The doctrine of sufficiency says, roughly, that what is important from the point of view of morality is that each person should have enough.(1) The doctrine has recently become a popular theme for philosophical analysis. The notion of 'having enough' and its ethical significance are by now central to any discussion of the ethics of distribution. The basic idea is that there is a privileged level of well-being, such that if X is badly off (below the threshold), and Y is well off (above it), at least some priority has to be assigned to benefiting X. This idea, which plays an important role in welfare programs in modern societies, is gaining increasing popularity among philosophers. Roger Crisp has recently developed a very attractive version of sufficiency. 2 Elsewhere, I developed my own version, which is different from Crisp's with respect to some of the central issues. 3 My purpose here is to point to the difficulties in the Crisp version, in order to show that a certain modification of the version I defended is the best way for sufficientarians to follow. The paper is organized as follows. In section 1, I distinguish strong formulations of the doctrine from weak ones and show that Crisp's is particularly strong. In section 2, I present the crucial challenge Crisp's strong version faces. In section 3, I present Crisp's answer to this crucial challenge, and in section 4, I reject it. In section 5, I develop a different answer to the challenge, which suggests a radically different version of strong sufficientarianism, which is set forth in section 6.
