## 1. What is a social minimum?



Our first task, then, is to clarify what a social minimum is. When we
speak of a "social minimum" we mean to refer to *the
bundle of resources that a person needs in order to lead a minimally
decent life in their society*. Now the members of a society might
decide to introduce *a set of institutions and policies that
secures every member reasonable access to a social minimum* in
this sense. We shall refer to this set of institutions and policies as
a "social minimum policy regime". In the discussion that
follows we shall often speak of "enacting a social
minimum". Enactment is a somewhat legalistic word, but we intend
the term to be understood broadly here; "enacting a social
minimum" means putting in place a social minimum policy regime.
(Strictly speaking, we should perhaps speak of "enacting a
social minimum policy regime"; but "enacting a social
minimum" is a less clumsy phrase, and these comments should
suffice to make clear what we mean by it.) These concepts--of the
social minimum and of a social minimum policy regime--are
intended to be quite abstract, and they clearly raise further
questions. These include:



(1)
How do we specify the level and kind of resources that people need
"to lead a minimally decent life in their
society"?
(2)
What do we mean by speaking of "reasonable access" to
a social minimum?


We shall now explore question
 (1)
 in sections 1.1-1.3, turning to question
 (2)
 in section
 1.4.



A further preliminary point will be helpful to note first, however.
When we speak of a 'society' enacting a social minimum, this term can
be taken in different ways. We could be referring to a national
society and thus to the enactment of a social minimum by a national
government. Or we could be talking about a society at a transnational
or the global level, and to the enactment of a transnational or global
social minimum. In the discussion that follows, we will assume a
national context as the baseline for discussion but many of the
arguments are also relevant to a transnational or global context.


### 1.1 Welfare, capabilities, and resources



If we are concerned with enacting a social minimum what are we
ultimately trying to secure a minimum *of*?



This relates to a wider question on political philosophy about how we
should understand the ultimate focus of concern when assessing
economic distributions. Three possible answers to this question are:
welfare; capabilities; and resources.



The first position suggests that what we should be aiming for in
enacting a social minimum is a minimum of *welfare* for all.
"Welfare" here is understood in one of two ways. In
classical Utilitarian thinking, pioneered by Jeremy Bentham, welfare
refers to happiness which, in turn, is understood as the net balance
of pleasure over pain that the individual experiences (Bentham 1789).
On this view, in assessing how well off someone is in life, we should
look at how happy they are, that is, at the net balance of pleasure
over pain in their life. In more recent economic writings, welfare is
identified with desire-satisfaction; people have more or less welfare,
and so have better or worse lives in a fundamental sense, depending on
how far they satisfy their desires.



Welfarism has been subject to compelling criticism. While we do not
have the space here to review the critique of welfarism in depth, two
apparent problems may be noted. One is the problem of adaptive
preferences. If people are born into deprived circumstances, then they
might adjust their expectations so that they are satisfied with their
lot. Even though they are poor, they are happy, or don't suffer
from much frustration of desire, because they have adapted to life in
which they have few resources at their command. But, as Amartya Sen
asks of a person in this situation,



> 
> 
> Can we possibly believe that he is doing well just because he is happy
> and satisfied? Can the living standard of a person be high if the life
> that he or she leads is full of deprivation? (Sen 1987a: 8)
> 
> 
> 



Another problem, according to the critics, is that it is wrong to
think that all that has fundamental value in a human life is how much
happiness or desire-satisfaction this life contains. Being happy is a
valuable achievement, to be sure; but critics argue that it is hardly
the only thing that matters, in a fundamental way, for how well our
lives are going (Sen 1987b, 1992, 1999, 2009: chapters
11-14).



These two thoughts have inspired a second position on how we should
conceive of the ultimate focus of distributional concern. Pioneered by
the economist, Amartya Sen, this is known as the *capability
approach*. Sen's analysis starts with a definition of a person's
well-being as constituted by the "functionings" that they
achieve:



> 
> 
> ... beings and doings [which]...can vary from such
> elementary things as being adequately nourished, being in good health,
> avoiding escapable morbidity and premature mortality, etc., to more
> complex achievements such as being happy, having self-respect, taking
> part in the life of the community, and so on. (Sen 1992: 39)
> 
> 
> 



Note that "functionings" here include welfarist concerns,
such as "being happy", but are not confined to such
concerns. A person's *capability* is then defined by Sen as
their power to achieve functionings: "a set of vectors of
functionings, reflecting the person's freedom to lead one type of life
or another" (Sen 1992: 40). On Sen's view, then, we should
assess how well off a person is by looking at how far they possess a
range of important capabilities. These might include a capability for
welfare in either or both senses defined above, but will not be
restricted to this one capability. A social minimum is understood as
the bundle of resources necessary to endow people with a decent basic
range and level of capabilities in this sense.



The challenge for advocates of the capabilities approach, however, is
then to explain *which* functionings and capabilities matter in
a fundamental way. What capabilities ought to feature on our list when
we come to make assessments of how well off people are? The worry is
that any list we draw up will reflect one rather specific, perhaps
sectarian understanding of what gives value and meaning to life, an
understanding that other people might reasonably reject. In short, the
worry is that the capabilities approach will either be too abstract to
be of any use, or else will be insufficiently *neutral* as
between different reasonable ethical conceptions (conceptions, that
is, of what gives value and meaning to life).



This concern, combined with the aforementioned concerns about
welfarism, motivates a third view about how to conceive what is of
ultimate concern in assessing economic distributions:
*resourcism*. Resourcism reflects the concern to try to find an
appropriately neutral way of assessing the respective advantage in
life enjoyed by different people. The idea is that although reasonable
people disagree about what gives life fundamental value and meaning,
they can nevertheless agree that it is important to hold certain
"all-purpose means" for the pursuit of whatever plans of
life they have (see, for example, Rawls 1993: 187-190). In the
simplest imaginable version of resourcism, we might focus solely on
the level of income and/or wealth someone has in making a judgment
about how well off they are in a fundamental sense.



The problem with resourcism, however, is that it looks potentially
"fetishistic" (Sen 1992): it asks us, in its simplest
form, to focus on resource holdings--income/wealth--without
considering what different people can do or be in virtue of these
holdings. Individuals' needs differ, e.g., due to differences in
health conditions. Resourcism, at least in its most straightforward
form, seems not to take account of this variability. Sen and others
argue that it is a merit of the capability approach that it is
sensitive to these differences - the approach advises that individuals
might require different amounts of resources to achieve a given level
of capability. Ronald Dworkin's theory of 'equality of resources' can
be seen as trying to address this problem by, in effect, regarding
differences in needs as a kind of difference in 'resources' (for
example, a person who needs more income to achieve something due to a
health condition is said to have fewer 'resources' by virtue of this
health condition and therefore as a candidate for getting additional
income). However, and putting aside other objections to this theory,
one can ask whether it is ultimately just using the language of
'resources' to try to talk about what Sen calls capabilities. It seems
better to talk explicitly in terms of capabilities (see also
Oosterlaken 2020 for a discussion of the resourcist-capability
theorist debate). 


### 1.2 An ecumenical-capabilities conception of the social minimum?



To adopt the capability approach, however, we do need to address the
objection that it is potentially *sectarian*: to avoid the
problem of resource-"fetishism", it asks us to consider
whether or not people have certain specific capabilities that are
allegedly central to the good life, but there is then a danger of
specifying a list that some regard as too biased towards one ethical
doctrine or societal culture than another - an issue which is perhaps
even more pressing if we are considering a social minimum at a
transnational or global level. One response to this apparent dilemma
is to try to develop a self-consciously "ecumenical"
version of the approach. Aware of the danger of sectarianism, the
capabilities theorist seeks to identify capabilities that are
genuinely important to people across a wide range of reasonable
ethical doctrines and societal cultures; and they seek to find ways to
make the application of the approach sensitive to ethical and cultural
diversity. Such an approach offers one way of elaborating what we mean
by a social minimum: the resources necessary for a person to lead a
"minimally decent life in their society" can be understood
as the resources necessary to hold a specified range of
*ecumenically significant capabilities*, taking due account of
the society's understanding of how these capabilities are typically
realized.



An approach of this kind has been developed by Martha Nussbaum (see
especially Nussbaum 1990, 1992, 1999, 2000, 2007). Nussbaum believes
we can identify a set of vitally important capabilities by posing the
question:



> 
> 
> What activities characteristically performed by human beings are so
> central that they seem constitutive of a life that is truly human?
> (Nussbaum 1999: 39)
> 
> 
> 



More concretely: What activities and related capabilities seem
important to us when we consider whether someone who has undergone a
major change in their capacities is still capable of a human life?
What activities and related capabilities are important to people when
they differentiate between the human and the non-human (sub-human or
superhuman) in, say, constructing stories? Proceeding inductively
through reflection on these questions, Nussbaum claims to identify a
range of "central human functional capabilities",
capabilities people must have if they are to be able to live a truly
human life. These include (for more details, see Nussbaum 1999:
40-41):


1. the capability for physical survival;
2. the capability for bodily health;
3. the capability for bodily integrity;
4. the capability for the exercise of imagination;
5. the capability for emotional response and exploration;
6. the capability for practical reason;
7. the capability for love and friendship;
8. the capability for connection with nature and other species;
9. the capability for play;
10. the capability for the exercise of control over environment,
including political control.



Adopting this approach, then, we would elaborate the concept of the
social minimum by agreeing on a specific list of capabilities, such as
that above, as necessary to a "minimally decent life", and
by working out the kinds and levels of resources that people need to
have these capabilities to an adequate extent. The above list is
clearly pitched at a high level of generality, and so it will make
sense in applying this approach to consider how the various
capabilities are typically manifested in particular national
societies. At the same time, such a list arguably provides a safeguard
against excessive cultural relativism in thinking about the social
minimum. If we can see no way in which a given capability on the list
is adequately satisfied for a given group, then we must conclude that
the society is denying these people the opportunity to lead a
"minimally decent life". The idea of the social minimum
can in this way have some critical bite in evaluating existing social
arrangements.



One important complicating factor must be noted here. Consider item
(2) on Nussbaum's list, the capability for bodily health. What does it
mean for people to have this capability *to an adequate
extent*? There is, after all, probably no limit to how far a
society could go in increasing this capability for its members by
devoting more and more of its resources to this end. At what point can
we say that it is doing *enough*? This is the problem of
*limit-setting*: the problem of determining in a fair way, and
in a way that has legitimacy for those concerned, just what level of
coverage for a given capability is satisfactory, given the commitment
to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to the resources
necessary for a minimally decent life. We shall not consider this
problem further here, but we will return to it in section
 3.3
 below.



We should note that Nussbaum's attempt to define a determinate list of
key or basic capabilities like the above is controversial. Critics
object that the approach is too rooted in a theorist's specific vision
of what is valuable in a human life, and that it may therefore be not
sensitive enough to reasonable differences of view (for discussion,
see Robeyns 2005, 2006). Similar approaches to Nussbaum's, which
employ the notion of "human needs", have similarly
controversial elements (see especially Doyal and Gough
 1991).[1]
 But some disagreement of this kind seems unavoidable when we try to
specify a standard for judging whether people enjoy a "minimally
decent life". Along with the problem of limit-setting, this
creates a potential problem of political legitimacy in the
specification and enactment of the social minimum to which we shall
return below (see section
 3.3).
 An important challenge in practice is to steer a course between an
overly prescriptive listing of desirable capabilities by, say,
academic philosophers and an overly subjective listing that might be
prone to problems such as adaptive preferences (for helpful
discussions, see Robeyns 2005, 2006, Wolff and De-Shalit 2007, and
Claassen 2020).


### 1.3 The social minimum and relative deprivation



We have said that a social minimum is the bundle of resources
necessary for someone to live a minimally decent life *in their
society*. Let's say we are talking, for the moment, about a
particular national society.



The question arises of how far the resources we need to live a
minimally decent life in a given national society are affected by the
general level of opulence of this society. Is the social minimum
higher in nations that are wealthier than others? This question is
closely related to a question that has long exercised students of
income and wealth distribution: Is poverty a matter of absolute income
or of relative income (or both)? Many studies of poverty assume that
poverty has a relative dimension. Estimates of the number of
households in poverty then take as the 'poverty line' a level of
income that is some fraction (say 50%) of average household income,
adjusted for differences in household size. Thus, if the incomes of
the poor at time *t*2 are the same as they were at
time *t*1, and in this time average income has
increased, then on this approach we would have to conclude that the
people who were poor at *t*1 have become even poorer
at *t*2 *even though their absolute income level
has not changed*. This clearly makes sense only if one thinks that
poverty is a matter of how well off people are in income terms
relative to others in their society. However, this way of thinking
about poverty invites the objection that the researcher is confusing
poverty with inequality. Critics argue that if one group has become
worse off in income terms relative to others then inequality has
increased, but this does not mean that poverty has, especially if the
group in question remains just as well off as before in terms of its
absolute level of income.



The ecumenical-capabilities approach outlined above offers reasonable
support for the claim that the social minimum does vary with a
nation's level of income/wealth, and in turn, for the claim that
poverty can increase when a group falls further behind the rest of a
national society in terms of its income. Following Sen, capabilities
theorists argue that even if the capabilities that define a minimally
decent life remain basically the same across nations of varying income
levels, the resources needed to have a given capability will be
greater, in the case of some capabilities, the richer one's nation is.
In other words, the resource cost of a given capability will tend to
increase with national income. According to Sen:



> 
> 
> To lead a life without shame, to be able to visit and entertain one's
> friends, to keep track of what is going on and what others are talking
> about...requires a more expensive bundle of goods and services in
> a society that is generally richer, and in which most people have,
> say, means of transport, affluent clothing, radios or television sets,
> etc.. (Sen 1987a: 18)
> 
> 
> 



For this reason at least, the level and content of the social minimum
in a given national society will to some extent be relative to the
average income of this society; and, accordingly, it will make sense
to define the poverty line in relation to (as some fraction of)
average income.



One idea that plays a particularly important role in discussions of
this issue is that of *self-respect*. People have an interest
in (capability for) self-respect (on which, see Rawls 1971 [1999]:
386-391). But, so the argument runs, our self-respect depends on
our being able to maintain a style of life that is sufficiently
similar to that of our fellow citizens. We will perhaps look inferior,
and start to feel inferior, if we do not wear the sort of clothes that
our fellow citizens wear, participate in the social activities that
they do, and so on. If self-respect depends on relative consumption in
this way, and "a minimally decent life" is one that
includes our being able to enjoy self-respect, then the social minimum
is properly seen as being relative to average income and the levels of
consumption that can be sustained on this level of income.



On the other hand, there is almost certainly a lower limit to this
relativity. If the average income level in a nation is very low
indeed, then even people with high income in relation to this average
might well lack the resources needed to lead a minimally decent life.
For example, if people in a given nation cannot eat well enough to
avoid malnutrition on an income that is twice the national average,
then even some people who are relatively rich in this nation will
still be living below the level of the social minimum. For this
reason, it also seems essential to hold to an idea of an absolute
global social minimum alongside that of nationally-specific
minima.


### 1.4 Reasonable access to the social minimum



Let us imagine that we have settled on an acceptable definition of
what is necessary for a person to enjoy a "minimally decent life
in their society". We now wish to enact a social minimum to
ensure that all members of a society have reasonable access to the
resources necessary to lead such a life. A key term here is
"reasonable access". What is meant by this term? Why not
say simply that society should ensure that its members have the
resources they need to lead a minimally decent life? Why take this
apparently roundabout way of expressing things by saying that they
ought to have reasonable access to such resources, rather than the
resources themselves?



We use this formulation so as to keep open at this stage some
important questions about the terms on which people may/ought to
receive these resources. It is tempting to think of enacting a social
minimum as introducing institutions and policies that will
*give* people the resources necessary to lead a minimally
decent life in their society. However, this is possibly too
restrictive an understanding of what it can mean to enact a social
minimum. To see why, consider the following case. There is an
individual, called Arya, who is unemployed and hence unable to buy
food and shelter. As things stand, Arya lacks the resources necessary
to lead a minimally decent life; they are living, as we might say,
below the social minimum. However, the government responds to their
plight by offering them a job with a wage equal to the level of the
social minimum. Now, provided that Arya is able to work, and the work
in question is not demeaning or punitive, or the terms of employment
otherwise unfair, we can reasonably say that if the government does
this for all those in Arya's position then, for them, it has enacted a
social minimum. But clearly it has not *given* Arya and others
like them a social minimum. Rather, it has intervened in a way that
provides Arya and these others with *reasonable access* to the
social minimum.



Now it might well be that in some cases--perhaps, in the majority
of cases--the most appropriate way to ensure reasonable access to
the social minimum is precisely to give people the resources in
question. If, say, Arya is simply unable to do a job, then offering
them the job will not provide reasonable access to the social minimum.
It will be appropriate just to give them the social minimum. And, as
we shall see below (see section
 3.2),
 some philosophers argue that the ethically most defensible policy is
to give everybody a social minimum, rather than conditioning the
social minimum on work or some other kind of behavior. However, this
is just one view of the form that the social minimum policy regime
should take, and it would be inappropriate to build this specific view
into our very definition of what a social minimum policy regime is,
and thus, of what it means to enact a social minimum. The substantive
ethical debate about the desirability of
"conditionality"--making resources conditional on
behaviour, such as work-related activity--is one we shall return
to below (see section
 3.2).


## 2. Why a social minimum?



Hopefully, we have now clarified what a social minimum is and what it
means to enact a social minimum. These clarificatory concerns met, we
can now consider *why* we might want to enact a social minimum.
As noted in the introduction, we shall review a number of influential
theories of social justice asking, with respect to each theory, what
support (if any) it can give to the case for enactment. The five
theories to be reviewed are: utilitarianism; libertarianism;
left-libertarianism; egalitarian liberalism; and relational
egalitarianism.


### 2.1 Utilitarianism



Utilitarianism is the view that actions and institutions should be
judged on how far they produce welfare (or "utility") for
people (or for all beings capable of experiencing welfare). In its
classical form, utilitarianism demands that social institutions be
arranged so as to maximize the sum total of happiness, understood as
pleasure net of pain, while in its more contemporary version it calls
for these institutions to maximize the sum total of
desire-satisfaction. In calculating this total, utilitarianism insists
on a principle of equality: each person's utility counts equally with
that of every other person (Mill 1861).



Utilitarianism has sometimes been a major inspiration for reformers
concerned to establish a welfare state so as to enact a social
minimum. It is not hard to see why. Imagine a society that leaves the
distribution of income to the market so that incomes are distributed
very unequally. Let's say we think that there is some level of income,
Y, which people typically need to lead a minimally decent life. The
inequality in this society is such that some people have income levels
below Y. However, it is possible for the government to introduce
tax-transfer schemes that will guarantee that the poorest members of a
society have reasonable access to Y. Now if the marginal utility of
income diminishes as people get more income, then it seems quite
likely that the shift from the free-market economic system to the
system with the social minimum policy regime will produce a net gain
in society's overall utility. Quite simply, the utility that the poor
gain as a result of the shift to the social minimum system is likely
to be greater than the utility lost by the rich in moving to this
system (given the assumption of the *diminishing marginal utility
of income*). Clearly, given that the utilitarian focus is on
welfare as the good in human life, a utilitarian conception of the
social minimum will be welfarist in kind: the social minimum will be
seen as the bundle of resources necessary to ensure a life with a
minimally acceptable level of happiness or desire-satisfaction.
However, as a matter of policy, a utilitarian might readily support
enactment of a social minimum inspired by some version of the
capabilities approach because, for the reason given above, they judge
the social minimum policy package in question as promoting an increase
in aggregate welfare. (For a discussion of the utilitarian rationale
for enactment of a social minimum, see Brandt 1981.)



From a utilitarian point of view, however, the foregoing argument for
the enactment of some form of social minimum is not conclusive. There
are arguments that can be made from within the utilitarian framework
that tell against enactment of a social minimum (whether conceived in
capabilities or welfarist terms).



The main utilitarian argument against enactment of a social minimum
appeals to the idea of *incentives*. The argument begins with
the claim that if we make a shift from a free-market economic system
to a system with a social minimum policy regime, we will reduce
incentives to work, save and be entrepreneurial. The rich will
allegedly work less hard, save less and be less entrepreneurial,
because they are being more heavily taxed to pay for the social
minimum policy regime. The poor will allegedly work less hard, save
less, and so on, because they have a welfare safety-net to fall back
on. As a result of this dampening of incentives, it is possible that
total income will be lower, or the growth of total income will be
slower, under the economic system with the social minimum policy
regime than under the free-market system. These economic impacts might
result in lower aggregate welfare in the system with the social
minimum policy regime than in the free-market system. If so, then as
utilitarians, we must *not* enact a social minimum.



Of course, it is possible that these concerns about incentives and
damage to the economy are much exaggerated and that a utilitarian
perspective consequently will support enacting a social minimum.
Nevertheless, it is important to see how a specifically utilitarian
perspective does leave the justification of enacting a social minimum
dependent on these empirical claims about how this affects the economy
- and thereby aggregate welfare - overall.


### 2.2 Libertarianism



If utilitarianism's criterion of justice is aggregate welfare,
libertarianism's is individual rights. Individuals are
"inviolable": they have rights, and these rights may not
be violated even for the sake of increasing aggregate
welfare--indeed, even for the sake of preventing the wider
violation of rights (Nozick 1974: 28-35).



If we ask exactly what rights the individual has, on the libertarian
view, then a large part of the answer is that the individual is
endowed with the rights of *self-ownership*. Someone enjoys
self-ownership, in the relevant sense, when they have full private
ownership of their own body and abilities (Cohen 1995: 68). A
corollary of the idea of self-ownership is the idea that individuals
do not have any non-contractual obligations to use their labor for the
benefit of others. In exercising their rights of self-ownership,
people may contract with others to offer them specified services and
benefits. But if the state forces people to provide such services and
benefits without the consent of the individuals concerned, it violates
their rights of self-ownership. It would, so the argument runs, treat
the individuals concerned as if they are *state*-owned assets,
to be pressed into service for the good of others at the state's
discretion. Now, in order to enact a social minimum, it seems likely
that the state will have to impose a non-contractual obligation on
high earning citizens to transfer resources to the less fortunate who
are otherwise at risk of falling below the level of the social
minimum. But this apparently violates the self-ownership rights of the
high earners (because it apparently forces them to share the 'fruits
of their labours' with others without their consent). For this reason,
libertarianism looks like an unpromising basis on which to defend
enactment of a social minimum.



However, things are not quite so clear-cut. Return to the question of
exactly what rights individuals have on the libertarian view. The
concept of self-ownership provides a large part of, but cannot provide
the whole, answer to this question. For the world does not only
contain people, but a wide variety of external resources, such as
land. What kind of rights do we have in relation to these other
resources? If we believe that individuals can come to have private
property rights in these resources, no less inviolable than those they
have in relation to their own bodies and abilities, we need to know
how the individuals concerned acquire these property rights. Part of
the answer the libertarian gives is that if we acquire a resource
through voluntary exchange with someone who already owns it
(legitimately), then we come to own the resource (an aspect of what
Nozick calls "justice in transfer"; Nozick 1974:
150-153). But if we trace the history of such trades back there
will be a point at which the resource in question did not have an
owner; someone, somehow, made an unowned resource--a piece of
land, say--their private property. But how can this happen? In
Robert Nozick's terms, the libertarian must given an account of
"justice in acquisition" (Nozick 1974: 151,
174-182).



The nature of justice in acquisition is a source of controversy
amongst libertarians. Assuming that the external resources we have in
mind are initially unowned, one might argue that specific individuals
can appropriate resources as private property by "mixing"
their self-owned powers with the resources concerned. This thought,
which we find in the work of John Locke (Locke 1689: Book 2, chapter
5), is that individuals integrate something they already own (their
labor) with something initially unowned (say, a piece of land), and,
thereby, come to own what they initially did not own. However, some
libertarians, such as Nozick, follow Locke in arguing that
appropriation through the exercise of self-owned powers is just
*only* if it does not harm those who, following appropriation,
lose access to the resource. This condition (often referred to as the
*Lockean Proviso*) can be elaborated in various ways. In
Nozick's influential statement of the libertarian view, the condition
is apparently elaborated as follows (see Nozick 1974: 174-182;
and, for helpful interpretation, Wolff 1991: 107-115): an act of
appropriation of a previously unowned resource is just only if no
person is thereby made worse off than they would be in a world where
all external resources remain unowned. In a world in which all
external resources remain unowned, each person would be able to reach
a certain level of welfare by using the resources that lie about
unowned. For any given individual, *i*, let us denote this
welfare level as *Wi*. A given act of appropriation
is just, then, provided that, post-appropriation, each individual
remains able to reach at least *Wi*. (Note that
*Wi* may differ between particular individuals
because of their unequal abilities to produce things in the
"state of nature" in which all external resources remain
unowned.)



The implication of this account of justice in acquisition is that any
regime of private property rights is just only provided that every
person living under said regime is able to achieve
*Wi*--the welfare level that they would have
been able to achieve in a world in which all external resources remain
unowned. Many libertarians, including Nozick, express optimism that a
private property regime will be able to provide people with the
opportunity to achieve this welfare level. But it is conceivable that
in the normal operation of the economy, a private property regime
might at some times, for some people, fail to provide access to this
level of welfare. If so, then justice--as the libertarian
understands it--demands that the state act to correct the
distribution of welfare generated by the spontaneous play of market
forces. Specifically, the state must compensate anyone who, due to the
existing allocation of private property rights in external resources,
cannot otherwise achieve *Wi*. According to at least
one influential libertarian philosopher, Robert Nozick, our basic
rights thus include not only our rights of self-ownership, but this
right to welfare as well.



In order to satisfy this right, a libertarian system might have to run
some assistance programs for the very poor. To some extent, then, even
a libertarian state might have some government programs that resemble
those we associate with a social minimum policy regime. It is in this
very limited sense that even a libertarian theory of justice might
lend support to the enactment of at least a partial social minimum
(see also the discussion in Brock 1998a and Sterba
 1998).[2]



That said, it is highly unlikely that this argument can be used to
support the enactment of anything like a full social minimum. This is
so for at least two reasons. Firstly, for most, if not all, people
*Wi* is likely to be very low, precisely because it
is the welfare level we could get in a world with no property rights
regime to stabilize expectations about the use of resources and,
therefore, a world without the huge productivity gains that come from
stabilizing such expectations. Hence, the level of assistance entailed
by the libertarian right to welfare is likely in general to fall well
short of what is needed to ensure people the capabilities for a
"minimally decent life" in their society. Secondly, it is
important to recall that *Wi* will almost certainly
vary across people according to the nature of their personal,
self-owned capacities. Those who are born with a good endowment of
productively applicable talents will obviously fare better in the
state of nature, in which all external resources remain unowned, than,
for example, those who are born with capacities that make it harder
for them to engage in production. In the case of some of the latter,
*Wi* may be close to zero--zero denoting the
outcome of starving to death in the state of nature. Thus, if these
people happen to be unfortunate enough to be starving to death in a
real-world private property rights regime, they may well have no claim
to assistance under the libertarian right to welfare: this right does
not demand that they be prevented from starving if this is what would
happen to them in the baseline world in which all external resources
remain unowned.



We may conclude that libertarianism gives only contingent and very
weak support for the enactment of a social minimum. Indeed, except in
some very rare instances, libertarianism implies that enactment of a
full social minimum is unjust.


### 2.3 Left-libertarianism



However, not all libertarians--those who endorse the principle of
self-ownership--agree with the theory of justice in acquisition
that we find in Nozick's work. According to some philosophers,
sometimes referred to as left-libertarians, the principle of
self-ownership should be combined with a more egalitarian principle of
division of initially unowned external resources. Thus, if we imagine
a group of people who find themselves transported to a previously
uninhabited planet, the left-libertarian holds that each of these
people has the rights of self-ownership *plus* a right to an
equal, per capita share of this planet's initially unowned external
resources (see, for example, Steiner 1994, and Vallentyne and Steiner
2000a,b).



There is a lively debate amongst left-libertarians as to which goods
count as external resources for purposes of equal division, but
virtually all would agree that these resources must include society's
inheritance of land. Some would argue that the pool of resources for
equal division should also include the capital stock that one
generation inherits from past generations. More recently, it has been
suggested that "job assets" and the value of the genetic
information that we carry as individuals should also be included in
the pool for equal division (see, respectively, Van Parijs 1992, 1995,
and Steiner,
 1994).[3]



Left-libertarianism seems to hold more promise of justifying something
like a social minimum than conventional libertarianism. To be sure, a
left-libertarian regime will not permit the redistribution of
*labor* incomes by the state as this violates the core
libertarian commitment to respect the rights of self-ownership. But
the parallel commitment to equal division of initially unowned
external resources will ensure that every person starts life with at
least some external resources, or a monetary equivalent. To see how
this may transform the prospects of those on low incomes, it may help
to go back for a moment to the people whom we just imagined being
transported to a new planet. On arrival, the people find that on the
planet there is a single external resource, uncultivated land, all
units of which are of homogeneous quality. Their own population is
divided into two groups, a majority who are able to work the land and
a minority that are much less able to do this (here we follow Cohen
1995: chapter 4). Now we saw in our discussion of libertarianism above
how, under a Nozick-style regime, members of the minority might well
have no justice-based claim to assistance against the majority, and,
in consequence, could starve. Under a left-libertarian regime,
however, the government is obliged to give each person an equal share
of the planet's land. Those unable to work well will be able to sell
or lease their share to members of the majority group, and can thereby
derive an income from this source. They will thus be at least somewhat
better off than under the Nozick-style regime.



In practice, left-libertarians do not propose that we actually divide
land and other resources up in this literal way. Instead, following
the argument of agrarian radicals such as Thomas Spence and Tom Paine,
they argue that the individual should receive a monetary grant
reflecting their fair share of society's external resources, such as
land (on Spence and Paine, see Vallentyne and Steiner 2000b). The
level of this grant will depend on a host of factors, but it is
possible that it will be equivalent--or even higher--in
value to the bundle of resources needed to enjoy a minimally decent
life in the society in question. Thus, depending on the circumstances
of the society in question, left-libertarian principles of justice
might support a policy that is more or less equivalent to the
enactment of a full social minimum.



Nevertheless, it is clearly important to emphasize the word
"might" in the previous sentence. There is no reason why
the basic grant we have imagined *must* be of equivalent value
to a full social minimum. Indeed, if the relevant external assets are
abundant, so that their market price is low, then the level of the
grant might not come anywhere near this level. In such a situation,
respect for self-ownership will rule out taking labor incomes to top
up the grant. It is possible, therefore, that some people will be left
with a level of resources below that necessary to lead a minimally
decent life (see Cohen 1995: chapter 4, especially pp. 102-105).
Thus, while left-libertarianism offers stronger support for enactment
of a social minimum than conventional libertarianism does, this
support is still highly contingent, and in many situations
left-libertarianism will probably rule out as unjust the course of
action needed to enact a full social minimum (taxation of labor
incomes). Moreover, even if the resource grant is high enough to
provide a full social minimum, some left-libertarians would argue that
individuals should receive their basic grant as a capital lump-sum at
the start of their adult life rather than as a periodic income payment
and/or as a freely available bundle of
 services.[4]
 This raises the possibility that some people might "blow"
their grants early in their adult lives and might then lack ready
access to a social minimum.


### 2.4 Egalitarian liberalism



Within contemporary political philosophy, egalitarian liberalism seeks
to present an alternative both to utilitarianism and to the two
versions of libertarianism discussed above. Egalitarian liberals agree
with libertarians that utilitarianism fails to take seriously the
inviolability of the person. Unlike libertarians, however, egalitarian
liberals do not think that respect for the inviolability of the person
commits us to the principle of self-ownership (for more on this issue,
see section
 3.1.2
 below). Consequently, they feel much less compunction in advocating
tax-transfer schemes, which the libertarian finds objectionable, so as
to secure a full social minimum. Indeed, they argue that justice
demands that we do introduce such schemes. Let us take a look at one
influential egalitarian liberal theory of justice, and its
implications for the justifiability of enacting a social minimum (see
also Dworkin 1985, 2000).



John Rawls's *A Theory of Justice*, first published in 1971
(with a revised edition in 1999) poses an intriguing question: What
principles would you accept to govern your society if you did not know
your actual or likely position in this society? In practice, we are
all aware of the religion we have (if we have one), we have some sense
of the natural abilities we have been born with, and the advantages or
disadvantages we have gained from our social background. But, for a
moment, envisage that we did not know such things and possessed only
very general information about the kind of society we are going to
live in. Behind this "veil of ignorance", not knowing our
religion, natural ability, or social background, what principles would
we choose to govern the institutions that affect the distribution of
"primary goods" like income and wealth?



Famously, Rawls argues that in an "original position" of
this kind, parties will choose to arrange social and economic
inequalities so that



> 
> 
> they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and
> (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of
> fair equality of opportunity. (Rawls 1971 [1999]: 72)
> 
> 
> 



Simplifying somewhat, part (a) of this formulation tells us that
inequality in goods like income and wealth is just if it is arranged
so that the group that is worst-off under this inequality is better
off than it would be under any other level of inequality. Rawls calls
this the *difference
 principle*.[5]



Many critics have found Rawls's argument for the difference principle
unconvincing (see, for example, Kymlicka 2001: 60-70). They ask
why people behind the veil of ignorance would not choose to gamble,
selecting an alternative principle that is less favorable to the
disadvantaged in society than the difference principle but which would
give higher rewards than this principle should one turn out in fact to
belong to one of the more favored social classes. However, even if
this is valid as a criticism of Rawls's argument for the difference
principle, it can be argued that Rawls's thought experiment
nevertheless provides strong intuitive support for those who believe
that justice requires at least the enactment of a social minimum. For
while most people placed behind the veil of ignorance might not be so
risk averse as to choose the difference principle to govern their
society, it is reasonable to suppose that most would at least be
concerned to insure themselves against the danger of desperate poverty
and would hence desire principles of justice that ensure everyone
reasonable access to a social minimum. Interestingly, efforts by
psychologists to model decision-making in situations akin to the
original position show that people in practice tend to choose a
principle that calls for the maximization of average well-being but
subject to the constraint that nobody falls below a specified floor
(see Frolich and Oppenheimer 1992).



Further support for the enactment of a social minimum from within
Rawls's theory comes from his discussion of the importance of the
"strains of commitment" in determining what is just (Rawls
1971 [1999]: 153-160). The parties behind the veil of ignorance
must recognize that they are selecting principles of justice that,
having been chosen, they must stick with in social life for good.
Thus, before they make their decision, they must honestly ask whether,
should they turn out to be the most disadvantaged under a chosen set
of principles, they could really bear the strains of commitment
entailed by living under these principles. Again, it is debatable as
to whether this consideration points unequivocally to the difference
principle as the appropriate principle to govern the distribution of
income and wealth. However, it seems plausible that this consideration
would rule out any principles that do not ensure everyone reasonable
access to the resources needed for a minimally decent life. How could
one honestly commit to the strains of living in a society that did not
guarantee you this? This consideration reinforces the argument that
the parties behind the veil of ignorance would choose principles of
justice that assure everyone of reasonable access to a social
minimum.



Moreover, it might be argued that even if one rejects the veil of
ignorance thought experiment as a way of exploring what justice
consists in, the strains of commitment idea still has force as a
consideration favoring the enactment of a social minimum. Even if one
has full knowledge of one's own and others' position in society,
one can put oneself in the place of others and consider the kind of
strains of commitment that they are likely to be suffering under the
present system. If one does this, can one really give assent to a
social system that, by failing to guarantee reasonable access to a
social minimum for some people, puts some of your fellow citizens
under what must be intolerable strains of commitment? Since one would
surely find such strains intolerable oneself, how can one reasonably
expect others to put up with them? (For more discussion of the strains
of commitment, see Barry 1995: 61-67, and, with specific
connection to case for the social minimum, see Waldron 1993a).



Rawls's theory as it stands is, however, by no means the last word on
justification of the social minimum. For example, Rawls's own
discussion abstracts away from disability but a theory of the social
minimum obviously needs to include the claims of disabled people. How
far can a 'contractualist' approach like that set out by Rawls be
extended to include disabled people? (See Nussbaum 2006, chapter 2,
for discussion of this question, and for wider discussions of justice
and disability see Barnes 2016, Begon 2021.) Does a Rawlsian,
egalitarian liberal approach need supplementing (or replacing with?)
an alternative that can perhaps better capture the claims of disabled
people?


### 2.5 Relational egalitarianism



Posing this question is one way to draw out the importance of another
perspective on social justice, that of *relational
egalitarianism*. This refers to perspectives in social philosophy
that give priority to the promotion of equality in *power* and
*status* relations (understood, let us assume, as a demand of
justice; see Fraser 1998, Anderson 1999). Relational egalitarians will
be concerned, for example, that disabled people have the capabilities
they need to avoid domination by others and a 'second class' social
status. Relational egalitarian perspectives are not necessarily
sharply distinct from egalitarian liberal perspectives, but they do
draw out and give more emphasis to considerations that are ignored or
underexplored in at least some formulations of egalitarian liberalism
(Young 1989).



One focus of concern for the relational egalitarian is with ensuring
the effectiveness of citizens' political liberties. In a
political democracy, all citizens have rights to vote, to campaign,
and to stand for political office in competitive elections (Dahl
1998). It seems likely that poverty can significantly diminish the
effectiveness with which individuals can exercise these rights (for
relevant empirical research on this issue, see Krishna 2006, Mood and
Jonsson 2015). Someone who is wrapped up in the struggle for basic
material well-being might simply lack the time and energy needed to
focus on political issues. In addition, they will be less able to
afford the monetary costs associated with political participation,
e.g., paying party membership fees, making campaign contributions, and
so on. This is bad for political democracy. It means that certain
viewpoints and interests are not heard, so that policy becomes
unfairly skewed against these viewpoints and interests. Hence it can
be argued that it is straightforwardly good for a political democracy
to enact a social minimum. By relieving the pressure of poverty, an
enacted social minimum will enable all citizens to participate
effectively in the democratic process, thereby ensuring that this
process is indeed genuinely
 democratic.[6]



Power is not only exercised within and through the formal political
process, however, but within and through a wide range of other social
relationships. For example, employers can exercise power over their
employees. Historically, husbands have often wielded great power over
wives. These power relations can emerge in part because of
inequalities in the economic positions between the parties (for very
helpful discussions, to which we are here indebted, see Goodin 1986,
1988; Okin 1989: chapter 7). One party--the employer, the
husband--might be able to do perfectly well financially without
the other party. By contrast, the second party--the individual
worker, the wife--might be financially reliant on the first
party. Were the first party to exit from the relationship, this party
would suffer little harm, but the second party would suffer a severe
fall in living standards. Precisely because of this inequality in the
costs of exiting from the relationship, the first party has the power
to shape the relationship on their terms. The worker or wife is not in
a position to argue with the employer's or husband's commands because
the employer's or husband's threat to leave the relationship unless
obedience is forthcoming will be at once credible (since they stand to
lose little financially from exiting it) and compelling (because the
worker or wife stand to lose so much financially if the employer or
husband do go ahead and exit). Power inequalities of this kind are
objectionable for a number of reasons. It can be argued that they
directly reduce the freedom of the less powerful parties by subjecting
them to 'domination' (Pettit 1997). They also put the less powerful
parties at risk of exploitation and abuse by the more powerful parties
(Goodin 1986, 1988; Okin 1989).



One important argument for the enactment of a social minimum is that
this can help to reduce the exit costs from such relationships for the
parties that are otherwise vulnerable, and so reduce these
objectionable inequalities of power. For example, if a worker knows
that the community will guarantee them a decent income even if they
quit their current job, then this makes it much easier for them to
stand up to the boss and refuse unreasonable demands. If a wife knows
that the community will assist her financially if she leaves her
husband, then the prospect of leaving him because he abuses her
becomes more feasible for her. This can change the dynamic of these
relationships, to some extent rebalancing the power relationships
between the parties.



For these reasons, then, relational egalitarian perspectives on social
justice offer strong support for the enactment of a social minimum
(see also Pateman 2005). Indeed, it is hard to see how any society
could retain relations characterised by equality of status and the
absence of domination for long in the absence of people having
reasonable access to a social minimum.


## 3. What can be said against the enactment of a social minimum?



Having reviewed arguments for the enactment of a social minimum, let
us now consider some possible objections to enactment. We shall here
consider three objections appealing respectively to the values of
freedom, fairness, and legitimacy.


### 3.1 The freedom objection



One objection to enactment of a social minimum that arises in
political discussion is that such enactment conflicts with respect for
individual freedom. To enact a social minimum, a government must
typically coercively tax and transfer resources and, in the view of
some thinkers, this coercion is inherently objectionable. We shall
consider two versions of this objection here. The first appeals to
freedom understood as the absence of intentional coercion. The second
appeals to the libertarian principle of self-ownership that we
discussed above (see sections
 2.2
 and
 2.3).


#### 3.1.1 The crude freedom objection



According to writers in the so-called "classical liberal"
tradition such as Friedrich Hayek, freedom consists in the absence of
intentional coercion (see Hayek 1960). If the government requires one
citizen, Bodhi, to pay taxes that will in turn be used to assist a
less fortunate citizen, Arya, as part of the process of enacting a
social minimum, then the government intentionally coerces Bodhi and,
therefore, reduces Bodhi's freedom. This is regrettable and, if we
regard freedom as the most important political value, we should
perhaps refrain from using governmental power to assist people like
Arya in this way. The *welfare* of people like Arya might
suffer; but *freedom* will be preserved.



The foregoing paragraph summarizes a common objection to government
taxation for welfare programs, or what one might call the crude
freedom objection to the enactment of a social minimum (see also Plant
1998: 67). How might a supporter of enacting a social minimum reply to
this objection?



One type of reply is to argue that while taxation to establish a
social minimum policy regime might reduce one kind of liberty, it will
promote another, more valuable kind of liberty. According to this
view, true or real liberty does not consist in the mere absence of
intentional coercion, but in the positive capability or power to act
in pursuit of significant goals, such as self-development. Poverty, so
the argument runs, diminishes this true, "positive
liberty"; by abolishing or alleviating poverty, welfare
programs, financed through coercive taxation, increase the true,
positive liberty of society's more unfortunate members. The loss to
the taxpayer in terms of "negative liberty" (liberty
understood as the mere absence of intentional coercion) is, so the
reply continues, morally outweighed by this gain in terms of
"positive liberty". This type of reply to the freedom
objection has a long history (Freeden
 1978).[7]



Despite its historical pedigree, however, this type of reply can be
faulted both as inconclusive and as too concessionary to the classical
liberal critic of taxation for welfare programs. It is inconclusive
because, faced with the reply, the classical liberal critic can always
simply counter-assert that "negative liberty" (again,
liberty understood as the absence of intentional coercion) is actually
the kind of liberty we should be primarily concerned with. We are then
apparently at an impasse with each side in the debate asserting the
greater value of one kind of liberty over another, or else merely
trading competing definitions of what freedom "really" is.
The reply is also too concessionary in that it too readily surrenders
the value of "negative liberty" to the classical liberal
critic of taxation for welfare spending. The argument for taxation and
welfare spending can in fact be made using the very notion of freedom
to which the classical liberal critic appeals. This argument is likely
to offer a more telling reply to the critic than one that appeals to
some other (alleged) kind of liberty (on this point, see Cohen 1988:
chapter 14: 291-292).



The essential point here is that poverty usually entails a limitation
of the kind of liberty *that the classical liberal professes to be
concerned with*. One major reason why poverty typically
"bites" into one's quality of life is that it reduces the
range of actions that one can perform without being subject to
intentional coercion by others (see Waldron 1993b, Cohen 1997, Swift
2001: 70-71). Imagine, for example, that you are poor and that
you wish to get a train from City A to City B. Because you are poor,
you cannot buy a ticket for the journey. Because you get on the train
without a ticket, the train guard makes you leave the train at Town C,
long before you reach your intended destination of City B. Your
ability to act as you wish has here been limited by the intentional
coercion of others. Or imagine that you are homeless and unable to
afford to rent a place to sleep. You locate a field in which to sleep.
But the field belongs to someone else, and when the landowner
discovers your presence by means of their closed-circuit television
camera system they call the police who wake you up and drag you off
the land. Once again, your ability to act as you wish is quashed by
the intentional coercion of others. By the same token, if the
government were to provide you with the money to buy a train ticket or
to rent a space to sleep in, then you would become able to perform
these actions without being subject to the intentional coercion that
you are subject to when you lack this money.



Thus, taxation for welfare spending cannot be said simply to reduce
"liberty", understood as the absence of intentional
coercion, in the name of some other value, such as welfare. Rather, it
will tend to produce *a different distribution of* *this
kind of liberty*. It will expose some to intentional coercion that
they would otherwise not be exposed to; but, if it genuinely reduces
poverty, it should also reduce the extent to which some people are
exposed to intentional coercion. For this reason, it simply will not
do to object that the enactment of a social minimum is undesirable
because it will reduce individual liberty. For the decision
*not* to enact a social minimum will also reduce the liberty of
some individuals. If the freedom objection is to have any force, it
must take a subtler form than that we have thus far considered.


#### 3.1.2 The self-ownership objection



A second, subtler version of the freedom objection comes from
libertarian philosophers committed to the principle of self-ownership.
As we have seen, libertarians do not object to transfers of income and
wealth which aim to make sure that each person receives their fair
share of external resources (or fair compensation for others'
appropriation of their share). However, these transfers might not be
enough to ensure that all enjoy a full social minimum. This insight
has led some political philosophers to conclude that commitment to the
enactment of a social minimum is ultimately incompatible with the
libertarian commitment to respect the self-ownership of persons: we
must be prepared to override certain claims of self-ownership, and
forcibly transfer a portion of labor incomes from higher earners to
the less well off, if a social minimum is to be enacted. But is this
justifiable? After all, on the face of it, self-ownership seems like
an attractive value, capturing some basic commitments we have to the
freedom and inviolability of the individual (see Cohen 1995: chapter
3).



Imagine someone, Charlie, who has very high earnings potential. In
order to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to a social
minimum, the state announces that it will tax 50% of whatever income
Charlie earns, and use the funds to raise the incomes of those with
low earnings power. The libertarian, including the left-libertarian,
will object that this violates Charlie's rights of self-ownership.
Should Charlie choose to work, half of their earnings will be funneled
to others, and thus, if they choose to work, they have no choice under
this tax regime but to assist others. In this way, the tax system may
be said to "harness" Charlie's talents and energies for
the good of others. This *effort-harnessing*, alleges the
libertarian, is inherently wrong; it puts Charlie in a position that
is akin to that of a slave, forced to work for the good of others
(Nozick 1974: 169).



In reply, some philosophers stress the kinds of freedoms that someone
in Charlie's position retains under the imagined tax regime, freedoms
which make it absurd (and offensive), in the view of these
philosophers, to compare their position to that of a slave. The tax
regime we have described leaves the decision about how much to work to
Charlie. It leaves the decision about what kind of job to do to
Charlie. In short, taxation of labor incomes does not necessarily deny
the worker who is taxed basic control over whether and how they deploy
their talents (see especially Christman 1991); and so, according to
this argument, there is nothing really objectionable about using such
taxation to enact a social minimum. Yes, self-ownership has been
limited; but, so the argument goes, nothing essential to personal
liberty or self-determination has thereby been diminished.


### **3.2 The fairness objection**



A different objection focuses on the alleged risk of unfairness in
enacting a social minimum. Specifically, the *unfairness
objection* is that public provision of a social minimum might lead
some people to make inadequate effort to help themselves and that this
is unfair to those whose efforts ultimately make the necessary
resources available. Note that the behavior allegedly caused by social
minimum programs might also or alternatively be considered a bad thing
because of its effect on the benefit recipient, rather than (just)
because of any unfairness to others. This thought motivates what one
might call the *dependency objection* to enactment of a social
minimum, in view of the alleged passivity or "dependency"
induced by reliance on welfare benefits (see, for example, Tocqueville
1835, Murray 1984; see also Humboldt 1852). However, a good deal of
what can be said in reply to the fairness objection also applies to
this dependency objection, and so we will not lose much by focusing
just on the fairness objection for present purposes.



Let's start by stating the fairness objection more precisely. One
version of the objection appeals to a *principle of
reciprocity*. This says that if one willingly shares in the
benefits created through the efforts of others in society, notably
through their work, then one has an obligation to reciprocate by
making a contribution to producing these benefits oneself, as long as
one has the capacity and opportunity to do so (White 2003). The idea
is not necessarily that you should produce in strict proportion to
what you consume, but that one should try to 'do one's bit',
understanding society as a cooperative scheme to which all should
contribute if they are able. Given this principle, the fairness
objection to enacting a social minimum is that this could somehow lead
to some people enjoying goods and services without satisfying their
reciprocity-based obligation to work. To prevent this, the argument
goes, we should not enact a social minimum.



As just stated, however, it seems like there is another obvious
response to the fairness objection. Rather than not enacting a social
minimum, we could instead enact a social minimum but include in the
rules of the social minimum policy regime a work- or
contribution-related condition. For example, if one claims cash
benefits to assist with low income then eligibility for the benefits
can be made conditional on work-related activity. We might call this,
the *principle of work-conditionality* (for apparent
endorsements of this principle, subject to widely varying degrees of
qualification, see Anderson 1999: 321; Gutmann and Thompson 1996:
chapter 8; Mead 1986, 1992, 1997; Rawls 2001: 179; White 2000, 2003,
2005). To be clear, by work-conditionality we mean conditions that
link elements of the social minimum policy regime to some kind of
employment-related activity, such as active job search or retraining,
not necessarily to work itself. ('Work' is, moreover, a broader
concept than 'employment', a point we shall return to below.)



This response to the fairness objection itself raises an important
ethical question. Should the social minimum be enacted in a way that
reflects the principle of work-conditionality? Space permits us here
to consider just two of the more important sets of arguments against
the principle of work-conditionality (for further, empirically
informed discussions, see Watts and Fitzpatrick 2018, Dwyer 2019,
Eleveld, Kampen and Arts 2020).


#### 3.2.1 Vulnerability, equity, and the relevance of background injustice



A first important set of arguments against work-conditionality appeals
to *problems of vulnerability and equity* in the application of
work conditions in a social minimum policy regime, and, under
non-ideal conditions, to the importance of considering the
*significance of background injustice*.



One possible problem concerns *vulnerability in the labor
market*. As we saw above in section
 2.5,
 one rationale for having a welfare state to enact a social minimum is
that, by providing access to urgently needed goods independently of
the sale of labor-power, it can reduce the pressure on disadvantaged
workers to scramble into poor quality (exploitative or abusive) jobs.
There is a danger that work-conditionality rules undermine this
desirable effect. If, for example, the government tells an unemployed
person that they must look for a job and take any job offered by an
employer on whatever terms this employer states, or else lose all
welfare benefits, then this person will be under severe pressure to
find and take a job. They will clearly have much less power to refuse
jobs that involve exploitative or abusive treatment than if they
received welfare benefits unconditionally. According to some critics,
this is the whole point of work-conditionality: to weaken the
bargaining position of labor in the interests of business and the
property-owning classes (see Piven and Cloward 1993). A distinct but
related objection is that work-conditionality might place a burden of
"shameful revelation" on those claiming transfers: to
qualify for transfers, they have to show that they have looked for a
job, but failed to get one, which is potentially damaging to
self-respect (Wolff 1998).



A second problem concerns the *vulnerability of dependents*. If
someone is denied the full social minimum because they choose not to
satisfy a work-conditionality rule then this will not only hurt them,
but is likely also to hurt others who depend on them for an income
such as their children (if they have children). Since these children
are in no way responsible for their parents' decision to ignore
a work-conditionality rule, this hurt is surely unfair (and may
undermine other social goals, such as achieving equality of
educational opportunity for children from different social
backgrounds).



A third problem is that work-conditionality rules may in practice lead
to *inequity between welfare recipients and other citizens*.
For example, what about those who inherit large amounts of wealth?
What can be done to get these wealthier citizens to meet their
reciprocity-based obligation to work? If nothing is done, then there
is apparently a failure to enforce a given social obligation equitably:
citizens who need welfare benefits will be forced to meet their
obligation to work, but citizens who receive large inheritances will
not be forced to meet this obligation. There is also a danger of
*inequity in the treatment of different kinds of work*. If we
think here of 'work' only as employment or market-facing work we will
ignore the non-market care work that many do for children and other
family members and friends. Arguably, at least some of this work also
counts in satisfaction of the reciprocity-based obligation to 'do
one's bit' in society, and so there is an injustice if those doing
this work - in most real-world societies, these people will be
disproportionately women - are required also to do as much employment,
market-facing work as others.



All of these points connect in turn to a basic, underlying question of
how just are the society's background economic structures. If
society's economic structures are just in other respects, then it may
seem reasonable to expect each citizen who is able to work to do so.
In a context of otherwise just social arrangements, then this seems
part and parcel of fair social cooperation. But what if the background
structures of the economy are actually unjust in other respects? For
example, perhaps society's educational institutions fail to secure
sufficient equality of opportunity, unfairly leaving some citizens
with limited job opportunities. Or perhaps the reward structure is
unequal to an unfair extent, leaving some workers with unfairly low
pay for the work they do. In this context, it can be argued that the
underlying obligation to work, as an expression of fairness in social
cooperation, does not in fact hold for those citizens who suffer
unfair disadvantage. This point is made by Tommie Shelby in his
discussion of the obligations of the Black ghetto poor in the USA:



> 
> ...job opportunities for low-skilled workers are severely
> limited and the jobs that are available are often menial, dead-end
> service positions that pay wages too low to provide adequate economic
> security for a family. Now it might be replied that if the ghetto poor
> do not want to take these low-wage jobs they should develop their
> skills....As is widely known, however, the quality of education
> available to ghetto residents is generally so substandard that most
> cannot get a basic education there, let alone proper preparation for
> college....This lack of equal educational opportunity, which in
> turn creates an unfair employment opportunity scheme, vitiates any
> obligation to work... (Shelby 2007, 146-147; see also
> Shelby 2016, chapter 6.)



The putative, reciprocity-based obligation to work does not exist for
those who are unjustly disadvantaged in the way described; hence,
there can be no question of justice requiring enforcement of this
supposed obligation. In addition, any attempt to enforce the
non-existent obligation is likely to make the unjust disadvantage
worse, for example, in the contemporary US context, by reinforcing
degrading historical conceptions of Black people as people whom it is
appropriate to force to work (see Shelby 2016, 197-200).



Taking these points on board, even some of those who have endorsed the
principle of reciprocity and the basic idea of work-conditionality
have also cautioned against applying work-conditionality in a way that
is insensitive to the background distribution of wealth and
opportunity in society (see, for example, Gutmann and Thompson 1996:
chapter 8; White 2003, 2005; see also Daniels 1981: 160-162).
They argue that the principle of work-conditionality should be
suspended, or at least moderated, if the background distribution of
wealth and opportunity is not sufficiently just. Indeed, given the
risks involved, and the complexity of creating the conditions for the
fair enforcement of work obligations, there is a case for avoiding
work-conditionality altogether even if one accepts the underlying
principle of reciprocity (White 2017).


#### 3.2.2 The inheritance argument against conditionality



A further objection to making the social minimum work-conditional
comes from philosophers influenced by the left-libertarian tradition
reviewed above (see section
 2.3).
 As we saw above, left-libertarians believe that, ideally speaking,
individuals have a right to an equal share of resources that are an
inheritance from nature or from past generations. Thus, imagine that
ten people arrive on an island and find that it contains a factory
containing ten machines. The machines can be used to produce the food,
clothing and shelter that the islanders need to survive. The
left-libertarian will argue that in principle each islander should
receive one machine--that is, an equal share of the machines in
the inherited factory. Now suppose that one of the ten islanders, call
them Drew, decides not to work their machine but to rent it out to
other islanders who are prepared to work it for a price. Drew does no
work, but simply lives off the rent that other islanders pay them for
the use of the machine that they have been allocated. Now, depending
on how high the rent is, Drew could conceivably be receiving an income
close to their society's social minimum, and they will be doing no
work in return for this income. But the left-libertarian will argue
that this is not unjust because Drew is only here making use of their
rightful share of society's inherited goods. As we noted above, it is
difficult in practice to divide inherited resources up literally in
this way. But we can perhaps identify these resources, assess their
market value, and give everyone a grant of income or wealth equivalent
to a per capita share of the market value of these resources. Some
people might choose to live off this grant without doing any work (or
doing as little work as possible). But, according to the
left-libertarian, this is no different to Drew deciding to do no work
and to live off the rent they can get from charging others to work on
their machine: it is a legitimate use of one's rightful share of
society's inherited resources. Subject to important nuances and
variations, a number of philosophers have employed this type of
argument in recent years to defend the payment to each citizen of a
*universal basic income* or a *universal capital grant*
(see Steiner 1994; Van Parijs 1992, 1995; Ackerman and Alstott 1999;
Dworkin 2000; Birnbaum 2012; Widerquist 2013; Bidadanure 2019).



There are, however, some difficulties with the argument, understood as
an attempt to defend the enactment of a full social minimum without
any work condition.



The first difficulty, already flagged up in our discussion of
left-libertarianism in section
 2.3,
 is that the grant which represents one's rightful share of society's
inherited wealth might fall somewhat short of the value of the full
social
 minimum.[8]



However, a second issue is whether people do in fact have a right to
an equal share of their society's inherited resources *regardless
of work effort*. The basic issue is whether it is fair to use an
inheritance, as Chris does in the example above, to extract a share of
what other citizens produce while choosing not to make a productive
contribution of one's own in return.



It might be said that people like Drew do contribute to production -
they do so by supplying their share of inherited resources for others
to use for productive purposes. But a distinction can be made between
the contribution that the inherited resources putatively credited to
Drew make to production, and Drew's own contribution. If Drew were not
on the island we imagined, the other islanders could still use the
inherited resources that we have supposed are otherwise credited to
Drew. They could work just as hard, and produce just as much, as they
do when Drew is there and is credited with an equal share of these
resources. But they would be better off because they would not have to
give a portion of this product to Drew in return for using some of the
island's inherited wealth. This, so the argument runs, shows that Drew
themselves is not in any real sense contributing economically to the
society. So is it fair for Drew to get an income without working
(assuming that they could if they so choose)? Some argue that Drew has
as much right to a share of the machines as anyone else and it is up
to them what benefit they get from this (Van Parijs 1995, drawing on
Dworkin 1985, 2000; Birnbaum 2012). Others argue that cases like this
show that a just distribution of assets should be more sensitive to
individuals' own interest in making direct use of the assets (see van
Donselaar 2009; see also Van der Veen 1998, White 2007).



To conclude, the concern for economic fairness (as reciprocity) does
not offer grounds for rejecting enactment of a social minimum. At
most, it supports making elements of a social minimum policy package
work-conditional. However, there are strong arguments for limiting
work-conditionality. One set of arguments appeals to the ways in which
work-conditionality can enhance the vulnerability of citizens to
exploitation or other forms of injustice and/or generate or exacerbate
other inequities between citizens. This set of arguments has
additional force in societies where background economic structures are
otherwise significantly unjust (Shelby 2007, 2016, White 2017).
Another kind of argument appeals to the idea that citizens have a
right to a share of inherited assets that is not conditional with
respect to willingness to work, though the scope and precise nature of
this right remains disputed.


### 3.3 The legitimacy objection



A third objection to the enactment of a social minimum appeals to the
value of legitimacy. A law or policy lacks legitimacy when the law or
policy is arbitrary in the eyes of those bound by the law or
policy--that is, they are not given a sufficiently good and
accessible reason to justify their subjection to this law or policy.
The absence of legitimacy signals a kind of alienation from the law or
policy, so that people are unable to identify with it as an expression
of what they value and believe. Critics might argue that the
establishment of a social minimum policy regime creates distinctive
problems of legitimacy for a society; and they might further argue
that these problems make it undesirable, all things considered, to
enact a social minimum. How might enactment of a social minimum
generate problems of legitimacy? How can these problems be tackled? Do
the problems really discredit the case for enactment?



One potential legitimacy problem is the *capability-list
problem* that we noted above in section
 1.2.
 To say what kind and level of resources are necessary for people to
be able to lead "a minimally decent life in one's
society", we must take a view about the functionings and
capabilities that are constitutive of a decent human life, and any
such view is bound to be somewhat controversial, perhaps especially if
we are trying to define a social minimum transnationally or globally.
Some people might not accept the capability-list used to determine the
social minimum as the right list. We shall return briefly to this
problem towards the end of this section, but only after first give
some consideration to a second potential legitimacy problem which we
also briefly noted in section
 1.1:
 the *limit-setting problem*. To recall the problem, consider
once again item (2) on Nussbaum's list of "central human
functional capabilities", as set out in section
 1.2,
 the capability for bodily health. What kind and level of access to
health-care resources must a society secure for its members for us to
say that this capability is satisfied to an extent that allows
everyone to lead "a minimally decent life"? If we hold
that a society must ensure access to whatever health-care resources
have, say, a life-sustaining impact, then we may well be committing
ourselves to spending the vast bulk of a society's resources just on
health-care. At some point limits must be set, or else the health-care
sector will devour the whole social product (making it impossible, of
course, to provide for other key capabilities). But, on the other
hand, how can limits be set in a way that is fair and has legitimacy
in the eyes of the people who will have to live with the consequences
of these limit-setting decisions? How is it possible for communities
to decide whether or not a new, expensive health-care treatment is in
or out of the social minimum, and for this decision to have legitimacy
in the eyes of the citizens?



These questions invite us to consider explicitly the *political
processes* through which limit-setting (and other) decisions are
made. It considers what features these processes must have if they are
to treat all those bound by the decisions fairly, and in a way that
all those concerned can regard as legitimate.



In the health-care context, the issue of limit-setting is explored in
an important paper by Norman Daniels and James Sabin (Daniels and
Sabin 1997). Daniels and Sabin argue that for limit-setting decisions
in this context to have legitimacy, the decision-making process must
satisfy four conditions (see Daniels and Sabin 1997: 322-325;
also Ham and Robert 2003: 2):


1. *Publicity*. The rationales for limit-setting decisions
must be made public.
2. *Reasonableness*. The rationales for limit-setting
decisions should be reasonable; that is, they should appeal to reasons
and principles that can be accepted as relevant by people who are
disposed to look for reasons and principles agreeable to all.
3. *Contestability*. There should be a mechanism through which
decisions can be challenged, with adequate opportunity to present new
arguments and evidence.
4. *Enforcement*. There should be a mechanism for forcing the
limit-setting body to respect the first three conditions.



The idea is not that the people who are affected by a given
limit-setting decision will necessarily agree with this decision if
these conditions are met, e.g., agree with a decision to exclude a
specific medical treatment from the health-care package provided under
the social minimum policy regime. Rather, the idea is that all parties
will be able to regard the decision as legitimate, even if they
disagree with it and some of them continue to oppose it. The
conditions of publicity and reasonableness work to ensure that a given
decision is grounded in reasons of a kind that affected parties can
see at least see as relevant. The contestability condition helps to
ensure that the reasonableness of the decision is robust, that all
relevant reasons and evidence have indeed been weighed by the
decision-making body in coming to its decision. In these
circumstances, even the person who "loses" in such a case
can feel assured that their interests and point of view have not been
overruled arbitrarily. In this sense, they are fairly treated and the
decision ought to have, even in their eyes, legitimacy, even if they
continue to think it mistaken and oppose it.



The implication of the foregoing analysis is that those who wish to
enact a social minimum need to give serious thought to the
institutional structures through which limit-setting decisions are
made, with an eye to seeing that the conditions of publicity,
reasonableness, contestability, and enforcement are met. This applies
not only in relation to health-care, but in relation to all the
programs that governments must typically have as part of enacting a
social minimum, such as cash transfer programs, educational services,
and so on.



Moreover, this concern for appropriate procedure should arguably
inform not only our response to the limit-setting problem, but to the
capability-list problem that we noted above. In a society where there
is broad, but not perfect, consensus in support of a Nussbaum-style
list of "central human functional capabilities", the
legitimacy of the final capability-list used to help specify the
social minimum can be enhanced by subjecting the formulation of the
list to a process that has the characteristics of publicity,
reasonableness, and contestability noted above (see Sen 1999: 110;
Nussbaum 1999: 47-49, for comments along these
 lines).[9]
 A similar focus on the importance of fair procedure in the
specification of the social minimum policy package can be found in
Nancy Fraser's work on the "politics of need
interpretation" (Fraser 1989, 1997), and in Amy Gutmann's and
Dennis Thompson's account of welfare state policy-making in a
"deliberative democracy" (Gutmann and Thompson 1996). The
use of conditionality, discussed in the previous section, is perhaps a
particularly important area in which to make sure that policy-making
procedures have these qualities of publicity, reasonableness, and
contestability. In societies where there is significant background
injustice, it will be very important also to ensure adequate voice in
the decision-making process for those who suffer unjust
disadvantage.



A further and key question for consideration here is whether the
standard processes of representative democracy are adequate to meet
the demands of publicity, reasonableness, and contestability, or
whether, to achieve decisions that have legitimacy, these processes
need to be supplemented by other kinds of institutions that are more
deliberative and inclusive of the people who stand to be bound by
limit-setting, capability-listing, and conditionality-defining
decisions. Interesting developments in this respect include:



(1) use of *citizens' juries*, *deliberative opinion
polls* and *Citizens' Assemblies* to assist with
decision-making (on which, see Fishkin 1995, Coote and Lenaghan 1998,
Smith and Wales 2000, Fung 2003, Smith 2009);



(2) *Participatory Budgeting*, which originated in Brazil in
the 1990s and has since been taken up (in various forms) around the
world (de Sousa Santos 2007, Wampler 2007, Baiocchi, Heller and Silva
2011, Fung 2011); and,



(3) *village parliaments (gram sabhas)* that are
constitutionally mandated in rural areas in India and which have
helped to empower poorer citizens to exercise more control over
provision of local public goods (Veron 2001, Parthasarathy and
Rao 2018, Parthasarathy, Rao and Palaniswamy 2019).



In view of the legitimacy problems discussed in this section, those
who support enactment of a social minimum should consider the
contribution of these and similar institutions in the specification
and operation of social minimum policy regimes.


## 4. Conclusion



Instead of summarizing the arguments of the previous sections here, we
close by noting three further points which put our discussion into
perspective.



Firstly, we should note that as we move to enact the social minimum
there are a number of important policy design questions that arise
that our discussion thus far leaves unresolved. We have considered one
design issue: the issue of how far access to the social minimum should
be work-conditional. But there is a huge range of other design issues
that we have not directly considered. For example, if we accept that
the government has a responsibility to its citizens to secure access
to certain basic goods and services, to what extent should the
government itself directly produce these goods and services, e.g.,
health-care? If we accept that the government must introduce
tax-transfer schemes to enact the social minimum, what form should
these take? Should the government use "means-testing" to
target transfers exclusively to the most needy, or should it seek to
enact the social minimum through so-called "social
insurance" programs to which all (or virtually all) citizens
contribute, and from which all receive
 benefits?[10]
 If the government provides citizens with assistance in meeting a
specific need, should it provide assistance in the form of
"in-kind" benefits or in the form of
 cash?[11]
 These are all major design questions that arise in thinking about how
to enact the social minimum. One cannot settle them merely by appeal
to the basic idea of the social minimum. Although many of the ideas
and considerations discussed here will be relevant in addressing these
questions, settling them requires further philosophical reflection
and, indeed, a lot of empirical research.



Secondly, it is important to emphasise again that much of our
discussion has taken the scope of the social minimum to be that of a
nation state, but we can and should also consider obligations to enact
a social minimum at transnational and global levels. A full discussion
of this would need to draw on the growing body of literature on global
 justice.[12]



Thirdly, even when considering economic and social arrangements within
a given nation, we need to keep distinct the specific question of
whether and why a social minimum is justified from the broader
question of what social justice consists in and demands of us.
Enacting a social minimum may well be a demand of social justice.
Indeed, it may well be one of the most urgent demands of social
justice. But, challenging as this demand is, social justice might
require much more of us than this.