Vincent Harting

Political theorists concerned with ways to counteract the oligarchic tendencies of representative government have recently paid more attention to the employment of “class-specific institutions” (CSIs)—that is, political institutions that formally exclude wealthy elites from decision-making power. This article disputes a general objection levelled against the justifiability of CSIs, according to which their democratic credentials are outweighed by their explicit transgression of formal political equality—what I call the political equality objection. I claim that, although CSIs do not satisfy political equality fully, their exclusionary thrust is inter alia justified in virtue of the fact that they unfold against the background of badly ordered, class-divided societies. Parallel to recent arguments in nonideal theory arguing for the priority of the right to resist economic oppression over the protection of private property rights, access to the empowering properties of CSIs should take priority over the full satisfaction of formal political equality. Yet, I also claim that the justification of CSIs depends on their orientation toward overcoming class divisions because, otherwise, we might end up wrongly naturalizing those divisions—a conclusion that needs to be avoided to reply to the political equality objection. The result is, I believe, a convincing egalitarian case for the democratic justifiability of CSIs.

Sufficientarian theories of distributive justice are often considered to be vulnerable to the ‘blindness to inequality and other values objection’. This objection targets their commitment to holding the moral irrelevance of requirements of justice above absolute thresholds of advantage, making them insufficiently sensitive to egalitarian moral concerns that do have relevance for justice. This paper explores how sufficientarians could reply to this objection. Particularly, I claim that, if we accept that the force of the aforementioned objection comes from relational, and not distributive, inequalities, different strategies are open for sufficientarians in order to be sensitive to these concerns. Drawing on recent literature about the relation between distributive and relational egalitarianism, and the possibility of reducing one to the other, strategies of ‘internalizing’ and ‘externalizing’ relational egalitarian concerns to a distributive sufficientarian framework are explored. In turn, I suggest that both strategies fail in their standard versions, but argue that a particular ‘hybrid view’ about justice is an attractive candidate for the sufficientarian theorist.