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The article deals with the question whether an unconditional basic income (UBI) is part of an ideal liberal-egalitarian welfare regime. Analyzing UBI from an ideal-theoretical perspective requires a comparison of the justice performance of ideal welfare regimes instead of comparing isolated institutional designs. This holistic perspective allows for a more systematic consideration of issues like institutional complementarity. I compare three potential ideal welfare regimes from a liberal-egalitarian perspective of justice: An ideal social democratic regime, a mixed regime containing a moderate UBI and a maximal UBI regime where UBI replaces most of the welfare state. These regimes are evaluated with respect to three aspects of justice performance: the scope and neutrality of opportunities provided, institutional complementarities with a dynamic, globalized economy and the policy feedback effects on the political stability of liberal-egalitarian political coalitions. I conclude that the overall performance of a mixed regime is superior to the other regimes.

In 2020/2021, the EU and its member states had to tackle the largest shock of the twenty-first century yet, the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 led to an unprecedented health and economic crisis. In this article, we analyse public opinion on redistributive EU measures based on an original survey in Austria, Germany and Italy and ask whether EU citizens support a common aid package, common debt and redistribution to those countries that are economically most in need. Testing the influence of three explanatory concepts – self-interest, justice attitudes and general support of European integration – we find that all three explanatory concepts have predictive power. However, we find stronger effects on support for EU-level redistribution for citizens’ instrumental calculations concerning whether their country benefits from EU aid, and on general support for EU integration, than for justice attitudes.

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What kinds of feasibility restrictions should be taken into account in practically relevant political philosophy? David Estlund argues that “ought” does not imply “can will,” and, hence, that we should be very cautious regarding the inclusion of motivational restrictions in political philosophy. As Nicholas Southwood and David Wiens point out, however, Estlund’s position clashes with the requirement that “ought” implies “feasible.” The present article argues that even though we must accept that “ought” implies “feasible,” this does not settle the question regarding the adequate set of feasibility restrictions to be included in applied normative thinking. Instead, we need to distinguish different kinds of normative theory that require different sets of feasibility restrictions. For this, the article provides a taxonomy of feasibility restrictions and a preliminary discussion of the adequate set of feasibility restrictions for different kinds of normative theory.