Maskivker
(Van Parijs, 1995, p. 23). Generally speaking, this kind of freedom is
Work lovers, freedom, and basic income
Julia Maskivker
Department of Politics, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, 32789, USA.
Abstract This article discusses left-libertarian justifications of basic income. The
basic income policy is designed to decouple income from employment in the
monetized economy by allowing the individual to access, on a regular stipulated
basis, a grant that is independent of her ability and willingness to work for
remuneration. This article attempts to amend an important failure with respect to
the way in which the concept of real freedom has been treated in Van Parijs’
pioneering defense of the universal grant. Van Parijs’ defense of basic income
does not pay substantial attention to the freedom that work-lovers would gain
from the opportunity to opt out of work, which the grant would facilitate if
sufficiently generous. Van Parijs’ justification of basic income is incomplete in
terms of the value it places on the opportunity to enjoy freedom from employment
from the purview of every member of society, not only those that will, or might,
decide to lead a life (partially) outside of work. The article develops the argument
that such failure results from the fact that Van Parijs’ conception of freedom is
centered on the importance of actual or potential preference satisfaction as opposed
to non-agent-centered reasons.
Contemporary Political Theory (2011) 10, 21–36. doi:10.1057/cpt.2010.7
Keywords: basic income; freedom; agency; preference autonomy; preference
satisfaction; employment
Introduction
This article discusses the conditions of ‘real freedom’ against the backdrop of
left-libertarian justifications of basic income. The basic income policy is
designed to decouple income from employment in the monetized economy by
allowing the individual to access, on a regular stipulated basis, a grant that is
independent of her ability and willingness to work for remuneration. This
article attempts to amend an important failure with respect to the way in which
the concept of real freedom has been treated in Van Parijs’ pioneering defense
of the universal grant. Real freedom, according to Van Parijs, is the possibility
to do all things that one might want to do, which the basic income facilitates
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www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/
understood as the freedom to lead the life one wants, or might want, while not
having to worry about having (minimal) access to the material means to do so.
My analysis in this article also develops a concept of freedom that is in
tension with the central role that employment receives in society. But I will
distinguish my view from Van Parijs’ and claim that his defense of basic income
does not pay substantial attention to the freedom that work-lovers would gain
from the opportunity to opt out of work, which the grant would facilitate if
sufficiently generous.1 Van Parijs’ justification of basic income is incomplete in
terms of the value it places on the opportunity to enjoy freedom from
employment from the purview of every member of society, not only those that
will, or might, decide to lead a life (partially) outside of work.
In particular, this article will develop the claim that even for individuals who
will prefer to work, the latter’s lack of opportunity to work less than full-time
via an unconditional basic income violates their real freedom, and the criteria
of preference autonomy and moral agency render such a violation lamentable.2
Preference autonomy is understood as the cognitive capacity to form prefer-
ences that are not conditioned by limited choice. Moral agency, in turn, is
interpreted more normatively as the opportunity to be the author of one’s own
life through the capacity to claim moral (substantive) responsibility for one’s
own actions and omissions. These two reasons are independent of individual
preferences, actual or potential. Applied to a discussion of employment, the
above analysis tells us that there are two reasons why the non-work option is
valuable: individuals will be able to live the life they wish to lead if they
prefer non-work to work; but they will also be able to freely choose what
that life might be, even if they will always prefer work over non-work. Having
the opportunity to do that which one prefers, or might prefer, to do is not
always tantamount to having freedom of choice because my preferred
alternative may be the only one available, for example. The idea that
freedom may result from an option the individual will never prefer to make
use of has not been emphasized in existing defenses of basic income and its
overall social benefits. The focus has rather been on the distributive
consequences of the policy, as well as the claim – based on considerations
of ethical neutrality – that people who value leisure more than work should not
be disadvantaged by social institutions on account of their preference for a
more relaxed way of life.
The next section of the article delineates my criticism of Van Parijs’ concept-
ualization of real freedom. I claim that his notion is based on the value of
preference-satisfaction, however odd this statement may strike the familiarized
reader; given the emphasis Van Parijs puts on the non-welfarist nature of his
philosophy. The subsequent section spells out two reasons – independent of
preference– why the basic income should be valued by work-lovers who sustain
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 Work lovers, freedom, and basic income
it through taxes. The penultimate section addresses the problem of comparing
the freedom loss of the work-lovers who finance the basic income through
taxes with the freedom gain of the individuals who avail themselves of the non-
work option. It could be argued that given our limited ability to measure
freedom, the attempt to compare freedom gains and freedom losses is akin to
‘comparing apples and oranges’ because the comparison is empirically
impossible. Although I cannot solve the measurement problem on technical
grounds, I will refute the incomparability claim on another basis.
Freedom and Want
The basic income literature – as best exemplified by Van Parijs’ work –
understands real freedom in normatively weak terms because it assumes that
freedom is based on (present or future) preference satisfaction. For Van Parijs,
real freedom obtains when access to the ‘opportunity to do whatever one might
want to do’ is possible (Van Parijs, 1995, pp. 23, 25); the expression ‘might
want’ in Van Parijs’ definition is illustrative. For Van Parijs, real freedom is the
actual capacity to realize intentions and plans; namely, what one wants or might
want to do. Van Parijs’ understanding of real freedom assumes that citizens
should have access to the material means necessary to fulfill their preferred life-
plans (now, or in the future) regardless of their contribution to the creation of
social wealth, as the basic income is unconditional. It has been argued that
defining real freedom as the possibility to do the things one might want to do
neglects actual preferences in favor of future or potential preferences. That is,
Van Parijs’ conception of freedom could be based on the idea that getting what
one wants is worthless because it does not privilege the agent’s actual desires
over desires she might have had, but does not in fact have (Barry, 1996, p. 54).
However, even acknowledging this bias, it would not be far-fetched to think
that Van Parijs’ conception of freedom is centered on the importance of actual
or potential preference satisfaction. After all, the intuition driving Van Parijs’
notion of freedom is that the agent should be able to achieve her preferred
plan of life even if she does not know what that is at the moment, or even if that
preference will change in the future.
Associating freedom with the opportunity to satisfy preferences is in
agreement with a rich body of literature on the conditions of autonomy. See,
inter alia, Arneson (1985) and Christman (2001). This literature holds that
freedom depends on the satisfaction of (rationally formed and legitimate)
desires.3 One consequence of this line of reasoning is that the presence or
absence of alternatives the individual does not desire to make use of is irre-
levant to freedom. Having access to options one does not desire to enjoy does
not make us substantially more free than not having such access, provided our
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desires have formed rationally – under conditions excluding duress and other
limitations that detract from the authenticity of our preferences such as mental
insanity and other incapacitating psychological or neurological conditions.
In the case of Van Parijs’ refined understanding of freedom (remember his
reference to potential wants), we could say that the availability of options that
the agent might never want to realize is normatively irrelevant. Of course, it is
difficult in practice to know which alternatives the individual may or may not
prefer. Thus, we may think that it is better to have more options than fewer
options just in case someone might end up preferring an option that has been
removed from her option set. But in purely ideal terms, a preference-based
conception of freedom tells us that if we knew people’s present and future
preferences, those options that no one would prefer at any time could well
be removed from the set of available options. (Arneson, 1985). I argue against
this conclusion, which I consider to be a corollary of Van Parijs’ conception of
real freedom.
Van Parijs could respond that reference to potential preferences in his
thinking means that his conception of freedom lacks the implications of
traditional preference-based views. Champions of basic income define real
freedom as the opportunity to do both what they want and what they might
want to do. This twist gives a non-welfarist tone to the theory since although
anyone can have potential preferences, no one in particular necessarily has
them. As a result, public policy does not have to focus on actual desires. I
believe that, even though Van Parijs is careful not to fall prey to traditionally
welfarist conceptions of freedom, he is blind to some strange implications of his
notion of freedom. In ideal terms, Van Parijs’ notion of freedom revolves
around that which the individual will or could choose now or in the future
(assuming correspondence between preference and choice). Thus, at the core of
his theoretical edifice is a concern with opportunities for potential, future or
actual preference fulfillment.
I argue that, although the opportunity to satisfy preferences is fundamental
to real freedom, freedom is also enhanced by the presence of options the
individual does not prefer and will never prefer to realize. That is, there is still
good reason to uphold an option even though no one might choose it at any
particular point in time.4 This reasoning assumes that the non-work option
confers freedom even if it is not, or might not be, desired by the agent. The
latter explains why the policy should be defended on behalf of society as a
whole, not just a particular portion of it; namely, those individuals whose ideal
of the good life requires, or might require, leading a life that is not centered on
employment. The idea that a given option may confer freedom even if never
desired by the agent is not meant as an empirical statement merely. Behind
such apparently descriptive view lies a moral account of human freedom based
on the potential to be the true authors of our life by having real amplitude of
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 Work lovers, freedom, and basic income
choice, which obtains, the argument goes, in the presence of those alternatives
that we will never wish to take advantage of. This non-preference-based
understanding of freedom cannot be taken to express an empirical fact only.
Importantly, it should be taken to express a moral reason to value an option
even when that option is not wanted. That reason is two-fold: it pertains to
the development of autonomous preferences and the exercise of agency. In
particular, this article develops the argument that citizens (and maybe
residents) should be given the option to opt out of work (if only partially)
for two reasons that have nothing to do with (informed) desire, namely,
preference autonomy and individual agency.
The availability of the alternative to work less than full time is justified,
according to this line of reasoning, on moral grounds. These grounds are not
grounds of logical necessity for two reasons. Anybody can perfectly decide
to work full-time, that is, everybody can perfectly decide not to opt out of
full-time employment, everything else being equal (under conditions near to
full-employment, for example). Second, even if it were logically impossible for
all able-bodied individuals to choose to work full-time, not having the freedom
to do what is logically impossible does not appear to impinge on autonomy
nor agency. For example, not being free to be in Amsterdam and New York
simultaneously does not seem to militate against any relevant capacity to
develop autonomous preferences nor to act with agency.
Autonomous preferences are the inverse of adaptive preferences. An adap-
tive preference is determined by an agent’s set of actual options. The fabled fox
in the sour grapes story undergoes an adaptive preference change (Elster, 1983,
p. 109). Because it cannot reach the grapes, it forms the belief that the fruits are
sour, therefore, undesirable. Autonomous preferences are also the inverse of
counter-adaptive preferences, that is, preferences that arise out of a fascination
with, or idealization of, the impossible. The common saying that the grass is
greener on the other side of the fence evokes this mechanism: Some people
cherish what they can’t have only because they can’t have it. We could say that
autonomous preferences are authentic ones, formed freely, not under the
influence of disruptive mechanisms triggered by limiting circumstances or
cognitive failures, inasmuch as this type of authenticity is humanly possible.
Moral agency could be construed as the individual’s capacity to claim moral
responsibility for her decisions (Hurka, 1987). The latter potential could be
regarded as derivative of her capacity to shape and author her life according
to her own criteria, undisrupted, insofar as that is humanly possible, by inesca-
pable circumstances. A person’s moral agency makes her responsible not only
for the fact that her life takes one form, but also for the fact that it doesn’t take
other forms. When circumstance is the overriding factor, the individual cannot
take responsibility, in a substantive way, for the fact that her life is not different
from what it is now. In such a scenario, she cannot claim true authorship of her
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trajectory because the absence of options to choose from detracts from any indi-
vidual act of judgment and discernment (Ullmann-Margalit and Morgenbesser,
1977) – and this is so regardless of the content of her preferences. The fewer
significant options the individual can independently choose from, the more
powerful a role circumstance will play in determining her decision. Real freedom
of choice and moral responsibility are flipsides of the same coin.
This article develops the argument that the real freedom that basic income
furnishes is valuable insofar as it allows for the exercise of moral agency and
preference autonomy irrespective of the content of our desires, all else equal,
but all else is not equal if we are unable to realize our preferences. Claiming
that the opportunity to satisfy a preference, actual or potential, is not the
sole source of real freedom does not entail overlooking the importance of
preference satisfaction to human development. In general terms, the individual
should be considered freer the more opportunities he has to realize the options
he desires but this does not mean that valuable states and goods are considered
worthy because the individual deems them as such. These goods may have
independent value, that is, they may be of worth even if not recognized to be so
by any particular person. Arneson (1990) acknowledges this possibility when
tackling the question of how to determine what a ‘primary’ good is, in
conversation with John Rawls.
The notion of ‘value’, thus, has an objective and a subjective side to it. The
subjective side is given by how important to the person’s plan of life a given
option is. The objective side is given by the value that it is reasonable, from an
external point of view, to place on the option on account of the human goods
that the opportunity grants access to. On this second criterion we ask: What
makes a life a good thing, as Sidgwick put it, ‘from the point of view of the
universe?’5 Isaiah Berlin describes the non-subjective aspect of human choice
as ‘what value, not merely the agent, but the general sentiment of the society in
which he lives, puts on the various possibilities’ (Berlin, 1958, p. 15). I prefer to
avoid reference to society’s ‘sentiments’ because a society where women are not
expected to work outside the home, for instance, is a society where any
particular woman’s aspiration to break free from her traditional role would be
deemed valueless. Instead, I rely on what Scanlon has called ‘Substantive Good
Theories’, namely, views that are based on substantive (non agent-based)
claims about what goods, conditions and opportunities make a life go better
(Scanlon, 1993, p. 189). John Rawls’ talk of ‘primary goods’, namely, things it
is supposed a rational person wants whatever else she wants, evokes this non-
subjective ingredient to valuation (Rawls, 1982). Rawls assumes that these
goods are of value on rational grounds. In this light, primary goods do not
cease to be valuable in cases where the particular individual does not prefer to
enjoy them. What makes them so worthy is not primarily because of their being
preferred in particular instances.
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 Work lovers, freedom, and basic income
Alluding to an idea of value that is independent of individual preference,
Ronald Dworkin draws a distinction between critical well-being and volitional
well-being (Dworkin, 2000, p. 242). According to him, ‘someone’s volitional
well-being is improved, and just for that reason, when he has or achieves what
in fact he wants. His critical well-being is improved by his having or achieving
what he should want, that is, the achievements or experiences that it would
make his life a worse one not to want’ (Dworkin, 2000, p. 243). Dworkin’s
position does not imply ignore the idea that the individual’s endorsement is
necessary to his well-being. It simply tells us that endorsement is not the only
thing that should count. That said, substantive good theories can allow for
variation. They can recognize that different people are capable of experiencing
desires under very different circumstances. Consequently, preferences and
desires do play an important role for non-subjective theories of value. But this
theoretical flexibility does not mean that preference enjoys priority over ‘the
point of view of the universe’, in Sidgwick’s terms. Objective good theories can
recognize that sometimes it is a good thing to be getting what you want, but
according to these theories, being an object of desire is not primarily what
makes things valuable.
Two Reasons to Value Diversity: Preference Autonomy and Moral
Agency
The basic income may be valued by the agent on grounds of the things it
enables her to obtain and enjoy. In this sense, the value the agent attaches to
the policy derives from previous interests in things she might be at liberty to do
thanks to the grant. In the case at hand, the individual may value the basic
income because it will permit her to live a life outside of full-time employment,
provided she prefers such type of life. (The individual may choose to partially
withdraw from the monetized economy, or she may choose to totally opt out of
work. The option of working less rather than not already constitutes a
significant and meaningful addition to the individual’s range of alternatives, as
argued supra.)
The individual may also attach independent value to the basic income.6 In
this case, the policy is desirable not because of the specific courses of action it
permits the agent to take, but for the type of person that it allows her to be,
namely, autonomous and self-directing. More specifically, the basic income is
valuable because it facilitates authenticity of preferences and moral agency.
We could say that having the option to work less than full time has
independent value because it permits the individual to know that her choice to
work will not be determined by the impossibility to choose not to work. In this
sense, diversity is valuable because of the importance attached to knowing that
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one is making decisions for the right reasons. Having the opt-out of work
option is of worth because it allows those who decide not to take it to know
that they work because they sincerely want to, not because they have to. Thus,
availability of the non-work option will make adaptive preference formation
unlikely.
Besides triggering the ‘sour grapes phenomenon’, unavailability of options
may cause the opposite effect, that is, ‘the forbidden fruit phenomenon’ (Elster,
1983, pp. 124–127). For many people, the unreachable becomes desirable only
because it is unreachable. But once the fruit is no longer forbidden, the desire
for it may as well dissipate. People tend to idealize what they prefer but cannot
have, granting it characteristics that pertain to the world of fantasy. A life of
less than full employment may turn out not to be permanent bliss, as some
people wary of degrading or badly paid work may (understandably) believe to
be the case. Thus, either because something is forbidden or because it is simply
difficult to attain, people may tend to overestimate the advantages associated
with it. A scenario in which one’s decisions are not unduly influenced by the
forgoing human cognitive failures is intrinsically good for the individual
because it reflects her capacity for autonomy irrespective of whether she would
prefer to drop out of work.7 It goes without saying that for those individuals
who would eventually decide to take the opt-out of employment option, the
value of that alternative resides in the fact that it offers what they most prefer.
That is, besides being valued on grounds of autonomy, the option will be
valued instrumentally. We can see that the opt-out of work alternative is
valuable because it enhances real freedom both when it is taken and when it is
not, albeit for different reasons.
A note of caution at this point is called for. Diversity of choices may bring
welfare decline because life satisfaction requires the absence of what we highly
aspire to enjoy or obtain. It is not unheard of, in psychological circles, that to
be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness
(Kenny, 1965). Because of this, the presence of significant options, previously
inaccessible, may make us freer and more autonomous but miserable at the
same time. Is it worth the tradeoff? This way of putting the dilemma rests on
confusion, however. The availability of previously non-existent options is not
equivalent to fulfillment of the agent’s aspirations and needs. It is a step in that
direction but it does not constitute the whole story. In the example of the non-
work option, the individual might see her desire for leisure come true, but this
possibility does not actualize her aspiration to be the kind of person she wants
to be once she is no longer a worker. The fulfillment of her plans is still as
uncertain as one can imagine. It is not at all unreasonable to assume that
people will want to become a certain type of person at leisure by developing
certain talents and projects. Simple time off work does not, albeit on a short-
term horizon, guarantee life-satisfaction. On the contrary, there is room to
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 Work lovers, freedom, and basic income
argue that it makes it more difficult to obtain. Away from the safe source of
personal identity that the job is (whether we are satisfied with it or not) the
individual might strive to find life meaning in a different realm. We have no
means to know how difficult or easy such task will be for her.
The second reason why the basic income may be valued independently (that
is, non-instrumentally) is moral agency. Moral agency should be generally
understood to be the capacity to be held morally responsible for the shape of
one’s life, insofar as life-authorship is humanly possible. To claim that a person
is morally responsible for a certain action is to claim that such action is
attributable to her in the sense required for it to be a basis of moral assessment.
Freedom is connected with moral responsibility through the idea that only the
free determination of our aims can render us morally accountable for our
actions (and omissions) (Frankfurt 1969; Fischer, 1999). Thus, we take moral
agency to be a desirable capacity to exercise in the sense that it enables us to
say that we are in command of our lives, other things equal (other things are
not equal if internal conditions of life-authorship are not present). Having
moral agency means that we can be held substantively (not merely causally)
responsible for what we do or do not do, that is, for facts about our life
(Hurka, 1987, p. 366).
Having amplitude of (non trivial) choices constitutes an invitation to fully
exercise our power to discard alternatives we do not prefer in favor of those that
we do prefer. In this sense, diversity of options is intimately related to the exer-
cise of moral agency. The latter implies that we can be held responsible for our
decisions the more we can say ‘no’ to some options and ‘yes’ to others because
when we are in a position to do this, we are actually exercising discernment. In
this vein, the more meaningful and diverse alternatives we face, the greater
number of times we can say ‘no’ when we make a choice. The chance to actively
exercise this capacity is worthy. To say that choice has value because of agency
is not to say that choice is an instrument to obtaining agency but that it
reflects agency (Hurka, p. 366). Barring physical and psychological pathologies,
diversity of options and moral agency are two sides of the same coin.
But does the argument of agency mean that the more free choices I make the
more of an (moral) agent I am? Because if such were the case, one could spend
one’s entire life making small, relatively irrelevant, decisions and be more of an
agent in this way. Is moral agency enhanced if we increase the number of
free decisions we make on a daily basis? Yes and No. There are many types
of agency, one should dare to say. The agency you exercise when choosing a
T-shirt among many T-shirts is qualitatively different from the agency you
exercise when choosing a career from a pool of available professions, no matter
how truly free your T-shirt choice is. Some decisions are more relevant than
others in the sense that they are more powerful in setting life in different
directions. And so is the exercise of agency that accompanies them, I posit. It is
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reasonable to suppose that no relevant life changes will result from certain
types of decisions despite their free nature. Of course, this statement is too
general and is not meant to apply to all particular cases. However, common
sense and observation favor the suggestion that decisions people make vary in
their life-changing capacity.
At this point we can see how absence of the opt-out of work alternative is
detrimental to agency. The incapacity to work less than full-time denies the
individual the capacity to determine important facts about her life even if
working is preferred to not working. Having the option to opt out of work
makes the individual responsible not just for the positive fact that her life
has one shape, but also for the negative fact that it doesn’t have other forms.
A person that can avail herself of the opt-out of work alternative is more
responsible for her life in the sense of being more of an active participant in
authoring it than someone who has only one alternative available, namely,
working. Thus, substantive freedom implies not only amplified access to (non-
trivial) options but also responsibility for what we make of those options.
Freedom and Taxes
As advanced above, we could think that taxes destined to finance the non-work
option are contrary to freedom. Many tax-payers will be left with less income
than they would command under the same work-leisure allocation if those
taxes did not exist. Income gives access to freedom because of the power that it
confers to do things. Why should the gain in freedom associated with the
introduction of the non-work possibility (via a basic income or similar policy
instrument) outweigh the loss in freedom associated with higher taxes? There
will be people whose real incomes will be diminished with the implementation
of a policy that actualizes the right to opt out of work. And it is quite indis-
putable that income enlarges freedom. However, it would be a leap to conclude
that other means to enhance freedom are less valuable, from an agent-neutral
perspective, or less desirable for the individual, than money.
If we limit our understanding of freedom to being free to do the things one
wants/might want to do, it will be difficult to argue that the prejudice caused to
income lovers is justified. There is an irresolvable conflict here, and this is the
point where discussion approaches a standstill. But if we understand freedom
in a richer way, as being free to do things that one autonomously wants to do, it
is reasonable to think that the presence of the non-work alternative is freedom-
enhancing for all. But what kind of autonomy are we exactly talking about?
Autonomy of preferences, I claim.
Everyone must be free not to work in order for their preference for work to
be autonomous. If I want to do x, and am free to do x, and free not to do x,
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then my want cannot be shaped by necessity. This authenticity is freedom-
enhancing for all individuals irrespective of their dispositions toward work and
leisure, as already argued. And so we may conclude that, other things being
equal, freedom is a function of the number and importance of the things that
one (a) wants to do, (b) has the possibility to do, and (c) has not the possibility
to do. (Elster, 1983, pp. 129–130). It is likely that my preference for work is not
shaped by the lack of alternatives to work if I have the option not to work. The
individual may prefer the money that taxes take away from him to preference
autonomy, if asked. However, I take it that freedom is not a question of what
the individual prefers simpliciter. There are various reasons that recommend
against an ideal of freedom based on actual wants, as the classic work of Isaiah
Berlin has illustrated, among many others. One could still say that those
reasons do not militate against an ideal of freedom that is preference-based as
long as those preferences are born out of a process that secures, as much as
possible, autonomy in their formation (see, paradigmatically, Arneson, 1989).
But necessity – which obtains when one option is inescapable – is surely not
part of such a process. In a society with no basic income, employment is
inescapable for the majority of people. Welfare provisions may ease this
inescapability in a temporary fashion, but they do not eradicate or debilitate it
as much as an unconditional income would.
There is an important objection against the argument of autonomous
preferences. Many people may not need to know that they can stop working in
order for their preference for work to be sincerely autonomous. It may be true
that the possibility to opt out of work is good for autonomy of desires but that
does not mean that everybody will develop inauthentic preferences if the option
does not exist. This observation makes the loss that goes in taxes all the more
difficult to justify. Can the ideal of substantive freedom still be evoked to
justify freedom from fulltime employment?
An individual is freer when he has the option to choose that which he
(autonomously and rationally) prefers vis-à-vis a situation where his preferred
option is not among his alternatives. However, an individual whose preferred
option is among her alternatives but who can also choose not to choose that
preferred option is even freer. Amartya Sen seems to agree with this insight
when he expresses that ‘[t]he loss of opportunity to eat freely is a substantive
loss even for the person who chooses to fast y. Doing x and choosing to do x
are, in general, not equivalent’ (Sen, 1988, p. 292).
Understanding substantive freedom as requiring the option not to choose
that which one is at liberty, or desires, to choose reflects a concern with
moral agency. Moral agency, as mentioned, could be thought of as the capacity
to be the author of one’s life, insofar as that control is humanly possible.
Having the option not to choose that which one is at liberty, or desires, to
choose is indicative of that control because it reflects the fact that we have
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had a say ‘against circumstance’. Thus, it is not unreasonable to theorize that
as long as there is the necessity to be employed fulltime in order to lead a
decent life in society, the individual will not enjoy the capacity to freely put her
powers to use in ways other than those required by modes of life centered on
full-time work. She can decide, if she is fortunate enough, between different
jobs, but she cannot afford to exercise powers that will not guarantee her
the means to survival. Although she has formal control over her powers in
that nobody can oblige her to use them in ways she does not consent to, she
does not have effective control over them insofar as she cannot use and develop
them in certain ways without society ‘allowing for it’ by organizing itself
differently. No sense of real control exists if meaningful options about how
to use powers are effectively absent for the individual since she cannot be
said to have freely chosen how to exercise her abilities under such circum-
stances. Thus, the non-work alternative seems to be justified by principles
of human agency which, according to the arguments presented in this section,
call for the freedom to choose contrary to that which one is at liberty, or
prefers, to choose.
The freedom of choice a person enjoys must give us information about the
overall directions her life can take besides giving us information about possible
combinations of work and leisure. The latter combinations might not be
illustrative enough of the range of life-modes available to the individual.
Another way to put this is to say that assessing freedom on the basis of income-
leisure allocations alone, without paying attention to the goods those
combinations give access to, is theoretically narrow. If it is reasonable to view
freedom as a measure of the available directions we can give to our personal
trajectories, inter alia, it is insufficient to focus on the burden that taxation
imposes, and conclude that such a burden cannot be compared to the gain of
non-work lovers. From a perspective that evaluates freedom according to the
number and diversity of life-types the agent is in a position to lead, the
individual is freer when the policy that permits her to opt out of work is in
effect. If we broaden our focus and assess freedom on the basis of accessible
life-modes (instead of work-leisure combinations alone), then comparisons
among states are indeed possible. This is not to say that no loss is implied in
taxes. If the individual prefers work over leisure she will have to work more in
order to get the material rewards she received before the policy.
The foregoing conclusion may strike some as flawed because associating
freedom with costs is counterintuitive. We tend to believe that anything that
promotes freedom will rid us of burdensome predicaments. However, the
intuition is defective. Freedom may impose costs but nevertheless amplify
desirable possibilities for action. Education, for example, is thought of as a
vehicle of freedom in a substantive sense in that it grants access to valuable
opportunities. However, education may be financially costly and it may also
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 Work lovers, freedom, and basic income
impose other kinds of costs by taking time away from family and work, among
other things.
Another social good that illustrates the idea that freedom carries with it costs
is health care. We are all relatively familiar with how psychologically (as well
as financially) costly some health-care initiatives may be for the individual.
Efforts to protect our health may constrain our immediate possibilities of
action (that is, we have to refrain from consuming delicious sugary food and
greasy fats if we desire to bring our cholesterol to an acceptable level). Organic
food – demonstrably healthier than many cholesterol-inducing products – is
more monetarily costly than regular food, additionally. However, an optimal
physical condition amplifies our options in the long term by lengthening our
life and enhancing our well-being overall. Freedom may be costly on many
counts but still worth achieving.
Meaningful relationships constitute another example of how freedom can
impose costs but still be desirable for the greater benefits – in terms of ampler,
richer experiences – that it affords. Committed relationships to loved-ones
require from us a degree of sacrifice and attention that may deter us from
realizing self-centered projects many times. However, it is not far-fetched to
believe that many people will prefer the limitations of commitment to the
simpler freedom of solitude, for personal interdependency opens the door to
human bonds and life-experiences that are inaccessible without commitment.
However varied in their preferences people may be found to be, the point I
wish to make is that it is not unreasonable to see that freedoms may clash with
one another in the case of the particular individual.
It is not unreasonable to note that liberties usually conflict with one another
(Rawls, 1971, p. 203) just as the freedom to spend our (legitimately earned)
money is constrained by the freedom of those who benefit from redistributive
taxation, to which we, as wage-earners, contribute to a lesser or greater extent,
for example. Additionally, freedom in some spheres of life may detract from
freedom in other spheres of life, as the education example above illustrates. The
freedom granted by the non-work option may detract from the freedom to earn
proportionally to effort, for in the absence of the basic income policy taxes are
lower, ceteris paribus, which means that work-lovers get to keep more of what
they earn. However, I see no conclusive reason to justify a society where work
is seen as normatively before leisure, if the material collective conditions to
allow for the latter exist, and if the non-work option will not impose an
unbearable burden on anybody. Of course, much hinges on what exactly we
should take ‘unbearable’ to imply.
Much ink has been spilled in the last two decades on the issue of reciprocity
and the ‘free-riding’ that the basic income policy arguably allows. This free-
riding has been deemed exploitative because it allegedly allows for those who
prefer not to work to take unfair advantage of those who do, by permitting
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Maskivker
them to live off the latter’s efforts without reciprocating8 (Elster, 1982). In the
framework of this reasoning, non-work lovers constitute a burden for those
individuals who contribute to society via their work. Whether this burden is
unbearable in the sense that it imposes too high a toll on society’s productivity
and the workers’ daily life is a different matter. What someone considers unfair
may not be necessarily unbearable or contrary to freedom in other less obvious
ways. In this article, I cannot dwell on the free rider objection for reasons of
space, but I do want to call attention to the fact that the fairness-based critique
against the basic income cannot be taken seriously if it is to rest on the idea
that the policy unequivocally jeopardizes the overall freedom of those
individuals who pay taxes to sustain it. This article developed the claim that
policy is capable of enhancing freedom for them through its impact on
preference autonomy and moral agency.
I warned the reader that I would not solve the problem of measuring freedom
in this section. I have no conclusive way to know with exactitude how much
freedom is gained and how much freedom is lost when the policy that would
implement the non-work option is in effect. I’m not even certain that freedom
can be measured in any conclusive way when the discussion is brought down to
specific policies and institutions – in the framework of which many people
interact and have their interests and expectations conflict with one another.
Despite the existence of lively discussions on the measurement of freedom
abstractly, my claims are more to the effect of justifying the idea that, even
acknowledging that some people may lose freedom if they happen to prefer work
when a basic income is in place, it is not so clear that the non-work option is
utterly inconsequential to them regarding other dimensions of freedom.
Concluding Remarks
This article deviated from standard definitions of real freedom in the basic
income literature that rely on sophisticated preference-based accounts of value.
The option to exit full-time employment is valuable in a non-subjective way
because it permits the individual to exercise moral agency and autonomy of
preferences. In this light, the possibility to choose it, even if she does not
sincerely prefer it – and will never so do – makes her freer vis-à-vis a scenario
where the option is non-existent.
Notes
1 The opting out does not have to be total. Relaxing the central role played by employment in
today’s society may still be achieved by decoupling income from work to some extent, but not to
the utmost extent, thereby making employment wholly voluntary. As Van Parijs himself notes, a
basic income at, or below, subsistence level is still better than nothing.
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 Work lovers, freedom, and basic income Maskivker

2 As suggested above, the Basic Income policy may allow for the opportunity to opt out of
remunerated work completely if the grant is sufficiently high. However, the arguments of
freedom and autonomy developed in this article do not centrally rely on this extreme possibility.
The opportunity to work less than full-time is already an indicator of enhanced autonomy and
agency, in line with the reasoning offered in this article. As many other values in political and
moral philosophy, agency and autonomy can be understood as being a matter of degree. (The
individual can be said to be more or less autonomous, and she can be said to be more or less of a
moral agent.) Because of this possibility, considerations of political feasibility are easier to
discuss. The likelihood that the policy instrument used to embody the ideals of agency and
autonomy be politically palatable is surely higher if the option on the table is not the funding of
some people’s total withdrawal from the monetized economy but only a more flexible lifestyle for
which freedom from full-time work is central. (How much thereof is a question which does not
need to be thoroughly discussed for the purposes of this paper.)
3 This is John Stuart Mill’s point when he writes in On Liberty that ‘the sole evidence it is possible
to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it’; Mill is cited by Arneson
(1985, p. 432).
4 One would have to acknowledge, however, that availability of too many options may impose
psychological costs on the individual related to the stress that the awareness of having too many
choices is likely to cause. Too many options to choose from may bring about welfare decline for
the individual. For elaboration of this point, see Dworkin (1982).
5 Sigdwick’s words are quoted in Scanlon (1993, p. 185).
6 The distinction between instrumental and independent value is drawn by Feinberg (2006, p. 423).
Analysis of the value of freedom can also be found in Nozick (1981, pp. 283–295).
7 Autonomy, here, is broadly understood as life-authorship and the associated ideal of self-
direction. See Joseph Raz (1986) for a definition of autonomy along these lines. However, in
other parts of the text I will be referring to a more narrow understanding of the term, to wit,
authenticity of preferences and desires. For this second understanding, see Frankfurt (1971) and
Dworkin (1981).
8 This literature is too extensive to cite completely. For an illustrative piece, see Elster (1986).
Elster, J. (1983) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Elster, J. (1986) Comment on Van Parijs and Van der Veens. Theory and Society 15: 709–721.
Feinberg, J. (2006) The interest in liberty on the scales. In: I. Carter, M. Kramer and H. Steiner
(eds.) Freedom: A Philosophical Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Fischer, J. (1999) Recent work on moral responsibility. Ethics 110: 93–139.
Frankfurt, H. (1969) Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. The Journal of Philosophy 66:
829–839.
Frankfurt, H. (1971) Freedom of the will and the concept of the person. Journal of Philosophy 68:
5–20.
Hurka, T. (1987) Why value autonomy? Social Theory and Practice 13: 361–382.
Kenny, A. (1965) Happiness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 66: 93–102.
Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (1982) Social unity and primary goods. In: B. Williams (ed.) Utilitarianism and Beyond.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raz, J. (1986) The Morality of Freedom. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, T. (1993) Value, desire, and quality of life. In: M. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds.) The Quality
of Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Sen, A. (1988) Freedom of choice: Concept and content. European Economic Review 32: 269–294.
Ullmann-Margalit, E. and Morgenbesser, S. (1977) Picking and choosing. Social Research 44:
757–783.
Van, Parijs, P. (1995) Freedom for All. What (if Anything) can Justify Capitalism? Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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