Ex post approaches to prioritarianism and sufficientarianism
2025-11-17
Although sufficientarianism has been gaining interest as a theory of distributive justice in recent years, it has not been examined in the presence of risk. We propose an ex post approach to sufficientarianism that has a strong link to ex post prioritarianism. Both ex post criteria are based on an axiom that we refer to as prospect independence of the unconcerned, a natural extension of the independence axiom known from the literature that focuses on situations with no risk. We characterize a class of ex post prioritarian orderings as well as the corresponding class of ex post sufficientarian orderings. In addition, we point out some important differences between these two ex post criteria, and we examine how they fare when assessed in terms of specific ex ante Paretian axioms.