Abraham Singer
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 4371985 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Abraham Singer |
| NOMBRES | Abraham |
| APELLIDO | Singer |
| FIRMA | SINGER A |
| AFILIACIONES | Loyola University Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6833-1995 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 22 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 15 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 22 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2015 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Racial Justice Without Character
Response to Pierre-Yves Néron’s Review of Everyone’s Business
Mutual engagement as methodology
Political theory in context, normativity without frontiers
The Political Morality of Associational Life
What are the political obligations of apparently non-political associations and groups? Political theorists generally address such questions by either appealing to the private nature of associations and the normative importance of securing their autonomy, or the public qualities of associations and the normative importance of making them more accountable to demands of justice or democracy. Both approaches often under-appreciate the normative and …
The Politics and Morality of Transnational Corporate Accountability
Transnational corporations pose a dilemma for scholars of normative political economy. On the one hand, many think that such entities must be tamed by instruments of legal accountability and political control, lest they be allowed to act relatively untamed by legal and moral concerns. On the other hand, the very concern about regulating transnational corporations lends itself to suspicion of such efforts. Just as corporate power often reflects th…
Can the Unfree Be Held Morally Responsible? A Douglassonian Conception of Freedom and Distributed Moral Agency
Can those dominated and oppressed by racialized power structures be held responsible for their actions? On some plausible accounts of moral responsibility, the answer is “no”: domination exempts the oppressed from moral obligations because they are structurally deprived of the freedom to make choices for which one might be blameworthy. In this article, I use the work of Frederick Douglass to offer a different understanding of moral responsibility…
What Sal Owes Mookie
The Corporate Baby in the Bathwater
The Social Subcontract
What does democracy demand of business? We argue that an answer to this question requires an understanding of the sorts of ethical obligations businesses have more generally. Against approaches that understand the duties of business in terms of citizenship or fiduciary obligation, we propose and develop the notion of subcontractor duties. We conceive of commercial activity as a social subcontract, in which businesses are empowered to exercise the…
The Form of the Firm
Contemporary discussions of the corporation tend to fall into one of two camps. The side that dominates much of public discourse is those who conceive of the corporation as purely economic. According to this view, corporations are “nexuses of contracts” that have no greater duties than to maximize profits for their shareholders and that should be given legal and political deference to do so. On the other side are those who conceive of the corpora…
A Framework for a Political Theory of the Corporation
This chapter provides the methodological framework for the rest of the book. It adopts a method of laying out the assumptions that are inherent to our current social institutions, and using them to critically engage with extant corporate structures and practices. It begins by laying out two presuppositions that seem to characterize our political and economic order: (1) liberal democratic norms and institutions are preferable to others; and (2) ma…
Conclusion
The conclusion reviews the arguments that have been offered throughout the book. This book started with some basic presuppositions that represent the underlying normative commitments of the liberal democratic market societies we find ourselves in. This chapters reviews the critique offered of the Chicago School of economics, the normative account of corporate productivity, as well as the prescriptions offered for corporate law, corporate governan…
Corporate Justice within Efficiency Horizons
This chapter expands on the idea of norm-governed productivity. Because this approach opens the door for a more straightforwardly political assessment of corporate hierarchy, this chapter considers how theories of workplace democracy stack up against this view of corporate efficiency. It argues that radical and participatory democrats are prone to error by essentially doing the mirror image of what the Chicago school does: where Chicago school sc…
The Managerial Challenge to Liberalism
This chapter considers the “managerial” approach to the corporation by unpacking Berle and Means’s famous argument about the problems of the modern corporation. This approach is important because it has proven influential in its own right; the “separation of ownership from control” that Berle and Means famously observed, and the resulting power and discretion that managers enjoy, has been an important trope for critics of corporate capitalism. It…
The Form of the Firm
Gaus’s choice”
Gaus has recently offered a novel argument for an open society, connecting it to recent methodological debates regarding ideal and non-ideal theory. The argument, briefly put, is that political philosophies based upon the search for an ideal to anchor their critical and prescriptive ambitions, so-called “ideal theories,” are bound to fail. The best possible case for doing ideal theory should lead us to recognize that such endeavors are conceptual…
Models of shareholder democracy
Existing discussions about shareholder control work with a state-centric and Westphalian conception of democracy. Therefore, they see the corporation as a state-analogue: shareholders (citizens) elect a board (legislature) charged with the responsibility to ensure that the executive follows their ‘collective interest’. We claim that state-centric models of democracy are not apt for an environment of corporate governance characterised by complex i…
The Political Nature of the Firm and the Cost of Norms
Political theorists are increasingly interested in understanding how firms are analogous to, or extensions of, government and the kinds of normative standards this implies. This is a welcome development. These theorists, however, have not appreciated how indispensable "transaction cost economics" is for understanding the firm. While transaction cost economics helps us see how a political theory of the firm can still be consistent with a concern f…
Race and the Meso-Level Sources of Domination
This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in liberal theory, and the work of John Rawls in particular. Controversy has centered on whether Rawls’s broader philosophical approach is capable of addressing racial injustice, and if not, precisely why the Rawlsian framework remains disconcertingly blind to such issues. Pace scholars who focus on Rawls’s emphasis on “ideal theory,” and whether that precludes his engagement with ra…
The Corporation as a Relational Entity
Are corporations merely composites of individuals, which then take on the rights and duties of individuals, or are they concessions from a sovereign government and therefore subject to popular control? The latter view in this perennial debate has been particularly influential to those who see the idea of corporate personhood as fundamentally anti-democratic and destructive. While sympathetic to the goals of these critics, this paper aims to show …
There Is No Rawlsian Theory of Corporate Governance
The major aim of this article is to show that John Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be applied effectively to questions of business ethics and corporate governance. I begin with a reading of Rawls that emphasizes both the critical and pragmatic nature of his theory. In the second section I look more closely at the notion of society’s “basic structure” and its place within Rawls’s theory. In the third section, I argue that “the corporation” cannot…
The Corporation as a Relational Entity
Are corporations merely composites of individuals, which then take on the rights and duties of individuals, or are they concessions from a sovereign government and therefore subject to popular control? The latter view in this perennial debate has been particularly influential to those who see the idea of corporate personhood as fundamentally anti-democratic and destructive. While sympathetic to the goals of these critics, this paper aims to show …
The Political Nature of the Firm and the Cost of Norms
Political theorists are increasingly interested in understanding how firms are analogous to, or extensions of, government and the kinds of normative standards this implies. This is a welcome development. These theorists, however, have not appreciated how indispensable "transaction cost economics" is for understanding the firm. While transaction cost economics helps us see how a political theory of the firm can still be consistent with a concern f…
Models of shareholder democracy
Existing discussions about shareholder control work with a state-centric and Westphalian conception of democracy. Therefore, they see the corporation as a state-analogue: shareholders (citizens) elect a board (legislature) charged with the responsibility to ensure that the executive follows their ‘collective interest’. We claim that state-centric models of democracy are not apt for an environment of corporate governance characterised by complex i…
The Social Subcontract
What does democracy demand of business? We argue that an answer to this question requires an understanding of the sorts of ethical obligations businesses have more generally. Against approaches that understand the duties of business in terms of citizenship or fiduciary obligation, we propose and develop the notion of subcontractor duties. We conceive of commercial activity as a social subcontract, in which businesses are empowered to exercise the…
Race and the Meso-Level Sources of Domination
This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in liberal theory, and the work of John Rawls in particular. Controversy has centered on whether Rawls’s broader philosophical approach is capable of addressing racial injustice, and if not, precisely why the Rawlsian framework remains disconcertingly blind to such issues. Pace scholars who focus on Rawls’s emphasis on “ideal theory,” and whether that precludes his engagement with ra…
There Is No Rawlsian Theory of Corporate Governance
The major aim of this article is to show that John Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be applied effectively to questions of business ethics and corporate governance. I begin with a reading of Rawls that emphasizes both the critical and pragmatic nature of his theory. In the second section I look more closely at the notion of society’s “basic structure” and its place within Rawls’s theory. In the third section, I argue that “the corporation” cannot…
The Corporation as a Relational Entity
Are corporations merely composites of individuals, which then take on the rights and duties of individuals, or are they concessions from a sovereign government and therefore subject to popular control? The latter view in this perennial debate has been particularly influential to those who see the idea of corporate personhood as fundamentally anti-democratic and destructive. While sympathetic to the goals of these critics, this paper aims to show …
The Form of the Firm
Contemporary discussions of the corporation tend to fall into one of two camps. The side that dominates much of public discourse is those who conceive of the corporation as purely economic. According to this view, corporations are “nexuses of contracts” that have no greater duties than to maximize profits for their shareholders and that should be given legal and political deference to do so. On the other side are those who conceive of the corpora…
A Framework for a Political Theory of the Corporation
This chapter provides the methodological framework for the rest of the book. It adopts a method of laying out the assumptions that are inherent to our current social institutions, and using them to critically engage with extant corporate structures and practices. It begins by laying out two presuppositions that seem to characterize our political and economic order: (1) liberal democratic norms and institutions are preferable to others; and (2) ma…
Conclusion
The conclusion reviews the arguments that have been offered throughout the book. This book started with some basic presuppositions that represent the underlying normative commitments of the liberal democratic market societies we find ourselves in. This chapters reviews the critique offered of the Chicago School of economics, the normative account of corporate productivity, as well as the prescriptions offered for corporate law, corporate governan…
Corporate Justice within Efficiency Horizons
This chapter expands on the idea of norm-governed productivity. Because this approach opens the door for a more straightforwardly political assessment of corporate hierarchy, this chapter considers how theories of workplace democracy stack up against this view of corporate efficiency. It argues that radical and participatory democrats are prone to error by essentially doing the mirror image of what the Chicago school does: where Chicago school sc…
The Managerial Challenge to Liberalism
This chapter considers the “managerial” approach to the corporation by unpacking Berle and Means’s famous argument about the problems of the modern corporation. This approach is important because it has proven influential in its own right; the “separation of ownership from control” that Berle and Means famously observed, and the resulting power and discretion that managers enjoy, has been an important trope for critics of corporate capitalism. It…
The Form of the Firm
Gaus’s choice”
Gaus has recently offered a novel argument for an open society, connecting it to recent methodological debates regarding ideal and non-ideal theory. The argument, briefly put, is that political philosophies based upon the search for an ideal to anchor their critical and prescriptive ambitions, so-called “ideal theories,” are bound to fail. The best possible case for doing ideal theory should lead us to recognize that such endeavors are conceptual…
Models of shareholder democracy
Existing discussions about shareholder control work with a state-centric and Westphalian conception of democracy. Therefore, they see the corporation as a state-analogue: shareholders (citizens) elect a board (legislature) charged with the responsibility to ensure that the executive follows their ‘collective interest’. We claim that state-centric models of democracy are not apt for an environment of corporate governance characterised by complex i…
The Political Nature of the Firm and the Cost of Norms
Political theorists are increasingly interested in understanding how firms are analogous to, or extensions of, government and the kinds of normative standards this implies. This is a welcome development. These theorists, however, have not appreciated how indispensable "transaction cost economics" is for understanding the firm. While transaction cost economics helps us see how a political theory of the firm can still be consistent with a concern f…
Race and the Meso-Level Sources of Domination
This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in liberal theory, and the work of John Rawls in particular. Controversy has centered on whether Rawls’s broader philosophical approach is capable of addressing racial injustice, and if not, precisely why the Rawlsian framework remains disconcertingly blind to such issues. Pace scholars who focus on Rawls’s emphasis on “ideal theory,” and whether that precludes his engagement with ra…
What Sal Owes Mookie
The Corporate Baby in the Bathwater
The Social Subcontract
What does democracy demand of business? We argue that an answer to this question requires an understanding of the sorts of ethical obligations businesses have more generally. Against approaches that understand the duties of business in terms of citizenship or fiduciary obligation, we propose and develop the notion of subcontractor duties. We conceive of commercial activity as a social subcontract, in which businesses are empowered to exercise the…
Can the Unfree Be Held Morally Responsible? A Douglassonian Conception of Freedom and Distributed Moral Agency
Can those dominated and oppressed by racialized power structures be held responsible for their actions? On some plausible accounts of moral responsibility, the answer is “no”: domination exempts the oppressed from moral obligations because they are structurally deprived of the freedom to make choices for which one might be blameworthy. In this article, I use the work of Frederick Douglass to offer a different understanding of moral responsibility…
Racial Justice Without Character
Response to Pierre-Yves Néron’s Review of Everyone’s Business
Mutual engagement as methodology
Political theory in context, normativity without frontiers
The Political Morality of Associational Life
What are the political obligations of apparently non-political associations and groups? Political theorists generally address such questions by either appealing to the private nature of associations and the normative importance of securing their autonomy, or the public qualities of associations and the normative importance of making them more accountable to demands of justice or democracy. Both approaches often under-appreciate the normative and …
The Politics and Morality of Transnational Corporate Accountability
Transnational corporations pose a dilemma for scholars of normative political economy. On the one hand, many think that such entities must be tamed by instruments of legal accountability and political control, lest they be allowed to act relatively untamed by legal and moral concerns. On the other hand, the very concern about regulating transnational corporations lends itself to suspicion of such efforts. Just as corporate power often reflects th…
Political science (20 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Sociology (18 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Law and economics (15 obras) · Economics (11 obras) · Philosophy (10 obras) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (10 obras) · Epistemology (9 obras) · Law (9 obras)