The Place of Sufficiency in Relational Egalitarianism

Relational egalitarians seek a society free of dominance, hierarchy, and discrimination. But they disagree about which distributive policies best achieve this ideal. Some support distributive equality, while others are content with the sufficiency principle. This article argues that relational egalitarians can preserve both distributive equality and sufficiency. It first argues that a commitment to relational equality also requires a commitment to distributive equality for both instrumental and non-instrumental reasons. On the one hand, distributive equality helps avoid dominance relations. On the other hand, this equality itself is a consequence of egalitarian relations between people cooperating for their mutual benefit. However, a plausible account of distributive equality must take into account people’s responsibility for their choices, which makes this position vulnerable to the cruelty objection. It is that people who are in unfortunate circumstances through their own fault should not receive help from the rest of the community, but this seems cruel. The solution to this problem is to combine two distributive principles, an egalitarian and a sufficientarian, the former of which is responsibility-sensitive and the latter is not. Three arguments are advanced for this synthesis: the necessity of agency for full moral responsibility, a basic right to basic needs, and a natural duty to help those in need. Although this pluralist form of egalitarianism requires further refinement and elaboration, it seems an intuitively appealing approach to justice that plausibly reconciles our commitments to equality, responsibility, and help for those in need.