Why Limitarianism?

Abstract

This article discusses ‘limitarianism’, which in its most general formulation is the idea that in the world as it is, no one should have more than a certain upper limit of valuable goods, in particular, income and wealth. What, if anything, does ‘limitarianism’ add to normative political philosophy? In Section I, I describe the context in which limitarianism has been introduced. Section II will provide a more detailed statement about limitarianism, including some more recent contributions to and developments in the literature. In the next two sections, I discuss egalitarianism (Section III) and sufficientarianism (Section IV) and ask whether they can do what I envision to be the task of limitarianism. Section V argues that within theories of distributive justice, limitarianism is best seen as part of a pluralist account. This is illustrated by sketching the proposal of a pluralist account combining sufficientarianism, opportunity egalitarianism, and limitarianism. Section VI concludes by pulling everything together, and will give an answer to the question of what limitarianism contributes to normative political philosophy.