Is there (or should there be) a right to basic income?

Introduction

Basic income is typically defined as an individual’s entitlement to receive a regular payment as a right, independent of other sources of income, employment or willingness to work, or living situation. This contrasts the assured entitlement to a basic income with the discretionary receipt of conditional income support, whether in the form of categorical and means-tested social assistance, social insurance, or charity. ¹

Historically, proponents have maintained that people’s entitlement to a basic income follows from the fact that we all have an equal right to the social inheritance bestowed upon us by previous generations. ² Thomas Paine, in Agrarian Justice, famously proposed to grant ‘the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age’, justifying his proposal ‘as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property’. ³ Basic income could be regarded as a third tier to the modern Welfare State, a Painean rights-based alternative to the familiar insurance-based Bismarckian and the residual, solidarity-based Beveridgean programs.

Modern justifications of basic income build on this foundation in various ways. Guy Standing traces the notion that everyone should receive a basic income as a right to income security all the way to Paine, but insists that in contemporary society the right to basic income is aimed at combating the dangerous rise of wholesale precariousness. ⁴ Adopting a feminist perspective, Carole Pateman asserts that basic income should be conceived as a democratic right that protects the important freedom not to be employed. ⁵ Philip Pettit, for his part, insists that the republican ideal of freedom-as-non-domination likewise favors instituting a robust right to a basic income, with republicanism according to Pettit being uniquely placed to satisfy the desiderata of ‘adequacy’ and ‘independence’. ⁶ These are but several of a number of ways in which philosophers and policy scholars in recent years have argued for something akin to a right to basic income. ⁷ They establish a number of grounds to think that a basic income scheme would take pride of place in a just social order that embraces the values of individual freedom and equality. At the same time, none of these justifications gives any special consideration of what it might mean for basic income to have a distinctive rights status. This is the concern we address in this article.

When basic income advocates advance a right to basic income they are implicitly doing one of two things. They may be simply asserting that there are important considerations or needs that ought to be recognized by the state. In a classic paper, Joel Feinberg refers to these as manifesto rights. Manifesto rights play an important role in political discourse, expressing among other things an aspiration towards a better future.

When manifesto writers speak of them as if already actual rights, they are easily forgiven, for this is but a powerful way of expressing the conviction that they ought to be recognized by states here and now as potential rights and consequently as determinants of present aspirations and guides to present policies. That usage, I think, is a valid exercise of rhetorical licence. ⁸

Adopting a legal rights framework suggests two different sets of questions, to be explored below. First, what are the implications – ethical and practical – of adopting basic income as a legal right as opposed to a mere policy, understood as a valuable social goal without rights status? Is there any real sense in which granting basic income a rights status matters? Or to put it differently, why bother with rights talk at all, and why not instead take the view that basic income represents an important policy goal where the notion of rights adds very little of value to the well-established discussion about basic income as a requirement of social justice? ¹¹ We take the view that rights status does matter – in fact, we believe it matters greatly – and we hope to demonstrate why having a legal right to a basic income is not a distinction without a difference.

Second, legal rights are in need of proper justification: what (if anything) justifies granting basic income legal rights status? This question connects to the former in that the very idea of singling out basic income as having a rights status, which implies granting basic income higher moral weight compared with ‘ordinary’ social policy, is also the reason it needs a proper moral grounding. Here our argumentative strategy is twofold. We first examine and express concerns about the idea that basic income might constitute a moral right, understood as a claim right that we should have on the grounds that it constitutes or promotes a vital individual interest. The remainder of this article then explores several weaker, goal-based approaches to ascribing a rights status to basic income. This article suggests that a rights basis must be grounded in comparative evaluation and discusses several comparative strategies available to basic income advocates.

I Basic income and legal rights: Why rights status matters

When a staunch advocate like Guy Standing talks about the right to a basic income, he implicitly refers to a right ‘embedded in legislation and enforceable in ordinary public law before the courts and tribunals’. ¹² Thus understood the right to basic income improves upon the aspirational category of a manifesto right, already alluded to in the introduction. At the same time, a right to basic income instituted through legislation does not necessarily entail a commitment to the sort of strong protection envisaged in constitutional rights, suggested by some basic income advocates. ¹³ In other words, the legal right to basic income falls short of being absolute ¹⁴ – granting basic income rights status means that it still would have to be balanced by considerations arising from other social and economic rights or, indeed, political and civil rights ¹⁵ – the idea of a legal right nevertheless implies that basic income would be given priority status over social policies writ large. This has a number of important consequences that are worth spelling out.

First, instituting a legal right to basic income has obvious expressive connotations whereby legislators as well as street-level bureaucrats signal the comparative importance of granting each citizen an unconditional cash grant. The expressive content of this right links basic income to values such as universality, equality, or citizenship, which are rife in the basic income literature. ¹⁶ The expressive function of law and policy is well documented in this literature. ¹⁷ In addition to communicating appropriate attitudes, the distinctive legal forms inherent in judicial reasoning and decision-making more generally express institutional facts that impact on recipients and the general public alike. The distinction between conditional policies which require recipients to demonstrate their (continued) eligibility to case workers, who in turn have considerable discretion determining the validity of recipient claims as well as sanctions in cases of non-compliance with regulations, and policies that take the form of a clear entitlement has been shown to affect importantly recipients’ overall sense of individual worth and self-respect as well as, more broadly, their sense of social inclusion and citizenship. ¹⁸ The right to a basic income expresses the value of equal citizenship in two ways: first, by not requiring recipients to engage in any forms of shameful revelation to obtain what is rightfully theirs; and second, by allowing them to actively claim their entitlement in cases where they may not receive this through a rights-based administrative or judicial complaint procedure. ¹⁹ It is an important feature of legal rights that they are justiciable through legal procedures. ²⁰

Second, granting basic income legal rights status presumably also implies stronger demands on the implementation mechanisms and guarantees in order to ensure that all entitled also effectively receive the grant. This is not a vacuous point, for even the ‘disarmingly simple’ proposal of an individual, universal and unconditional basic income, faces a number of bottlenecks at the implementation stage. ²¹ Basic income advocates often fail to appreciate the distinction between nominal (or formal) and substantive (or real) universalism, which refers to the fact that the mere absence of eligibility criteria is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for granting every individual equal access to a basic income. ²² The case of the homeless serves as an excellent example, for their lack of address or (in many cases) bank account makes it difficult for the relevant administration to assess clearly whether they have received their entitlement. Similarly, practical difficulties may arise figuring out where and how to deposit the basic income in a manner that makes it easy for them to withdraw their entitlement. Finally, for a variety of reasons the homeless often also do not have the relevant information or means to lodge an effective complaint when they have not received what they are owed. A right to basic income, which we understand to have priority status, insists the state must devote whatever effort or resources are needed to ensure implementation failures do not exclude the most vulnerable populations. Within a rights perspective, failure to do so constitutes an unacceptable rights violation.

Third, if basic income is designated a legal right this entails a prima facie obligation on the part of the state to legislate in favor of such a right. This point is what sets apart manifesto rights from legal rights. Of course, such an obligation may be overridden in certain circumstances – e.g. in the case of a conflict between rights ²³ – but granting basic income rights status nevertheless has the crucial implication that it shifts the burden of proof onto those failing to institute the relevant legal right. ²⁴ In cases of conflict, the onus is on the state to justify explicitly why appropriate legislation (including, for instance, budgetary approval) cannot be provided. This point is most relevant in those cases where it may be the case that a state has legitimate reasons of resource constraints why it cannot fulfill its legal obligations. A state may legislate in favor of basic income, because it believes there are sufficient reasons to grant each (adult) citizen such a right, but nevertheless not be in a position to immediately implement this right in full. Consider, for instance, the case of Brazil where law no. 10.835 [Lei de Renda Básica de Cidadania], authored by Senator Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy, was signed into law by then President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on 8 January 2004. Unfortunately, the relevant law is hampered by the fact that it critically depends on budgetary approval, which is entirely at the discretion of the Executive Branch. ²⁵ The problem with the Brazil example, from a legal rights perspective, is precisely that the state seems not to feel the need to justify its failure to legislate the required budget. ²⁶ In addition, and this is a second major implication of granting basic income rights status, the Brazilian state should be considered to be under an obligation to make reasonable efforts to implement (or even to take practical steps towards implementing) the basic income right in the near future. According to several critics, this has not happened and evidence suggests the state does not intend to do so either. ²⁷

At this point it is worth briefly discussing an objection to the right to basic income arising from the fact that it implies a move away from strict negative rights to the more controversial category of positive rights, which critics of positive rights feel disqualifies them from rights status altogether. ²⁸ Fried, for instance, writes that while it is logically possible to respect any number of negative rights without contradiction, ‘[p]ositive rights, by contrast, cannot as a logical matter be treated as categorical entities, because of the scarcity limitation’. ²⁹ However, in response social rights proponents for many decades have insisted that the restriction of fundamental rights to purely negative rights – rights ‘to something not to be done to one’ – is unsustainable. ³⁰ These general considerations would also apply to the right to a basic income, as Raymond Plant has explicitly argued. ³¹

In addition, proponents of the right to a basic income have an additional set of responses in their arsenal that allow them to further disarm their critics. Specifically, since basic income both is universal and typically comprises a grant fixed at a specified level, the argument can be made that it withstands two powerful criticisms lodged against positive rights more generally. On the one hand, the fact that every citizen effectively receives her or his entitlement puts basic income in a marked contrast to those positive rights that seemingly apply only to a subset of needy individuals (such as, for instance, the right to decent housing). ³² On the other hand, the relatively fixed level of the grant, uniformly distributed to each individual, suggests that worries of positive rights necessarily implying a bottomless pit of resource investment are grossly misapplied in this particular case. In this respect, the right to a basic income finds itself on firmer ground than, for instance, the right to health. ³³ Furthermore, a fixed level of a benefit indicates also that there is no basis for worrying about the complexity of adjudicating positive rights, because in such a case, judges, when resolving an individual dispute, will not have to examine cases plagued by polycentricity. ³⁴ In short, to our mind, there is nothing in the basic income proposal that conceptually rules out that it be granted a legal rights status, provided of course we can establish firm grounds for granting basic income the status of a legal right. The remainder of this article now turns to this question.

II Basic income as a moral right: A road best avoided?

The strongest line of argument for justifying basic income as a right (and not merely a desirable goal) would be if the former were to follow directly from a moral right – a right that individuals should have, morally speaking. In a nutshell, whereas legal rights form part of a legal order (a system of legal norms, if you like), moral rights are governed by moral norms that may or may not have a corresponding expression in positive law. Nevertheless, while moral rights do not necessarily give rise to a body of legal rights, they at least give us a very strong presumption in favor of such a move. ³⁵ However, we remain skeptical that thinking of basic income as a moral right is plausible.

Individuals can be said to have many rights, which in one leading interpretation are commonly understood as either constituting or promoting valuable (even vital) interests. ³⁶ The right to freedom of speech serves as a good example of the former: being able to express oneself is customarily regarded as a constitutive element of being a moral or political person. ³⁷ In a Kantian perspective, for instance, ‘the right to free speech is constitutive of the rightful relation between citizens and their state’. ³⁸ Alternatively, we may conceptualize a slightly weaker sense of rights as a set of means that are directly and unequivocally linked to promoting a valuable goal or interest, which is to say that without secure access to those specific means the underlying vital interests are not ensured. ³⁹ An example here is the right to health, typically understood as secure access to healthcare services, which are said to be vital (albeit not sufficient) for promoting the distinct good of health. ⁴⁰ To our mind, basic income fits neither of the above criteria, as we explain in this section.

Let us first consider whether there a sense in which we could think of basic income as constituting an interest of sufficient weight to grant it a rights-basis along Razian lines? Joseph Raz famously argued that one has a right if one has an interest that is important enough to hold another person (or group of persons) under some duties.

‘X has a right’ if and only if X can have rights and, other things being equal, an aspect of X’s well-being (his interest) is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) under a duty. ⁴¹

There is general agreement that in a modern society sufficient income is a necessary condition for being an autonomous agent. ⁴³ This insight is expressed by thinkers as diverse as the English republican James Harrington and the German revolutionary socialist Karl Marx. Harrington wrote: ‘[T]he man that cannot live upon his own must be a servant; but [he] that can live upon his own may be a freeman.’ ⁴⁴ Two centuries later Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, similarly wrote: ‘[T]he man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.’ ⁴⁵ In a contemporary capitalist society, lack of income security equals dependency, commonly regarded an impediment on autonomous agency and a social condition that, according to many critics, has taken on pandemic proportions in the past decade. ⁴⁶

But it seems rather implausible to insist that there is a right to basic income as opposed to a more general ‘right to an adequate standard of living’ ⁴⁷ or, in more recent parlance, ‘income security’. To think of basic income as a Razian interest in its own right, therefore, is fundamentally to confuse the ends with the means for achieving such ends. While basic income is a policy tool aimed at furthering an important interest – here, minimum income security – its justification ultimately depends on its being able to achieve the fulfillment of those interests. ⁴⁸ It may be contingently true that granting income security to all citizens without demanding a means test or work requirement secures the goal of bringing about the desired interest while avoiding the many perverse side effects that haunt contemporary welfare policy. ⁴⁹ Nevertheless, these are at best ancillary reasons that supplement rather than constitute the core Razian interest in income security.

Let us briefly elaborate on this point. In Social Rights Under the Constitution, Cécile Fabre has forcefully argued the case for including access to a minimum income in the list of social rights required to lead a minimally decent life. Fabre justifies the right to a minimum income by virtue of its playing a central role in alleviating both our basic subsistence needs and the more socially mediated needs associated with living in a complex society. ‘The right to a minimum income is a right to be given the wherewithal to meet both kinds of needs.’ ⁵⁰ Leaving aside the specific justificatory basis for establishing the right to minimum income – we assume for the sake of argument that Fabre’s argument is sufficiently persuasive – for the present purposes it is important to focus on the notion of a right amounting to the wherewithal to meet certain interests. This broad prescriptive category suggests several competing schemes may be instrumental in securing the right in question, whether severally or in combination.

Consider now the various ways in which the aforementioned right could be met, institutionally. First, we could institute a combined policy of minimum wages and guaranteed work through an employer-of-last-resort commitment. Employer-of-last-resort schemes mean that every citizen either holds a private job or is employed in the public sector, with in both cases the relevant job paying sufficient to secure one’s right to income security. In addition, individuals secure access to pension rights or the right to paid sickness benefit derived from employment contributions. ⁵¹ Second, we could consider a policy of improving access to paid work through job subsidies, combined with residual benefits for those unemployed or otherwise incapacitated to work. ⁵² This option relies less on guaranteed work and resembles a relatively generous workfare scheme in that state benefits may come to be conditioned on certain willingness-to-work tests or restrictions on the usage of benefits (e.g. food stamps). A third option could further expand the requirement for socially useful activities well beyond formal employment. This suggests something like Tony Atkinson’s Participation Income, which not only covers those in employment but also captures a host of individuals engaged in socially useful activities such as education, caring, or volunteering. ⁵³ There exists finally the option of a universal and unconditional regular payment, pitched at a level sufficient to secure an adequate living standard.

Each of these four options is in principle compatible with the right to an adequate living standard or income security, but only the last option strictly embodies the right to a basic income. Basic income advocates often maintain that in the absence of income support being unconditional it cannot be considered to be a genuine candidate for a right to an adequate standard of living. But this assertion faces three types of problem. First of all, conditionality would be a problem in the strict sense only if compliance failures lead to reduced income below the threshold of an adequate standard of living. While this certainly applies in most of the schemes currently in operation, this does not have to be the case. In cases where conditionality is expressed in ways other than income deductions, there is no reason to think such schemes cannot serve a role in the promotion of a right to an adequate standard of living. Second, the schemes above can be combined such that a level of redundancy is built into the overall system of income support. Again, we may have good reasons to doubt the effectiveness of such a joined-up approach in practice, but prima facie it seems this strategy is compatible with the legal right to an adequate standard of living. Recall that one key aspect of a legal right is precisely the possibility of rights-holders to claim their right through the judicial process: even where a joined-up approach fails certain individuals, as long as the judicial process allows for easy redress options no rights violation has occurred. Third, when basic income advocates proclaim the superiority of basic income over alternative schemes, they typically assume that a delivery structure is in place that ensures implementation proceeds without any hitch. Recent work in the implementation of basic income policies suggests that while the scheme clearly avoids some of the difficulties associated with conditional income support, it too nevertheless faces important practical bottlenecks. ⁵⁴ Together these three arguments support the idea that basic income is not a priori the only plausible policy instrument to secure and promote a right to an adequate standard of living. ⁵⁵

If the previous line of argument holds, it explains why basic income should not be conceived as constituting a moral right. A similar line of reasoning also applies to the weaker option of a basic income directly and unequivocally promoting a core interest. By virtue of the fact that the instrumental rights relation is contingent on basic income performing its function well – where ‘well’ should be read as ‘better than any alternative feasible policy or program’ – it also seems implausible to grant basic income a moral rights status on this weaker ground. As already alluded to before, the choice of which option among the four canvassed above is preferable depends on critical empirical facts – such as the ability of a government to act as a genuine employer-of-last-resort, for instance. It also depends on important ethical strictures – such as whether government should support the work ethic or instead favor breaking the link between work and income. ⁵⁶ No doubt such ethical strictures rightly play an important part in the evaluation of whether a basic income is permissible or even required, but there is also considerable disagreement about which ethical concerns should be given weight in this debate and how competing moral concerns are supposed to balance out in the final analysis. This is the remit of the considerable philosophical literature about the place of basic income in a theory of social justice.

Our aim is not to contribute to this debate, but instead merely to point out that once we grant that the justification of a basic income depends on balancing ethical concerns as well as ensuring key empirical conditions are in place this importantly weakens any claim that basic income unequivocally protects a core interest. Simply put, we cannot merely assume on the basis of the formal properties of the basic income proposal that it will be the most effective policy instrument for unequivocally promoting the interests that ground the right in question. This proposition may hold under many empirical conditions, as basic income advocates maintain, but this nevertheless implies that the relationship between basic income as a policy instrument and the promotion of core welfare or autonomy interests is too contingent to warrant designating basic income a moral right. Society may have good reasons for wanting to institute a basic income (and being justified in doing so), but those reasons fall short of constituting a sufficient basis for grounding a moral right. This suggests we look elsewhere for the vindication of the legal right to basic income.

III Vindicating the legal right to basic income

In light of the difficulties outlined in the previous section, how should we go about vindicating the legal right to a basic income? Recall that the point of having a right to a basic income is to be able to prioritize its institution over other types of policies. This may entail, for instance, that the basic income budget is ring-fenced from political interventions or that the state is under a strong obligation to ensure that each individual citizen receives the basic income he or she is entitled to. The opportunity cost of instituting a legal right to a basic income may take the form of cuts in other social programs. In this section we examine some options for establishing a justificatory foundation for a right to basic income. Our main aim is to illuminate how to think about this sort of question, rather than offering a particular justification.

To start off our examination, recall that we earlier suggested that basic income is contingently related to socially desirable goals, such as the right to an adequate standard of living discussed in the previous section. But equally basic income may play an important role in promoting a broad range of rights listed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including the right to minimally adequate healthcare, the right to education, the right to decent housing, as well as certain labor rights (the right to a minimum income, fair wages, rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours). In the previous section we argued the essentially instrumental relation of basic income as a means to achieve a particular end fails to ground a moral right. Nevertheless, in our view this strategy offers a valid starting point for justifying a legal right to basic income. Whereas a moral right commonly suggests the presence of a non-instrumental (e.g. a constitutive) value, legal rights are not burdened by such a demanding prerequisite. In other words, there is nothing wrong with justifying a legal right to basic income instrumentally, provided the relationship between means and ends is sufficiently robust across a wide variety of social contexts.

There are a number of complications that need addressing in adopting an instrumental approach to justifying the right to basic income. The first issue is that anticipating the effects of a basic income remains a somewhat speculative enterprise, given that a substantial monthly basic income along the lines of what is typically proposed by its advocates has so far not been instituted. While evidence from a number of high-profile pilot projects in Canada and, most recently, in India suggests many positive outcomes on education or health, there is much that we simply do not know. So, inevitably, the instrumental justification of a legal right to basic income would be contingent on the effects of a basic income effectively materializing. Reasonable expectations grounded in the best available evidence would go some way to justify instituting a right to basic income, but the validity of this right remains conditional throughout. There is a further problem, however, in that the performance of a basic income is not merely to be judged on its own but inevitably is a matter of comparing ⁵⁷ basic income with a number of competing schemes, whether existing or hypothetical. At this point we must clarify how precisely to engage in such a comparative exercise.

Presumably, a sufficiently robust expectation that basic income would indeed produce significant positive effects compared with its main competitors seems to provide us with prima facie reasons to favor instituting a basic income as a legal right. However, this general claim can be interpreted in two quite different ways. A first approach operates through the familiar mechanism of pair-wise comparisons: after identifying a particular key issue – e.g. gender equality – basic income is pitched against each competitor scheme individually to see which of either scheme is likely to produce the better outcome from a gender equality point of view. Assuming basic income makes at the top of the list, does this mean we have sufficient reasons to institute a right to basic income? We think not for two related reasons.

The first problem is that basic income may be the recommended policy to institute a particularly important social goal, but there are of course many others. And, as philosophers such as John Rawls or Jeremy Waldron have rightly emphasized, there exists reasonable disagreement among citizens in a democratic polity about how to trade-off social goals. ⁵⁸ Thus, not only may a large part of the citizenry deny that, say, gender equality is such a critical social good, more importantly (and certainly more plausibly) they may think that the opportunity costs of instituting a right to basic income on other social values would be unwarranted. What goes wrong in a pair-wise comparison is that it is unduly restrictive in scope and presumes something like a suitably circumscribed domain to which the right to basic income applies. The more plausible and realistic picture, however, is one in which the effects of a right to basic income – positive as well as negative – will inevitable experience considerable ‘leakage’ into other social arenas.

The obvious solution is to repeat the pair-wise comparison across however many core social arenas we identify, but at this point the second problem emerges: it is simply implausible to think that basic income will emerge as the optimal policy proposal in each distinct social domain we apply it to. ⁵⁹ This leads to a number of intractable problems, including foremost the question of how to aggregate basic income’s effects across such policies. If we assume 10 core issues, do we take it as sufficient for basic income to gain the upper hand at half of them? Whatever solution we adopt here seems to be vulnerable to a charge of arbitrariness. We may have arrived at a paradox of sorts: either the expected positive impact of a basic income is too restrictive to merit being elevated to rights status, or else its scope is expanded at the cost of gaining a clear and non-arbitrary upper hand.

There is another comparative approach available to us, however. Suppose we adopt the view that a legal right to basic income is warranted because basic income is uniquely placed, when compared with its main competing policy alternatives, positively to affect a large number of the social rights and goals we value simultaneously. This is to say that, on this strategy, basic income finds itself in a preferential relation to the conjunctive set of social rights or social goals the state is under an obligation to promote. For this strategy to work, what matters is not that basic income is the most important policy instrument that positively affects highly desirable social goals such as decent employment, minimum income security for marginalized groups, access to education, healthcare, social and political participation, and so on. What matters instead is how widely the positive ripple effects of a right to basic income would spread across policy domains. The more social domains basic income can be shown to positively influence, the more reason to grant it legal rights status. Importantly, we need not engage in a deliberation about a threshold number of social goals that must be affected (or even resolved). Rather, adopting a comparative approach we merely must establish that basic income outperforms other policies by virtue of having such a broad positive impact, even where certain of its competitors may outperform basic income within a single domain. ⁶⁰

Why should we care about the scope of impact in a comparative evaluation, rather than how a policy performs within each domain? Several lines of argument help explain this feature. First, the narrow comparison within a single social domain ignores the extent to which we welcome positive spillover effects in policy and rights. In strict cost–benefit analysis externalities are often discounted, but in reality they are to be welcomed. The more social domains a basic income influences, the more benefits it produces; and in these circumstances presumably basic income will rapidly outperform a narrowly targeted social policy. Second, there is much to be said for having a set of core policies that robustly cover a large area of social life, as opposed to having a range of narrowly targeted policies each addressing a distinct social problem. The former model is not only likely to be more efficient by avoiding practical problems of joined-up governance. Keeping in mind that legislating and implementing policy requires that we expend political, financial and administrative resources, the real advantage of a basic income scenario might be that it avoids unnecessary competition between policy instruments. Furthermore, it would reduce the antagonistic trading-off between policy goals that seems inherent to policy competition. Another advantage of a right to basic income that has a broad social impact is that it does not require us to engage constantly in the prioritization of social rights or goals, which may bypass at least some of the problems associated with pluralism and persistent disagreement. ⁶¹

The main line of argument in this section, if successful, has shown that a plausible case for a legal right to basic income is essentially comparative and contingent on demonstrating basic income outperforming competing policies in terms of their impact on core social goals or social rights. We have also argued in favor of a comparative approach that turns basic income’s ability to simultaneously influence a variety of goals or rights into a strategic advantage over its leading competitors. We have not, however, established that a legal right to basic income is conclusively justified, precisely because of the contingent nature of the ethical foundation for basic income. Demonstrating the positive impact a basic income is expected to have, or how significant these effects are likely to be, remains a key task and challenge for basic income advocates. ⁶² There are three related reasons that lead us to think this challenge is nonetheless one that can be accomplished within a reasonable time horizon. First, there is quasi-universal agreement on the critical role played by income security for pursuing one’s life-plans and, conversely, the deleterious impact of poverty and income inequality. Second, there exists considerable appreciation of the fact that the particular ways in which income security is achieved, including the specific design of income support programs, matters greatly. Here basic income design is often singled out precisely because it achieves income security in a manner that is entirely compatible with equal status and dignity. Third, the growing body of evidence from pilot projects is broadly consistent with the expectations. ⁶³

Conclusion

When basic income advocates propose to grant all individuals in a polity an unconditional grant as a right, we can interpret this in two ways. We can regard it as an instance of rights talk, a reflection of the importance we attach to institutionalizing a basic income policy in a just society. Or we can think of basic income as a legal claim right, correlated with legal duties enshrined in public law, that the state is obliged to respect and promote. In this article we are mostly engaged with exploring the latter.

First of all, we offer a set of reasons to think that granting basic income rights status entails a number of non-trivial consequences, both for the rights-holders and for society writ large. In short, a legal right to a basic income is not the same as being entitled to a basic income as a matter of policy. Regarding the justification of a legal right to basic income, we adopt a skeptical perspective on the idea of grounding basic income as a moral right. Instead, we opt for a thoroughly instrumental justification, which makes the legal right to basic income contingent on its having important positive effects on a critical set of social goals or social rights.

Elaborating on this perspective, we argue that justifying a right to basic income requires engaging in a comparative evaluation of basic income against its leading competitor policies. In our view, basic income is uniquely placed by virtue of being able to simultaneously affect a broad range of social goals or social rights, while its main competitors tend to have a more narrowly focused scope. Building on this insight, basic income advocates can develop a promising argumentative strategy for granting each adult citizen a legal right to an individual and unconditional regular income. While this article does not offer (nor is intended to offer) a specific account of why a legal right to basic income is justified, we do hope to have gone some way to indicating how such a justification can be achieved.