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Suppose social justice can be understood as requiring our social institutions to be designed so that the worst off enjoy as high a level of real freedom as is sustainable. This arguably generates a strong presumption in favor of as high an unconditional basic income as can be sustained, part of which to be given in kind rather than in cash. What attitude should people in Europe committed to a conception of justice as “real freedom for all” adopt on such issues as the development of AI, immigration, and the war in Ukraine? Much depends, no doubt, on what exactly is meant by “real freedom,” on how widely the “all” is to be understood, and on a no-nonsense assessment of what we can hope to do, in our messy world, so as to make it somewhat less unjust.

Philippe Van Parijs was the founding director of Louvain’s Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics, and, for several years, a regular visiting professor at Harvard and Oxford. He is currently professor emeritus at UCLouvain and special guest professor at KU Leuven, and chairs the Advisory Board of the Basic Income Earth Network and the Brussels Council for Multilingualism. His books include Qu’est-ce qu’une société juste? (1991), Marxism Recycled (1993), Real Freedom for All (1995), L’Allocation universelle (2005; with Yannick Vanderborght), Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (2011), Just Democracy (ECPR 2011), Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (2017; with Yannick Vanderborght), and Belgium: Une utopie pour notre temps (2018).