Elizabeth Anderson

Based on two lectures given in 2014 by the author during the Tanner Lectures on Human Values delivered at Princeton University, followed by four commentaries by eminent scholars and the author's response to the commentators. Anderson questions the authoritarian control workers have been forced to give to their employers in order to remain employed and historically why this goes against American ideology of free market values.

How Employers Rule Our Lives (and why We Don't Talk about It)

Private Government

Shows how the work ethic has been used to oppress workers, and also to liberate them.

How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back

Hijacked

Elizabeth Anderson offers a new theory of value and rationality that rejects cost-benefit analysis in our social lives and in our ethical theories. This account of the plurality of values thus offers a new approach, beyond welfare economics and traditional theories of justice, for assessing the ethical limitations of the market. In this light, Anderson discusses several contemporary controversies involving the proper scope of the market, including commercial surrogate motherhood, privatization of public services, and the application of cost-benefit analysis to issues of environmental protection. Table of Contents: Preface 1. A Pluralist Theory of Value A Rational Attitude Theory of Value Ideals and Self-Assessment How Goods Differ in Kind (I): Different Modes of Valuation How Goods Differ in Kind (II): Social Relations of Realization 2. An Expressive Theory of Rational Action Value and Rational Action The Framing of Decisions The Extrinsic Value of States of Affairs Consequentialism Practical Reason and the Unity of the Self 3. Pluralism and Incommensurable Goods The Advantages of Consequentialism A Pragmatic Theory of Comparative Value Judgments Incommensurable Goods Rational Choice among Incommensurable Goods 4. Self-Understanding, the Hierarchy of Values, and Moral Constraints The Test of Self-Understanding The Hierarchy of Values Agent-Centered Restrictions Hybrid Consequentialism A Self-Effacing Theory of Practical Reason? 5. Criticism, Justification, and Common Sense A Pragmatic Account of Objectivity The Thick Conceptual Structure of the Space of Reasons How Common Sense Can Be Self-Critical Why We Should Ignore Skeptical Challenges to Common Sense 6. Monistic Theories of Value Monism Moore's Aesthetic Monism Hedonism Rational Desire Theory 7. The Ethical Limitations of the Market Pluralism, Freedom, and Liberal Politics The Ideals and Social Relations of the Modern Market Civil Society and the Market Personal Relations and the Market Political Goods and the Market The Limitations of Market Ideologies 8. Is Women's Labor a Commodity? The Case of Commercial Surrogate Motherhood Children as Commodities Women's Labor as a Commodity Contract Pregnancy and the Status of Women Contract Pregnancy, Freedom, and the Law 9. Cost-Benefit Analysis, Safety, and Environmental Quality Cost-Benefit Analysis as a Form of Commodification Autonomy, Labor Markets, and the Value of Life Citizens, Consumers, and the Value of the Environment Toward Democratic Alternatives to Cost-Benefit Analysis Conclusion Notes References Index Reviews of this book: Anderson/auhtor is anxious to combat what she sees as a tendency for commercial values to invade areas of human life where they do not belong...A useful contribution to debate about the proper scope of the market. "Not everything is a commodity, insists Anderson, and her brief should shake up social science technocrats." DD--Philadelphia Inquirer "The book is rich in both argument and application." DD--Alan Hamlin, Times Higher Education Supplement "In this rich and insightful book Elizabeth Anderson develops an original account of value and rational action and then employs this account to address the pragmatic political question of what the proper range of the market should be. Anderson's principal targets are consequentialism, monism and the crude 'economistic' reasoning which underpins much contemporary social policy...This is an important book...For anyone interested in political philosophy this is essential reading." DD--A. J. Walsh, Australasian Journal of Philosophy --Hugo Dixon, Financial Times [UK] Reviews of this book: Not everything is a commodity, insists Anderson, and her brief should shake up social science technocrats. --Philadelphia Inquirer Reviews of this book: The book is rich in both argument and application. --Alan Hamlin, Times Higher Education Supplement Reviews of this book: In this rich and insightful book Elizabeth Anderson develops an original account of value and rational action and then employs this account to address the pragmatic political question of what the proper range of the market should be. Anderson's principal targets are consequentialism, monism and the crude 'economistic' reasoning which underpins much contemporary social policy...This is an important book...For anyone interested in political philosophy this is essential reading. --A. J. Walsh, Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Value in Ethics and Economics

The imperative of integration

part I. immune

Immun

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, but The Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy.

The Imperative of Integration

Elliot blames himself for the death of his best friend Charlie, and has a hard time dealing with it. Eventually he meets Allison, a fellow member of the stage crew for the school play. He slowly allows her into his life and they become best friends. The friendship is tested when she learns she is diagnosed with bone cancer. How will he be able to lose another friend?

Impressions

For Virginia Woolf, H.D., Mary Butts and Gwendolyn Brooks, things mobilise creativity, traverse domestic, public and rural spaces and stage the interaction between the sublime and the mundane. Ordinary things are rendered extraordinary by their spiritual or emotional significance, and yet their very ordinariness remains part of their value. This book addresses the intersection of spirituality, things and places – both natural and built environments – in the work of these four women modernists. From the living pebbles in Mary Butts's memoir to the pencil sought in Woolf's urban pilgrimage in 'Street Haunting', the Christmas decorations crafted by children in H.D.'s autobiographical novel The Gift and Maud Martha's love of dandelions in Brooks's only novel, things indicate spiritual concerns in these writers' work. Elizabeth Anderson contributes to current debates around materiality, vitalism and post-secularism, attending to both mainstream and heterodox spiritual expressions and connections between the two in modernism. How we value our spaces and our world being one of the most pressing contemporary ethical and ecological concerns, this volume contributes to the debate by arguing that a change in our attitude towards the environment will not come from a theory of renunciation but through attachment to and regard for material things.

Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing

Andrew Radford

Heather Walton

Concentrating on female modernists specifically, this volume examines spiritual issues and their connections to gender during the modernist period. Scholarly inquiry surrounding women writers and their relation to what Wassily Kandinsky famously hoped would be an ‘Epoch of the Great Spiritual’ has generated myriad contexts for closer analysis including: feminist theology, literary and religious history, psychoanalysis, queer and trauma theory. This book considers canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf while also attending to critically overlooked or poorly understood figures such as H.D., Mary Butts, Rose Macaulay, Evelyn Underhill, Christopher St. John and Dion Fortune. With wide-ranging topics such as the formally innovative poetry of Stevie Smith and Hope Mirrlees to Evelyn Underhill’s mystical treatises and correspondence, this collection of essays aims to grant voices to the mostly forgotten female voices of the modernist period, showing how spirituality played a vital role in their lives and writing.

A Piercing Darkness

Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality

Eric T. Anderson

From 2002 to 2011, coffee-machine manufacturer Keurig had grown from a privately held company with just over $20 million in revenues to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, a publicly traded company with net revenues of $1.36 billion. This case examines the rapid rise of Keurig.

Elizabeth Anderson

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