Jobs as Gifts: A Reconstruction and a Qualified Defense

Abstract

This chapter continues our exploration of how best to specify luck-egalitarian commitments to equality of opportunity and, thus, complement the status-egalitarian demands discussed in chapter 2. Philippe Van Parijs’s way of arriving at his radical conclusion that justice requires “the highest sustainable” basic income rests heavily on one interesting and controversial argument, namely, that the so-called employment rents, accessed through favorable jobs, belong to the category of resources to which all have an equal claim.