Three Talks in Bucharest

From June 13-15^th three members of the Fair Limits team traveled to Romania for the first annual Conference in Analytical Political Theory hosted by the Bucharest Center for Political Theory. The theme of the conference was “Thresholds in Justice: Sufficientarianism and Limitarianism Revisited.”

Ingrid Robeyns delivered one of the keynote addresses, “What is Limitarianism?” where she provided a systematic accounting of distinctions between different kinds of limitarian views and the reasons one might offer in support of them. The other keynote was delivered by Liam Shields of the University of Manchester who clarified and developed his influential conception of sufficientarianism.

Dick Timmer also presented a paper titled “How Much Is too Much? On Thresholds in Distributive Justice.” In it, Dick laid out a novel way of how to conceive of “threshold” views in general and used that to reply to some commonly lobbed objections. Colin Hickey’s paper “Sufficiency, Limits, and the Two-Level Threshold Thesis” argued that sufficientarians should be limitarians, and vice versa. Both sparked interesting and helpful discussion, which in addition to a range of other papers touching on issues such as adequacy in education justice, limitarianism across time, “relative” thresholds, limitarianism and partiality, international trade justice, and many others made for countless fruitful conversations throughout the conference.