As a child I was fascinated arguments about and ideas of fairness. Distributive justice was my first love. I found Parfit’s Equality or Priority, Nussbaum’s discussion of capabilities, and G. A. Cohen “If you’re an egalitarian how come you’re so rich?” exhilarating as an undergraduate. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice showed me how a rigorous and systematic approach to justification could yield an illuminating theory to settle questions of fairness and justice. But it Harry Frankfurt’s Equality as Moral Ideal, which argues that if everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others was my first true academic inspiration.
For a while I was true believer of Frankfurt’s doctrine of sufficiency, and my undergraduate dissertation defended it against versions of prioritarianism. But as a PhD student I developed a different way of understanding sufficiency as a demand of justice, one that brought precision to the idea that getting enough is an important component of justice, while taking seriously complaints raised by egalitarians and prioritarians. The result was Shift Sufficientarianism, according to which sufficiency marks a shift or change in our reasons to benefit people, not a point beyond which inequalities, and other differences, do not matter.
Shift Sufficientarianism is set out both in my first ever paper “The Prospective of Sufficientarianism” and my first book Just Enough: sufficiency as a demand of justice. A special issue of the journal Law, Ethics and Philosophy contains seven critical responses to the book and my own reply. Almost all sufficientarians I know reject this position. They hold, instead, that sufficiency thresholds identify a point beyond which we have no reasons to benefit people, or beyond which inequalities are not important for justice.
We continue to discuss and debate the differences between us. I will reflect further on the questions and objections they raise about my position and hope to raise a few about their position in the future.