This article criticizes radical labor republicanism on republican grounds. I show that its demand for universal workplace democracy via workers’ cooperatives conflicts with republican freedom along three different dimensions: first, freedom to choose an occupation…and not to choose one; second, freedom within the very cooperatives that workers are to democratically govern; and third, freedom within the newly proletarian state. In the conclusion, I ask whether these criticisms apply, at least in part, to the more modest, incrementalist strand of labor republicanism. (...) To the extent that they do, delaboring republicanism might be the best response. (shrink)

When Marx dissected the capitalist economy and intervened in the international workers’ movement, he did so in the service of freeing people from alien, uncontrolled power. His political project was the realisation of what he called the social republic, and his theoretical project was to identify the forces that promote or retard this political project. In order to bring out the specificity and cogency of the social-republican Marx, this essay uproots the positive-freedom reading that has overgrown the edifice of his (...) thought. Marx certainly hoped for ‘real freedom’, which is a sort of self-realisation. He also hoped for a sort of collective self-determination. And he thought that collective self-determination was a prerequisite for general self-realisation. But Marx also thought that generalised freedom from domination was a prerequisite for collective self-determination. (shrink)

Contemporary political philosophy often operates on a ‘two-tiered’ theoretical treatment of global politics, on which domestic political systems and the principles governing their internal...

The article reviews the recent debate about workplace democracy. It first presents and critically discusses arguments in favor of democratizing the firm that are based on the analogy with states, meaningful work, the avoidance of unjustified hierarchies, and beneficial effects on political democracy. The second part presents and critically discusses arguments against workplace democracy that are based on considerations of efficiency, the difficulties of a transition towards democratic firms, and liberal commitments such as the rights of employees and owners to (...) work for or invest in nondemocratic firms. The conclusion summarizes the debate and argues that experiments with democratic workplaces as what Erik Olin Wright calls “real utopias” could deliver new insights and thus move the discussion forward. (shrink)

In response to critiques of rights as moralistic and depoliticising, a literature on the political nature and contestability of rights has emerged. In this view, rights are not merely formal, liberal and moralistic imperatives, but can also be invoked by the excluded in a struggle against domination. This article examines the limits to this practice of rights-claiming and its implication in forms of domination. It does this by returning to Marx’s blueprint for the critique of subjective rights. This engagement with (...) Marx will, however, take a particular form. I will read Marx first through the eyes of Claude Lefort and thereafter against Lefort. The latter’s critique of Marx still constitutes the strongest case against the dismissal of subjective rights. Introducing a reading of Lefort into the argument allows us to discover what is dead and what is well alive in the Marxist theory of rights. What is dead, I will argue, is Marx’s early conception of subjective rights as ideology and illusion. However, the more mature Marx developed a theory and critique of the legal form that is able to explain why the politics of rights—despite its undeniable advances—has not been able to overcome certain forms of domination. (shrink)

This article explores objections made against ideal theorizing in political philosophy by two prominent contemporary critical theorists: Axel Honneth and Charles Mills. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth...

Theories of domination are primarily attempts to understand the value of justice, freedom, and equality by examining cases where they are absent. Such theories seek to clarify and systematize our judgments about what it is to be weak against uncontrolled strength, i.e., about what it is to be vulnerable, degraded, and defenseless against unrestrained power. -/- Much contemporary disagreement about domination involves competing answers to three questions: (1) Who, or what, can dominate? (2) Is it possible to dominate merely by (...) having power with a certain structure, or is domination an exercise or an abuse of power? (3) Exercised or unexercised, what kind of power is domination? The remainder of this entry will address each of these questions in turn, then conclude with a survey of how the idea of domination has been used in recent applied ethical theory. It will become clear as we examine competing answers to these three questions that different theorists have very different ideas of why, exactly, we need a theory of domination. There may be wide agreement that we need the idea of domination to make sense of unjust power relations, but unjust power relations are wildly varied, and theorists of domination disagree not only about which varieties most need to be understood, but about how theorizing domination helps us to understand them. (shrink)

When an employee’s off-duty conduct generates mass social media outrage, managers commonly respond by firing the employee. This, I argue, can be a mistake. The thesis I defend is the following: the fact that a firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context brought about by the employee’s off-duty conduct generates a strong ethical reason weighing against the act. In particular, it contributes to the firing constituting an inappropriate act of blame. Scholars who caution against firing an employee (...) for off-duty conduct have thus far focused primarily on due process related issues or legal concerns pertaining to free speech, lifestyle discrimination, and employment at-will. However, these concerns amount to only a partial, and contingent, diagnosis of what is at issue. I argue that even when due process considerations are met, firings in these contexts can be unjustified. Moreover, even if a business is not concerned with the unethical conduct per se, but is rather strictly concerned with PR, the argument I advance nevertheless provides one important ethical reason that counts against firings in mass social media outrage contexts. Given that managers are often under significant pressure to respond swiftly in cases where an employee is at the center of mass social media outrage, it is especially important that scholars begin to clarify the normative issues. This article builds on the burgeoning philosophical literature on the ethics of blame and provides a novel account of a distinctive ethical concern that arises with firings in mass social media outrage contexts. (shrink)

Is it a requirement of justice to democratize private companies? This question has received renewed attention in the wake of the financial crisis, as part of a larger debate about the role of companies in society. In this article, we discuss three principled arguments for workplace democracy and show that these arguments fail to establish that all workplaces ought to be democratized. We do, however, argue that republican-minded workers must have a fair opportunity to work in a democratic company. Under (...) current conditions, this means that a liberal order must actively promote workplace democracy. (shrink)

This article presents the most important strands of the philosophical debate about markets. It offers some distinctions between the concept of markets and related concepts, as well as a brief outline of historical positions vis-à-vis markets. The main focus is on presenting the most common arguments for and against markets, and on analyzing the ways in which markets are related to other social institutions. In the concluding section questions about markets are connected to two related themes, methodological questions in economics (...) and the topics of business ethics and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This article brings to bear findings from the debate on the boundary problem in democratic theory on discussions of workplace democracy to argue that workplace democrats’ focus on workers is unjustified and that more constituencies will have to be included in any prospective scheme of workplace democracy. It thereby provides a valuable and underdiscussed perspective on workplace democracy that goes beyond the debate’s usual focus on the clarification and justification of workplace democrats’ core claim. It also goes beyond approaches like (...) stakeholder theory in law and economics that determine decision-making rights without taking into account genuinely democratic considerations. My discussion proceeds by considering three principles for inclusion from democratic theory for the specific case of the corporation. I submit that two of them, the all-coerced and the all-subjected principle, are not appropriate for this specific case, because they cannot capture the distinguishing features of the corporation. The all-affected principle however is appropriate but has a very wide range. I further argue that this is not as big of a problem as it first might seem and that this principle is still the most appropriate for defining the demos of the democratic corporation. The article closes by pointing out the consequences of this result for the workplace democracy debate and for the legitimacy of the market as a coordination mechanism. (shrink)

Debates around the state-firm analogy as a route to justifying workplace democracy tend towards a static view of both state and firm, and position workplace democracy as the objective. We contend, however, that states and firms are connected to one another in ways that should alter the terms of the debate, and that the achievement of workplace democracy raises a new set of political issues about the demos in the democratic firm and ‘worker migration’ at the boundaries of the firm. (...) Our argument thus contains two key steps: First, drawing on an empirical case study of a worker-owned firm, we enrich the state-firm analogy by developing a more dynamic view of both, focussing on the creation of workplace democracies; worker movement in and out of them; the dynamic meanings of ‘citizenship’ within them; and the status of the unemployed in a world of democratic workplaces. We then argue that in moving to a more sociological view of the state, the things we were comparing begin to show their real-world connections to one another. By going beyond the idealised view of states that has distorted the state-firm analogy debates, we arrive at a more robust view of how widespread workplace democracy might reconfigure basic political relationships in society. (shrink)

Relational egalitarians sometimes argue that a degree of distributive equality is necessary for social equality to obtain among members of society. In this paper, we consider how such arguments fare when extended to the intergenerational case. In particular, we examine whether relational reasons for distributive equality apply between non-overlapping generations. We claim that they do not. We begin by arguing that the most common reasons relational egalitarians offer in favour of distributive equality between contemporaries do not give us reasons to (...) object to distributive inequality between non-overlapping generations. This argument by itself however will not fully suffice to show that there are no relational reasons to care about intergenerational distributive equality, given the nature of relational equality and its requirements in the intergenerational case are likely to be qualitatively different than in the contemporary case. Therefore, we also make the positive argument that for the intergenerational case to satisfy the requirements demanded by the ideal of relational equality it suffices that future persons’ interests are meaningfully incorporated and protected in the decision-making of preceding generations, and there is no basis for a concern with distributive equality. While some have argued that the one-way and asymmetrical causal influence between non-overlapping generations means concerns of social equality are inapplicable in the intergenerational case, we argue that the ongoing nature of this influence makes concerns of social equality appropriate. If successful, the upshot of the argument is that it can be coherent to maintain a commitment to relational equality between non-overlapping generations, all while remaining agnostic about distributive equality between them. (shrink)

This review of Elizabeth Anderson’s Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge University Press, 2023), sets out Anderson’s main claim, that the original Protestant work ethic split into two different work ethics, the conservative (anti-worker) and the progressive (pro-worker) work ethics, and that the conservative work ethic “hijacked” the work ethic, turning it into a tool for the rich to dominate and harm workers and the poor. Conservative thinkers have, Anderson (...) argues, managed to discredit, erase, or deceptively coöpt proponents of the progressive work ethic; her book accordingly aims to re-introduce readers to the suppressed, centuries-long progressive work ethic tradition, and to offer it as a tool for critiquing and counteracting the most recent incarnation of the conservative work ethic, neoliberalism. In the course of doing so, Anderson also re-categorizes a number of supposed heroes of the conservative work ethic, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, as in fact proponents of the progressive work ethic. The review gives attention to each chapter of Anderson’s book. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in workplace democracy, the question whether nonworker stakeholders, like suppliers and local communities, warrant inclusion in the governance of democratic companies, as workers do, has been largely neglected. We inspect this question by leaning on the boundary problem in democratic theory. We first argue that the question of who warrants inclusion in democratic workplaces is best addressed by examining why workplace democracy is warranted in the first place, and offer a twofold normative benchmark—addressing objectionable corporate power and (...) upholding efficiency—to assess the principles of democratic inclusion on offer. Against this benchmark, we next argue that the All-Affected Principle is unfit due to its over- and underinclusive extensional results, and that the All-Subjected Principle, whose variants we examine alongside their extensional results, holds more promise when coupled with independent considerations of justice or a constrained variant of the All-Affected Principle. These combinations need not entirely preclude, but speak against, nonworker stakeholder inclusion. (shrink)

This paper provides an examination of some problems caused by the concentration of influence in the capital markets of developed countries. In particular, I argue that large asset managers exercise quasi-political power that is not democratically legitimate. In section two, I will examine the economic driver behind the size and power of the big asset managers: the passive investing revolution. I will discuss several respects in which this revolution has fundamentally changed capital markets, most notably by making a large share (...) of investors universal owners. In the third section, I argue for my central analytical conjecture: asset managers exercise quasi-political power. They use their influence to shape the rules of the game in public capital markets in order to implement social and environmental policies that have traditionally been the exclusive purview of states. “Asset manager capitalism” is a recent term coined to refer to the contemporary system of corporate governance that succeeded the Berle and Means corporation with its dispersed ownership; the argument of this section is that asset manager capitalism is also a new political-economic regime. In the fourth section I defend my central normative claim: asset manager capitalism is an untenable and illegitimate political-economic arrangement, for at least two reasons. First, the power of asset managers is not checked by any institutional constraints, and is not rendered legitimate by any democratic process. More fundamental than this procedural critique is an argument that the interests of asset managers could not be aligned with the public interest, given the fact that the distribution of capital is highly unequal. I conclude by discussing several proposals to reform asset manager capitalism. (shrink)

Most business ethicists maintain that corporate actors are subject to a variety of moral obligations. However, there is a persistent and underappreciated concern that the competitive pressures of the market somehow provide corporate actors with a far-reaching excuse from meeting these obligations. Here, we assess this concern. Blending resources from the history of philosophy and strategic management, we demonstrate the assumptions required for and limits of this excuse. Applying the idea of ‘the state of nature’ from Thomas Hobbes, we suggest (...) that corporate actors would be excused from duties if complying with them threatened their vital interests. We show how this excuse is not available for most individuals within firms; instead, it is an excuse perhaps available to firms themselves, but only given substantive assumptions about corporate personhood. For those willing to make these assumptions, we apply the competitive advantage construct to delimit the scope of this excuse. We suggest that firms are excused from fulfilling an obligation when complying leads to a competitive disadvantage, as this imperils the firm’s vital interests. After revealing why this excuse does not generalize, we conclude by considering when we should reform the market to avoid the legitimacy of this excuse. (shrink)

While the challenges workers face in the gig economy are now well-known, reflections on emancipatory solutions in political philosophy are still underdeveloped. Some have pleaded for enhancing workers' bargaining power through unionisation; others for enhancing exit options in the labour market. Both strategies, however, come with unin-tended side-effects and do not exhaust the full potential for worker self-government present in the digital gig economy. Using the republican theory of freedom as non-domination , I argue that G.D.H. Cole's 20th-century defence of (...) guild socialism offers a promising avenue for enhancing worker autonomy in the gig economy. Platform companies rely on relational and structural domination to undermine worker autonomy, but Cole's guild socialism was specifically designed to enhance autonomy in the workplace. Following Cole's advice today would amount to a defence of worker-owned cooperative platforms. By putting workers in control of platform design and governance, cooperative platforms create new opportunities for worker autonomy. However, platform coopera-tivism faces serious challenges if it plans on becoming a realistic alternative to the traditional gig economy. (shrink)

What justifies political power? Most philosophers argue that consent or democracy are important, in other words, it matters how power is exercised. But this book argues that outcomes primarily matter to justifying power.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Existing social disparities in the United States are inconsistent with the promise of democracy; therefore, there was a need for critical conceptualization of the first principles that undergird American democracy and the genesis of democratic social change in America. This constructivist grounded theory study aimed to construct a grounded theory that provides an understanding of the process of American democratic social change as it emerged from the nation’s founding documents. A post hoc polytheoretical framework including Foucault’s, Bourdieu’s, and Marx and (...) Engels’s theories of power was used to understand power dynamics. The research question focused on understanding the process of democratic social change in America. The sample comprised the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution. The documents were retrieved from the National Archives and Library of Congress. The data analysis plan incorporated successive comparison, situational and dramaturgical analysis, deconstruction, and perspective taking as strategies. The result was the construction of a democratic social change process theory preceded by five grounded theories: (a) first principles of democracy, (b) first principles of democracy conceptual framework, (c) socio-ethical principles of democracy, (d) demoralizing process, and (e) either-or approach to democracy. Positive social change implications include applying a democratic social change process to future social change endeavors across domains and levels of analysis, a normative framework for a republican form of government, and a tool to analyze and minimize the latent consequences of social justice policies. (shrink)

This essay argues that a black radical Kantianism proposes a Kantian theory of justice in the circumstances of injustice. First, I describe BRK’s method of political critique and explain how it builds on Kant’s republicanism. Second, I argue that Kant’s original account of public right is incomplete because it neglects that a situated citizenry’s adoption of an ideal contributes to its refinement. Lastly, with the aid of W.E.B. Du Bois’s analysis of American Reconstruction and his proposal of an “abolition democracy,” (...) I offer my refined universalizable standard for political critique. Du Bois reconceptualizes the requirements of justice to protect the political liberties and productive powers of black freedmen and the working poor. While originating with the political demands of black freedmen during the Reconstruction era, the universal protection of political liberties and productive powers offers a novel public standard for political judgment that should still anchor deliberation today. (shrink)

Relational egalitarians claim that a situation is just only if everyone it involves relates to one another as equals. It implies that relational egalitarians believe the ideal of “living as equals” (for short) is desirable, and furthermore, necessary for justice. In this paper, I distinguish three accounts of the desirability of the ideal: the instrumental value account, the non‐instrumental value account, and the non‐consequentialist account. I argue that the former two accounts cannot provide satisfying reasons for being a relational egalitarian. (...) Instead, the ideal of “living as equals” ought to be understood as fundamentally a moral requirement in a non‐consequentialist sense. In addition, a pluralist (though fundamentally non‐consequentialist) approach is welcome. (shrink)

Shirking, the act of avoiding the demands of one’s job, is generally seen as unethical. Drawing on empirical evidence from the sociology of work, I develop a normative conception of shirking as a form of worker resistance against illegitimate managerial power. In doing so, I present a new approach to the political theory of the firm, which is more adversarial and agent-centered than available alternatives. It is more adversarial as it recognizes the political value of counterproductive and disruptive behavior in (...) capitalist firms. It is more agent-centered because it theorizes the firm from the perspective of workers, asking what pro tanto reasons they have to shirk. I show that shirking under the structural domination of capitalism has diagnostic, agential, and epistemic values. The paper contributes to the wider methodological ambition to tailor political theorizing to the positionality of social actors by shifting attention from the institutional design of the firm to the methods of worker resistance. (shrink)

A citizens’ movement in Berlin advocates for the expropriation of housing corporations and has won a significant majority in a popular referendum in September 2021. Building on this proposal, this paper develops a general account of expropriation as a measure for corporate reform and thereby contributes to the ongoing debate on the democratic accountability of business corporations. It argues that expropriation is a valuable tool for intervention in a dire situation in some economic sector to enable a re-structuring of the (...) governance of the assets in question. Compared with other tools available, expropriation is a more forward-looking, genuinely political measure that does not depend on the legal assignment of guilt but rather proceeds in a pragmatic and problem-oriented manner. It also allows us to reconsider in how far the market mechanism should be employed in the administration of assets. Objections from private property rights against expropriation fail as corporations generally are privileged, quasi-public institutions that can justifiably be subject to democratic interventions. Expropriation is thus an important addition to the arsenal of corporate reform proposals, especially for those concerned with a broad democratization of the corporation. (shrink)

There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into the debate by appealing to a levels ontology. Recently, Christian List and others have considered (...) how the notion of levels could be relevant to the free will debate. Invariably, however, the focus is on the significance of facts at lower levels. The threats come from below, from fundamental physics or neuroscience. Here, I aim to show how we can frame many interesting concerns about free will in terms of threats from above. After arguing that determination from above is no less threatening, I catalogue such concerns that might constitute threats to our freedom. Doing this not only allows us to show how these concerns relate to those standardly discussed, but it pushes us to expand our conception of freedom. (shrink)

This article analyses Adam Smith's and Sophie de Grouchy's accounts of sympathy to show how they arrive at strikingly different views on whether inequality is a threat to, or precondition of, social order. Where many scholars have recently sought to recover Smith's egalitarianism, I instead focus on how his account of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments naturalises socioeconomic inequalities, while also highlighting the wider inegalitarian implications of his analysis. I demonstrate that Grouchy was alert to these implications and (...) reveal how her own account of sympathy challenges the moral psychology underlying Smith's position on inequality. By reconstructing Grouchy's response to Smith, I illustrate how retrieving the insights of long‐overlooked thinkers can reorient the way we understand key debates in the history of philosophy, since Grouchy was far more concerned than Smith with exposing how economic inequality imperils the prospects of relating to one another as equals. (shrink)

Respondeat superior is a legal doctrine conferring liability from one party onto another because the latter stands in some relationship of authority over the former. Though originally a doctrine of tort law, for the past century it has been used within the criminal law, especially to the end of securing criminal liability for corporations. Here, I argue that on at least one prominent conception of criminal responsibility, we are not justified in using this doctrine in this way. Firms are not (...) answerable for the crimes committed by their employees, because firms cannot answer as to why the crime was committed; they lack the authority to offer the employee’s reasons for action. Though this rules out respondeat superior as a general principle, I show contexts in which vicarious liability is still appropriate in the criminal law, and I respond to a number of other concerns raised by this picture. (shrink)

Abstract“Freedom” is a fundamental political concept: contestations or endorsements of freedom-conceptions concern the fundamental normative orientation of sociopolitical orders. Focusing on “freedom,” this article argues that the project of bringing about emancipatory sociopolitical orders is both aided by efforts at engineering fundamental political concepts as well as required by such ameliorative ambitions. I first argue that since the absence of ideology is a constituent feature of emancipatory orders, any attempt at bringing about emancipation should leverage genealogical approaches in order to (...) debunk existing ideological freedom-concepts, which can occur only by exposing the discursive functions these have come to serve for the (re-)production of dominant power relations. I then suggest that establishing and sustaining an alternative, ideology-free conception of “freedom” is a steeper task. Ensuring widespread uptake of any ameliorated concept is contingent on effective change in the relevant social environment. Where fundamental political concepts such as “freedom” are concerned, effective intervention in the relevant social environment requires radical sociopolitical change. But if such change can be brought about and enables the widespread uptake of an “improved” freedom-concept, the concept's content comes to reflect changed social facts, thereby stabilizing the particular emancipatory sociopolitical order which has newly arisen. (shrink)

This article explores the cooperation of government and the private sector to tackle the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence. The argument draws on the institutionalist approach in philosophy and business ethics defending a ‘division of moral labor’ between governments and the private sector. The goal and main contribution of this article is to explain how this approach can provide ethical guidelines to the AI industry and to highlight the limits of self-regulation. In what follows, I discuss three institutionalist claims. First, (...) principles of AI ethics should be validated through legitimate democratic processes. Second, compliance with these principles should be secured in a stable way. Third, their implementation in practice should be as efficient as possible. If we accept these claims, there are good reasons to conclude that, in many cases, governments implementing hard regulation are in principle the best instruments to secure an ethical development of AI systems. Where adequate regulation exists, firms should respect the law. But when regulation does not yet exist, helping governments build adequate regulation should be businesses’ ethical priority, not self-regulation. (shrink)

The impact of large digital corporations on our freedom is often lamented but rarely investigated systematically. This paper aims to fill this desideratum by focusing on the power of social media corporations and the freedom of their users. In order to analyze this relationship, I distinguish two forms of freedom and two corresponding forms of power. Social media corporations extend their users’ freedom of choice by providing many new options. This provision, however, comes with the domination by these corporations because (...) it is based on their power of uncontrolled interference. Users could escape this domination through exit. One reason why they do not choose this option is that they would lose the benefits associated with the network effects provided by social media services. A second reason is that the power of social media corporations runs so deep that they are able to manipulate the autonomous decision-making processes of their users. Users are provided with many new avenues for authentic self-presentation on social media. By using them, however, users need to conform to a web interface that is designed by corporations to undermine self-control. Through these two mechanisms, corporations are able to promote an interest in users to present themselves on their platforms. Insofar as this works, they secure the users’ compliance to their domination through subjectivation. This double conjunction of choice and domination, on the one hand, and autonomy and subjectivation, on the other, makes the case that the very power of corporate social media stems from their intrinsic connection to genuine practices of freedom. (shrink)

We should conceive of illegal covert animal rescue as acts of “subrevolution” rather than as civil disobedience. Subrevolutions are revolutions that aim to overthrow some part of the government rather than the entire government. This framework better captures the relevant values than the opposing suggestion that we treat illegal covert animal rescue as civil disobedience. If animals have rights like the right not to be unjustly imprisoned and mistreated, then it does not make sense that an instance of animal rescue (...) will be justifiable only if it meets criteria for justified civil disobedience, e.g., the requirement that the civil disobedient not rescue more animals than would be necessary to communicate their message. Thus, the framework of subrevolution is a more apt way to analyze animal rescue. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Historically, many philosophers and social scientists have sharply distinguished between “normative” and “empirical” forms of inquiry. In response, some have called for a re-engagement of these forms of inquiry. Here I offer a novel way of justifying such re-engagement in democratic theory. Drawing on classical pragmatism, I argue that normative democratic theory is a form of practical reasoning, hence inevitably involves empirical inquiry. Thus, in reasoning about what democratic processes ought to look like, we should avoid sharply distinguishing normative (...) from empirical forms of reasoning, just as we should avoid sharply distinguishing theoretical from practical forms of reasoning. (shrink)

This paper presents a critique of left republican writings from a non-republican socialist standpoint. It examines three claims that have been advanced by left republican authors: that workers are dominated 1) by their lack of access to the means of production; 2) by the market; and 3) by their employer. With regard to 1) and 2), it argues that alternative conceptions of freedom can identify the unfreedom in question, and that there are good reasons for pressing these complaints on the (...) basis of these alternative conceptions. With regard to 3), it argues that, while alternative conceptions of freedom may be able to identify the unfreedom in question, republican freedom provides a more suitable basis for pressing this claim. It concludes that while left republicans have shown that socialists have reason to care about republican freedom, they have not shown that socialists should adopt republican freedom at the expense of other conceptions of freedom. (shrink)

In recent years the view that the non-instrumental value of democracy is a relational value, particularly relational equality, gained prominence. In this paper I challenge this relational egalitarian version of non-instrumentalism about democracy’s value by arguing that it is unable to establish a strong enough commitment to democracy. I offer an alternative view according to which democracy is non-instrumentally valuable for it establishes relationships of mutual service among citizens by enlisting them in the collective project of ruling the polity justly (...) together which is a self-standing source of value for them. Relating in the mode of mutual service is not a species of relating as equals; it is a distinct relational value. Democracy is uniquely suited to realize this relational value, for it renders citizens co-authors of the fundamental rules of the system of social cooperation under which they live, and only as co-authors of these rules are they able to mutually serve each other in a way that is appropriate within their relationship as citizens of the same polity. For this reason, a strong commitment to democracy can be based on the relational value of mutual service, which therefore better fits the theoretical purposes of non-instrumentalism than relational equality. (shrink)

This paper argues that social media companies’ power to regulate communication in the public sphere illustrates a novel type of domination. The idea is that, since social media companies can partially dictate the terms of citizens’ political participation in the public sphere, they can arbitrarily interfere with the choices individuals make qua citizens. I contend that social media companies dominate citizens in two different ways. First, I focus on the cases in which social media companies exercise direct control over political (...) speech. They exercise quasi-public power over citizens because their regulation of speech on social media platforms implies the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with citizens’ democratic contestation in the political system. Second, companies’ algorithmic governance entails the capacity to interfere with citizens’ choices about what mode of discursive engagement they endorse in their relationships with fellow citizens. By raising the cost of deliberative engagement, companies narrow citizens’ choice menu. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 122-164, May 2022. I argue that the consensus view that one must never level down to equality gives rise to a dilemma. This dilemma is best understood by examining two parallel cases of leveling down: one drawn from the economic domain, the other from the political. In the economic case, both egalitarians and non-egalitarians have resisted the idea of leveling down wages to equality. With no incentives for some people to work (...) hard social productivity will likely decline, further lowering people's wages and thus leaving everybody all-things-considered worse off as a result—hence “never level down.” On the other hand, however, the argument against leveling down does not appear to pass muster in the political sphere: denying political equality in the form of “one person, one vote”, for example, by giving a higher share of voting power to people with, say, more education seems straightforwardly objectionable, even if such a voting scheme would improve the outcomes of all people, including those who are ultimately left with fewer votes. Thus, a fundamental tension arises: we can either endorse the widely-affirmed “never-level-down” thesis, which says that sacrificing people's well-being exclusively for the sake of promoting equality can never be the right thing to do, or we can endorse the principle of “one person, one vote.” But we cannot do both. I defend this dilemma against a view I call the compatibility view: roughly, that because OPOV is strictly necessary to advance some weighty, non-egalitarian interest people have, accepting OPOV as a principle of justice is compatible with one's rejection of leveling down. (shrink)

Workplace democracy is often defined, and has recently been defended, as a form of intra-firm governance in which workers have control rights over management with no ownership requirement on their part. Using the normative tools of republican political theory, the paper examines bargaining power disparities and moral hazard problems resulting from the allocation of control rights and ownership to different groups within democratic firms, with a particular reference to the European codetermination system. With various qualifications related to potentially mitigating factors, (...) such as workforce and shareholder composition or risk aversion and reallocation, the paper contends that forms of workplace democracy in which workers control and own the firm, such as cooperativism, are preferable to other forms, such as codetermination, in which ownership and control rights are formally separated. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 190-227, May 2022. There is a sense of fairness that is distinctive of markets. This is fairness among economic competitors, competitive fairness. We regularly make judgments of competitive fairness about market participants, public policies and institutions. However, it is not clear to what these judgments refer, or what moral significance they have. This paper offers a rational reconstruction of competitive fairness in terms of non-domination. It first identifies competitive fairness as a (...) distinctive claim, advanced within markets in turn characterized as antagonistic, instrumental and procedural. It distinguishes competitive fairness from a number of familiar ideals with which it might be confused: legitimate expectation, equality of opportunity, sporting fairness and economic efficiency. While many exponents likely assume competitive fairness can be explained in terms of one of these ideals, in each case there are significant objections to doing so. Instead, the paper argues that the most promising justification of competitive fairness is under the republican ideal of non-domination, which can reconstruct many of the intuitive judgments of competitive fairness that we make in particular cases. However, it concludes, this explanation makes it difficult for exponents to continue to emphasize competitive fairness, given diverse other risks of domination, and to other values, in markets. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 209-229, June 2022.

Digital platforms and application software have changed how people work in a range of industries. Empirical studies of the gig economy have raised concerns about new systems of algorithmic management exercised over workers and how these alter the structural conditions of their work. Drawing on the republican literature, we offer a theoretical account of algorithmic domination and a framework for understanding how it can be applied to ride hail and food delivery services in the on-demand economy. We argue that certain (...) algorithms can facilitate new relationships of domination by sustaining a socio-technical system in which the owners and managers of a company dominate workers. This analysis has implications for the growing use of algorithms throughout the gig economy and broader labor market. (shrink)

The attention economy — the market where consumers’ attention is exchanged for goods and services — poses a variety of threats to individuals’ autonomy, which, at minimum, involves the ability to set and pursue ends for oneself. It has been argued that the threat wireless mobile devices pose to autonomy gives rise to a duty to oneself to be a digital minimalist, one whose interactions with digital technologies are intentional such that they do not conflict with their ends. In this (...) paper, we argue that there is a corresponding duty to others to be an attention ecologist, one who promotes digital minimalism in others. Although the moral reasons for being an attention ecologist are similar to those that motivate the duty to oneself, the arguments diverge in important ways. We explore the application of this duty in various domains where we have special obligations to promote autonomy in virtue of the different roles we play in the lives of others, such as parents and teachers. We also discuss the consequences of our arguments for employers, software developers, and policy makers. (shrink)

This paper clarifies the usage of Albert Hirschman’s categories of market behaviour as of exit and voice in debates about workplace democracy by taking seriously his critique of the neoclassical analysis of competition. Pro-market liberals are generally hostile to the idea of workplace democracy and tend to favour top-down hierarchies as a way of organising labour. This hostility is generally inspired by the neoclassical analysis of exploitation and efficiency, which leads them to defend distributions achieved through exit-based competitive equilibria. Following (...) Hirschman, I propose to consider a hypothetical alternative: a democratic equilibrium, reached through the use of voice. I show that it would present the same appealing characteristics than its competitive counterpart while also accounting for the non-ideal conditions in which markets operate. Support for free markets should entail support for workplace democracy minimally understood as a strengthening of voice. (shrink)

This article analyses the phenomenon of ‘micro-domination’, in which a series of dominated choices are individually inconsequential for a person’s freedom but collectively consequential. Where the choices concerned are objectively inconsequential, micro- domination poses a problem for ‘objective threshold’ accounts of domination which either prioritise particularly bad forms of domination or exclude powers that do not risk causing serious harm to their victims. Where the choices concerned are subjectively inconsequential to the victim, micro-domination poses a problem for the common republican (...) strategy of creating arenas of contestation for victims of domination, which rely on victims objecting strongly enough to a dominating relationship to sound the alarm. This kind of invigilation may systematically fail victims of micro-domination. Throughout the article, I suggest some ways of better accounting for and responding to cases of micro-domination. (shrink)

Pourtant en perte de vitesse depuis les années 1980, les débats ayant trait à la démocratie d’entreprise et au travail démocratique ont connu un regain d’intérêt au cours des dernières années. Intervenant dans le contexte de ces débats, Elizabeth Anderson a ainsi proposé de remobiliser et de redéfinir le concept de « gouvernement privé » afin d’appréhender dans une perspective politique les rapports sociaux en milieu de travail et de montrer en quoi ils constituent un problème. Cet article entend procéder (...) à l’évaluation critique du concept de gouvernement privé. Il se propose de réinscrire le concept au sein de l’égalitarisme relationnel défendu par Anderson, de l’exposer à trois critiques qui permettent d’en saisir la portée et les limites, et de montrer qu’il permet de résoudre certains des problèmes que pose la théorie de la firme dans son appréhension des rapports sociaux en milieu de travail. (shrink)