So, Karl Widerquist has this awesome new series on youtube where he has this college class discussing the ethics of UBI, which he is publishing on youtube. I plan on watching all of what he posts at some point, but he posted 2 classes today and I decided to jump on his session discussing Van Parijs and Real Freedom. And, after watching it, I decided to discuss some aspects of what was discussed from my own perspective.
Some ground epistemology
So, I kind of feel like this is necessary to lay some groundwork for how I think. This is outofplatoscave2012....meaning I support people leaving platos' cave and questioning their assumptions about life. A lot of philosophers like to ask a lot of fancy questions like "well how do you justify people not working and living off of the labor of others?" and stuff like that. Like I need to answer such a loaded question. Uh, no. Like, this is unpopular with some, but I'm not HUGE on philosophy in general in the sense that I feel like these questions deserve a response. Why? Because they assume the moral justness of a system in which it's inherently wrong in which people do live off of the labor of others.
Look, I basically, at the end of the day advocate for a position of moral nihilism. When I left christianity, and thus left the cave, I came to adopt the position that all things are permissible, but not all things are useful. When I was a christian, it was beaten into me that without god, that morality is like...relative and stuff. And while they framed it from a bad perspective like oh noes people would just run around killing everyone, I dont take that approach. I see it as freedom. And I would say that we form ethics, sociologically, in order to establish rules for how to live with one another. For me, ethics and governance are sociological functions of human beings decide to come together and establish rules for living for one another. There is no one correct answer to these questions. And in this sense, questions regarding how we distribute labor and resources are equally subjective.
Now, that's not to say that all ethical systems are equal, while I believe in not objective moral code, I do believe that there is objective harm to people done in this world. If someone hits another, someone is probably being hurt by that. And while to some extent ethics is contextual, attacking others is okay in self defense or some sort of war situation, ultimately, harm done is harm done. And another thing I tend to emphasize is maximizing freedom. A big part of human flourishing involves people being free to do what they want to do. While reducing freedom isnt necessarily directly harmful, it reduces peoples' capacities to pursue life worth living. So it should be respected to the greatest extent possible.
That is an overall outline of how, at the end of the day, I view ethics. I ultimately trend toward utilitarianism and libertarianism as a result, and while there can be tensions between the two, and we can debate the extent to which one should take precedence over another, my views ultimately pursue to balance both.
That said...discussing the ethics of work refusal
Look, I ultimately view work as a necessary evil. There's a lot of discussion around the value of work. And for me, work, is a means to an end. While it CAN give people purpose, it's only truly purposeful if a person chooses it freely. But for most, if not all of human society, work has had a coercive element to it. You have to work, or you're denied resources needed to survive, which is effectively a form of passive violence. Sometimes work takes the form of active violence in the form of slavery.
In modern society, we are driven by this protestant work ethic, where work essentially becomes like a calling. People are called to work, they are here to labor, and if people do not spend most of their time laboring, they will succumb to vices and drink and gamble and have sex and maybe, just maybe, not think religion is a good idea. Cant have that. Let's call this for what it is. Calvinists, and those who base their views off of calvinist ideals, are authoritarians. Work isnt just a necessity of life, work IS life. And without work, humans would do things, that they would rather they not do. So basically, working works like work does in a cult. What do you do when you want to keep people not questioning things? Well, you dont let them sit and think long enough to have bad thoughts. So you keep them working and working and working. It's a form of control.
I reject that. While work can provide purpose for people, I only see it as having a valid purpose if freely chosen. Otherwise it's just a form of soft or hard slavery depending on the coercion involved. So work is a negative. So for me, the real thing that must be justified is coercive labor in the first place. Is coercive labor justified?
Well, for much of human history, YES, actually. As I said, ethics are situational. The idea that those who dont work, do not eat comes from the fact that if you dont make people contribute to society, they will end up taking more than they give. And if that happens, then society falls apart. So, making people work is ultimately a matter of societal sustainability. if society isn't sustainable, then anti work ethics don't mean crap. If they lead to a society that doesn't work, then the whole idea is a nonstarter.
And for most of human society, human productivity was low enough where if people didnt work, starvation and material deprival is a real thing. And doesnt it make sense, in a situation with that level of scarcity, that those who suffer from it are first and foremost those who didnt contribute to that society succeeding in the first place? So...if you need everyone to work to survive, it makes perfect sense that those who don't work, don't eat.
However in a society that can have its cake and eat it too, like ours, arguably, then I would argue that forcing people to continue to work due to outdated social norms is immoral and unnecessarily coercive. We're robbing people of their ability to live as they want, because we think people need to suffer to earn bread that has become...easily producable as a society. So, the need for coercion to work goes down as society gets richer and more productive in my mind, as long as work incentive remains high enough to sustain whatever distribution makes work less coercive in the first place.
Discussing the fairness of distributing resources to the unproductive
A big problem raised in the video is the idea that why should the productive pay for the nonproductive? And for me, the answer is subjective. Distribution of labor in society is subjective. Distribution of rewards is subjective. I don't care first and foremost about fairness. I care about society functioning and the incentives.
For me, if work is voluntary, and you accept a job, you accept whatever rewards come with the job, and you accept whatever taxes you pay on those rewards. You know the game, you can choose whether a job is worth it based on whether you see it as improving your situation. If you dont consent to those rules, then you don't have to consent to that job. And if the work refusal is too great that society's sustainability is questioned, well, we can tweak things to ensure a better system of incentives.
That said, it isn't, in my mind, the utmost question to justify the idea that we distribute resources from the productive to unproductive. I dont necessarily accept the premise that those who work are entitled to all that they earn in the first place, as that's a subjective moral idea that has stuck around and become commonplace because it's been a functional idea that keeps society working properly throughout the ages. Again, it's ultimately a matter of incentives. All we need to do is get people on board with this idea, where we change the ethics away from this idea of forced reciprocity, toward an idea based more on "indepentarian" or "real libertarian" ideals. And why would people do this?
Well, because it gives everyone, on paper, the same freedom. The idea of a basic income is that we give everyone a bare minimum regardless of contribution, and in a left libertarian paradigm, this both solves poverty and frees people from coercion. While traditional left wing economics provide for people to a greater degree than right wing economics, they typically tend to suffer from the perception of being more authoritarian in other ways, since they often require things of the populace to make them work. But a left libertarian society would seek to maximize freedom by some set of principles (in this case "real libertarianism" a la van parijs or "indepentarianism" a la widerquist). This allows us to have our cake and eat it too. People are free to contribute as much or as little as they like within the boundaries of society being sustainable, and as long as the sausage is made, that maximization of freedom and minimization of poverty are all that matter to me. As widerquist points out in the video, under his system, there would still be plenty of room to work, because people will continue to be driven toward acquiring more luxuries. I mean, and given my whole f2p society article last month, i really suspect people will continue to work to some extent to acquire completely arbitrary cosmetic rewards that give them a sense of social status, even if all physical needs were taken care of. All that matters is the incentives. As long as work incentive still exists to a point society is functional, then all answers to the question of distribution of work and resources are permitted, and I believe my system would maximize both freedom and material well being.
Heck, most people who work dont even earn enough to pay into my UBI plan. The median income in the US for individuals was like $36000 a year in 2019....whereas under my UBI plan you would need to earn almost twice that much, around $66-70k or so depending on the exact tax rate, to pay more than you would take in UBI. And it only scales better in households. So most people have a very good reason to take my UBI idea, even if they work full time. Most who work, would actually continue to get more money from UBI than they would pay in. And if they quit, their economic security is ensured.
And we also need to consider work disincentives with UBI. UBI is really only gonna be something like $12-15k a year or so depending on the plan in most cases. Most people wouldn't quit their jobs over this amount anyway and while some sources might have a slight work reduction, it would not be outside of what can be said to be sustainable. I mean, what we face now due to the pandemic is probably far worse than life under UBI would typically be like.
So...that said, is this really that big of a deal? Only if you subscribe to a very outdated ethical system.
And given the other major question the video raised was work incentives, well, I answered that. The amount will be balanced based on what's sustainable. If work disincentives are too great, you would need to reduce the UBI. If work incentives are too coercive and there is no sustainability issue, we can discuss raising the UBI. That's generally how it works.
Conclusion
Honestly, I didn't really think that answering this would be as easy as it was, but that's my view. I mean, I think the big thing that really is important in my perspective is how I don't just assume the justness of existing ethical systems and insist we must justify UBI or freeing people from work within a perspective that is based around just assuming work is good and you're bad if you don't want to do it. Rather, we should deconstruct society, understand, from a functionalist perspective, why things as they are, and within that framework, then question their assumptions about things and advocate for change.
My own moral system based on moral nihilism, and then rebuilding ethics around both well being and freedom, tend to lead to a moral system where work is seen less as this good thing everyone should totally do, and more as a lesser evil. Work is...well...work. We dont do it because we like it. We do it because we have to, and the less of it the better. And once we start accepting that premise rather than "work good, laziness bad", is where the real magic happens. Because then we can understand that our entire system is built the way it was, because it needed to function that way in preindustrial times for us to function. We also kind of uncover the fact that a lot of the fathers of the modern work ethic were inherently authoritarian and believed in work as a way to keep people busy so they didn't do things like...ya know, sinning, or doing what I'm doing and questioning religion and their entire ethical system.
Once we don't just assume work good, we can work at eliminating work, and seeking to minimize people's compulsion to do it. Obviously early on, we will need to balance these ambitions with reality, but over time, i think an anti work mindset would build a better world, one that is far less coercive and allows people to fill their time doing what they want to do, not what they have to do. And, of course, because work will almost always likely exist in some form, we just need to maintain a healthy balance of incentives to ensure stuff gets done. But that doesn't mean we should have this moral obligation to work. Heck, as a libertarian, I'll be blunt, I dont think we should have a moral obligation to do anything outside of extreme situations that force such a thing on the basis of life, death, or the sustainability of that society. If we can minimize positive moral obligations, I'd say that's a very good thing, as it would give people more liberty to do what they want.
And I think the sooner we realize how much better this kind of world would be, the better off we will be. Of course, people need to accept my arguments first, but hey, that's why I present them, to free your mind from what we just take for granted.
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