Abstract: It's highly intuitive that a just society protects its elderly members by assisting them to save for old age. A standard view is that the state ought to facilitate pension schemes, on which people retire at a specific age. These are understood as a species of insurance, and the standard view some support from more general considerations about the state's legitimate role in promoting (even mandating) cooperative activity between participants that serves to protect those who end up most worse off.
My aim here is to first highlight some assumptions behind this standard view, both about how insurance is being understood and other background views about the relationship between aging and labour market participation. This will lead me to defend some negative and positive claims. Negatively, I will argue that pension schemes are (typically) not insurance schemes after all, as the distribution of payouts does not inversely track a relevant distribution of bad luck (largely because people die at different ages). This raises questions about the state's legitimate role in facilitating types of pooling other than insurance. More positively, I will argue that the right to retire should be understood in terms of 'phased' or gradual retirement. This would take retirement pooling closer to the insurance model, improving the case for state's role in enabling it to take place, as well as having some independent theoretical advantages.

NB: Tea starts at 3pm