AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

In recent years, several philosophers have noted, and tried to resolve, a seemingly deep tension between Rawls’s accounts of inter- and intragenerational justice; namely, that the just savings principle seems to require the very sort of inequalities that the difference principle forbids. In this talk, I do three things. First, I reframe and strengthen the tension by showing that it is ostensibly deeper than most have conceived of it. Most fundamentally, the just savings principle seemingly violates not only the difference principle but also a condition of reciprocity that Rawls suggests the parties in the original position would require any principle of justice to satisfy. Second, I employ this reframing to expose the flaws in several of the leading solutions to the tension to date. And third, I offer a new solution that goes beyond Rawls’s view—a version of the just savings principle I call the Compensated Savings Principle. This principle both exemplifies reciprocity and, unlike its main rival, also satisfies a new adequacy condition I propose for the savings principle. According to this Imperative to Expedite Justice, the savings principle must give a certain priority to establishing the material conditions needed for just institutions sooner rather than later.