Egalitarianism is the position that equality is morally important. Egalitarian philosophers spend a lot of time arguing about “equality of what?” questions but to be an egalitarian is to say that there’s some answer to that question (resources, opportunities, flourishing, something) such that it’s troubling if some people are left with less of it than others.
Sufficientarianism is the position that “as much” isn’t morally important in itself. What matters is “enough.”
Steven Pinker, for example, is a sufficientarian. In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, he describes “the second decade of the 21st century” as a time when “economic inequality has become an obsession.” After quoting everyone from Bernie Sanders to Pope Francis say things that reflect this “obsession,” Pinker speculates that all of these people have simply confused inequality with some other, more important concept like poverty.
Some readers will have already noticed that egaltiarianism and sufficientarianism, at least as I’ve defined them above, are actually compatible. Equality could be “morally important” while only sufficiency could be morally important in itself if equality was important for some derivative reason.
Compare: Cigarettes are bad not in themselves but because they cause cancer and emphysema. If we had a simple pill to prevent those conditions you could pop with a swallow of whiskey before your first cigarette of the evening, then all else being equal (no one around to breathe your second-hand smoke, etc.), you might as well light up.
You could, for example, be skeptical that sufficiency can be attained and politically maintained in any society where inequality has metastasized beyond a certain point. This skepticism could come from a few different sources. Certainly, a Marxist analysis of class inequality points in that direction. But we don’t need to assume any of that. Even conducting the discussion on normie-lib terrain, where we ignore the economic structures at the base of society and just look at the distribution of income and its political consequences, a fairly obvious worry is that in any society where we let the gap between the economic floor and the economic ceiling get too wide, those with more will exercise disproportionate political influence and use it to block efforts to redistribute some of their wealth to raise those with less to sufficiency.
One of the most charmingly provincial things about American liberals is that so many of them seem to think this is a problem that can be solved with better campaign finance laws, as if the only path for disproportionate wealth and economic power to translate itself into disproportionate political influence lies through campaign donations. But a quick look around the world should suffice to show you that the planet is full of democracies with better campaign finance laws than the United States, and rich people exert disproportionate political influence in all of them.
This thought generalizes into another derivative reason to care about equality. Even if you don’t think economic equality matters in itself, you have a powerful reason to work towards it if you at least think political equality (otherwise known as “democracy”) is something that matters.
Economic inequality can give a society cancer in lots of ways. But the ways that it inevitably degrades democracy and makes it harder to do anything about poverty should be enough to show that even in-principle sufficientarians should be egalitarians in practice. As such, the philosophical debate between sufficientarians and in-principle egalitarians probably shouldn’t keep anyone up at night.
Even so, I think there’s a powerful case for in-principle egalitarianism.
First, it’s worth getting clear on a few side issues.
“Enough” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “not desperately poor.” This is a point emphasized in Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality (a far more philosophically sophisticated defense of sufficientarianism than the inequality chapter of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now). You could have a fairly ambitious view of what everyone needs to live a good, rich, flourishing life and think it’s unjust in principle to fail to redistribute until the worst-off people are all up to that level while still thinking that (at least as a first-order question) it’s fine for the best off to be hundreds or even thousands of times better-off than that baseline.
Second, being an in-principle egalitarian doesn’t mean insisting that equality is always more important than every competing value or that there’s never any reason to allow any inequality (of whatever your answer to “equality of what?” might be). Even a socialist society might need some level of income inequality to incentivize its citizens to take certain jobs, whether because they involve a lot of stress and responsibility, or because they’re particularly dirty and dangerous. (Under the current system, we often provide such incentives for the first kind of jobs while relying on desperation to fill the second kind.) And there are lots of scenarios where greater income inequality could only be achieved through an unjustifiable level of intrusiveness into citizens’ personal affairs. I don’t believe in private property rights in the means of production, but I certainly believe (at least within reasonable limits) in private property rights for personal possessions, and it doesn’t take much creativity to come up with a thousand scenarios where it would take an unreasonable amount of interference in those rights to prevent trivial amounts of inequality. I’m obviously not in favor of doing any of that, and I know of no egalitarian who disagrees.
Finally, the kind of in-principle egalitarianism I’m drawn to isn’t about income or resources in the first instance, but access to material advantage. I’d come down somewhere at least in the close vicinity of G.A. Cohen’s version of “luck egalitarianism.”
With Cohen, I believe that the location of the floor is a matter of great moral importance, and I think that under some historical circumstances, it’s unfortunately necessary to allow what would be otherwise troubling inequalities for the sake of economic efficiency, to stop the floor from sinking too low. (In fact, I’d probably go further than late-in-life Cohen in being pessimistic on classic historical-materialist grounds about the prospects for achieving meaningful and lasting equality without a foundation of material abundance.) And with Cohen, even absent such circumstances, I don’t think there’s anything terribly troubling in principle about some degree of income inequality if it truly arises from nothing but some people choosing of their own free will to work harder than others. What’s troubling in principle is inequality that’s outside of the control of whoever gets the short end of the stick. My strong feeling is that, all else being equal, we should think about inequalities that fail this test less like cigarettes than like the diseases they cause.
The classic consideration that undercuts my intuition here comes from “leveling down” thought experiments. Start with a society that includes significant inequalities, and eliminate the wealth of the better off without improving the lot of the worse off, so everyone is doing equally badly. Surely, this wouldn’t be better. In fact, it wouldn’t be better-in-some-ways, worse-in-others, such that we might be even momentarily torn about whether to do it. It would be flatly undesirable. But, how could this be if inequality per se is morally important?
I took a stab at responding to this objection here, basically arguing that the bad aspects of a hypothetical scenario being so bad that “let’s absolutely not do that” is a very easy call shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that there are no competing values at stake. Perhaps you won’t be convinced by that response. (At least one very smart and normally appreciative reader found it unsatisfying and we emailed back and forth about it for a while.) I do think that scenarios like these pose a serious challenge to in-principle egalitarianism. I don’t think it’s an insurmountable one, but I do think that sorting out the issues here can help egalitarians sharpen our position. I promise I’ll write a new “On Leveling Down Arguments” essay here by the end of this year.
What I want to end on today, though, is something entirely different. Probably others have made this point. Perhaps there’s even a standard response to it by sufficientarians that I just haven’t run across. If so, and if readers who have run across that can educate me in the comments, I’ll be genuinely grateful. But it seems to me that there’s a simple and powerful un-leveing up argument to be made against sufficientarianism. I made a version of it in the previous essay, though I didn’t describe it that way. I want to see if I can make it more clearly and crisply now.
Start with Harry Frankfurt’s utopia. Or yours, if you subscribe to some subtly different shade of sufficientarianism. Everyone has achieved whatever you think is “enough.” We’ll also go ahead and stipulate that no one happens to have advanced beyond the “enough” level. Remember, that doesn’t make it not-utopia for you if you’re a sufficientarian, since your position is that whether or not anyone has more than enough is a matter of moral indifference.
Now, make one change. All the white people in this society have 10% more than enough, while all the black and brown people are stuck at enough. Hell, give all the white people 10% more than enough and all the black and brown people 5% more than enough.
If you this sounds unjust to you…why?
What legitimate-on-sufficientarian-grounds complaint do the non-white citizens of Slightly Altered Sufficientarian Utopia now have?
Clearly not that they don’t have enough, since by stipulation everyone started with enough. If you now want to say that they have less than enough because the standard of “enough” should rise in a society that can afford to give 10% more to all the white people, you’ve just thrown in the towel and become some sort of egalitarian. The whole point of sufficientarianism is that we should be able to define “enough” independently of comparisons.
The luck egalitarian has a simple and compelling explanation of what’s wrong with Slightly Altered Sufficientarian Utopia. This is an inequality linked to a factor outside of the control of those who are worst off, and luck egalitarianism just is the position that inequalities of this kind are unjust in principle. Even if some powerful competing consideration made the trade-off worth it, such a trade-off would involve a real moral cost—the acceptance of some degree of distributive injustice—and nothing about what we’ve described suggests that such a tradeoff would even be in the cards. So, this seems like a very straightforward case of morally arbitrary inequality.
But, the sufficientarian doesn’t start with the idea that inequalities (even inequalities in access to advantage) are guilty in principle and have to prove their innocence. Their whole thing is thinking that, unlike insufficiencies, inequalities are fine in principle and can only be objectionable for some derivative reason. So, what’s the derivative reason here? Perhaps you think that even 10% above sufficiency in a society where no one is below it is sufficient to trigger all the concerns about the downstream effects of inequality mentioned earlier. If so, though, I have to say that “I’m not an egalitarian, just a sufficientarian” is starting to look like an awfully thin distinction. But if that’s not the issue, what is?
Perhaps you think that the problem here is it sounds like the new distribution must in way one way or another downstream of historical injustices. But what’s the principle here, exactly?
To make sure we’re applying consistent standards, let’s shift examples. Take a European society whose founding historical injustices weren’t racialized slavery and the dispossession of natives but feudalism and monarchy. Start there and redistribute your way to absolutely universal sufficiency. Now take some dude who can trace his lineage back to the Bourbon dynasty that ruled France before the revolution. There have been various changes in the fortunes of his branch of the family over the centuries, plenty of bad investments, perhaps a great-grandfather with a gambling problem, and however much wealth this dude started his own life with has been taxed to hell in the process of turning France into a sufficientarian utopia. Even so, the end result of all these reductions in the family’s place (and his personal place) in the world is that he’s still doing 10% better than French people who only have whatever the sufficientarian considers to be exactly enough. Is this unjust? Presumably yes, if you think "resulting from historical injustices” is enough to render a distribution unjust. But, why exactly should it be?
Again, the luck egalitarian would say it is because a distribution of wealth resulting to some extent from historical injustices is one that is to that extent outside of the control of whoever’s left worse off. Any random Jean or Pierre on the street who ends up with only enough in this scenario didn’t choose not to be descended from royal parasites, so all else being equal, it’s unfair that they have less as a result. But this explanation is unavailable to the sufficientarian. They’ll need to find one of their own.
As I’ve said, perhaps they already have one. Perhaps suffficientarians have tangled with this problem before and there’s a good response out there somewhere. All I can say is that, if so, I’d love to hear what it is.
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