An early version of my manuscript, Property and the Power to Say No: Five Arguments for Universal Basic Income is now available online.
This manuscript is my first statement of the “indepentarian” theory of justice, I call, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.” Most of it comes from my doctoral dissertation, which I submitted to the university of Oxford in 2006 (available for free here). However, I am in the progress of making the following changes in advance of publication. First, I’ve added one chapter, Chapter 13: “Reciprocity and Universal Basic Income,” which is taken from an article, “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income,” published in Politics and Society, in 1999. Second, I’m working on copyediting changes, updates to the citations, and a few updates to the terminology (in all progress). For example, where appropriate, I now use “Universal Basic Income” or “UBI” rather than “basic income,” or “guaranteed income.”
Chapters 1-5, 12, and 14 were published in highly altered form in the book, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No. Heavily revised versions of three chapters were published as articles. Chapter 5 was published in 2010 as “The Physical Basis of Voluntary Trade,” Human Rights Review 11 (1): 83-103. Chapter 7 was published in 2010 as “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation,” Public Reason 2 (3). Chapter 11 was published in 2006 as “Who Exploits Who?” Political Studies 54 (3). Chapters 6, 8, 10, and 14 are published here for the first time.
There are several reasons for making this manuscript available in this form at this time. It is my first broad statement of “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord” (JPA) the theory of justice I have been working on since 1999. It contains a shorter and more succinct version of the JPA theory of freedom than I have published elsewhere. It is the first published version of my argument for dropping the natural-rights-based justification of property in favor of the JPA alternative, property rights by general agreement. It brings together my replies to three common objections to Universal Basic Income (UBI). I call them the exploitation objection, the duty objection, and the reciprocity objection. The parts that have not previously been published are best understood in the context of this manuscript as a whole.
This manuscript provides five arguments for UBI, one based on the JPA theory of freedom (Part One), another based on the JPA theory of property (Part Two), and three that reply to common objects to UBI and in each case turns the argument around using the central concepts in a justification for UBI (Part Three). I submitted the dissertation on which this manuscript is based before I settled on the terms “indepentarianism” and “justice as the pursuit of accord,” but most of the elements that make up those concepts are in place here, one central example being the existence of dissenters (people who have reasonable objections to prevailing social arrangements, the duties they are asked to perform, or the rewards they are given in return). The presence of dissenters implies both the failure of social contract theory to create social arrangements that no reasonable person could object to and the failure of natural rights theory to come up with a list of rights that all rational ethical people can or should accept.
You can find the manuscript online at this link: Property and the Power to Say No: Five Arguments for Universal Basic Income. Comments welcome.
Karl Widerquist
Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina, January 1, 2022
Karl@Widerquist.com
