When stockbroker Peter Hargreaves donated £3.2 million to the Leave.eu campaign, he explained his enthusiasm for Brexit as follows: “It would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had… We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.” Intel co-founder Andrew Grove similarly argued in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, that fear is essential for our political economy to function, spurring the pace of productivity and progress.

Claims of this kind are often heard and used to argue against the introduction of a Universal Basic Income—the welfare reform initiative that would replace our current means-tested benefit systems (and their unwieldy administration) with an unconditional, automatic payment to each member of the political community. There is a diverse range of models of a UBI, some more plausible than others, but the general idea is still pretty straightforward, something like: from cradle to grave, each individual receives a monthly income from the state, regardless of any income earned by other means (with the exclusion of health and disability benefits).

Critics shudder at the thought of a UBI—it would be dire for our economic progress. The argument goes that if everyone knew their income was taken care of, they would not be sufficiently motivated to work hard, innovate, create, or contribute.

A UBI may offer freedom from precarity, but would that freedom help or hinder economic progress?

What’s interesting, though, is the language of fear is also used to argue in favour of a UBI. The argument here goes that that it’s precisely when people are afraid that productive well-being, creativity, and innovation wane.

Can either of these arguments deliver what its proponents want? A UBI may offer freedom from precarity, but would that freedom help or hinder economic progress?

To begin to answer this, we can look at the empirical and theoretical research we have on fear. The philosophy of emotion aims to articulate what emotions are, and what they can do. Some of the inconsistencies in the political rhetoric for and against a UBI can be cleared up by considering three things we know from the philosophy of emotion, and in particular the philosophy of fear.

Firstly, emotions can function as sources of information, and fear focusses our attention on the immediate context. Fear can tell us something about reality, in particular by capturing and sustaining our attention to what’s immediately relevant in our environment. The fact that fear directs our focus to such objects has clear prudential benefits from an evolutionary perspective.

When we’re talking about workplace fear though—fear of leaving a painful or exploitative job, fear of reporting harassment or other unsafe working conditions—what can be troubling is when this attention to the immediate threat can also blind us.

In relation to economic progress, fear prioritises short-term solutions over comprehensive and long-term solutions.

The philosophy of fear shows us that when people are afraid, they demonstrate a cognitive bias that favours narrow rather than broad attention and information-processing strategies: for example, judging images to be more similar when they exhibit more superficial connections rather than inclusive, associative connections. In relation to economic progress, fear prioritises short-term solutions over comprehensive and long-term solutions.

Secondly, fear limits creativity. More worrying for the “insecurity-is-fantastic” argument is the evidence we have about how creativity responds to fear.