  Suppose one compares the grim conditions of life endured by the poorest inhabitants of the earth with the garishly opulent conditions of life enjoyed by the wealthiest people. A natural reaction is that it is morally outrageous that such inequalities in life prospects exist. As George Orwell once wrote, “a fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight” (Orwell 1938, 115). But one may wonder if what is troubling about the example is the gap between rich and poor or rather the deplorable condition of the poor, which might continue unabated even if the gap itself were eliminated. To put the issue another way, if it is the inequality per se that is bad, then the gap between poor and rich would seem to be no worse than a same-sized gap between the life prospects of the rich and super-rich. Talk here of a “same-sized gap” presupposes that we have an agreed standard for measuring the sizes of gaps. The claim then would be that according to any plausible such standard, the gap between someone who is very badly off and someone who is much better off will be far more morally significant and bad than an identical gap between someone who is extremely well off in non-comparative terms and someone who is much better off than that. If the latter inequality strikes one as morally inconsequential, the question arises whether inequality is in and of itself really objectionable. Perhaps the problem is not that the poor have less than the rich, but rather that the poor do not have enough—a sufficient level of resources to provide a good life or a reasonable prospect of a good life. The suggestion then is that sufficiency not equality is what per se matters. How one's condition compares to the situation of other people is not important in itself. What is morally important is that people have enough to bring them over the threshold of decent life prospects. (For this line of thought, see Frankfurt 1987 and 2000, Nussbaum 1990 and 2000, Miller 1995, Wiggins 1991, Anderson 2000, and for an earlier statement of the sufficiency ideal, Walzer 1983).