Question

The distribution of wealth and income in the United States has grown increasingly unequal over the last forty years.  This may soon get worse, for engineers and programmers are now developing new forms of automation, including robots and artificial intelligence, which will replace human labor and eliminate some jobs.  You can already find devices on the table in some restaurants that take the place of a server to come get your order; there are still servers, but fewer of them, for part of their job has been automated. Travel agencies have largely disappeared; their work is now handled mostly by websites run primarily by computer. Self-driving cars and trucks threaten to throw huge numbers of taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work. Factories require fewer workers than ever before, and this trend is continuing.  To sum things up, a new report from Oxford University concludes that nearly half of all jobs in America may disappear due to automation in the next 20 years (though the authors suggest that some of those people may find new work elsewhere in the economy—like a former factory worker who gets a job at Walmart.)

In the past, new industries arrived to employ people who lost their jobs due to mechanization.  Factories, for example, employed people who no longer worked on farms or made craft goods by hand.  However, some experts believe we might not be so lucky this time, for the new industries that are coming along use relatively few workers.  (For example, Google has roughly 74,000 workers and dominates the web browser market, while General Motors, which shares the auto market with several other huge companies, has 180,000 workers.)

For purposes of this part of the exam, we’re going to imagine that, 20 years from now, 3 out of 10 working Americans are permanently unemployed due to automation.  That may or may not happen, but for the sake of discussion let’s imagine a world where it does.

Many people have proposed to deal with such a situation by giving people a “universal basic income.”  Here is one common version of this idea: you get $1700 a month if you have no income or assets, and progressively less the more you make, with nothing at all for people making more than $30,000.  (In other words, if you made $20,000 a year, you would get something in addition to that, but less than $1700 a month.)  Imagine that this would be funded from the profits of businesses who have automated and laid off workers (so that part of what they used to pay workers is now paid in taxes to support the basic income for others).    

For purposes of your discussion, assume that we are considering instituting a universal basic income just like the one described above, paying for it in the way described above, and that this will go to the 3 out of 10 Americans who are permanently unemployed due to automation.  

Is this solution to the problems created by automation consistent with justice?  Why/why not?

Discuss this issue using the Utilitarian theory of distributive justice.  Here are some concepts you might use in your answer:

Utility and the Principle of Utility

What a distribution must be like to be just, according to Utilitarianism

Discuss this issue using Nozick’s version of the Libertarian theory of distributive justice.  Here are some concepts you might use in this part of your answer:

Liberty (autonomy, self-determination)

Principle of original acquisition

Principle of justice in transfer

Principle of justice in rectification

What a distribution must be like in order to be just, according to Nozick’s version of Libertarianism

Discuss this issue using Rawls’ version of the Egalitarian theory of distributive justice.  Here are some concepts you might use in this part of your answer:

The liberty principle

The difference principle

The fair equality of opportunity principle

Answer 1

From a normative standpoint, receiving without giving is unjust. However From a practical standpoint of a utilitarianian ethics, the absence of mechanisms that promote reciprocation on part of the unemployed citizens invites free riding which threatens to erode the economic structure upon which the system of distribution depends. A possible solution to this could be for communities to adopt social norms that encourage basic income recipients to contribute to the productive capacity of society by engaging in volunteer work. Therefore, it is believed that the solution is quite legitimate and it is possible to justify an unconditional basic income of based on the utilitarian idea of “freedom for all” .

A utilitarian idea on this issue can be guided by the Rawl’s concept of justice. According to him, justice is not about what people want, or what would be morally good to give them, but justice is about giving people what is due to them and not giving them what is not due to them. Thus, in the near future where economic status of many people would be at stake due to larger social and economic developments, then society would have a greater role to play because the organization of society is that which concerns giving people their due such as through redistribution of wealth. Issues like a minimum wage, or the abolishment of child labor seemed, at first sight, unrealistic and impossible to carry out in practice but have now become reality. In the same way, The concept of an unconditional basic income might be a good solution to deal with some of the future changes in society.