FREEDOM AS NON-DOMINATION AND EQUALITY: A NEO-REPUBLICAN THEORY OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

My main claim in this thesis is that, if we want the fundamental ideal of neo-republicanism, notably freedom as non-domination, to be ensured, we need excessive individual wealth to be limited. This claim stems from a twofold premise. First, freedom as non-domination is constituted by political equality. To be free from domination, people should be protected from anyone else’s arbitrary capacity to interfere with their choices, that is, they should be granted an equal status to one another by the state; nonetheless, to avoid the state’s interferences to be arbitrary themselves people should also have equal opportunities to influence the public decision-making process, that is, they should be granted political equality (Pettit, 1997; 2012; Pansardi, 2013; 2015; Gädeke, 2020; 2020a). Second, though, such a political equality is jeopardized by the presence of very rich people within a democracy: very rich people indeed enjoy disproportionate opportunities to influence politics because of their wealth (Gilens & Page, 2014; Cagé, 2020). Moreover, neo-republicans have either overlooked this problem (e.g., Pettit, 2012), or they have addressed it from a procedural perspective, i.e., by envisaging institutional measures to prevent the wealthy from playing such a significant role in politics (McCormick, 2011; 2019). By contrast, I show that the presence of economic elites within a democracy represents one of the major threats for freedom as non-domination: if people do not enjoy equal opportunities to influence the lawmaking process, they shall comply with arbitrary laws, thus they will be dominated. Furthermore, I argue that procedural solutions are not sufficient to solve this problem. When people possess large amounts of wealth more than their fellows, indeed, they can easily translate it into political power through a great variety of direct and indirect mechanisms that elude formal separations between economic and political spheres (Knight & Johnson, 1997; Christiano, 2010; 2012; Robeyns, 2017). Therefore, if one wants freedom as non-domination to be ensured, one needs not only to protect the democratic ideal of political equality from the super-rich’s unfair influence, but also to investigate material, rather than formal, solutions for this purpose. This is the reason why my dissertation aims at developing a theory of distributive justice for neo-republicanism. In this respect, I argue that a limitarian principle should be advocated, namely that principle according to which no-one should have more than a certain threshold of wealth (Robeyns, 2017; 2019; 2022). My view of this threshold, however, differs from the classical limitarian formulation (Robeyns, 2017), which has also been retrieved in the first proposal of republican limitarianism (Dumitru, 2020). Rather than being put where people no longer need their resources for their full flourishing, a limitarian threshold should be put where the risks it aims at eliminating materialize (Harel Ben-Shahar, 2019). When it comes to freedom as non-domination, this means that what should be withdrawn are all those resources that allow the super-rich to enjoy disproportionate and boundless power in politics – or so I argue. Moreover, I believe that this could be done through a top marginal taxation rate of 100% on what people inherit beyond that threshold. This is because, on the one hand, a top marginal taxation rate of 100% seems to best represent the ceiling to individual wealth that a limitarian threshold aims at establishing (Robeyns, 2017). On the other, I argue that taxing inheritance away would tackle the root of the problem of political domination by economic elites, given that inheritance facilitates the accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of few people (Piketty, 2014; Halliday, 2018). My conclusion hence is that a limitarian theory of distributive justice, which could be implemented via an inheritance tax, should be advocated within neo-republicanism as a precondition of political equality grounding the core ideal of freedom as non-domination. By reformulating the limitarian principle for neo-republican liberty, furthermore, my dissertation offers a novel argument for limitarianism: being grounded in the idea of freedom as non-domination rather than in the value of full flourishing, the threshold appears thus more compatible with the human plurality of lifegoals.