| Intergenerational relation is a basic relation and an organic constituent of social structure coexisting with human beings. But either from its biological sense (intergenerational extension) or from its economic sense (the intergenerational allocation of resources) or cultural sense (the intergenerational commitment or identification of values), the intergenerational relation in traditional society doesn't exist as "questions", but are concealed by economic relation, political relation, social relation and class relation in a recessive state. In modern times, however, especially in mid-20th century, unprecedented changes have taken place, which are shown as follows: the "generational colony" in cultural sense has come into being and becomes obvious. The sense of "generational community" is formed for generations and members from the community have a comparatively consistent demands of benefits, values and lifestyle, thus distinguishing from other "generational communities". The relations formed with generations become to emerge as "dominant" social relation. Hence how to deal with intergenerational social relations gradually becomes an important theoretical and practical issue for modern society. This kind of change leads objectively to the differentiation and integration of social benefits and values, and becomes an important aspect and vital manifestation of the differentiation and integration for the entire social benefits and entire social values.In accordance with the above-mentioned intergenerational social relations, there have been a lot of survey and researchon intergenerational social relations from different viewpoints of different disciplines since the early 20th century, especially the mid-20th century. These disciplines mainly include: youth study, sociology, cultural anthropology, economics and some other studies pertaining to families. In China, the study of intergenerational relations started from the 80's of the 20th century. The main focus on intergenerational relation is in the sociology and youth study apart from some spare references in other fields. It may well be said that intergenerational relation studies have made great progress in these disciplines.Up till now, however, two main questions call for attention in the study of intergenerational relations: firstly, in the disciplines above, only the generations present are included in the perspective of their study, and the relation between generations present and other generations like those exiting and emerging are not dealt with. But in modern society, the relation between the generations present and the next generation has become a prominent question; secondly, the intergenerational social relation inevitably includes intergenerational ethic relations and therefore an ethics survey and analysis is essential for the study of intergenerational social relation from intergenerational perspectives. On the whole, however, ethics restrains the research of intergenerational socialrelation in the realm of ecological ethics. In other words, the ethics does not have an overall study of intergenerational social relation.This paper intends to probe into the dominant ethic problems in intergenerational social relations on the basis of the relations between generations present, generationslast and generations next from a longitudinal, dynamic and diachronic visual threshold. The perspective of intergenerational relation analysis is an "intergenerational ethic" analytical perspective.The first problem in the point of social ethic is how to define "generation", which is of both natural property and social cultural property. Its natural property is generally expressed by the biological age, which constitutes the "natural frame" of generation. The social cultural property is prescribed by the identical or similar values and lifestyle shared by their contemporaries. Different disciplines have different inclination either towards its natural property or towards the investigation of its social cultural property, according to...
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