A UBI focused on justice and poverty cannot address racial inequality
Nwogbo, 2021 – PhD Candidate in Philosophy at University of Sussex [Johnbosco, Dec 20, Doctoral Thesis “Racial Injustice And Philippe Van Parijs’ Distributive Justice Basis For The Universal Basic Income: Introducing The Filtered Leximinning Of Modified Real Freedom Theory Of Distributive Justice” https://philpapers.org/rec/NWORIA Acc 3/23/23 TA]
To conclude, in this thesis, I have argued that Van Parijs’ theory of distributive justice, which grounds his basic income offer, is blind to racial inequality, and therefore to racial injustice. I revised his theory to make it insusceptible to charges of blindness to racial injustice as well as suitable for grounding a basic income that can help reduce or eliminate racial inequality. According to Van Parijs’ theory, people’s freedom should not only incorporate the absence of hindrance in doing what they might want to do. It should also include their real access to the opportunities to do what people might want to do, hence he defines freedom as critically including a principle of the leximinning of real freedom, or more precisely, of opportunities. I have argued that on this account, a leximin chooser would be unable to consider a racially equal society as more just than a racially unequal society. That is, Van Parijs’ theory is blind to racial injustice. To deal with this, I argued for racially-sensitive versions of leximin and real freedom. I proposed a filtered leximinning of modified real freedom theory of distributive justice. And as I have suggested earlier in this conclusion, this theory will ground a basic income offer, albeit with close resemblances with Van Parijs’s, that can help eliminate or at least reduce racial inequality.