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Autonomy-Based Reasons for Limitarianism

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Abstract

This paper aims to provide autonomy-based reasons in favour of limitarianism. Limitarianism affirms it is of primary moral importance that no one gets too much. The paper challenges the standard assumption that having more material resources always increases autonomy. It expounds five mechanisms through which having too much material wealth might undermine autonomy. If these hypotheses are true, a theory of justice guided by a concern for autonomy will support a limitarian distribution of wealth. Finally, the paper discusses two issues autonomy-based limitarianism would raise. First, insofar as coercion invades autonomy, do autonomy-based reasons legitimate coercive measures to secure a limitarian distribution of wealth? Second, is a limitarian ethos consistent with the incentive to produce enough wealth to secure distributive justice?

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Notes

  1. One might rather attribute the irresponsibility of Crouch to a parenting style of indulgence and unwillingness to impose limitations rather than wealth. This is indeed a plausible explanation of Crouch’s behaviour. But the paper does not purport to explain why Crouch behaved as he did. It just attempts to build on the idea that wealth might undermine responsibility, which is sufficiently meaningful to have been used as a legal defence in the criminal justice system.

  2. Robeyns uses the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental (or non-intrinsic) rather than the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding reasons to make a similar point. Note, however, that the two distinctions do not necessarily coincide. There are instrumental and self-regarding reasons for limitarianism. For example, if material wealth is detrimental to well-being, limitarianism may have the instrumental value of increasing rich people’s well-being, regardless of its positive effects on others.

  3. See the introduction of Section 3.

  4. See: Dworkin (1988: 6)

  5. Seminal discussions of the authenticity conditions include: Christman (1987); Dworkin (1988: 3–20); Frankfurt (1988: ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’); Friedman (1986)

  6. On this dimension of autonomy, see, for example: Benson (2005); Mackenzie (2014); McLeod (2002); Westlund (2009).

  7. E.g. Raz (1986: 372–373).

  8. Cf. Rawls (2001: 45).

  9. For a defence of this approach to relational autonomy, see Oshana (2006, pp. 49–74).

  10. For an overview of the empirical literature on the relationship between income and happiness, see: Angelescu (2014).

  11. Morton’s main concern is the justification of the norms of practical deliberation, but she provides useful insights on the effects of the environment on deliberative capacities.

  12. Excessive scarcity of resources might also hinder the development of deliberative capacities, for example by inducing decision fatigue (e.g. Spears 2014).

  13. I thank Carl Knight for having pointed out this to me.

  14. Serene J. Khader criticises this account of adaptive preference on two grounds (Khader 2011, 87–88). First, she points out that the only way for practitioners and policy makers to know whether other people’s preference are deficient in autonomy is to look at the content of preferences (since they cannot “read other people’s minds”). She thus suggest that they “are surreptitiously using a theory of the good rather than procedural autonomy to distinguish” adaptive preferences. But this is a practical problem rather than a fundamental issue. The fact that it is difficult to identify a phenomenon does not mean we must change the definition of this phenomenon. Adaptive preferences as autonomy deficits may be a meaningful concept and describe a real and socially relevant phenomenon without being easy to diagnose. This critique is thus not fatal to autonomy-based accounts of adaptive preferences. Second, Khader worries that this definition classifies too many preferences as adaptive. Akratic preferences and (unconscious) correction of expensive tastes would count as adaptive. The problem is that she does not precisely explain why it is problematic to count such preferences as adaptive. She seems to suggest that we should not see such preferences as “worthy of public suspicion”. Indeed, if we thought adaptive preferences always required coercive public interventions aiming to actively prevent agents from satisfying their preferences, it would be dangerous to treat too many preferences as adaptive. But the adaptive preference literature does not have to draw such extreme implications from its definition of adaptive preferences. It may just recommend setting social conditions conducive to autonomous preference formation.

  15. I borrow the term from Maurin (2009), although Maurin uses it in a different way and addresses a different issue, that is, the social and economic consequences of the fear of a drop in status of middle class graduates who have a stable job.

  16. To my knowledge, Bourdieu did not defend a limitarian tax as a way to render people more autonomous. He suggested we could increase our autonomy by increasing our sociological knowledge, and in particular by becoming aware of our habitus (Bourdieu 1981, 44–45).

  17. I thank an anonymous reviewer for having raised this important issue.

  18. These commitments need not be acquired in an autonomous way. Most of our commitments are not: we tend to adopt the religions, ethical and political views that are endorsed by the people around us. But this need not be a problem as long as education also equips us with the capacities needed to revise these commitments and come to embrace them in the right kind of way.

  19. Let us remark that autonomy-based limitarianism is a partial theory of justice and does not preclude the normative relevance of other demands of justice.

  20. I deliberately do not mention compulsory education, because, in our societies, we consider treating children as non-autonomous agents more legitimate than treating adults as non-autonomous agents. Discussing whether and under which conditions it is justifiable to treat children as non-autonomous agents is beyond the scope of this paper.

  21. There are exceptions, of course, such as Stuart White’s proposal to replace higher education subsidies with a basic capital (White 2010).

  22. For some goods such as education, it may help mitigating coordination costs and better address asymmetry of information between providers and users. For instance, see Colin Crouch’s discussion of the problems created by market provision of education: Crouch (2003).

  23. The disproportionate attention political philosophy, economics and public administration place on the poor’s alleged lack of autonomy (compared to the rich) seems to amount to a systematic epistemic injustice of the testimonial sort (Fricker 2007). Testimonial injustices occur when an agent does not receive the right amount of credibility from an observer (or hearer) owing to prejudice on the observer’s part (Fricker 2007, 17). The right amount of credibility is the amount that matches the truth (Fricker 2007, 18). Testimonial injustice is systematic when it is connected with other types of injustices, such as distributive injustices (Fricker 2007, 27). Because not all poor people are non-autonomous, the poor who are falsely treated as incompletely autonomous receive an unfair deficit of credibility and are thus victims of testimonial injustices. Because not all rich people are fully autonomous, the rich who are falsely treated as fully autonomous receive an unfair excess of credibility and are thus also victims of testimonial injustices. According to Fricker, most epistemic injustices consist of credibility deficits. Credibility excess, however, constitutes an epistemic injustice when it is cumulative, that is, when a person’s capacity as a knower has been undermined, malformed and insulted by repeated excessive attributions of credibility. She illustrates this possibility by the case of a member of the ruling elite who would have since childhood been repeatedly “epistemically puffed up” by others. The development of this person’s capacity as a knower would thus have been seriously hampered. He would have been made a fool of (Fricker 2007, 18).

  24. I thank an anonymous reviewer for having pressed this point.

  25. Note that limitarianism would require this income tax to be combined with a wealth tax.

  26. I thank an anonymous reviewer for having pointed this to me.

  27. This paragraph owes a lot to a discussion with George Pavlakos.

  28. For example, Rawls argues that taxation is justified insofar as it contributes to the provision of public goods and to the realisation of the difference principle (Rawls 1999, para. 43).

  29. Another potential objection to coercive redistributive tax-and-transfer schemes might appeal to desert. According to this objection, redistributive taxation is wrong when it prevents the hard-working and the competent from receiving money in accord with what she deserves (desert being measured either according to her level of effort or to her level of contribution). Rawls’s discussion of desert and the difference principle casts doubt on the desert objection by pointing out that our talents, capacity to contribute and willingness to put forth effort can often be traced to “undeserved contingencies” such as “class and natural abilities” (Rawls 1999, 246). Note also that, even if the desert objection were valid, it would not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the rich are owed their wealth, since wealth might be detrimental to them. Society should not reward deserving people with defective goods. I thank an anonymous reviewer for having pointed this objection to me.

  30. There could be other grounds for condemning coercion from a liberal perspective, but since the article is mostly concerned with the value of autonomy I shall stick to Raz’s account.

  31. By “motivated by a concern for the rich’s autonomy”, I do not mean that the actual individuals, political representatives, policy-makers or administrators, would be necessarily motivated by such concern (whatever motivates people to strive for the realisation of justice and political morality is often complex and consists in a mix of moral, quasi-moral and non-moral motives). I mean the tax could be justified on the ground that it protects the rich’s autonomy, and such justification would follow from valid factual and normative premises.

  32. Perhaps non-economic attitudes, such as a commitment to the well-being of one’s community, would suffice to motivate the high-skilled to contribute by working harder in a limitarian society. But this is speculative.

  33. The seminal contribution that posed the problem of optimal tax progressivity in terms of maximising a social welfare function is an article by Mirrlees. See: Mirrlees (1971). For a synthesis of the evolutions of the theory of optimal taxation since Mirrlees’s article, see: Slemrod (2006).

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Acknowledgements

Versions of this article have been presented at the Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law Video Workshop jointly organised by the universities of Cordoba and Louvain, at the Workshop in Economics & Philosophy (Université catholique de Louvain), at the Political Theory Group (University of Glasgow) and at the Philosophie et théorie économique seminar (University of Reims). I am grateful to all the participants for their helpful comments and questions, and in particular to Antoinette Baujard, Jean-Sébastien Gharbi, Brian Girvin, Axel Gosseries, Cyril Hédoin, Carl Knight, Lucas Misseri, George Pavlakos and Pierre Van Zyl. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for the detailed and insightful comments they provided on earlier versions of the manuscript. All errors are my own.

The work reported in this publication had benefited from a grant from the Fonds Spécial de Recherche (FSR) of the Université catholique de Louvain.

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Zwarthoed, D. Autonomy-Based Reasons for Limitarianism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 1181–1204 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9958-7

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