THE PAPER DEFINES AND DEFENDS A PRINCIPLE OF COLLECTIVE SELF-DETERMINATION AS ONE OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ORDERING OF A JUST SOCIETY. THAT PRINCIPLE SPECIFIES THAT INDIVIDUALS PARTICIPATE EQUALLY IN THE MAKING OF DECISIONS WHICH WILL GOVERN THEIR ACTIONS WITHIN INSTITUTIONS OF SPECIAL COOPERATION. THE PAPER ADOPTS THE STRATEGY OF ARGUING TO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE BY ASKING WHAT PRINCIPLES WOULD BE CHOSEN IN RAWLS' ORIGINAL POSITION. IT ARGUES THAT, CONTRARY TO THE THRUST IMPLICIT IN RAWLS AND OTHER LIBERAL THINKERS, PERSONS (...) IN THE ORIGINAL POSITION WOULD HAVE NO BASIS FOR DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN POLITICAL AND NON-POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIAL COOPERATION, AND THUS WOULD CHOOSE THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-DETERMINATION DIRECTLY AS APPLYING TO ALL INSTITUTIONS AND ACTIVITIES OF SOCIAL COOPERATION. (shrink)

In this book R. G. Peffer tackles the challenges of finding in Marx's work an implicit moral theory, of answering claims that Marxism is incompatible with morality, and of developing the outlines of an adequate Marxist moral and social ...

Abstract:The central problems of political philosophy (e.g., legitimate authority, distributive justice) mirror the central problems of business ethics. The question naturally arises: should political theories be applied to problems in business ethics? If a version of egalitarianism is the correct theory of justice for states, for example, does it follow that it is the correct theory of justice for businesses? If states should be democratically governed by their citizens, should businesses be democratically managed by their employees? Most theorists who have (...) considered these questions, including John Rawls inPolitical Liberalism, and Robert Phillips and Joshua Margolis in a 1999 article, have said “no.” They claim that states and businesses are different kinds of entities, and hence require different theories of justice. I challenge this claim. While businesses differ from states, the difference is one of degree, not one of kind. Business ethics has much to learn from political philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract:The organization is importantly different from both the nation-state and the individual and hence needs its own ethical models and theories, distinct from political and moral theory. To develop a case for organizational ethics, this paper advances arguments in three directions. First, it highlights the growing role of organizations and their distinctive attributes. Second, it illuminates the incongruities between organizations and moral and political philosophy. Third, it takes these incongruities, as well as organizations’ distinctive attributes, as a starting point for (...) suggesting an agenda for an ethics of organizations. (shrink)

Abstract:Phillips and Margolis argue that moral philosophy is a poor basis for business ethics, but their narrow view of moral philosophy would exclude Aristotle, for one. They criticize me for assimilating states and organizations in using the Rawlsian device, but they put too much faith in Rawls’s distinction between states and voluntary organizations and pay too little attention to the continuities between them. Their plea for a conceptually autonomous ethics for organizations I interpret as reasonable and largely compatible with my (...) own stated opinion. (shrink)

There are two principal philosophical conceptions of socialism, corresponding to two interpretations of the notion of a rational society. The first conception corresponds to an instrumental view of social rationality. Captured by the image of socialism as “one big workshop,” the instrumental view holds that social ownership of the means of production is rational because it promotes the optimal development of the productive forces. Social ownership is optimal because it eliminates the costs of coordination imposed by the conduct of economic (...) activities in formally independent enterprises, and, more generally, overcomes fetters on development that result from the control of resources by individuals whose particular interests imperfectly correspond to a general interest in productive advance. (shrink)

This paper stands at the confluence of two streams in contemporary political thought. One stream is composed of those critics of liberal political philosophy who are often described collectively as ‘communitarians’. What unites these critics is a belief that contemporary liberalism rests on an impoverished and inadequate view of the human subject. Liberal political thought – as manifested, for instance, in the writings of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin – claims centrally to do justice to individuality: to specify (...) the conditions under which distinct individuals, each with his own view about how life should be lived, can pursue these visions to the best of their ability. But, the critics claim, liberalism is blind to the social origins of individuality itself. A person comes by his identity through participating in social practices and through his affiliation to collectivities like family and nation. An adequate political philosophy must attend to the conditions under which people can develop the capacity for autonomy that liberals value. This, however, means abandoning familiar preoccupations of liberal thought – especially the centrality it gives to individual rights – and looking instead at how social relationships of the desired kind can be created and preserved. It means, in short, looking at communities – their nature and preconditions. (shrink)

Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.

In arguments in support of capitalism, the following propositions are sometimes advanced or presupposed: the best life for the individual is one of consumption, understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense; consumption is to be valued because it promotes happiness or welfare, which is the ultimate good; since there are not enough opportunities for consumption to provide satiation for everybody, some principles of distributive justice must be (...) chosen to decide who gets what; the total to be distributed has first to be produced. What is produced depends, among other things, on the motivation and information of the producers. The theory of justice must take account of the fact that different principles of distribution have different effects on motivation and information; economic theory tells us that the motivational and informational consequences of private ownership of the means of production are superior to those of the various forms of collective ownerships. In the traditional controversy over the relative merits of capitalism and economic systems, the focus has been on proposition. In this paper, I consider instead propositions and. Before one can even begin to discuss how values are to be allocated, one must consider what they are – what it is that ought to be valued. I shall argue that at the center of Marxism is a specific conception of the good life as one of active self-realization, rather than passive consumption. (shrink)

In arguments in support of capitalism, the following propositions are sometimes advanced or presupposed: the best life for the individual is one of consumption, understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense; consumption is to be valued because it promotes happiness or welfare, which is the ultimate good; since there are not enough opportunities for consumption to provide satiation for everybody, some principles of distributive justice must be (...) chosen to decide who gets what; the total to be distributed has first to be produced. What is produced depends, among other things, on the motivation and information of the producers. The theory of justice must take account of the fact that different principles of distribution have different effects on motivation and information; economic theory tells us that the motivational and informational consequences of private ownership of the means of production are superior to those of the various forms of collective ownerships. In the traditional controversy over the relative merits of capitalism and economic systems, the focus has been on proposition. In this paper, I consider instead propositions and. Before one can even begin to discuss how values are to be allocated, one must consider what they are – what it is that ought to be valued. I shall argue that at the center of Marxism is a specific conception of the good life as one of active self-realization, rather than passive consumption. (shrink)

We consider two reasons why firms should be owned and run democratically by their workers. The first concerns accountability : Because the employment relationship involves the exercise of power, its governance should on democratic grounds be accountable to those most directly affected. The second concerns efficiency : The democratic firm uses a lower level of inputs per unit of output than the analogous capitalist firm.

In this paper I want to discuss a well-known but poorly understood problem: how can socialists reconcile the observed paucity of cooperatives in capitalist societies with their alleged superiority on normative grounds? If cooperatives are so desirable, why don't workers desire them? If one's ideal of socialism is central planning, it is clear enough that it cannot emerge gradually within the womb of the capitalist economy. If instead it is something like market socialism, it is not clear that a discontinuous (...) transformation of society is required. If workers want socialism, they can start up here and now. If they don't, doesn't it prove that they do not want it? I shall proceed as follows. Section I argues that the usual explanation - that cooperatives are not economically viable or that workers prefer working in capitalist firms – is not necessarily correct. The explanation may lie elsewhere, in endogenous preference formation, adverse selection, discrimination, or externalities. Section II is concerned with the variety of cooperative arrangements. Only rarely do we find cooperatives in their pure form, with all workers and only workers having equal ownership rights. Non-working owners, non-owning workers and unequal distribution of shares are frequent. When the deviations become sufficiently large, the firms cease to become cooperatives in any meaningful sense. Section III extends the argument of Section I by surveying the causes of cooperative failure. Some fail by success: profitable cooperatives often attract or turn into private ownership. Others fail outright, partly because they tend to be established under unfavorable circumstances and partly because of intrinsic difficulties of management. (shrink)

In this article I use Kantian moral philosophy to develop a concept of meaningful work. Specifically, a Kantian would argue that work is meaningful if (1) it is freely entered into, (2) it allows the worker to exercise her autonomy and independence, (3) it enables the worker to develop her rational capacities, (4) it provides a wage sufficient for physical welfare, (5) it supports the moral development of employees and (6) it is not paternalistic. I then provide examples of contemporary (...) management practices that provide meaningful work in this sense. (shrink)

We have long been accustomed to thinking of democracy as a major selling point of Western institutions. That a set of political institutions should be democratic is widely regarded as the sine qua non of their legitimacy. So widespread is this belief that even those whose institutions do not look very democratic to us nevertheless insist on proclaiming them to be such. Meanwhile, an adulatory attitude toward democracy has arisen in many quarters, and many theorists have taken up anew the (...) idea that if democracy is the way to go in political institutions, then it must also be the way to go in “other” areas, notably in economic and social institutions. So there has arisen a call for “economic democracy” — which is taken to mean, especially, that the “means of production” should be managed by their constituent workers in concert rather than by some few who own, or act for the owners of, those enterprises. Robert Dahl, in his influential Preface to Economic Democracy, sums it up nicely when he proclaims a “stronger justification” for worker participation: “ If democracy is justified in governing the state, then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises; and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state.”. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the flowering of a new literature on the economic nature of firms marked by a concern with their internal organization and contractual characteristics. Related literatures on the principal-agent problem and the theory of financial markets have also contributed to a better understanding of firms as economic institutions. However, the place of the concept of the ownership of the firm is poorly developed in most of this literature, with many writers either ignoring the concept entirely or arguing (...) that it is of no importance. The purpose of the present article is to point out that the concept of ownership of firms is crucial to an understanding of internal governance issues. Most economists implicitly presume that firms must be ownable and saleable if they are to be operated efficiently, and recently this viewpoint has been made more explicit by writers such as Jensen and Fama and Williamson. Their point of view is to some degree at odds with views of the firm as a coalition, which frequently appear in the same literature, and even more fundamentally in conflict with conceptions of the firm as an association or polity within which greater or lesser degrees of democracy in governance may be pursued. The first purpose of this article is to show that the incompletely articulated position of the leading authors on the economics of organization is that the firm is a commodity and must be so for purposes of efficiency. (shrink)

Tocqueville pessimistically predicted that liberty and equality would be incompatible ideas. Robert Dahl, author of the classic _A Preface to Democratic Theory,_ explores this alleged conflict, particularly in modern American society where differences in ownership and control of corporate enterprises create inequalities in resources among Americans that in turn generate inequality among them as citizens. Arguing that Americans have misconceived the relation between democracy, private property, and the economic order, the author contends that we can achieve a society of real (...) democracy and political equality without sacrificing liberty by extending democratic principles into the economic order. Although enterprise control by workers violates many conventional political and ideological assumptions of corporate capitalism as well as of state socialism. Dahl presents an empirically informed and philosophically acute defense of "workplace democracy." He argues, in the light of experiences here and abroad, that an economic system of worker-owned and worker-controlled enterprises could provide a much better foundation for democracy, political equality, and liberty than does our present system of corporate capitalism. (shrink)

Employee governance, which includes employee ownership and employee participation in decision making, is regarded by manyas morally preferable to control of corporations by shareholders. However, employee governance is rare in advanced market economies due to its relative inefficiency compared with shareholder governance. Given this inefficiency, should employee governance be given up as an impractical ideal? This article contends that the debate over this question is hampered by an inadequate conception of employee governance that fails to take into account the difference (...) between employees and shareholders. It offers a different, more adequate conception of employee governance that recognizes a sense in which employees currently have some ownership rights. The argument for this conception of employee governance is built on an expanded understanding of the ownership of a firm. The article also suggests new strategies for strengthening the role of employees in corporate governance. (shrink)