Abstract
This chapter considers the question of duty and how it relates to the arguments for freedom from forced interaction presented above. Beginning with the assumption that there are some situations in which individuals have an enforceable obligation to contribute to a joint project, this book considers what limits JPA theory implies for the enforcement of duties. This discussion is largely a response to the objection to basic income on grounds variously described as “exploitation, “reciprocity, or “parasitism. Many political theorists have argued against policies are allowing people to receive an unconditional basic income. It takes labor to generate the social product from which basic income is drawn. Therefore, basic income recipients, supposedly, act as parasites, exploiting workers who contribute to the social product without making a reciprocal contribution to it.2
State what, in your opinion, is the best way to enlist colored men for soldiers.
—General Sherman (through his agent)
I think, sir, that all compulsory operations should be put a stop to. The ministers would talk to them, and the young men would enlist.
—Garrison Frazier1
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Notes
E.D. Townsend, “Minutes of an Interview between the Colored Ministers and Church Officers at Savannah with the Secretary of War and Major-Gen. Sherman, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ed. Steven F. Miller (College Park, MD: Department of History, University of Maryland, 2007).
Elizabeth S. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?, Ethics 109, no. 2 (January 1999): 287–337
B.R. Bergmann, “A Swedish-Style Welfare State or Basic Income: Which Should Have Priority?, Politics and Society 32, no. 1 (2004): 107–18
J. Elster, “Comment on Van der Veen and Van Parijs, Theory and Society 15, no. 5 (1986): 709–22
Gijs Van Donselaar, The Benefit of Another’s Pains: Parasitism, Scarcity, Basic Income (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Department of Philosophy, 1997)
Gijs Van Donselaar, “The Stake and Exploitation, in The Ethics of Stakeholding, ed. K Dowding, Jurgen De Wispelaere, and S. White (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 94–113
Gijs Van Donselaar, The Right to Exploit: Parasitism, Scarcity, and Basic Income (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Stuart White, “Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income, Political Studies 45, no. 2 (1997): 312–26
Stuart White, “Fair Reciprocity and Basic Income, in Real Libertarianism Assessed, ed. Andrew Reeve and Andrew Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 136–60
Stuart White, The Civic Minimum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
This example is essentially the same as Van Parijs’s Crazy-Lazy challenge. Philippe Van Parijs, Real Ereedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Karl Widerquist, “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income, Politics and Society 33 (1999): 386–401
Karl Widerquist, “Does She Exploit or Doesn’t She?, in The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, ed. Karl Widerquist, Michael A. Lewis, and Steven Pressman (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 138–62
Karl Widerquist, “Who Exploits Who?, Political Studies 54, no. 3 (October 2006): 444–64
Karl Widerquist, Property and the Power to Say No: A Freedom-Based Argument for Basic Income (Oxford University: Department of Politics and International Relations, 2006). The fourth of these references lays out some the property theory eluded to in this work. I hope to lay it out in greater detail in a future work.
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Widerquist, K. (2013). On Duty. In: Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313096_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313096_10
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