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)

A central debate in the conspiracy theory research concerns how to understand conspiracy theories in a theoretically fruitful way given our research interest to study the nature of such theories and those who believe in them. However, far from settling on one account, this is still an on-going dispute in which researchers take widely different positions. For instance, while some argue for a purely descriptive understanding, others seem strongly committed to the view that conspiracy theories are, or can be shown (...) to be, inherently irrational. In an attempt to reconstruct this controversy, I argue that the disagreement arises because there are in fact two distinct motives underlying scholarly studies in the field: to attain objective knowledge of the phenomena in question versus to defend beliefs and norms that are part of the researcher’s own cultural context. This paper examines the epistemological and methodological challenges in the study of conspiracy theories, focusing on how competing frameworks—normative cultural biases versus objective scientific inquiry—shape our understanding of rational belief. I argue, finally, that if the motive is to attain objective knowledge, there is no serious alternative to the descriptive understanding of conspiracy theories. (shrink)

Understanding a normative concept like oppression requires attention to not only its harms but also the causes of those harms. In other words, a complete understanding of such a concept requires a proper causal explanation. This causal explanation can also inform and constrain our moral response to such harms. Therefore, the conceptual explanatory framework that we use to inform our moral diagnosis and our moral response become significant. The first goal of this dissertation is to propose complexity theory as the (...) proper framework for not only explaining a social phenomenon like oppression but also understanding the proper sites for social change. The second goal of this dissertation is to answer three interrelated questions about how we should respond, morally, to a chronic and complex social problem like racial or gender inequality: (1) Why do the current interventions to address these problems fail? (2) Do social movements play any unique role in addressing these problems? (3) What is our individual responsibility to participate in social movements? In response, I argue that the explanatory frameworks that we choose to understand the cause(s) of social problems can be the source of the inadequacy of our intervention. I argue that a proper social and moral intervention needs to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the social world. I also show that changing the explanatory framework allows us to see the unique role social movements play in making effective and sustainable social change possible. Finally, I conclude supporting such movements is a moral imperative. (shrink)

Deceased organ donation is widely considered as a case of easy rescue―that is, a case in which A may bestow considerable benefits on B while incurring negligent costs herself. Yet, the policy implications of this observation remain unclear. Drawing on Christopher H. Wellman’s samaritan account of political obligations, the paper develops a case for a so-called opt-out system, i.e., a scheme in which people are defaulted into being donors. The proposal’s key idea is that we may arrange people’s options in (...) specific ways for the sake of others. (shrink)

I argue that philosophical studies of the virtues of creativity should attend to the ways that our conceptions of human creativity may be grounded in conceptions of human nature or the nature of reality. I consider and reject claims in this direction made by David Bohm and Paul Feyerabend. The more compelling candidate is the account of science, creativity, and human nature developed by the early Marx. Its guiding claim is that the forms of creativity enabled by the sciences are (...) ultimately valuable insofar as they advance our emancipation from a state of existential alienation. I end by encouraging future investigations of such vertical explanations of the significance of certain virtues in the context of scientific enquiry. (shrink)

Historical materialism I take to be the view expressed in the well-known Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and exemplified in Capital and in many other writings by Marx and by Marxists. I shall begin with a few introductory remarks, next sketch in the theory, and finally contend that, despite real attractions, it too far limits the scope of legitimate historical enquiry to be ultimately acceptable.

There is an under-appreciated tradition of genealogical explanation that is centrally concerned with social functions. I shall refer to it as the tradition of pragmatic genealogy. It runs from David Hume (T, 3.2.2) and the early Friedrich Nietzsche (TL) through E. J. Craig (1990, 1993) to Bernard Williams (2002) and Miranda Fricker (2007). These pragmatic genealogists start out with a description of an avowedly fictional “state of nature” and end up ascribing social functions to particular building blocks of our practices (...) – such as the fact that we use a certain concept, or live by a certain virtue – which we did not necessarily expect to have such a function at all. That the seemingly archaic device of a fictional state-of-nature story should be a helpful way to get at the functions of our actual practices must seem a mystifying proposal, however; I shall therefore endeavor to demystify it in what follows. My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, by delineating the framework of pragmatic genealogy and contrasting it with superficially similar methods, I argue that pragmatic genealogies are best interpreted as dynamic models whose point is to reveal the function – and non-coincidentally often the social function – of certain practices. Second, by buttressing this framework with something it notably lacks, namely an account of the type of functionality it operates with, I argue that both the type of functional commitment and the depth of factual obligation incurred by a pragmatic genealogy depend on what we use the method for: the dynamic models of pragmatic genealogy can be used merely as heuristic devices helping us spot functional patterns, or more ambitiously as arguments grounding our ascriptions of functionality to actual practices, or even more ambitiously as bases for functional explanations of the resilience or the persistence of practices. By bringing these distinctions into view, we gain the ability to distinguish strengths and weaknesses of the method’s application from strengths and weaknesses of the method itself. (shrink)

While the volume of material inspired by Rawls’s reinvigoration of the discipline back in 1971 has still not begun to subside, its significance has been in serious decline for quite some time. New and important work is appearing less and less frequently, while the scope of the work that is appearing is getting smaller and more internal and its practical applications more difficult to discern. The discipline has reached a point of intellectual stagnation, even as real-world events suggest that the (...) need for what political philosophy can provide could not be more critical. What follows then is a set of statements about how I believe that we, as political philosophers, should approach what we do. It contains my view as to what political philosophy should be about, how political philosophy should be done, and how courses in political philosophy should be taught, interlaced with commentary on the current state of the profession. (shrink)

This essay defends a rational reconstruction of a genealogical debunking argument that begins with the premise “that's just what the economic elite want you to believe” and ends in the conclusion “you should lower your confidence in your belief.” The argument is genealogical because it includes a causal explanation of your beliefs; it is debunking because it claims that the contingencies uncovered by the genealogy undermine your beliefs. The essay begins by defending a plausible causal explanation of your belief in (...) terms of the wants of the elite. Then a number of recent objections to genealogical debunking arguments are considered. It is argued that the genealogy offered in the first part constitutes evidence that a testimony-based belief is not safe and therefore does not constitute knowledge if the economic elite wants you to believe it. (shrink)

Public health policies typically assume that there are characteristics and constraints over health that an individual cannot control and that there are choices that an individual could change if he is nudged or provided with incentives. We consider that health is determined by a range of personal, social, economic and environmental factors and we discuss to what extent an individual can control these factors. In particular, we assume that the observed health status of an individual is a result of factors (...) within the individual’s control and constraints the individual faces. We suggest three different constraints: budget, time and psychological constraints and position various determinants of health according to increasing levels of constraint and increasing degrees of individual control. We finally discuss public health policies such as nudging, intervening and rewarding within this new framework and show that the level of constraints and the degree of individual control on health status are essential dimensions to consider when designing and implementing public health policies. (shrink)

Giving plays an important role in the contemporary economy, but this has been obscured by the perspectives of both mainstream economics and Marxist political economy. This paper draws on the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham to argue that this stunts our imagination about alternative futures, and on the work of Erik Olin Wright to suggest that gift-oriented economic practices could play a significant part in such futures. The most promising alternative economic futures involve not the replacement of a monolithic capitalism (...) with some other monolithic alternative, but rather a changing mix of already-diverse economic practices. One part of the Marxist tradition that stands in the way of such thinking is its employment of the concept of modes of production, and the paper proposes complexes of appropriative practices as an alternative or supplementary concept. (shrink)

The subject of this chapter is the complex and confusing course of the discussion of cause and teleology before and during the period of Mill and Comte, and its aftermath up to the early years of the twentieth century in the thinking of several of the major founding figures of disciplinary social science. The discussion focused on the problem of the sufficiency of causal explanations, and particularly the question of whether some particular fact could be explained without appeal to purpose. (...) In response to such questions, the defenders of the new conception attempted to replace older terminology with new (“function” for “purpose,” for example), sometimes muddling the issues, sometimes turning them into terminological disputes, and sometimes making the different positions difficult to distinguish. The problem of methodological unity in the social sciences is rooted in the discussions of the time. (shrink)

In light of Perry Anderson's recent re-Iaunch of New Left Review, and the publication of Gregory Elliott's Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History, it is perhaps an opportune moment for Marxists to assess Anderson's contribution to socialist strategic thought. At the heart of Anderson's manifesto is the claim that the principal aspect of the past decade ‘can be defined as the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neoliberalism'. There is, obviously, something in this claim. However, Anderson also briefly (...) notes, amongst other counter-currents, the labour upsurge in France in 1995, but dismisses the significance of these events with the claim that ‘capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule'. Anderson compares the context of the launch of the first New Left Review with that of the present day. He writes that, back then, a third of the planet had broken with capitalism, the discrediting of Stalinism in 1956 had unleashed a vital process of the rediscovery of authentic Marxism, while, culturally, there had been a qualitative break with the conformism of the 1950s. Today, by contrast, American capitalism has reasserted its international primacy, European social-democratic governments are implementing policies designed to follow the American model, Japan is suffering from a slump, while the Russian catastrophe has produced no popular backlash. Moreover, the Western powers have recently asserted themselves successfully in the Balkans, and, despite upsurges against capital in the 1990s, ‘no collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon’. How are socialists to respond to this diagnosis? In this essay, I want to locate the logic of Anderson's interpretation of the present conjuncture within the context of his previous strategic claims. I will argue that, while socialists will always have much to learn from Anderson, strategically his thought has systematically suffered from a form of political impressionism. This suggests that his interpretation of the present conjuncture may fail the test of history. (shrink)

Andrew Levine analyses the theoretical legacy of recent Marxist schools, focusing in particular on analytical Marxism (AM). He argues that AM is uniquely suited to provide the foundations for a revival of Marxist theory. In this paper, Levine's reconstruction of the core of Marxism and his analysis of the trajectory of AM are critically discussed. Although the theoretical contribution of AM should not be overlooked, some objectionable methodological and theoretical tenets of AM, and in particular of Rational Choice Marxism, are (...) discussed, which may help to explain the demise of the school. Various directions for further research are suggested, which emphasise the importance of structural constraints and endogenous preferences. Key Words: analytical Marxism • methodological individualism • rational choice theory • endogenous preferences • structural constraints. (shrink)

This article seeks to develop the Marxist conception of social structure by incorporating developments within critical realist philosophy. It rejects forms of economic determinism such as the base-superstructure model and those reconstructions—like Cohen’s—that attribute primacy to productive forces in explaining history and society. It argues instead that society is the product of complex, often contradictory combinations of many different structures and mechanisms. They form a structural ensemble, hierarchically arranged, but where each element has its own dynamics and emergent powers. It (...) concludes that society is best understood through critical realist conceptions of stratification, emergence, transformation, and overdetermination. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz continue in the tradition of Plato with their work on the role of education in a just society. Both argue that a just society depends on education enabling citizens to realize democratic or civic equality and that this equality depends on sufficiency in the distribution of educational goods. I agree that education is important to preparing democratic citizens, but I disagree about the plausibility of sufficiency here, especially in the educational context. My argument is two‐fold: (...) I first reconsider a generic positional goods objection to educational inequality, I then argue that plausible sufficientarian replies to this objection fail insofar as they are premised on an impoverished conception of class and power that treats all statuses more like socio‐cultural traits when they should instead be referencing the material conditions someone has inside a social structure. One cannot bring an individual X into the halls of power and simultaneously have X represent or compensate those who are presently disadvantaged in the way that X had formerly been disadvantaged. In short, we should worry about the realistic possibility of securing and sustaining a civic‐minded elite because elites have the power and motivation to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us. For the sufficientarian story to work, we need more that explains the realistic possibility of a benevolent ruling elite, until then, democratic equality seems to be better realized by aiming for equal educations, adequacy isn't enough. (shrink)

The week, twenty-five years ago, of the Apollo spacecraft's return visit to the moon was described by Richard Nixon as the greatest since the Creation. Across the Atlantic, a French Academician judged the same event to matter less than the discovery of a lost etching by Daumier. Attitudes to technological achievement, then, differ. And they always have. Chuang-Tzu, over 2,000 years ago, relates an exchange between a Confucian passer-by and a Taoist gardener watering vegetables with a bucket drawn from a (...) well. ‘Don't you know that there is a machine with which 100 beds are easily watered in a day?’—‘How does it work?’—‘It's a counterbalanced ladle’—‘too clever to be good … all machines have to do with formulae, artificiality [which] destroy native ingenuity … and prevent the Tao from residing peacefully in one's heart’. ‘Engines of mischief, in the words of the Luddite song, or testaments to ‘the nobility of man [as] the conqueror of matter’, in those of Primo Levi, the products of technology continue to inspire phobia and philia. (shrink)

This article returns to the debate about the relative importance of the productive forces and the relations of production in the feudal mode of production. It argues, using western medieval evidence, that this relation is an empirical one and varies between modes, maybe also inside modes; and that, in the specific case of feudalism, not only were the relations of production the driving force, but developments in the productive forces actually depended upon them.

Prima facie there is confusion in that part of Marx's theory which deals with religion and revolution. On the basis of Marx's scattered statements on religion one can construct two views of the relationship between revolutionary action and the abolition of the religious mentality. One view is that the exploited class can come to atheism prior to the creation of communist society, and, indeed, must attain a secular consciousness if it is to be the agency of revolution. The other view (...) is that the power of religion cannot be broken until after the communist revolution because only a new economic order can remove the material conditions which sustain religion as a mass phenomenon.In the face of these conflicting views we are left with two alternatives. Either we can take one of the constructions as the authentic one, or, we can conclude that Marx's position is incoherent. Seeking the best in both worlds, my approach involves showing why the charge of incoherence appears plausible while arguing for a resolution in the direction of the first construction. (shrink)

Why does the world have the pattern of patriarchy it currently possesses? Why have patriarchal practices and institutions evolved and changed in the ways they have tended to over time in human societies? This paper explores these general questions by integrating a feminist analysis of patriarchy with the central insights of the functionalist interpretation of historical materialism advanced by G. A. Cohen. The paper has two central aspirations: first, to help narrow the divide between analytical Marxism and feminism by redressing (...) the former's neglect of the important role female labor has played, and continues to play, in shaping human history. Second, by developing the functionalist account of historical materialism in order to take patriarchy seriously, we can derive useful insights for diagnosing the emancipatory challenges that women face in the world today. The degree and form of patriarchy present in any particular society is determined by the productive forces it has had at its disposal. According to historical materialism, technological, material, and medical advances that ease the pressures on high fertility rates (such as the sanitation revolution, vaccinations, birth control, and so on) are the real driving forces behind the positive modulations to patriarchy witnessed in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Karl Marx (1818-1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary communist, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact (...) with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx's theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, culminating in communism. Marx's economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx's prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal. (shrink)

In this article I put forth a new interpretation of historical materialism titled the supervenient interpretation . Drawing on the insights of analytical Marxism and utilizing the concept of supervenience, I advance two central claims. First, that Marx's synchronic materialism maintains that the superstructure supervenes naturally on the economic structure. Second, that diachronic materialism maintains that the relations of production supervene naturally on the forces of production. Taken together, these two theses help bring to the fore the central tenets of (...) historical materialism. Furthermore, they help resolve what I call the problem of reductionism and the problem of verification . Key Words: Marx • historical materialism • supervenience • synchronic materialism • diachronic materialism. (shrink)

Marx develops his economic theory in Capital in a rather peculiar way. This paper focuses on some of these peculiarities, especially his attempt to base his account of prices and derivative entities (profit, rate of profit, etc.) on the labour theory of value. Although he may be said to have failed in this, there is still some kind of Marxist theory of prices possible. This is due to both, the so-called fundamental theorem (linking profit and surplus-value) and the possibility, shown (...) by Sraffa and others, to determine prices from the physical parameters of production. By adding on an earlier paper of mine, in which the surplus-value theory has been reconstructed within the structuralistic framework, this paper sketches such a reconstruction for the basic parts of a full-blown Marxist economic theory of capitalistic production. (shrink)

(2002). Rich Egalitarianism, Ordinary Politics, and the Demands of Justice. Inquiry: Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 97-117.

This paper presents an 'internal' criticism of Winch's seminal 'Understanding a Primitive Society'. It distinguishes between two contrasting approaches to critical social understanding: (1) the metaphysical approach, central to the whole tradition of critical philosophy and critical social theory from Kant, through Marx to the Frankfurt School and contemporary theorists such as Habermas and Searle; (2) the descriptive approach, advocated by Winch, and which derives from Wittgenstein's critique of philosophical theory. It is argued, against a long tradition of 'critical theory' (...) depicting Wittgenstein's philosophy as irredeemably 'conservative', that the descriptive approach is perfectly apt for generating a critical understanding of central Western institutions. Rather than seeking to provide an explanatory theory through which to discern what allegedly is imperceptible to theoretically unaided perception (i.e. the metaphysical approach), the descriptive approach aims for a 'perspicuous presentation' of our everyday practices and institutions in such a way as to see their 'irrational' and 'alienating' dimensions. Winch's basic position in 'Understanding a Primitive Society' is endorsed, but it is argued that ultimately he fails in his descriptive intent. In place of the Christian prayer analogy that Winch invokes in order to make sense of Zande witchcraft, it is proposed that Western commodity production and exchange provide a more appropriate, instructive, and critical comparison. (shrink)

This paper examines the implicit foundations of several theoretical propositions characteristic of the Marxist tradition in sociology. It argues that these propositions derive from self-contradictory critical premises which are paradoxes of Action Theory. Implicit in these premises is an ideal picture of social reality quite different from the one analytically described by Parsons. I suggest that Action Theory can provide conceptual tools needed to address some specific issues characteristic of the Marxist perspective and, moreover, offers a solution to some epistemological (...) problems raised by the authors who endorse the postmodern position in social sciences. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau’s Marxist and post-Marxist works are best understood when they are embedded in the history of Argentina’s National Left. This socialist-populist current underpinned his strategic horizons onward of at least 1963. While purely theoretical interpretations of Laclau can sometimes be enlightening, they tend to lose sight of the historical density of the Argentine’s thought. Over the course of his working life, Laclau’s theories presented the Argentinean Left with a challenge concerning how to engage with Peronism: specifically, how to develop (...) a leftist hegemonic project in an era when the working class remained stubbornly linked to a Peronist political identity. Laclau’s political trajectory and his understanding of Marxism are analysed here in order to explain the nature of his post-Marxism. (shrink)

Within cultural history there is a widespread eschewal of speculative reasoning. This article notes the complicity of the general postmodern avoidance of metanarratives with Anglo-Saxon empiricism and locates the major problem facing cultural history in postmodernism's conflation of trajectories and teleologies. Any discussion of the directionality of history is imputed to be a full-blown teleology. Using previous discussions from different fields, the difference between a teleology and trajectory is defended and, after clarifying certain confusions, it is argued that trajectories, as (...) following the working of generative mechanisms, are necessary to theorize in order to make interesting progress within the field of cultural history. (shrink)

This is a revised version of a Licenciatura Thesis (defended at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1997).

Social capital is frequently offered up as a variable to explain such educational outcomes as academic attainment, drop-out rates and cognitive development. Yet, despite its popularity amongst social scientists, social capital theory remains the object of some scepticism, particularly in respect of its explanatory ambitions. I provide an account of some explanatory options available to social capital theorists, focussing on the functions ascribed to social capital and on how these are used as explanatory variables in educational theory. Two of the (...) most influential writers in this field are Coleman and Bourdieu. I explore their commonalities and differences, both in respect of their writing and in respect of some of the many theorists they have influenced. I argue that social capital theorists have made substantial progress in responding to sceptically minded critics, but that significant questions remain, especially about the success of the more ambitious explanatory variants as these apply to educational outcomes—functional explanation in particular. Functional explanation, and its association with Bourdieu, is discussed in ‘Bourdieu and functional explanation’; thereafter I discuss the more modest ambition of identifying the functions associated with social capital. In ‘Coleman, intergenerational closure and educational outcomes’ I show how Coleman provides resources for revealing how social structure features in social explanation in an educational context, and in ‘Inequality, class and ethnicity’ I suggest that some of the questions raised in his account are most satisfactorily responded to by educational theorists who adopt Bourdieu’s emphasis on social class and inequality. (shrink)

This thesis constructs a model of the material causes of the capacity of individuals to act at work, by using the ontology of scientific realism to facilitate a synthesis between Marx and Foucault. This synthetic model is submitted as a solution to the long-standing problem of Industrial Relations theory, now manifest in the deconstruction of the organon of 'control'. The problems of 'control' are rooted in the radical concept of power and traditional, base/superstructure, interpretations of Marx. Developing an alternative to (...) the last provides the means of transcending the limitations of the first and the second. A realist, chronological-bibliographic reading of Marx provides an alternative to traditional interpretations, by creating a novel concept of his object, his initial explicandum and his putative explicans. This reading identifies a fresh problem with his model of capital: it cannot explain how labour is organized into a productive power and subsumed to capital. Foucault provides the means of resolving these deficiencies of Marx's explicans. A realist interpretation turns Marx and Foucault around to face each other, renders them compatible and establishes points of contact between their work. Together they constitute a model of the operative logic of production relations capable of explaining the organization of labour, its subsumption to capital and the materialism of civil society and the idealism of the state. On this basis, the contemporary form of the problem of Industrial Relations theory is explained. (shrink)

During the 1980s and 1990s, the debate on the Marxist theory of history centred largely around the work of Robert Brenner’s property-relations-centred construal of it, and G.A. Cohen’s attempt to revive the classical, determinist argument. This article examines two influential arguments by Erik Wright and his colleagues, and by Alan Carling, which acknowledge important weaknesses in Cohen’s work, but which also try to construct a more plausible version of his theory. I show that the attempts to rescue Cohen are largely (...) unsuccessful. And, to the extent that they render the argument plausible, they do so at the cost of turning it, willy-nilly, into a kind of class-struggle theory. I conclude that this spells the demise of the classical version of historical materialism, but also observe that this does not leave us with a voluntaristic understanding of history, as some of its defenders fear. (shrink)

Elster's work unstably combines Leibnizian and utilitarian conceptions of action and offers various deconstructions of rationality and individuality. His method ological individualism gives an inadequate account of its privileged object, individual teleologies, and a distorted account of the relational framework of social reproduction and transformation. Elster has not properly conceptualized the relation of the teleological act to patterns of material and social causality, and his rational choice theory proves unable to accommodate the interactions of his postulated monadic individuals. His most (...) recent work dearly illustrates the limits of an individualist approach, while remaining committed to its principles. (shrink)

Is the meaning of life to get rich quick? That would certainly explain the way many people have lived under the spell of a constitutive fantasy: the fantasy of instant wealth. Drawing on Lacan’s Discourse of the Capitalist, the article explores the fantasy of instant wealth and its relationship to addiction, especially addiction to shopping. The article concludes with a meditation on how the fantasy of instant wealth supplants and in some ways contradicts another fantasy: the fantasy of labour.

Once we shift the intension of the concept of wage-labour from juridical attributes of negative ownership and contractual freedom to the actual performance of capital-positing labour, the extension of the concept – the cases that fall under it – changes as well. Once the concept of wage-labour is intensively re-defined as capital-positing labour, it becomes evident that the history and the geographical scope of wage-labour have not been well understood. This shift in the intension of the concept of wage-labour also (...) disjoins the association between capitalism and freedom. (shrink)

: Half a century of political Marxism and Soviet social science deflected Marxist thought from its canonical sources. Communism and Marxism were so intertwined by events of the twentieth century that it is difficult to see what remains of the latter after the demise of the former. Specifically, three foundational principles--"being determines consciousness," the Asiatic Mode of Production, and "the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas"--have been corrupted by heartfelt ideological commitments. A review of those principles against (...) the background of Marxist writing on the history of science stakes out research frontiers that remain to be reconnoitered. (shrink)

This paper explores a neglected normative dimension of algorithmic opacity in the workplace and the labor market. It argues that explanations of algorithms and algorithmic decisions are of noninstrumental value. That is because explanations of the structure and function of parts of the social world form the basis for reflective clarification of our practical orientation toward the institutions that play a central role in our life. Using this account of the noninstrumental value of explanations, the paper diagnoses distinctive normative defects (...) in the workplace and economic institutions which a reliance on AI can encourage, and which lead to alienation. (shrink)

Criticism and sarcasm are interspersed with description and analysis throughout Marx's work. Most of the criticism is aimed at one or another side of a single target: what Marx sees as capitalism's pretensions of freedom, equality, and prosperity in the face of exploitation and recurrent crises. But the remarks on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital seem to be directed at a different target. Here Marx tells us that a commodity is ‘a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties (...) and theological niceties.’ But instead of going on to reveal the nature of commodites-the task that occupies him for the preceding 30 and subsequent 700 pages-Marx takes the opportunity to explore their ‘mystical’ character. The passage repays careful consideration. It is one of the few places in his mature writings in which Marx returns to the tone of his youthful works. It is also the passage in which commentators have claimed to find grounds for attributing a doctrine of ‘false consciousness’ to Marx. (shrink)

How should we assess the burden of moral demands? A predominant assessment is provided by what Murphy calls the baseline of factual status-quo (FSQ): A moral theory is demanding if the level of agents’ well-being is reduced from the time they begin to comply perfectly with the theory. The aims of my paper are threefold. I will first discuss the limits of the FSQ baseline. Second, I suggest a different assessment, which examines moral demands from a whole-life perspective. My view (...) is that even if agents’ compliance with a moral theory will not cause a substantial reduction to their existing level of well-being, the total quality of life that they may obtain from complying with this theory may still be lower than what they could have obtained by following some other moral theories. The third aim of this paper is that, through this investigation, I hope to explicate the relation between agents’ acceptance of a moral theory and the burden of demands that is created by it. I believe that we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of moral demands by paying attention to the psychological development of agents as they accept and internalize a moral theory. (shrink)

In this paper I critically engage with Hennie Lötter’s impressive book, Poverty, Ethics and Justice. I discuss his conception of poverty, and offer an interpretation of his claim that poverty is a uniquely human scourge. I exam the various harms of poverty that Lötter discusses. I consider two reasons that he offers for why we have a moral duty to end poverty, and I argue that the reason based on what we can justify to others if we take their human (...) dignity seriously is most compelling. Finally, I argue that Lötter overemphasizes of the moral importance of aid and downplays in the importance of the justice of institutional and structural change. I close by considering the prospects for social equality given our experience of capitalist development as a means for poverty eradication. I consider the moral importance of limits to the achievement of robust equality. (shrink)