The Virtues of Limits by David McPherson

Author:David McPherson [McPherson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192664679
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Sufficientarian Justice

I want to make the case for a sufficientarian conception of distributive justice, which I will contrast with and defend against a common egalitarian conception known as “luck egalitarianism.” The basic sufficientarian claim is that what matters with regard to distributive justice is, as Harry Frankfurt puts it, “not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough,”21 where what counts as “enough,” on my view, is that each person can live and live well in a characteristically human mode of life, and where addressing dire human need is of paramount importance.22 Indeed, many times when people say they are concerned with inequality, it seems that what they are really concerned with is poverty, that is, that people do not have enough. After all, it does not seem important that two wealthy people have the same amount of resources, but it is important that everyone has enough to live well.

It should be noted up front that although I reject luck egalitarianism as the right form of distributive justice, I do affirm moral egalitarianism, which maintains that all human beings in virtue of being human possess the same basic intrinsic dignity, and which is also connected to a relational egalitarianism where we treat other human beings as our equals with respect to basic dignity. Such moral and relational egalitarianism, I maintain, does not require that everyone should have the same material conditions, but it does require that everyone should have enough, since to disregard dire human need is to disregard human dignity. Where one cannot meet this need for oneself, the obligation falls to others, especially the political community, which I suggested should be understood as in part constituted for this purpose. Beyond meeting dire need, we should also seek to promote a broad “equality of condition” (rather than equality of outcome), which Tocqueville thought was the characteristic condition of genuinely democratic societies.23 As Sandel describes it, such equality of condition “enables those who do not achieve great wealth or prestigious positions to live lives of decency and dignity—developing and exercising their abilities in work that wins social esteem, sharing in a widely diffused culture of learning, and deliberating with their fellow citizens about public affairs.”24

With these preliminary remarks now complete, let us now examine luck egalitarianism as the major egalitarian rival to sufficientarianism. Luck egalitarianism finds a prominent supporter in G. A. Cohen, whose essay “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value” I drew on in Chapter 1 in articulating the importance of an accepting-appreciating stance toward the given world. I will argue that luck egalitarianism is in fact at odds with a proper accepting-appreciating stance toward the given, since, as David Wiggins puts it, it wages “a metaphysical crusade against contingency.”25 By contrast, sufficientarianism does not have this problem, and this is an important reason in its favor, as I will return to discuss.

In his essay “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Cohen expresses the basic idea of luck egalitarianism when he writes: “a large

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