Care shortages and duties to age abroad.

Abstract

Many higher-income countries have shortages of care-workers, which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as virtually all of these societies are ageing. The philosophical literature on this problem has concentrated mostly on the merits and demerits of different policy solutions, especially on the recruitment of foreign care-workers and on investments in care robots and other relevant technologies. However, the question of what moral duties, if any, private individuals have to help address care-worker shortages has been entirely neglected. In this article, I help to fill this lacuna by arguing that some inhabitants of higher-income countries have moral duties to age abroad in order to reduce the pressure on the aged care-systems of their current societies, whereby 'ageing abroad' is defined narrowly as moving to a foreign country to receive residential or non-residential aged care. As I show, these duties are dependent on a number of conditions being met, including the requirement that the host populations not be made worse off.