Limitarianism is the view that there should be an upper limit to how many resources a person can appropriate; in most cases, the focus is on economic resources, and the claim is that there should be a limit to how rich a person can be. Limitarianism is thus a view in the wider family of egalitarian proposals, but urges us to focus explicitly on the harms and bads done by extreme wealth concentration.

However, most of the reasons given for limitarianism are focusing on the effects among a political community of voters. Similarly, most of the institutional proposals that have been put forward on how one could move in the direction of a limitarian world focus on the  possibilities given by the fiscal system. In other words, in the existing literature there is a significant focus at what this means for political actions within a country. 

In this talk, I ask what the limitarian view needs when considered from a global perspective. Does limitarianism become implausible if we consider the realities of an interconnected world? Or does it require us to make modifications or put additional requirements to the institutional proposals to advance limitarianism?

Speaker Bio

Ingrid Robeyns holds the chair in ethics of institutions at Utrecht University. She works mainly in normative political philosophy, but also engages in interdisciplinary research. Some of the topics on which she published are the capability approach, concepts of wellbeing, gender inequality, methods in normative political philosophy, climate justice, as well as specific institutional proposals, such as universal basic income or inheritance taxation. Her most recent work is on limitarianism, on which she is writing a book aimed at a broader audience (in North America, forthcoming with Astra Publishing House).