Critical-Level Sufficientarianism
38 Pages Posted: 12 Jun 2020
Date Written: May 18, 2020
Abstract
This paper provides an axiological foundation of a class of sufficientarian principles that are based on the individual transformed well-being gains and losses from a threshold level. The ideas underlying these principles have their origins in the literature on population ethics. We characterize this class by showing that its members are the only principles that possess some intuitively appealing properties. One of these conditions explicitly expresses the absolute priority to be given to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous earlier sufficientarian approaches. In addition, we examine well-established conditions that prescribe the consequences of progressive transfers and identify the subclass of our principles that satisfy the requisite requirements.
Keywords: sufficientarianism; critical-level utilitarianism; social choice; distributive justice; population ethics
JEL Classification: D31; D63
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation