Mandatory Participation Series Contents
In any earlier post in this series,[1] I argued that the ideal of a UBI society is one in which we all commit to respecting each individual’s right to refuse to any and all work they find unattractive. I suggested we can easily use positive incentives to get people to do what needs to be done.
What if I’m wrong? What if there are duties that we all have a responsibility to do and that if we rely only on positive incentives, not everyone will do their duty and not all the duties will get done. The duties I’m thinking of could be of two kinds: things we all need done to keep humanity alive and duties to help others. For an example of the first kind, imagine a group of people in a rowboat above a falls, and they all will surely die unless each of them literally pulls their weight. For an example of the second kind, consider the need to provide care for children, the elderly, or the disabled who are unable to reciprocate.
I addressed this issue in the chapter called “On Duty” in my book the Power to Say No (which was published as Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say “No.” (Sorry for the long title. I should have pushed back harder against the publisher.) Here’s the basics of the argument from that chapter.
I could be wrong. There might be duties that would not get done if there was a UBI. But there is no argument that is consistent with equal rights for all and that gets you from this premise to the justification of the mandatory-participation system we have and that UBI opponents want to maintain. The system we have is one where everybody has to make money. Some people own assets that make money for them. They work if they want to and let their assets work for them. They have no obligation to perform any duty of active contribution.
Non-wealthy people have a very effective obligation to make money by selling their labor. But making money by selling your labor is very different from performing any moral duty. The vast majority of jobs do not perform any work that we could conceivably be construed as a moral duty. A large portion of it simply fulfills the whims of better off people sometimes by performing trivial or even counter-productive tasks.
We are not in a desperate struggle for survival: we are more accurately in a challenging struggle to provide more luxuries without killing the environment that sustains us. The actual labor devoted to anything that can conceivably be called a duty can’t be more than one, three, maybe five years out of the average laborer’s lifetime.
If we wanted a system in which everyone performs the things that we actually have a duty to perform, we would have to have a work obligation for everyone, rich and poor alike, and that obligation would have to be equally onerous for everyone. Nobody gets out of their obligation to do an actual duty by saying I’m so good looking that rich people will pay me to stand there and let somebody take my picture. Nobody gets out of their obligation by saying the laws give me “title” to these resources, and they work instead of me.
Everyone picks the vegetables, everyone changes the bedpans of the elderly, everyone cleans the toilets of the preschool, and so on for one, three, maybe five years, then we all get our UBI for ourselves (and our children) as our pension for having fulfilled our duty to society.
Maybe most of us don’t want to do these things. But if we won’t do these things ourselves even for a few years, we can’t claim any moral high ground while use the threat of poverty, destitution, and homelessness to force less privileged people to spend their entire lives performing these duties for us.
-Karl Widerquist, completed the Battery Cafe, St. John’s Newfoundland, July 25, 2023
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of the posts in this series were written with the intention of going into my forthcoming book, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge for MIT Press, and many, if not most, of the ideas presented here did make it into the book, but the publisher suggest I soften the wording and some of the arguments, because as is, in this version of it, “the anti-UBI crowd seems like a bunch of mustache-twirling robber barons,” and she rightly thought that the antagonistic stance would be less convincing than more confrontational one here. So, for the book, I made those changes, but I liked what was left out as well. I thought there must be a place for it. And I decided that place was on my blog. I refer everyone to the book because it has a different approach; because it benefits from peer review, copyediting, and more extensive proofreading; and because it has important ideas that aren’t here. Also, many of the arguments here are developed more fully in other books and articles of mine, most of which you can find on my website: www.widerquist.com.
Karl Widerquist, Karl@Widerquist.com
[1] Part 13, Mandatory-participation and voluntary-participation as competing ideals (July 6, 2023).