Mutual obligation and the ethics of individualised citizenship

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?