Abstract

In recent years, Fabian Wendt’s sufficientarian or moderate libertarianism has stood out among theories of distributive justice. This theory is based on the project pursuit argument and recognizes individual’s rights to self-ownership and ownership of external resources. But the second of these rights is limited by the sufficiency proviso, which requires that all people have a minimum sufficient share of resources to engage in personal projects. This article takes a critical look at moderate libertarianism, showing that its limitation to the sufficiency threshold is incompatible with its reliance on the project pursuit argument, since this argument implicitly assumes a presumption of equal concern for persons. In the absence of additional reasons, this presumption requires that people as projects pursuers be given not a sufficient, but an equal share of external resources.