both approaches obscure normative tensions between responsibility for the present and the future, as well as between care and autonomy. It follows that intergenerational responsibility in health and care provision must be understood as a practice structured in terms of time and relationships.

We discuss the findings within the framework of feminist ethics and argue that dialogical negotiation processes between generations can help to highlight structural injustices in overlapping crises. The systematic consideration of temporal and structural dimensions of responsibility proves to be a necessary prerequisite for addressing intergenerational injustices in the context of equitable health and care provision.