In this chapter I seek to provide a theoretical defense of workplace democracy that is independent from and outside the lineage of Marxist and communist theory. Common to the council movements, anarcho- syndicalism and many other forms of libertarian socialism was the idea “that workers’ self- management was central.” Yet the idea of workers’ control has not been subject to the same theoretical development as Marx’s theory, not to mention capitalist economic theory. This chapter aims to contribute at (...) a theoretical level by providing a justification and defense of self- managed workplaces that is independent of the particular historical tradition of the council movements. There is a clear and definitive case for workplace democracy based on first principles that descends to modern times through the Reformation and Enlightenment in the abolitionist, democratic and feminist movements. By the twentieth century, the arguments had been scattered and lost – like the bones of some ancient beast scattered in a desert – partly due to misconceptions, mental blocks and misinterpretations embodied in Marxism, liberalism and economic theory. When one has worked through some of these intellectual roadblocks, then one may be better able to reassemble the case for workplace democracy from well- known first principles developed in the abolitionist, democratic and feminist movements. (shrink)

In the 1990s, a debate raged across the whole postsocialist world as well as in Western development agencies such as the World Bank about the best approach to the transition from various forms of socialism or communism to a market economy and political democracy. One of the most hotly contested topics was the question of the workplace being organized based on workplace democracy (e.g., various forms of worker ownership) or based on the conventional employer-employee relationship. Well (...) before 1989, many of the socialist countries had started experimenting with various forms of "self-management" operating in more of a market setting, Yugoslavia being the most developed example. Thus one "path to the market" would .. (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)

Workplace democracy is often advocated on two intertwined views. The first is that the authority relation of employee to firm is akin to that of subject to state, such that reasons favoring democracy in the state may likewise apply to the firm. The second is that, when democratic controls are absent in the workplace, employees are liable to objectionable forms of subordination by their bosses, who may then issue arbitrary directives on matters ranging from pay to (...) the allocation of overtime and to relocation and promotion. Daniel Jacob and Christian Neuhäuser have recently submitted these views to careful criticism. They argue that the parallel between firms and states is unwarranted. For, unlike managerial authority, state authority is final. The state grants firms their legal status and subjects their authority to its regulations, which citizens in democracies already control. And they also argue that suitable workplace regulation alongside meaningful exit options may suffice to prevent, with no need for democratization, objectionable forms of workplace subjection. Neither view offers, they resolve, compelling reasons to believe that justice requires that firms be democratic. I here inspect these criticisms in turn, and offer reasons for skepticism. (shrink)

Dewey's instrumentalist approach to problem-solving stressed social organization; and under this umbrella he included unionization. First part of this article: his active involvement in and support for the union movement summarized. Second part: his theoretical defense of unions is addressed, especially as to "democratic liberalism" and its implementation in the fabric of society. Third part: a brief account of the current status of unions in universities.

The republican case for workplace democracy is presented and defended from two alternative means of ensuring freedom from arbitrary interference in the firm—namely, the right to freely exit the firm and workplace regulation. This paper shows, respectively, that costless exit is neither possible nor desirable in either perfect or imperfect labor markets, and that managerial discretion is both desirable and inevitable due to the incompleteness of employment contracts and labor legislation. The paper then shows that WD is (...) necessary, from a republican standpoint, if workers’ interests are to be adequately tracked in the exercise of managerial authority. Three important objections are finally addressed— that WD is redundant, that it is unnecessary provided that litigation and unionism can produce similar outcomes, and that it falls short of ensuring republican freedom compared to self-employment. (shrink)

In the 1990s , a debate raged across the whole postsocialist world as well as in Western development agencies such as the World Bank about the best approach to the transition from various forms of socialism or communism to a market economy and political democracy. One of the most hotly contested topics was the question of the workplace being organized based on workplace democracy (e.g., various forms of worker ownership) or based on the conventional employer-employee relationship. (...) Well before 1989, many of the socialist countries had started experimenting with various forms of "self-management" operating in more of a market setting, Yugoslavia being the most developed example. Thus one "path to the market" would have been to push those experiments all the way to some Western form of employee ownership or worker cooperatives operating in a full market environment. Alternatively, all these decentralizing experiments could be condemned as "vestiges of communism" to be eradicated by renationalizing all the decentralized firms and then privatizing by some alternative means. (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)

Are workers dominated? A recent suite of neo-republican and relational egalitarian philosophers think they are. Suppose they are right; that is, suppose that some workers are governed by an unjust and arbitrary power existing in labour relations, which persists even in the presence of the actual ability to exit. My question is this: does that give us reason to impose restrictions on firms? According to the so-called Efficiency Objection there are relevant trade-offs that need to be considered between the efficiency (...) of firms and the freedom of workers, and upon considering these trade-offs, we should reject workplace democracy. In this paper, I present a dilemma for the Efficiency Objection. I argue that either the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds or non-moral grounds; if the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds, then it fails because efficiency cannot be valued for its own sake (it is only instrumentally good); if the Efficiency Objection is justified on non-moral grounds, then it fails because of the respect that we owe to persons as persons; therefore, the Efficiency Objection fails. (shrink)

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 have a say over the governance of the firm. Second, the structure of the argument is unfolded. Third, two salient similarities between firms and states regarding their internal and external effects and the standing of their members are addressed in order to asses the potential and limits of the argument, as well as three relevant differences regarding the voluntariness of their membership, the narrowness of their goals, and the stiffness of the competition they face. After considering these similarities and differences, the paper contends that the the parallel-case argument provides a sound reason in favor of democracy in the workplace—a reason, however, that needs to be importantly qualified and that is only pro tanto. (shrink)

This paper addresses ways of arguing fors ome form of economic democracy from within a broadly Rawlsian framework. Firstly, one can argue that a right to participate in economic decision-making should be added to the Rawlsian list of basic liberties, protected by the first principle of justice. Secondly,I argue that a society which institutes forms of economic democracy will be more likely to preserve a stable and just basic structure over time, by virtue of the effects of economic (...) democratization on the development of an active, democratic character among citizens. Thirdly, I argue that a proper understanding of the demands of the difference principle shows that justice demands more than ex post redistribution, but also requires the ex ante redistribution of power and authority in economic life. This connects to Rawls’s discussion of the badness of inequality, and to his endorsement of a “property-owning democracy”. -/- My conclusion is that, even if we may doubt the success of this first Rawlsian argument,the second and third arguments are both successful, and together establish a strong Rawlsian case forseeing economic democratization as a requirement of justice. (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 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 this book was first published in 1990, there were massive economic changes in the East and significant economic challenges to the West. This critical analysis of democratic theory discusses the principles and forces that push both socialist and capitalist economies toward a common ground of workplace democratization. This book is a comprehensive approach to the theory and practice of the "Democratic firm" – from philosophical first principles to legal theory and finally to some of the details of financial (...) structure. The argument for economic democracy supports private property, free markets and entrepreneurship for instance, but fundamentally it replaces the employer/employee relationship with democratic membership in the firm. For students, teachers, policy makers and others interested in the application of democracy to the workplace, this book will serve as a manifesto and a standard reference on the topic. (shrink)

Socialist republicans advocate public ownership and control of the means of production in order to achieve the republican goal of a society without endemic domination. While civic republicanism is often attacked for its conservatism, the relatively neglected radical history of the tradition shows how a republican form of socialism provides powerful conceptual resources to critique capitalism for leaving workers and citizens dominated. This analysis supports a programme of public ownership and economic democracy intended to reduce domination in the (...) class='Hi'>workplace and wider society. I defend this socialist republicanism from both the Marxist objection that it overlooks the impersonal nature of domination under capitalism and the left-liberal objections that property-owning democracy or worker codetermination are sufficient to suppress dominating relationships. The resulting position identifies the need for more ambitious institutional grounds for republican liberty than is often supposed, while offering us a distinctive emancipatory justification for socialism. (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)

The paper focuses on the “spillover thesis” which constitutes a pillar of much of contemporary participatory democratic theory; specifically, we assess the claim that workplace democratization leads to a higher degree of political participation amongst labourers. The paper analyses the thesis as formulated by Carole Pateman, including its later revisions triggered by ambiguous results of empirical studies aiming to (dis)prove it. The spillover thesis is then confronted with important methodological and theoretical critiques, the upshot being that in order to (...) be able to arrive at determinate conclusions, more carefully designed empirical studies are needed. Normatively speaking, however, blame can always be laid on the wider environment of market economy and/or representative democracy, to the effect that the spillover thesis is both difficult to disprove and radically subversive. Given the recent dominance of deliberative democratic theory which incorporates a strong participatory element, we finally discuss whether a recent innovation – namely, the concept of deliberative systems – could be fruitfully employed as a flexible umbrella-type framework for the spillover thesis and the participatory ideals related to it. (shrink)

Liberal thought (in the sense of classical liberalism) is based on the juxtaposition of consent to coercion. Autocracy and slavery were seen as based on coercion whereas today's political democracy and economic 'employment system' are based on consent to voluntary contracts. This paper retrieves an almost forgotten dark side of contractarian thought that based autocracy and slavery on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts. To answer these 'best case' arguments for slavery and autocracy, the democratic and abolitionist movements forged arguments (...) not simply in favour of consent, but arguments that voluntary contracts to legally alienate aspects of personhood were invalid 'even with consent' – which made the underlying rights inherently inalienable. Once understood, those arguments have the perhaps 'unintended consequence' of making the neo-abolitionist case for ruling out today's self-rental contract, the employer-employee contract. The paper has to also retrieve these inalienable rights arguments since they have been largely lost on the Left, not to mention in liberal thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that two orthodox views of meaningful work—the subjective view and the autonomy view—are deficient. In their place is proposed the contributive view of meaningful work, which is constituted by work that is both complex and involves persons in its contributive aspect. These conditions are necessary due to the way work is inherently tied up with the idea of social contribution and the interdependencies between persons. This gives such features of the contributive view a distinct basis from those (...) found in existent accounts of meaningful work. (shrink)

I develop a socialist republican conception of economic liberty and show how it can be used to understand the domination of workers. It holds that both paid and unpaid workers can be deprived of economic freedom when they are exposed to an arbitrary power to undermine their access to the economic capabilities needed for civic equality. Measures intended to reduce domination are recommended, including public ownership of productive property, workplace democracy, and robust unconditional basic income and services. Finally, (...) I discuss the implications of this approach for platform capitalism, digital surveillance, the rise of automation, and post-work politics. (shrink)

Political theorists have recently sought to replace the liberal, contractual theory of the firm with a political view that models the authority relation of employee to firm, and its appropriate regulation, on that of subject to state. This view is liable to serious difficulties, however, given existing discontinuities between corporate and civil authority as to their coerciveness, entry and exit conditions, scope, legal standing, and efficiency constraints. I here inspect these, and argue that, albeit in some cases significant, such discontinuities (...) fail to undermine the firm/state analogy, either because they are not significant enough to do so or because the particular trait on which they hinge is not decisive for how authority, in the state and in the firm, should be regulated to be legitimate. A pro tanto requirement exists, I thus argue, that corporate authority be held to regulatory norms comparable to those legitimate states abide by, including civil liberties, rule-of-law constraints, and accountability to subjects. (shrink)

The wide presence of the right to work in national and international legal texts contrasts with a lack of agreement about the concrete content of this right. According to the hegemonic interpretation, it consists of two elements: extension of wage labour and significant improvement of working conditions. However, if we study the history of right to work claims, especially from the French Revolution to 1848, we can notice that the meaning of this right was rather wider in the past. Rescuing (...) the historical significance of the right to work may help to face the problem of the future of work. In particular, and unlike what might seem at first sight, the claim that everyone should have his or her right to work guaranteed can be a way of articulating and concretizing issues such as workplace democracy, the organization of domestic work or the transition to a sustainable society. (shrink)

In her recent book Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson makes a powerful but pragmatic case against the abuses experienced by employees in conventional corporations. The purpose of this review-essay is to contrast Anderson’s pragmatic critique of many abuses in the employment relation with a principled critique of the employment relationship itself. This principled critique is based on the theory of inalienable rights that descends from the Reformation doctrine of the inalienability of conscience down through the Enlightenment in the abolitionist, democratic, and (...) feminist movements. That theory was the basis for the abolition of the voluntary slavery or self-sale contract, the voluntary non-democratic constitution (pactum subjectionis), and the voluntary coverture marriage contract in today’s democratic countries. When understood in modern terms, that same theory applies as well against the voluntary self-rental or employment contract that is the basis for our current economic system. (shrink)

Corporations are increasingly asked to specify a ‘purpose.’ Instead of focusing on profits, a company should adopt a substantive purpose for the good of society. This chapter analyses, historicises, and radicalises this call for purpose. It schematises the history of the corporation into two main purpose/power regimes, each combining a way of thinking about corporate purpose with specific institutions to hold corporate power to account. Under the special charter regime of the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, governments chartered companies to pursue (...) specific public purposes. Under criticism for corruption and lack of competition, the special charter regime gave way to the contemporary general incorporation regime, under which no particular purposes are demanded of corporations, and profit-seeking has become the norm. This regime has now come under criticism, with calls for a new social purpose regime. The analysis of these three regimes focuses on politicisation. The chapter argues that orienting companies to substantive social purposes requires politicising the business corporation, creating meaningful accountability mechanisms to align companies with the goals of the public. The purpose paradigm must overcome its political timorousness and be more institutionally radical. The difficulty is doing this without unacceptable corruption and inefficiency. A form of ‘proper politicisation’ is needed. At the end of the chapter, some directions for reform are discussed, which may deliver on that desideratum. (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)

In my 1990 work – Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice – I argued for four modifications of Rawls’s principles of social justice and rendered a modified version of his theory in four principles, the first of which is the Basic Rights Principle demanding the protection of people’s security and subsistence rights. In both his Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness Rawls explicitly refers to my version of his theory, clearly accepting three of my four proposed modifications but rejecting the fourth (...) ‐‐ the demand for social and economic democracy – on grounds that it automatically justifies socialism as opposed to capitalism. I argue, contrary to Rawls, that it is not true that this demand automatically picks socialism as the preferablesocioeconomic/political system and that a Social and Economic Democracy Principle demanding workplace and neighborhood democracy is officially neutral between these two systems … although plausible empirical assumptions may, indeed, favor the former. I then significantly elaborate my second version of Rawls’s theory of social justice which is composed of the following principles arranged in a very strong order of priority : Basic Rights Principle, Equal Basic Liberties Principle, Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle, Modified Difference Principle, and Social and Economic DemocracyPrinciple. I argue that this elaborated version of the theory – which I call “Justice as Fair Rights” – is better than either Rawls’s original theory or my previous versions of it. (shrink)

In the contemporary context of business and management, the leadership studies are considered as one of essential genre to allow sight of the holistic picture of the organizational performance. The general theory of leadership studies has given us a scope of elements involving the nature of leadership, and a body of research work contributed to elicit and deal with the factors significant to determine the effect of leadership, e.g, LMX (Leader and manager exchange).The participatory leadership and diversity or democracy (...) in the workplace has been a key concept for the organizational theorists and practitioners. There are a scope of case studies about the leadership and organizational change, yet being relatively small in number, however, concerning the higher educational institutions, and least in the context of Korean universities. We see that Korea would no longer be a developing country. Its national education is fine and of quality setting aside the national context of particularities. One would be the election system of University chancellors, and the other would be a recent pressure from the government. It triggers a rationalization of poor quality of colleges and universities. In this mainstream, the local universities and their leadership can be generally located to interact with the local compassion and requirements. The paper, in this context, aims to describe the leadership from a former CU Chancellor H. J. Cheon,organization change s well as the evaluation of his leadership. I hopefully expect that the narratives can increase an awareness of leadership elements, its play within the educational nstitutions, and particularly about the local universities of Korea in distinct flavor. (shrink)

From the school yard to the workplace, there’s no charge more damning than “you’re being unfair!” Born out of democracy and raised in open markets, fairness has become our de facto modern creed. The very symbol of American ethics—Lady Justice—wears a blindfold as she weighs the law on her impartial scale. In our zealous pursuit of fairness, we have banished our urges to like one person more than another, one thing over another, hiding them away as dirty secrets (...) of our humanity. In Against Fairness, polymath philosopher Stephen T. Asma drags them triumphantly back into the light. Through playful, witty, but always serious arguments and examples, he vindicates our unspoken and undeniable instinct to favor, making the case that we would all be better off if we showed our unfair tendencies a little more kindness—indeed, if we favored favoritism. Conscious of the egalitarian feathers his argument is sure to ruffle, Asma makes his point by synthesizing a startling array of scientific findings, historical philosophies, cultural practices, analytic arguments, and a variety of personal and literary narratives to give a remarkably nuanced and thorough understanding of how fairness and favoritism fit within our moral architecture. Examining everything from the survival-enhancing biochemistry that makes our mothers love us to the motivating properties of our “affective community,” he not only shows how we favor but the reasons we should. Drawing on thinkers from Confucius to Tocqueville to Nietzsche, he reveals how we have confused fairness with more noble traits, like compassion and open-mindedness. He dismantles a number of seemingly egalitarian pursuits, from classwide Valentine’s Day cards to civil rights, to reveal the envy that lies at their hearts, going on to prove that we can still be kind to strangers, have no prejudice, and fight for equal opportunity at the same time we reserve the best of what we can offer for those dearest to us. Fed up with the blue-ribbons-for-all absurdity of "fairness" today, and wary of the psychological paralysis it creates, Asma resets our moral compass with favoritism as its lodestar, providing a strikingly new and remarkably positive way to think through all our actions, big and small. (shrink)

Scientific management introduced a novel way of organizing work and measuring productivity into the modern workplace. With a stopwatch and a clever method of analysis, Frederick Winslow Taylor is either acclaimed or reviled, depending on the audience, for giving industrial/organizational consultancy a groundbreaking tool: the efficiency study. What is less well known is that the American pragmatist John Dewey criticized scientific management for its dualistic assumptions, for treating workers as pure doers or “muscle” and management as pure thinkers or (...) “brains” in an efficient, though inhumane, work process. The first section of this paper examines the similarities and differences between Dewey’s and Taylor’s respective conceptions of science and management. In the second section, I consider Dewey’s critique of scientific management in his book Democracy and Education. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the implications of Dewey’s critique of Taylorism for organizational theory and industrial relations today. (shrink)

Table of Contents Foreword .................................................................................................... ......................................... xiv Preface .................................................................................................... .............................................. xv Acknowledgment .................................................................................................... .......................... xxiii Section 1 On the Cusp: Critical Appraisals of a Growing Dependency on Intelligent Machines Chapter 1 Algorithms versus Hive Minds and the Fate of Democracy ................................................................... 1 Rick Searle, IEET, USA Chapter 2 We Can Make Anything: Should We? .................................................................................................. 15 Chris Bateman, University of Bolton, UK Chapter 3 Grounding Machine Ethics within the Natural System ........................................................................ 30 Jared Gassen, JMG Advising, USA Nak Young Seong, Independent Scholar, (...) South Korea Section 2 From the Outside In: Intelligent Machine Technologies as a Window on Human Morality both as Evolved and as Evident in Internet Discourse, Today Chapter 4 The Emergence of Arti cial Autonomy: A View from the Foothills of a Challenging Climb ............. 51 Fernando da Costa Cardoso, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Luís Moniz Pereira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Chapter 5 Semantic Analysis of Bloggers Experiences as a Knowledge Source of Average Human Morality .... 73 Rafal Rzepka, Hokkaido University, Japan Kenji Araki, Hokkaido University, Japan Section 3 From the Inside Out: The Ethics of Human Enhancement from Moral Perception to Competition in the Workplace Chapter 6 Machine Ethics Interfaces: An Ethics of Perception of Nanocognition ............................................... 97 Melanie Swan, Kingston University, UK Chapter 7 Ethical Concerns in Human Enhancement: Advantages in Corporate/Organizational Settings ......... 124 Ben Tran, Alliant International University, USA Section 4 From Far to Near and Near to Far: The Ethics of Distancing Technologies in Education and Warfare Chapter 8 Responsibility and War Machines: Toward a Forward-Looking and Functional Account ................. 152 Jai Galliott, Macquarie University, Australia Chapter 9 Ethical Responsibilities of Preserving Academicians in an Age of Mechanized Learning: Balancing the Demands of Educating at Capacity and Preserving Human Interactivity ................... 166 James E. Willis III, Indiana University, USA Viktoria Alane Strunk, Independent Scholar, USA Section 5 Wrapping Things Up, then Unwrapping Them Again: Integral Visions of Morality in a Technological World, Over Evolutionary Time, with Revolutionary Means, and with Open Questions about the Final Purpose of It All Chapter 10 Bridging Two Realms of Machine Ethics ........................................................................................... 197 Luís Moniz Pereira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Ari Saptawijaya, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal & Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia Chapter 11 Robots in Warfare and the Occultation of the Existential Nature of Violence ................................... 225 Rick Searle, IEET, USA Chapter 12 Self-Referential Complex Systems and Aristotle’s Four Causes ........................................................ 239 Aleksandar Malecic, University of Nis, Serbia Related References .................................................................................................... ........................ 261 Compilation of References .................................................................................................... ........... 292 About the Contributors .................................................................................................... ................ 325 Index .................................................................................................... ............................................... 329 . (shrink)

Once again the decision and court opinion are an element within the general understanding of law at least in the common law countries. A lawyerly way has implications in shaping the pattern of public administration, but in differing extent of public attraction or normative impact. -/- First, while the Constitution of United States had brought a popular democracy and Constitution-based structure of government, the Ancient Regime had been overhauled in new land. The “nobility” as a basis of government was (...) dispelled, and people arose as a main class or pillar of nation. As we take a precept of chaotic years from the Articles of Confederation thorough the Constitution, the earlier ambition was mixed between the diplomatic unity and one strong national government. This context implicates much over the centuries and can also be illustrated with a residue of classic and present practice of international politics. The characteristics as temporal for the years would more properly be sensible with the kinds of description, for example, “atmosphere of war, interstate comity or discredit, chaos from the heterogeneous regional power and social incongruence nationally.” A threat from the mainland Europe had been constant at considerable period of time upon the independence. For the nation, it is more urgent to make it clear who will decide the will of nation, how to effectively consolidate the function of government, or how to manage the least of nation with the subjects than active interaction with the people, although the people are one distinct element of new Constitution and ideologically pronounced in the preamble of Constitution. This generally led to recognition that the role of Constitution and Supreme Court were minimal in terms of public policy making and that their policy contained in the opinion often is sheer of internal issues among the public power other than those of people. The kind of Kantian ambition for the universal justice on liberty and equality, hence, should wait for more prosperous time afterwards that people tend to be conscious of their basic rights or public good from the arbitrary rule of majority, given our concocted recognition from the kind of public policy ideals from Bentham, “the greatest happiness of greatest number,” and “revolutionary spirit on people.” It perhaps would not be irrelevant, in understanding of the impact of judicial rulings on public policy, that the US is other than unitary system of government. Oftentimes the kind of rulings on criminalization of adultery or right to privacy would surprise the people, but the kind of oxymoron or public debate, as likely persistent over the decades and diverse reaction, would normally not be present in the jurisdictions of unitary system. The people of such jurisdictions would be more than receptive, and be readily marshaled to adapt with the public guidelines elucidated by the court ruling. We also chat on the multiculturalism in the society and workplace. Given the judicial activism, the Supreme Court justices might be clairvoyant, who would be equipped with goodwill, wisdom and almighty intelligence to assuage an untreatable scope of interests and state specificities. Foreign lawyers would find such ample source of laws in surprise, who might envy a wide coverage of judicial interests. They perhaps would take the US context as the kind of insightful classroom and learn the lessons from their case laws. (shrink)

What, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? While a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics (Meyer 2002; Mills 1957; Postman 1987) none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. This paper will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to (...) democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. We will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. This is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. We will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems. (shrink)

This essay offers a Duboisian defense of democracy’s expressive and experimental values. It argues that the expressive value of democracy supports an ideal of inclusion, whereas the experimental value of democracy supports that of innovation. One appeals to the ideal of inclusion to extend to excluded groups codified constitutional protections and to condemn white hypocrisy. The ideal of innovation, in contrast, helps one reimagine what constitutional protections should be in the first place. Drawing on Du Bois’s writings, (...) this essay argues that the civic activities of black American counter-publics exhibited both experimental and expressive democratic values. In particular, it highlights the innovations of black women civic leaders who reimagined care work under a public conception of the common good. It concludes that counter-publics shape the asymmetric moral insight of its participants, namely, the oppressed. (shrink)

Most businesses are aware of the costs associated with sexual harassment and are concerned about limiting its presence in the workplace. Although the business ethics literature contains work on sexual harassment, it has very little to say on chastity or its value in the workplace, even though unchaste behavior underlies the prevalence of sexual harassment. This article begins this investigation into chastity worth having in the workplace, taking typical company policies as a guide for what kind of (...) chastity is worth having in the workplace in particular. The first question asked in this article is: for what reasons is chastity worth having in the workplace? I consider four answers—harm prevention, respect for employee consent/dissent, respect for others’ dignity, and conflict of interest avoidance—and I examine workplace policies that enforce chaste behavior in search for a unified and underlying reason for these policies. In the process of locating the primary reason for the value of being chaste in the workplace in particular, we will be given tools to develop an account of chastity worth having in the workplace, which I will argue is primarily cognitive, rather than volitional or affective. I conclude that chastity is the disposition not to construe a coworker as a satisfier of one’s sexual interest, and I argue that chastity is valuable in the workplace because it secures coworkers’ ability to have their contributions appropriately valued. The hope is that once the reason and locus of chastity is identified, the professionals who know how to train businesspeople in developing virtues will better be able to focus their attention and efforts. (shrink)

Is democracy a requirement of justice or an instrument for realizing it? The correct answer to this question, I argue, depends on the background circumstances against which democracy is defended. In the presence of thin reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value democracy only instrumentally (if at all); in the presence of thick reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value it also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since the latter type of disagreement is pervasive in (...) real-world politics, I conclude that theories of justice designed for our world should be centrally concerned with democracy. (shrink)

Democracy is widely praised as a great achievement of humanity. However, in recent years there has been an increasing amount of concern that its functioning across the world may be eroding. In response, efforts to combat such change are emerging. Considering the pervasiveness of technology and its increasing capabilities, it is no surprise that there has been much focus on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to this end. Questions as to how AI can be best utilized to extend (...) the reach of democracy to currently non-democratic countries, how the involvement in the democratic process of certain demographic groups (e.g. ethnic minorities, women, and young people) can be increased, etc. are frequent topics of discussion. In this article I would like not merely to question whether this is desirable but rather argue that we should be trying to envisage ways of using AI for the exact opposite purpose: that of replacing democratic systems with better alternatives. (shrink)

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises – voter independence – is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, ‘large crowds are fallible but better than small groups’. This theorem rehabilitates the importance of (...) deliberation and education, which appear inessential in the classical jury framework. Our theorem is related to Ladha's (1993) seminal jury theorem for interchangeable (‘indistinguishable’) voters based on de Finetti's Theorem. We also prove a more general and simpler such jury theorem. (shrink)

Democracy is the central political issue of our age, yet debates over its nature and goals rarely engage with feminist concerns. Now that women have the right to vote, they are thought to present no special problems of their own. But despite the seemingly gender-neutral categories of individual or citizen, democratic theory and practice continues to privilege the male. This book reconsiders dominant strands in democratic thinking - focusing on liberal democracy, participatory democracy, and twentieth century versions (...) of civic republicanism - and approaches these from a feminist perspective. Anne Phillips explores the under-representation of women in politics, the crucial relationship between public and private spheres, and the lessons of the contemporary women's movement as an experience in participatory democracy. (shrink)

This paper generalises the classical Condorcet jury theorem from majority voting over two options to plurality voting over multiple options. The paper further discusses the debate between epistemic and procedural democracy and situates its formal results in that debate. The paper finally compares a number of different social choice procedures for many-option choices in terms of their epistemic merits. An appendix explores the implications of some of the present mathematical results for the question of how probable majority cycles (as (...) in Condorcet's paradox) are in large electorates. (shrink)

Plato’s references to Empedocles in the myth of the Statesman perform a crucial role in the overarching political argument of the dialogue. Empedocles conceives of the cosmos as structured like a democracy, where the constituent powers ‘rule in turn’, sharing the offices of rulership equally via a cyclical exchange of power. In a complex act of philosophical appropriation, Plato takes up Empedocles’ cosmic cycles of rule in order to ‘correct’ them: instead of a democracy in which rule is (...) shared cyclically amongst equal constituents, Plato’s cosmos undergoes cycles of the presence and absence of a single cosmic monarch who possesses ‘kingly epistēmē’. By means of a revision of Empedocles’ democratic cosmology, Plato’s richly woven myth is designed precisely to reject the appropriateness of democracy as a form of human political association and legitimate monarchy in its stead. (shrink)

Great Britain subjugated colonists using various power strategies, including dehumanization, misinformation, fear, and other divisive strategies. The Founders described these oppressive strategies as “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” Throughout the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers imbued the people with hope in a government for the people: one unlike that of the monarchy, which sought to protect itself at the expense of colonists. As a result, the Founders created a government more likely to lead (...) with fairness, demonstrate respect for human dignity, unite Americans as one people, empower citizens through hope, and lead the nation toward security. This socio-ethical framework was an abductive discovery nested within a grounded theory study where it had been concluded that the first principles of democracy were woven within the American founding documents. Using Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory, the first principles of democracy—knowledge, fairness, human dignity, hope, unity, and security—were used to answer an emerging research question: Are there two democratic frameworks in the founding documents, and how do they differ? The first principles of democracy promote a culture of ethics, resilience, and freedom. Their empowering disposition makes them suitable as a normative framework for a democratic government for the people. (shrink)

Abstract Democracy is a fundamental right linked to the realization of a person’s worthy life project regarding its corresponding fulfillment of Human Rights. Along with the procedures to form political majorities, it is mandatory to incorporate the substantial part as a means and end for the normative content of Human Dignity to be carried out allowing it to: i) freely choose a project of valued life with purpose and autonomy ii) to have material and intangible means to function in (...) society; and iii) to live free from harm and fear in order to achieve human flourishing. The integral democracy is a means and an end to materialize individual happiness and the common good as long as everyone has concrete opportunities to unfold its inherent human dignity capacities within the trademark of the democratic constitutional State. Assuming this, integral democracy is the fundamental right of Fundamental Rights. (shrink)

The study investigated university workers’ perception of the verbal and non-verbal communication variables that are important to workplace peace. Three research questions were posed. Questionnaires were used for data collection. The analysis was done using simple percentages. The results showed that for verbal communication, participants considered a rich vocabulary and good diction as very important to workplace peace. For non-verbal communication, politeness and words of endearment were rated most important to workplace peace.

The object of this paper is to present and discuss the way democracy is conceived of by some prominent Islamic thinkers. Their position is that democracy, rightly understood, is simply a method of dispensing, sharing, and managing political authority, and as such does not imply secularism or other values and practices that are associated with liberalism. This paper is conceived of within a broader project to theorize the relations (actual and possible) between Islam, democracy, and modernity.

The Ideal of Deliberative Democracy The Discursive Dilemma The Relevance of the Dilemma for Deliberative Democracy The Resolution in Republican Theory This Resolution and Other Arguments for the Ideal Notes.

Democracy is one of the virtues we ache for, as many now observe an undemocratic society as a savage society. Richard L. Sklar built up a hypothesis called developmental democracy in which he opines that democracy will essentially prompts the improvement of African people and states. For the most part, there has been contention whether development precedes democracy or rather democracy helps development, which is very much unclear. Regardless of the answer, since the prodemocracy charges (...) hit Africa since 1990s, democracy has not made substantial strides. There have still been huge issues of underdevelopment, corruption and mal-administration. Many have started scrutinizing the possibility of democracy been ideal for Africa. The purpose of this paper is to audit the possibility of developmental democracy within African context. This paper presents that democracy is not ideal for Africa, it likewise guarantees that, if democracy is really what it is said to be, there would not have been any requirement for polarization, for instance, developmental, liberal, social democracies and so on. This is because any democracy will essentially include all. It is on this background that the paper attempts to criticize Richard’s Sklar’s idea of developmental democracy. (shrink)