IN this article, we defend the statement that the requirements of distributive justice are fulfilled when everyone has enough, often referred to as sufficientarianism or the sufficiency principle.1 This entails that justice does not require that we aim for an equal distribution, as many contemporary political philosophers claim. In fleshing out our account of sufficiency, we will show that the reasoning behind many arguments for distributive equality are, ought to be, or at least could be compatible with sufficiency understood in this manner.We will introduce the ideal of freedom from duress, by which we mean the freedom from significant pressure against succeeding in central aspects of human life, as the threshold above which people can be said to have enough. Alternative versions of the sufficiency principle have often been met with forceful objections, which have brought certain aspects and implications of the principle into question. 2 We believe, however, that sufficientarianism understood as freedom from duress can disarm these objections. Thus, we mean to bolster the notion of securing enough for everyone by providing intuitively appealing reasons for the importance of achieving sufficiency. We will claim, then, that any plausible *We are very thankful to Søren Flinch Midtgaard,
This paper suggests an account of sufficientarianism-i.e. that justice is fulfilled when everyone has enough-laid out within a general framework of the capability approach. In doing so, it seeks to show that sufficiency is especially plausible as an ideal of social justice when constructed around key capabilitarian insights such as freedom, pluralism, and attention to empirical interconnections between central capabilities. Correspondingly, we elaborate on how a framework for evaluating social justice would look when constructed in this way and give reasons for why capabilitarians should embrace sufficientarianism. We do this by elaborating on how capabilitarian values underpin sufficiency. On this basis, we identify three categories of central capabilities; those related to biological and physical needs, those to fundamental interests of a human agent, and those to fundamental interests of a social being. In each category, we argue, achieving sufficiency requires different distributional patterns depending on how the capabilities themselves work and interrelate. This argument adds a new dimension to the way capabilitarians think about social justice and changes how we should target instances of social justice from social-political viewpoint.
Prioritarianism pertains to the generic idea that it matters more to benefit people, the worse off they are, and while prioritarianism is not uncontroversial, it is considered a generally plausible and widely shared distributive principle often applied to healthcare prioritisation. In this paper, I identify social justice prioritarianism, severity prioritarianism and age-weighted prioritarianism as three different interpretations of the general prioritarian idea and discuss them in light of the effect of pandemic consequences on healthcare priority setting. On this analysis, the paper arrives at the following three conclusions: (1) that we have strong prioritarian reasons for special concern about the vulnerable and socially disadvantaged in reference to pandemic effects, (2) that severity of illness is an important factor in identifying the worse off in priority setting but that this must not over-ride the special priority to the socially disadvantaged and (3) that the maximisation rationale of the age-weighted view runs against the core prioritarian idea, and the age-weighted prioritarianism is thus unfitting as a prioritarian response to the COVID-19 case.
Age rationing is a central issue in the health care priority‐setting literature, but it has become ever more salient in the light of the Covid‐19 outbreak, where health authorities in several countries have given higher priority to younger over older patients. But how is age rationing different under outbreak circumstances than under normal circumstances, and what does this difference imply for ethical theories? This is the topic of this paper. The paper argues that outbreaks such as that of Covid‐19 involve special circumstances that change how age should influence our prioritization decisions, and that while this shift in circumstances poses a problem for consequentialist views such as utilitarianism and age‐weighted consequentialism, contractualism is better equipped to cope with it. The paper then offers a contractualist prudential account of age rationing under outbreak circumstances.
In recent works, Shlomi Segall suggests and defends a luck egalitarian approach to justice in health. Concurring with G. A. Cohen's mature position he defends the idea that people should be compensated for "brute luck", i.e. the outcome of actions that it would be unreasonable to expect them to avoid. In his defense of the luck egalitarian approach he seeks to rebut the criticism raised by Norman Daniels that luck egalitarianism is in some way too narrow and in another too wide to uphold justice in health and health care distribution. He points out that a pluralistic outline of luck egalitarianism taking into account the moral requirement of meeting everyone's basic needs can avoid this line of criticism. In this article I argue against the application of such pluralistic luck egalitarianism in matters of health distribution. First of all, Segall has not shown that luck egalitarianism handles well health distributions above a threshold of basic needs. Secondly, his way of avoiding Elizabeth Anderson's abandonment objection is theoretically problematic. Finally, I argue that luck egalitarianism in general fails to acknowledge the moral foundation of health and health care as a basic human entitlement. Thus I conclude that luck egalitarianism fails to take health needs seriously and that it cannot therefore uphold justice in health.
Cross sections for single and double ionisation of He and Ar by impact of H0 and H- projectiles have been measured in the energy range 0.5-2 MeV. By a coincidence technique, the authors differentiated between all possible final charge states of the projectile. The total cross sections for single ionisation compare reasonably well with predictions of the free-collision model. Further, the ratio between the total double- and single-ionisation cross sections is in good agreement with predictions of the free-collision model, which is based on known cross section ratios for proton and electron impact. Thus, to a large extent, ionisation processes involving fast structured projectiles (H0 and H-) can be understood on the basis of collision properties of the constituent particles (e- and p+) of the projectile.
In this article, I offer an account of when and why inequality is problematic. I build this account upon the central elements of the sufficiency view—that justice is concerned with eliminating noncomparative deficiencies rather than comparative inequalities. The account that I develop here is concerned with an inequality if, and only if, it involves an instance of noncomparative deficiency; either material or social. I then conduct an analysis of suggested reasons to care about inequality identified in recent studies of the politics of inequality, and I argue that the sufficiency account can explain the reasons that empiricists give for their concern with inequality. Upon that analysis, I conclude that we have strong reasons to be concerned with inequalities, but that these reasons stem from our acceptance of the sufficiency view rather than from an intrinsic worry with inequality.
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