Distributive sufficiency, inequality-blindness and disrespectful treatment

ABSTRACT

Sufficientarian theories of distributive justice are often considered to be vulnerable to the ‘blindness to inequality and other values objection’. This objection targets their commitment to holding the moral irrelevance of requirements of justice above absolute thresholds of advantage, making them insufficiently sensitive to egalitarian moral concerns that do have relevance for justice. This paper explores how sufficientarians could reply to this objection. Particularly, I claim that, if we accept that the force of the aforementioned objection comes from relational, and not distributive, inequalities, different strategies are open for sufficientarians in order to be sensitive to these concerns. Drawing on recent literature about the relation between distributive and relational egalitarianism, and the possibility of reducing one to the other, strategies of ‘internalizing’ and ‘externalizing’ relational egalitarian concerns to a distributive sufficientarian framework are explored. In turn, I suggest that both strategies fail in their standard versions, but argue that a particular ‘hybrid view’ about justice is an attractive candidate for the sufficientarian theorist.

KEYWORDS:

• Distributive sufficiency
• inequality-blindness
• relational egalitarianism
• internalizing and externalizing strategies
• hybrid theories of justice

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tom Parr, Dušan Rebolj, Lukas Schmid, Peter Wilson, one reviewer of CRISPP, and especially David Axelsen for very insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is important to stress that sufficientarianism does not intrinsically rule out the importance of distributive equality or priority, and that distributive hybrids are possible – e.g. Liam Shield’s claim that there is a discontinuity in the importance of benefiting people once they have met the threshold (Shields, 2012, p. 108). I will leave aside distributive-hybrid versions in my analysis, however, because they are inconsistent with the GSV (Nielsen, 2019, p. 22).

2. I am grateful to David Axelsen for this example.

3. Axelsen and Nielsen have recently recognized that disrespectful treatment is a justice-based wrong ‘…independently of distributive outcomes. Moral agents, [they claim], should not be treated with distrust or a lack of common courtesy [even if they “have enough”]’ (Axelsen & Nielsen, 2020, p. 6).

4. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for making me conscious about this problem.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vincent Harting

Vincent Harting is a PhD Candidate in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His main research interests are Marxism, neorepublicanism, democratic theory, and distributive justice.