In his widely-discussed book, Real Freedom for All, Philippe Van Parijs argues that justice requires the provision of a universal, unconditional basic income. Some critics reject that conclusion on the grounds that it violates requirements of reciprocity or prohibitions on exploitation, free-riding and parasitism. This paper explores a less familiar critique, which operates within the same resource egalitarian parameters as Van Parijs's argument, and leaves unchallenged his conviction that justice requires a basic income. Instead the paper suggests two reasons to (...) doubt his ambitious claims about its magnitude. First, the paper argues that if envy elimination is the fundamental egalitarian aim then Van Parijs's argument for boosting basic income by including jobs within the class of external assets to be equalized is unsuccessful. Second, it argues that Van Parijs fails to show that the provision of basic income should not be constrained by a more restrictive principle for correcting inequalities in personal resources than his favored compensatory norm. Before defending these criticisms, two preliminary sections describe Van Parijs's distributive principles and his central argument for basic income. (shrink)

In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called ‘Equality of What?’ Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realized in a given society. What aspect of a person’s condition should count in a fundamental way for egalitarians, and not merely as cause of or evidence of or proxy for what they regard as fundamental?

This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a strongly socialist egalitarian doctrine. The narrative of Cohen's reckoning with that inheritance develops through a series of sophisticated (...) engagements with the central questions of social and political philosophy. In the case of Rawlsian doctrine, Cohen looks to people's lives in general. He argues that egalitarian justice is not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice. Personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. Those truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should, and Cohen's focus on them brings political philosophy closer to moral philosophy, and to the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, than it has recently been. (shrink)