INTRODUCTION

1.1 HOURS FOR WHAT WE WILL

Many people, including in the contemporary United States, have little free time. They must spend long hours in paid work, household labor, personal care, and caregiving. They have little time to devote to any ends beyond meeting the necessities of life. This book argues that in the just society all citizens would have their fair shares of free time, time they could devote to the pursuit of their own projects and commitments.

As a matter of liberal egalitarian justice, all citizens are entitled to a fair share of free time — time not consumed by meeting the necessities of life, time that one can devote to one's chosen ends. Free time is a resource that citizens generally require to pursue their conceptions of the good, whatever those may be. Without the resource of free time, citizens lack the means to exercise their formal liberties and opportunities. In order to ensure that citizens can exercise their freedoms, a central commitment of liberal egalitarian theories of justice, citizens must be guaranteed their fair shares of free time.

This argument is absent from contemporary political philosophy, but it can be found in the origins of liberal egalitarian ideas, among nineteenth-century labor reformers. Early American journeymen argued that they had a "just right" to the time necessary to exercise their political liberties. In order to exercise their rights as enfranchised citizens, they argued that they required free time to acquire information and study the interests of their country. Unrelenting work diminished the value of their liberties, as it rendered "the benefits of our liberal institutions to us inaccessible and useless." Over the course of the nineteenth century, as labor's call went from ten hours of work to eight hours with a day of rest, workers drew on this argument more broadly to claim time to exercise their full set of liberties, for education, family, association, and religion. As trade union leader William Sylvis argued, "It is true that churches are erected, school houses are built, mechanics' institutes are founded and libraries ready to receive us ... but alas! We lack the time to use them — time." To enjoy their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," they must have the "means" to make use of them. The final extension of this line of argument was that workers were entitled to free time not only for the exercise of a set of specific and fundamental liberties, but to do anything they wished. Workers argued that they were entitled to "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will."

This book defends that idea: we have a just claim to "hours for what we will." Citizens are entitled to time that is not consumed by meeting the necessities of life, so they can have time to devote to any other pursuits they might choose — whether familial, religious, associational, recreational, political, creative, productive, or of any other sort. They are entitled to time to find and follow their own projects and commitments. They are entitled to a fair share of free time.

1.2 THE CLAIM TO FREE TIME

Contemporary liberal egalitarian theories of justice have given little attention to the demand for more "hours for what we will." They have instead implicitly assumed that how much leisure time citizens have is not an appropriate concern of a liberal theory of justice. They have understood leisure to be part, to varying extents, of some ideas of the good life, and not a part of others. Because it is not the proper role of a politically liberal state to promote some conceptions of the good life over others, it is presumptively impermissible for the state to act with the aim of providing or promoting leisure time.

Instead, in accordance with the standard liberal egalitarian approach to distributive justice, liberal proceduralism, it is held that so long as just background conditions — that is, a just distribution of liberties, opportunities, and resources like income and wealth — obtain, citizens can choose their leisure patterns based on their own ideas of the good life, and whatever distribution of leisure results is presumptively just. Some citizens will want to work long hours and have little leisure, while others will want to work few hours and have more leisure. The resulting distribution of leisure will be unequal, true, but on this approach that in itself is not a cause for concern. On the contrary, for the state to aim at some particular distribution of leisure, absent some special justification, would be objectionable, for it would be impermissibly paternalistic, perfectionist, or otherwise partial to one conception of the good over another. Instead of attending to the distribution of leisure, the state should ensure that just background conditions under which citizens can fairly choose to pursue work or leisure, obtain.

The liberal proceduralist approach to distributive justice is to ensure that all citizens have fair access to specific goods, the particular components of one's particular conception of the good, by ensuring a fair distribution of resources, the all-purpose means that are generally required to pursue any conception of the good. Leisure has been understood, on the basis of both its philosophical and economic treatments, as a specific good. Leisure is variously defined as time engaged in intrinsically valuable activities, or as time in play and recreation, or as time not engaged in paid work, and on each understanding, as a specific good.

This narrow understanding of leisure time is, however, incomplete. Though "leisure" does correspond to goods that are appropriately regarded as specific goods (contemplation, play, time not working), it also refers to an idea that is best understood as a resource. This is the idea that the slogan "hours for what we will" captures — it is the time one can spend at one's discretion, pursuing one's own ends. It is, in a word, free time. Citizens require such time — time not committed to meeting the necessities of life — to pursue their conceptions of the good, whatever those may be.

When one redescribes the specific good of leisure as the resource of free time, the liberal's neglect of time loses its foundation. If free time is a resource, then its just distribution is no longer something that results from just background conditions. Rather, the just distribution of free time instead must be recognized as a component of just background conditions.

Specifically, I argue that justice requires that all citizens have a fair share of free time. Citizens have legitimate claims to free time on the basis of the effective freedoms principle, a foundational tenet of liberal egalitarian justice, which holds that citizens have legitimate claims to a fair share of the resources that are generally required to exercise their formal liberties and opportunities. In the same way that citizens generally require the resources of income and...