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)

According to a prominent account, the central normative commitments of socialism are a luck egalitarian principle of equality and a principle of community or solidarity. The model has a number of attractions. However, it appears to be vulnerable to a series of objections that have been pressed against luck egalitarian accounts of the concept of exploitation. In this paper I argue that, despite some overlooked flexibility, the exploitation objection represents a serious challenge to this model and provides a good reason (...) to explore alternative accounts of socialism’s normative grounds. (shrink)