A lot of people think that a supermarket with self-check out would probably be empty within the day, with people trucking off their goods in every which direction. Maybe in some places that's actually still how it works. This supposes that morality is mostly extrinsic (low trust society).

Throughout quite a bit of the West, Europe , Finland we're dealing with high trust societies these days. In these countries, all said and done self checkout is actually netto cheaper to run than manned checkout, and that includes shrinkage. (Above some point) every penny spent on checkout counter operators is wasted. So -at least in Finland-, morality is mostly intrinsic (high trust society).

If you tell this story to a person from a low trust society, they'll think you're pulling their leg. Every man, woman, and child to themselves, right?

Meanwhile, in high trust societies like Finland, it's just Tuesday: 'Bleep... bleep'.

Now when it comes to people with intrinsic morality: Making them go through extra procedures might actually slow them down; Hiring extra people to keep an eye on them can go negative yield.

There's more to be said on this, but the key intuition is that much of western thinking on morality is still calibrated on extrinsic morality, while many westerners are now actually being raised with intrinsic morality. It's a slow cultural change.

+ see also: Dan Pink: Drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

That is true, but it leaves out the question of who's morals we are discussing. If the recipient is not under any obligation, and yet gets a job, that morality is played out in them.

If the person is under obligation and gets a job as a result, their moral position is unknown but likely unchanged

Or perhaps we are talking about wanting other people to live out our morality?

Let's say someone does not get a job. Are they looking for one and being unsuccessful or are they just cashing their benefits?

Checks are needed in practice unless it can be shown they are not (what I suggested in my previous comments).

In the richest most affluent society in the history of the planet.

In a society where it is organized so a handful of people control more than 50% of the society's wealth, and it is also organized so the minimum wage has stripped is no longer even sufficient to work FULL TIME and get above the poverty line. In a society where a family owns the largest employer in the country and sits on $Billions of wealth while they pay so little that a substantial number of their employees qualify for food assistance.

Who is freeloading, the billionaire owners taking massive tax breaks and paying less than their office workers, or the minimum-wage laborer who must "take" government assistance in addition to his pay merely in order to not starve?

A society can rightly be judged by how it treats it's lowest members.

A moral affluent society would organize itself so every single person has a minimum of food, housing, healthcare, and education, even if a few were freeloading.

Instead, you attempt to justify refusing to feed and house people because a few might freeload. Or, if not refusing, to implement massive government bureaucracies, which 1) are both costly and 2) are proven to make worse outcomes and 3) are even more easily defrauded, merely to make sure all the lowly workers who cannot get a leg up are suitably shamed and monitored, lest they receive just a little too much.

And do not start on how some will waste UBI it on alcohol or drugs. The rich also waste their lives in the same way.

While you stand on your moral high-horse, you argue for the most immoral actions.

You’re treating it as a moral imperative that (to be charitable) all able-bodied adults in a society must be somehow self-supporting, and using that as justification to either browbeat the recipients of minimum-quality-of-life benefits in order to continue receiving them, or to deny such benefits entirely after some point.

Given the relative wealth of our society, it’s immoral to cut off minimum-quality-or-life benefits when doing so would result in people becoming homeless, hungry, or sick. Even from a strictly utilitarian perspective, that will in the end impose higher costs on society than just distributing benefits.

Similarly, if what you actually care about is the cost to society in a utilitarian sense, the cost of the administrative overhead of browbeating benefits recipients and doing the necessary tracking to ensure benefits are cut off when they reach their endpoint and stay that way will be higher than just distributing them.

So what is your actual moral argument? It comes down to “everyone should have to work.” And, well, why? Some people can’t work and I hope you don’t begrudge them being cared for by society. Similarly there are the young and elderly who society should care for, rather than rely just on family to care for. So why is an able-bodied adult different to you?

If the argument is that you have to work so others should too, well, under the proposed scheme you actually don’t! If you want to just hang out all day every day on minimum benefits, I wouldn’t begrudge you that. Sooner or later you’ll probably work anyway just to get more than is possible at the very bottom. Or maybe you’ll create art and contribute to society that way. Or maybe you’d avoid being a drag on a workplace that’d be a bad fit for you, and contribute in that way. Or maybe you’d be able to devote your time to raising a child so they can contribute much better than if you weren’t there because you were working.

A morality that treats work as virtuous for its own sake is too simplistic to survive contact with the real world.

For instance: "You keep claiming there is a moral problem with giving people enough of a basic stipend to actually live out of the gutter."

I have never suggested this...

"... and using that as justification to either browbeat the recipients of minimum-quality-of-life benefits"

Or that.

"A morality that treats work as virtuous for its own sake"

And neither have I that...

Interesting how people have also latched on my mentioning morals and ignored everything else.

Meanwhile, I noticed a slight detail which both sides may have missed? : Job-finding rates were equal with the treatment and control group. Which makes sense in a high-trust society actually.