Periodic Reporting for period 4 - FAIR LIMITS (Can Limitarianism Be Justified? A Philosophical Analysis of Limits on the Distribution of Economic and Ecological Resources)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-01-01 bis 2022-12-31
It hardly needs explanation of why investigating these questions is important for society, since we are living in a serious ecological crisis, and since there are increasingly citizens raising their voices against the growing inequalities of wealth and income. What the project aims to offer to society, is scholarly analysis on intuitions that citizens may have: what, if any, sound reasons are there for believing that there should be limits to the possession of economic resources (income, wealth), and to the use of ecological resources? For the latter, the Fair Limits project zooms in on the most urgent societal issue, namely climate change.
The overall objectives are to investigate, firstly, what limitarianism would mean, exactly; secondly, what could be reasons to endorse this view, and whether these reasons can withstand strict philosophical analysis; third, what could be objections to this view and how strong are those objections; and fourth, what would this imply for the design of public policies and institutions.
From the point of view of the development of theories of distributive justice, the main results are the following. First, we have worked out the different ways in which limitarianism could be understood. The notion of limitarianism is of a similar type as the term 'egalitarianism' - and here, too, we know that this can be understood in different ways, some of which gain more normative support than others. Secondly, we have advanced arguments for why a pluralist or modular theory of distributive justice, which includes both a sufficientarian lower threshold and a limitarian upper threshold, could be an attractive account of distributive justice. Third, we have made general contributions to the field of normative political philosophy by advancing the development of a non-ideal or grounded method for normative political analysis, as well as by discussing what mainstream political philosophy on inequalities could learn from pluralizing the discipline -that is, including more diversity in the kind of approaches that inform our scholarship.
While some of our discussions are 'technical' in the sense that one needs to have very advanced training in academic political philosophy, and theories of distributive justice in particular, to understand them, we have also been very active in disseminate as much as possible our results to a wider audience; links to blogs, as well as some articles that can be read by a wider group of professionals and citizens, can be found on the homepage of our project, see www.fairlimits.nl (we aim to keep this website in the air for a few more years after the end of the project in December 2022).
How will the research done within the FAIR LIMITS project affect normative political philosophy as a discipline? Philosophy is a discipline that develops slowly (as probably most of the disciplines). There is thus a possibility that after some more years of investigating limitarianism, arguments will be developed that make us conclude that there are no further insights to be gained from studying and developing limitarianism. But so far, the indications we have point to quite the opposite. Limitarianism has been further developed by scholars outside the network of the PI or the other members of the Fair Limits team, such as Dr. T. Malleson, who has defended limitarianism in his book 'Against Inequality' (Oxford University Press 2023). Limitarianism has been added as a topic to several syllabi on theories of distributive justice and on inequality (in both philosophy, policy studies, and economics programs). The program committee of the American Philosophical Association 2024 Eastern Division meeting has invited the PI to present a philosophical paper on limitarianism at an invited symposium. We might therefore conclude that within the international community of academic philosophers there is a strong interest in limitarianism, and thus that the FAIR LIMITS project has made a significant contribution to the field.