Reciprocity and the Justification of an Unconditional Basic Income. Reply to Stuart White
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00084 |
| Date | 01 June 1997 |
| Published date | 01 June 1997 |
| Author | Philippe van Parijs |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Reciprocity and the Justi®cation of an
Unconditional Basic Income.
Reply to Stuart White
PHILIPPE VAN PARIJS1
Universite Catholique de Louvain
Real Freedom for All (Oxford, Clarendon, 1995, henceforth RFA) claims to
provide a principled, ®rst-best justi®cation of a substantial unconditional basic
income (henceforth UBI). One objection to this claim is that it condones
exploitation: those who choose to live o their basic income without making
any productive contribution unfairly free-ride on those citizens who do make
the required contribution. Chapter 5 of RFA examines several variants of this
objection and argues that either they rely on indefensible conceptions of social
justice or they prove consistent with the legitimacy of an UBI.
In a thoughtful critical essay,2 Stuart White argues that this rebuttal is
unsuccessful. His `essential intuition' is the same as in the variants of the
exploitation objection I considered: `where others bear some cost in order to
contribute to a scheme of cooperation, then it is unfair for one to willingly enjoy
the intended bene®ts of their cooperative eorts unless one is willing to bear the
cost of making a relevantly proportionate contribution to this scheme of co-
operation in return' (pp. 317±8). This intuition relies on some eciprocity-based
conception of justice, though one that need not appeal to some unavoidably and
unacceptably inegalitarian principle of strict reciprocity (`putting in as much as
one takes out'. It can appeal to a far more egalitarian principle of baseline
reciprocity (`doing one's bit'): `in return for [a] decent minimum of income each
citizen has a corresponding obligation to perform a decent minimum of
contributive activity, the size of this minimum varying with degree of productive
handicap' (p. 319). Those who do not satisfy this suitably adjusted reasonable
work expectation `take unfair advantage of ± i.e. exploit ± those citizens who
do satisfy this expectation' (p. 320). Such a critique is not vulnerable to the same
brute luck objection on the basis of which White says I rightly rejected the
versions of the exploitation-based objection I examined (p....
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