Philippe van Parijs on Basic Income

• Main Authors: Yu-wen Hsiao, 蕭郁雯
• Other Authors: Ser-min Shei
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/78377786058538773524

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 哲學研究所 === 87 === In this thesis, I discuss Phil. van Parijs' defense of Basic Income. He thinks that a society with Basic Income is one that can best promote people's real freedom, and one that can reduce the degree of inequality of people's internal and external resources. He proposes a principle, which he called Undominated Diversity, to compensate for the inequality of internal resources. As for the elimination of the inequality of external resources, his idea was to distribute the employment rent equally to each member of the society. The members of the society include people without jobs, so Basic Income is criticized as a policy allowing exploitation of workers. In order to understand whether Basic Income involves exploitation, we must not only trace back the reasons why Basic Income is needed, but examine whether Basic Income can meet the objections from exploitation. Van Parijs' conclusion is that the four major definitions of exploitation are either problematic, or Basic Income can in fact reduce exploitation. I agree with van Parijs mostly, but still think that in order to diminish people's doubts about Basic Income, his theory's implications need be fully elaborated. These include a picture of the social situation resulting from the realization of Basic Income, and the emphasis that the fact "people without job receive Basic Income" should not be the right reason to reject Basic Income. Because, what is important is that people who are most in need have Basic Income.