Let’s Elder Justice
With 'elder' as a verb with high transitivity

First Names First

Your parents chose your first name with care. It announced their aspirations. Spoken by others across a lifetime, it strengthens your sense of self. Written in your own hand, it scripts your signature relationship with the world.

We are always on a first-name basis with ourselves. So too with family and friends. Others seek respectful relationship through our surname and a title — Coach, Nurse, Officer, Reverend, Auntie — that reflects and reifies our roles, goals, and history. Names carry us through time. They anchor identity. They are among the first things we give a person and among the last things we take away.

And yet, across a lifetime, others may distance us with derogatory and debilitating descriptors — words that diminish rather than honor, that assign rather than acknowledge. We feel their weight not only in the present but in the future self we are always becoming.

The Isms That Harm Us

Throughout the life course, complex and compounding inequities accumulate. They are based on bias — negative judgments about a person or group that harden into stereotypes, prejudices, and discriminations: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral, respectively. Not all isms involve injustice — magnetism, for example. But socially unjust isms maintain an illusion of superiority and license discrimination. They are forms and norms of social harm, endured lifelong.

Each category of unjust discrimination follows its own logic and demands its own strategy. Treating them as interchangeable obscures both the harm and the remedy.

When harms are healed, individuals and groups can realize potential through what psychologists call pragmatic prospection — thinking about the future so as to guide actions toward desirable outcomes. Prospection is a tonic against bias. It keeps the future self in view.

Elder justice is in its infancy compared with our other moral, social, and legal obligations. But justice is not about just one cause — it is inclusive and embracing. Elder justice can help complete, not compete with, other causes. Hegel said it plainly, paraphrased: the conflict is not between good and evil but between goods that are each making too exclusive a claim. Our common good blossoms when common ground is cultivated by conscience — personal first, then relational — understood as moral belief applied to conduct.

As Sam Harris observes, the notion of moral responsibility is always forward-looking. Our future self and justice share that forward orientation — and together they provide a leverage point for addressing structural and systemic injustice across every dimension of social life.

Language Leads the Way

It is time to come to terms with terminology. The words we choose matter in ways both seen and unseen.

Long ago, our ancestors on the Serengeti did not inherit a level playing field. They tipped it in their favor — not only by reshaping the physical environment, but by creating new ones far away and far within. They expanded their niche in space and time through language and mind. The late linguist Derek Bickerton argued compellingly that language came first — before thought, not after it. His subtitle put the case plainly: How humans made language, how language made humans.

To assume thought comes first puts the cart before the horse. Even our most private, silent thinking is structured from syllable to syntax by language. We do not reach for words to express thoughts that already exist fully formed. Language is the vehicle — and the road.

So let us harness language to explore the relationship between our future self and justice. Neither has an expiration date. Both are timeless. Both cradle our life and legacy.

Coming to Terms With "Elder"

The term elder is a noun that can connote sage wisdom — or imply reduced competency. It can describe a subject imbued with agency — or one subjugated by schema. It can honor — or objectify. And crucially, it imposes a kind of term limit: used carelessly, it distances and debilitates the very future self it names.

As Paul Nash, Tonya Taylor, and Becca Levy observe: ageism is unlike any other form of prejudice in that we are all at risk of experiencing it as we age. Ageism does not target someone else. It targets our future selves.

In combination, elder justice compounds the problem: elder arrives as an adjective that limits the greater meaning of the noun it modifies. Justice, which should be boundless, is narrowed before it can breathe.

Let's Elder Justice

What if we freed the word?

Consider elder not as a noun, not as an adjective, but as a transitive verb — one that expresses action and passes through its object to complete its meaning. In its most functional form, a verb with high transitivity profoundly affects the agency of its direct object. Empower works this way. So does elder — if we let it.

Let's elder justice.

Language leads. Justice follows. Our future self is waiting.