Whereas the reality of “innate talent” is questioned by the authors, the role of “attributed talent” is not discussed fully. “Attributed talent” is the imputation of high, not yet unfolded ability to an individual. Only if talent is attributed to a novice will resources be invested in the development of expertise. An alternative for estimating future achievement is discussed.

Imagine 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)

John Roemer 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)

This is an interview by the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics with John E. Roemer. The interview covers Roemer’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.

_A new theory of how and why we cooperate, drawing from economics, political theory, and philosophy to challenge the conventional wisdom of game theory_ Game theory explains competitive behavior by working from the premise that people are self-interested. People don’t just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for cooperation leave much to be desired. Unlike competing players, cooperating players take those actions that they would like others to take—which Roemer calls (...) “Kantian optimization.” Through rigorous reasoning and modeling, Roemer demonstrates a simpler theory of cooperative behavior than the standard model provides. (shrink)

All 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)

During the last 40 years, political philosophers have made important advances in our understanding of why equality is valuable, and what kind of equality is important. This article summarizes the development of these ideas, in particular, the contributions of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Richard Arneson, and G. A. Cohen. It shows how these ideas have filtered into economic thinking in the conceptualization of equality of opportunity. It concludes with a brief discussion of how these ideas might (...) be extended to evaluate intergenerational and global distributions of income or welfare. (shrink)

Isabella Berr consciously employs haziness to create an unobtrusive intensity in her mysterious-looking works, evoking in the viewer memories of familiar places and people. She distances herself from photography as a technical means of the reproduction of reality and her work approaches the realms of painting. The works brought together in this publication thus capture our inner feelings and sensations. Isabella Berr was born in Schongau in 1963. Following her training and extensive experience as a photographer, in 2002 she began (...) to dedicate herself exclusively to artistic photography. Since then, her photographic work has been regularly represented in solo exhibitions and group shows, in museums and at art fairs. With an essay by Holden Luntz.". (shrink)

As John Roemer says in his introduction to this volume, 'During the past decade, what now appears as a new species in social theory has been forming: analytically sophisticated Marxism. Its practitioners are largely inspired by Marxian questions which they pursue with contemporary tools of logic, mathematics, and model building … These writers are, self-consciously, products of both the Marxian and non-Marxian traditions.' This volume assembles substantial and original essays, both published and unpublished, by some of the leading practitioners of (...) 'analytical Marxism'. The essays discuss a number of the fundamental issues of Marxian thought as well as questions that conventional Marxists see no need to raise. They exemplify the ways in which analytical Marxists are beginning to reinvigorate the Marxian tradition and, in doing so, to break down the barriers that have divided it from other forms of social theory. The volume will make an excellent textbook and an ideal introduction to this new approach. (shrink)

Professor Roemer's goal in this book is to give a rigorous view of classical Marxian economic theory by presenting specific analytic models. The theory is not extended to deal with new problems, but it is deepened: Marxian theory is given micro-foundations and upon those foundations the author begins to rebuild a tightly constructed Marxian economics. The book begins, after a methodological introduction, with an examination of the Marxian notion of equilibrium and the theory of exploitation, and goes on to deal (...) with the theory of the falling rate of profit. The next section explores one of the points made in the first section of the book, that the Marxian theory of exploitation can be constructed completely independently of the labor theory of value as a theory of exchange. Technical study of this problem allows comment on various issues, such as the relative importance of 'marginal utilities' and 'class struggle' in determining relative prices. The final part examines models of various Marxian concepts. (shrink)

State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor ratios, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. Although (...) extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor - supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe - thus engendering the post-war movement towards social - insurance is an open question. (shrink)

In Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences, Yong Chen takes an interesting approach to the subject of Confucian religiosity: he concentrates on analyzing the intellectual and academic debate about the question of whether Confucianism is a religion and highlights its cultural as well as socio-political implications for contemporary China, assuming that this debate coincided with a transition from the predominance of Confucian paradigms to those of modernity. Without this paradigmatic shift, argues Chen, the past and ongoing controversy about Confucian religiosity (...) could not be fully appreciated.To verify his assumption, the author first examines the Chinese reception of the Western concept of... (shrink)

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten gilt mit Fug und Recht als der selbstandigste aller Wolffianer. Doch hat man kaum je systematisch untersucht, worin - uber die Begrundung der Asthetik hinaus - seine denkerische Originalitat besteht. Im vorliegenden Band wird der fur Kant wichtigste Schulautor als Erkenntnistheoretiker, Psychologe und Moralphilosoph erstmals prononciert aus dem Schatten Wolffs herausgeholt. Nach der jungsten Pionierubersetzung der Metaphysica ins Deutsche folgt hier eine interpretatorisch wegweisende Detailstudie zu philosophischen Schlusselthemen des fruhvollendeten Hochaufklarers - gerade recht zu den anstehenden Jubilaen. (...) Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten is regarded justifiably as the most independent of all Wolffians. Up to now however there have been very few systematic studies examining his intellectual originality, apart from his founding of aesthetics. In this volume, the author who was most important for Kant during his school years finally steps out of Wolff's shadow and is revealed to be an epistemologist, a psychologist and moral philosopher. After the recent translation of the Metaphysica into German, a pioneering achievement, what follows here is an interpretively groundbreaking detailed study of the key philosophical subjects of the philosopher of the High Enlightenment, just in time for the current anniversaries. (shrink)

This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with (...) Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order. (shrink)

Ethical concerns regarding agricultural practices can be found to co-evolve with technological developments. This paper aims to create an understanding of ethics that is helpful in debating technological innovation by studying such a co-evolution process in detail: the development and adoption of the milking robot. Over the last decade an increasing number of milking robots, or automatic milking systems (AMS), has been adopted, especially in the Netherlands and a few other Western European countries. The appraisal of this new technology in (...) ethical terms has appeared to be a complicated matter. Compared to using a conventional milking parlor, the use of an AMS entails in several respects a different practice of dairy farming, the ethical implications and evaluation of which are not self-evident but are themselves part of a dynamic process. It has become clear that with its use, the entire practice of dairy farming has been reorganized around this new device. With a robot, cows must voluntarily present themselves to be milked, whereby an ethical norm of (individual) freedom for cows can be seen to emerge together with this new technology. But adopting a robot also implies changes in what is considered to be a good farmer and an appropriate relation between farmer and cow. Through interviews, attending “farmers’ network” meetings in the Netherlands, and studying professional literature and dedicated dairy farming web forums, this paper traces the way that ethical concerns are a dynamic part of this process of rearranging a variety of elements of the practice of dairy farming. (shrink)

Egalitarian theorists, since Rawls, have in the main advocated equalizing some objective measure of individual well-being, such as primary goods, functionings, or resources, rather than subjective welfare. This discussion, however, has assumed, implicitly, a static environment. By analyzing a society that survives for many generations, we demonstrate that equality of opportunity for some objective condition is incompatible with human development over time. We argue that this incompatibility can be resolved by equalizing opportunities for welfare. Thus, “subjectivism” seems necessary if we (...) are to hope for a society that can both equalize opportunities and support the development of human capacity over time. (shrink)

It seems misleading to regard Georg Simmel as one of the founders of modern cultural studies. Instead, it is argued that Simmel's cultural sociology remained oriented to 19th century's culture. In this sense the article reconstructs his theory of individual and collective cultivation as standing in contrast to currently dominating cultural concepts based on egalitarianism.

Kann und soll die katholische Kirche auf die Christliche Sozialethik verzichten, auf eine Disziplin, die sich an den theologischen Ausbildungsorten des deutschsprachigen Raums fast überall etabliert hat und gleichsam als Bindeglied zwischen Kirche und Welt dient? Kann ihr Feld von den Moraltheologen "mitbetreut" werden? Eine Frage, die der Autor letztlich verneint, wenn es auch Bereiche gibt, in denen sich der individualethische Ansatz der Moraltheologie vom sozialethischen nicht völlig trennen lässt. Ein historischer Überblick zeigt, dass die Geschichte der Christlichen Sozialethik nicht (...) erst mit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts und dem Erscheinen der 1. Sozialenzyklika "Rerum novarum" 1891 beginnt, sondern in die Anfänge der Kirche zurückgeht, und zwar dort, wo es um die soziale Frage (Armut, Reichtum und Sklaverei), um die Wirtschaftsfrage (Eigentum, Zins und Wucher) sowie um die politische Frage (Krieg und Frieden, Verhältnis Kirche und Staat) gegangen ist. Das heutige Selbstverständnis der Christlichen Sozialethik steht sodann im Mittelpunkt. Anhand der ("neuen") Politischen Theologie und der Wirtschaftsethik werden zwei Themenkreise aufgegriffen, an denen sich zeigt, wie hochaktuell und bedeutsam dieses theologische Fach als "Disziplin in der Welt" ist. (shrink)

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