Abstract
Christine Overall continues the conversation about people’s changing abilities through time. Overall’s aim is to show that conceptions of oldness are generally indeterminate, and potentially in need of revision in light of normative concerns about age discrimination and justice and in light of relatively recent advances in life expectancy. To be old is not to have lived to a particular age, but to have a social and political status or to possess other normatively significant properties associated with old age. Overall describes various forms of discrimination against old people, such as ageism and ableism, and advocates for solidarity between the old and the not-yet-old in an effort to address the unjust marginalization of old people.
This chapter was originally printed in The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging.
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Notes
- 1.
Sometimes “old” carries positive connotations, for example when we speak of old wine, old masters, or old institutions. But the positive connotations are more usual in application to things than to people, and there are fewer of these than of cases where “old” has a negative connotation.
- 2.
It’s significant that there are at least two main classes of antonyms of “old”: An entity that is not old either may be young or it may be new. Some of the negative connotations in Western culture of “old” as applied to people may come from the fact that the word is also the antonym of “new.”
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Even though to be old is not necessarily to be ill, impaired, feeble, or debilitated. One has only to consider the case of Olga Kotelko , who in her 90s was setting track records (Grierson 2014).
- 6.
This observation may seem exaggerated, perhaps even grotesquely so. And it might be objected that, while youth often regards oldness with revulsion, old persons sometimes regard young ones with disdain. The difference, however, is that Western culture is devoted to preserving and enhancing youthfulness for as long as possible, with entire industries dedicated to approaching that goal. But no aspect of western culture encourages aspirations to oldness ; being old is a condition to be postponed or avoided, and hence to be dreaded.
- 7.
Indeed, the American Heritage Dictionary says that “old” ‘suggests at least a degree of physical infirmity and age-related restrictions’ (quoted in Yagoda 2015, my emphasis).
- 8.
As Gullette notes, “Many people are systematically disadvantaged throughout their lives. Their midlife wage-peak is low. Old age—if by that ugly shorthand we mean, as so many do, income declines and physical ailments—for them starts young” (Gullette 2011, p. 74).
- 9.
Gullette goes so far as to say that before the decline in infant mortality in the USA around 1900, old people seemed the healthiest group precisely “because they had survived so much. Death occurred so frequently to newborns and children under five that they seemed heavy with it, heavier perhaps than all other categories but the enfeebled” (Gullette 2004, p. 108, her emphasis).
- 10.
Silvers remarks, “feeling old or being treated as old seems to happen when people age out of productive social roles. … Where work roles demand youthful capacity for great physical exertion and stamina, people are likely to be considered old at an earlier age. Also, and especially for women, being viewed as no longer executing a reproductive role often prompts being designated as old” (Silvers 2012, p. 9).
- 11.
“[A]n event’s contribution to the value of one’s life depends on its narrative relation to other events” (Velleman 1993, p. 344).
- 12.
Concepts of oldness can be highly gendered. For discussion of this theme, see the papers in Pearsall 1997.
- 13.
Perhaps if Western society valued oldness as much as it values youth—or better yet, valued all stages of life as significant for the human project—at least some of the problems associated with old age would be diminished.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Geoffrey Scarre for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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Overall, C. (2018). How Old Is Old? Changing Conceptions of Old Age. In: Flanigan, J., Price, T. (eds) The Ethics of Ability and Enhancement. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95303-5_8
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