In a bunch of recent posts (here, here, and here), I’ve been piling on employment-at-will, mostly from the perspective of the aggrieved employee. Employment-at-will, I’ve argued, has problematic consequences for employees who are terminated at will, without cause. Terminations-without-cause incentivize arbitrary, unaccountable exercises of power in the labor market of the sort aptly described as “dominations” by Philip Pettit in his account of republican freedom.
Continue readingCategory Archives: MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism
The Soft Domination of Everyday Life
Consider this post an unplanned addendum to my earlier series on domination and at-will employment.
A friend of mine just got “fired”–you’ll see in a minute why the word is in scare quotes–and we’re disagreeing about what it all means. Naturally, I thought I’d share tidbits of our discussion here. My friend blames himself; I blame his employer. Which of us is right? I’ll give you an impeccably impartial account below; you decide. Then feel free to chime in either way.
Let’s call my friend “Claude.” Claude was caught vaping on the job. There’s no explicit rule in his company’s handbook against vaping on the job. It’s simply understood that “one does not vape on the job.” It’s not clear why this is so. “It is what it is.” Argument is not invited, and evidence is not required. We all know evil when we see it. Continue reading
Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (5/6)
4200 words, 25 minutes’ reading time
For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here. For part 4, go here.
5. Pettit on employment-at-will
I said above that I agree in a broad way with Pettit’s critique of employment-at will. Let me put it this way: I agree that employment-at-will, at least as currently practiced in the American labor market, is a highly problematic institution, one that frequently exemplifies domination for just the reasons Pettit gives. But while this may sound like substantial-enough agreement, I think it conceals some subtle but significant disagreement. In this post, I want to work through some of the agreement and the disagreement.
Though Pettit doesn’t put things quite this way, I think we can probably agree that two things make employment-at-will problematic. One is its asymmetric character. The other are the stakes involved when it’s invoked and exercised. Continue reading
Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (4/6)
2800 words, 15 minutes’ reading time.
For part 1 of this series, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here.
4. Pettit on domination
I started out by saying that I have a conflicted–with any luck, instructively conflicted–view of Pettit’s republicanism, and of its application to employment-at-will. I wish I had a single snappy way of describing my conflict, but I don’t. At one level, I agree in principle with Pettit; at another level, I don’t. At one level, I agree with Pettit’s critique of employment-at-will; at another level, I don’t. Let me work through some of this out loud in the hopes that my tangles are instructive to others. Continue reading
Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (3/6)
For part 1 of this series, go here. For part 2 of this series, go here.
5300 words, 28 minutes’ reading time
Trigger warnings: broken promises, failed hookups, orgasm gaps, Immanuel Kant, Murray Rothbard, Richard Epstein, employment
3. Contract and liberal interference
Traditionally, liberals have insisted that property and contractual rights—including those rights exercised within a corporate setting–are expressions of freedom, and so, fall within the zone or space to be protected by the State. Buying, selling, paying, loaning, renting, hiring, firing, investing, gifting, donating and so on are all protected on the side of what we might call the economic agent, as are being bought-from, being sold-to, being paid, being loaned-to, being rented-to, being hired, being fired, having someone invest your money, and so on, on the side of what we might call the economic patient. A third party “interferes” here when agent and patient consent to engage in one of the preceding activities, but the third party steps in to intrude on (hence violate) the agreed-upon terms, putting an impediment in the way of one of the party’s satisfaction of the terms. Continue reading
Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (2/6)
For part 1 of this series, go here.
2. Republicanism and/vs. liberalism
Central to Pettit’s book is a contrast between republicanism and liberalism. The contrast is useful, but complicated by several terminological complexities. In colloquial American parlance, we often contrast the ideology of the Republican Party with that of liberalism, itself associated with the Democratic Party. So it may tempting at first to think that Pettit is defending the former against the latter. In fact, the preceding contrast has almost nothing to do with the way the terminology of “republicanism” and “liberalism” is used in political philosophy, and nothing to do with the topic of Pettit’s book. So set it aside. Continue reading
Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (1/6)
- Introduction
We’ve been discussing Philip Pettit’s Republicanism in our online discussion group since March of this year. Our July 21 meeting focused on Chapter 5, “Republican Aims and Policies”: “what a state ought to achieve, and what form it ought to assume, in the modern world” (Republicanism, p. 129). Chapter 5 is the first of four in the book that explicitly ties the book’s theoretical claims to political practice, concretizing what would otherwise be a rather abstract set of theses.
I’ve had some conflicted thoughts about Pettit’s republicanism from the beginning of our discussions, crystallized by his account in Chapter 5 of a pet topic of mine, at-will employment. Having recently finished the book, I sat down over the last few weekends to put my thoughts in order. I have no idea whether these thoughts are of general interest, but in any case, I’ve written up a series of five longish blog posts on Republicanism (five excluding this one), and sketched out a bunch of shorter digressions that were originally footnotes but ended up taking on a life of their own. Starting tomorrow, I’ll post the first of the five posts here, followed by one post per week. I haven’t yet written up the digressions, so there’s no telling when (or if) they’ll appear. But they’re digressions, after all. They can wait. So can you. Continue reading
“Justice by Means of Democracy”
Modesty is supposed to be a virtue. Freeriding is an expression of vice. So how could modesty lead to freeriding? Well, suppose you have bloggers so modest that they refuse to advertise their own publications. Then it’s left to me to do it for them.
With that preface: PoT blogger and freerider John Davenport has a review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy. First paragraph: Continue reading
First Thoughts on Pettit’s Republicanism
I want to get some basic thoughts on Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, on the record. Pettit’s ideas have the virtue of being not so far out in left field (from my own perspective) as to be hopeless, yet strange enough to be difficult to grapple with. What follows really are just some first thoughts, not very elegantly expressed, and not very certain.
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Policy of Truth 