Mutual obligation and the ethics of individualised citizenship

Note: The author views this article as a work-in-progress and retains its copyright.

The value of the current welfare reform debate in the Anglo democracies is that it invites us to return to the principles on which ideas of social welfare should be based. This is a debate about how we should conceive the nature of individualised citizenship. "Individualised citizenship" means a conception of the subject of government that includes all persons, including children, as individuals who are capable of autonomous action and who being so are to be respected and recognised as individual agents in all transactions with them.

In historical context this conception of citizenship poses unprecedented challenges for patrimonial democracy. By patrimonial I mean that the condition of being regarded as an individual required one first to be an independent head-of-household who governed those who came under this household's jurisdiction as its dependents. Within patrimonial democracy, it was legitimate for adults who could not establish their own households to depend on those who could, either as private householders or as the public association of householders that they comprised.

Patrimonial-democratic authority has been effectively de-legitimised and destabilised by three social movements. The first is the women's movement, which has claimed that women are to count as individuals, and that their dependency on men is no longer to be automatically presumed. The second is the disability movement, which has claimed that people with different kinds of disability are to be respected and recognised as individuals whose capabilities for autonomous and independent action can be cultivated. The third represents postcolonial movements, including Indigenous people's movements. These movements advance the claim that those whom western colonialism regarded as mentally and morally inferior are to be respected as both collectively and individually autonomous actors.

The shared challenge of these movements is that they require us to rethink democracy, to open it up to very different kinds of person to the traditional subject of liberal democracy. This has two aspects. The first involves opening up a distinction between self-determining action and independent action. When this distinction opens up, it becomes possible to treat all persons including children as self-determining or autonomous individuals while allowing that not all persons can be economically independent. The second aspect involves the challenge of thinking more carefully about independent action. What is independence and why is it to be valued? Specifically, what is its relationship to self-determination?. Moreover, is independence to be reduced to economic (that is, market-based) independence or self-reliance?

Patrimonial traditions of independence celebrate an aristocratic conception of self-sufficiency where the household rather than the individual is the unit of social action. The household head enjoys an aristocratic privilege of rule both over himself and over his dependents. His individuality is confused with the individuality of the household and of those within it. Thus, while he knows and acts in terms of an aristocratic type of individualised independence, he does not know or understand autonomy, either for himself or for those whom he considers his dependents.

'Mutual obligation' is the key word for a particular and currently dominant response to the challenge of individualised citizenship. It is a response, however, that opens up an inclusive conception of individuality while holding onto the traditional patrimonial model of individuality.

Mutual obligation is an axiom of popular morality – that in return for society's contribution to us, we should make a contribution to society. We should be careful about popular axioms. Because they command easy and fast assent, they can be used to block and displace careful thought and dialogue about what principles should underlie welfare reform. The hallmark of popular morality is its hostility to critical analysis because it makes certain propositions appear to be self-evidently true or in accord with the nature of things.

If principles are to have any validity, they have to be argued for within a philosophically coherent argument that is ethically oriented. By ethical orientation, I mean that the principle or value at issue is rationally argued in relation to universal standards of right. Such an argument has also to be situated within a dialogical relationship of accountability to all those who can be counted as stakeholders in the matter.

Argumentation of this kind is singularly lacking in current debates about welfare reform. Most who participate in these debates seem to find it sufficient to argue in terms of axioms of popular morality, and they evade the task of ethical argumentation. They neither offer philosophical clarification of the principles they adduce nor do they test the universalism of these principles in opening them to communication with all those to whom they apply. This leaves the floor open to those who are willing to authoritatively and paternalistically speak for 'society' on mutual obligation. Since most people hold an unreflective attachment to the basic idea of mutual obligation, the popular view of mutual obligation is ripe picking for populist conservatives on both sides of politics.

Populist conservatism is the appropriate name for the view that people who receive income support from government are reneging on their obligation to society if they can work but for whatever reason 'choose' 'welfare dependency' over earning their own income through work. It is a highly prejudicial view that pays scant attention to the empirical realities of the relationship of poor people to both welfare and work. It is also a view that erroneously homogenises the welfare subject, and leads to a new type of ‘one size fits all’ policy orientation to people on welfare.

Mutual obligation depends for its coherence on the idea that people who get welfare or public income support are somehow getting away with something, they are getting something for nothing, if they are not required, that is forced, to do something in return for getting public income support.

Populist conservatism has it that taxpayers have not only assumed the burden for providing for themselves and their 'own' dependants, but they are forced through taxation to bear the burden of supporting those who are dependent on public income support.

What is wrong with this view? First, it implies that the virtuous taxpayer does not get public subsidy of various kinds. It thus obscures the extent and variety of such subsidy (for instance, tax breaks that really only become valuable for equity owners as well as the full range of public subsidy to the private service systems that private consumers access).

Second, it maintains the myth that earnings through employment or productive investment equate to contribution. Thus if some consume the hard-earned income appropriated through the public taxation of others without making their own contribution to the economy (and thus to taxation), they are in effect robbing the former. The idea that earnings equate to contribution is nonsensical when consideration is given to the interdependencies of the economy considered as a system. Just what particular part of a collective product a particular individual contributed is impossible to determine, and it is erroneous to see inequalities in earnings as following from the differential value of individuals' contribution to the economy. They have much more to do with how class hierarchies of different kinds structure differences in earnings.

Third, the justification for taxation resides in an obligation to contribute to the funding of the res publica. If we value democratic citizenship, then we require a public institutional order that not only provides the infrastructure for the market economy but also builds and maintains the capability of individuals to be self-determining citizens. This means also securing an equality of civic status for all who belong to the jurisdiction in question. For this reason, inequalities of wealth must not be allowed to get so great that they overwhelm both the ethic of civic equality and the capacity to deliver it. In addition, in order to maintain civic equality, redistribution is justified.

Finally, it may be reasonable to require that all those who receive public support (in cash, in service or tax breaks) assume the obligation to contribute to the public or civic community on whose behalf government acts. The question turns on how civic obligation should be understood. Is it a matter of rule-following where those who do not follow the rules should be punished? Or is it a matter of encouraging all citizens to understand the nature and significance of civic obligation and, simultaneously, of building the capabilities to fulfil their civic obligation?

Thus I do not object to the idea that adults who receive public income support should be encouraged and facilitated in seeking employment if this particular goal helps secure and advance their standing as a self-determining individual. However, it is not reasonable to use the authority of government to require all the different kinds of individual on public income support to conform to the same bureaucratic set of rules. Nor is it reasonable to force individuals into types of employment relation that, being exploitative and tyrannical, undermine their sense of efficacy as a self-determining being. With regard to interventionist programs targeted at the long-term jobless, the benchmark of success has to be whether those receiving such intervention experience it as enhancing or developing their capability or as restrictive and disabling.

The champions of mutual obligation are not using such a benchmark. They have no interest in capability building. If they had, they would be talking about public investment in capability building, and they would be drawing attention to the capability deficits that the current historical disinvestment in a public infrastructure for individual capability-building entails. If there is to be serious effort to build the capabilities of people on public income support to be self-determining and economically independent, welfare must be seen as one component of the interlocking systems of health, education, welfare, housing, and employment.

Instead of thinking systemically about building capabilities, the proponents of mutual obligation recommend tying welfare to work requirements. They do so at a time when low-wage work conditions have worsened relative to the recent past, unionisation has dropped, institutional protection for workers has been weakened, the percentage of poor people has increased, and the income gap between poor and rich has considerably increased. Tying welfare to work requirements offers a host of opportunities for punishing the poor for breaking the rules.

Proponents of mutual obligation expressly declare that civic obligation must take precedence over civic entitlement. The refusal of citizenship entitlement for those on public income support in mutual obligation discourse gives the plot away. In this discourse the tendency is to construct citizenship and dependency as oppositional terms. It is a discourse that thrives on a binary ordering of values: rights versus obligations; self-reliance versus dependency; competence versus incompetence; responsibility versus irresponsibility. Social complexities of many kinds are reduced to a simple choice of either moral responsibility or immoral dependency.

The duality of good and bad subject positions drives a public policy that justifies the tyranny of those who are cast as the virtuous over the morally weak or inadequate. This basis for public policy means that a more integrated acceptance of the moral ambiguities of people's lives is not possible and that respect cannot be accorded to how welfare beneficiaries live their lives. Instead, the state is licensed to use a paternalistic tyranny over people who need public income support if they are deemed employable.

This simple righteousness justifies a double standard of moral worth as well as a highly conditional and undemocratic idea of freedom. The good are worthy and they are free because they are good; the bad are not worthy and they are legitimately subject to the control of the good because they are bad. This morality cannot satisfy ethical universalism, the principle of equal moral worth or the norm of universal respect. Any consideration of what this norm entails would readily show that a structure of thought that permits the good (or more worthy) to control the bad (or less worthy) is ethically indefensible.

In conclusion, I cannot agree that mutual obligation supplies an ethical basis for thinking about the nature and demands of individualised citizenship. Once we enter the ethical territory of individualised citizenship, there is nothing by way of traditional or popular morality to guide us. Instead we have some very real complexities to confront. These include: does a non-discriminatory conception of individualised citizenship require that we adopt the one model of social adulthood? And at what price?