This chapter presents and discusses important challenges to sufficientarianism as a theory of distributive justice. First, the groundlessness objection claims that sufficientarianism cannot reasonably be grounding on any relevant value. Second, the outweighing priority objection says that sufficientarianism implausibly allows small benefits to people below the threshold to outweigh large benefits to people above it. Third, the indifference objection observes that sufficientarianism is counterintuitively indifferent to even significant inequalities above the threshold. Finally, the threshold problem refers to the difficulty in identifying and justifying the threshold. The chapter responds to all these objections and concludes that sufficientarianism is largely unmoved by them. The chapter argues that the response to the indifference objection uncovers a minor intuitive problem in relation to sufficientarianism’s ability to explain the asymmetry between benefit-driven and burden-driven inequalities at high levels. And, that the threshold problem is not in and of itself an objection to sufficientarianism but rather an essential part of the development of sufficientarian theory.

This introduction presents the main arguments of the book, develops a novel terminological framework, and situates the book in current research. First, from the perspective of international economic and social human rights, this is not an age of human rights triumphalism. The main human rights advocates featured in this book were concerned with international justice and redistributive justice, and theirs was a long quest to lift international economic and social human rights onto a level-playing field through three phases: internationalizing rights, criticizing global inequalities through rights, and attempting to secure the legitimacy of these rights once and for all. Second, on a broader egalitarian plateau, human rights advocacy can be situated on a redistributionist terrain. Third, this book supplements institutional, organizational, diplomatic, political, and movement-centered research on international human rights. There is a gap in existing scholarship in understanding historical interrelations between human rights and inequalities, which is where this book intervenes, above all from an intellectual historical perspective.

Twentieth-century scholars defined “pastoral nomadism” as an environmental adaptation inherently linked to specific political, social, and economic traits: long-distance mobility; tribalism, social egalitarianism, and dependence on sedentary agricultural communities; economic specialization in pastoralism; and “marginal” land. To resolve conceptual conflation and promote the writing of histories of pastoralism, archaeologists require a new framework that draws on anthropological ideas about mobility, political complexity, intensification of production, and pastoral landscapes.

The book has shown that, like any other concept, fiṭra has a complex history. And like any concept with a lively history, fiṭra needs to be interpreted. The philosophers’ ethics and politics, and particularly their commitment to intellectual, social, and political hierarchies, do not map onto our ethics or politics. However, that does not mean that their engagement with fiṭra is not crucial in the current moment. Working through fiṭra among the philosophers creates tensions – among them, and between them and other Islamic interpreters such as the scriptural commentators. In these tensions the ethical work lies, opening space for both a more robust conception of Islamic intellectual history and more informed debates in the present. The possibilities of what it means to be human in Islamic thought are so much more diverse and contextual and signal that if one of our most foundational concepts, human nature, is under contestation, then so is our moral life. In fact, this contestation is necessary, deeply human, and traditional.

The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

Mathematical models based on evolutionary and ecological principles can help explain and predict variation in political organization and inequality across societies. This chapter introduces five major themes in human behavioral ecology that contribute to this goal. First, vertical power relationships between dominants and subordinates arise when resources are economically defensible and environmental or social circumscription limits outside options. Second, inequality increases when resources are durable and can be accumulated and inherited between generations within lineages. Third, egalitarian leveling can limit dominance behavior and inequality when there is a high degree of social interdependence, contributions to cooperation can be voluntarily given or withdrawn, or leveling coalitions facilitate collective bargaining. Fourth, organizational hierarchies are favored when they provide net benefits to group members compared to more egalitarian alternatives; inequality within these hierarchies is limited by the ability to replace aggrandizing leaders or move between groups. Finally, large-scale territorial hierarchies such as states and empires arise under conditions of escalating competition between groups over concentrated and defensible resources, such as high-quality agricultural land. The ecological parameters highlighted by these models define a multidimensional space of possibilities for human political organization and inequality.

Status hierarchy likely exists in all human societies, whether pronounced or more subtle, and even in more egalitarian societies where resources are widely shared and overt status-seeking is actively policed. This chapter reviews models of the evolution of status hierarchy, including models from behavioral ecology as well as from evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution. A central concern of these disparate models is the adaptive problem of why any individual should adopt a subordinate status if higher status tends to increase fitness. Solutions to this problem involve the benefits to individuals from avoiding costs of repeated competition over resources or from deferring to prestigious others. Hierarchy can facilitate coordination and collective action that, in humans, enables both the massive scale of our societies and unparalleled levels of exploitation. These explanations are summarized in detail while addressing related questions, including: Do women and men differ in status-seeking? What contributes to variation in status hierarchy across species and across human societies? The goals of this chapter are to highlight consilience and provoke new directions within the evolutionary literature on status hierarchy.

Chapter 5 notes that the anarchist argument against private property underdetermines which positive position libertarian property rights theorists ought to endorse. One option is to simply concede that people lack any sort of claim rights when it comes to natural resources ‒ that is, endorse what the chapter calls the Hobbesian conclusion. However, the chapter argues that this proposal must be rejected because it violates the moral tyranny constraint. Instead, the chapter argues that libertarians and property rights theorist should accept what it calls the anarchist conclusion. This thesis holds that persons do possess certain claims against others using unowned resources, where these claims correspond to the prescriptions of a luck egalitarian principle of distributive justice. The chapter then argues that libertarians have limited basis for rejecting the anarchist conclusion, as it is compatible with both their favored property-based theories of justice and the arguments that support such theories.

Having a satisfying romantic relationship and satisfying employment is important to most people but maintaining the balance between these two domains is not easy. Both roles require a significant investment of time, effort, and cognitive and emotional resources. There is an increased realization in academia that the separation between studying relationships and studying work is artificial and does not represent the many intersections of these roles. In this chapter, we discuss how work and romantic relationships can interact with each other and impact individuals’ outcomes. We first cover workplace romantic relationships, workplace sexual harassment, and organizations’ attempt to regulate romantic relationships at work. Then, we continue with reviewing the positive and negative associations of work and romantic relationship. Lastly, we introduce an economic perspective to examining romantic relationships and consider the workplace as a local marriage market.

Recent scholarship has sought to read Smith in TMS as an ethical critic of market inequality, one motivated by egalitarian commitments. This chapter pushes back against this reading, arguing that the position Smith adopts in TMS is most accurately labelled sufficientarian, not egalitarian. However, Smith’s sufficientarian considerations are deliberately focused on what is most apt for securing individual happiness. He says little of direct or decisive bearing on the plausibility of egalitarianism as a political commitment. Yet because ethical questions are not, in this area at least, isomorphic with political ones, we ought not to assume the latter can straightforwardly be read off the former. This ought to temper both our reading of Smith’s argument, and what we can appropriately extract from his text for present normative debate.