Unconditional welfare benefits and the principle of reciprocity

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 331-354

  Segall, Shlomi ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

contractualism; reciprocity; unconditional basic income; welfare state; work

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248042191     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X05056607     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. Hegel complained that for the needy to receive subsistence from public resources ‘directly, not by means of their work. would violate the principle of civil society’. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, Section 245 (emphasis added) cited in J. Donald Moon, ‘The Moral Basis of the Democratic Welfare State’, in Democracy and the Welfare State, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 27–52. J.S. Mill, equally, has warned against the moral corruption entailed by what amounts to guaranteed income (see below). ‘Leave the people in the situation in which their condition manifestly depends upon their numbers, and the greatest permanent benefit may be derived from any sacrifice made to improve the physical well-being of the present generation, and raise, by that means, the habits of their children. But remove the regulation of their wages from their own control; guarantee to them a certain payment, either by law, or by the feeling of the community; and no amount of comfort that you can give to them will make either them or their descendants look to their own self-restraint as the proper means of preserving them in that state. You will only make them indignantly claim the continuance of your guarantee to themselves and their full complement of possible posterity.’ See J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (emphasis added) cited in Gerald F. Gaus, The Modern Liberal Theory of Man (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 248.
2. Welfare paternalists think that welfare policy should move to supervise the lives of the poor who have become dependent on welfare. Their main focus is on the work requirement, but their paternalism can also entail conditioning welfare on proof of drug and alcohol rehabilitation. See Lawrence M. Mead, The New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Welfare (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1997).
3. See Mary E. Hawkesworth, ‘Workfare and the Imposition of Discipline’, Social Theory and Practice 11 (1985): 171; Peter Street, ‘The Poverty of Workfare: Dubious Claims, Dark Clouds, and a Silver Lining’, Dissent 45 (1998): 58. On the British case, see Des King and Mark Wickham-Jones, ‘From Clinton to Blair: The Democratic (Party) Origins of Welfare to Work’, The Political Quarterly 70 (1999): 62-74. On the Norwegian case, see Nina Kildal, ‘Justification of Workfare: The Norwegian Case’, Critical Social Policy 19 (1999): 353-70. Admittedly, even after the imposition of workfare only a minority (34 percent in 2000) of the recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are working (where working is defined as a minimum working week of 30 hours). See URL: http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/opre/ar2001/indexar.htm.
4. Amy Gutmann and Dennis F. Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1996), Ch. 8; Stuart White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, Political Studies 45 (1997): 312-26; Stuart White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
5. David Miller, for example, writes that UBI does ‘not consort well with socialist concerns about community and social responsibility. unconditional basic income permits those who could work but choose not to do so to exploit those working out of a sense of social responsibility, and such exploitation violates a socialist norm of reciprocity’. See David Miller, ‘What's Left of the Welfare State’, Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2003): 109.
6. Lawrence M. Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York and London: Free Press, 1986), p. 82.
7. See Karl Widerquist, ‘Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income’, Politics and Society 27 (1999): 387-402.
8. Arneson invokes a similar example. See Richard J. Arneson, ‘Is Work Special? Justice and the Distribution of Employment’, American Political Science Review 84 (1990): 1129.
9. Equally, an alleged obligation ‘to support one's family’ cannot be said to be imposed by welfare contractualists, since they do not, in effect, demand that each adult do her utmost to support her family, but rather that at least one adult in the family will do so. This, again, cannot be an obligation of citizenship. The same applies to an alleged obligation ‘to avoid being needy’ or ‘avoid being a burden to society’. People such as Mead consciously avoid espousing an obligation of that kind because, for a start, it is unclear what such an obligation demands, but mainly because we usually baulk from civic obligations that are of a consequential, rather than a deontological, nature.
10. See Joseph H. Carens, Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market: An Essay in Utopian Politico-Economic Theory (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
11. See André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (London and New York: Verso, 1989). Of course, Gorz's suggestion to impose a civic obligation to work requires the state, at the same time, to provide a rewarding job for everyone, and to ban the sale of personal services. The latter condition prevents the somewhat absurd situation that prevails in the USA following the introduction of TANF, whereby single mothers who are ‘on welfare’ are prevented (in the name of the obligation to ‘work off’ their welfare benefits) from home- and child-caring in their own homes during the work day, but may well find themselves doing the same exact work in the homes of other citizens. See Gwendolyn Mink, Welfare's End (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 134.
12. Becker, ‘The Obligation to Work’, pp. 36–7.
13. See, for example, Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1944), Ch. 4.
14. Lawrence C. Becker, Reciprocity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 73. Obviously, the same applies to reciprocation of bads (retribution), where one might perhaps think of some moral duty to revenge. Gouldner refers in this context to ‘retaliation’ as ‘negative norms of reciprocity’. See Alvin W. Gouldner, ‘The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement’, American Sociological Review 25 (1960): 172.
15. Becker, Reciprocity, p. 73.
16. Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 46; Becker, ‘The Obligation to Work’, p. 35; George Klosko, The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992).
17. Note also that for institutions to enforce a duty of respect between citizens is very different from the duty of institutions to respect their citizens, which is a much more plausible proposition. On the latter, see Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996).
18. In speaking of ‘a duty of reciprocity’, White seems to compound a requirement of justice (the duty not to free-ride) with the moral duty to show gratitude. It is fairly easy to tell where he has one in mind and where the other. When thinking of the requirement of justice, White defends it in terms of avoiding exploitation. When he has the moral duty to show gratitude in mind, he brandishes an argument about dignity and ‘democratic mutual regard’. See White, The Civic Minimum, Section 3.2.
19. Joseph H. Carens, ‘An Interpretation and Defense of the Socialist Principle of Distribution’, Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2003): 146.
20. See also Gouldner, ‘The Norm of Reciprocity’, p. 169. Gouldner speaks of ‘duties and rights’ rather than burdens and benefits.
21. Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 29.
22. Dagger, Civic Virtues, p. 58.
23. See also White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, pp. 318–9.
24. As is suggested by Becker, Reciprocity, pp. 73–144, especially pp. 74–5, 83.
25. Warren calls this ‘perfect reciprocity’. See Paul Warren, ‘Self-Ownership, Reciprocity, and Exploitation; or Why Marxists Shouldn't be Afraid of Robert Nozick’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994): 50. See also White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, p. 318; White, The Civic Minimum, Ch. 3.
26. Warren, ‘Self-Ownership, Reciprocity, and Exploitation’, pp. 50–51.
27. Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty, p. 29.
28. Dagger, Civic Virtues, p. 58.
29. Since all principles of justice entail some understanding of reciprocity it is therefore somewhat redundant, I think, to speak of ‘justice as fair reciprocity’ in the way that White does. See White, The Civic Minimum, Ch. 4. In contrast, the term ‘justice as fair reciprocity’ does make sense when it refers to a specific theory of justice that holds that reciprocity is the basis of, and therefore all that there is to, justice. For a sympathetic view of the latter, see Allan Gibbard, ‘Constructing Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991): 264-79. For a critical view, see Allen Buchanan, ‘Justice as Reciprocity Versus Subject-Centred Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1990): 227-52; Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 46–51.
30. Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty, p. 29.
31. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 569.
32. See also Carens, ‘An Interpretation and Defense of the Socialist Principle of Distribution’, p. 149.
33. Under a needs-based scheme one is also under a corresponding obligation not to exaggerate or aggravate one's needs. Duties of citizens in an egalitarian society, thus, may include the duty to look after one's health and lead healthy lifestyles, so as to minimize the burden on health resources that should be available for everyone on the basis of need. See Heather Draper and Tom Sorell, ‘Patients’ Responsibilities in Medical Ethics’, Bioethics 16 (2002): 343-5.
34. See Joseph H. Carens, ‘Right and Duties in an Egalitarian Society’, Political Theory 14 (1986): 31; Carens, ‘An Interpretation and Defense of the Socialist Principle of Distribution’, p. 150.
35. See also Dagger, Civic Virtues, pp. 72–8.
36. Which is not to say that users of a lighthouse cannot be made to pay towards its upkeep (something which when exercised by the state, can indeed make lighthouse building and keeping into a profitable private enterprise, rather than a case of market failure). See Ronald H. Coase, ‘The Lighthouse in Economics’, in Famous Fables of Economics: Myths of Market Failures, edited by Daniel F. Spulber (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 32–48.
37. White, The Civic Minimum, p. 61.
38. But earlier I have said that no just relation is at odds with reciprocity, and a relation based on equity should not be an exception. The point, then, is that a concern with reciprocity simply does not arise in a purely equity-based exchange.
39. White, The Civic Minimum, p. 61.
40. As in, for example, Hobhouse's evocation of the obligation to contribute. Leonard T. Hobhouse, ‘Liberalism’, in Liberalism and Other Writings, edited by James Meadowcroft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 79.
41. White, The Civic Minimum, pp. 137–8.
42. See King and Wickham-Jones, ‘From Clinton to Blair’, p. 62 on a similar point.
43. I therefore do not commit myself to the view that there is nothing wrong with punishing idle citizens. One may say the following, though. It is not at all obvious that punishing non-compliance with a civic obligation to work (that is, when it is imposed across the board) is more repugnant than doing so with regard to other civic obligations. It is not clear why we should be more apprehensive about legally enforcing a civic duty to work than about enforcing compulsory military service, say. Yet, many contemporary liberal democracies regularly imprison or fine their citizens for shirking military service.
44. Whether effort is luck insensitive is an issue I leave aside. Van Parijs, for example, thinks effort could also be a matter of luck. See Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 168.
45. I call this ‘the luck-egalitarian position’, because luck egalitarians do not consider differences of income to be unjust when they only reflect differences in the burden of work. See, for example, G.A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics 99 (1989): 906-44.
46. Both of which are the measurements of effort proposed by Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 568.
47. See Carens, ‘An Interpretation and Defense of the Socialist Principle of Distribution’, p. 157.
48. Take unpleasantness, for example. As Van Parijs asks, is it more strenuous conscientiously to dust a piano for an hour or to spend an hour lifting it to the third floor? See Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, pp. 155–6.
49. Note that even Carens, who previously (in Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market) advocated a duty to contribute based on a different interpretation of effort (namely, a duty to work at the highest pre-tax earning job possible), has come to endorse the duty simply to work full time, thereby endorsing the application of effort as being simply the duration of work. See Carens, ‘Right and Duties in an Egalitarian Society’, p. 35.
50. White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, p. 318. A typical problem with this principle, which we nevertheless set aside here, is that it would create disincentives for efficiency, that is, it would create an incentive to work hard even when there are less strenuous means for achieving the same end. See Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, pp. 97, 164.
51. This is noted by Van Parijs. See Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, pp. 166–7. This is also why, according to Van Parijs, the effort principle, if anything, should only govern the allocation of privileges. See Philippe Van Parijs, ‘Reciprocity and the Justification of an Unconditional Basic Income: Reply to Stuart White’, Political Studies 45 (1997): 330.
52. White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, p. 319.
53. Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, p. 165.
54. Under TANF, for example, every welfare recipient (even a single mother with no childcare) is expected to work 30 hours a week at the first available job.
55. Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, p. 167.
56. Something that even its critics admit. ‘The alternative construal can be aligned with the view that there is a duty to work and that the economy should be arranged so that those who fulfil this duty do better than those who violate it.’ See Richard J. Arneson, ‘Is Socialism Dead? A Comment on Market Socialism and Basic Income Capitalism’, Ethics 102 (1992): 508 (emphasis added).
57. White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, p. 319. This same principle appears in a slightly different wording in a later text: ‘those who claim the generous share of the social product available to them under these institutions have an obligation to make a decent productive contribution, suitably proportioned and fitting to ability and circumstances, to the community in return. I term this the fair-dues conception of reciprocity.’ See White, The Civic Minimum, p. 59 (see also p. 97).
58. White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, pp. 319–20.
59. It is possible, of course, for us to modify White's proposal so that income above ‘baseline reciprocity’ would still be proportionate to effort. The point of my argument is that, given the relatively long working week demanded by ‘baseline reciprocity’, we cannot retain the strong proportionality between effort and income in those upper levels of income.
60. However, it should be pointed out that White conditions the implementation of the work-test on the welfare state becoming much more generous than Mead would allow. See, White, The Civic Minimum, pp. 149–52.
61. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1993), p. 182, note 9. Incidentally, even this well-rehearsed intuition is not so straightforward as it initially may seem. As Widerquist points out, whereas nowadays those surfing all day off Malibu or Hawaii may be looked upon as parasites, several centuries ago, before most natural resources there were privatized, many Hawaiians did afford doing precisely that. See Widerquist, ‘Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income’, p. 391.
62. Note that White's baseline reciprocity draws part of its initial appeal from the following. It is attractive to correlate ‘a decent minimum of income’ with ‘a decent minimum of contributive activity’. See White, ‘Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income’, p. 319 (emphasis added). See also White, The Civic Minimum, pp. 58, 97. But there is a confusion in the use of the adjective ‘decent’ here. ‘Decent minimum’ with regard to income concerns what constitutes a minimum level of decent living in a given society. With regard to contributive activity, the ‘decent minimum’ refers to what constitutes a reasonable (rather than a ‘decent’) trade-off between leisure and labour. More importantly, even if there was some verbal symmetry between a decent minimum of income and a ‘decent’ minimum of work, this by no means necessitates correlating the entitlement to a decent minimum of living with a reasonable minimum hours of work. A minimum level of decent living could as easily, for that matter, be correlated with half the reasonable minimum of a working day, say (especially when strict proportionality is forsaken, as it is in this case).
63. Miller, ‘What's Left of the Welfare State’, p. 109, note 29.
64. It has been established, in fact, that making work into a legal duty undermines one's work commitment. See Hawkesworth, ‘Workfare and the Imposition of Discipline’, p. 170. Equally, research has shown that it is precisely the universal welfare state, with its generous benefits system and its commitment to full employment that in fact conveys the message of work as a civic obligation. See Knut Halvorsen, ‘The Work Ethic Under Challenge?’ in Work-Quo Vadis? Rethinking the Question of Work, edited by Jan Holmer and Jan C. Karlsson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), p. 121.
65. By ‘relatively unconditional’ I mean a high replacement rate in unemployment benefits, coupled with an extended period of entitlement and lax regulations regarding proof of job seeking. All this, it has been noted, in effect ‘gives the individual a great deal of guaranteed income security’. Gosta Esping-Andersen and Walter Korpi, ‘From Poor Relief to Institutional Welfare States: The Development of Scandinavian Social Policy’, in The Scandinavian Model: Welfare States and Welfare Research, edited by Robert Erikson (London: Sharpe, 1987), p. 54.
66. See Robert E. Goodin, Bruce Headley, Ruud Muffels, and Henk-Jan Driven, The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 189–90. A system of generous benefits is, it seems, (at least) compatible with a high employment rate. This has not changed much even during the turbulent 1990s in Scandinavia, when eligibility for and the duration of benefits was only minimally tightened. See Sven Jochem, ‘Nordic Labour Market Policies in Transition’, West European Politics 23 (2000): 115-38. Admittedly, the high rates of labour-force participation in Scandinavia coexisted with (and according to some critics, were produced by) a decline in the length of the working week. See Per- Anders Edin and Robert Topel, ‘Wage Policy and Restructuring: The Swedish Labour Market since 1960’, in The Welfare State in Transition: Reforming the Swedish Model, edited by Richard B. Freeman, Robert Topel, and Birgitta Swedenborg (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997), pp. 162–4.
67. Surveys show that Scandinavians demonstrate the highest work commitment in the West (while having the most unconditional of benefit systems). See Torild Hammer, ‘The Influence of Different Compensation Levels of Unemployment Benefits on Job Chances among Unemployed Youth: A Comparative Study of the Nordic Countries’, Acta Sociologica 42 (1999): 123-34. Now, it has long been part of conventional wisdom that generous and unconditional unemployment benefits prolong, at least in the short term, the duration of unemployment. See Richard Layard, How to Beat Unemployment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Ch. 4; Steven J. Nickell, ‘The Effect of Unemployment and Related Benefits on the Duration of Unemployment’, The Economic Journal 89 (1979): 34-49. At the same time, however, it has been established that while generous and unconditional benefits make citizens ‘fussier’ with regard to the type of employment they are willing to take and allow them more time to seek the ‘right’ job, it is also the case that benefits do not have a negative effect on work commitment or on the general incentive to work. See Halvorsen, ‘The Work Ethic Under Challenge?’ In fact, unemployed people generally show a higher commitment to work than do employed ones. See Duncan Gallie and Carolyn Vogler, ‘Unemployment and Attitudes to Work’, in Social Change and the Experience of Unemployment, edited by Duncan Gallie, Catherine Marsh, and Carolyn Vogler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 125.
68. Edmund S. Phelps, Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self- Support to Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 92.
69. Note that when White claims that there is ‘a widespread intuition that in a just society citizens must have access on reasonable terms to the resources necessary to meet their basic needs’ (that is, that entitlement to health care and other basic goods should be conditional), he refers to empirical studies that exclusively examine US and British public attitudes in this respect. See White, The Civic Minimum, p. 131 (emphasis added). See also Lawrence M. Mead, ‘Citizenship and Social Policy: T.H. Marshall and Poverty’, Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1997): 222. White refers here to Miller, and Miller in turn, cites evidence from the USA and Britain. See David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 73–8. However, we know that ‘Americans are less positive than Europeans, even on social welfare matters that have very high levels of support in the United States - retirement benefits, health care, jobs, and housing. The United States is consistently at the bottom in its support for different kinds of social welfare benefits.’ Furthermore, in this respect, we find ‘the Anglo- American nations (US, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia) at the lower end and the US at the bottom’. See Robert Y. Shapiro and John T. Young, ‘Public Opinion and the Welfare State: The United States in Comparative Perspective’, Political Science Quarterly 104 (1989): 69. This picture is confirmed elsewhere. Approval of the statement ‘The government should provide everyone with a guaranteed basic income’ attracts only 34.2 percent of US respondents, compared to 58.1 percent of German respondents and 78.4 percent of Norwegians. Svallfors notes the deviant case of Sweden with a surprisingly low 45.5 percent, something which he attributes to the particular translation of the question into Swedish. See Stefan Svallfors, ‘Worlds of Welfare and Attitudes to Redistribution: A Comparison of Eight Western Nations’, European Sociological Review 13 (1997): 288. See also Peter Taylor-Gooby, ‘What Citizens Want from the State’, in International Social Attitudes: The 10th BSA Report, edited by R. Jowell, L. Brook, and L. Dowds (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1993), pp. 81–101.