Abstract
This paper provides an axiomatic analysis of sufficientarian social evaluation. Sufficientarianism has emerged as an increasingly important notion of distributive justice. We propose a class of principles that we label generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings. The distinguishing feature of our new class is that its members exhibit constant critical levels of well-being that are allowed to differ from the threshold of sufficiency. Our basic axiom assigns priority to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous other sufficientarian approaches. When combined with the well-known strong Pareto principle and the assumption that there be a constant critical level, the axiom implies that the critical level cannot be below the threshold. The main results of the paper are characterizations of our new class and an important subclass. As a final observation, we identify the generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that permit us to avoid the repugnant conclusion and the sadistic conclusion, which are known as two fundamental challenges in population ethics.
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We thank two referees for their comments and suggestions. The paper was presented at the 2020 conference on Population, Climate Change, and Social Welfare Economics in Austin, at Tohoku University, at Sophia University, and at the University of Montreal. Financial support from the Fonds de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture of Québec, from the Japan Securities Scholarship Foundation through a grant for research in population ethics in social choice theory, and from KAKENHI through Grants Nos. 20H01446, 20K01565, 22K01387, and 22H05086 is gratefully acknowledged.
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Bossert, W., Cato, S. & Kamaga, K. Thresholds, critical levels, and generalized sufficientarian principles. Econ Theory 75, 1099–1139 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-022-01439-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-022-01439-z