Elizabeth Anderson

This essay critically examines the thesis that social science is value–neutral–that is, that it neither presupposes nor supports any nonepistemic (social, political, moral) value judgments. I argue that the standard arguments for value-neutrality are contradictory. Their real concern is not that scientific theories might have evaluative content, but that they might be held dogmatically. I demonstrate, through a detailed examination of a case study of feminist research on divorce, how to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate (dogmatic) uses of value judgments in science, and more from less epistemically fruitful values. I also argue that there is empirical evidence for value judgments, which lies in our emotional experiences to things in the world.

Expressive accounts of practical reason, morality, and law are gaining increasing currency. At the most general level, expressive theories tell actors-whether individuals, associations, or the State-to act in ways that express appropriate attitudes toward various substantive values. In one well-known version, the State is required to express equal respect and concern toward citizens. Expressivists do not present this view as some radically new theory of morality and law. Instead, we claim that much of our existing practices of moral and legal evaluation are best understood through expressivist perspectives-but that the more perspicaciously we can grasp the expressive structure of action, the more we can improve our evaluative practices. Expressivism is thus an internal account of existing normative practices, but one with sufficient critical capacity to exert leverage over those practices and to indicate where they ought to be reformed. This Article provides a more comprehensive account than has previously appeared of the aims and features of such theories.

En este trabajo se plantea que la soberanía del consumidor descansa sobre un conjunto de confusiones conceptuales, de presupuestos empíricamente falsos y de afirmaciones normativamente dudosas. La sección 1 muestra cómo estas confusiones conceptuales enmascaran una ambigüedad fundamental en el principio de la soberanía del consumidor, entre la promoción del bienestar y la autonomía. Sostengo que los mejores argumentos a favor de la soberanía del consumidor favorecen la interpretación de la autonomía. La sección 2 muestra cómo la concepción individualista de la autonomía favorecida por los economistas no puede dar cuenta de los problemas de acción colectiva generados por la conformidad externa a las normas sociales. La sección 3 muestra cómo el intento de un economista por desarrollar una concepción de la autonomía adecuada a esta tarea nos lleva más allá del marco individualista de la economía neoclásica a una concepción colectiva de la autonomía. La sección 4 demuestra que el concepto de autonomía colectiva es coherente y que el proyecto institucional de los Estados democráticos puede ser considerado como un intento para lograrlo. La sección 5 plantea que cuando los individuos expresan preferencias autónomas diferentes en y para diferentes escenarios, el principio de la soberanía del consumidor es inherentemente ineficiente. La sección 6 sostiene que el principio dc soberanía del consumidor está en conflicto con la autonomía de los ciudadanos y, por lo tanto, no puede servir como una base coherente para guiar la política del Estado.

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.

El argumento de la subdeterminación establece que las personas de ciencia pueden utilizar valores políticos para orientar la investigación, pero no proporciona criterios para distinguir entre una orientación legítima y una ilegítima. Este artículo provee tales criterios. El análisis de los confusos argumentos contra la ciencia cargada de valores revela el criterio fundamental de la orientación ilegítima: cuando los juicios de valor operan orientando la investigación a una conclusión predeterminada. Un estudio de caso de la investigación feminista sobre el divorcio revela numerosas formas legítimas en que los valores pueden orientar a la ciencia sin vulnerar este criterio.

This book brings together a team of leading theorists to address the question 'What is the right measure of justice?' Some contributors, following Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, argue that we should focus on capabilities, or what people are able to do and to be. Others, following John Rawls, argue for focussing on social primary goods, the goods which society produces and which people can use. Still others see both views as incomplete and complementary to one another. Their essays evaluate the two approaches in the light of particular issues of social justice - education, health policy, disability, children, gender justice - and the volume concludes with an essay by Amartya Sen, who originated the capabilities approach.

Much contemporary egalitarian theorizing is broadly divided between luck egalitarians, such as G. A. Cohen, Richard Arneson, and John Roemer, and relational egalitarians, such as John Rawls, Samuel Scheffler, Josh Cohen, and me. The two camps disagree about how to conceive of equality: as an equal distribution of non-relational goods among individuals, or as a kind of social relation between persons - an equality of authority, status, or standing.This disagreement generates a second, about when unequal distributions of non-relational goods are unjust. Luck egalitarians claim that inequality is unjust when it is accidental: when it is caused by morally arbitrary factors such as circumstances of birth. Relational egalitarians claim that inequality is unjust when it disadvantages people: when it reflects, embodies, or causes inequality of authority, status, or standing.

This paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions through an assessment of three epistemic models of democracy: the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem, and Dewey's experimentalist model. Dewey's model is superior to the others in its ability to model the epistemic functions of three constitutive features of democracy: the epistemic diversity of participants, the interaction of voting with discussion, and feedback mechanisms such as periodic elections and protests. It views democracy as an institution for pooling widely distributed information about problems and policies of public interest by engaging the participation of epistemically diverse knowers. Democratic norms of free discourse, dissent, feedback, and accountability function to ensure collective, experimentally-based learning from the diverse experiences of different knowers. I illustrate these points with a case study of community forestry groups in South Asia, whose epistemic powers have been hobbled by their suppression of women's participation.

Sunstein represents moral heuristics as rigid rules that lead us to jump to moral conclusions, and contrasts them with reflective moral deliberation, which he represents as independent of heuristics and capable of supplanting them. Following John Dewey's psychology of moral judgment, I argue that successful moral deliberation does not supplant moral heuristics but uses them flexibly as inputs to deliberation. Many of the flaws in moral judgment that Sunstein attributes to heuristics reflect instead the limitations of the deliberative context in which people are asked to render judgments.

Many problems of inequality in developing countries resist treatment by formal egalitarian policies. To deal with these problems, we must shift from a distributive to a relational conception of equality, founded on opposition to social hierarchy. Yet the production of many goods requires the coordination of wills by means of commands. In these cases, egalitarians must seek to tame rather than abolish hierarchy. I argue that bureaucracy offers important constraints on command hierarchies that help promote the equality of workers in bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy thus constitutes a vital if limited egalitarian tool applicable to developing and developed countries alike.

Individuals in capitalist societies are increasingly exposed to market risks. Luck egalitarian theories, which advocate neutralizing the influence of luck on distribution, fail to cope with this problem, because they focus on the wrong kinds of distributive constraints. Rules of distributive justice can specify (1) acceptable procedures for allocating goods, (2) the range of acceptable variations in distributive outcomes, or (3) which individuals should have which goods, according to individual characteristics such as desert or need. Desert-catering luck egalitarians offer rules of the third type. Their theories fail because considerations of market efficiency, freedom, and dignity undermine the claims of desert to inform standards of justice for society as a whole. Responsibility-catering luck egalitarians offer rules of the first type. Their theories fail because such rules don’t constrain the downside risks of market choices. To solve this problem, we need rules of the second type, which allow market forces, and hence luck, to influence distributive outcomes, but only within an acceptable egalitarian range. The ideal of equality in social relations helps us devise acceptable constraints at the top, bottom, and middle of the income range.

Este trabajo investiga las capacidades epistémicas de las instituciones democráticas a través de una evaluación de tres modelos epistémicos de democracia: el Teorema del Jurado de Condorcet, el Teorema ‘Diversidad supera Habilidad’ y el modelo experimentalista de Dewey. El modelo de Dewey es superior a los demás en su capacidad de modelar las funciones epistémicas de tres características constitutivas de la democracia: la diversidad epistémica de los participantes, la interacción de la votación con el debate y los mecanismos de retroalimentación como las elecciones periódicas y las protestas. Considera que la democracia es una institución para reunir información ampliamente distribuida sobre problemas y políticas de interés público mediante la participación de conocedores epistémicamente diversos. Las normas democráticas de libre discurso, disenso, retroalimentación y rendición de cuentas funcionan para garantizar el aprendizaje colectivo y con base experimental a partir de las diversas experiencias de los diferentes conocedores. Ilustro estos puntos con un estudio de caso de grupos forestales comunitarios en el Asia meridional, cuyas capacidades epistémicas se han visto perjudicadas por la supresión de la participación de las mujeres.

This chapter aims to explore how social groups learn moral lessons from history, particularly from their own histories, and with a particular focus on the history of slavery. It asks: how do historical processes of contention over moral principles lead groups to change their moral convictions? This interest is normative: how can we know that changes in collective belief count as moral improvements, as acquisitions of genuine moral knowledge? The chapter draws some lessons about how the social organization of moral inquiry—of contention over moral claims—affects the prospects that a group will be able to improve its moral beliefs.

In this article, I argue that mass incarceration belongs to a category of social status interventions by which the modern state either withholds the ordinary protections and benefits of the law from outlawed groups or subjects them to private punishment based on their mere membership in those groups. In the US these groups include immigrants and resident Latinos, the homeless, the poor and poor blacks, sex workers, and ex-convicts. Outlawry is a fundamentally anti-democratic practice that cannot be justified in terms of deterrence and is incompatible with public safety.

What is the proper role of politics in higher education? Many policies and reforms in the academy, from affirmative action and a multicultural curriculum to racial and sexual harassment codes and movements to change pedagogical styles, seek justice for oppressed groups in society. They understand justice to require a comprehensive equality of membership: individuals belonging to different groups should have equal access to educational opportunities; their interests and cultures should be taken equally seriously as worthy subjects of study, their persons treated with equal respect and concern in communicative interaction. Conservative critics of these egalitarian movements represent them as dangerous political meddling into the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They cast the pursuit of equality as a threat to freedom of speech and academic standards. In response, some radical advocates of such programs agree that the quest for equality clashes with free speech, but view this as an argument for sacrificing freedom of speech.