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"Sufficientarianism" published on by Oxford University Press.

Suflicientarianism is a prominent approach in political philosophy and in policy analyses. However, it is virtually absent from the formal normative economics literature. We analyse suflicientarianism axiomatically in the context of the allocation of opportunities (formalised as chances of success). We characterise the core suflicientarian criterion, which counts the number of agents who attain a "good enough" chance of success. The characterising axioms shed new light on the key ethical constituents of suflicientarianism: they express a liberal principle of non-interference, a form of minimal respect for equality, and a form of separability across individuals. Given the large indifference classes inbuilt in the core version, we also discuss two alternative social opportunity relations that refine the suflicientarian intuitions: the multi-threshold suflicientarian ordering and an incomplete relation focusing only on the suflicientarian strict preferences.

AbstractThis paper defends strong emissions sufficientarianism as an approach to assigning moral rights to generate greenhouse gas emissions. Strong emissions sufficientarianism holds that only subsistence emitting is morally permissible. This paper argues that, since it is uncertain how many subsistence emissions there will be, the present generation owes it to future generations to refrain from generating non-subsistence emissions, not to risk imposing on them a tragic choice between sacrificing themselves and contributing to very dangerous climate change. The paper also addresses the charge that emissions sufficientarianism, in general, is too permissive since it entails a right to contribute to very dangerous climate change. The overall message is that, given the moral urgency posed by climate change, there is little room for distributive principles besides emissions sufficientarianism. This casts doubt on the appropriateness of relying on carbon budgets in assigning rights to emit.

Principles of sufficiency are widely discussed in debates about distributive ethics. However, critics have argued that sufficiency principles are vulnerable to important objections. This article seeks to clarify the main claims of sufficiency principles and to examine whether they have something distinctive and plausible to offer. The article argues that sufficiency principles must claim that we have weighty reasons to secure enough and that once enough is secured the nature of our reasons to secure further benefits shifts. Having characterized sufficientarianism in this way, the article shows that the main objections to the view can be avoided; that we can examine the plausibility of sufficiency principles by appealing to certain reasons that support a shift; and that we should be optimistic about the prospects for sufficientarianism because many of our strongest reasons seem to be of this sort. This shift, I claim, is the overlooked grain of truth in sufficientarianism. © Cambridge University Press 2012.

AbstractWhat impact should sufficientarianism have on the measurement of inequality? Like other theories of justice, sufficientarianism influences how economic inequality is conceived. For the purpose of measurement, its standards of justice can be approximated by income-based thresholds of sufficiency. At which income level could a threshold of having enough be pegged in OECD countries? What would it imply for standard indicators of inequality, such as decile comparisons of cumulated income, income spreads, or the Gini coefficient? This paper suggests some answers to these questions, showing that sufficientarian ideas could make a difference with respect to the measurement of inequality in a society.

Despite the prominence of thresholds and limits in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of their role within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around threshold views in distributive justice. In this thesis, I develop an account of the conceptual structure of such views. Such an account helps understand and characterize threshold views, can subsume what may seem to be different debates about such views under one conceptual header, and can be used to further examine and develop patterns of justice that draw on thresholds. In light of this account, I propose a novel characterization of sufficientarianism which sheds new light on the distinctiveness of sufficientarianism as a distributive principle and on the common objections to sufficientarianism. Moreover, I examine and defend limitarianism, which is the view that people should not have more than a certain amount of wealth. In particular, I argue in favour of limitarianism as a midlevel principle for guiding institutional design and individual actions and, furthermore, as a specification of what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints.