Tag: sufficientarianism

In the second blog in this series, I argued that the currency of sufficientarianism – the metric that can be used to quantify how much is ‘enough’ for each person – should be self-respect. If a person has self-respect, then they have enough.

In this third and final blog post, I explore the implications of this view. Specifically, I explain how it allows the rebuttal of a powerful objection to sufficientarianism: that it is indirectly self-defeating. This provides even stronger grounds to hold that the currency of sufficientarianism should be self-respect. With other currencies, like welfare or resources, the objection cannot be so convincingly answered.

What is an indirectly self-defeating theory?

A self-defeating theory is one which, if sound, would demonstrate itself to be unsound. For example, relativism holds that nothing can be true objectively, for all people at all times. Yet, if true, relativism itself would not be true objectively. Hedonism is a putatively self-defeating normative theory. It holds that people should pursue pleasure above all else. In doing so, however, a hedonist would conceivably receive less pleasure in the long run than if they had pursued another value. Pleasure is not the kind of thing that can be attained through conscious effort.

Derek Parfit made a perceptive distinction between directly and indirectlyself-defeating normative theories. 

1. Directly self-defeating: where doing what the theory tells you leads to achieve the aims it gives you less successfully than if you did something else (as in the hedonism example).

2. Indirectly self-defeating: where efforts or attempts to do what the theory tell you leads to achieve the aims it gives you less successfully than if you did something else.

Parfit gives impartial consequentialism as an example of an indirectly self-defeating theory. Impartial consequentialism holds that the morally right action is the one that has the best consequences, impartially considered. An impartial consequentialist might not care much about keeping up with their friends and family. They’d be focused on achieving the best outcomes for people they didn’t necessarily know. Yet if everyone was an impartial consequentialist, then no-one would care about keeping up with their friends and family, and the value of such relationships to society would be lost. 

To achieve the best consequences, impartially considered, it is plausible that it would be best if no-one (or, at least, not everyone) were an impartial consequentialist. Yet this isn’t because of an inconsistency within impartial consequentialism. Rather, it’s because impartial consequentialism neglects important social and psychological facts and so indirectly undermines itself.

How sufficientarianism could be indirectly self-defeating

Directly or indirectly self-defeating theories are unsound. If sufficientarianism were self-defeating, we should reject it and adopt a different principle of distributive justice (such as the difference principle, which I wrote about in the first post in this series).

How could sufficientarianism be self-defeating? Recall that sufficientarianism, roughly put, holds that a just distribution is one in which all members of society have at least enough to live a dignified life. Provided this condition is met, it would be fine, from the standpoint of justice, for individuals to amass as much wealth, power, and influence as they might want.

But now imagine a society where that is taken to extreme limits. A tiny fraction of the population emerges with incredible amounts of wealth, power, and influence, orders of magnitude greater than everyone else. This huge inequality between the 1 and the 99 percent would conceivably be very bad for social and political cohesion. This process could mean that those with the least in society lose out and no longer have enough to live a dignified life. For example, technological progress might drive large-scale automation of people’s jobs, leading to widespread unemployment. However, the increased profits from this automation may be concentrated in the hands of the 1 percent, with the 99 percent left without jobs or compensation.

In such cases, sufficientarianism would be indirectly self-defeating. By focusing only on ensuring that those at the bottom have enough, sufficientarianism neglects the fact that the sustainability of this situation partly depends on how much those at the top have. Too much inequality between the bottom and the top could threaten the integrity of the sufficientarian distribution. Efforts to achieve the aims given to us by sufficientarianism – that everyone has enough to live a dignified life – could therefore lead us to achieve these aims less successfully than if we followed a different principle of distributive justice, which prevented too much inequality from developing.

Why sufficientarianism is not (always) indirectly self-defeating

I think this objection is unsound. It falsely assumes that the currency of sufficientarianism is one that would allow such huge inequalities to emerge in the first place. Specified correctly, with the right currency, sufficientarianism could prevent this from happening. 

What qualities would such a currency need to have? As well as imposing an explicit lower bound on what people should have, it would have to impose an implicit upper bound on what they can have. As I explain below, I think the currency of self-respect does just this. 

My argument here draws on an insightful paper by Yannic Vitz about the relationship between libertarianism and limitarianism. These are two seemingly competing philosophical theories. Libertarianism is a set of views roughly holding that individual freedom should be prized above all other values. Limitarianism, meanwhile, is the claim that there should be a limit on the amount of resources that any one individual has. We might reasonably suppose that your average libertarian would completely reject this claim. Provided everyone is completely free, then there is no problem with having a lot. Yet Vitz shows that a popular interpretation of libertarianism implicitly does accept there should be such limits. 

This interpretation is one that includes a condition regulating how people acquire resources in the first place. This kind of libertarian might hold, for example, that it is necessary to leave ‘enough and as good for others’, in the words of John Locke. A person couldn’t simply come along and grab all the resources before any else has a chance to. If they did, they would have to pay compensation to others. Moreover, the value of this compensation would have to be greater than that of the grabbed resources, to make up for the harm inflicted as well as the value of the resources foregone. 

Vitz points out that, if one adopts this interpretation, then implicitly one is accepting that there is a theoretical limit on the amount of resources that an individual can have. An individual should not take more resources than they can compensate others for. ‘If one would do so’, in Vitz’s words, ‘one would be impermissibly well off’. 

Similarly, sufficientarianism combined with the currency of self-respect would implicitly impose an upper bound on the amount that an individual or group of individuals could have. This is because, like libertarianism, it would implicitly set some practical conditions for how society is organised. As I explained in the last blog post, these would be that: 

(a) society conforms with some basic principles of equality and tolerance; and 

(b) everyone has an opportunity to achieve reasonably-held goals. 

In practice, condition (a) would directly limit the amount of inequality that could permissibly develop. Condition (b) would do so indirectly. As a society became wealthier, so the expectations of people living in it would become more ambitious and they would need more to achieve their reasonably-held goals. Correspondingly, the level of what constitutes enough would rise, acting as a check on the growth of inequality. In combination, these conditions would arguably prevent the kind of dystopian situation I envisaged above from emerging.

One might object that, even taken together, these conditions would only be a weak check against the growth of inequality. First, even if people’s expectations did rise a society became wealthier, this could be at a much slower rate than increases in levels of inequality. Second, it is possible that people’s expectations would not rise at all (or not very much) as a society became wealthier. For example, there could be a widespread belief that individuals take full responsibility for wherever they end up, because success depends simply on how hard one tries. The fact that some people become wealthier or more powerful may have no bearing on what others reasonably expect. 

In response, I’d note that both objections are empirical in nature. They need to be backed up with evidence before we can judge whether they are persuasive. Moreover, there may be good grounds for dismissing the second objection even if it is empirically valid. This is because it is morally objectionable to hold that individuals in a society must take full responsibility for wherever they end up, regardless of whether a majority believe this is right. This belief is mistaken. It neglects the fact that some people are privileged by the circumstances of their birth; that people have basic needs which others arguably have a duty to meet; and that gross inequalities may be objectionable even if they fully reflect people’s conscious choices.¹

 ¹ There is a parallel here with the problem of ‘adaptive preferences’ explored by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The problem relates to situations where people living in deprivation or under oppression lower their expectations of life and need less to satisfy their preferences. This counts against preference-based theories of wellbeing, which hold that wellbeing consists in preference satisfaction. Preferences themselves are not necessarily innocent or value neutral. 

A further defence of the currency of self-respect

If I am right, then sufficientarianism can escape the objection that it is indirectly self-defeating. Yet observe that this is only the case when the currency of sufficientarianism imposes an implicit upper bound on what people can have, in addition to an explicit lower bound on what they should have. How do currencies of sufficientarianism other than the self-respect currency fare in this regard?

First, consider the resources currency. This is clearly vulnerable to the objection. It would require only that everyone has at least a base level of resources, saying nothing against the emergence of extreme inequality in the amounts of resources different individuals have.

Second, consider the welfare currency. This would prevent the emergence of large inequality in the amounts of resources different individuals have, insofar as such inequality would push the group at the bottom of the distribution under the minimum acceptable level of welfare. Yet the size of such an effect may not be large and could therefore be a weak safeguard against the emergence of extreme inequality. More dramatically, we could imagine the wealthy and powerful deliberately maintaining the poor and weak in a state of ignorant bliss in order to keep them pliant, as in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley or The Matrix films. Such a situation may be permissible under sufficientarianism combined with the welfare currency.

Finally, consider the capabilities currency. Depending on the specific capabilities included, this might prevent the emergence of extreme inequality. For instance, capabilities related to political freedoms or economic opportunities might indirectly limit the amount of inequality that could develop. This would be true to the extent that inequality could prevent everyone from having such capabilities. Yet this would not be the case with respect to other, perhaps more characteristic capabilities, such as access to healthcare, housing and education. 

With the possible exception of the capabilities currency, the currency of self-respect emerges as one of the only plausible currencies that can enable sufficientarianism to escape the objection that it is indirectly self-defeating. This provides further grounds to believe that the currency of sufficientarianism should be self-respect.

Conclusion

In this series of blog posts, I have motivated and fleshed out an interpretation of sufficientarianism inspired by the ideas of Rawls. This interpretation may not persuade critics of sufficientarianism that it is the best justified principle of distributive justice. There are counter-arguments that I haven’t addressed. Nevertheless, I hope that my arguments have shown that, starting from a similar position to Rawls (one that is popular with many philosophers), it is possible to arrive at a different destination. If you take Rawls’ arguments seriously, then you should take sufficientarianism seriously too.

With thanks (again) to Yannic Vitz, Cedar Green and Karl Reimer for helpful comments.

Refer to the introductory post in the series here, the first blog here, and the second blog here.

In the first blog in this series, I explained how Rawls’ arguments for the difference principle, his preferred theory of distributive justice, also support sufficientarianism, a rival theory. 

In this blog, I consider a related question: what should the currency of sufficientarianism be? By currency, I mean the metric that is used to quantify what or how much individuals should receive under a sufficientarian distribution. Drawing on the ideas of Rawls, I argue the currency should be self-respect. In other words, provided everyone has self-respect, then they have enough.

Importantly, the debate here is about what currency is of fundamental moral importance, not simply what is an adequate proxy for this currency. We’re trying to work out what, from the perspective of justice, should be distributed fairly between people, even if, practically speaking, we need to allocate something more tangible (e.g. money) to turn the vision into reality. 

What currencies are there?

Currencies of distributive justice fall into three broad categories: welfare, resources, and capabilities.

Welfare

Making welfare our currency would mean trying to identify and then distribute units of wellbeing. This is motivated by the broadly utilitarian view that wellbeing – rather than, say, rights or virtues – is of ultimate moral importance and that we can accurately quantify it. Accurately measuring welfare might seem impossible, but there are credible ways of doing so. For instance, we could use surveys to measure how happy people are in different situations (or, in more technical language, their hedonic states). 

The advantage to making welfare our currency is that it would enable us to account for the fact that some people might legitimately need more than others. For instance, disabled people might need more than non-disabled people so they could, say, buy a wheelchair or guide dog and attain the same quality of life. By using welfare as our currency, this reality would be reflected in our distributive choices.

However, with welfare as our currency we would not necessarily be able to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate reasons for differential resource allocation. An example of a potentially illegitimate reason is expensive tastes. It does not seem justifiable to give one person more because they need caviar to reach the same level of wellbeing as someone who is happy with a cheese sandwich.

Resources

Making resources our currency would mean distributing a good or service that is taken to be valuable for everyone. An obvious example is money. More sophisticated examples could be baskets of different goods and services that plausibly everyone would value, regardless of who they are.

The advantage to making resources our currency is that it would satisfy the intuition that we should be aiming for equality of opportunity rather than outcome. It would give individuals the ability to make choices for themselves about how to use their resources and, in this way, would protect and promote their autonomy.

On the other hand, using resources as our currency conflicts with the fact that different people plausibly need different amounts of resources to achieve equal levels of welfare or standing in society. (This is the same point made above in relation to the welfare currency). 

Capabilities

Capabilities can be understood as freedoms or opportunities to do the things we want to do. G.A. Cohen distinguishes capabilities from welfare and resources using the example of nutrition. The capability to be well nourished would mean having access to nutritious food, which allows one to carry out the activities and accomplish the objectives one wants to. By contrast, the welfare currency would focus on ‘the utility [a person] gets out of eating food’, while the resources currency would be concerned simply by a person’s ‘food supply’.

Having capabilities as our currency would involve trying to identify what they should be and then either distributing them fairly or ensuring everyone had access to them. There are a range of plausible contenders for capabilities, such as access to healthcare, housing, education, and employment. The UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index, inspired by the capabilities idea, is an example of what they could look like when operationalised. This index measures countries’ development based on their life expectancy, levels of education, and per capita income indicators.

Making capabilities our currency would arguably combine the best of the welfare and resources currencies. Like welfare, capabilities emphasise what people can actually do with various goods and services, rather than their mere supply. Like resources, they protect and promote individuals’ autonomy because they enable people to make choices for themselves about what to do with their opportunities.

Yet as well as having the advantages of the welfare and resources currencies, the capabilities currency may have some of their downsides. Under the welfare currency, it may be difficult to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate reasons for differential resource allocation. Similarly, under the capabilities currency, it may be hard to specify which capabilities are normatively valid. The resources currency struggles with the fact that different people may legitimately need different quantities of resources. Likewise, the capabilities currency faces the challenge that different people may need different amounts or compositions of capabilities to achieve the same ends.

Currency	Rationale	Objection	Associated with
Welfare	Enables us to account for the fact that some people may legitimately need more than others.	Fails to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate reasons for differential resource allocation.	Utilitarianism
Resources	Protects and promotes individuals’ autonomy by enabling them to choose how to use their resources.	Doesn’t capture the fact that some people may need more resources to achieve the same welfare level or standing in society as others.	Gerald Dworkin
Capabilities	Emphasises what individuals can actually do with resources, while protecting and promoting their autonomy.	May be difficult to specify which capabilities are normatively valid; people may need different amounts or compositions of capabilities to achieve the same ends.	Amartya Sen

What should the currency of sufficientarianism be?

In theory, sufficientarianism (along with all other distributive principles) could be combined with any of these three currencies. Welfare sufficientarianism would ensure that everyone in society had a base level of welfare; resources sufficientarianism that they had access to a minimum quantity of goods and services; and capabilities sufficientarianism that they at least those capabilities deemed essential for all. 

Nevertheless, it may be that certain distributive principles are conceptually better suited to one currency or another. For instance, utilitarianism seems clearly suited to the welfare currency.¹ Unlike the resources and capabilities currencies, utilitarianism isn’t motivated by appeals to individual autonomy. Instead, like the welfare currency, it is motivated by the idea that we can assess what is good for people from an impartial perspective and make comparisons between how well-off different individuals are.

Similarly, I think sufficientarianism is best suited to a particular currency: self-respect. I won’t comment in detail on how to categorise this currency using the framework above, but I’d suggest it falls somewhere between resources and capabilities.

 1 Utilitarianism is not commonly thought of as a principle of distributive justice, but it can be interpreted in this way. It holds that a just distribution is one that maximises either the average or total amount of a given currency within society. For more on the wide variety of ideas associated with utilitarianism, see this interesting website.

What do I mean by self-respect?

Rawls argued that self-respect comprises two conditions:

1. ‘A person’s sense of his own value, his secure conviction […] that his plan of life is worth carrying out’

and

2. ‘A confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is within one’s power, to fulfil one’s intentions’

I call (1) the psychological and (2) the material condition. While Rawls doesn’t say this explicitly, I think we can take him to mean the conditions are individually necessary but only collectively sufficient for self-respect.

The psychological condition refers to an individual’s belief that their life is important and meaningful. I’d suggest that whether one can coherently hold this belief depends on whether one’s society conforms with some basic principles of equality and tolerance. A society is made of up of individuals pursuing different goals. Nevertheless, if everyone agrees that no-one is automatically more important than anyone else and that there are many legitimate goals one can have, then everyone can appreciate they are important and able to live a meaningful life, regardless of who they are or what goals they have. 

The material condition relates to an individual’s ability to translate their goals into reality. My interpretation is that this does not require that everyone does achieve their goals. People’s goals may be unreasonable; for instance, not everyone is going to be a famous singer or football player. Instead, it requires that have everyone has an opportunity to achieve goals it is reasonable for them to have, such as success in a career. This is essential because a person who doesn’t have such an opportunity cannot genuinely feel their lives are as important or meaningful as others who do. 

One might object that condition (2) is psychological, not material. Logically, a person could be ‘confident in one’s ability […] to fulfil one’s intentions’ even while living in extremely poor material circumstances. Such a person would arguably be delusional though; they would need at least some material resources to achieve their reasonably-held goals. Correspondingly, material resources would still be necessary, even if indirectly, for them to have self-respect.

Why the currency of self-respect?

Sufficientarianism with the currency of self-respect would ensure that everyone in society had enough to secure their self-respect. In line with the interpretation of self-respect I set out above, in practice this would require that: (a) society conforms with some basic principles of equality and tolerance; and (b) everyone has an opportunity to achieve reasonably-held goals.

So why self-respect? I noted above that certain distributive principles seem conceptually better suited to one currency or another. I think this is the case for self-respect in relation to sufficientarianism.

Rawls’ argument that parties in the original position would select a distributive principle that secures the social bases of self-respect gives one reason. (See the blog post before this for an explanation of this argument). What better way to ensure that the ultimate distribution secures self-respect for all than by making this the very currency of the distributive principle?

Yet there are also grounds to support self-respect as the currency of sufficientarianism even if you do not buy Rawls’ reasoning. The concept of sufficiency depends, at least partly, on a social context. Once a person’s basic needs have been met, whether they have ‘enough’ is a function of what others around them have. It plausibly means having access to a quantity and quality of goods and services that a person could reasonably expect depending on the society in which they live.

The currency of self-respect, unlike welfare, resources, and capabilities, is sensitive to social context. It would have different implications depending on the society to which it was applied. For example, in a wealthier society, meeting the material condition may be more demanding than in a poorer society; a person might need more to have to achieve their reasonably-held goals. Accordingly, a sufficientarian distribution with the currency of self-respect would set different levels of ‘enough’ in different societies (varying across both time and place). 

Objections

One objection is that the currency of self-respect appears to have regressive implications. We can easily imagine a society in which the quantity and quality of goods and services a person can reasonably expect is very low. The currency of self-respect could legitimise the existence of poverty in such a society, even though we might strongly believe that this poverty is morally bad.

My initial response would be that the currency of self-respect would plausibly imply a high minimum threshold regardless of the society in which it applied. For the material condition to be met, a person would need access to a reasonably high quantity and quality of goods and services. This means the objection has less bite. 

A more profound response is that, in this situation, we could agree that the poverty was morally bad, but not for reasons of justice. Instead, the existence of poverty could be morally bad because it showed that well-off people had not acted upon their obligations to help people in need if it came at insignificant cost to them. We might maintain, though, that the poverty was not unjust. Justice relates to the background rules and principles that should govern society, rather than obligations incumbent on individuals.

A second objection is that the currency of self-respect is insufficiently distinct from another currency of distributive justice: Rawls’ primary goods. Primary of goods are things, divided into the categories ‘natural’ and ‘social’, that Rawls claims it would be rational for everyone to want (see a list in the table below). The specific objection is that Rawls already includes self-respect (referring to it as ‘the social bases of self-respect) within his list of primary goods. So what makes the currency of self-respect different?

Type of primary good	Including
Natural	Health Intelligence
Social	Rights and freedoms Income and wealth Social bases of self-respect

In answering, I would highlight that other primary goods Rawls identifies are implied by the currency of self-respect. Specifically, the psychological condition would guarantee some basic rights and freedoms, while the material condition would ensure everyone had access to a base level of income and wealth. The currency of self-respect should be preferred to primary goods on the grounds that it is a simpler theory.

A third and final objection is that self-respect is not a workable currency of distributive justice, because accurately measuring whether someone has self-respect is impossible. 

In response, I would emphasise that we’re trying to identity a currency that is of fundamental moral importance and that this may not be easily measurable. Nevertheless, I do think that the psychological and material conditions give us some practical steps to securing self-respect for every individual. Moreover, other currencies, such as the welfare currency, might have appeared impossible to measure, but psychologists and economists have now devised credible methods to do so. This makes it seem more plausible that accurate ways to measure self-respect could be created.

In the third and final blog in this series, I’ll explain how sufficientarianism with the currency of self-respect has some surprising and advantageous features. Specifically, it enables a satisfactory response to the claim that sufficientarianism is indirectly self-defeating. This provides further grounds for holding that the currency of sufficientarianism should be self-respect.

With thanks to Yannic Vitz and Cedar Green for helpful comments.

Refer to the introductory post in the series here and the first blog here.