Leisure: The Resource of Time in Theories of Distributive Justice

Abstract

Just as citizens generally require income and wealth to take advantage of their formal liberties and opportunities, so too do citizens generally require leisure time. In order to do almost any of the things one enjoys the legal freedom to do, one requires the resources of both income and time. While social justice movements have long recognized that citizens need both income and leisure to exercise their formal freedoms--and have accordingly strived not only for greater wealth equality but also greater leisure equality, through legal limitations on working hours--liberal egalitarian theorists of distributive justice have almost universally neglected the distribution of leisure, instead attending primarily to the distribution of income and wealth. Theorists of distributive justice have neglected leisure as they have uncritically adopted the basic economic conception of leisure as the inverse of paid work, a good that, provided all enjoy fair shares of income and wealth and occupational liberties, individuals can freely choose how much to possess in accordance with their preferences.

The dissertation argues that this economic understanding of leisure obscures how citizens require leisure time as a resource, and begins by reconceptualizing leisure as time not engaged in securing the necessaries of life, whether through paid, domestic, caregiving, or bodily labor. The dissertation then argues, first, that citizens generally require such time to exercise their formal freedoms, and, second, that providing citizens with income and wealth is not sufficient to ensure that all citizens possess leisure time because income and wealth are not perfectly fungible resources. Therefore, in accordance with the foundational liberal egalitarian principle that citizens are entitled to the resources required to exercise their formal freedoms, citizens have a legitimate claim to a fair share of leisure as a distinct object of distributive justice. Guaranteeing citizens their fair share of leisure time requires a combination of leisure-targeted policies, including, for instance, maximum and flexible work hours regulations, public provision of caregiving, and income subsidies.

The argument of the dissertation also has relevance to debates about how to secure equality of opportunity between the sexes with respect to household labor, and the dissertation argues that justice requires not that men and women equally divide all paid and household labor, but that men and women both enjoy fair shares of leisure.