Adelin Dumitru

In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two arguments provided by Ingrid Robeyns in favour of limitarianism, namely the democratic argument and the argument from unmet urgent needs and the two distinct limitarian views which these arguments give rise to. We claim that strong limitarianism, which is supported by the democratic argument, should be rejected as it fails to fully instantiate the value of political equality, while having some other unattractive implications as well. By contrast, we argue that weak limitarianism, which is supported by the argument from unmet urgent needs, should be endorsed, albeit in a qualified version which also takes responsibility constraints into consideration.

In this article I defend the capability approach by focusing on its built-in gender-sensitivity and on its concern with comprehensive outcomes and informationally-rich evaluation of well-being, two elements of Sen's work that are too rarely put together. I then try to show what the capability approach would have to gain by focusing on trans-positional objectivity (as Elizabeth Anderson does) and by leaving behind the narrow confines of states in favor of a more cosmopolitan stance. These preliminary discussions are followed by two more precise applications. At first, I show how a gender-sensitive capability approach that respects the criteria of trans-positional objectivity and cosmopolitanism can enhance the agency of women inhabiting third-world societies. I turn next to show how mainstream feminism can insulate itself against criticisms such as bell hooks' by switching to trans-positional objectivity in public reasoning.

Many important criticisms to the possibility of global justice are advanced following one or another operationalization of the Rawlsian concept of a basic structure. The purpose of this paper is twofold: i) to show that the existence of a global basic structure is irrelevant from the standpoint of justice; ii) to set the stage for a cosmopolitan theory of global justice that employs satisficing sufficientarianism as a distributive principle. One of the main contentions is that the institutional-interactional cut in the recent literature should be transcended. That is, the site of justice should be extended to incorporate both the efficiency of discharging one’s duties through a just institutional scheme and the moral value of promoting a good state of affairs through one’s own efforts. In order to avoid the overdemandingness objection, however, the selected principles of justice ought to belong to the sufficientarian family. Towards the end of the paper I sketch one such theory, satisficing sufficientarianism.