In his blogpost on The Blog of the American Philosophical Association, Associate Professor Dr. Nicholas Vrousalis discusses how economic inequalities create conditions of domination that undermine individual and democratic freedom. Subsequently, employing the orchestra analogy, Vrousalis gives examples from political philosophers Karl Marx and John Rawls who envision more equal, post-capitalist societies.
“Many philosophers, from Kant and Marx to Rawls and Angela Davis,” Vrousalis writes, “take the nature of the economy to be central to the justification of the democratic state.” But economic inequalities, particularly wealth and income disparities, corrupt individual and thus democratic freedom by creating conditions of domination. Vrousalis explains that when workers depend on the utilization of means of production of the rich or capitalists, they lose their freedom because the very possibility to work depends on the private wills of the owners of those means to either let them work or not.
The orchestra analogy is used to further illustrate this concept of domination through dependency: if one person controls all the instruments, the other musicians are dominated because they can only play with permission. However, if the orchestra as a whole controls the instruments, each member cooperates equally in the mutual creation of music. This idea illustrates a classless, cooperative society where economic independence and equal citizenship are preserved.
Both Karl Marx and John Rawls envision such a post-capitalist society but differ in their approach. Marx advocates for a socialist system that abolishes private ownership of the means of production, while Rawls imagines a society where justice and individual good lives align. Furthermore, the article identifies two key problems with these approaches. Firstly: the ‘perfection problem’: can a theory of justice be built without relying on an ideal vision of the good life, since Marx and Rawls may have been overly optimistic about this alignment? And lastly the ‘janitor problem’: how can equality for those in supposedly less meaningful work, for example janitors, be ensured in a society with an equal division of labor?
- CV
Nicholas Vrousalis is an Associate Professor in Practical Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Vrousalis read economics at Cambridge and got his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford. He has since taught moral and political philosophy, economic ethics, and the history of philosophy at the universities of Cambridge, Leiden, and Leuven.
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Read the full blog post on the website of the Americal Philosophical Association.
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