A Simple Argument Against Sufficientarianism

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