A UBI based on race blind justifications will reproduce racial inequality – distributive justice arguments only use income to determine those least well off in society, ignoring racist obstacles to opportunity

This thesis is written by a supporter of a universal basic income. What I argue, in essence, is that the blindness to racial injustice present in the theory of justice Van Parijs uses to ground it leads to a basic income proposal that is likely to perpetuate racial injustice. And over and above demonstrating how Van Parijs's theory is susceptible to the charge that it is blind to racial injustice, I propose revisions to his theory aimed at proofing it against that charge. In the conclusion, I suggest ways that the changes I make to the theory could be said to affect what a basic income offer that ameliorates racial injustice should look like but systematic research in this last area will have to take place outside this thesis. This thesis is laid out in the following way: in chapter one, I discuss Van Parijs's theory of distributive justice. I describe the components of Van Parijs's conception of real freedom, namely, security, self-ownership and leximin opportunity. Security is the idea that a free society incorporates a well-enforced regime of property rights. Self-ownership is the idea that each person owns themselves and cannot be forced to perform actions they do not want to. Combined these two components make up formal freedom on which freedom is merely the absence of hindrance from exercising your property or selfownership rights. But for Van Parijs, real freedom must also offer an answer to our intuition that if I do not have the money to get on a cruise, I am not really free to get on that cruise. The last component of real freedom is opportunity, which is the absence of being hindered from what you might want to do by any other circumstance, and which is especially given effect by providing people with the means and resources to do the things they might want to do or live as they might want to. With the addition of the opportunity component, Van Parijs argues that to achieve distributive justice opportunity should be leximinned, subject to formal freedom being respected. Leximinning opportunity means that a society should be considered more just than another society if those with the least opportunities in that society have more opportunities than those with the least opportunities in the other society. Van Parijs justifies the introduction of the basic income as the result of taking the leximinning of people’s opportunities seriously. For him, monetary incomes serve as a measure of people’s opportunities in market societies. In chapter two, I offer one criticism of this theory of justice outlined in chapter one. I argue that this theory of justice is blind to institutional racism.4 I demonstrate this using a thought experiment involving two societies that are identical in every way (they have the exact same number of income strata and the occupants of each stratum have the exact same amount of opportunities in both societies) except that race is a determining factor in membership in the lowest stratum of one of the societies, whereas it is not the case for the other. I argue that the society in which race is a determining factor in people ending up in the lowest stratum is an institutionally racist society, but also that a Van Parijsian leximin chooser (that is, someone choosing between both societies solely based on the leximin principle) would be unable to prefer the non-institutionally-racist society to the institutionally racist society. In essence, the leximin principle would judge both societies as equally just.