Abstract
According to Amartya Sen, a man named Kader Mia went to a riot-plagued and hostile part of the city of Dhaka to find work during the civil strife near the end of the British occupation of South Asia in 1944.2 His wife told him that it was too dangerous, but he went because he had no food for his children. He was stabbed and died from his wounds. The penalty of his economic unfreedom turned out to be death.3 What Kader Mia found in the labor market was unusual, but the unfreedom that compelled him into the marketplace was not. Hunger made Kader Mia unfree to refuse whatever employment happened to be available at the time. Billions of people worldwide face hunger if they refuse whatever employment is available. Most of them are not forced to accept an imminent risk of death in the marketplace, but many of them are forced to accept a lifetime of the worst working conditions, lowest pay, and lowest status in jobs that require them to serve the interests of at least one person who controls access to resources. Throughout history, economic deprivation has forced people to accept slavishly long, difficult, humiliating, dangerous, or low-paying jobs; to prostitute themselves; to beg; and to sell themselves into indentured servitude. Although some people have done some of these things voluntarily, economic deprivation has clearly forced reasonable people to do things they should not do and would not do if they had the power to say no.
I’m working, but I’m not working for you.
—Mac McCaughan1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
M. McCaughan, L. Ballance, and C. Garrison, “Slack Motherfucker, in Superchunk (Matador, 1990).
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999)
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).
L. Doyal and I. Gough, A Theory of Human Need (London: MacMillan Education, 1991)
J. Drèze and A.K. Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
M.C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
M.C. Nussbaum and J. Glover, Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981)
Sen, Development as Freedom; M. Sharif, Work Behavior of the World’s Poor: Theory, Evidence and Policy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003).
To cite only a few: Stuart White, The Civic Minimum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 17
Elizabeth S. Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality? Ethics 109, no. 2 (January 1999): 287–337
John Rawls, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good, Philosophy and Public Affairs 17, no. 4 (1988): 251–76
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 257.
For efficiency-based criticism of the traditional welfare system, see Karl Widerquist and Michael A. Lewis, “An Efficiency Argument for the Basic Income Guarantee, International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2, no. 1 (2006): 21–43.
Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality? 287–337; J. Elster, “Comment on Van der Veen and Van Parijs, Theory and Society 15, no. 5 (1986): 709–22
John Rawls, “Reply to Alexander Musgrave, Quarterly Journal of Economics 88, no. 4 (1974): 633–55
Rawls, Justice as Fairnessp. 179; Stuart White, “Liberal Equality, Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional Basic Income, Political Studies 45, no. 2 (1997): 312–26
White, The Civic Minimum; Stuart White, “Fair Reciprocity and Basic Income, in Real Libertarianism Assessed, ed. Andrew Reeve and Andrew Williams (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) pp. 136–160
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.
For example, A. Levine, “Fairness to Idleness: Is There a Right Not to Work, Economics and Philosophy 11, no. 2 (1995): 255–74.
Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 108.
Van Donselaar, The Benefit of Another’s Pains; Van Donselaar, “The Stake and Exploitation; Gijs Van Donselaar, The Right to Exploit: Parasitism, Scarcity, and Basic Income (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); White, “Liberal Equality, Exploitation; White, The Civic Minimum; White, “Fair Reciprocity and Basic Income.
H. Arendt, “Work, Labor, Action, in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. P. Baehr (London: Penguin, 2000) pp. 167–81. Arendt draws a distinction between work and labor, demonstrating that labor is more connected with necessity, the cycle of life, and transience. But there is a great deal of overlap in the way we use the two terms, and both are used for many different things.
White (2003), The Civic Minimum, p. 91.
White (2003) The Civic Minimum, pp. 161–62.
Karl Marx, Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994).
Karl Widerquist, “What Does Prehistoric Anthropology Have to Do with Modern Political Philosophy? Evidence of Five False Claims, in USBIG Discussion Paper Series (USBIG Network, 2010); Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
The lack of compensation is usually justified by claiming either that it would violate the rights of property holders or that it would violate the principle of reciprocity, giving the propertyless something for nothing. I have argued elsewhere that the direction of obligation runs in the opposite way. Only unconditional payments from property owners to the propertyless fulfill the principle of reciprocity, compensating them for the liberties lost in step 2. Karl Widerquist, “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income, Politics and Society 33 (1999): 386–401.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Karl Widerquist
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Widerquist, K. (2013). The Importance of Independence I: Framing the Issue. In: Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313096_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313096_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44580-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31309-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Economics & Finance CollectionEconomics and Finance (R0)