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Honestly rather than arrive at a surface-level verdict one way or the other, I find it both more useful and more accurate to speak more broadly and say that opinions and values about inter-generational responsibility are more grounded in culture rather than a rationalist conclusion based on axiomatic principles.
For example, the modern United States has for a long time been one of the most significantly individualistic societies of all time. Many of us do indeed carry an attitude of 18-21 as being a hard border of personal self-responsibility and somewhat related to primacy of a conjugal bond over all other relationships, and the somewhat non-sequitur that parents have a strong and longer-lasting responsibility for their kids than vice versa. However, many other cultures do indeed view family units as having their own collective sense of honor, of responsibility, and of continuity.
As an aside, I find that the whole collectivized Social Security setup isn't really related to any actual American principles but rather was just a convenient kick-it-down-the-road approach. Well, okay fine, that's not entirely true. You might find somewhat interesting the Social Security Administration's own short history, which notably traces the true beginnings of this kind of collectivization to Civil War pensions -- which to me reflects a tacit admission that the State more broadly was somewhat responsible for so many people dying unnaturally, undermining traditional self-sufficiency. Then later, you had the forces of urbanization, more mobile workforces, longer life expectancy, and basic "nuclear family" stuff. But the main Social Security idea was originally one more similar to regular "insurance" against sudden unpredictable bad things, and as time passed on the system only got bigger and bigger and the principle debt burden shifted earlier and earlier. In fact some early participants were explicitly given kick-backs in acknowledgment that they might not have participated long enough to get vested.
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