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The Sufficiency Principle
While there are many principles of distributive justice that would allow people to live satisfactorily for the rest of their lives, the most favorable of principles — when chosen behind a veil of ignorance — is the sufficiency principle. This ensures that everyone will always be guaranteed their ‘basic needs.’ Anything greater than that depends on rewards from markets that can be constrained by the legislature. Does this principle allow for people to have the most benefit financially? No. However, this principle does ensure that everyone will always have basic needs no matter what. The other principles — eliminating government intervention or giving everyone equal resources or even giving inequalities of resources so the least well off would be at an advantage — merely do not give the client the best conditions to live under satisfactorily. Since this person is to live under one principle for his entire life, the sufficiency principle is the most favorable due to its standard equality yet giving room for people to have a higher status if they so choose.
Through this principle, everyone is given a guaranteed ‘basic needs’ safety net in which everyone is given their basic needs of survival no matter what class they are in. Basic needs include the absolute minimum resources for a person to live long-term, such as food, water, and shelter basic these are necessities to survive, and they are the most…
