Rescuing sufficientarianism from itself

Abstract

The sufficiency view holds that justice requires that people have enough, that is, that they achieve a level of well-being postulated as adequate. Recently, the sufficientarian view has received numerous criticisms, mostly concerning its disregard for inequalities above the threshold (or upper threshold, in the case of multilevel sufficientarianism) and the arbitrariness of the threshold. A particular criticism raised by Lasse Nielsen comes from within the sufficiency view and states that sufficientarianism fares badly in regard to our intuitions that the well-off have more duties, even in societies where there is no absolute deficiency. This article represents a rejoinder to that criticism, showing that a properly construed multilevel sufficiency view employing capabilities as its metric is not vulnerable to what Lasse Nielsen calls the unequally distributed burdens objection. Nonetheless, Nielsen’s objection captures the important insight that how duties are distributed matters even in such societies in which no one falls under a certain threshold. My claim is that one way that this can be achieved is by incorporating limitarian considerations into the sufficientarian project.