Brown Bag Seminar with Benjamin Sachs-Cobbe, School of Philosophy What are Old Age Pensions for?

Every developed country runs an old-age pension (OAP), though there's considerable variation in their design.

In his research, Benjamin Sachs-Cobbe, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, isolates what's essential to OAPs and explains why they stand in need of ethical justification.

Join Benjamin, who will be discussing his research paper, which takes the first step toward justifying OAPs and providing a constructive interpretation of them. This involved taking account of the actual practice of OAPs and the plausible intentions and goals that stand behind that practice in the pursuit of offering the most charitable possible explanation of what OAPs are for.

Benjamin concludes that OAPs exist to relieve people of the burden of having to do especially effortful work. He explores the implications of this interpretation of OAPs for their design, including whether one ought to be able to continue to work while drawing one's OAP, whether OAPs should be means-tested, and whether they should be contribution-funded.