How much economic inequality is fair in liberal democracies? The approach of proportional justice

Abstract

The article argues that the possibility of an unlimited gap in income and wealth between the top and bottom segments of society is incompatible with a democratic commitment to political equality. The first section outlines why current distributive and relational approaches are unable to adequately address this problem. The second and third sections introduce the notion of material domination and argue that the only remedy against it is the containment of economic inequality within a certain proportion, expressed in terms of ratios between the material resources of the best-off and the worst-off. The fourth section spells out the constraints that any definition of these ratios should satisfy and shows, through a case study based on the contemporary United States, that an approximate, yet non-arbitrary definition is within reach. The fifth and final section rebuts some predictable objections to this approach.