Technological unemployment is a subset of historically recurring problems related to jobs in general and unemployment in particular, which are now of global importance. The typical difficulties of...

Work is an integral part of modern society. However, the question of the normative conditions that distinguish just from unjust work has been under-investigated in political theory. This article, b...

Ostensibly accepting Lockean property theory and some basic assumptions of Nozick’s entitlement theory, Barbara Fried argues that property owners have a right to the physical things they own, but not to their “surplus value,” which is produced not by the owner’s labour but by “scarcity conditions of one sort or another.” I argue that Fried’s interpretations of Nozick and Locke lead her to a conclusion that is not supported by those Lockean and Nozickian entitlement principles which she does accept. I (...) also argue that Nozick’s weaker interpretation of the Lockean Proviso is closer to Locke’s originally intended meaning, and is more plausible in itself. Finally, I attempt to resolve another issue which could be raised as an objection to Nozick’s entitlement theory—that “ownership” is indeterminate—by proposing an alternative approach which rejects the endeavour to devise an account of the essential concept of ownership. (shrink)

Although widely used across psychology, economics, and philosophy, the concept ofeffort is rarely ever defined. This article argues that the time is ripe to look for anexplicit general definition of effort, makes some proposals about how to arrive at thisdefinition, and suggests that a force-based approach is the most promising. Section 1presents an interdisciplinary overview of some chief research axes on effort, and arguesthat few, if any, general definitions have been proposed so far. Section 2 argues thatsuch a definition is (...) now needed and proposes a basic methodology to arrive at it, whosefirst step is to make explicit the various tacit assumptions about effort made acrosssciences and ordinary thinking. Section 3 unearths 4 different conceptions of effortfrom research on effort so far:primitive-feelings accounts,comparator-based accounts,resource-based accountsandforce-based accounts. It is then argued that the first 2kinds of accounts, although interesting in their own right, are not strictly speaking abouteffort. Section 4 considers the 2 most promising general approaches to efforts: re-source-based and force-based accounts. It argues that these accounts are not only compatible but actually extensionally equivalent. This notwithstanding, it explains why force-based accounts should be regarded as more fundamental than resource-basedaccounts -/- . (shrink)