In recent years, some cities and localities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere have adopted or intend to adopt one potential solution to the difficulties inherent in addressing the needs of street beggars: diverted giving schemes (DGSs). A DGS is an institutional response designed to motivate people to donate money in charity boxes or donation meters rather than directly to street beggars. Their advocates believe that DGSs are both more efficient and more ethically permissible than direct giving to individual beggars. This article asks whether and how a DGS can be justified. It offers a normative evaluation of the main idea behind this policy, namely, that anonymous and spontaneous donations to charity boxes are in themselves an adequate policy instrument to address the problem of street begging. Ultimately, the paper argues against this idea and develops the case that DGSs can potentially compromise our ability to act on our moral duties toward truly needy beggars. Moreover, it explains why and under which circumstances this kind of program can potentially and seriously interfere with the freedom and opportunities of individuals in the begging population.

Is mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients morally justifiable? This article argues that none of the three justifications typically offered in support of drug testing—that is, paternalist, contractualist, and harm-based justifications—are normatively persuasive. On the one hand, I claim that these normative justifications do not warrant the violation of welfare recipients’ privacy. That is, I argue that they fail to make the case that the benefits of drug testing outweigh its costs in terms of welfare recipients’ privacy. On the other hand, I argue that even if we accept any of these normative justifications for drug testing, current background conditions in the US make the implementation of this policy unfair in practice. First, the enforcement of drug testing can strengthen existing injustices. Second, under current circumstances, drug testing policies are likely to engender moral obligations which cannot be fulfilled.

This article offers a novel defence of participation income (PI). It claims that there are pragmatic and normative reasons to prefer PI over alternative redistributive policies, such as an unconditional basic income and workfare programmes. In particular, it argues that PI should be conceived as a particular type of civic service programme designed to address a large number of unmet social needs that are not met by entrepreneurs in the marketplace. The article ends by addressing five objections that can be raised against its argument.

In this article, I argue that a participatory income (PI)—the proposal originally presented by Anthony Atkinson in 1996—can potentially perform better than an unconditional basic income (UBI) in terms of addressing unmet social needs. I explain why we should expect that unmet social needs can be better alleviated by the recipients of a PI rather than by the voluntary actions of UBI recipients. In particular, the argument presented here seeks to develop a particularly forgotten point in the PI debate—namely, the importance of using income transfer programmes as a policy tool to motivate people to engage in socially valuable activities.

No abstract