by Tim Sommers
Suppose a small group of people are stranded together on a desert island. They have no fresh water or food – until they come across a stash of coconuts. They can drink the milk and eat the coconut meat to survive. But how do they divide up the coconuts fairly between them?
The coconuts are not the product of anyone’s hard work or ingenuity. They are manna-from-heaven. In such circumstances, in a sense, no one deserves anything. So, the question is how to distribute something valuable, even essential, but which no one has any prior claim upon, in an ethical way. In other words, what is the appropriate principle of distributive fairness in such a case?
The most obvious suggestion is that the coconuts should be distributed equally. And that may well be the right answer. Many people consider equality the presumptive fair distribution, especially in manna-from-heaven situations like this. Distributions that depart from strict equality, many believe, must be justified, but equality requires no justification. For example, suppose we also find buried treasure on the island. Various arguments could be made that one person made a decisive contribution to the discovery that others didn’t, but isn’t the starting place an equal distribution?
But suppose after most of the coconuts are distributed equally there is one coconut left. For the sake of argument, imagine single coconuts are not divisible or fungible for some reason and so one coconut cannot be shared. What do we do with the extra coconut?
Strict equality seems to imply that you should just throw it away to avoid making the distribution unequal. This is called the leveling-down problem. You can almost always increase the amount of equality in an unequal distribution by taking stuff from the better-off and simply throwing it away. If equality is valuable in and of itself, then any situation can be made fairer (at least in one way) by leveling down how much the better-off have so that there is less inequality – even if this makes no one better-off in absolute terms.
Maybe, for this reason, we shouldn’t care about equality in and of itself, after all. Why do we? Here’s one theory. What we really care about is not equality, but poverty and the suffering of the least well-off. “Prioritarianism” is a distributive view endorsed by John Rawls and Derek Parfit (with some qualifications) that gives priority to the worst-off in a distribution.
Perhaps, one or more of our islanders is injured or ill. They might need more coconuts than the rest of us. As prioritarians, we might think giving the suffering more has greater moral weight than whatever happens, distributively, among the comparatively well-off. Prioritarianism doesn’t have a leveling down problem because it only tracks the absolute level of welfare of the worst-off.
The problem with prioritarianism is that it only gives advice about helping the worst-off. And about the worst-off it only says they should get some kind of priority, but not exactly what kind.
Here’s a different view that also starts from the thought that maybe the point of caring about equality is caring about the worst-off. It’s called sufficientarianism. It says everyone should have the minimum number of coconuts to achieve, at least, some minimum level of welfare. Sufficientarians think we can define an objective, noncomparative level of sufficiency. Let’s come back to that. Here’s a different problem.
Sufficientarians say that the only thing that matters is that everyone has a sufficient amount. Imagine I distribute the coconuts such that everyone has a sufficient amount to survive for now, but that this is only half the number of coconuts on hand. I keep the other half. Maybe, that’s unfair for some other reason. For example, maybe equality jumps back in here and says ‘How do we justify any deviation from an equal distribution after we have met sufficiency?’ But on the sufficientarian view it doesn’t seem to be unfair for anyone to have so much as long as everyone has enough.
However, if one person has half the coconuts, they may have the means to rule over all of the others. Similarly, in a society where the top 10% controls almost 70% of the total resources, that 10% might rule over the other 90%. So, limitarianism says that there ought to be an upper-limit on the number of coconuts any one of us can have. No one should have more coconuts than they need to flourish. Like the view that everyone should have a sufficient amount, the view that there is an upper limit on what anyone should have is incomplete. It only addresses the very top of the distribution. But what if we combine limitarianism with sufficientarians? Sufficilimitarianism is the view that everyone should have a sufficient amount of coconuts and no one should have more than the number of coconuts they need to flourish.
There’s a problem that sufficientarians, limitarians, and (to a lesser extent) prioritarians share that is relevant here. In order to get around equality and the leveling down objection, all these views abandon comparing people to each other in favor of an objective, noncomparative standards. So, there’s a certain amount that sufficientarians say is needed by anyone to achieve a certain minimal level of well-being. But how much, exactly, is that? Limitarianism says there is a certain amount that is too much. How much is that?
Here are two reasons to doubt the possibility of noncomparative definitions of sufficiency – or too much.
(1) Variation. Would an ideal of sufficiency that I formulate now, for the United States in the 21st century, be the same as the ideal I would advocate for contemporary hunter/gather bands or for Medieval Europeans? More to the point, would sufficiency on this desert island be the same as sufficiency if we were on a crowded beach in Hawaii?
(2) Irrelevance. Even if there was such a thing as “objective noncomparative” sufficiency, it is not clear that that would not be the relevant social or political ideal. Suppose there is no hope of most people in a particular society crossing that sufficiency threshold. Everyone is still owed a distributive share of at least some socially feasible size. So, even if the size of that socially feasible share is insufficient according to some purportedly objective ideal, that ideal is simply not what is socially relevant. More to the point, what if there are not enough coconuts for anyone to have enough? I don’t know about you, but I still want my share!
If instead we take a comparative view and think of sufficiency as not too far from the average member of society, and “too much” as not so much compared to what others have as to disempower most people in society you arrive at a view I call range egalitarianism.
The best principle of distributive fairness says that no one should have too much or too little relative to the average amount that most people have. Or simply we should not pursue strict equality, but too much inequality is bad and/or unfair. This avoids the leveling down objection since it does not commit us to thinking that any reduction of inequality is always valuable in and of itself. To see that, think of it like this.
If you think that too much distributive inequality is bad, but that it is not always preferable to make things increasingly equal, that there is a point, for example, well short of strict equality, at which one should become indifferent to further decreases in inequality, then you are already a range egalitarian.
As far as I can tell, surprisingly, I am the first philosopher to explicitly take this view. Why? I don’t know. But many people are already range egalitarians. They just don’t use that label.
In surveys of Americans about wealth inequality most people say that what they care about, and what one should care about, is simply inequality not being too great. While people are willing to describe extreme inequality as morally wrong, most don’t conclude that strict equality is ideal. This makes them range egalitarians. They are against inequality that is too great, but indifferent from a moral or other normative point of view to decreases in inequality after a certain point – and on either end of the spectrum.
For example, a Pew survey from a few years ago showed that the majority of Americans believe that there is too much inequality, but 70% of that majority think that some level of inequality is morally acceptable. It might surprise prioritarians, but of the 42% of those surveyed who believe that “reducing inequality should be a top priority” were more worried about the wealthy having too much than about the plight of the worst-off.
I am not arguing that one should endorse range egalitarianism if some people, or even a majority, already hold the view. Nor am I arguing that respondents in these types of surveys are particularly insightful on these issues. Such surveys also show, for example, that Americans wildly underestimate the level of inequality they live with and how far the United States is from what they say they want equality-wise – as in the memorable phrase that when it comes to income inequality, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”
What I am arguing is that if range egalitarianism is a coherent position, and one that people already take, then it belongs on the menu of options as a normative distributive principle.
There are other possible interpretations of these responses, of course. For example, respondents may believe that one should allow for a certain amount of inequality to avoid inefficiencies or to incentivize work – though these surveys try to avoid conflating considerations. But, perhaps, people are not range egalitarians in these surveys, and instead what they value is strict equality, but they don’t value it enough to willingly suffer the cost of too egalitarian a regime.
I believe this is the wrong interpretation of at least some people’s attitudes. Some people do not accede lamentingly to less than that strict equality because of other factors. Me, for example. In these surveys and related interviews, many people seem genuinely not to care about differences that fall within a certain range. This need not involve any trade-off between strict equality and something else that is also valuable. It can be a rejection of the idea that strict equality is what one should value.
Who cares? The most important reason to care about range egalitarianism is this. Range egalitarianism may well be the morally correct, fair principle of distribution for certain things in certain contexts.
But there’s also this. Parfit said that distributive fairness has a subject matter as long as there are any cases where “No one deserves to be better off than anyone else; nor does anyone have entitlements, or special claims.” But admitted that his real view, “like Rawls and others,” is that at the fundamental level “most cases are of this kind.” So, if range egalitarianism is the correct principle of distributive fairness, and most cases are fundamentally distributive cases without prior entitlements, range egalitarianism is a widely-applicable, fundamental moral principle – if not simply the most basic principle of justice.
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Sources
I apologize for a longer list of sources than usual, but this one is an active research project of mine. I proposed range egalitarianism in How Equality Matter to Justice: Relational Egalitarianism, Distributive Justice, and the Concept of Equality, Sommers, Timothy, The University of Iowa, 2022. https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=M0zF9IQAAAAJ&citation_for_view=M0zF9IQAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC and I defend it in “Range Egalitarianism: A Novel Principle of Distributive Fairness,” currently under submission.
G.A. Cohen was an arch defender of strict equality arguing that distributive egalitarians take it “for granted that there is something which justice requires people to have equal amounts of.” On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, edited by Michael Otsuka, Princeton and Oxford, 2011, pp. 3-43.
John Rawls and Derek Parfit are the most well-known prioritarians. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 1999; Parfit, Derek, Equality or Priority? The Lindley Lectures, Lawrence, KA: The University of Kansas, 1995.
Probably, the most well-known sufficientarian was the late, great Harry Frankfurt. Inequality, Princeton University Press, 2015.
I believe Ingrid Robeyns invented limitarianism in “Why Limitarianism?” Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (2): 249-270 (2022).
The kibbutz quote above is from Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, Penguin, 2012.