TY - JOUR
T1 - Limitarianism: Pattern, Principle, or Presumption?
AU - Timmer, Dick
N1 - Funding Information:
For especially helpful discussion and comments on earlier drafts of this article, I thank Rutger Claassen, Fergus Green, Colin Hickey, Matthias Kramm, Tim Meijers, Ingrid Robeyns, Ro?l van?t Slot, Yara Al Salman, and Marina Uzunova. I am also grateful to the reviewers and editors of this journal for their detailed and thoughtful feedback. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 726153).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
PY - 2021/11
Y1 - 2021/11
N2 - In this article, I assess the prospects for the limitarian thesis that someone has too much wealth if they exceed a specific wealth threshold. Limitarianism claims that there are good political and/or ethical reasons to prevent people from having such ‘surplus wealth’, for example, because it has no moral value for the holder or because allowing people to have surplus wealth has less moral value than redistributing it. Drawing on recent literature on distributive justice, I defend two types of limitarian principles of justice. First, limitarian midlevel principles draw on the limitarian thesis to specify normative commitments for guiding institutional design and individual actions. Second, the limitarian presumption draws on that thesis to specify what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints. Such a presumption says that without substantive reasons to the contrary, we should regard a distribution as unjust if some people’s wealth exceeds the limitarian threshold. Furthermore, I will argue that we must reject a possible but implausible interpretation of limitarianism as an ideal distributive pattern. Yet both as a midlevel principle and as a presumption, limitarianism can play an important role in theorizing about justice in the real world.
AB - In this article, I assess the prospects for the limitarian thesis that someone has too much wealth if they exceed a specific wealth threshold. Limitarianism claims that there are good political and/or ethical reasons to prevent people from having such ‘surplus wealth’, for example, because it has no moral value for the holder or because allowing people to have surplus wealth has less moral value than redistributing it. Drawing on recent literature on distributive justice, I defend two types of limitarian principles of justice. First, limitarian midlevel principles draw on the limitarian thesis to specify normative commitments for guiding institutional design and individual actions. Second, the limitarian presumption draws on that thesis to specify what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints. Such a presumption says that without substantive reasons to the contrary, we should regard a distribution as unjust if some people’s wealth exceeds the limitarian threshold. Furthermore, I will argue that we must reject a possible but implausible interpretation of limitarianism as an ideal distributive pattern. Yet both as a midlevel principle and as a presumption, limitarianism can play an important role in theorizing about justice in the real world.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101811692&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/japp.12502
DO - 10.1111/japp.12502
M3 - Article
SN - 0264-3758
VL - 38
SP - 760
EP - 773
JO - Journal of Applied Philosophy
JF - Journal of Applied Philosophy
IS - 5
ER -