Limitarianism holds that there is an upper limit to how many resources, such as wealth and income, people can permissibly have. In this article, I examine the conceptual structure of limitarianism. I focus on the upper limit and the idea that resources above the limit are ‘excess resources’. I distinguish two possible limitarian views about such resources: (i) that excess resources have zero moral value for the holder; and (ii) that excess resources do have moral value for the holder but (...) that their claim to such resources is outweighed by other normative concerns. Moreover, I argue that, depending on the values limitarianism seeks to promote, limitarians should care about the number of people with excess resources or the total amount of excess resources (or both), that they can adopt redistributive measures and/or predistributive measures, and that some versions of limitarianism should take into account the distribution of risk among those above the riches line. (shrink)

According to limitarianism, it is morally impermissible to be too rich. We consider three main challenges to limitarianism: the redundancy objection, the inconclusiveness objection, and the commitment objection. As a distributive principle, we find that limitarianism fails to overcome the three objections—even taking recent theoretical innovations into account. Instead, we suggest that the core commitment of limitarianism can be drawn from the excess intuition. It entails that at some point, people's claims to retain wealth become qualitatively different: they become preposterous (...) from the point of view of interpersonal morality and justification. Extreme wealth, we argue, adds a distinctive expressive reason to worry about inequality and insufficiency, compounding these other distributive injustices. In retaining or wasting excess wealth while others have too little, the wealthy send a message of complete disregard for the interests of their co-citizens. They express that their disadvantaged compatriots have a diminished moral standing. (shrink)