Sufficientarianism – Can Justice Get Enough?

Sufficientarianism is a new theory of justice building on old intuitions. Many people believe that there should be a limit to what we owe others in terms of distributive justice. Sufficientarians capture this belief through the motto ‘enough is enough’. We do not owe people, who already have enough, support with further resources. There is a threshold of possessing wealth, welfare or resources above which a person has to rely on her own means and cannot claim aid from others. On this basis, sufficientarians challenge egalitarian claims that any undeserved inequalities of wealth, welfare, or resources need to be levelled. They also reject the prioritarian claim that the worse-off deserve priority over the better-off regardless how affluent they are in absolute terms.

Sufficientarianism has attracted considerable academic interest over the last decades. It also came under severe criticism by defenders of incumbent theories of justice, such as egalitarianism and prioritarianism. This conference is the first event entirely focusing on sufficientarianism and wants to discuss how successful sufficientarians have been in warding off the arguments of their opponents and what shape of theory (or its variants) emerges as a result.