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ABSTRACT
What kind of basic minimum do we owe to others? This paper defends a new procedure for answering this question. It argues that its minimally good life account has some advantages over the main alternatives and that neither the first-, nor third-, person perspective can help us to arrive at an adequate account. Rather, it employs the second-person perspective of free, reasonable, care. There might be other conditions for distributive justice, and morality certainly requires more than helping everyone to secure a basic minimum. Still, if the minimally good life account is correct, and we owe everyone a basic minimum, we must ensure that everyone lives well enough.
Disclosure Statement
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Notes
1 Please see Hassoun [Citation2017, Citation2020] for some preliminary work on this topic, and Hassoun [Citationforthcoming] for further discussion of these ideas.
2 Some reject the idea that there should be any basic minimum. Most notably, libertarians do not think that members of political societies owe each other any such thing [Nozick Citation1974]. But even utilitarians and prioritarians may reject the claim that members of political societies should have any special concern for helping people to secure a basic minimum [Arneson Citation1999, Citation2000]. Moreover, those who endorse a basic minimum often disagree about how we should treat people who fall below the threshold, and whether we owe people much more than this [Arneson Citation2000; Casal Citation2007; Hassoun Citation2009, Citationforthcoming; Huseby Citation2010; Dorsey Citation2012: 70; Freiman Citation2012]. Furthermore, luck, responsibility, and so forth may influence the role that a basic minimum should play in a full theory of distributive justice [Dworkin Citation2000; Miller Citation2001; Fleurbaey Citation2008]. This paper does not attempt to resolve the larger debates about the role of the sufficiency threshold in a full theory of justice, although its account helps to specify the content of a full theory [Frankfurt Citation1988; Huseby Citation2010; Freiman Citation2012; Shields Citation2012; Lin Citation2016]. The paper aims just to provide a much more philosophically robust account of the sufficiency threshold than most have offered to date.
3 There are different possible bases for a basic minimum. For instance, on a capability view, we have to provide people with whatever they need to secure the requisite sets of valuable functionings (activities and states) [Sen Citation1980; Nussbaum Citation2000b]. Alternately, on a resource theory, we only have to provide everyone with sufficient goods. Moreover, different accounts set the threshold for a basic minimum at different levels (they include different capabilities and resources, etc.). Although it is impossible to consider every possible combination of bases and thresholds, this paper argues that its account has some advantages over the main alternatives.
4 I focus here on what basic minimum is necessary for distributive justice (whether the scope of distributive justice is properly national or global). The way that we understand what constitutes a basic minimum may also affect how we must treat people in our private lives, as well as in our roles as citizens and members of the global community [Tiberius Citation2008; Haybron Citation2013]. However, here I set aside these issues.
5 The flourishing at issue here goes beyond what is good for a person and what someone who cares about another would choose for them. People can live flourishing lives and sacrifice some interests, despite the fact that those who care about them would not choose this for them.
6 Reasonable caring people must fully understand emotionally, and otherwise, what it is like to live as they do, by putting themselves in the others’ shoes (appreciating their history as well as their current state). This is what Darwall calls ‘projective empathy’ [Citation2002: 61–2]. When we empathize in this way, we share other people’s feelings as their perspective warrants [ibid.: 62]. As Adam Smith put it [1759/Citation2002: §371]:
In order to enter into your grief, I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son were unfortunately to die; but I consider what I would suffer if I were you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters.
7 Because the mechanism is supposed to work in the real world (where people are not very good at giving others’ interests equal consideration), people have to take others’ interests very seriously, but, for more on why we must also care for people to determine what they need, see Nussbaum [Citation2006].
8 Again, this paper’s primary aim is to provide a procedure for figuring out what a minimally good life requires, rather than to defend a substantive account of the basic minimum.
9 Connie Rosati [Citation1995] argues that often welfarist theories employ unrealistically demanding forms of idealization. She suggests that full information views are not epistemically accessible, cannot help people to choose, and cannot inform policy. However, thinking about what reasonable, caring, and free people would say about different cases might help people to think better about welfare as the people they are, even though reasonable, caring, and free people might fail to fully understand what it is like to live as other people do because they lack relevant empirical information. Still, they can often understand enough to make decent decisions. I admit, however, that this is an empirical proposition that merits further inquiry (that is, some coherentist validation of the standard at which reasonable, caring, and free people will arrive might be helpful in fully defending this paper’s account of the minimally good life).
10 The proposed method for figuring out what people need to live minimally well resembles ideal-observer theories of prudential value, with three key differences. First, I am not concerned just with what is prudentially valuable. Second, on my account, the reasonable, caring, and free people who are deciding what is necessary for others to live minimally well must be content to bear the costs of living the lives that they decide are minimally good. Finally, and most importantly, my account is supposed help us to make moral progress in the actual world, and is not aimed primarily at conceptual analysis. For this reason, the account avoids an analogue to what is the primary objection to ideal-observer theories of prudential value. One cannot object that reasonable, caring, and free people’s judgments do not determine what makes lives minimally good; rather, they judge lives to be minimally good because they are minimally good. People’s judgments might be wrong for many reasons. They might be coloured by their past experiences, depend on how information is presented, and so forth. No one is fully reasonable, caring, or free, and we certainly lack a lot of relevant information about what other people’s lives are like. So, in practice, opinions about what people need to live minimally good lives will differ, in part based on evaluator’s previous experiences, ideology, and so forth. However, I claim only that empathetically putting ourselves in others’ shoes, and thinking hard about whether we would be content to live their lives, will help us to arrive at plausible judgments about whether their lives are good enough. We should try to resolve any remaining disagreements through deliberation and discussion. By employing this method, we demonstrate respect for others’ basic moral equality, and appropriate concern.
11 I do not consider Rawls’s [Citation1971] theory at length here, because it is not a simple resource theory. He specifies that we owe people basic primary goods—which are all-purpose means for exercising moral powers and developing a conception of the good life. But he also says that people need maximal equal basic liberty and fair equality of opportunity. Moreover, he is ultimately concerned with an individual’s capability to develop and maintain the two moral powers—a conception of the good life and sense of justice. However, I believe that the resource component of his view alone is still inadequate and that we need a broader conception of what, at a minimum, we owe to people. I also think that the way in which he sets the threshold on his primary goods is implausible as an account of the basic minimum (because he does not attempt to provide such an account, but focuses on social justice, more broadly). Even if we must maximize the position of the least-well-off, we do not have to do so to provide such a minimum (after all, the least-well-off might be very-well-off indeed).
12 I have argued for this conclusion at length elsewhere, and some of the text below is adapted from that source [Hassoun Citation2013]. Here I do not consider alternative accounts of needs, such as David Miller’s, simply due to space constraints; but see Hassoun [Citation2009] for further discussion.
13 Like Braybrooke’s, however, his account may suffice for policy makers interested only in arriving at a rough characterization of what people generally need.
14 The claim is not that we can or should try to provide these things directly to people; it is that we should at least structure social and political institutions in ways that support individuals’ ability to secure these things.
15 I am grateful for support from the Templeton funded Happiness & Wellbeing project at St. Louis University, and for comments from audiences at the American Philosophical Association, University of St. Louis, Vanderbilt University, and students and colleagues at Binghamton and Cornell University who read earlier versions of this work. I would like to thank Dan Haybron, Andrew Chignell, Tony Reeves, Luc Bovens, Johnathan Wolff, Charles Goodman, Anders Herlitz, Avi Appel, Alex Esposito, Anja Karnein, Sarah Wright, Bradley Monton, Gillian Brock, Adam Etinson, Govind Persad, Thomas Pölzler, Dale Dorsey, Dick Miller, and Judith Lichtenberg for particularly extensive comments and discussion, sometimes on multiple drafts, and the Global Health Impact team (global-health-impact.org/new) for research assistance. I apologize for leaving this list vastly incomplete.