Limitarianism: The Ethical Limit and Moral Perfectionism

My holiday reading was Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns. I agree with the most important conclusion, which is that there is some level of wealth such that an individual possessing or controlling that much wealth is harmful for society, and this justifies governments putting in place measures which prevent individuals having that much wealth. This is essentially a political argument based on the democratic principle that governments should aim to improve the lives of all citizens. If the accumulation - hoarding - of wealth impacts upon the ability of the government to provide core services to ensure the well-being of the poorer or disadvantaged members of the society, then the government should, morally speaking, act to prevent that hoarding. Even if the generation of that wealth hasn’t harmed teh worst off and may have even made them slightly better, the redistribution of wealth is justified when its current distribution prevents society doing even more for the most in need.

But as well as this political limit on wealth, which is necessarily quite high because the sums have to be large enough to impact on society more widely, Robeyns argues for two other limits:¹

1. The Riches Line: this is the level of wealth, which will be relative to a particular society, at which "additional money cannot increase your standard of living" (15).
2. The Ethical Limit: this is the level of wealth above which "we can't in good conscience justify keeping the excess money" (15).

The determination of 1) is empirical, at least once we have defined "standard of living", and Robeyns discusses empirical work on determining this by her team in the Netherlands and Abigail Davis et al. in London. The core idea is that there is a point beyond which more or bigger houses, more holidays, more or more luxurious cars, etc. will serve no purpose other than to display - to others but often just to themselves - the owner's ability to pay for them. Robeyns uses the familiar phrase "conspicuous consumption" but one may suspect that the person who buys a Bentley rather than a BMW, or a Philippe Patek rather than a Tissot, is doing it primarily for the pleasure of being able to do it, the sense that they can afford to pay massively over the odds for marginal improvements in quality.

Let's grant that there is, to some level of approximation, such a thing as a Riches Line for a given society, which will not be rigid because it may differ from individual to individual: some may need greater wealth to ensure the standard of living of a disabled child after their death, others may support family in more expensive countries, but in such cases the greater wealth is not being used for consumption of goods beyond those needed for the peak standard of living for that country.

The Ethical Limit is not empirical. Now, Robeyns' intuition is that for most people this is lower than the riches line, that most people could live very happy and fulfilled lives well below peak standard of living for their society, and thus they cannot justify having greater wealth than that. It is at this point that I think the philosophical foundations of Robeyns' view need deeper examination. In particular, there is an unexamined appeal to a perfectionist structure in ethical theory.

We can start to see this by examining the inference from the undoubted fact that many people, perhaps most, in our societies manage to live happy and fulfilled lives despite being considerably less wealthy than the Riches Line. Standard of living does not correlate directly with happiness. So let us imagine someone - perhaps yourself, though we will call her Petra - who is happy and fulfilled, with no financial dependents or loans/mortgages, but has wealth well below the Riches Line, maybe only half of it. Now Petra receives a windfall, maybe a bequest from a forgotten relative, of a sizeable amount but still not enough to reach the Riches Line. In Robeyns' framework, this would be "excess money" and keeping it could not be justified.

Now that inference can be challenged. What seems to be going on is this:

a. It would be better if Petra gave away the excess money (keeping it doesn't do her any good, but it could do a lot of good for others)
b. So Petra cannot justify keeping the excess money
c. So Petra ought to give the excess money away to benefit others

This form of inference goes from an evaluation (X is better than Y) to a prescription (you ought to do X rather than Y). There are two problematic consequences of accepting this form of inference. One is that we become very moralistic, continually finding things that people ought to do. One might think that this is a weakness of Robeyns' book, where the word 'immoral' appears with great frequency. The other is that it quickly generates a form of moral perfectionism. For just about any choice you make, there is an alternative which would be a bit morally better. Suppose you are shopping and your first choice of coffee costs 50p more than your second choice, which you normally buy since your favourite is often out of stock. Today your first choice is in stock so you could buy it, or you could give that extra 50p to a homeless charity collecting outside the shop. 50p won't make much difference to them, but it is likely to be overall better than you getting your first choice coffee. It seems to follow that you ought to buy the cheaper coffee and give the money to t he charity. But if that is the case, just about every choice we make becomes moralised and ordinary life becomes unlivable because we are always striving for moral perfection.²

Robeyns seems to avoid this by an appeal to eudaimonism, the idea that there is a 'good life' to be achieved, and once that has been achieved, duties to oneself have been exhausted and only duties to others remain. We are familiar with the generalisation of the airline safety slogan "Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" and eudaimonism similarly encourages us to make our lives better even if it is, sometimes and to a small extent, at the cost of what we can do to make others' lives better. Clearly Robeyns does not think that the good life can be defined as a form of hedonism, of desire satisfaction, because she thinks that the desires that the super-rich satisfy by having wealth above the Riches Line are morally irrelevant. Instead there is an intuitive grasp of a happy and fulfilled life we are expected to share.

With this eudaimonist framework in place, Robeyns can argue that the inference a)-c) works because Petra has, to all intents and purposes, achieved eudaimonia, she has a good life. That is why Robeyns thinks she has reached the Ethical Limit and ought to give her windfall away. However, this will not work because it assumes a more direct connection between the good life and one's standard of living than there is. Suppose that Petra isn't happy, but she is coping. Further suppose, that her sources of unhappiness (e.g. unrequited love or bereaved of a child) are not ones that could be addressed by more money. There will be many people who aren't coping at all and who would have better lives with more money. It looks like Robeyns has no way of blocking the inference from 'X is better than Y' to 'Petra ought to X' in such cases. Robeyns seems committed to the general conclusion:

The Ethical Limit is the level of wealth such that more money wouldn't make you happier but less would make you unhappier, and you ought to give away anything in excess of the Ethical Limit to someone who is below their Ethical Limit.

To challenge this we do not need to challenge the very similar, but crucially different, evaluative, claim:

The Ethical Limit is the level of wealth such that more money wouldn't make you happier but less would make you unhappier, and it is good to give away anything in excess of the Ethical Limit to someone who is below their Ethical Limit.

Thus we might try to accept a) but deny the inference to b) and c).

Against Moral Perfectionism

How might we make the case that it would be morally good if Petra gave away her excess wealth to those for whom it would not be an excess, but she is not morally required to do that? How do we block the slide to moral perfectionism, to thinking that it is never permissible to choose the morally worse option?

One way we might answer the first question, but possibly not the second, is by appeal to property rights. If you acquire money in a morally, legally, and socially acceptable way, as Petra has done, then it is up to you what to do with it. It is your money. We might make exceptions for taxes, which are the charge for the society you benefit from, and legal fines, but apart from that, your property right is absolute: there can be no general moral obligation to give any of your property away. There may be specific circumstances where someone has a claim on you, perhaps as a dependent or in a case of dire need where it falls to you to help, but these will arise from an interaction of your property rights with the directed rights of another person to make a claim on you. The fact that giving your money to someone who would benefit more from it would be a good thing does not create an obligation to do that, because your moral right to control your own property protects you from the interests of others.

Like Robeyns, I reject this argument. Her response is that there are and have to be limits on property rights in a democratic society. That is true, but there is a deeper problem, which is that the whole structure of moral rights creates a morality with the primary function to protect individuals against the - presumed threatening - interests of others. In this case, it is telling us that Petra has no obligation to give her money away because her moral right to her property protects her from having to respond to the needs of others. That is a slight caricature, but it points clearly to why we might want to be suspicious of a framework of moral rights.

What we need to reject is the idea that morality gives a "verdict" of right or wrong, required or prohibited, on every action we take or decision we make. Even if we extend the range of moral judgements to include "neither right nor wrong but permissible", the idea remains that morality functions to assess not merely the value of different outcomes or situations but also correctness of actions and decisions. Hence, we not only judge that Petra giving her excess wealth away would be good, but also that not doing it would be wrong.

What would an alternative look like?³ Firstly, we do have to accept that certain actions are 'beyond the pale', are simply prohibited, whatever other contextual information we have. These are ones where the conclusion 'You ought not to X' cannot be undermined by adding additional considerations. Genocide and rape are clear examples. The extent of this class is subject to debate, and there is some very difficult work to be done on what counts as a relevant form of argument in such a debate, but let us agree that there is such a class and it probably includes most deliberate acts of physical and psychological harm. In those cases, morality is not giving a verdict, an all things consideration judgement of what is right, but simply proscribing actions without exception.

This will then leave us a large space of actions which can be morally evaluated, where we can consider whether option X is better or worse, morally, than option Y, but if morality does not in general give verdicts in such cases, then there is no direct route from these evaluations to a decision about what to do. X may be better than Y, but Y is still permissible.

Instead of morality giving verdicts and requiring the moral agent to act according to them, which is a picture of morality as an external constraint like the law, we would be left with those individual moral agents having to make up their own minds, decide for themselves, and take responsibility for those decisions. It is (morally) incumbent on them to take into account the moral evaluations, but in all the messy complexity of life, their personal circumstances, their psychological makeup and dispositions, their past experiences and expectations of their future, there is no possibility of a verdict. There is just a human trying to cope in this difficult world without being a bad person.

If Petra really is happy and fulfilled, she may give the excess money away. After all, if she doesn’t spend it, it will eventually be given to another as an inheritance. Or she may decide to keep it because she feels her happiness may be fragile in ways she doesn’t understand, or because she is more risk averse about the stability of her society than some. Or maybe she decides to give it away but not to the cause which is morally ‘best’, rather to a cause she has a personal commitment to - perhaps she has often volunteered at a charity and wants to give them financial stability or perhaps she strongly cares about animal welfare.

What matters morally is that she takes into account the moral evaluation of the options alongside all the other reasons there are, and makes a decision in the light of that which she feels comfortable with. Keeping the money is not one of those clearly impermissible actions, so she can justify, in good conscience, doing that. But equally, she can justify different ways of giving it away. None of us can know in advance what Petra will decide if she reflects carefully on the matter, for there is no right answer. Her deliberation about what to do with the money is not finding out what she ought to do, but making up her mind about what is the course of action for her now which she can fully and reflectively justify to herself.⁴

Back to Limitarianism

Suppose this is right, that the Ethical Limit defines the point at which it is unequivocally morally better to give away excess wealth to good causes than to keep it, but that does not entail a moral obligation to give it away, what does that tell us about Limitarianism?

Let us start by distinguishing ordinary charitable giving and voluntary wealth redistribution (to good causes). In ordinary charitable giving, we give as opposed to spend. That is, we give from the discretionary income which we have set aside for spending and which does not impact our existing or planned future wealth. The miserly minimise that discretionary spend to maximise wealth accumulation - and thus usually forego charitable donations - but most of us are lucky enough to be able to have some discretionary spend, beyond what is strictly necessary to survive, in order to have a decent standard of living. The ethical considerations about giving to charitable causes out of that discretionary spend are a distinct topic from the one raised by Limitarianism and thus out of scope right now.

Voluntary wealth redistribution is when an individual gives away some of their wealth, the money they have over and above what they need to survive and the discretionary spend they need for a decent standard of living. They don’t just spend less, as with ordinary charitable giving, but they make themselves less wealthy, less able to spend in the future. This is what the Ethical Limit is meant to inform us about.

I have argued that this may often be a good thing and that morally sensitive people may often decide to do it, but that does not entail that it is a moral requirement or that not so doing is immoral. That does not exclude the possibility that in an individual case, the balance of reasons is such that the good that can be done by this voluntary wealth redistribution clearly and incontrovertibly outweighs any other considerations that the person in question may have. That will be true in most cases of wealth in excess of the riches line (though I noted some possible exceptions earlier) and may be for other individuals at a lower point. Someone who refused to give away their excess wealth in such a situation would certainly be guilty of a moral failing, but not the one of doing the impermissible. Their failing would be one of not fully appreciating the moral considerations. Perhaps they carefully insulate themselves from seeing the suffering of others, or persuade themselves it is somehow deserved, or cultivate a persona of ruthless indifference - these are all moral failings in the sense that they will lead the person to justify to themselves what cannot really be morally justified.

Others may not even engage in the process of reflection, due to lack of training and experience in considering morally weighty matters, and may fritter away their excess wealth for e.g. a lottery win in a careless manner. That is still a moral failing, but perhaps a less culpable one.

Which all boils down to saying that when properly understood, the Ethical Limit isn’t very significant, for whenever we have choice about how to spend our money, there may be morally better or worse ways to do it. But we avoid the slide into moral perfectionism, into making every spending choice a matter of right and wrong, by allowing that it is morally permissible to choose the less good option, so long as the choice was sensitive to the moral dimensions.

It is fine to sometimes treat yourself to the better coffee and sometimes give the 50p to the charity box, just so long as you know what you are doing and why, and can take personal responsibility for those decisions.