Distributing Linguistic Advantage: A (Provisional) Sufficientarian Approach

Policies aimed at promoting both mobility and inclusion in multilingual societies face a range of difficulties, both conceptual and practical. In this paper, I consider how we should distribute linguistic advantage (and disadvantage) in the face of several practical obstacles that make a just distribution difficult to identify and implement. These obstacles include the practical consequences of disagreement among the relevant experts as to how to conceptualize linguistic advantage, and how linguistic advantage ought to be distributed. Even if these questions are settled via an eventual consensus, or legitimate decision-making procedure, further practical questions arise with regard to how the costs and benefits of particular language policies ought to be empirically assessed. In response to these problems, I suggest that policymakers who are risk averse ought to adopt a view that I call “provisional sufficientarianism”, which seeks to ensure that each person in society has a language repertoire that allows him or her to be sufficiently mobile, and to experience sufficient inclusion in society. What makes this a “provisional” version of sufficientarianism is that it is endorsed by policymakers only until a consensus emerges among the relevant experts (political philosophers) as to what the correct principles of justice actually are. I compare this approach to provisional egalitarian and prioritarian alternatives, and argue that what makes provisional sufficientarianism preferable to either is that it is especially revisable and that because of this, the consequences of being wrong in choosing provisional sufficientarianism are not likely to be as bad as the alternatives. Having set out the advantages of provisional sufficientarianism, I conclude by examining the challenges that must be overcome if such a view is to be implemented successfully. Chief among these are the difficulties associated with defining sufficient mobility and inclusion, and measuring the position of individuals relative to these thresholds. Here I argue that the empirical demands of provisional sufficientarianism are not likely to be significantly greater than those of the viable alternatives, and suggest that we should approach the problem using a similar strategy that leads us to endorse provisional sufficientarianism itself: by ensuring that the sufficiency thresholds themselves are revisable, we can minimize the risks associated with adopting a threshold that is too high, or too low. If this is correct, risk-averse policymakers ought to distribute linguistic advantage according to provisional sufficientarianism, unless and until political philosophers can reach a broad consensus as to the correct principles of distributive justice.