Ex-Post Approaches to Prioritarianism and Sufficientarianism

Abstract

Although sufficientarianism has been gaining interest as a theory of distributive justice in recent years, it has not been examined in the presence of risk. We propose an ex-post approach to sufficientarianism that has a strong link to ex-post prioritarianism. Both ex-post criteria are based on an axiom that we refer to as prospect independence of the unconcerned, a natural extension of the independence axiom known from the literature that focuses on situations with no risk. We characterize a class of ex-post prioritarian orderings as well as the corresponding class of ex-post sufficientarian orderings. In addition, we point out some important differences between these two ex-post criteria, and we examine how they fare when assessed in terms of specific ex-ante Paretian axioms.

Keywords: sufficientarianism, prioritarianism, risk, Pareto axioms independence axioms

JEL Classification: D63, D81