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  1. Employers have a Duty of Beneficence to Design for Meaningful Work: A General Argument and Logistics Warehouses as a Case Study.Jilles Smids, Hannah Berkers, Pascale Le Blanc, Sonja Rispens & Sven Nyholm - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (3):455-482.
    Artificial intelligence-driven technology increasingly shapes work practices and, accordingly, employees’ opportunities for meaningful work (MW). In our paper, we identify five dimensions of MW: pursuing a purpose, social relationships, exercising skills and self-development, autonomy, self-esteem and recognition. Because MW is an important good, lacking opportunities for MW is a serious disadvantage. Therefore, we need to know to what extent employers have a duty to provide this good to their employees. We hold that employers have a duty of beneficence to design (...)
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  • The Difficulty of Making Good Work Available to All.Pascal Brixel - 2024 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 41 (2):267-288.
    How might good work – skilled, autonomous work which affords workers opportunities for meaningful social cooperation in decent conditions – be made available to all? I evaluate five commonly advanced strategies: an unregulated labor market, egalitarian redistribution of resources, state regulation, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy. Each, I argue, has significant limitations. An unregulated labor market ignores workers' unduly weak bargaining power vis-à-vis employers. Egalitarian redistribution alone fails to solve this problem due to distinctive and endemic imperfections of labor markets. (...)
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  • The Future of Work: Augmentation or Stunting?Markus Furendal & Karim Jebari - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology (2):1-22.
    The last decade has seen significant improvements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, including robotics, machine vision, speech recognition and text generation. Increasing automation will undoubtedly affect the future of work, and discussions on how the development of AI in the workplace will impact labor markets often include two scenarios: (1) labor replacement and (2) labor enabling. The former involves replacing workers with machines, while the latter assumes that human-machine cooperation can significantly improve worker productivity. In this context, it is often (...)
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  • Meaningful work, nonperfectionism, and reciprocity.Caleb Althorpe - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
    Any liberal argument for incorporating meaningful work within a theory of justice inherits a burden of proof to show why it does not fall to the objection that privileging the work process valorizes particular ideas about the good and thereby unfairly privileges some persons over others. Existing liberal defences of meaningful work, which rely on the formative effects of work in contemporary economies, have a limited scope of appeal and do not provide a convincing reply to the objection. The paper (...)
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  • ‘But it’s your job!’ the moral status of jobs and the dilemma of occupational duties.Lisa Herzog & Frauke Schmode - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
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  • Ownership and Control Rights in Democratic Firms: A Republican Approach.Inigo González-Ricoy - 2020 - Review of Social Economy 78 (3):411-430.
    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, (...)
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  • Risk Shifts in the Gig Economy: The Normative Case for an Insurance Scheme against the Effects of Precarious Work.Friedemann Https://Orcidorg Bieber & Jakob Https://Orcidorg Moggia - 2020 - Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (3):281-304.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • A Normative Meaning of Meaningful Work.Christopher Michaelson - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 170 (3):413-428.
    Research on meaningful work has not embraced a shared definition of what it is, in part because many researchers and laypersons agree that it means different things to different people. However, subjective and social accounts of meaningful work have limited practical value to help people pursue it and to help scholars study it. The account of meaningful work advanced in this paper is inherently normative. It recognizes the relevance of subjective experience and social agreement to appraisals of meaningfulness but considers (...)
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  • Structural domination in the labor market.Lillian Cicerchia - 2022 - European Journal of Political Theory 21 (1).
    In recent years, there has been a wide-ranging debate about the neo-republican principle of non-domination. Neo-republicans argue that domination is a capacity for one to intentionally use arbitrary power to interfere in someone’s life. Critics of neo-republicanism argue that this definition of freedom as non-domination precludes a structural analysis of domination, which would explain and critique the ways in which societies produce structural domination unintentionally. The article focuses on capitalism’s labor process and its labor markets. It argues that critics are (...)
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  • Firms and parental justice: should firms contribute to the cost of parenthood and procreation?Sandrine Blanc & Tim Meijers - 2020 - Economics and Philosophy 36 (1):1-27.
    This article asks whether firms should contribute to the costs of procreation and parenthood. We explore two sets of arguments. First, we ask what the principle of fair play – central in parental justice debates – implies. We argue that if one defends a pro-sharing view, firms are required to shoulder part of the costs of procreation and parenthood. Second, we turn to the principle of fair equality of opportunity. We argue that compensating firms for costs they incur because their (...)
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  • Justice and Corporate Governance: New Insights from Rawlsian Social Contract and Sen’s Capabilities Approach.Magali Fia & Lorenzo Sacconi - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 160 (4):937-960.
    By considering what we identify as a problem inherent in the ‘nature of the firm’—the risk of abuse of authority—we propound the conception of a social contract theory of the firm which is truly Rawlsian in its inspiration. Hence, we link the social contract theory of the firm with the general theory of justice. Through this path, we enter the debate about whether firms can be part of Rawlsian theory of justice showing that corporate governance principles enter the “basic structure.” (...)
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  • Survey Article: Philosophy and Public Policy after Piketty.Martin O'Neill - 2017 - Journal of Political Philosophy 25 (3):343-375.
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  • The Difference Principle at Work.Samuel Arnold - 2012 - Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (1):94-118.
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  • Participation in the Workplace: Are Employees Special?Jeffrey Moriarty - 2010 - Journal of Business Ethics 92 (3):373-384.
    Many arguments have been advanced in favor of employee participation in firm decision-making. Two of the most influential are the "interest protection argument" and the "autonomy argument." I argue that the case for granting participation rights to some other stakeholders, such as suppliers and community members, is at least as strong, according to the reasons given in these arguments, as the case for granting them to certain employees. I then consider how proponents of these arguments might modify their arguments, or (...)
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  • Firms, States, and Democracy: A Qualified Defense of the Parallel Case Argument.Iñigo González Ricoy - 2014 - Law, Ethics and Philosophy 2.
    The paper discusses the structure, applications, and plausibility of the much-used parallel-case argument for workplace democracy. The argument rests on an analogy between firms and states according to which the justification of democracy in the state implies its justification in the workplace. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the argument is illustrated by applying it to two usual objections to workplace democracy, namely, that employees lack the expertise required to run a firm and that only capital suppliers should (...)
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  • Conceptualising Meaningful Work as a Fundamental Human Need.Ruth Yeoman - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 125 (2):1-17.
    In liberal political theory, meaningful work is conceptualised as a preference in the market. Although this strategy avoids transgressing liberal neutrality, the subsequent constraint upon state intervention aimed at promoting the social and economic conditions for widespread meaningful work is normatively unsatisfactory. Instead, meaningful work can be understood to be a fundamental human need, which all persons require in order to satisfy their inescapable interests in freedom, autonomy, and dignity. To overcome the inadequate treatment of meaningful work by liberal political (...)
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  • Incentives, Inequality and Self-Respect.Richard Penny - 2013 - Res Publica 19 (4):335-351.
    Rawls argues that ‘Parties in the original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect’. But what are these social conditions that we should so urgently avoid? One evident candidate might be conditions of material inequality. Yet Rawls seems confident that his account of justice can endorse such inequalities without jeopardising citizens’ self-respect. In this article I argue that this confidence is misplaced. Unequalising incentives, I claim, jeopardise the self-respect of those least advantaged—at (...)
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  • The Common Good of the Firm in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition.Alejo José G. Sison & Joan Fontrodona - 2012 - Business Ethics Quarterly 22 (2):211-246.
    ABSTRACT:This article proposes a theory of the firm based on the common good. It clarifies the meaning of the term “common good” tracing its historical development. Next, an analogous sense applicable to the firm is derived from its original context in political theory. Put simply, the common good of the firm is the production of goods and services needed for flourishing, in which different members participate through work. This is linked to the political common good through subsidiarity. Lastly, implications and (...)
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  • Business and the Polis: What Does it Mean to See Corporations as Political Actors? [REVIEW]Pierre-Yves Néron - 2010 - Journal of Business Ethics 94 (3):333-352.
    This article addresses the recent call in business ethics literature for a better understanding of corporations as political actors or entities. It first gives an overview of recent attempts to examine classical issues in business ethics through a political lens. It examines different ways in which theorists with an interest in the normative analysis of business practices and institutions could find it desirable and fruitful to use a political lens. This article presents a distinction among four views of the relations (...)
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  • Rawlsian Institutionalism and Business Ethics: Does It Matter Whether Corporations Are Part of the Basic Structure of Society?Brian Berkey - 2021 - Business Ethics Quarterly 31 (2):179-209.
    In this article, I aim to clarify some key issues in the ongoing debate about the relationship between Rawlsian political philosophy and business ethics. First, I discuss precisely what we ought to be asking when we consider whether corporations are part of the “basic structure of society.” I suggest that the relevant questions have been mischaracterized in much of the existing debate, and that some key distinctions have been overlooked. I then argue that although Rawlsian theory’s potential implications for business (...)
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  • Recognitive arguments for workplace democracy.Onni Hirvonen & Keith Breen - 2020 - Constellations 27 (4):716-731.
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  • A Normative Argument for Independent Voice and Labor Unions.Cedric E. Dawkins - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 155 (4):1153-1165.
    The paper argues that an ethical firm has cause to realize and to respect, in good faith, the decision of workers regarding labor unions, and proceeds along the following lines. First, the employer is due appropriate deference the bounds of which should be determined in conjunction with employees, as they are the most closely affected party. Second, employee preferences for defining the employment relation and appropriate deference are best reflected through autonomous voice. Third, autonomous voice is assured by the right (...)
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  • Workplace Democracy, Market Competition and Republican Self-Respect.Daniel Jacob & Christian Neuhäuser - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (4):927-944.
    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 (...)
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  • Automation, Labour Justice, and Equality.Denise Celentano - 2019 - Ethics and Social Welfare 13 (1):33-50.
    This article contributes to the debate on automation and justice by discussing two under-represented concerns: labour justice and equality. Since automation involves both winners and losers, and given that there is no ‘end of work’ on the horizon, it is argued that most normative views on the subject – i.e. the ‘allocative’ view of basic income, and the ‘desirability’ views of post-work and workist ethics – do not provide many resources with which to address unjustly unequal divisions of labour involved (...)
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  • Expanding Workers’ ‘Moral Space’: A Liberal Critique of Corporate Capitalism.Sandrine Blanc - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 120 (4):473-488.
    This paper assesses employees’ moral agency within corporate capitalism from a politically liberal standpoint. While political liberalism has spelt out its key institutional implications at state level, it has neglected moral agency at work, assuming that a rights-based state that secures freedom of contract, free choice of occupation and a free labour market within a fair context would protect it sufficiently. Yet two features of corporate capitalism constrain employees’ moral agency: the relation of authority that forms part of the work (...)
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  • Participating in the Common Good of the Firm.Alejo José G. Sison & Joan Fontrodona - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 113 (4):611-625.
    In a previous essay (Sison and Fontrodona 2012), we defined the common good of the firm as collaborative work, insofar as it provides, first, an opportunity to develop knowledge, skills, virtues, and meaning (work as praxis), and second, inasmuch as it produces goods and services to satisfy society’s needs and wants (work as poiesis). We would now like to focus on the participatory aspect of this common good. To do so, we will have to identify the different members of the (...)
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  • Virtue and Meaningful Work.Ron Beadle & Kelvin Knight - 2012 - Business Ethics Quarterly 22 (2):433-450.
    ABSTRACT:This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from (...)
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  • Equality, efficiency and hierarchy in the workplace.Alexander Motchoulski - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (3):711-730.
    Relational egalitarians argue that workplace hierarchy is wrong or unjust. However, even if workplace hierarchy is morally deficient in one respect, the efficiency of hierarchical cooperation might vindicate hierarchy. This paper assesses the extent to which relational egalitarians must make concessions to workplace hierarchy for the sake of efficiency. I argue that considerations of hierarchy provide egalitarians with reasons that make workplace hierarchy tolerable despite being unjustified, and, moreover, that under a predominantly hierarchical status quo, the practical import of egalitarian (...)
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  • Sharing Burdensome Work.Jan Kandiyali - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):143-163.
    I defend the proposal that certain forms of work—specifically forms that are socially necessary but involve the imposition of considerable burdens—be shared between citizens. I argue that sharing burdensome work would achieve several goals, including a more equal distribution of the benefits and burdens of work, a greater appreciation of each other's labour contributions, and an amelioration of problematic inequalities of status. I conclude by considering three objections: that sharing burdensome work would (1) involve morally unacceptable constraints on freedom, (2) (...)
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  • The ILO's Decent Work Initiative: Suggestions for an Extension of the Notion of “Decent Work”.Jean-Philippe Deranty & Craig MacMillan - 2012 - Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (4):386-405.
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  • Business ethics: An overview.Jeffrey Moriarty - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (5):956-972.
    This essay provides an overview of business ethics. I describe important issues, identify some of the normative considerations animating them, and offer a roadmap of references for those wishing to learn more. I focus on issues in normative business ethics, but discuss briefly the growing body of work in descriptive business ethics. I conclude with a comment on the changing nature of the field.
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  • The goods (and bads) of self‐employment.Jahel Queralt - 2023 - Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (3):271-293.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • The Normativity of Work: Lockean and Marxist Overlapping Consensus on Just Work.Chi Kwok - 2020 - Journal of Human Values 26 (3):228-237.
    Work is an integral part of modern society. However, the question of the normative conditions that distinguish just from unjust work has been under-investigated in political theory. This article, b...
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  • Corporate Institutions in a Weakened Welfare State: A Rawlsian Perspective.Sandrine Blanc & Ismael Al-Amoudi - 2013 - Business Ethics Quarterly 23 (4):497-525.
    ABSTRACT:This paper re-examines the import of Rawls’s theory of justice for private sector institutions in the face of the decline of the welfare state. The argument is based on a Rawlsian conception of justice as the establishment of a basic structure of society that guarantees a fair distribution of primary goods. We propose that the decline of the welfare state witnessed in Western countries over the past forty years prompts a reassessment of the boundaries of the basic structure in order (...)
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  • Technological Unemployment, Meaning in Life, Purpose of Business, and the Future of Stakeholders.Tae Wan Kim & Alan Scheller-Wolf - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 160 (2):319-337.
    We offer a precautionary account of why business managers should proactively rethink about what kinds of automation firms ought to implement, by exploring two challenges that automation will potentially pose. We engage the current debate concerning whether life without work opportunities will incur a meaning crisis, offering an argument in favor of the position that if technological unemployment occurs, the machine age may be a structurally limited condition for many without work opportunities to have or add meaning to their lives. (...)
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  • Labor human rights and human dignity.Pablo Gilabert - 2016 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 42 (2):171-199.
    The current legal and political practice of human rights invokes entitlements to freely chosen work, to decent working conditions, and to form and join labor unions. Despite the importance of these rights, they remain under-explored in the philosophical literature on human rights. This article offers a systematic and constructive discussion of them. First, it surveys the content and current relevance of the labor rights stated in the most important documents of the human rights practice. Second, it gives a moral defense (...)
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  • Meaningful Work: Connecting Business Ethics and Organization Studies.Christopher Michaelson, Michael G. Pratt, Adam M. Grant & Craig P. Dunn - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 121 (1):77-90.
    In the human quest for meaning, work occupies a central position. Most adults spend the majority of their waking hours at work, which often serves as a primary source of purpose, belongingness, and identity. In light of these benefits to employees and their organizations, organizational scholars are increasingly interested in understanding the factors that contribute to meaningful work, such as the design of jobs, interpersonal relationships, and organizational missions and cultures. In a separate line of inquiry, scholars of business ethics (...)
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  • The “black box” at work.Ifeoma Ajunwa - 2020 - Big Data and Society 7 (2).
    An oversized reliance on big data-driven algorithmic decision-making systems, coupled with a lack of critical inquiry regarding such systems, combine to create the paradoxical “black box” at work. The “black box” simultaneously demands a higher level of transparency from the worker in regard to data collection, while shrouding the decision-making in secrecy, making employer decisions even more opaque to the worker. To access employment, the worker is commanded to divulge highly personal information, and when hired, must submit further still to (...)
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  • Democratic Patterns of Interaction as a Norm for the Workplace.Roberto Frega - 2019 - Journal of Social Philosophy 51 (1):27-53.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Corporate Social Responsibility and the Priority of Shareholders.Nien-hê Hsieh - 2009 - Journal of Business Ethics 88 (S4):553-560.
    In a series of articles, Thomas Dunfee defended the view that managers are permitted and at times, required, to utilize corporate resources to alleviate human misery even if this is at the expense of shareholder interests. In this article, I summarize Dunfee's defense of this view, raise some questions about his account and propose ways in which to answer these questions. The aim of this article is to highlight one of Dunfee's contributions to the debate about corporate governance and corporate (...)
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  • Where Democracy Should Be: On the Site(s) of the All-Subjected Principle.Andreas Bengtson - 2021 - Res Publica 28 (1):69-84.
    In this paper, I set out to defend the claim that a central principle in democratic theory, the all-subjected principle, applies not only when one is subject to a rule by a state but also when one is subject to a rule by a ‘non-state’ unit. I argue that self-government is the value underlying the all-subjected principle that explains why a subjected individual should be included because she is subjected. Given this, it is unfounded to limit the principle to the (...)
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  • Promoting High Quality Work: Obstacles and Opportunities. [REVIEW]David A. Spencer - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 114 (3):583-597.
    This article addresses competing arguments from ethics as well as economics about the obstacles and opportunities for promoting high quality work (i.e. work that sustains and enhances well-being). It ultimately defends on ethical as well as economic grounds the case for maximising the number and equalising the distribution of high quality work opportunities and outlines some policy measures that might be used to achieve the latter objective. The article contributes to the business ethics literature principally by offering a systematic and (...)
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  • Self-Respect or Self-Delusion? Tomasi and Rawls on the Basic Liberties.Richard Penny - 2015 - Res Publica 21 (4):397-411.
    A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two (...)
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  • Meaningful Work, Worthwhile Life, and Self-Respect: Reexamination of the Rawlsian Perspective on Basic Income in a Property-Owning Democracy.Satoshi Fukuma - 2017 - Basic Income Studies 12 (1).
    As is well known, John Rawls opposes the idea and policy of basic income. However, this paper posits that his view of self-respect and activity could accommodate its implementation. Rawls lists the social basis of self-respect in social primary goods as the most important good, but does not assume that it is derived from wage labor alone. It appears that his theory of justice aims to criticize the work-centered (wage-labor) society and to overcome it. Besides, as Rawls desires, for our (...)
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  • Are Rawlsian Considerations of Corporate Governance Illiberal? A Reply to Singer.Sandrine Blanc - 2016 - Business Ethics Quarterly 26 (3):407-421.
    ABSTRACT:Singer has recently argued that questions related to corporate governance are beyond the reach of Rawls’s political conception of justice. This is because justice applies to the basic structure of society, understood as society’s legally coercive structures, and because corporate governance cannot be considered part of this structure in political liberalism. This commentary challenges the second part of the argument. First, it suggests that the criterion used to exclude corporate governance from the basic structure—whether employees can exit economic organizations—is not (...)
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