Liberal equality, exploitation, and the case for an unconditional basic income

Political Studies

Volumn 45, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 312-326

  White, Stuart ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040645650     PISSN: 00323217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9248.00083     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. I would especially like to thank Brian Barry, Amy Gutmann, David Miller, Debra Satz, Philippe Van Parijs, Albert Weale, Andrew Williams, an anonymous referee, and members of the Nuffield College Political Theory Workshop, for their comments on various earlier drafts of this paper.
2. P. Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995).
3. Here I follow Van Parijs, Real Freedom, pp. 21-4.
4. On the notion of brute luck inequality, see especially G. A. Cohen, 'On the currency of egalitarian justice', Ethics 99 (1989), 906-44.
5. Van Parijs' acceptance of these two qualifications is expressed in his definition (Real Freedom, p. 27) of a 'free society' as 'one in which people's opportunities are being leximinned subject to the protection of their formal freedom ... of a structure of rights that incorporates self-ownership'.
6. Internal capacities include talents and handicaps.
7. Indeed, it could conceivably be even higher than this.
8. This example and explication follows Van Parijs, Real Freedom, pp. 98-100.
9. See Van Parijs, Real Freedom, p. 101.
10. The focus on motivation effects is characteristic of recent 'efficiency wage' theories of unemployment, and the focus on turnover costs, of recent 'insider-outsider' theories. See A. Lindbeck, 'The microfoundations of unemployment theory', Labour 5 (1991), 3-23.
11. See Van Parijs, Real Freedom, pp. 106-9.
12. Once employment rents are included in the UBI tax base 'it is then no longer ludicrous to suggest that the non-discriminatory concern with people's access to the means for the pursuit of their conceptions of the good life, the leximinning of real freedom, should demand that people be given an adequate basic income' (Real Freedom, p. 108).
13. This argument can be found, for example, in H. Spencer, Social Statics (Johnathan Chapman, (1st ed.) 1851), and H. George, Progress and Poverty (New York, The Robert Schlakenbach Foundation, 1962 [1879]).
14. This argument can be found, for example, in H. Spencer, Social Statics (Johnathan Chapman, (1st ed.) 1851), and H. George, Progress and Poverty (New York, The Robert Schlakenbach Foundation, 1962 [1879]).
15. Van Parijs' response to this potential difficulty takes up ch. 3 of Real Freedom, pp. 58-88. I will not attempt to evaluate the adequacy of the response here.
16. Why add the qualifier 'intended' to 'cooperative benefits'? Because if A and B cooperate to produce a good, X, which has as an unintended side-product, Y, it is not clear that (able-bodied) C is free-riding on, and thus exploiting, A and B, if she willingly partakes of Y, while still refraining from consumption of X. Intended economic benefits of social cooperation are, paradigmatically, the flows of intentionally produced goods and services in an economy that provide, though not exhaustively, the material basis for the pursuit of individuals' respective conceptions of the good.
17. K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (Peking, 1976), p. 16.
18. Individuals may suffer 'productive handicaps' which limit their ability to engage in production. Contributive activity is then properly weighted by degree of productive handicap so that these individuals need not perform the same number of 'raw' hours of socially useful labour to be entitled to a given level of income as those who suffer no such handicap.
19. The contributive status of various kinds of domestic labour is a complex issue and space prevents me from exploring it in the depth it warrants here. Also bracketed in this discussion is the no less important question of the contributive status of the capitalist, i.e., one who supplies capital for productive purposes rather than working. For present purposes I make the provisional and simplifying assumption that personal contribution takes the form of work, and add to this the assumption that some forms of domestic care work do count, to some (here unelaborated) extent, as contributive.
20. Put another way, the condition is that the individual must have at least some minimum threshold level of marketable talent in order to acquire obligations under the principle of baseline reciprocity. This condition is added so as to ensure that no productively capable individual is constrained over the long-term to satisfy the work expectation by working at an objectively highly unpleasant job (which would be a noxious form of brute luck disadvantage). My working assumption is that this goal can be achieved by ensuring that all citizens have access to a high minimum of education and training. Those whose level of talent simply cannot be raised sufficiently through education to satisfy this condition may be regarded as sufficiently productively handicapped as to be exempt from the work expectation.
21. By 'pure natural resources' I mean natural resources in their natural, unimproved state, and the 'value' of pure natural resources is simply the value of natural resources in this state, e.g., the value a piece of land has in virtue of its natural fertility, deducting any value added by human improvements to its fertility.
22. Presumably there has to be some sort of state apparatus to enforce the right in question in which case it can be argued that individuals owe some portion of their natural resource UBI back to society in return for the services this apparatus provides; equivalently, we may say that a portion of the UBI is paid as income in kind, in the form of these services, with the general cash payment being correspondingly reduced. I thank Amy Gutmann for raising this point.
23. A 'cooperative community' is here conceived as an association of persons engaged in sustained economic cooperation on the basis of ground-rules that reflect a shared, public conception of justice; in the case of a liberal egalitarian cooperative community, this conception of justice will incorporate the equal opportunity and reciprocity principles discussed above.
24. Van Parijs states this quite explicitly in an earlier paper, 'Competing Justifications of Basic Income' in Van Parijs (ed.), Arguing for Basic Income (London, Verso, 1992), p. 13. It is also implied by his claim in Real Freedom, p. 102, that the UBI financed only from our first two layers is likely to range from 'the pathetically low to the frankly negligible'.
25. See Real Freedom, p. 102.
26. For recent proposals along these lines, see M. White, Against Unemployment (London, Policy Studies Instititute, 1991), pp. 215-21, and R. Haveman, Starting Even: an Equal Opportunity Program to Combat the Nation's New Poverty (New York NY, Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 168-71.
27. For recent proposals along these lines, see M. White, Against Unemployment (London, Policy Studies Instititute, 1991), pp. 215-21, and R. Haveman, Starting Even: an Equal Opportunity Program to Combat the Nation's New Poverty (New York NY, Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 168-71.
28. The participation income shares the first two features of the UBI (i.e., is paid on an individual basis and without a means-test), but is conditional, in the case of the able-bodied, on some form of contributive activity, though not necessarily paid work. See A. B. Atkinson, Beveridge, the National Minimum, and its Future in a European Context (London School of Economics, STICERD Welfare State Programme Discussion Paper 85, 1993).
29. Such policies are required by the reciprocity principle to the extent that they are necessary to ensure that citizens have adequate opportunity to satisfy their reasonable work expectation, and to ensure that those satisfying this expectation receive at least the decent minimum of income to which they are entitled.
30. See Van Parijs, Real Freedom, p. 109.
31. For similar criticism of this aspect of Van Parijs' argument, see E. Torisky Jr., 'Rawls, Van Parijs, and unconditional basic income', Analysis 53 (1993), pp. 289-97, and R. Arneson, 'Is socialism dead?', Ethics 102 (1992), 485-511, specifically pp. 507-8.
32. For similar criticism of this aspect of Van Parijs' argument, see E. Torisky Jr., 'Rawls, Van Parijs, and unconditional basic income', Analysis 53 (1993), pp. 289-97, and R. Arneson, 'Is socialism dead?', Ethics 102 (1992), 485-511, specifically pp. 507-8.
33. See Real Freedom, ch. 5, pp. 133-85.
34. Real Freedom, p. 145.
35. The three principles are respectively set out and discussed at pp. 145-53, 153-60, and 160-9 of Real Freedom.
36. Thus, according to Van Parijs, the Lockean principle 'would force us to endorse massive inequalities between the rewards of workers ... operating under different conditions' (p. 153); and the Lutheran principle has an 'embarrassing implication' - of rewarding workers who have the good fortune of having more powerful tools more handsomely than other workers who work equally long and hard' - which is said to be 'strictly parallel' to that just noted in relation to the Lockean principle (p. 160). As regards the strong effort principle, Van Parijs expresses doubt that this principle would command widespread intuitive consent (p. 167), and backs this claim up with the thought that 'the principle of proportionality between income and effort loses all plausibility in a situation in which there are arbitrary inequalities in the opportunity to engage in productive effort' (p. 168). Van Parijs makes many other criticisms of each of these principles which I lack space to raise here, but this brute luck objection is the most persistent criticism, the only one which is levelled at all three principles.
37. See Van Parijs, Real Freedom, pp. 167-9.
38. At least, it does not tolerate individuals suffering absolute disadvantage - a deficiency in opportunity relative to some minimally acceptable baseline - as a matter of bad brute luck.
39. On the point and exact import of this qualifier, see footnote 21.