Discourses on Universal Basic Income: An Alternative Model of Idea of Justice

Abstract

Discourses on Universal Basic Income, or UBI, are current political concerns that aim to provide all members of a political community with a fixed amount of money each month, with no conditions attached, in order to enable them to live good, dignified, and secure lives. UBI has strong connections with theories of justice. Having strong opposition, it is being more or less experimented with and piloted in most of the countries of the world. This paper tries to explore the arguments regarding how the UBI could be instrumental in realizing the major objectives of theories of justice. Among two dimensions of justice, reformative theory of justice connects to the legal aspect while the distributive theory of justice connects to the notion of social justice. Distributive justice believes that all the available means of livelihood and fruits of economic growth must be available to all human beings so that they could live a decent life and would not be forced to work without their wishes. Today's world is a world of automation and digitalization. Digitalization of the world economy resulted in massive joblessness, loss of social safety nets and wealth concentration in a small number of private players or MNCs. The Global Crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic has further multiplied the very adversity. In such a global scenario, the present study, by contemplating discourses on UBI and citing the case of Indian UBI, tries to see UBI as an alternative model of justice and put forward the argument that if UBI is implemented properly and universally, it will not only result in a conceptual shift in the political theory of justice, liberty, democracy and relative equality and others but also lead to the attainment of human emancipation which is the primary concern of political and social theorists.