ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an intergenerational contract that includes young people in its making and benefits young people – and everyone else. A way to pursue and promote intergenerational contract and participation is by encouraging forbearance. The unwillingness to acknowledge or address the problem of contemporary intergenerational unfairness relies on several unhelpful and deep-seated age-based prejudice. To develop a generational contract, obstacles like the belief that young people lack the moral competence or cognitive abilities to make ethically informed or rational choices that adults presumably possess need to be put to rest. Talking about freedom and young people in the same breath tends to elicit deeply entrenched and naturalized age-based prejudices. Young people are largely missing from formal policy and political debates regarding matters of public interest and issues of direct interest to them. An orientation to equality, non-domination and freedom are political principles that should inform an intergenerational contract.
