In A Minimally Good Life (2024), Nicole Hassoun proposes an account of the minimally good life. She offers this account as a solution to the problem of basic justice. This problem involves specifying what human beings owe to all other human beings and what human beings may reasonably claim from all other human beings. In Rawls’s terms, Hassoun offers her account of the minimally good life as a conception of basic justice. She further contends that any such conception must specify a threshold below which no human being should be allowed to fall. For her, basic justice imposes a duty upon all human beings to raise everyone above this threshold so long as acting upon this duty does not lower anyone below the threshold. The assumption that basic justice must take this form generates a dilemma for Hassoun. Set the threshold low, and it is hard to imagine how anyone could be motivated to make the sacrifices demanded by basic justice. Set the threshold high, and only a small minority of human beings will regularly be confronted by the demands of basic justice. The difficulties posed by this dilemma raises the question of whether basic justice really must assume the form specified by Hassoun.
