Having Too Much E-Book

Ingrid Robeyns

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Having Too Much is the first academic volume devoted to limitarianism: the idea that the use of economic or ecosystem resources should not exceed certain limits.


This concept has deep roots in economic and political thought. One can find similar statements of such limits in thinkers such as Plato, Aquinas, and Spinoza. But Having Too Much is the first time in contemporary political philosophy that limitarianism is explored at length and in detail.


Bringing together in one place the best writing from key theorists of limitarianism, this book is an essential contribution to political philosophy in general, and theories of distributive justice in particular. Including some of the key published articles as well as new chapters, Having Too Much is necessary reading for scholars and students of political theory and philosophy, as well as anyone interested in questions of distributive justice.




 

Leseprobe

Having Too Much

Having Too Much

Philosophical Essays on Limitarianism

Edited by Ingrid Robeyns

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Table of Contents

Preface viii

Ingrid Robeyns

1. Introducing the Philosophy of Limitarianism 1

Ingrid Robeyns

2. Having Too Much 15

Ingrid Robeyns

3. Limits to Wealth in the History of Western Philosophy 61

Matthias Kramm and Ingrid Robeyns

4. Autonomy-Based Reasons for Limitarianism 91

Danielle Zwarthoed

5. Limitarianism: Pattern, Principle, or Presumption? 129

Dick Timmer

6. The Limits of Limitarianism 151

Robert Huseby

7. Why Limitarianism? 175

Ingrid Robeyns

8. Presumptive Limitarianism: A Reply to Robert Huseby 203

Dick Timmer

9. Sufficiency, Limits, and Multi-Threshold Views 219

Colin Hickey

10. A Neo-Republican Argument for Limitarianism 247

Elena Icardi

11. The Self-Respect Argument for Limitarianism 271

Christian Neuhäuser

12. Climate Change, Distributive Justice, and “Pre-Institutional” Limits on Resource Appropriation 297

Colin Hickey

13. Ecological Limits: Science, Justice, Policy, and the Good Life 335

Fergus Green

14. Limitarianism and Future Generations 361

Tim Meijers

Contributor Biographies 391

Index 395

Preface

Ingrid Robeyns

© 2023 Ingrid Robeyns, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0338.15

This is the first volume that brings together philosophical papers on limitarianism—the view that it is not permissible to have more than a certain upper limit of resources. Or, put colloquially, the view that there are moral limits to how rich a person can be, or how many other types of scarce and valuable resources they can appropriate.

There is a lot of interest in these issues in society. That is not surprising, since in many countries the media are paying more attention to the increasing gap between the best-off and the rest of society. While in recent years most people have experienced more difficult times—first because of the increasing effects of climate change, then because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and most recently because of rising energy prices due to the Russian war in Ukraine—the position of the richest in society has not been negatively affected. While everyone else is experiencing a stagnation or decline in their living standards, the richest are getting richer.

Due to this widespread societal interest and the fact that this book is published open access, members from a general readership might pick up this book. However, this is not a book written for a broader audience. This is a book in which academic philosophers present their research to their colleagues and advanced students; it presupposes at least some training in (analytical) political philosophy, and for most chapters also a good understanding of contemporary political philosophy. The broader audience might find more accessible arguments on the moral problems with excessive wealth in Neuhäuser (2018) and on limitarianism specifically in Robeyns (2024).

In putting together this volume, I have been very lucky to work with a wonderful group of contributors. I thank Matthias Kramm, Danielle Zwarthoed, Robert Huseby, Dick Timmer, Colin Hickey and Fergus Green for granting permission to reprint their earlier published articles. In addition, Dick Timmer, Colin Hickey, Elena Icardi, Christian Neuhäuser and Tim Meijers enthusiastically wrote new papers for the volume. As former members of the Fair Limits project, which ran at Utrecht University from 2018 until the end of 2022, Dick, Colin, Fergus and Tim also served as a great group of advisors on various editorial decisions that had to be made. It has been a real pleasure to work with them on the Fair Limits project, and I am delighted that we can close it with this collective publication.

Unfortunately, limited resources forced me to make a choice in which earlier published articles on limitarianism to reprint, and many fine articles could not be included. But they are mentioned in the Introduction, and some of those papers are discussed in more depth in certain chapters. I hope this volume will thus serve as a useful introduction to the philosophical literature on limitarianism, and allow interested readers to find their way to additional articles.

A book is always a project to which many people contributed, not just by providing chapters but also in other ways. I would like to thank the two referees of the volume—who were first anonymous, but later turned out to be Tammy Harel Ben Sahar and Alexandru Volacu. They provided very helpful comments on the new chapters and did so in a very short time frame. In addition, thanks also to Morten Fibieger Byskov and Adelin-Costin Dumitru for providing anonymous referee reports on one particular chapter, as well as many other colleagues who provided comments on various chapters. They are thanked in the acknowledgements of those specific chapters. Thanks also to Bart Mijland, who was the practical coordinator of the Fair Limits team for most of the duration of the project, and to Emma Hulsbos who provided some editorial assistance in the early stages of the work on this volume. I would also like to thank the editorial team at Open Book Publishers, in particular OBP’s director Alessandra Tosi; Melissa Purkiss, Mark Harris and Lucy Barnes for their editing work; and Jeevan Nagpal for the cover design. Thanks also to Roland Pierik for providing us with a picture for the cover. The cover picture symbolizes the view that the sky is the limit, which limitarianism rejects.

This edited volume will be published both in English and in Spanish translation. For the Spanish translation, I am grateful to Iñaki Larrínaga Márquez, who spent countless hours translating all these philosophical papers into Spanish. I hope that many Spanish-speaking readers will enjoy the fruits of his efforts.

Finally, the financial support for by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 726153) is gratefully acknowledged.

References

Neuhäuser, Christian. 2018. Reichtum als Moralisches Problem. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Robeyns, Ingrid. 2024. Limitarianism. The Case Against Extreme Wealth. London: Allen Lane/New York: Astra House.

1. Introducing the Philosophy of Limitarianism

Ingrid Robeyns

© 2023 Ingrid Robeyns, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0338.01

1. The Basic Intuition of Limitarianism

We are all familiar with the many reasons why we should fight poverty. Poor people do not have enough money to meet their basic needs, are excluded from society, are often not given proper respect, or can become easy prey at the hands of others who want to dominate them. In the domains of both material and immaterial goods, there is a widespread understanding about what it means when someone is deprived, that is, when they do not have enough important goods such as income, wealth, power, authority, water, food, housing, or energy. Virtually everyone, regardless of their political persuasion, agrees that every person should have access to enough of what matters.

If the claim is made that we should, if possible, avoid poverty, it is often made as a moral claim which suggests that poverty is bad or wrong (some non-altruistic persons might only endorse it as an instrumental claim, for example because they only care about physical security and stability, and hope that eradicating poverty will avoid their being confronted with pitchforks). We could make it into a political claim by saying that our social institutions should be designed to avoid poverty to the extent that this is feasible (and some might add to the extent that avoiding poverty does not come at a greater loss of other values that matter).

But can we also say that there are situations in which someone has too much? And what reasons are there to worry about someone having too much? These are the questions that are central to the limitarian project.

This is not merely a question that is relevant for political philosophers. In society at large, there are many instances when citizens or commentators argue that some people are taking, receiving, or acquiring too much. The fortunes of the richest billionaires have become so inconceivably large that journalists, activists, and artists are trying to come up with ways to visualize them so as to make them comprehensible. For example, the Forbes World’s Billionaires List 2022 estimates that the biggest fortune of an individual is $251 billion, that is $251,000,000,000—owned at some point during 2022 by Elon Musk. Just try to compare that with, for example, $40,000, which is the average wage of a production worker at Tesla (Musk’s largest company). But there is also moral and political outrage about the financial holdings of much less wealthy persons, such as those of CEOs in Europe who earn several million euros each year—including directors of banks that had to be saved in the financial crises of 2018—or of fossil fuel companies such as Shell that are criticized for slowing down the deep decarbonization so badly needed to keep the planet habitable for humans. Some multi-millionaires, however, have organized themselves, in groups such as the Patriotic Millionaires, and are engaging in political activism that aims to decrease economic inequalities by making the superrich pay more taxes.

Limitarianism says that at some point of earning or accumulating, one has too much. The view is that no-one should have more than a certain upper limit of some goods or resources that are scarce and valuable. The most widely examined of those goods is money—either in the form of income or in the form of wealth. But limitarianism is also applicable to other valuable scarce goods, such as the services that ecosystems give to human beings or the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases.

This volume brings together state-of-the-art philosophical debate on limitarianism by presenting articles that have already been published alongside some new work on the topic.1 The idea that one can have too much may sound weird to those raised with neoliberal values in contemporary capitalist societies, but it has been argued for by many thinkers in the past. More than 2000 years ago, Plato argued in The Laws that in the ideal polis there would be neither destitution nor great affluence, because if either of these existed, the city would be subjected to civil war. He therefore proposes that ownership should not be more than four times the poverty limit at most (Plato 2016, 744e). As Matthias Kramm and I have shown in our helicopter view of Western political philosophy,2 there have been thinkers from a variety of traditions who have argued for upper limits to the acquisition and possession of wealth or to consumption (the latter generally presupposes but does not imply the former). Still, arguments in contemporary Western political philosophy often take different forms to past arguments. In particular, past arguments often relied on virtue ethics and an identification of the ethical with the political, whereas contemporary arguments are generally grounded in a form of political philosophy that tries to steer clear of moral judgements about character and personal choices made outside the public domain.

I coined the term ‘limitarianism’ in a paper I started developing in 2012 and which was ultimately published in the 2017 NOMOS annual yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (Knight and Schwartzberg 2017). That paper is reprinted here as Chapter 2. Others were working on similar ideas; most strikingly, Christian Neuhäuser (2018) published an entire book on the moral problems of wealth concentration (in German) without either of us knowing about each other’s work. In the last five years, a small but fast-growing literature has emerged on this topic. I was particularly fortunate to be awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council, which allowed a larger team of political theorists and philosophers to work on the questions of limits in the appropriation of ecological and economic resources. The development of this small area of literature was also aided by several workshops and conferences devoted to scholarly discussions on limitarianism.3 This volume aims to bring together those key published articles, as well as several novel arguments. And since this volume will be published in English as well as in Spanish translation, it will make these texts more easily available to students and scholars from two large academic language communities.

2. Aims of this Volume

This volume has three core aims.

The first is to provide a state-of-the-art discussion about limitarianism—to the extent that this is possible when there is a rapidly evolving literature.4 As not all of the book chapters that previously appeared as articles were published via open access, one goal of this volume is to make more articles on limitarianism accessible to all. Since this volume also serves as the final collective publication of the Fair Limits project, our selection of reprinted articles has focussed on articles published within the framework of that project.

Chapter 2 is a reprint of the chapter “Having Too Much” in which limitarianism was introduced (Robeyns 2017). Chapter 3 is a reprint of Kramm and Robeyns (2020), in which we provided a brief overview of what one could consider ‘predecessors’ of limitarianism in the history of Western philosophy. Clearly this overview is not complete, and not only because it leaves out the histories of the various non-Western philosophies. For example, Eric Schliesser has argued that Spinoza should be read as endorsing a qualified form of limitarianism in his account of the ideal monarchy that he wrote in the seventeenth century (Schliesser 2021). Another example that Schliesser (2022) found is L.T. Hobhouse, who made explicit limitarian claims in his 1911 book Liberalism. We can expect that increased discussion of this topic will uncover more historical thinkers who have made limitarian claims.

Chapter 4 is a reprint of Danielle Zwarthoed’s article “Autonomy-based Reasons for Limitarianism”, which argues that in order to protect the moral autonomy of persons, a society needs to put a limit on how rich a person can be (Zwarthoed 2019). Chapter 5 is a reprint of Dick Timmer’s article “Limitarianism: Pattern, Principle or Presumption” in which he analyses precisely what kind of principle limitarianism is (or could be), and in which he defends limitarianism as a mid-level principle as well as on presumptive grounds (Timmer 2021b). Chapters 6and 7 are reprints of a two-paper symposium recently published in The Journal of Political Philosophy in which Robert Huseby (2022) argued that limitarianism is superfluous because it can be reduced either to sufficientarianism or to egalitarianism. In the second paper (Robeyns 2022), I responded to those objections and also further clarified the idea of limitarianism (see also Section 3 of this Introduction). I also endorsed the claim that was recently explicitly defended by Liam Shields (2020) in the context of sufficientarianism, and which builds on earlier arguments by John Roemer (2004), that we should move towards hybrid or multi-principled accounts of distributive justice, which was indeed Rawls’ own theory of justice (Rawls 1971). The reasons for combining sufficientarian thresholds with limitarian thresholds in a full account of social or distributive justice are further developed in Colin Hickey’s new paper in this volume (Chapter 9).

In his paper, Huseby also criticizes the presumptive argument for limitarianism advanced by Timmer (reprinted here in Chapter 5). In Chapter 8 of this volume, “Presumptive Limitarianism: A Reply to Robert Huseby”, Dick Timmer responds to Huseby’s critique by partly revising and further clarifying his defence of presumptive limitarianism.

The second aim of this volume is to advance novel arguments in this debate. In Chapter 9, “Sufficiency, Limits, and Multi-threshold Views”, Colin Hickey argues that there are good reasons for sufficientarians to also endorse limitarianism and for limitarians to endorse sufficientarianism. He also offers some speculative thoughts on a necessary conceptual connection between the two. He closes the chapter by explaining why we should not be surprised that most plausible accounts of distributive justice are multi-threshold views containing at least one sufficientarian and one limitarian threshold.

In Chapter 10, “A Neo-republican Argument for Limitarianism”, Elena Icardi analyzes whether neo-republicans should endorse limitarianism, and if so, which form. She argues that since freedom as non-domination is grounded on citizens having an equal opportunity for political influence, and since this equality is jeopardized both by the fact that the super-rich enjoy greater opportunities and by the fact that formal institutional constraints can only prevent it to a minimal extent, neo-republicanism should endorse a limitarian threshold. However, unlike Adelin Costin Dumitru (2020), Icardi holds that such a threshold should be imposed in those places where the wealthy dominate democracy because of their wealth, rather than where they possess more resources than they need to fully flourish.

In Chapter 11, Christian Neuhäuser provides a novel reason for limitarianism, which is based on the notion of self-respect as a primary basic good. He argues that limitarianism is needed to protect the self-respect of all members of society so that they can develop a sense of self-worth and enjoy the freedom to pursue their own ideas of the good life and the projects that this entails. This implies, Neuhäuser argues, that Rawls’ theory of justice should endorse limitarianism, either by interpreting the difference principle in a way that includes an upper threshold, or else by adding it as an additional principle.

The volume’s third aim is to bring the philosophical analysis of upper limits to wealth and the analysis of upper limits on the use of ecological resources closer together. Limitarianism need not be restricted to questions of wealth alone, and could also be considered in relation to questions about the use of ecological resources.

Chapter 12 is a reprint of Colin Hickey’s (2021) article “Climate Change, Distributive Justice and ‘Pre-institutional’ Limits on Resources Appropriation”, in which he argues that pre-institutional limits on the use of the absorption capacity of the atmosphere can be justified on the basis of several ethical theories. Chapter 13 is a reprint of Fergus Green’s article in which he looks at the question of limits in the sphere of ecological resources in a non-ideal and institutional setting (Green 2021). Finally, in Chapter 14, Tim Meijers turns to future generations and asks two questions. First, do we have reasons relating to intergenerational justice to support economic limitarianism understood as limits to current wealth? He argues that if we owe future generations just institutions, we have reasons to prevent the entrenchment of wealth and to prevent future inequalities. Second, if we move beyond economic limitarianism and also look at ecological limits, what would a limitarian view that takes concerns about future generations as a starting point look like?

3. Some Key Developments in the Literature

It is not surprising that when an idea is put forward and defended, the conceptualization of the idea itself, as well as possible reasons for the view, change in response to further discussions and critiques. In my response to Huseby (2022), I have already pointed out some of those changes, and I would like to use this opportunity to highlight one important change in particular and explain the background that motivates it.

When I started writing about limitarianism in 2012, I was initially motivated by two questions. First, can one plausibly draw the opposite of a poverty line, that is, a line representing an amount of material resources such that one has more than one needs for a maximally flourishing life? And second, what reasons could there be for the claim that the money above that line should be redistributed to others or used to deal with problems which, if solved, would improve the flourishing of those who are worse off? Answers to these questions came in the form of the account of riches (Robeyns 2017: 14–30) and the argument from unmet urgent needs (Robeyns 2017: 10–14) that I provided. The account of riches and the objections to that account are indeed a large part of this paper and were developed first. When I further developed the paper in late 2013 and early 2014, I came to realize (no doubt through discussions with interlocutors) that the threat to political equality might be at least as important a reason to object to excessive wealth concentration, and therefore I added the democratic argument as a second argument for limitarianism. However, I did not ask at the time whether the riches line—the level at which a person is fully flourishing and cannot spend more money to improve her flourishing (if we use a political and purely materialist account of flourishing)—is also the proper upper limit that is sufficient for protecting the value of political equality. Discussions within the Fair Limits team and among the participants at a workshop in Utrecht in January 2019 made it clear that the different underlying values that limitarianism aims to protect might require different limitarian thresholds, and that some of those thresholds should be relative, rather than absolute (this was Plato’s view, too, when he argued that the upper limit of ownership should be no more than four times what the poorest have). At the time of writing this Introduction, several papers have been published that argue for relative thresholds, on either conceptual or normative grounds (Harel Ben Shahar 2019; Alì and Caranti 2021; Caranti and Alì 2021; Timmer 2021a; see also the chapter by Icardi in this volume).

While I still think that the right conceptualization of riches (that is, the concept that signifies the symmetrical opposite of poverty) is an absolute threshold and can plausibly be called ‘the riches line’, I agree that the riches line is only one of several possible limitarian thresholds. Similarly, while the money above the riches line that a rich person has can still be called ‘surplus money’ or ‘surplus wealth’ (i.e., money she cannot use to flourish in the specific sense outlined above), the more general term for money above the limitarian threshold is ‘excess wealth’ or ‘excess money’ (Robeyns 2022: 253–254). This broadening and generalization of the conceptual building blocks of limitarianism are not only needed to give the democratic argument its due, but also allow for a wider range of limitarian theories to be developed and investigated.

Another development in the literature is that it is now obvious that there is a wide range of reasons for limitarianism. The first two reasons were the argument for unmet urgent needs, which is essentially a modification of the utilitarian argument proposed by scholars such as Peter Singer (1972), and the democratic argument, which aims to protect political equality understood as equal political influence. Daniel Zwarthoed (2019) added an argument based on moral autonomy; Christian Neuhäuser (2018) added an argument based on human dignity; Neuhäuser (2018) and Robeyns (2019) added ecological reasons for limitarianism; and Dumitru (2020) and Icardi (this volume) developed arguments based on republican freedom. Moreover, several theorists argued that limitarianism should work with relative thresholds, rather than an absolute threshold (e.g. Harel Ben Shahar 2019, Alì and Caranti 2021; Caranti and Alì 2021). In so far as different political theories often have one master value to which they give lexical priority over other values, one might ask whether there is widespread agreement concerning limitarianism in different political theories, albeit that different theorists would endorse it for different reasons. This would certainly be a strength of the view, especially with respect to policy recommendations and the design of institutions.

4. Future Directions

The papers in this volume already raise a number of questions for further research. But there are additional questions that have been raised while various scholars have worked on this topic over the years. I will discuss a few in this section, or enough to show that these questions are diverse and give rise to a significant research agenda, but I do not aim to provide an exhaustive overview.

First, it will be vital for philosophers to know whether limitarianism is merely a moral view without institutional implications (and hence not a political view), or whether it is a political view, or a combination of the two. If it is a combination, what exactly would such a combination look like?5

Second, various arguments have been offered in the literature in favour of limitarian thresholds being either absolute or relative. In the paper in which limitarianism was introduced, I defended an absolute threshold, but as I explain in the previous section, this was motivated by my project of developing a riches line. This is, in my view, the proper limitarian threshold for the unmet urgent needs argument (although it is worth stressing that this doesn’t exhaust all duties to meet such needs, and that there are very good arguments for why those below the riches line also have certain duties, albeit possibly less stringent ones). Yet several philosophers have, rightly in my view, argued that the democratic argument, which focusses on avoiding material domination in the political sphere, needs a relative threshold (Harel Ben Shahar 2019; Alì and Caranti 2021; Caranti and Alì 2021). In a forthcoming paper, Lisa Herzog offers another reason for a relative threshold as a way to take into account the potentially negative effects of positional goods (Herzog forthcoming). Thus, in principle, thresholds could be either absolute or relative, and different reasons for limitarianism give rise to different thresholds (Harel Ben-Shahar 2019; Timmer 2021a). The exact reasons for when thresholds should be relative and when they should be absolute, and whether hybrid options are possible, require further thought.

Third, as long as one only endorses one reason for limitarianism, one might not need to bother with multiple thresholds; but what if one endorses multiple reasons for limitarianism, which lead to multiple thresholds? Things might get even more complicated if some of these multiple thresholds are absolute and some are relative. This raises new issues. One new question it raises is what the relationship is between those thresholds, and whether there are possible conflicts between them. Another issue is how, if there are trade-offs between the goals of staying below several separate limitarian thresholds, we should analyse and respond to those trade-offs. Recently, Dick Timmer (2021c) has advanced our conceptual understanding of what constitutes a threshold in theories of distributive justice and has explained why thresholds in accounts of distributive justice do not need to be arbitrary. But more work in this area is needed, including at the level of normative analysis. One other possible line of investigation is whether the question of the moral versus the political nature of limitarianism can be put to work to solve any possible conflicts between multiple limitarian thresholds.

Fourth, how exactly should we determine those thresholds? What are appropriate methods for doing so? Is this something that philosophers can do on their own (I suspect not), and if not, do philosophers have to take into account the research constraints of the empirical sciences with which they are collaborating? Is it methodologically sound to elicit a riches line (hence a threshold that is absolute and based on flourishing or quality of life), that is based on a survey of vignettes, as was done by an interdisciplinary team at Utrecht University?6 Or should this only be done with focus groups and should one still use other methods, for example letting participating citizens use something like Lego bricks to build their ideal wealth distribution, as was done by a team based at the LSE in London?7 And how can we estimate the upper limits when the reason for limitarianism is not meeting urgent needs but rather protecting democracy, or another reason altogether?

Fifth, in so far as we are interested in limitarianism as a contribution to theorizing about distributive justice, it is crystal clear that it only provides part of an account of distributive justice. This raises the question of what a (more) complete account of distributive justice, which includes one or more upper thresholds, would look like. Building on the work of John Roemer (2004), Liam Shields (2020) argues for a pluralistic theory of distributive justice, which consists of lexically ordered distributive principles and also allows for a plurality of currencies of justice. As Shields rightly points out, Rawls’ theory of justice contains both multiple principles and multiple metrics. If limitarianism is to play any role in a theory of distributive justice, the question is what role it would play in such a combination of principles and currencies.

Sixth, if limitarian principles are proposed not just for one valuable scarce good—such as money—but for multiple goods, for example if we add goods such as our use of the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gasses, then additional issues arise. An important question is what effect a limitarian threshold in one distributive metric has on distributive principles in another metric. A concrete and extremely relevant example is the question of what the implications are of a limitarian principle in the domain of ecological resources for questions concerning distributive justice in the domain of money, and vice versa.

Seventh, there is much more work to be done on the policy implications of limitarianism. Philosophers often think of policy implications as elements that are clean and neat (e.g. changing the tax rates), but it seems much more likely that limitarian goals can only be reached via a more comprehensive plan consisting of several measures that stand in a particular relation to each other. For example, if we want to increase taxation on capital, we might first have to close international tax havens, or take other measures, as a precondition that aims to avoid a massive level of international tax mobility.

Finally, there are many objections one might raise to limitarianism, both at the purely conceptual level and at the substantive-normative level. Some of the papers cited in this chapter, as well as in the symposium edited by Timmer and Neuhäuser (2022) have formulated objections to limitarianism. But clearly much more work is needed on this front too—not just by formulating objections, but also by analysing them.

5. Concluding Remarks

This volume aims to advance philosophical scholarship on limitarianism. It tries to do so by bringing together and making more widely accessible some core earlier publications on limitarianism, as well as by presenting novel work on the subject. The current state of the world underscores the need to take limits to the appropriation of resources seriously: national income and wealth inequalities are at the highest levels in decades and the richest have never been so rich before; the debilitating effects of these problems on democratic structures and practices can no longer be denied; and the disproportionately negative effect of the consumption patterns of the rich on climate change is growing. We thus must ask whether there is a point at which someone has too much. It is our hope that, with this volume, we can make a scholarly contribution to this much-needed debate.

Acknowledgement

For comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, I am grateful to Colin Hickey, Elena Icardi, Tim Meijers, Chris Neuhäuser, and Dick Timmer. The editorial work on this volume and the writing of this introduction have been financially supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 726153).

References

Alì, Nunzio and Caranti, Luigi. 2021. How Much Economic Inequality Is Fair in Liberal Democracies? The Approach of Proportional Justice, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 47(7), 769–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453720987865

Caranti, Luigi and Alì, Nunzio. 2021. The Limits of Limitarianism. Why Political Equality Is Not Protected by Robeyns’ Democratic Argument, Politica & Società, 89–116. http://doi.org/10.4476/100808

Davis, Abigail, Hecht, Katharina, Burchardt, Tania, Gough, Ian, Hirsch, Donald, Rowlingson, Karen and Summers, Kate. 2020. Living on Different Incomes in London: Can Public Consensus Identify a ‘Riches Line’? London: Trust for London.

Dumitru, Adelin-Costin. 2020. Republican Limitarianism and Sufficientarianism: A Proposal for Attaining Freedom as Non-Domination, Ethical perspectives, 27(4), 375–404. https://doi.org/10.2143/EP.27.4.3289451

Green, Fergus. 2021. Ecological Limits: Science, Justice, Policy and the Good Life. Philosophy Compass, 16, e12740, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12740

Harel Ben-Shahar, Tammy. 2019. Limitarianism and Relative Thresholds, unpublished manuscript, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3404687

Herzog, Lisa. Forthcoming. Liberal Egalitarianism beyond Methodological Atomism. In: Ingrid Robeyns (Ed.). Pluralizing Political Philosophy: Economic and Ecological Inequalities in Global Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hickey, Colin. 2021. Climate Change, Distributive Justice, and “Pre-institutional” Limits on Resource Appropriation, European Journal of Philosophy, 29, 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12569

Huseby, Robert. 2022. The Limits of Limitarianism. Journal of Political Philosophy, 3, 230–248. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12274

Knight, Jack and Schwartzberg, Melissa (eds.). 2017. Wealth. NOMOS LVIII: Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. New York: NYU Press.

Kramm, Matthias and Robeyns, Ingrid. 2020. Limits to Wealth in the History of Western Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, 28, 954–969. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12535

Malleson, Tom. 2023. Against Inequality. The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neuhäuser, Christian. 2018. Reichtum als Moralisches Problem. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Plato. 2016. The Laws. Edited by Malcolm Schofield; translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknapp Press.

Robeyns, Ingrid. 2017. Having too much. In: Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg (Eds). Wealth. NOMOS LVIII: Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. New York: NYU Press, pp. 1–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26785948

Robeyns, Ingrid. 2019. What, If Anything, Is Wrong with Extreme Wealth? Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 20, 251–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2019.1633734

Robeyns, Ingrid. 2022. Why Limitarianism? Journal of Political Philosophy, 30(2), pp. 249–270. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12275

Robeyns, Ingrid, Buskens, Vincent, van de Rijt, Arnout, Vergeldt, Nina and van der Lippe, Tanja. 2021. How Rich Is Too Rich? Measuring the Riches Line, Social Indicators Research, 154, 115–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02552-z

Roemer, John E. 2004. Eclectic Distributional Ethics, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 3(3), 267–281. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X04046238

Schiessler, Eric. 2021. Spinoza and Economics. In: Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Ed.). A Companion to Spinoza . London: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 410–421.

Schiessler, Eric. 2022. ‘On Hobsbown’ Blogpost. Digressions and Impressions, https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2022/06/on-hobhouse-with-some-mention-of-pareto-and-rawls.html

Shields, Liam. 2020. Sufficientarianism, Philosophy Compass, 15, e12704. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12704

Singer, Peter. 1972. Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243.

Summers, Kate, Accominotti, Fabien, Burchardt, Tania, Hecht, Katharina, Mann, Elizabeth, and Mijs, Jonathan. 2022. Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality, Social Justice Research, 35, 379–400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-022-00389-0

Timmer, Dick. 2019. Defending the Democratic Argument to Limitarianism: A Reply to Volacu and Dumitru. Philosophia, 47, 1331–1339. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0030-6

Timmer, Dick. 2021a. Thresholds and Limits in Theories of Distributive Justice. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University.

Timmer, Dick. 2021b. Limitarianism: Pattern, Principle, or Presumption? Journal of Applied Philosophy, 38, 760–773. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12502

Timmer, Dick. 2021c. Thresholds in Distributive Justice. Utilitas, 33, 422−441. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820821000194

Timmer, Dick and Neuhäuser, Christian. Eds. 2022. Symposium on Limitarianism. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 25(5), pp. 717–791. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-022-10354-0

Volacu, Alexandru and Dumitru, Adelin Costin. 2019. Assessing Non-Intrinsic Limitarianism. Philosophia, 47, 249–264. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9966-9

Zwarthoed, Danielle. 2019. Autonomy-based Reasons for Limitarianism, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21, 1181–1204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9958-7

1 It has been impossible to be complete, and some important and fine articles had to be left out, such as those by Volacu and Dumitru (2019), Timmer (2019), Alí and Caranti (2021), Caranti and Alí (2021), and Dumitru (2020). See also the paper by Harel Ben Shahar (2019), which is unpublished but has already been cited multiple times, as well as the monograph by Neuhäuser (2018) and the PhD dissertation by Timmer (2021a).

2 Reprinted here as Chapter 3.

3 This includes, in particular, a workshop on principles of distributive justice in Utrecht (January 2019) organized by the Fair Limits team; the inaugural Bucharest Conference in Analytical Political Theory on the topic of “Thresholds in Justice: Sufficientarianism and Limitarianism revisited” (June 2019), organized by Alexandru Volacu and colleagues; and a workshop on limitarianism in Dortmund (November 2019) organized by Christian Neuhäuser and Dick Timmer.

4 In the final stages of this project, Dick Timmer and Christian Neuhäuser (2022) published a symposium of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice on limitarianism, and Lisa Herzog (forthcoming) wrote a paper on liberal egalitarianism that draws out implications for limitarianism. Limitarianism is also defended in the new book by Tom Malleson (2023).

5 I develop the view that, in the current deeply inegalitarian and nonideal world, limitarianism should be a combination of ethical (personal) claims and moral-political claims in my forthcoming book (to be published early 2024 by Allen Lane (UK) and Astra House (USA)).

6 See Robeyns, Buskens, Van de Rijt, Vergeldt, and van der Lippe (2021).

7 See Davis et al. (2020); for a very interesting methodological reflection by this team, see Summers et al. (2022).

2. Having Too Much

Ingrid Robeyns

© 2023 Ingrid Robeyns, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0338.02

1. Introduction

Whatever else contemporary theories of distributive justice take a stance on, they always specify a metric of justice and a distributive rule.1 The metric is concerned with the good X whose distribution matters insofar as justice is concerned. Among the most influential metrics are welfare, resources, primary goods, and capabilities. The distributive rule specifies how X should be distributed; prime examples are the principles of priority, sufficiency, equality of outcomes, equality of opportunity, and Rawls’s difference principle.

This chapter articulates and defends a view of distributive justice that I call limitarianism. In a nutshell, limitarianism advocates that it is not morally permissible to have more resources than are needed to fully flourish in life. Limitarianism views having riches or wealth to be the state in which one has more resources than are needed for maximally flourishing in life, and claims that, in such a case, one has too much, morally speaking.2

Limitarianism is only a partial account of distributive justice, since it can be specified in a way in which it is agnostic regarding what distributive justice requires for those who are not maximally flourishing. It could, for example, be combined with one of the many versions of equality of opportunity below the limitarian threshold. The version of limitarianism that I defend here is not agnostic as to what happens below the line of riches; but, as I will point out in Section II, there are several different versions of limitarianism, and different versions may have different views on what morality requires below the line of riches.

In this chapter I defend limitarianism as a non-ideal doctrine. I postpone the question of whether limitarianism could be defended as an ideal theory for future work. Analyzing limitarianism as a non-ideal doctrine requires that we start from the distribution of the possession of income and wealth as it is, rather than asking what a just distribution would be in a world with strong idealized properties, such as for example the absence of inherited wealth and privileges, a world in which everyone’s basic needs are met or where we are in a state of initial property acquisition.3

Social scientists and scholars in the humanities have a long tradition of theorizing and conducting research on the position of the worst-off in society. In theories of justice, this is especially visible in the wide support for sufficientarianism.4 In its dominant understanding, sufficientarianism is the view that distributive justice should be concerned with ensuring that no one falls below a certain minimal threshold, which can be either a poverty threshold or a threshold for living a minimally decent life.5 It shouldn’t be surprising that the study of poverty and disadvantage is so vast, since most people hold the view that these conditions are intrinsically bad.

Given the sizeable philosophical literature on poverty and the position of the worst-off, it is surprising that so little (if any) contemporary theorizing on justice has focused on the upper tail of income and wealth distribution. Obviously, there is a great deal of literature about theories of justice in relation to inequality in general; it may well be that political philosophers assume that it is not necessary to single out the upper tail of the distribution in particular. Still, I think it would be helpful for political philosophers to conduct a normative analysis of the upper tail of the distribution. For one thing, this would make it possible for philosophers to have greater impact on existing debates in society. For a long time normative claims related to the rights, privileges, and duties of rich people have been advanced in public debate. Most countries have some political party that claims that the rich should pay for economic crises, rather than the poor or the middle classes. In recent years several European political parties have proposed introducing an increase in the highest marginal tax rate of the highest income group; similarly, the Occupy movement in the United States has claimed that the “one percent” should be taxed much more heavily. Some citizens have also complained that austerity measures affect the poor and the middle classes disproportionally, rather than affecting the rich in equal measure. What all these normative claims have in common is a focus on the upper tail of the distribution—thereby making a distinction between the middle class and the rich.6

Interestingly, in recent years several economists have developed analyses of the top of the income and wealth distributions. Most famous was Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, along with his earlier collaborative research with other economists, which generated part of the data forming the empirical basis of the later book.7 These studies show that in the decades following the Second World War inequality decreased, yet wealth inequality has again been expanding since the 1980s. Piketty offers a theory for why the postwar period should be regarded as an historical exception, rather than the beginning of a period in which inequality would decrease or stagnate. Piketty argues that this increase in inequality is undesirable, but certainly not all economists share this view. The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw has defended the moral desirability of letting the rich be rich, on the grounds that they deserve their wealth.8 However, as Mankiw himself admits, he is merely engaging in “amateur political philosophy.”9 In fact, few normative claims made by economists about inequality and the rise of top earners are well defended. But this should not necessarily be seen as a criticism, since in the intellectual division of labor, this task falls on other shoulders.

In this chapter I want to articulate one particular version of limitarianism and offer a justification. But before doing so, I first want to highlight that there are a variety of limitarian views, and a variety of grounds on which they can be defended. In this sense it is no different from the other distributive doctrines, such as sufficientarianism, prioritarianism, or egalitarianism. In the next Section, I spell out a variety of potential strategies for defending the limitarian view. Some offer reasons why being rich is intrinsically bad. In contrast, the reasons that I offer regard limitarianism as derivatively justified. Limitarianism as a distributive view is justified in the world as it is (the non-ideal world), because it is instrumentally necessary for the protection of two intrinsic values: political equality (Section III), and the meeting of unmet urgent needs (Section IV). After offering these two arguments for limitarianism, I address the question of which notion of wealth or riches the two arguments require (Section V), and discuss whether limitarianism should be considered a moral or a political doctrine (Section VI). I will also respond to two objections: the objection from unequal opportunities and the incentive objection (Section VII). The final section sketches an agenda for future research on limitarianism.

2. Intrinsic versus Non-Intrinsic Limitarianism

In its most general formulation, limitarianism is a claim relating to distributive morality, which entails that it is not morally permissible to be situated above a certain threshold in the distribution of a desirable good. Limitarianism could be defended in various dimensions or domains, and with different theoretical modifications. For example, the case of a personal emissions quota that has been studied in the climate ethics literature is an example of a limitarian institution, whereby the good that is limited is the right to emit greenhouse gases. Breena Holland has argued for the introduction of “capability ceilings” in environmental regulation, which are “limitations on the choice to pursue certain individual actions that are justifiable when those actions can have or significantly contribute to the effect of undermining another person’s minimum threshold of capability provision and protection.”10 For example, if having access to high-quality water and not living in an environment with severely polluted water are capability thresholds, then extracting gas by means of hydro-fracking may not be permitted in case fracking could contaminate the local hydro-ecosystems. Normative arguments for limits could also be provided in other areas of life. For example, one could discuss limitarianism in the context of global population size, and argue that due to environmental concerns, there should be a moral limit of one child per adult.11

In this chapter, the focus is on limitarianism of financial resources. Limitarianism is then the view that it is not morally permissible to be rich. Given that our “metric” is a monetary metric, we can reformulate the limitarian claim. Call surplus money the difference between a rich individual’s financial means and the threshold that distinguishes rich from non-rich people. By definition, only rich people have surplus money. Limitarianism can then be restated as claiming that it is morally bad to have surplus money.

How can limitarianism be justified? That would depend on whether we aim to defend limitarianism as having intrinsic value or instrumental value—a distinction that also applies to egalitarianism.12Intrinsic limitarianism is the view that being rich is intrinsically bad, whereas according to non-intrinsic limitarianism, riches are morally non-permissible for a reason that refers to some other value.

In this chapter I am concerned only with non-intrinsic limitarianism, and remain agnostic on the question of whether intrinsic limitarianism is a plausible view. To examine the plausibility of intrinsic limitarianism, one could develop an argument based on paternalism, whereby wealth is objectively a burden on rich people and their children, leading them to suffer in the nonmaterial dimensions of a flourishing life. There may be some evidence for this, but in this chapter I will not investigate this argumentative strategy any further.13 Other argumentative strategies for intrinsic limitarianism can be sought in virtue ethics. Several arguments against wealth accumulation, based on virtue ethics and perfectionist theories, can be found in the history of ethics, and have been very important in, for example, the teachings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

In this chapter, I merely want to note the possibility of defending intrinsic limitarianism, and will remain agnostic on the plausibility of that view and on the soundness of any of its justifications. Instead, I limit myself to developing two reasons for non-intrinsic limitarianism. The first, which I will discuss in the next section, is the democratic argument for limitarianism, which focuses on the claim that wealth undermines the ideal of political equality. Section IV will then present and analyze another argument for limitarianism: the argument from unmet urgent needs.

The distinction between intrinsic and non-intrinsic limitarianism is important, since the two views offer different answers to the question: “What—if anything—is wrong with some people being rich in an ideal world?” Non-intrinsic limitarianism will most likely respond that in such an ideal situation, where all important intrinsic values are secured, riches are not morally objectionable. Non-intrinsic limitarianism will limit its claim that riches are morally objectionable to a world where certain intrinsically important values are not secured, and where limitarianism is instrumentally valuable to securing those ultimate ends. In contrast, intrinsic limitarianism will answer the question affirmatively. Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, in this chapter I am agonistic on whether intrinsic limitarianism is a plausible view. My aims here are instead limited to an analysis and defense of non-intrinsic limitarianism.

3. The Democratic Argument for Limitarianism

The first justification for the limitarian doctrine can be found in political philosophy and political science, where there exists a long history of arguments that great inequalities in income and wealth undermine the value of democracy and the ideal of political equality in particular.14 Rich people are able to translate their financial power into political power through a variety of mechanisms. In his article “Money in Politics,” Thomas Christiano discusses four types of mechanisms by which the expenditure of money can influence various aspects of political systems.15Christiano shows how the wealthy are not only more able but also more likely to spend money on these various mechanisms that translate money into political power. This is due to the decreasing marginal utility of money. Poor people need every single dime or penny to spend on food or basic utilities, and hence, for them, spending 100 dollars or 100 pounds on acquiring political influence would come at a serious loss of utility. In contrast, when the upper-middle class and the rich spend the same amount, they see a much lower drop in utility, that is, the utility cost they pay for the same expenditure is much smaller.

The democratic argument for limitarianism can easily be derived from the mechanisms that Christiano outlines: Because rich people have surplus money, they are both very able and seemingly very likely to use that money to acquire political influence and power. On the account of “the rich” that I will develop in Section 5, the rich have virtually nothing to lose if they spend their excess money, which is the money that goes beyond what one needs to fully flourish in life. The welfare effect—understood in terms of a certain set of valuable functionings—is more or less zero. There may be some psychological welfare loss, such as a loss in status if one spends a fortune on politics rather than on the latest Lamborgini, or there may be a purely subjective loss if one does not like to witness a decline in one’s financial fortune, but there will be no loss on the account of well-being presented below. In other words, the arguments Christiano develops for those who have some money to spend will apply a fortiori to the rich, as defined in Section 5.

The four mechanisms that turn money into political power are buying votes, gatekeeping, influencing opinion, and the workings of money as an independent political power.

First, rich people can fund political parties and individuals. In many systems of private campaign financing, those who donate a lot will get special treatment or greater support for their causes. Donations generally come with the expectation that if the funder one day needs some help from the politician he or she will get it. This commonsense wisdom is reflected in the saying “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Receiving money makes people, including politicians, indebted to the donor and likely to try to please them, do them a favor, spread their views, or at the very least, self-censor their own views to avoid upsetting the donor. In the political arena, this undermines political equality. But, as Christiano points out, there are also other democratic values at stake. When money can be used to buy votes, those who funded the elected politician will see their interests protected in the policies that are implemented—but a large part of the costs of those policies will be borne by society as a whole. Vote-buyers are, in a certain sense, free-riding on the spending of society as a whole, which bears a (large) chunk of the costs, for legislation that favors the interests of said private donors.

The second mechanism for turning money into political influence or power is in using money to set the agenda for collective decision making. If, as with the US presidential elections, the ability to raise funds is a crucial determinant in who will be the next candidate, and if upper-middle-class and wealthy people are more likely to be donors, then political candidates who represent those upper-middle and upper-class interests are much more likely to be on the ballot in the first place. Since the affluent are much more likely to contribute to campaign financing, and since donors choose to give money to people who have the same values and beliefs, those who cannot donate will not have their interests and views represented in the election debates or on the ballot. Christiano argues that if part of the value of democracy is that it publicly treats citizens as equals by giving them an equal say in the process of collective decision making, then financial expenditures on politics cause a great inequality of opportunity when it comes to influencing the political agenda.16

A third mechanism is that money can be used to influence opinions. Rich people can buy media outlets, which they can use to control both the spread of information and the arguments that are exchanged in public debate. Media outlets have become a very important power factor in contemporary democracies, yet if access to the media is a commodity that can be bought and sold to the highest bidder, this provides another mechanism for rich people to translate financial power into political power. Lobbyists are another increasingly important instrument for influencing opinions. Again, their services are costly, so the interests of those who can afford to hire lobbyists will be much better represented in the decision making of policy makers and politicians.

While the corporate media and lobbyists are most often discussed when analyzing how money can influence opinions, there are also more subtle ways for rich people to influence views—not necessarily on direct questions of legislation and policy making, but also more diffusely on the construction of what is perceived as sound evidence and knowledge. Rich people can also put financial power into changing the ideological climate and what is perceived as “sound evidence,” e.g., via research and think tanks, which provide arguments supporting the views of their funders on various social, economic, and political issues. For example, historical research by Daniel Stedman Jones has shown how private financial support played a crucial role in the spread of neoliberal thinking within universities and subsequently within politics.17

Finally, to the extent that rich people have their wealth concentrated in firms, they can undermine democratically chosen aims by using their economic power. This turns the power of capitalists into a feasibility constraint for democratic policy making. For example, if citizens have democratically decided that they want fewer greenhouse-gas emissions in their country, then major firms can threaten to shift polluting production to other countries if the democratically elected government were to impose stricter ecological emission regulation.18

These are all mechanisms through which wealth undermines the political equality of citizens. Yet the political equality of citizens is the cornerstone of free societies—and it is the most basic principle of our democratic constitutions. The constitution should guarantee political equality, but it does not protect our right to be rich. Thus, we have an initial argument for why we shouldn’t be rich—namely, that it undermines political equality.

One could object to the democratic argument for limitarianism as follows. The moral concern is not so much that there are inequalities within one sphere of life (e.g., economic welfare) but rather that one’s position in one sphere of life can be used to acquire a better position in another sphere of life (e.g., politics, education). The real moral concern is therefore not inequality per se, but rather the spillover of inequality from one sphere of life into another sphere of life.19 Surely there should be solutions to preventing financial power from turning into political power other than simply forcing rich people to get rid of their surplus money. For example, one could try to reform the legislation on campaign funding, or the state could guarantee public radio and television in order to restore the balance of views and arguments in public debate. Dean Machin has argued that we should present the superrich with the choice between incurring a 100% tax on their wealth above the level that makes them superrich, or forfeiting some political rights.20 The idea is that this would prevent the rich from buying political influence and power. Similarly, one could argue that if we implement proper campaign legislation and anti-corruption legislation, the money invested by the rich could no longer significantly affect politics, and there would be no democratic reason to make surplus money an undesirable thing.

While some of these institutional measures are surely necessary for a healthy democracy, none of the solutions will restore political equality between rich and non-rich citizens. The reason for this is that much of the political influence of rich people escapes the workings of formal institutions, such as legislation and regulation. Rich people could give up their right to vote, but if they are still able to set up and fund think tanks that produce ideologically driven research, or if they still have direct private access to government officials, then they will still have disproportionate levels of political power. Given the overall class stratification in society, rich people tend to know other rich people from the schools and colleges where they received their education, or from socializing in clubs where membership is only affordable to rich people. Money not only translates into economic capital and political power; it also translates into social capital. Class-stratified social capital accumulation can to some extent be limited, for example, by outlawing expensive and selective private education, or by using spatial politics to create mixed neighborhoods. But this can at best limit the accumulation of social capital according to lines of affluence and class. Most of the reasons why rich and influential people socialize with other rich and influential people cannot be influenced by policy makers.

Imposing formal institutional mechanisms in order to decrease the impact of money on politics is thus feasible only to a limited extent. Large inequalities in income, and the possession of surplus money in particular, will thus always undermine political equality, even in societies where those four mechanisms have been weakened as much as possible through institutional measures. Therefore, if we hold that the value of democracy, and political equality in particular, are cornerstones of just societies, then we have an initial reason to endorse limitarianism.

4. The Argument from Unmet Urgent Needs

The second justification for the limitarian doctrine can be called the argument from unmet urgent needs. This argument is essentially consequentialist in nature, and makes the justification of limitarianism dependent upon three empirical conditions. These conditions, which we can call the circumstances of limitarianism, are the following:

(a) the condition of extreme global poverty: a world in which there are many people living in extreme poverty, and whose lives could be significantly improved by government-led actions that require financial resources;

(b) the condition of local or global disadvantages: a world in which many people are not flourishing and are significantly deprived in some dimensions and whose lives could be significantly improved by government-led actions that require financial resources;

(c) the condition of urgent collective-action problems: a world that is faced with urgent (global) collective-action problems that could (in part) be addressed by government-led actions that require financial resources.

The argument from unmet urgent needs is dependent upon these conditions: if none of these conditions are met, the argument no longer holds. At least one of these three conditions has to hold for this argument to be valid. Yet, in the world as we know it, all three are met.21 First, the condition of extreme global poverty is clearly met. Billions of people worldwide are living in (extreme) poverty, and while not all solutions that entail financial costs or financial redistribution are effective in eradicating