Abstract
This article discusses left-libertarian justifications of basic income. The basic income policy is designed to decouple income from employment in the monetized economy by allowing the individual to access, on a regular stipulated basis, a grant that is independent of her ability and willingness to work for remuneration. This article attempts to amend an important failure with respect to the way in which the concept of real freedom has been treated in Van Parijs’ pioneering defense of the universal grant. Van Parijs’ defense of basic income does not pay substantial attention to the freedom that work-lovers would gain from the opportunity to opt out of work, which the grant would facilitate if sufficiently generous. Van Parijs’ justification of basic income is incomplete in terms of the value it places on the opportunity to enjoy freedom from employment from the purview of every member of society, not only those that will, or might, decide to lead a life (partially) outside of work. The article develops the argument that such failure results from the fact that Van Parijs’ conception of freedom is centered on the importance of actual or potential preference satisfaction as opposed to non-agent-centered reasons.
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Notes
The opting out does not have to be total. Relaxing the central role played by employment in today's society may still be achieved by decoupling income from work to some extent, but not to the utmost extent, thereby making employment wholly voluntary. As Van Parijs himself notes, a basic income at, or below, subsistence level is still better than nothing.
As suggested above, the Basic Income policy may allow for the opportunity to opt out of remunerated work completely if the grant is sufficiently high. However, the arguments of freedom and autonomy developed in this article do not centrally rely on this extreme possibility. The opportunity to work less than full-time is already an indicator of enhanced autonomy and agency, in line with the reasoning offered in this article. As many other values in political and moral philosophy, agency and autonomy can be understood as being a matter of degree. (The individual can be said to be more or less autonomous, and she can be said to be more or less of a moral agent.) Because of this possibility, considerations of political feasibility are easier to discuss. The likelihood that the policy instrument used to embody the ideals of agency and autonomy be politically palatable is surely higher if the option on the table is not the funding of some people's total withdrawal from the monetized economy but only a more flexible lifestyle for which freedom from full-time work is central. (How much thereof is a question which does not need to be thoroughly discussed for the purposes of this paper.)
This is John Stuart Mill's point when he writes in On Liberty that ‘the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it’; Mill is cited by Arneson (1985, p. 432).
One would have to acknowledge, however, that availability of too many options may impose psychological costs on the individual related to the stress that the awareness of having too many choices is likely to cause. Too many options to choose from may bring about welfare decline for the individual. For elaboration of this point, see Dworkin (1982).
Sigdwick's words are quoted in Scanlon (1993, p. 185).
The distinction between instrumental and independent value is drawn by Feinberg (2006, p. 423). Analysis of the value of freedom can also be found in Nozick (1981, pp. 283–295).
Autonomy, here, is broadly understood as life-authorship and the associated ideal of self-direction. See Joseph Raz (1986) for a definition of autonomy along these lines. However, in other parts of the text I will be referring to a more narrow understanding of the term, to wit, authenticity of preferences and desires. For this second understanding, see Frankfurt (1971) and Dworkin (1981).
This literature is too extensive to cite completely. For an illustrative piece, see Elster (1986).
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Maskivker, J. Work lovers, freedom, and basic income. Contemp Polit Theory 10, 21–36 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.7