Equality of opportunity and the precarization of labour markets

What is libertarian resourcism?

I shall use the label libertarian resourcism to describe an account of equal opportunity that accepts the following three claims:

Control self-ownership is a necessary requirement of freedom.

The work of Philippe Van Parijs offers a clear, compelling and thoroughly elaborated form of libertarian resourcism which has been widely employed to justify strong political conclusions about how to address inequalities in real-world societies. His position will therefore be my main example throughout this article. However, as already mentioned, libertarian resourcism is meant to capture a way of thinking that plays a role also in other prominent justifications of such a reform strategy (as I will discuss below).

Even though Van Parijs has referred to his conception of justice as ‘real libertarianism’, it is important to understand that it is not libertarian in any traditional or orthodox sense. Van Parijs favours far-reaching redistribution on grounds of freedom, and his project has evolved in close dialogue with Marxian ideas. Thus, the term libertarian is here used to describe a specific interpretation (rather than a critique) of the egalitarian ideal and of how we may counteract socio-economic inequalities in a freedom-respecting manner.

Starting with (a), the forms of self-ownership endorsed in this tradition vary in strength. Van Parijs’ theory incorporates an interpretation of self-ownership that is weak rather than strong. Specifically, he ascribes moral priority to the control rights of self-ownership that cover the right to decide how to use one’s mind and body. This is – for example – violated by forced labour (including not only slavery but also direct taxation of people’s ‘internal’ or ‘personal’ resources or talents, as distinct from taxation of the external assets that people control). However, he does not endorse the income rights attached to stronger notions of self-ownership according to which the taxation of any economic returns from the voluntary exercise of one’s talents (or voluntary transfer of such resources) counts as a direct violation of freedom (Van Parijs, 1995: 9, 26f.; for a similar view see Widerquist, 2013: 30ff.). This contrasts sharply with the views of traditional left libertarians who, in virtue of their commitment to strong self-ownership, are confined to a much more modest category of external resources when specifying permissible or just forms of taxation.

Thus, turning to claim (b), left libertarians traditionally focus mainly on taxes justified as a way to make those who (in the absence of redistribution) appropriate more than their equal share of natural resources in their ‘unimproved state’ to compensate those who access less than their per capita share (Tideman and Vallentyne, 2001). ² In the case of Van Parijs, the relevant assets that are subject to equal (or, as he argues, leximin) distribution have been characterized in a much more inclusive way to cover external ‘gifts’ (broadly conceived), whether natural or produced, and whether left behind by past generations or produced by contemporaries. This includes not only the advantages of valuable inherited assets and inter vivos gifts but also (more importantly) so-called employment rents that arguably constitute a major share of the wages attached to ‘scarce’ or highly attractive jobs in contemporary employment-based economies (Van Parijs, 1995, 2009; see also Birnbaum, 2012, Van Donselaar, 2009; Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017).

Libertarian resourcism in its most distinctive form is guided by a particular view in the so-called currency of justice debate (Cohen, 1989). According to this view, egalitarians should aim to equalize access to resources (Dworkin, 2000), as distinct from – for example – equality of welfare or capabilities. This holds for the theories of Van Parijs, Steiner and Tideman, although their views (as we have just seen) yield very different conclusions about the scope of egalitarian norms, i.e. the range of assets to which demands for equalization apply. According to this position, considerations of distributive justice and how to equalize opportunities consistently with (control) self-ownership should be primarily focused on endowing people with external resource bundles (in the relevant category of natural resources or ‘gifts’) of equal market value. Notably, the idea that all should be provided with equally valuable resource shares, in the sense of reflecting what others would be prepared to pay for these assets, implies that there is a conceptual and not merely contingent (instrumental) link between justice and the market. A market mechanism, in some form, is viewed as essential to measure the value of different resource bundles in a way that is sensitive to people’s preferences and thus mirrors the opportunity costs of these resources, i.e. how valuable they are to others in the relevant community (Satz, 2010; Van Parijs, 2009).

Finally, (c), the idea of a strong link between freedom and state neutrality or anti-perfectionism in issues of basic justice, also plays an important role for explaining why individual and unconditional cash endowments should be something of a default option as the core strategy for providing people with their fair shares. This could either take the form of a regular income stream or a basic capital, that is, one or a few lump-sum payments. One important implication of this view is that work preferences should be treated as an integral part of people’s personal conceptions of the good life. They should not affect our social entitlements any more than our religious convictions, food habits or other aspects of the values we live by. Given the liberal starting point that people’s attachment to different conceptions of the good life must be respected, each person should be free to use her fair set of resources flexibly for whatever purposes she may have. For this reason, it is crucial to (re-)distribute resources without any type of behavioural conditionality (Van Parijs, 1995: 42) and without earmarking them for specific purposes, such as subsidies for particular goods or services such as food vouchers, or services meant to boost people’s employment opportunities. On this view, respecting individual freedom implies that we should opt for cash transfers of equal value rather than distribution in kind (although there are important exceptions, such as education and health insurance, to which we will return below). Taken together, the label libertarian resourcism captures a characteristic combination of ideas, expressing a commitment to self-ownership, a market-based and resource-centred metric of (dis)advantage and an emphasis on individual cash payments as the key tool for equalizing opportunities consistently with liberal neutrality.

The social empowerment objection to libertarian resourcism

Let us now turn to the practical relevance of this view and its potential for providing a basis for sensible action guidance in contemporary societies. My ‘social empowerment objection’ to libertarian resourcism starts out from the observation that the central normative commitments of this view are entirely detached from many of the most urgent political considerations in real-world democracies about how to sustainably empower vulnerable groups to participate as equals in their societies; to effectively voice their concerns and successfully support their interests over time. Hence, these theories do not engage more directly with the nature of, and strategies for, strong agency in contemporary societies, i.e. how persons could and should be empowered to exercise their liberties with security and confidence and, thus, to act from a position of power that allows them to identify and resist social subordination and oppression in social life.

This gap in relation to key objectives of egalitarian movements reflects the analytical focus and methodology of key works in the traditions on which libertarian resourcism builds, and where many complexities of real-world societies are simply assumed away. Philosophical debates in left libertarianism and resource egalitarianism have often focused on highly specific and stylized examples to address whether unconditional wealth endowments, or forms of income support, are required by (or consistent with) social justice. How, for example, should we divide plots of land fairly between shipwrecked individuals washed up on a desert island, assuming equal talents but different work preferences (Dworkin, 2000; Van Donselaar, 2009; Van Parijs, 1995)?

To be sure, setting important complications aside is often necessary to enable focus and precision in philosophical arguments, and to gain critical distance from historically established practices and conventions. Still, an unfortunate effect of this tabula rasa style of argument is that some of the most serious forms of social subordination, and most important reasons for deviating from cash payments as the primary method of equalization, tend to escape systematic attention in these analyses (Pierik and Robeyns, 2007). It may seem unfair to criticize theories for not providing answers to questions they do not pose. However, without claiming to offer a conclusive or exhaustive analysis of the issues at hand, many supporters of these and similar philosophical views do claim to offer arguments of great and more or less immediate relevance to policy decisions in the existing social world, such as whether we should endorse (Van Parijs, 1995) or reject (Van Donselaar, 2009) a basic income. If we wish to make such a claim for policy relevance under real-world conditions, I contend that we must either engage thoroughly with the theory-practice connection, or take a step back and downplay the political significance of our philosophical views.

The objection from social empowerment to libertarian resourcism has two elements. Firstly, with respect to the content of the egalitarian ideal, it claims that whenever objectionable forms of social subordination and servility are not reducible to a formal freedom deficit (self-ownership) or a relative shortage of measurable resources (inequality of external assets), libertarian resourcism is unable to detect or resolutely address them. One important and direct implication of this is that it therefore has insufficient to say about people’s fundamental interests and capacities to fully participate as equals in their communities, which, for example, normally entails effective access to the most important contexts for seeking affiliation, recognition and self-respect (general aims to which I return in the next section). Secondly, with respect to political strategies for realizing and upholding egalitarian practices (including those that libertarian resourcism claims to justify) in contemporary democracies, it remains silent about the preconditions for building the social forms and agents (individual and collective) that may sustainably empower the disadvantaged.

But the objection is not only that libertarian resourcism is insufficient for expressing or dealing satisfactorily with concerns of social empowerment. More seriously, by demanding that we must not interfere with what I call disempowered consent – preferences formed or acts made under conditions of great structural power asymmetries or social subordination (as distinct to material poverty) – it may also stand in the way of measures to effectively address fundamental sources of powerlessness, and to establish a solid foundation for strong agency. If the default position from which deviations must be justified is self-ownership combined with equal cash endowments (whatever other social obstacles and processes of subordination are in play), efforts to reshape the context of preference formation by way of in-kind transfers may be blocked as violations of liberal neutrality or anti-perfectionism.

It is important to stress that this objection is not only relevant as an external critique in the sense that it shows how this type of view fails to accommodate convictions that are important to supporters of rival (and consistently non-libertarian) conceptions, such as more relational accounts of social justice (cf. Anderson, 1999; Pettit, 2012; Satz, 2010). While such an external critique may usefully help clarify ideas and their implications, it would not lead into much of a debate with supporters of libertarian resourcism because it can be straightforwardly dismissed with a ‘so what?’ response. However, some of the most central motivations and key commitments expressed in libertarian-resourcist discourse on equal opportunity are clearly to reduce socio-economic inequalities and empower the disadvantaged; to boost their bargaining power and security, widen their range of occupational choice and target social subordination. Real freedom for all ‘essentially requires empowering as much as is sustainable those with least power to shape their lives’ (Van Parijs, 2015: 168).

Hence, an important implication of the social empowerment objection is that weaving such libertarian elements into our conception of justice causes strong and possibly fatal tensions with values and objectives that libertarian resourcists themselves subscribe to. In short, if they want to realize their promise of sustainably empowering vulnerable groups they will need to move beyond the libertarian-resourcist interpretation of equal opportunity, and the privileged role it ascribes to unconditional cash payments.

Real-libertarianism, disempowered consent and the privatization of injustice

How does this objection apply to Van Parijs’ real-libertarian conception of justice, the most well-known attempt to provide a principled justification for basic income built on resource-egalitarian foundations? While Van Parijs’ reasoning is rigorous and thorough, the central practical demands of his theory of ‘real freedom for all’ are not difficult to summarize. They essentially boil down to the combination of a secure protection of self-ownership (‘formal freedom’) with unconditional individual resource endowments, largely provided in the form of cash payments, thereby ensuring ‘real freedom for all’ (some further requirements, related to special needs and health impairments, will be discussed in the next section). Taking efficiency into account, we should accept a leximin standard of distributive justice, aiming for the highest sustainable basic income, funded by way of predictable revenue-maximizing taxation of gifts, broadly conceived (Van Parijs, 1995: 25).

To place this notion of freedom in perspective, we may compare such a view – with its emphasis on self-ownership and equally valuable resource endowments – with two other influential interpretations of the preconditions for being able to relate to one another as free and equal citizens. Firstly, the republican notion of freedom as non-domination associates freedom with a social status that allows us to ‘walk tall and look others in the eye’, thanks to having the necessary resources and protections against uncontrolled or arbitrary interference in the exercise of one’s basic liberties (Pettit, 2012: 83). Secondly, Rawls’ normative conception of persons as ‘free and equal’ involves having a sense of justice and a conception of the good, supported by ‘a lively sense of their worth as persons and to be able to advance their ends with self-confidence’ (Rawls, 2001: 59). Similarly, this view also makes it necessary to examine the particular kinds of goods and vulnerabilities that require attention if people are to enjoy such a social standing and, thus, to realize and fully exercise the relevant ‘moral powers’ (Rawls, 1993: 34; Rawls, 2001: 169f.). ³

By contrast, (control) self-ownership presents us with a very limited idea of the rights and liberties associated with respect for freedom and agency, focusing narrowly on consent in human interaction. Self-ownership does not (on its own) provide an impetus to think more broadly about how people are – or should be – equipped to relate to themselves and their fellow citizens in a way that enables them to fully interact as equals. A person’s self-ownership can be intact – her control and consent respected – even if, for reasons related to the distribution of power and social resources, she has internalized a view of herself as inferior to others or is ‘voluntarily’ treated as a mere servant to others. Thus, self-owners do not necessarily care about powerlessness, exploitable dependency or domination in social relations.

Supporters of libertarian resourcism emphatically stress the empowerment associated with providing self-owners with (equal) unconditional cash endowments. However, such measures offer no guarantee that people are able to effectively access a range of valuable options for affiliation and recognition, or that they have the resources necessary to resist domination or oppression in social and political life. In the libertarian framework, resourcing such wider empowerment measures is typically banned as a form of non-consensual coercion. Indeed, it will generally seem unacceptable to leave people with a lower basic income to use as they please because some resources are diverted to the funding of a social empowerment project that they did not initiate or consent to.

A first illustration of this problem and its practical significance is provided by considering how unconditional cash transfers may affect the prospects of women facing rigidly gender-structured institutions and relations that offer them (qua women) highly constrained opportunity sets and living conditions. These relations are upheld by a complex social structure that prevents full participation on equal terms, including wage inequalities between the sexes, informal expectations and social sanctions regarding duties of care in the household and civil society, combined with labour markets poorly adapted to care needs and work-family balance. Familiar examples of such obstacles are deficient or unaffordable daycare facilities, absence of adequate and equally shared parental leave arrangements, direct and/or statistical discrimination of women and more unconscious biases.

Whenever all or some of these background conditions are in place, it would often be more rational or convenient for many women to make use of their individual, unconditional monetary transfer to reduce time in employment and weaken their labour market attachment, thereby reducing their double shift. While this may be an individually attractive option to cope with everyday needs within such an unequal social structure, it would also be likely to reinforce (rather than challenge) a traditional gendered division of labour, and the many barriers (formal and informal) to full participation on equal terms that it tends to reproduce.

The empirical basis for this objection, the mechanisms involved and the reasons for thinking that this structure is objectionable when related to the demands of social equality, have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere (Gheaus, 2008; Robeyns, 2000, 2001). The relevance of worries attached to such a gender-structured labour market response to guaranteed minimum income schemes are, for example, confirmed by empirical evidence from the negative income tax experiments in the United States and Canada in the 1970s. They are also supported by experiences from forms of income support that provide time-limited unconditional payments linked to voluntary career breaks, or sabbaticals of different kinds (e.g. Robeyns, 2000: 123f). For example, possibilities for reducing hours in paid work, made possible by unconditional cash grants, are more often welcomed by women than men for purposes of devoting more time to care for children.

We should be careful not to generalize from such pieces of contextual evidence. Patterns of labour market participation and gender norms are not constant. Moreover, addressing the gendered division of labour is not all there is to social or gender justice. There are also important feminist arguments in favour of basic income (Pateman, 2006), provided that it is combined with other, targeted and resolute measures to address these forms of structural disadvantage (for a discussion, see Birnbaum, 2012: 190–98). Our present point is simply that the libertarian-resourcist justification of such proposals, due to its treatment of disempowered consent and liberal neutrality, not only fails to justify such targeted measures to address fundamental structural barriers for full participation. It also implies that such measures – that will often involve care-related services rather than unconditional cash payments – are inconsistent with ‘real freedom for all’.

A second illustration of this problem is offered by a scenario where pursuing an agenda of cash endowments at the expense of a wider support structure for full participation may effectively deny vulnerable workers (lacking relevant skills, connections and market power to find a rewarding occupation) access to a relevant context for affiliation, recognition and self-respect in the public life of their communities. Again, libertarian resourcism suggests that investing in services and infrastructure needed to overcome such barriers for meaningful participation in the main areas of social and political life – say wage subsidies, support for relocation, adult education, culture etc. – is a violation of liberal respect for people’s commitment to diverse conceptions of the good life.

To be sure, workers that are disempowered, in this sense, may find it particularly attractive not to work, or not to actively seek an occupation, given that they lack access to other types of resources that would make such a search meaningful. The ‘voluntary’ choices of disempowered workers are thus treated as something crucial to respect in the name of liberalism, and an outcome of that respect is to deny them the social resources needed to successfully confront such obstacles.

It is true that unconditional cash transfers can also be of great assistance for supporting people’s access to meaningful employment, or useful activities more broadly (an issue to which I return later). However, the key observation in both of these two examples is that the potential of income support to socially empower the disadvantaged in the labour market and elsewhere depends very much on the background context, and on recipients’ wider opportunity sets (see e.g. Bergmann, 2006).

While we should be careful not to romanticize employment, access to meaningful work or to useful activities is important to take into account when we think of freedom in terms of power and social status rather than (exclusively) self-ownership and external resource bundles of equal value. If people are to be endowed with the resources necessary to ‘walk tall’ (Pettit) and ‘advance their ends with self-confidence’ (Rawls), we need to address people’s desire and opportunities for being wanted, valued and respected in a wider group or community more directly (Gheaus and Herzog, 2016).

In order for a theory of justice to tackle structural disadvantages at the root, it is thus crucial that (a) this background structure itself is dealt with as a potentially important context for (or source of) unjust inequalities, and (b) we look beyond the market value of people’s individual resource endowments to assess whether they have been equipped as equals. The implication of the libertarian-resourcist line of argument is, instead, that we should ask individuals rather than society as a whole to take responsibility for how the aggregate patterns of individual choices may harm or support the preconditions for social and political participation on equal terms.

To put this point differently, the suggestion that we may straightforwardly apply an opportunity cost framework to measure and equalize people’s opportunity sets (primarily in the form of individual resource bundles) in a context where structural obstacles to social equality are pervasive leads to a privatization of injustice. The attitudes, plans and likely choices of people under circumstances tainted by structural injustices and fundamental barriers to participation (often maintained through informal mechanisms linked just as much to norms and culture as to inequality of resources) are treated as relevant inputs to the interplay of supply and demand that help define people’s rightful entitlements.

Such a privatization of injustice deals with social sources of subordination as relevant ‘parameters of justice’ in the sense of constituting justice instead of themselves being subject to justice assessments. ⁴ In effect, people disadvantaged by these conditions are invited to blame the individual choices of other (often vulnerable) persons for the structural inequalities they all face instead of channelling their claims and frustrations into collectively seeking to reshape these complex patterns of social disadvantage.

Libertarian resourcism versus social empowerment?

The social empowerment objection suggests that treating full participation on equal terms as a key requirement of justice demands sensitivity to the complex interaction between transfers, services and social structure (formal and informal, conscious and unconscious) instead of focusing narrowly on cash endowments (Okin, 1989; Pierik and Robeyns, 2007; Satz, 2010). Central to our argument is that such resources cannot be (fully) replaced by unconditional cash payments since the latter would often fail to serve the particular function – the social empowerment – that this justification appeals to. Orthodox libertarian resourcists will be happy to welcome strategies of self-empowerment in the sense that individuals can use their cash entitlements and selves to create empowerment groups voluntarily. However, it will be essential for them to make sure that if people wish to be subordinated, or not to affiliate, they must be able to follow such a path without diverting any of their resources to (other) people’s pursuit of affiliation. Hence, this cash-orientated interpretation of what it means to respect people’s agency and choice implies that endowing them with the real opportunities for gainful participation violates rather than enables freedom.

To clarify the dividing line here, the question is not whether a wish to be a hermit should be respected. But there is a huge difference between choosing to be a hermit because other relevant options are not known or available to us (for example, due to a lack of educational resources, services or social infrastructure) and choosing to be a hermit while being fully enabled to participate as an equal in our community and, thus, to access and assess a wide range of options that are widely found valuable.

One possible rejoinder to this charge is that libertarian resourcism does not necessarily deny that these social forms of relative disadvantage constitute injustices, or that they may call for a diversified political toolbox that also includes attaching considerable weight to distribution in kind. In addressing the cash versus kind issue, Van Parijs helpfully identifies several categories of resources that may call for a deviation from individual cash payments as the relevant method for endowing people with equal opportunity sets, within the real-libertarian framework.

Applying his considerations to aims of health, care, culture and education, it is likely that state investment for such purposes would often greatly enhance productivity and, thus, sometimes be justified on grounds of efficiency, given their positive net effect on the sustainable level of basic income. ⁵ Yet, these considerations for when and why they should be supported do not speak directly to the set of concerns outlined above. And whenever such reasons do not apply, further steps in the direction of supporting earmarked transfers for social empowerment will generally count as unjustified deviations from liberalism; as a failure to offer people the flexibility needed to fully access and use their individual resource entitlement for whatever purposes they may have.

Furthermore, such a clash between the aims of full participation and unconditional cash grants will not take long to arise when these aims are analyzed through a real-libertarian lens. To show this I want to bring attention to Van Parijs’ criterion for when externalities would justify state support. On his view, it is not enough that the public provision of such resources would be positive for, or unlikely to diminish, the sustainable level of basic income. Instead, such measures need to have an ‘optimal’ impact on the sustainable level of cash grants, in the sense that ‘no other public use of the resources thus allocated must have a more favorable impact’ (Van Parijs, 1995: 246). This clearly implies that when we can support basic income expansion by way of removing, or choosing not to develop, free or highly subsidized services that may be crucial for enabling equal participation but less than optimal for basic income maximization, we are in fact required to do so.

If the social empowerment objection is sound, this is backwards. We should only rely on this particular policy instrument – the unconditional basic income – insofar as it also supports, or remains consistent with, the wider objective of enabling full participation on equal terms. It is odd to imply that there is something illiberal about denying people the cash equivalent of these agency-building or communal resources. In a broadly liberal perspective that links the idea of free and equal citizens to social status and self-respect (as exemplified by Pettit and Rawls above), these resources are specifically intended to support the set of means with which people can themselves define and advance their ends, from a relevantly equal social position. The obligation to establish and uphold such a background layer of entitlements is based on a particular purpose (to enable citizens to interact as equals) linked to particular types of goods and services. It is thus beside the point that some would not be inclined to use (the full value of) such resources and would therefore prefer to access and spend that value in cash on whatever they might want to (see e.g. Satz, 2010: 78f).

This is not to deny that there is a relevant concern about the possibility of a skewed distribution of some goods and services. For example, some forms of cultural support or opportunities for education may often be disproportionally consumed by people with a socially privileged background, say (to use Van Parijs’ examples) opera tickets or university courses in Etruscan history (cf. Van Parijs, 1995: 44). But the adequate response to this is not to question the need to reserve a substantial component of people’s resource bundles for purposes that are inherently social or communal, as if individual cash transfers would be the only option that could satisfy demands of fairness and liberal neutrality. Rather, it is to make sure that the structure and content of this infrastructure is designed in a flexible and inclusive way that makes these general types of services equally and effectively available to all.

However, it needs to be clarified that the social empowerment objection is directed to libertarian resourcism, not (necessarily) resourcism per se. One path for articulating a positive foundation for the social empowerment objection is provided by so-called relational or social conceptions of egalitarian justice. These are typically characterized as rivals to the idea of distributive justice as equality of resources, and the ambition to counteract the impact of brute luck on the distribution of life prospects (Pettit, 2012: 91). Yet, it remains an open question whether we also need to depart from resourcism, in the general sense of specifying equality of opportunity (partly) through an idea of equally valuable resource bundles, in order to accommodate these concerns. I shall offer two reasons for the possibility of such a resourcist basis for the priority of social empowerment.

Firstly, one way of justifying and explaining the role of these values and requirements is to state that the problem with the interpretation of resourcism criticized above is that it lacks sufficient attention to the normative baseline of true or relevant opportunity costs. Once we address the question of how the liberties, rights and opportunities of such a market context should be specified in order not to produce morally tainted outcomes, resourcism may well avoid these problems. Ronald Dworkin’s seminal work on resource-egalitarianism (which provides the backdrop for much of this discussion) actually stressed that a complete and compelling account of equality of resources requires that preferences can be formed and expressed in a context that ensures that they are authentic and not unduly influenced by prejudice or stereotypes (Dworkin, 2000: 158–166). ⁶

Taking this seriously is in fact likely to have weighty implications for how to equip people to participate on equal terms, including close attention to ‘social expectations’ resulting from unjust patterns of discrimination and stereotyping (Dworkin, 2002: 137). It is hard to see how the impact of stereotypes and prejudice can be effectively prevented or counteracted, or how the preconditions of authenticity and well-informed preferences can be sustainably satisfied in the absence of resolute measures to support strong agency and universal access to the social and cultural resources of vibrant communities (alongside, or as a basis for, individual resource bundles in cash).

A second and less familiar path for incorporating many of these concerns into a resource-egalitarian framework appears when we take into account that Van Parijs recognizes the need to supplement uniform cash transfers with measures to address non-pecuniary handicaps, and various health-related needs. Contrary to Van Parijs’ own views, I want to argue that this may have the implication of making his resourcism substantially less libertarian, by challenging the idea of a fundamental link between equality of resources and unconditional cash payments. Van Parijs has discussed different strategies to tackle the issue of unequal personal or internal resources (as distinct to impersonal or external resources). However, his later contributions (abandoning the criterion of ‘undominated diversity’, defended in Van Parijs (1995: ch. 3)) have repeatedly argued that we should address this problem by relying on a thought experiment (adapted to local circumstances) to justify and guide deviations from uniform, periodic cash grants as the strategy for realizing real freedom for all. ‘Supposing we had nothing but the universal basic grant and knew nothing about our life expectancy, health state and risks, how would we want it to be spread over our lifetimes and how much would we want earmarked for specific expenditures?’ (Van Parijs, 2009: 159; Van Parijs, 2015: 169f.).

Importantly, the agenda that flows from such a thought experiment must not (contrary to what is sometimes suggested, see e.g. Anderson (1999)) be understood only or mainly as a project of compensation for specific physical disadvantages when they arise. One expected and welcome outcome of such an experiment is indeed a clear justification of targeted transfers and services to help us cope with handicaps or health impairments. Yet, as Van Parijs rightly points out, it would be just as important to design social measures to help minimize the extent to which special needs would become weighty disadvantages (or a source of health issues) in the first place.

In this case, the purpose is not to boost the sustainable level of basic income but to equip citizens with equal resource endowments, taking our unequal (vulnerability to) health disadvantages into account. Van Parijs’ brief discussions are focusing on modest and uncontroversial deviations from equal cash endowments supplemented with a universal health insurance, such as supporting the mobility and inclusion of people with disabilities of different kinds (Van Parijs, 2009: 159). But why stop there? Specifically, the extent to which certain disabilities, or the social meaning attached to sex, skin colour, age and so on, would give rise to health-related inequalities in the first place seems to depend importantly on the presence of preventative measures of social empowerment and gainful participation.

While ultimate causes are difficult to pin down in a conclusive way, empirical research on disadvantage very clearly suggests that affiliation is what Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit refer to as a fertile functioning, while the relative absence of it is the opposite; a corrosive disadvantage, i.e. a disadvantage leading to other disadvantages. Summarizing the empirical evidence, it is clear and unsurprising that these forms of social exclusion and, thus, a lack of vital social relationships, tend to be ‘psychologically damaging and harmful to one’s health’, being – for example – associated with lower life expectancy and higher risks for disability and mental illness (Wolff and De-Shalit, 2007: 122ff., 138ff).

Thus, addressing what is likely to be one of the stable, root causes of relative health disadvantages, by investing more directly in more equal access to affiliation, recognition and social esteem while removing barriers for social participation and meaningful work, may thus be a particularly well-targeted strategy. This argument, focusing on the strong connections between affiliation and health, suggests strong reasons for why more far-reaching in-kind measures in support of full participation on equal terms would – pace Van Parijs – have an indispensable role to play even in the theory of real freedom for all. In sum, under a revised interpretation of real freedom, offering a non-libertarian interpretation of true opportunity costs (route 1) and/or how to prevent health disadvantages (route 2), cash transfers no longer enjoy the status of a default option for how to provide people with their fair share. Thus, it is no longer an example of libertarian resourcism, as characterized at the start of this article.

The insufficiency of basic income as a tool for social empowerment

There is, however, another possible reply from the libertarian-resourcist camp to the social empowerment objection. This response recognizes that we should indeed accept a more open-ended, multi-dimensional approach to distributive justice and, in this context, ascribe great importance to the aims of social empowerment and full participation. Still, it denies that such a normative stance should lead us to embrace a more radically diversified arsenal of measures, claiming that unconditional basic income should be welcomed as the most important tool for empowerment in this wider sense.

In terms of policy prescriptions, this position converges with an increasingly influential position in political philosophy on how best to promote justice as ‘non-domination’ and ‘status freedom’, and similar views that place power and social status (rather than self-ownership and resources) at the very centre of attention. These conceptions depart from claims (a) and (b) that characterize a fully-fledged form of libertarian resourcism (as described at the start of the article). However, several recent articulations of such theories (e.g. Lovett, 2010; Widerquist, 2013) share an equally strong commitment to (c), i.e. that there is a firm and profound link between individual freedom and unconditional cash transfers.

One argument for this view defends the unique flexibility of basic income for supporting access to gainful participation and social recognition in a non-perfectionist manner. While the philosophy of ‘real freedom for all’ does not address considerations of social power and self-respect more directly (indeed, Van Parijs explicitly leaves them out of his resource-egalitarian formula), Van Parijs has repeatedly stressed how the policy of unconditional transfers has key advantages (relative to conditional transfers) in serving the aims of meaningful work and social recognition. ⁷ Unlike a strategy that aims to push all people into the structure of paid work, no matter individual desires or the content of employment, the basic income is meant to offer ‘the power to choose the sort of life they want to live by broadening their choice of occupation’ (Van Parijs, 2009: 161). If what we are looking for in combating unemployment ‘is not some sort of work fetishism – an obsession with keeping everyone busy’ but meaningful work and recognition (Van Parijs, 2001a: 19; Van Parijs, 2001b), the basic income is what we should opt for (see also Van Parijs, 1995: 42). Among the many reasons offered for this conclusion are that such a policy would offer greater opportunities for part-time work and the possibility to use it as an indirect job subsidy, thereby enabling personal training. It may also support entrepreneurship by reducing the personal risk of initiating a small firm, or running a co-operative.

It can thus be said that the cash-orientated solutions of libertarian resourcism deal with these concerns sufficiently, not by denying their moral significance but by emphasising that cash payments can be flexibly used for purposes of affiliation in the labour market and elsewhere. At the same time, they stress that we must avoid perfectionistic accounts of justice according to which paid work is treated as a necessary ingredient of the good life. We should respect the great variety of ways in which people may want to pursue such general purposes and how much they might want to spend for such purposes relative to other objectives they find important. As in the case of ‘clothes and shelter, drink and food’ that are ‘indispensable whatever one might wish to do with one’s life’ (Van Parijs, 1995: 43), recognizing their importance should not lead us to prefer job subsidies or other targeted ‘in-kind’ solutions any more than it should lead us to favour food vouchers.

A second argument in support of the same policy conclusion claims that basic income is the ideal tool for exit-based empowerment, thereby offering a highly effective and economical strategy for improving access to gainful participation in a way that will often make more targeted and complex measures redundant. With such a policy in place, people can renegotiate unfair agreements and poor working conditions from a position that allows them to tell anyone to ‘get lost’. By enabling such an exit threat, basic income can support access to meaningful forms of participation while avoiding the intrusive bureaucracy associated with many policy options that involve various forms of behavioural conditionality. Robert Taylor’s recent contributions on exit and non-domination are careful to emphasize that basic income can only offer an empowering exit option in the labour market if it is integrated in wider sets of policies. Still, he argues forcefully that it can play a key role in such an agenda:

government delivery of resources [alongside various measures for competitive labour markets] that empower workers in labor-market choices can remain largely aloof from relations within the firm, trusting instead that free exit will discipline owners and managers and prevent them from dominating their employees. (Taylor, 2013: 599) ⁸

In response, while the anti-perfectionist rejection of ‘work fetishism’ is well taken, the idea that meaningful work can be neatly subsumed under the more general category of unconditional cash transfers may easily lead us into another form of dogmatism. As I have argued above, there is no good reason to think that basic income is typically sufficient, or ideal, for targeting social powerlessness and supporting people’s access to affiliation and contexts of recognition in the labour market and elsewhere (which is not to deny that it may be a very useful supplement to other measures; for a similar view, see Pettit (2007: 5)).

Thus, we can safely assume that the hoped-for impact on people’s opportunities for gainful participation depends very strongly on the availability of other forms of support. This includes a wider infrastructure for mobility and job transitions; affordable adult education; access to high-quality services for the care of children and the elderly; social and cultural resources such as libraries, museums and other parts of a society’s intellectual and cultural heritage; and much else apart from cash transfers. And whenever this proves to be the case, a non-fetishistic and open-ended interpretation of how best to pursue the objectives of social empowerment needs to conclude that the general presumption for cash endowments fades. The upshot of all this is that we need to be open to empirical evidence about the best means for supporting the relevant purposes in each particular context rather than stubbornly holding on to basic income as the main tool of empowerment and participation, no matter what.

Turning to the argument from exit-based empowerment, the insufficiency of basic income for providing access to affiliation and recognition also implies that such a policy alone may not do much to empower vulnerable workers in the intended way. The main reason is that this limitation has great implications for the credibility of a worker’s threat to exit, or to say no to a poor occupation (see also Birnbaum and De Wispelaere, 2016). Having a basic income but lacking any realistic, alternative prospects for gainful participation – implying a condition of exclusion and isolation – can be a desperate situation that we would do almost anything to escape, rather than an empowered fallback position. Under such conditions, employers do not need to do much or anything to improve the conditions of work in order to attract the employees they want. Thus, a basic income is not only consistent with the absence of key resources for satisfying basic social needs, but also with being stuck in that situation.

Things would be different if there was also (i.e. in addition to a well-funded basic income) stable access to education and other support structures that would provide realistic, alternative options within reach, and if both employers and employees were aware that these options were available, thereby making the exit threat more credible. However, in this context there are reasons to stress not only the need for a more diverse and flexible political toolbox for social empowerment, but also the strategic priority of collective strategies for sustainably supporting the long-term prospects of structurally disadvantaged groups. As Alex Gourevitch points out, redistribution of power and resources is:

never the product of one-off acts or single policies … Rather, it is the product of ongoing struggle, over years and decades, and it lasts only as long as the demand to rule over collective life together remains a living demand. (Gourevitch, 2016: 10)

This observation illustrates how the case for exit-based empowerment by way of unconditional cash transfers has much too often been guided by an overly individualistic interpretation of bargaining power, which is more likely to lead into the privatization of (struggles against) injustice rather than supporting sustainable, long-term strategies for egalitarian aims. In the absence of strong and sustained collective support for redistribution, ensuring that the disadvantaged individual would not stand alone in efforts to fight injustices, it is hard to interpret the individual exit option of unconditional transfers as a solid basis for bargaining power; a genuine source of security on which people can safely rely whatever may happen.

It is therefore crucial not to detach the analysis of individual bargaining power from the structural conditions for collective empowerment of disadvantaged groups, implying systematic attention to how exit and voice strategies may be fruitfully combined. From this perspective, supporting a basis for full participation and social empowerment is not only an essential part of the ideal we should aim for. It is also a matter of strategic priority for enabling the social forms and collective agents that are crucial to establish and sustain the radical measures that such an ideal requires.

In conclusion, the social empowerment objection is not meant to question that there may be a strong connection between social justice and unconditional cash payments (Birnbaum, 2012). However, it suggests that such a link is far more contingent than libertarian resourcists claim, and that the aims of freedom and equal opportunity expressed in basic income advocacy cannot be adequately fleshed out unless we dissociate the justification of such measures from libertarian ways of thinking.