Abstract
In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two arguments provided by Ingrid Robeyns in favour of limitarianism, namely the democratic argument and the argument from unmet urgent needs and the two distinct limitarian views which these arguments give rise to. We claim that strong limitarianism, which is supported by the democratic argument, should be rejected as it fails to fully instantiate the value of political equality, while having some other unattractive implications as well. By contrast, we argue that weak limitarianism, which is supported by the argument from unmet urgent needs, should be endorsed, albeit in a qualified version which also takes responsibility constraints into consideration.
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Notes
See Anderson (2010: 82) for the distinction between pattern-sensitive rules of distributive justice and pattern-insensitive ones.
As we will discuss in depth in what follows, capabilities constitute the proper metric of justice in Robeyns’ construal of limitarianism, with the power of material resources representing a proxy for assessing individual capability sets.
We appeal here to the distinction drawn by Hamlin and Stemplowska (2012) between the theory of ideals and theories of institutional design (further consisting of a continuum of ideal and non-ideal theory). The theory of ideals seeks to identify, specify the content of values and study their interplay, while theories built at the level of institutional design seek to identify and specify the content of social arrangements.
Robeyns makes no attempt to defend a form of intrinsical limitarianism, although she does suggest that grounds for such a defence may be found in virtue ethics, paternalism or perfectionist accounts (Robeyns 2017: 5).
Surplus money is to be understood as “the difference between an individual’s financial means and the threshold of riches that distinguishes rich from non-rich people” (Robeyns 2017: 4).
It is worth mentioning, as a side note, that it is not entirely beyond dispute if political equality necessarily relates to equality of influence in the way implied by Robeyns. Dworkin, for instance, has extensively criticized the ideal of equality of influence, according to which “citizens should have as much scope for extending their moral life and experience into politics as possible” (Dworkin 2002: 198). Dworkin advocates instead for a pure dependent conception of democracy, which instantiates the value of equal concern and equal standing, but is less preoccupied with inputs than with outputs. According to such a dependent conception, “the main features of a democracy are justified because a community in which the vote is widely held and speech is free is more likely to distribute material resources in an egalitarian way” (Dworkin 2002: 186).
Some measures, mentioned but discounted by Robeyns as insufficient, could be campaign funding law or guaranteeing access of non-mainstream political contestants to public radio and public television. Another mechanism, which is not discussed by Robeyns, could be the two-layered proposal of Pettit (1997), which endorses both constitutional constraints and the development of a contestatory form of democracy, in which citizens can raise concerns regarding decisions taken by the legislators.
Clearly, there is no practical distinction between options (1) and (2) and between options (3) or (4) as a matter of fiscal policy, the only relevant difference being related to the justification of each of them and the former two can be more generally described as being part of the family of weak limitarian conceptions, while the latter two are part of the family of strong limitarian conceptions.
Note that the sense in which Robeyns uses the ideas of income and wealth does not reflect the more technical meaning of these terms, standardly used in economics. Thus, Robeyns appears to lump all types of economic resources under the generic umbrella of income, reserving the label of wealth to describe a level of economic resources that exceeds a certain level. This contrasts with the economic approach, where income is a flow variable that corresponds to the quantity of economic resources gained by someone within a time period from labour, dividends etc. and wealth is a stock variable that corresponds to the total amount of economic resources held by someone at a specific point in time. On this latter distinction, it would make sense, as one anonymous reviewer suggests, for limitarians to be fundamentally interested in wealth taxation, rather than income taxation, as a means for ensuring political equality and economic sufficiency. Robeyns’s view is not, however, inconsistent with such an approach, entailing both wealth and income taxation (in the economic sense), to the extent that they exceed the riches line.
The conversion factor is the main input from the capability approach. When this factor takes the value of 1, which is maximal, then that person “is perfectly able to turn income into a valuable functioning” (Robeyns 2017: 22). If it takes values smaller than 1, this means that the individual has some impairment which prevents her from perfectly converting income into functionings (Robeyns 2017: 20–22).
Stated in the more familiar terminology proposed by Cohen (2003: 241) it could be argued that limitarianism is not a first principle of justice, but rather a principle of social regulation. This latter understanding of the view has been suggested to us by Robeyns in a personal communication.
Notably, the term political egalitarianism has also been employed in a somewhat different sense by Heath (2008), who uses it to “refer to a conception of egalitarian distributive justice that is capable of serving as the object of an overlapping consensus in a pluralistic society” (Heath 2008: 485).
See footnote 7 of the present article.
Consider for instance, the idea that rich people can set up ideologically-driven think tanks which may then be used to influence public opinion to their own benefit (Robeyns 2017: 8). It is highly unlikely that institutional measures could be taken to ensure that such actions will not be undertaken by the rich, in a liberal democratic society, as this seems to severely curtail important freedoms such as the freedom of conscience and the freedom of association.
Though perhaps they could be partially mitigated by moving towards a limitarian social ethos and by devising a set of “non-monetary incentive systems” (Robeyns 2017: 36).
In which case, the tension between Robeyns’s two arguments in favour of limitarianism would disappear.
Perhaps this is because the government that has taxed them would not prioritize allocating resources to their preferred issues, or because they are warm-glow altruists, who “are not indifferent between gifts made by themselves and gifts made by other individuals or the government” (Andreoni 1990: 473), or because of some other reason altogether.
As one anonymous reviewer points out, Robeyns (2017: 9-10) does not argue that institutional constraints should be removed or avoided, but only supplemented with limitarian policies. Though this is true, since the enactment of limitarian policies without institutional constraints would still allow for political equality to be undermined, it follows that institutional constraints, and not limitarianism, do the normative work required for instantiating political egalitarianism. Thus, even if limitarianism could perhaps be instrumental in reducing the extent of political inequalities which escape formal institutional constraints (e.g. the funding of ideologically-driven think tanks), it would still be unable to fully extinguish them either.
Although some sufficientarian theories may directly take positions on this issue as well.
Some authors, such as Knight, argue that the second and third possibilities are conceptually identical, and that “it becomes more pressing to identify those who are advantaged or disadvantaged by differential brute luck, whether by acts or injustice or by natural misfortune” (Knight 2013: 598). According to Haydar and Øverland (2014: 349), Knight’s position implies scepticism about the existence of a moral duty not to benefit from injustice. They criticize this position, arguing that amassing advantages pursuant to an unjust act should be condemned and that benefiting from brute luck is conceptually distinct from benefiting from injustice.
As weak limitarianism seeks to enact revenue-maximising tax policies (Robeyns 2017: 34).
We borrow the first part of the term from Arneson (2000b), who constructs a version of what he calls responsibility-catering prioritarianism. Some authors (e.g. Blake and Risse 2008; Armitage 2005; Devooght 2008) also use the term responsibility-catering egalitarianism to refer to what is more commonly known as luck egalitarianism.
By well-off we subsequently refer to all individuals above the threshold of meeting urgent needs and by worse-off we refer to all individuals who are positioned below this threshold.
Note that, if they would ask that these persons should also be taxed at the revenue-maximising level, the limitarian doctrine would be empty, in this respect, since the riches line would no longer bear any moral salience.
We therefore engaged here with one of the points outlined by Robeyns (2017: 36) in her “research agenda” for limitarianism, which is to study the relation between this view and other distributive rules.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Andreas Albertsen, Dimitrios Efthymiou, Carl Knight, Lasse Nielsen, Ingrid Robeyns, Efrat Ram-Tiktin and Rudolf Schuessler as well as the audience at the Europe on Distributive Justice International Workshop, held at the University of Aarhus in June 2017, for valuable discussions on previous drafts of the paper.
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Volacu, A., Dumitru, A. Assessing Non-intrinsic Limitarianism. Philosophia 47, 249–264 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9966-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9966-9