Interrogations for Equality Seminar Session 4. Basic Income September 24, 2009 Ben Kilbarger Is there good reason, contra Bergmann, to put SG or UBI on the short-to-medium term agenda? UBI and SGs both sound really, really cool. I’ve spent no small amount of time this weekend staring off into space wondering what the US would be like if either of them were implemented. I’m not sure which to prefer. I look forward to hearing which people find best, all things considered. I worry, however, that we’re premature in considering either. Bergmann’s challenge troubles me: we have a fixed amount of resources, which will go toward funding a welfare state or a system of wealth distribution like a UBI or SG. We cannot, at present, have both. Equality is important. But Bergmann seems to point at something even more fundamental: what’s really important is ending the worst suffering of the worst off, and ending it immediately. We care about this regardless of whether we care about equality. Once we sufficiently help the worst-off, we can redirect our resources toward achieving equality in the broader sense, including income, wealth, jobs, etc. That’s not to say that meeting the pressing, immediate needs of the worst-off is not contained within or fully compatible with achieving overall equality. It’s that the focus on wealth-redistribution seems too diffused a notion of equality in a world with way too much hunger, disease, violence, and way too few resources like healthcare, quality housing and education. If we only have X% of the GDP to work with (allowing for healthy growth), should we not focus all of our resources on ending the most tangible, immediate, ameliorable forms of human suffering? Once that’s achieved, we can move on to consider further equalizing measures. In short, is there a good response to Bergmann? Is there good reason to put a UBI or SG plan on the short-to-medium term political agenda? Especially in a country like the US, which has relatively poor social services? (This points back to the non/ideal issue: the UBI/SG question is fascinating, but is it the right one to ask in a world like ours? Or does it idealize too far away from the actual?) Gina Schouten As Philippe Van Parijs recognizes, his case for a guaranteed basic income as a “first-best” means of achieving social justice depends upon the acceptance of a “real freedom” metric of justice, where real freedom is understood as “the real freedom to pursue the realization of one’s conception of the good life, whatever it is” (Van Parijs 16). I am not persuaded that “realSociology 915 & Philosophy 955. Interrogations week 4 2 freedom” is what egalitarians should seek to equalize, so I am not persuaded by Van Parijs’s arguments in defense of a basic income. I hope we are able to spend some time in seminar talking about how plausible the “real freedom” metric of justice is, and whether a first-best case for basic income can still be offered if we reject that metric. My reason for being doubtful that real freedom is the appropriate distribuendum of social justice stems from my belief that people can have conceptions of the good life which are incorrect and/or objectionably harmful to other people. When people have conceptions of the good life which are incorrect or harmful (or at least when those conceptions are both incorrect and harmful), there is no duty of justice to ensure that those people are as free to pursue those conceptions as others are to pursue correct or benign conceptions of the good. (It might (I hope!) seem less pompous to entertain the possibility of incorrect and harmful conceptions of the good life if we imagine a conception which we are strongly inclined to consider harmful—let’s say to the agent herself—and then consider whether it is plausible to say that it is also incorrect in virtue of the harm it causes.) In suggesting that some conceptions of the good life can be wrong, and that our duties of justice do not require us to promote those on a par with other conceptions of the good life, I mean to be suggesting that the state need not be entirely neutral with respect to conceptions of the good. This is, I think, what makes Barbara Bergmann’s proposal of universal provision of “merit goods” (Bergmann 130) so much more appealing to me than the provision of a basic income. Catherine Willis Sufficiency I was quite surprised by the interpretation of sufficiency offered by Casal; she seems to interpret Frankfurt's concept to mean the bare minimum required to survive, while Frankfurt specifically rejects this (38). I found absent from both discussions the idea that sufficient might change depending on the general distribution of income in society in two ways. First, in a society with some very rich people, it would seem that what is sufficient would need to be higher than if there were no very rich people. So for sufficiency to be satisfied as a criteria, might a reduction of inequality starting from the top not also be required? Second, absent from the discussion is an explicit look at how establishing sufficiency would require not just looking at the job market and cost of living, which is also the focus in Ackerman et al., but looking at the money needed to even out political inequality. Right now for example, I would argue that my income is sufficient with regards to my living needs, but absolutely inadequate with regards to influencing politics like many business leaders can. For my income to be considered sufficient in this context it would be necessary to increase my income or reduce the ability of the richest members of society to use their money to influence politics. Children and basic income Bergmann (in Ackerman et al. 140) raises the problem of “loss of power over children by their parents” as a consequence of Basic Income. For me, bringing children into the debate raises a whole other slew of questions about basic income, and I am not sure of the answers: − why give basic income to children: to help their parents raise them or for their parents toSociology 915 & Philosophy 955. Interrogations week 4 3 save for them for when they get older? − who controls this money? Do we assume that a parent with a basic income does not have enough money to raise a child? − does giving children a basic income contribute more to equality than having a well supported welfare