H A R RY F R A N K F U RT A N D S U F F I -C I E N C Y

1 . INTROD UCTION

Ever since the French Revolution, egalitarian-

ism has had a wide appeal as a moral ideal, such that

most people in our society, even those quite privi-

leged and reluctant to give away any of their re-

sources, find themselves sympathetic to such an

ideal. Clearly, very few consider equality as the first

principle of justice; even in the famous cry ‘liberté,

égalité, fraternité’ it takes the second place. Egalitar-

ians such as Cohen (1989:908) insist that their

claims for equality are ‘weak (qualified) equalisan-

dum claims’1; Rawls (1972:61ff.§39.§82) underlines

that liberty is lexically prior to the difference princi-

ple, which itself allows deviations from the more

purist egalitarian ideal.

However, the value of equality as a moral ideal

has recently come under attack from various sides:

libertarians such as Nozick (1974 ch.7) claim that

the redistributive policies needed to implement egal-

itarianism are unjust as they violate personal rights

(unless they are completely voluntary); prioritarians

1 ‘A qualified or weak equalisandum claim says that [people] should be as equal as possible in some dimension but subject to whatever limitations need to be imposed in deference to other values: those limitations are not specified by the claim in ques-tion’ Cohen (1989:908).

(e.g. Parfit, 1998) and sufficientarians claim that

equality is not a moral ideal but simply masks deep-

er ideals such as that of giving priority to the worse-

off, or that of ensuring that everyone has enough,

respectively.

In this essay, I will discuss Harry Frankfurt’s at-

tack on egalitarianism (in Ethics 98, 1987; reprinted

in Frankfurt, 1997) and contend that Frankfurt’s

arguments do not support the conclusion he is try-

ing to make.

2. THE D OCTRINE OF SUFFICIENCY

Let us clarify a number of points at the outset.

It is important to note that Frankfurt’s objection to

egalitarianism is an ethical, not a pragmatic or aes-

thetic or religious one: “what is important from the

point of view of morality is not that everyone

should have the same but that each should have

enough” (1997:261). He admits that equality may

nevertheless be desirable for a number of reasons

(e.g. as the best pragmatic approach to problems of

economic distribution), but insists that such reasons

cannot be moral ones. Furthermore, he claims that

if from a moral point of view, egalitarianism is not a

value (it is irrelevant), the very idea that equality is a

moral ideal is itself not morally neutral; it creates

envy, and ‘moral shallowness’ in that nobody is in-

terested in determining what is ‘enough’.

This last point illuminates directly what I find

problematic with Frankfurt’s argument. The word

‘enough’, in English, has two different meanings: on

one hand it indicates the psychological state of ‘sat-

isfaction’ (the gratification of a particular desire, and

in an extended sense, the gratification of all possible

desires), on the other hand it indicates the more

objective concept of ‘sufficiency’ (the adequate

meeting of a need, and, in an extended sense, the

adequate meeting of all needs). Clearly, Jane may

have all her needs met and yet not be satisfied;

Claire may be a Tiny Tim, living in dire poverty and

yet completely satisfied with what she has. Given

that the ‘doctrine of sufficiency’ is supposed to yield

a principle of justice, it is immediately evident that

interpreting enough as ‘satisfactory’ bring up all the

‘offensive and expensive tastes’ arguments used by

resourcists against welfarists2; interpreting it as ‘suf-

ficient’ brings up various other problems: how can

we determine what is sufficient? Is the distribution

of the excess beyond the scope of justice? What

2 Cohen (1989:912ff) offers a good review of the Rawlsian and Dworkinian arguments on the subject.

would be just when there is not enough resources to

ensure that everyone has enough? Clearly, avoiding

such a dodgy term is hardly a sign of ‘moral shal-

lowness’.

3. CONFUTATION OF EGALITARIAN AR-

GUMENTS

I consider egalitarianism as the most ‘common

sense’ position at present, hence anyone contesting

it should bear the burden of proof. Frankfurt does

this to some extent in the second part of the paper,

while dedicating the first part in an attempt to coun-

ter egalitarian arguments. The last part is dedicated

to a clarification regarding what he understands by

‘enough’; unfortunately he does not distinguish be-

tween sufficiency and satisfaction.

The main egalitarian argument that Frankfurt

discusses is that regarding diminishing marginal util-

ities. The core idea behind the principle of diminish-

ing marginal utility is that a dollar is more useful to

a person dying of hunger than to a billionaire: as the

amount of utility (say, wealth, or money, or pleas-

ure) that a person possesses tends to infinity, the

utility s/he gets from an additional dollar tends to

zero; the less utility one possesses (the poorer a per-

son is), the more utility one gets from an addition-

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al dollar. This intuitively seems approximately correct;

bearing in mind the problems with the term ‘utili-

ty’3, the utility differences between persons with

approximately equal wealth4 and the buying power

of the unit (be it 1p, 1 euro, 100 yen…).

For example, this last problem renders the hy-

pothesis a first-order approximation, since there are

phenomena such as saving and overcoming of

thresholds that are linked to the buying power of

the defined unit, such factors create local kinks on

the decaying marginal utility curve but should not

affect the best fit curve (i.e. when comparing curves

for different persons, at the same value (n) for the

person’s wealth, person x may get very little margin-

al utility (because that nth dollar went into saving for

a future preference satisfaction) while person y may

get a great deal of utility (because with that nth dol-

lar she saved enough to buy something she had

been saving for since quite a long time.))

3 Interpreting ‘utility’ as the satisfaction of preferences that can be bought, rather than hedonic enjoyment renders the hypothesis more plausible, since a billionaire may ‘enjoy’ a 1$ bag of popcorn more than a person dying of hunger his 1$ meal, but usually, that extra dollar doesn’t go to satisfy the billionaire’s first or second preference.

4 The utility difference of an additional dollar given to two peo-ple with very slight difference in wealth will not be very signifi-cant.

Thus, the principle of marginal utility must be

understood as a rough-and-ready concept in politi-

cal science, not as a Newtonian law. Frankfurt’s ar-

gument, however, targets the local inconsistencies

with some obvious counter examples, but does not

show that as an approximate rule of thumb, the

principle is inconsistent. The main examples invoke

thresholds; and at times make use of ambiguities.

To take one example, Frankfurt uses a thresh-

old-effect argument to suggest that there are cases

where an egalitarian distribution actually minimizes

aggregate utility. He gives the example of a distribu-

tion of medicine needed for survival (note that here

Frankfurt shifts from satisfaction to sufficiency: a

hedonic example would not be so convincing): there

are x persons, d doses and a treatment consists of n

doses; d < x.n. Hence, Frankfurt argues, giving the

doses out in an egalitarian fashion, we risk that no-

body gets the n doses required for survival and

hence all the persons die. This argument is expected

to demonstrate the falsity of the principle: ‘where

some people have less than enough, no-one should

have more than anyone else’. But, obviously, all this

case demonstrates is that an egalitarian should dis-

tribute treatments, not single doses that have no

value in themselves. Frankfurt takes the example

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further, claiming that supposing a little medicine

may be toxic, the principle ‘when some people have

more than enough, no-one should have less than

enough’ turns out to be false. Again, this merely

shows that the doses in themselves have no worth,

and further the word ‘enough’ is being used ambig-

uously with two different references: ‘‘when some

people have more than enough cure, no-one should

have less than enough poison’ is no egalitarian’s

claim! This demonstrates how easy it is to use the

term ‘enough’ equivocally.

To conclude, I do not think that this is the most

significant argument in favour of egalitarianism:

most contemporary egalitarians are not utilitarians

and would not justify their theories by referring to

the principle of utility; besides, egalitarianism as a

(moral) doctrine developed before classical utilitari-

anism (Bentham, Mill) and before contemporary

economists started introducing into political theory

concepts such as that of marginal utility. Frankfurt’s

arguments can at most be used to sustain a claim

such as that of Cohen (1989) or Sen (1997), that

money is not the right currency of egalitarian justice,

but not that the principle of marginal utility, as a

rough rule, is flawed.

4. FRANKFURT’S ERROR THEORY

In countering the intuition that an egalitarian

distribution is fair, and that inequality is unjust,

Frankfurt proposes a sort of ‘error theory’: what is

intuitively morally objectionable “is not the fact that

some of the individuals in those situations have less

money than others but the fact that those with less

have too little” (p. 268). What is morally important

“is manifestly not that our society permits a situa-

tion in which a substantial minority of Americans

have smaller shares than others of resources [… but]

rather, that the members of this minority do not earn

decent livings” (p. 269). Hence, what is morally wrong

is poverty, but we tend to assume that what is (also)

morally wrong is the inequality which accompanies

such poverty. Frankfurt then argues that the link

between poverty (not having enough for sufficiency,

rather than for satisfaction, here) and inequality is

contingent and hence that if poverty is bad, it does

not entail that inequality (in itself) is bad. In other

words, the injustice is in the absolute measure, not

(necessarily) in the relative measure (of well being,

resources etc.)

A first thing to note is that Frankfurt’s argu-

ments (that speak of ‘smaller share of resources’)

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are not directed towards welfare egalitarians. We

shall come back to this later. A second observation

is the use of the guarding term ‘manifestly’. Clearly,

egalitarians often use examples of injustice where

both poverty and inequality are present; what is

most blatantly unjust is the poverty, but the inequal-

ity too may be unjust on its own account even if it

turns out that it is not necessarily linked to the pov-

erty in the given examples. A third problem is that

with absolute measures in such cases: how can we

determine what is enough?

5. AN EGALITARIAN RESPONSE

Some egalitarians, such as Rawls (1972:302ff)

use our intuitions regarding equality of opportunity

to argue in favour of egalitarianism. Even if two

people, John and George, are both well-off (and

have what is sufficient), distributing extra resources

arbitrarily is unfair unless they accept the terms of

such a distribution or unless one takes the good

while the other renounces it. Say they together find

a precious pearl, and don’t know who should get it,

so they elect Mr Ross as arbiter to decide who

should get it. If Mr Ross decides to give it to John

because he has a shorter name, we would say this is

unfair. If Mr Ross proposes a fair coin-toss, which

procedure both accept, we say this is fair (even

though the result is arbitrary). Unless there is a per-

sonal attachment to the pearl itself, the most sensi-

ble thing would be to sell the pearl and divide the

money. Egalitarians can extend such cases to the

distribution of resources in our society and argue

that intuitively, not only poverty, but also inequality

is morally wrong. Frankfurt, however, assumes that

showing that there is no necessary link between

poverty and inequality is enough to show that ine-

quality is not morally relevant.

But this very example shows the problem with

the doctrine of sufficiency. Consider a rational dis-

tribution of resources in a society. For the two un-

derstandings of ‘enough’, there are possible cases:

a) Everyone has enough, and further re-

sources remain to be distributed;

b) The resources available are used up,

and some people do not have enough;

c) Everyone has enough and all the re-

sources are used up.5

5 There are two further possibilities: that some people have enough and some have less than enough when (d) all resources have been used up, (e), not all resources have been used up; but these cases reduce to (a), (b), or (c), once a ‘fair’ redistribution (by sufficientarian standards) is made.

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In case (a) sufficiency (as sole principle of jus-

tice) would tell us nothing about how to distribute

the excess, and according to our intuitions in the

pearl example, we do need justice in cases of excess,

hence we need a further principle of justice -- and

the most obvious would be an egalitarian one! In

(b), assuming that ‘enough’ is not just the bare min-

imum for survival6, we still need a principle of jus-

tice to decide how to distribute the limited re-

sources (if, say, sufficient were to be two meals a

day — while people with one meal would still sur-

vive — would it be just to give two meals to as

many people as possible and let the others starve, or

would you first give one meal to everyone and then

give out the second meal?). Only in (c), then, does

the sufficientarian principle seem to suffice.

Whether enough is understood as ‘sufficient’ or

as ‘satisfactory’, it is highly implausible that (c) could

obtain in real life (i.e. all resources are used up and

exactly everyone has enough). A sufficientarian may

nevertheless object, suggesting, say, that ‘sufficient’

be so defined so as to mean ‘the amount each per-

son gets in a rational distribution’ (which concept

6 Frankfurt (1989:270) himself claims that he does not refer to the ‘bare minimum’; rather he understands ‘non-trivial needs’ to be those that have “significant bearing upon the quality of a person’s life or upon his readiness to be content with it”.

we will call q-sufficiency)7. But q-sufficiency (and

likewise q-satisfaction) works out to be a relative

concept of ‘enough’, it depends on what other peo-

ple have. In (c), where all resources are distributed

with none remaining, if someone gets more than the

amount defined as ‘enough’ under q-sufficiency,

then necessarily someone else would get less than

‘enough’. If someone gets more than me, then I am

getting less than ‘enough’; hence I am interested to

know what others get: this is precisely what Frank-

furt attacks in egalitarianism!

In (c), therefore, q-sufficiency is logically equiv-

alent to a sort of resource egalitarianism that, may-

be, does not seek to distribute money, but goods

such as balanced nutrition, mobility, ‘adequate’

healthcare etc. (since these are the things that com-

pose what is ‘sufficient’)8. Q-satisfaction (defined,

say, as ‘what each one gets in a rational distribution

of pleasure’9), similarly collapses into equality of

welfare, and one of the worst kind, that is, a naïve

7 Say, if we cannot give 2 meals to each person, but only 1.5, we could say that 1.5 meal per day is sufficient.

8 Frankfurt seems to assume (e.g. in his arguments regarding marginal utility) that resource egalitarianism means that every-one gets the same amount of money. But resource egalitarian-ism can distribute other goods, to attain q-sufficiency.

9 One actually distributes resources, not ‘pleasure’, but the value of the resources is measured on the amount of pleasure afford-ed to the persons who get them, such that in the end, all per-sons are equally ‘pleased’ with what they get.

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welfarism open to all the objections regarding of-

fensive and expensive tastes. If someone is com-

pletely satisfied with little but someone else isn’t

completely satisfied with plenty, q-(complete)-

satisfaction would redistribute from the Tiny Tim to

the person with ‘expensive tastes’, such that both

would be maximally (but not completely, in absolute

terms) satisfied. If not we get situation (b) where

satisfaction is a ‘limited resource’ and sufficientari-

anism does not help us decide whether it is just or

not that Tiny Tim should be completely satisfied

while the person with the expensive tastes should

not10. Again, we note here that q-(complete)-

satisfaction is a relative measure.

The problem of defining ‘enough’ is not con-

fined to case (c). By medieval standards, most hu-

man societies are now in situation (a). By contem-

porary standards, most are in (b). What can we take

as ‘enough’?

10 I think that the more elaborate welfarist positions, such as Sen’s (1997) ‘equality of capability’, Arneson’s (1997) ‘equal opportunity for welfare’ and Cohen’s (1989) ‘equal access to advantage’ have interesting solutions to such problems; certain-ly Frankfurt’s (p.272) suggestion — that provided all have enough satisfaction, there is no injustice in some having ‘greater amounts of satisfaction’ (!) — is not very helpful.

6. CONCLUSION

The doctrine of sufficiency is therefore an in-

complete principle of justice since it does not tell us:

(i.) What criteria will be used to define

‘enough’;

(ii.) Whether to understand ‘enough’ as suf-

ficiency or satisfaction;

(iii.) how to govern the distribution of the

surplus, if any remains [(a), above];

(iv.) how to govern the distribution of avail-

able welfare or resources, should they

be less than ‘enough’ [(b), above].

Furthermore, in the case of (c) above, Frank-

furt’s arguments do not refute egalitarianism; if any-

thing they support some resource or welfarist form

of the doctrine. In a society with limited resources

— the most plausible way of understanding human

societies — sufficientarianism seems to collapse

into egalitarianism once we try to derive from it

complete principles of justice applicable to such a

society.

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REFERENCES

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portunity for Welfare’. in Pojman and West-

moreland, 1997.

Cohen, G. A. 1989. ‘On the currency of egali-

tarian justice’. Ethics 99 (July 1989): 906-944.

Frankfurt, H. 1997. ‘Equality as a Moral Ideal’.

In Pojman and Westmoreland. [reprinted from Eth-

ics 98: (1987) pp. 21-43].

Kymlicka, W. 20022. Contemporary political philoso-

phy : an introduction. Oxford University Press.

Oxford. xiv+497 pp.

Parfit, D. 1998. ‘Equality and Priority’. in Ma-

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Malden (Massach.). xi+114pp.

Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

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Pojman, L. P. and R. Westmoreland (eds.) 1997.

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New York. x+325pp.

Rawls, J. 1972. A Theory of Justice. Oxford Uni-

versity Press. Oxford. xvi + 607 pp.

Sen, A. 1997. ‘Equality of What?’. in Goodin, R.

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– An Anthology. Blackwell. Oxford — Malden

(Massach.). x+648pp.

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