Mich "Limitarianism across Time: Should we worry about time-sliced or lifetime extreme wealth?"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Manuel Sá Valente (Hoover Chair) & Tim Meijers (Leiden University)

Limitarianism holds that it is bad or unjust if some people have too much. It has been subject to much debate in the last few years. Yet one crucial question, so far not discussed, is the temporal scope of `having too much'. Should we think of limitarianism in terms of a lifetime – where extreme wealth refers to how much we have over our entire lives - or should the principle be time-sliced – referring, instead, to how much we have at specific times? Reading the literature, it might seem obvious that limitarians mean the second. In this paper, we argue that the answer is not evident. Both solutions run into considerable difficulties, and none of the answers limitarians may provide are entirely satisfactory. We will identify the most plausible ways forward, which, although in favour of time-sliced limitarianism, also considerably dent limitarianism's ambitions.