Sufficiency as Freedom from Duress

I N this article, we defend the statement that the requirements of distributive justice are fulfilled when everyone has enough, often referred to as sufficientarianism or the sufficiency principle. 1 This entails that justice does not require that we aim for an equal distribution, as many contemporary political philosophers claim. In fleshing out our account of sufficiency, we will show that the reasoning behind many arguments for distributive equality are, ought to be, or at least could be compatible with sufficiency understood in this manner. We will introduce the ideal of freedom from duress, by which we mean the freedom from significant pressure against succeeding in central aspects of human life, as the threshold above which people can be said to have enough. Alternative versions of the sufficiency principle have often been met with forceful objections, which have brought certain aspects and implications of the principle into question. 2 We believe, however, that sufficientarianism understood as freedom from duress can disarm these objections. Thus, we mean to bolster the notion of securing enough for everyone by providing intuitively appealing reasons for the importance of achieving sufficiency. We will claim, then, that any plausible *We are very thankful to Søren Flinch Midtgaard,