UBI is immoral utopia – prove me wrong

Question

1. Money is an equivalent of value that people trade with each other.2. Value is something to be produced by people, i.e. something that requires work to be done (even if by pumping oil, or setting up AI systems, or protecting oil from neighbouring tribe...)3. Why those who do the work would just pay for free loaders? Why is it considered to be moral at all?And why being a free loader (assuming you are capable of doing work) is not immoral from any position?On the most general common sense level, regardless of your political views or economical system...

eimrine · Accepted Answer

You do see that pumping oil is not just a somebody's work and nothing more.

smoldesu · Answer

On some level, the United States already distributes a form of basic income via welfare. A lot of people already apply for it, but very few of those are freeloaders per-se; they're using a government service to supplant homelessness or destitution. Whether you consider it an abusive system or not, it exists; the logical leap of expanding it into UBI is not very large.Now, I don't personally think UBI is a good idea, but I do think valuing people based on the whims of a free market is a terrible idea. Something better has to be proposed, or else the income gap will increase and the populist sentiment will further side with UBI. Your move, Voltaire.

allears · Answer

When you talk about "moral" you're implying a personal system of beliefs. Putting your ideas of right and wrong aside for a moment, do you think your life would be improved if there was less crime, fewer homeless, safer neighborhoods, etc? The idea of supporting poor people by those of us with a little more money is not only advocated by most major religions, it's actually an effective strategy for improving the general quality of life. If there are fewer desperate people in the world, who knows in what ways things might improve?

rini17 · Answer

Debt existed before money (based on plenty of anthropology research among other) and money was actually invented to more easily manage and satisfy it. Not to measure "value", that was a retroactive definition added much later.Now, lacking any possibility to discharge debt was considered immoral in many religious and philosophical texts since antiquity. Similar arguments and reasons should apply to (im)morality of "undeserved" income.

jfengel · Answer

Proving your argument faulty is trivial, in that it's just a bare assertion that free loading is wrong. That's not an argument at all; it's just a statement.
There are plenty of positions from which it is immoral to allow a human being to starve in a world with so much food. That, too, is a bare assertion, but you've given no reason to think it's any worse than yours. Any time you find yourself appealing to "common sense", that's a red flag that you're really just asserting your opinions as facts.
You'll never be able to prove an "ought" from an "is" -- and you should be skeptical of any moral argument that claims to ground itself in absolutes. You can, however, make your moral assumptions as clear as possible, and then you can investigate why others make different moral assumptions.
Your moral assumptions seem to start with absolutist understandings of property. Those are difficult to justify in a world with a finite commons (all of your wealth involves some contribution from things you did not create), and where you cannot live without help from other people.
That does not disprove your moral assertions, simply because they are moral assertions and cannot be proven or disproven. But I can say that your argument is faulty in that you take the assertion as if it were ground truth, and that you don't seem to have examined your assertion very closely.