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1261Jazz Bands, Camping Trips and Decommodification: G. A. Cohen on CommunitySocialist Studies 8 (1): 141-163. 2012.
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217Exploitation, Vulnerability, and Social DominationPhilosophy and Public Affairs 41 (2): 131-157. 2013.
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179Exploitation: A PrimerPhilosophy Compass 13 (2): 1-14. 2018.This paper reviews the recent literature on exploitation. It distinguishes between three main species of exploitation theory: teleology-based accounts, respect-based accounts, and freedom-based accounts. It then addresses the implications of each.
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110Workplace Democracy Implies Economic DemocracyJournal of Social Philosophy 50 (3): 259-279. 2019.Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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105Libertarian SocialismSocial Theory and Practice 37 (2): 211-226. 2011.Socialists believe that equality, community, and economic democracy can only be achieved by a system of joint ownership in the means of production. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to their own person. Libertarians believe that individual liberty and autonomy are only coextensive with a set of stringent rights to the person and its powers. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to the external…Read more
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95G. A. Cohen on exploitationPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 13 (2): 151-164. 2014.This paper argues that Cohen’s early work on Marxism, and his work in political philosophy, entails commitment to a distributive paradigm, that is, the view that exploitation obtains only if distributive injustice obtains. Cohen’s early espousal of that paradigm is explicitly reaffirmed in his defence of luck egalitarianism. The paper argues that Cohen’s distributive paradigm is neither the only defensible theory of exploitation, nor indeed the most plausible. It also shows that Cohen himself ha…Read more
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92Exploitation as Domination: A Response to ArnesonSouthern Journal of Philosophy 54 (4): 527-538. 2016.In a recent paper in this journal, Richard Arneson criticizes the domination account of exploitation and attributes it to me and Allen Wood. In this paper, I defend the domination account against Arneson's criticisms. I begin by showing that the domination view is distinct from the vulnerability-based view defended by Wood. I also show that Alan Wertheimer's influential account of exploitation is congenial to the domination view. I then argue that Arneson's own fairness-based view of exploitatio…Read more
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86The Capitalist Cage: Structural Domination and Collective Agency in the MarketJournal of Applied Philosophy 38 (1): 40-54. 2020.This article develops and defends a triadic account of structural domination, according to which structural domination (e.g. patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism) is a triadic relation between dominator(s), dominated, and regulator(s)—the constitutive domination dyad plus those roles and norms expressively upholding it. The article elaborates on the relationship between structure and agency from the perspective of both oppressor and oppressed and discusses the deduction of the concept of the …Read more
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81Socialism Unrevised: A Reply to Roemer on Marx, Exploitation, Solidarity, Worker ControlPhilosophy and Public Affairs 49 (1): 78-109. 2020.Philosophy & Public Affairs, EarlyView.
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67Smuggled into Existence: Nonconsequentialism, Procreation, and Wrongful Disability (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3): 589-604. 2013.The wrongful disability problem arises whenever a disability-causing, and therefore (presumptively) wrongful, procreative act is a necessary condition for the existence of a person whose life is otherwise worth living. It is a problem because it seems to involve no harm, and therefore no wrongful treatment, vis-à-vis that person. This essay defends the nonconsequentialist, rights-based, account of the wrong-making features of wrongful disability. It distinguishes between the person-affecting res…Read more
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66Interdependent Independence: Civil Self-Sufficiency and Productive Community in Kant’s Theory of CitizenshipKantian Review 27 (3): 443-460. 2022.Kant’s theory of citizenship replaces the French revolutionary triptych of liberty, equality and fraternity with freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit) and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). The interpretative question is what the third attribute adds to the first two: what does self-sufficiency add to free consent by juridical equals? This article argues that Selbständigkeit adds the idea of interdependent independence: the independent possession and use of citizens’ interdependent ri…Read more
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60Imperialism, Globalization and ResistanceGlobal Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 9 (1). 2016.Imperialism is the domination of one state by another. This paper sketches a nonrepublican account of domination that buttresses this definition of imperialism. It then defends the following claims. First, there is a useful and defensible distinction between colonial and liberal imperialism, which maps on to a distinction between what I will call coercive and liberal domination. Second, the main institutions of contemporary globalization, such as the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, etc., are large…Read more
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55Capital without wage-labour: Marx’s modes of subsumption revisitedEconomics and Philosophy 34 (3): 411-438. 2018.:This paper argues that capitalist social relations do not presuppose wage-labour. The paper defends a functional definition of the capitalist relations of production, in terms of what Marx calls the ’subsumption of labour by capital’. I argue that there are at least four modes of subsumption, one transitional to and one transitional from the capitalist mode of production. Unlike the capitalist mode of production, capitalist relations of production are compatible with the absence of a labour mar…Read more
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47Between Insensitivity and Incompleteness: Against the Will Theory of RightsRes Publica 16 (4): 415-423. 2010.This paper recasts an old objection to the will theory in the light of recent attempts to defend that theory, notably by Nigel Simmonds and Hillel Steiner. It enlists the idea of duties of care—effectively restrictions over legal officials’ discretionary exercise of powers—to form a dilemma for such theorists: either legal officials’ discretion over powers is restricted by duties of care for the unempowerable, or it is not. If their discretion is unrestricted, then the will theory is insensitive…Read more
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42Exploitation, Domination and MarxismProceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 69 437-442. 2018.This paper argues that there is a conceptual connection between economic exploitation and domination. If I am right, then exploitation is a form of domination, rather than a form of distributive injustice. It follows that the contemporary infatuation of many analytical Marxists with distributive injustice is misguided, and their attention is better spent studying relations of power, in particular the possibility of abstract forms of domination.
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36Exploitation as Domination: What Makes Capitalism UnjustOxford University Press. 2022.The exploitation of human by human is a globally pervasive phenomenon. Slavery, serfdom, and the patriarchy are part of its lineage. Guest and sex workers, commercial surrogacy, precarious labour contracts, sweatshops, and markets in blood, vaccines or human organs, are some contemporary manifestations of exploitation. What makes these exploitative transactions unjust? And is capitalism inherently exploitative? This book offers answers to these two questions. In response to the first question, i…Read more
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28Free Productive Agency: Reasons, Recognition, SocialismPhilosophical Topics 48 (2): 265-284. 2020.This paper argues that recognition is, fundamentally, a relationship between a person and a reason. The recognizer acts for a reason, in the interpersonal case, only when she takes the recognizee’s rational intentions—intentions whose content is favored by reasons—as reasons. Free agency, on this view, is a rational power to act for reasons: the recognizer’s disposition to take the recognizee’s rational intentions as reasons across relevant possible worlds in which she forms these intentions. On…Read more
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27The Logic of Estrangement: Reason in an Unreasonable Form, Julius Sensat. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, xi + 213 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 34 (2): 282-289. 2018.
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14The political philosophy of G.A. Cohen: back to socialist basicsBloomsbury Academic. 2015.Gerald Allan Cohen was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford for 23 years and is considered one of the most influential political philosophers of the past quarter-century. He died in 2009.The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen is the first full-length study of Cohen's highly influential thinking and method in political philosophy covering a range of fundamental topics such as equality, freedom and fraternity and his views on Marx, Nozick and Rawlsian con…Read more
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14Review of Ernesto Screpanti’s Labour and Value: Rethinking Marx’s Theory of Exploitation. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019, 131 pp (review)Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 13 (1). 2020.
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Lamentation in the face of historical necessityIn Axel Gosseries & Yannick Vanderborght (eds.), Arguing about Justice: Essays for Philippe Van Parijs, Presses Universitaires De Louvain. pp. 367-376. 2011.Marxists are committed to the elimination of exploitation of man by man. But they also believe that, for long stretches of history, exploitation is historically necessary. These two claims are in practical tension. As Engels would have it, this tension causes 'the leader of an extreme party' attempting premature revolution to be 'irrevocably lost'. This brief note argues against a Marxist attempt to alleviate this tension and sketches the moral predicament of revolutionists faced with it. Histor…Read more