What Egalitarianism Requires: An Interview with John E.Roemer.JohnRoemer,Marina Uzunova &Akshath Jitendranath -2021 -Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 13 (2).detailsThis is an interview by the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics with John E.Roemer. The interview coversRoemer’s intellectual biography; his extensive writings on exploitation, egalitarianism, socialism, bargaining, and justice; his latest work on Kantian optimization, his vision for the future of socialism; and, finally, his methodological commitments and the value of interdisciplinarity.
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Providing Equal Educational Opportunity: Public vs. Voucher Schools*: JOHN E.ROEMER.John E.Roemer -1992 -Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1):291-309.detailsAll advanced societies maintain a commitment to equal educational opportunity, which they claim to implement through a public school system that is charged toprovide all children with an education up to a state-enforced standard. Indeed, what public schools do, even in the best of circumstances, is to provide all children with a more or less equal exposure to educational inputs, rather than to guarantee them equal educational attainment. Children, as the schools receive them, differ markedly in their docility — due (...) in part to innate ability, but perhaps due more to the economic status and cultural practices of their families. Many, including myself, believe that the task of schools should be to provide some measure of equal educational attainment among students of heterogeneous talent and background. Schools should devote more educational resources to students who require them in order that they be educated to an acceptable standard. (shrink)
Equality of Opportunity.JohnRoemer -1998 - Harvard University Press.detailsJohnRoemer points out that there are two views of equality of opportunity that are widely held today. The first, which he calls the nondiscrimination principle, states that in the competition for positions in society, individuals should be judged only on attributes relevant to the performance of the duties of the position in question. Attributes such as race or sex should not be taken into account. The second states that society should do what it can to level the playing (...) field among persons who compete for positions, especially during their formative years, so that all those who have the relevant potential attributes can be considered. -/- Common to both positions is that at some point the principle of equal opportunity holds individuals accountable for achievements of particular objectives, whether they be education, employment, health, or income.Roemer argues that there is consequently a “before” and an “after” in the notion of equality of opportunity: before the competition starts, opportunities must be equalized, by social intervention if need be; but after it begins, individuals are on their own. The different views of equal opportunity should be judged according to where they place the starting gate which separates “before” from “after.”Roemer works out in a precise way how to determine the location of the starting gate in the different views. (shrink)
A Public Ownership Resolution of the Tragedy of the Commons*: JOHN E.ROEMER.John E.Roemer -1989 -Social Philosophy and Policy 6 (2):74-92.detailsImagine a society of fisherfolk, who, in the state of nature, fish on a lake of finite size. Fishing on the lake is characterized by decreasing returns to scale in labor, because the lake's finite size imply that each successive hour of fishing labor is less effective than the previous one, as the remaining fish become less dense in the lake. In the state of nature, the lake is commonly owned: each fishes as much as he pleases, and, we might (...) suppose, calculates his fishing plan by taking the labor of the others as given, as he sees it. Each knows that the distribution of fish will be proportional to labor expended among the fisherfolk: if I fish twice as long as you, I will end up with twice as much fish as you. This is not due to some kind of concern with equity among the fisherfolk; it is a technological fact, implied by the assumption that fishing labor is homogeneous, and all are equally likely to catch a fish in a unit of time. An equilibrium under common ownership can be thought of as a Nash equilibrium of the game where each computes his optimal fishing plan, given the labor of the others and knowing what the consequent distribution of fish would be. (shrink)
Equality of talent.John E.Roemer -1985 -Economics and Philosophy 1 (2):151-.detailsIf one is an egalitarian, what should one want to equalize? Opportunities or outcomes? Resources or welfare? These positions are usually conceived to be very different. I argue in this paper that the distinction is misconceived: the only coherent conception of resource equality implies welfare equality, in an appropriately abstract description of the problem. In this section, I motivate the program which the rest of the paper carries out.
The cerebral representation of space: insights from functional imaging data.Eleanor A. Maguire -1997 -Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1 (2):62-68.detailsFunctional imaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, present a unique opportunity to examine, in humans, the cerebral representation of space in vivo. Space is ubiquitous and not a unitary phenomenon, and the brain uses visual, vestibular and proprioceptive inputs to produce multiple representations of space subserving spatial cognition, ranging from gaze control to remembering multiple complex large-scale environments. Functional imaging studies have shown the importance of the parietal cortex in perceptual, motor, attention and working (...) memory aspects of body-centred human spatial cognition. Functional imaging has also revealed pathways in humans homologous to those found in monkeys for the separate processing of spatial location and object identity. There are further suggestions of similar differentiation in working memory. The importance of the medial temporal region in the recall of spatial location has been confirmed also and novel virtual reality paradigms are now providing insights into the cerebral representation of spatially-extended large-scale environments. We still have much to learn about the cerebral representation of space in the human brain and functional brain imaging, in concert with patient studies and animal models, will allow us to continue investigating. (shrink)
What Walrasian Marxism Can and Cannot Do.JohnRoemer -1992 -Economics and Philosophy 8 (1):149-156.detailsIn their article “Roemer's ‘General’ Theory of Exploitation is a Special Case: The Limits of Walrasian Marxism,” Devine and Dymski portray me as some sort of Walrasian automaton who believes that phenomena that are not easily modelled using the Walrasian model of perfect competition do not exist. Their criticism of my theory assumes that I was attempting to model capitalism in its entirety, a task that, I agree, I failed to do. I did not propose a theory of accumulation, (...) or of technological change, or of the methods by which capitalists maintain their ideological hegemony over workers, or of the methods by which they extract labor from labor power at the point of production. I was not, in short, trying to write an alternative to Das Kapital. My General Theory of Exploitation and Class, as its Introduction explained, was an attempt at understanding the root causes of exploitation and class, so as to better understand how class formation and exploitation might occur in postcapitalist societies. To this end, I adopted a well-known scientific method: strip away many real aspects of the thing under study down to a minimal skeleton and see how many phenomena descriptive of the real thing one can generate. Then add more real aspects of the thing to the model, and see how much more one can generate. (shrink)
Jerry Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? Some Thoughts.John E.Roemer -2010 -The Journal of Ethics 14 (3-4):255-262.detailsIn his book Why Not Socialism?, G.A. Cohen described several kinds of inequality that would be acceptable under socialism, yet nonetheless harmful to community. I describe another kind of inequality with this property, deriving from the legitimate transmission of preferences and values from parents to children. In the same book, Cohen proposes that the designing of a socialist allocation mechanism is a key problem for socialist theory. I maintain this is less of a problem than he believes. Finally, some thoughts (...) on the “law of motion of socialist ethos” are offered. (shrink)
Gaining and maintaining consent when capacity can be an issue: a research study with people with Huntington's disease.Eleanor Wilson,Kristian Pollock &Aimee Aubeeluck -2010 -Clinical Ethics 5 (3):142-147.detailsThis paper recognizes the complexity of the debate on informed consent and discusses the importance of the ongoing process of consent for people affected by Huntington's disease (HD). Although written information may not be the most appropriate form of obtaining informed consent in qualitative research, it remains an important part of the ethical approval process for health research in the UK. This paper draws on a study in which the information sheet and consent form were specifically designed to help obtain (...) consent from people who may be impaired by the cognitive and physical effects of HD. The forms were developed by drawing on expert opinion and relevant literature and fall in line with recommendations from the Mental Capacity Act 2005 to encourage people to make their own decisions. The paper describes the feasibility of a method for obtaining consent as an ongoing process with patients affected by HD using information sheets and consent forms specifically designed for people with potential cognitive and/or physical impairments. In conclusion, this paper adds a pragmatic approach to the debate on informed consent by describing the development of a written information sheet and consent form being used in a current social research study. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of written information being adapted according to the needs of potential participants. (shrink)
Engineers on responsibility: feminist approaches to who’s responsible for ethical AI.Eleanor Drage,Kerry McInerney &Jude Browne -2024 -Ethics and Information Technology 26 (1):1-13.detailsResponsibility has become a central concept in AI ethics; however, little research has been conducted into practitioners’ personal understandings of responsibility in the context of AI, including how responsibility should be defined and who is responsible when something goes wrong. In this article, we present findings from a 2020–2021 data set of interviews with AI practitioners and tech workers at a single multinational technology company and interpret them through the lens of feminist political thought. We reimagine responsibility in the context (...) of AI development and deployment as the product of work cultures that enable tech workers to be responsive and answerable for their products over the long and short term. From our interviews, we identify three key pain points in understanding the distribution of responsibility between actors and developing responsible design and deployment practices: (1) unstable business ecosystems and AI lifecycles, which require an approach to responsibility that accounts for the dynamic nature of these systems; (2) the issue of incentivizing engineers to take responsibility for the mundane maintenance practices essential to the functioning of AI systems and (3) the need to overcome individual and structural barriers to taking ownership over AI products and their effects. From these findings, we make three recommendations based on feminist theory: (1) organisations should move from a static model of responsibility to a dynamic and ethically motivated response-ability; (2) companies need to revalue care and maintenance practices; and (3) firms must move away from individualistic ideas of responsibility towards fostering wider cultures of responsibility. (shrink)
Narrative Deference.Eleanor A. Byrne -forthcoming -Topoi:1-13.detailsRecent work on distributed cognition and self-narrative has emphasised how autobiographical memories and their narration are, rather than being stored and created by an individual, distributed across embodied organisms and their environment. This paper postulates a stronger form of distributed narration than has been accommodated in the literature so far, which I call narrative deference. This describes the phenomena whereby a person is significantly dependent upon another person for the narration of some significant aspect of their own autobiographical self-narrative. I (...) suggest that a person is more likely to narratively defer where they suffer a mnemonic impairment regarding some significant adverse life experience like trauma, illness or injury. Following a recent turn in the literature towards investigating the harmful aspects of distributed cognition as well as its many advantageous features, this paper explores how the benefits of autobiographical self-narrative deference within close personal relationships are complexly related to its harms. (shrink)
Affective scaffolding and chronic illness.Eleanor Alexandra Byrne -2024 -Philosophical Psychology 37 (4):921-946.detailsABSTRACT Current attempts to understand unusually high rates of psychiatric illness in complex, chronic illnesses can be guilty of operating within an explanatory framework whereby there are two options. Either (a) that the psychiatric predicaments are secondary to the bodily condition, and (b) that they are primary. In this paper, I draw upon philosophical work on affect, contemporary empirical work, and qualitative first-person patient data to illustrate a much messier reality. I argue that affective experience is generally more complex in (...) such conditions, and that a variety of pre- and post-morbid causal factors dynamically interact such that the resultant psychiatric predicaments do not permit to classification as strictly primary or secondary to the bodily condition. Affective scaffolding, in my view, provides an apt theoretical framework for capturing this nuance. (shrink)
Sorting gender out in a children's museum.Eleanor W. Herzog &Zella Luria -1991 -Gender and Society 5 (2):224-232.detailsPsychologists believe grade schoolers' free play in the United States is universally biased toward single-gender groups. In a study of grade schoolers in a children's museum, already-acquainted kindergartners to sixth graders were observed at three exhibits. While boys chose more automobile play and girls more supermarketing, one-quarter of each group played in settings dominated by the other gender. Boys had no group-size preference; girls had a strong preference for small groups. That preference accounts for most of the gender differences found (...) in children's gender sorting in a novel environment. However, the ubiquity of gender segregation in large groups of grade schoolers was disconfirmed for this setting. (shrink)
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Worldly Virtue, by Judith Andre.Eleanor Wittrup -2016 -Teaching Philosophy 39 (1):110-113.detailsBook review Virtue Moral theory Moral Psychology.
Striking the balance with epistemic injustice in healthcare: the case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.Eleanor Alexandra Byrne -2020 -Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 23 (3):371-379.detailsMiranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one’s predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is (...) therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice. (shrink)
Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics.Eleanore Holveck -2001 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.detailsIn Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, with references to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barr_s, Arthur Rimbaud, AndrZ Breton, and Paul Nizan. The book provides a detailed philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invitZe.