Principles of sufficiency are widely discussed in debates about distributive ethics. However, critics have argued that sufficiency principles are vulnerable to important objections. This article seeks to clarify the main claims of sufficiency principles and to examine whether they have something distinctive and plausible to offer. The article argues that sufficiency principles must claim that we have weighty reasons to secure enough and that once enough is secured the nature of our reasons to secure further benefits shifts. Having characterized sufficientarianism in this way, the article shows that the main objections to the view can be avoided; that we can examine the plausibility of sufficiency principles by appealing to certain reasons that support a shift; and that we should be optimistic about the prospects for sufficientarianism because many of our strongest reasons seem to be of this sort. This shift, I claim, is the overlooked grain of truth in sufficientarianism.

Sufficientarianism is a position in debates about distributive justice. Sufficientarianism states that whether individuals have secured enough of some goods is a question that is central to determining whether a society is just. In this paper I provide an overview of this work, and highlight what I think are the most interesting recent contributions to it. Towards the end, I describe a way forward for sufficientarians and argue, in stark contrast to Frankfurt, that sufficientarian accounts of distributive justice should be pluralist and are more plausible when they accommodate, rather than reject, other distributive values, such as equality. 1 | INTRODUCTION Sufficientarianism is a position in debates about distributive justice. Sufficientarianism states that whether individuals have secured enough of some goods is a question that is central to determining whether a society is just. The big bang of contemporary sufficientarianism is the publication, in 1987, of Harry Frankfurt's 'Equality as a Moral Ideal'. In that paper, Frankfurt claims that egalitarian thought contributes to the moral shallowness of our time and diverts our attention away from considerations of greater importance than equality. 2 More positively, he argues that 'If everyone had enough it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others'. 3 Following the publication of 'Equality as a Moral Ideal', many have developed sufficientarian standards of distributive justice and others have raised objections. In this paper I provide an overview of this work, and highlight what I think are the most interesting recent contributions to it. Towards the end, I describe a way forward for sufficientarians and argue, in stark contrast to Frankfurt, that sufficientarian accounts of distributive justice should This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Equality of Opportunity is widely thought of as the normative ideal most relevant to the design of educational institutions. One widely discussed interpretation of this ideal is Rawls' principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. In this paper I argue that theories, like Rawls, that give priority to the achievement of individual autonomy, are committed to giving that same priority to a principle of sufficient opportunity. Thus, the Rawlsian's primary focus when designing educational institutions should be on sufficiency and not equality. The paper then argues this commitment has at least three attractive implications. Firstly, it enables defenders of Fair Equality of Opportunity to overcome Richard Arneson's powerful objections. Secondly, it suggests a revised version of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity that is more plausible. Thirdly, it has attractive practical implications for educational provision.

Almost everyone accepts that parents must provide a good enough upbringing in order to retain custodial rights over children, but little has been said about how that level should be set. In this paper, I examine ways of specifying a good enough upbringing. I argue that the two dominant ways of setting this level, the Best Interests and Abuse and Neglect Views, are mistaken. I defend the Dual Comparative View, which holds that an upbringing is good enough when shortfalls from the best alternative upbringing in terms of the child's interests are no more significant than the parents' interest.

This chapter argues that shift-sufficientarianism reveals new and interesting positions in debates about global justice. The chapter considers cosmopolitan and statist positions as well as sufficientarian and non-sufficientarian positions. The chapter argues that whether global or domestic sufficiency is achieved could make a profound difference to whether we can justly prioritize co-nationals or the global poor. This type of view would help reconcile two intuitions about global justice. The first is that we may be partial to our compatriots in some cases and the second is that the state or where we happen to be born or live is arbitrary. These new shift-sufficientarian views allow for partiality to be justified once enough is secured but for the arbitrariness of the state not to influence our entitlements when individuals lack enough.

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It is widely accepted both that adequate parents cannot be denied custodial rights for the reason that someone else would do a better job and that children should be reared in adequate families, even when communal arrangements would be no worse for children and would promote equality. So-called dual interest theorists of parental rights defend their view on the grounds that it can fully explain these convictions because only their view attaches importance to the interests of the parents which are adversely affected. In this paper the author argues that this defence of the dual interest view is flawed because some of these convictions can be explained only at the expense of others. The author offers an alternative defence of the dual interest view, one that requires us to revise these widely accepted convictions but ultimately puts the dual interest view on a surer footing.

In this article, I defend a proposal to cap the proportion of students admitted to elite colleges who were educated at elite, often private, schools to not more than the proportion of students who attend such schools in society as a whole. In order to defend this proposal, I draw on recent debates that pit principles of equality against principles of adequacy, and I defend the need for a pluralist account of educational fairness that includes both elements. I argue that while equality best captures our convictions about unfairness in access to the instrumental and positional benefits of education, such as job prospects and college admission, adequacy best captures our convictions about unfairness in stunting the development of human talent and the intrinsic benefits of education. The proposal to cap the proportion of private school students at elite universities advances both of these, usually conflicting, principles because it permits unequal but efficient talent development through the vehicle of private tuition and elite schooling, and yet promises to seriously curtail the unfair positional instrumental benefits of private or elite schooling by having those students compete against each other and not students who did not attend elite schools. The policy also achieves its aim consistent with preserving some attractive aspects of parental choice. Towards the end of the article I consider a number of practical objections and an alternative proposal.