Debates about alternatives to capitalism in post-Rawlsian political philosophy have focused on property-owning democracy and market socialism as the most promising socio-economic regime types. This paper argues that corporations in property-owning democracy and market socialism remain prone to tendencies to exploitation, either exploitation by investors or exploitation of investors. Hence it argues in favour of a third alternative, which it calls the 'Social Ownership Democracy'. In such a regime, corporations realize three principles: (i) the anchoring of a non-exploitative social purpose, (ii) the adoption of a control structure aimed at realizing this purpose and (iii) the subordination of profit extraction to this purpose. The paper argues that pure forms of cooperatives and foundation-owned companies best realize these principles, since they remove outside investors who may be financially incentivized to maximize profits by exploiting other stakeholders. In the final part, it also discusses impure forms, which allow outside investment by long-term-oriented private investors, state or family ownership, as well as hybrid forms, where outside investors invest in cooperatives or foundation-owned companies. These may be needed to finance social ownership corporations in the non-ideal situation where they have to compete with regular, investor-owned corporations.
In this article, I discuss what I call the "climate bargain" approach to climate ethics as put forward by Broome and Foley. The central idea of this approach is that if the energy transition is to succeed, it must do so by enabling a win-win, or Pareto-improving, bargain between the current emitters of greenhouse gases and future generations, mediated via a "World Climate Bank." I argue here that Broome and Foley's analysis ignores central insights in the economic literature on externalities. In particular, they fail to appreciate the importance of transaction costs, which suggest that an intragenerational Pareto-improving bargain is highly unlikely to succeed. We hence should expect that any effective climate policy approach will not only create winners, but also losers. As a result, we face a choice: Should the resulting losses be allocated such that inequality is increased or reduced? Broome and Foley argue against inequality-reducing climate policy, since they believe that any such policy will jeopardize the political feasibility of dealing with climate change. I argue contra Broome and Foley that once we take transaction costs explicitly into consideration, we have good reason to believe that effective climate policy will likely require us to reduce inequality.
This paper argues that reductivism, the dominant form of contemporary just war theory, cannot justify violent climate protest, despite Andreas Malm's suggestion that just war theory might help confront the challenge of the climate crisis. The argument has three stages. It begins by showing both the relevance of Malm's attacks on the climate movement's strategic pacifism to questions about the appropriateness of violence in climate activism in political philosophy and the dominance of reductivism in contemporary philosophical discussions of violence. It then shows that reductivism's individualism will make it difficult to establish liability for climate harms substantial enough to be met with defensive force. Finally, it argues that violent climate protest is unlikely to be necessary to protect individuals, since it will not effectively reduce individual vulnerability to climate change. The collective character of the threat of climate change is in tension with reductivism's commitment to justifying all violence in terms of individual defensive rights.
Are markets coercive? Contemporary debate is dominated by two answers. The first, longstanding among defenders of free markets, holds that voluntary exchange is non-coercive by definition: coercion enters the picture only when rights are violated. The second, revived from Robert Hale's 1923 essay and embraced today by progressive legal scholars and post-liberal conservatives alike, holds that markets are pervasively coercive because property rights backed by state power constitute a system of mutual coercion. Both answers fail, but the Halean answer fails in the more interesting way. The libertarian answer moralizes coercion, stripping it of evaluative force; the Halean answer de-moralizes coercion, stripping it of discriminating power. If coercion is everywhere, it cannot pick out the arrangements worth criticizing. Drawing on a convergence across the philosophical literature on coercion, the paper develops a third option: identify coercion non-moralistically-as a factual matter of options restricted by another's institutionally backed power-but evaluate its significance in graduated terms, by attention to the significance of the options curtailed, the availability of alternatives, and the directness of compulsion involved. The result is a framework that can distinguish cases of genuinely worrisome market coercion from cases where the concept does no moral work.
Institutions and public policies are increasingly evaluated by their effects on self-reported happiness or life satisfaction. Yet if institutions shape not only outcomes but also the aspirations against which outcomes are judged, reported well-being can be a misleading welfare metric. This paper develops a simple dynamic framework that makes this problem precise by bringing together two ideas. From Arthur Schopenhauer, it takes the insight that aspirations adapt endogenously, so that hedonic gains from improvements tend to dissipate as standards adjust. From Frank Knight, it takes the claim that welfare depends partly on cultivating "higher wants": developing capacities, projects, and evaluative sophistication, not merely satisfying given preferences. Individuals in the model invest in "taste capital," which is treated as intrinsically valuable in the welfare criterion but which also raises the aspiration benchmark. Any positive weight on taste cultivation shifts the welfare optimum toward sustained investment and higher long-run aspirations, which can widen aspiration gaps and lower experienced well-being even as overall welfare rises under the criterion. The analysis formalizes a mechanism through which aspiration-raising institutions, such as education systems and meritocratic norms, can be welfare-improving while appearing welfare-reducing in happiness data. It also clarifies the normative commitments embedded in treating subjective well-being as a sufficient statistic for policy evaluation and the supplementary evidence required when institutions shape aspirations.
