Justice Beyond Feasibility: Political Norms Under Conditions of Radical Scarcity

Abstract: Contemporary political theory is commonly divided between ideal and non-ideal approaches, which are often presented as rival strategies for addressing injustice under real-world constraints. This paper argues that both paradigms share a deeper, largely unexamined assumption: the persistence of conditions of moderate scarcity. Under such conditions, resources are limited but sufficient to sustain meaningful distributive principles, institutional coordination, and normatively coherent claims of justice. I show that this assumption plays a foundational role not only in ideal theories of justice, most notably Rawlsian liberalism, but also in non-ideal theory, which explicitly seeks to relax idealising assumptions in response to injustice, non-compliance, and institutional failure. While non-ideal theory successfully lowers epistemic and motivational thresholds, it nevertheless presupposes that scarcity remains within bounds that allow justice to retain its basic conceptual structure. The core claim of the paper is that once conditions of radical scarcity obtain—where resources are insufficient to satisfy even minimal claims without systematic exclusion—central normative categories begin to break down. Distributive justice gives way to triage-like decision-making, rights become threshold-dependent rather than universal, and legitimacy is replaced by weaker standards of procedural acceptability or survival-oriented coordination. Importantly, these failures cannot be addressed through further non-ideal refinement, as the problem lies not in excessive idealisation but in a shared background assumption about material conditions. By identifying moderate scarcity as a hidden presupposition of both ideal and non-ideal political theory, the paper clarifies why existing frameworks struggle to account for political normativity under conditions of systemic collapse, climate crisis, or large-scale institutional failure. Rather than proposing a fully developed alternative, the paper concludes by suggesting the need for a distinct mode of theorising political norms beyond the ideal/non-ideal divide—one that begins from conditions of radical scarcity rather than treating them as exceptional or temporary deviations.