A deontological theory without inalienable rights would have a hard time criticizing self-sale contracts, non-democratic governance and coverture marriage contracts. It would be hard to critique capitalism because you’d have no objection to workers selling their voting rights in firms and any organization to the highest bidder.
Workers consent to the employment contract with their particular employer. Labor monopsony is solvable with unionization like capitalist Nordic countries.
@jlou Under the gold standard for consent, it is specific, informed and reversible. Self-sale and coverture require one to unconditionally give away all rights forever: not specific, informed or reversible. They cannot be validly consented to.
Even supposing the argument against the sale of voting rights failed, it is only concentration of power that creates the mutual incentives for such a sale. Economic egalitarianism = the sale ceases to be mutually beneficial even if morally permissible.
In a self-sale contract, you relinquish your labor rights for your working lifetime but retain your right to life, etc. Irreversibility isn’t unique to self-sale contracts. For instance, transferring material property is also irreversible, as the purchaser can transform it or refuse to sell it back. This argument doesn’t rule out self-sale in all cases. After a self-sale, the person can still buy themselves back. Inalienable rights actually rule out these abhorrent contracts.
There are still incentives to engage in voting rights transfers, even in egalitarian circumstances, as a risk reduction through diversification strategy or because the seller doesn’t get much value out of their individual voting rights. Even if you start out egalitarian, without inalienability, rights will eventually concentrate and accumulate resulting in an inegalitarian situation. The only way to truly prevent an inegalitarian situation is non-transferability of rights.
Of course there would be mutually beneficial incentives. I buy your voting rights and you get paid. Seems mutually beneficial to me.
Do you have any evidence to support the claim that no buyer would be able to afford any sellers price? That’s a pretty strong claim.
@jlou Social aversion to concentration of power.
When you start buying votes, that draws skeptical looks. Other people's voting rights have a social cost that no one's willing to pay.
If you don't have inbuilt social mechanisms against the concentration of power, if political power is just another commodity that can be bought and sold without raising eyebrows, you don't have an economically egalitarian society.
Why would there be a social aversion if there is nothing morally wrong with selling voting rights?
“If you don't have inbuilt social mechanisms against the concentration of power, if political power is just another commodity that can be bought and sold without raising eyebrows, you don't have an economically egalitarian society.”
Exactly, inalienable rights are essential to economic egalitarianism.
I’ll concede that violations of social etiquette constitute social aversion. However, there are problems that make this limited in its effectiveness at preserving egalitarianism.
1. Social etiquette violations don’t merit as strong of a response as moral rights’ violation.
2. Social etiquettes are difficult to preserve in the presence of strong economic incentives for breaking them.
3. What is economically incentivized transforms culture.
@jlou Under egalitarianism, political parity is valued roughly equally by all agents, i.e. even if the agent who valued it the lowest were to trade it with the one who valued it the highest, the surplus would be very low.
Social norms impose a high transaction cost, higher even than the surplus. Thus the transaction is not mutually beneficial at any price point.
I could just as easily come up with an alternative narrative where individuals don’t value political parity that highly due to the initial equal distribution of voting rights, they can expect other voters to have similar interests. By the time the attacker has bought up a large share of voting rights, it’s too late to do anything.
Also, you don’t know that social norms would create transaction costs higher than the benefit to the attacker. You’re speculating. That isn’t evidence.
You can’t simply take back the voting rights if you sold them. They belong to the person who bought them. You’ve to buy new voting rights. It essentially makes governance into a corporation. Inalienable rights say that such sales are immoral.
How is consent violated in that situation though? All the sales of voting rights were consensual.
@jlou Nonconsensual contracts are void.
We're talking about an attacker trying to purchase a decisive share of the votes. This would not happen in the open because the attacker would not risk social retaliation. Thus it would happen under the table, hence violating informed consent.
I don’t think you have to have knowledge about every transaction that is happening behind the scenes to have informed consent.
I don’t see this couldn’t be over the table. The attacker could enter negotiations with each vote-seller than announce when a deal with all of them is secured
@jlou When it comes to a socially binding vote, yeah, information is paramount because the goal is social good. It's why manipulability is such a concern in social choice theory.
People would be alarmed that someone were going around trying to negotiate others' voting rights. This would carry an enormous risk of retaliation.
You’re mixing utilitarian considerations with deontological ones. For the pure deontologist, there is no conception of social good beyond protecting people’s rights. From the point of view of consent, there is nothing wrong with consensually exchanging voting rights in secret.
Giving people assets whose value will change, if a certain policy is enacted, is not equivalent to paying them to vote a certain way. You have to give people an economic interest in those ventures.
If this proves to be a serious attack against the system, I would just use a voting system that takes into account how coordinated agents are. I don’t see the issue with using such a voting system.
I disagree that they are equivalent because I can treat them morally differently by giving different moral reasons for why they’re invalid.
I don’t think this attack is permissible because people holding the same financial instrument are economically coordinated.
@jlou Yes, you've said you don't regard it as morally equivalent. They are materially equivalent because their material outcomes are the same: an exchange of a vote for an economic benefit.
«I don’t think this attack is permissible because people holding the same financial instrument are economically coordinated.» I'm not following. Would you clarify?
okay, that is a major disagreement. Wage labor/employment contracts are always invalid and inherently violate workers inalienable rights to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor and to workplace democracy. The alternative is individual or joint self-employment as in a worker cooperative.
Going back to the quibble about consent. In the hypothetical, we would be starting with a roughly equal distribution of wealth. I was focused on critiquing labor contracts
@magitweeter It means the property rights and liabilities that workers create in production. Those ought to belong jointly to the workers in the firm. This inalienable right entails all firms must be worker co-ops to be morally valid.
The moral intuition is that the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of your labor is just the principle that legal responsibility ought to be assigned to the de facto responsible party applied to property.
Source: https://youtu.be/fvWJ10ONPkY
@jlou I haven't watched the whole video, but the argument that the presenter seems to be setting up is not one that's intended to address one's moral intuitions. (And i have no moral intuitions about “legal responsibility”, no).
Regardless, i'm interested in your moral stance on a setup where all productive firms are worker co-ops with no productive capital while all capital goods are owned by private individuals. No labor contracts, only rental contracts for capital goods.
@magitweeter so you don’t think that the person who is factually response for a result ought to be the one held legally or institutionally responsible? For example, if someone commits theft, shouldn’t the person who actually carried out the theft be responsible rather than some innocent party?
I think a system with a worker co-op mandate and leased capital is fine, but it would need social ownership of the means of production through venture communes to make getting start up capital easier.
@jlou More accurately, legal or institutional responsibility is not how i go about framing ethical problems.
I think you may be conceding the admissibility of an arrangement that is materially equivalent to labor contracts under a sort of state capitalism.
The notion of responsibility is core to morality because it is what distinguishes moral agents from moral patients. The notion of justice is people are held responsible for the results to their own actions. Do you think it is acceptable for one person to commit a murder and an innocent person to be held responsible by the community?
It isn’t equivalent to capitalism because workers get a democratic say.
@jlou Responsibility, yes, just not legal or institutional responsibility. No, a community is not the same thing as an institution.
Workers would get as much of a democratic say as the rental contract said they get.
Communities can have institutions, such as mechanisms for democratic self-management and accountability for results of intentional human actions. If such an institution exists, then principles of justice are relevant.
You didn’t answer my question about who ought to be held responsible.
A “capital rental” contract that denies workers’ democratic rights in the workplace is not a capital rental contract; it’s an employment contract.
@jlou Sure, communities can have institutions, but those are far removed from my moral *intuitions*. Of course i have positions on how an institution ought to work, but i don't draw those from intution, i draw them from analysis.
Sure, call it an employment contract, but the co-op's options are to sign it or find a different state to rent capital from. If you have no moral objection to worker co-ops renting state capital, you have no moral objection against this.
@cy The contract @magitweeter is positing would be recognized to be invalid and illegal under the system I advocate.
Land ought to be owned collectively since it isn’t the fruits of anyone’s labor.
Some aspects of how institutions ought to be comes directly from moral principles. Other aspects are up to the democratic decision of the people involved and no right or principle is violated doing it some way.
What is there to analyze here? This is basic aspect of justice. Any system that holds innocent people responsible for the results of other people’s intentional actions is inherently unjust. You still haven’t answered the question of who ought to be held responsible.
Ellerman’s analysis shows the two concepts are equivalent. If people should be held responsible for the results of their actions, they should appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. Since workers are jointly de facto responsible for productions’ positive and negative results, they are guilty, while employers are often innocent. Holding employers responsible for production results, as the employment contract does, is holding an innocent party guilty.
@magitweeter The argument isn’t talking about who gets the value. It’s a labor theory of property not labor theory of value. We’re talking about assigning property rights and liabilities created in production not who ends up getting the value. Ellerman explicitly mentions insurance to illustrate that the role of the employer isn’t, in principle, risk-bearing.
If you’re fined, you can, in principle, get someone else to cover the cost of the fine. That doesn’t mean you weren’t held responsible.
@jlou The material effects of such an arrangement are, under most circumstances, the same as those of an employment contract.
We keep coming back to the same spot. Your moral objections to certain arrangements seem not to apply to certain other materially equivalent arrangements.
@magitweeter They aren’t materially equivalent. In one arrangement, workers own 100% of the product of their labor. In the other, workers own 0% of the product of their labor. 0% is quite different from 100%.
I think an economy where all firms are mandated to be worker co-ops is materially different from capitalism.
@jlou In both arrangements, ownership of the produced goods is transferred to the provider of the capital. In both arrangements, the liabilities are economically and legally (i.e. materially) transferred to the provider of the capital, even if the workers cannot morally divest themselves from them.
Materially equivalent.
There is no legal or institutional transfer of produced goods under the employment contract. The employer owns it at all points during production, which is what alienates management authority from the workers to the employer.
In a worker co-op, the workers appropriate the liabilities.
They’re obviously not materially equivalent.
@magitweeter Those are material differences. Who owns property is a material difference. Why are those not material differences? Please explain in detail. Also, please define what you consider a “material” difference.
Mandating worker co-op structure on all firms effectively acts as a minimum-wage-like regulation where the “wage” is expressed as inalienable voting shares in the firm. Do you think having a minimum wage is materially different than not having one?
@jlou I'm thinking of a “you can use my machines for this long, and you give me these amounts of these finished goods, and i'll insure you for these and these liabilities” contract.
Ownership of the goods is transferred only when determined by the contract.
Voting rights for the co-op mean little if the only materially relevant vote is on accepting or rejecting these terms.
This situation is bad because it’s monopolistic. Markets need competition to function. If this is the only choice available to them, there must be very limited competition in the market.
Insurers only get the return to risk-bearing not the entire pure profits. Any profit leftover after pricing out risk-bearing would go to the workers. This is what I was alluding to when I said that Ellerman argues that the role of the employer isn’t the same as the risk bearer.
@jlou Cory Doctorow's newest newsletter reminded me of our conversation:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/
If the state monopolizes all capital goods, what will prevent it from “chickenizing” all the worker co-ops?
@magitweeter These cases generally involve companies legally treating people as independent contractors despite them being employees from a moral standpoint. In the system I advocate, such workers would have voting rights in the firm.
The situation you suggest where state monopolizes capital is illegitimate on anti-competitive and private property grounds.
Unfortunately, some statist democratic socialists literally advocate a situation where the state monopolizes all capital unironically.
J Lou
Fabio G.
Cy