Why not More Equality? Sufficientarianism and Inequalities above the Threshold
(2018) Law, Ethics and Philosophy — Vol. 5, p. 130-141 (2018)
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- For people starting from a presumption in favor of equality, the very idea of a sufficiency threshold where the demands of justice would stop because everyone has enough is puzzling. What puzzles them in particular is that some inequalities are tolerated by sufficientarians although they do not have a special moral justification. The main merit of Liam Shields’ account of sufficiency as a demand of justice is to potentially reconcile these egalitarians with the principle of sufficiency. This comes from Shields’ endorsement of what he calls “the shift thesis”, stating roughly that there is a discontinuity in the weight of our reasons to benefit people once they have enough. This thesis distinguishes his theory from other accounts of sufficientarianism by not denying the injustice of inequalities above the threshold. Thereby, it changes the way one can look at the relation between sufficiency and equality. The principle of sufficiency becomes the first principle of a conception of justice that must be completed by another – possibly egalitarian – principle. In the first section, I start with a brief exposition of the shift thesis and the way it relates to other accounts of sufficiency. Then, in light of this, I introduce in the second section a distinction between agnosticism and indifference towards inequalities above the sufficiency threshold, Shields’ position being associated with agnosticism. In the third section, I argue that pragmatism might provide reasons to focus on sufficiency if one is agnostic about these inequalities. And I conclude with a discussion of the opportunity of defending a partial view of justice as Shields does.
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Vandamme, P.-E. (2018). Why not More Equality? Sufficientarianism and Inequalities above the Threshold. Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 5, 130-141. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/174995 (Original work published 2018)