Books by Iñigo González Ricoy
Impreso en España El papel utilizado para la impresión de este libro está calificado como papel e... more Impreso en España El papel utilizado para la impresión de este libro está calificado como papel ecológico y procede de bosques gestionados de manera sostenible. No se permite la reproducción total o parcial de este libro, ni su incorporación a un sistema informático, ni su transmisión en cualquier forma o por cualquier medio, sea este electrónico, mecánico, por fotocopia, por grabación u otros métodos, sin el permiso previo y por escrito del editor. La infracción de los derechos mencionados puede ser constitutiva de delito contra la propiedad intelectual (Art. 270 y siguientes del Código Penal). Diríjase a CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos) si necesita fotocopiar o escanear algún fragmento de esta obra. Puede contactar con CEDRO a través de la web www.conlicencia.com o por teléfono en el 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47.
Papers by Iñigo González Ricoy
Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2022
Political theorists have recently sought to replace the liberal, contractual theory of the firm w... more Political theorists have recently sought to replace the liberal, contractual theory of the firm with a political view that models the authority relation of employee to firm, and its appropriate regulation, on that of subject to state. This view is liable to serious difficulties, however, given the extant discontinuities between corporate and civil authority as to their coerciveness, entry and exit conditions, scope, legal standing, and efficiency constraints. I here inspect these, and argue that, albeit in some cases significant, such discontinuities fail to undermine the firm/state analogy, either because they are not significant enough to do so or because the particular trait on which they hinge is not decisive for how authority, in the state and in the firm, should be regulated to be legitimate. A pro tanto requirement exists, I thus argue, that corporate authority be held to regulatory norms comparable to those legitimate states abide by, including civil liberties, rule-of-law constraints, and accountability to subjects.
The Oxford Handbook of Time and Politics, 2020
Institutions to address short-termism in public policymaking and to more suitably discharge our d... more Institutions to address short-termism in public policymaking and to more suitably discharge our duties toward future generations have elicited much recent normative research, which this chapter surveys. It focuses on two prominent institutions: insulating devices, which seek to mitigate short-termist electoral pressures by transferring authority away to independent bodies, and constraining devices, which seek to bind elected officials to intergenerationally fair rules from which deviation is costly. The chapter first discusses sufficientarian, egalitarian, and prioritarian theories of our duties toward future generations, and how an excessive focus on the short term in policymaking may hinder that such duties be fulfilled. It then surveys constraining and insulating devices, and inspects their effectiveness to address the epistemic, motivational, and institutional drivers of political short-termism as well as their intra-and intergenerational legitimacy.
Economic disparities often translate into disparities in political influence, rendering political... more Economic disparities often translate into disparities in political influence, rendering political liberties less worthy to poor citizens than to wealthier ones. Concerned with this, Rawls advocated that a guarantee of the fair value of political liberties be included in the first principle of justice as fairness, with significant regulatory and distributive implications. He nonetheless supplied little examination of the content and grounding of such guarantee, which we here offer. After examining three uncompelling arguments in its favor, we complete a more promising yet less explored argument that builds on the value of self-respect. We first inspect the conditions and duties that securing self-respect entails. We then look into how uneven allocations of the value of political liberties bear, expressively and due to the power imbalances they yield, on such conditions and duties.
Workplace democracy, which is attracting renewed political and philosophical interest, is often a... more Workplace democracy, which is attracting renewed political and philosophical interest, is often advocated on two intertwined views. The first is that the authority relation of employee to firm is akin to that of subject to state, such that reasons favoring democracy in the state likewise apply to the firm. The second is that, when democratic controls are absent in the workplace, employees are liable to objectionable forms of subordination by their bosses, who may then issue arbitrary directives on matters ranging from pay to the allocation of overtime and to relocation and promotion.
Daniel Jacob and Christian Neuhäuser (2018) have recently submitted these views to careful criticism in this journal.1 Jacob and Neuhäuser (JN, for short) argue, on the one hand, that the parallel between firms and states is unwarranted. For, unlike managerial authority, state authority is final. The state grants firms their legal status and subjects their authority to its regulations, which citizens in democracies already control, such that they could render democracy in the workplace mandatory if they wish. They also argue, on the other hand, that suitable workplace regulation alongside meaningful exit options may suffice to prevent, with no need for democratization, objectionable forms of workplace subjection. Neither view offers, they resolve, compelling reasons to believe that justice requires that firms be democratic. I here inspect these criticisms in turn, and offer reasons for skepticism.
Representing unborn generations to more suitably include future interests in today's climate poli... more Representing unborn generations to more suitably include future interests in today's climate policymaking has sparked much interest in recent years. In this review we survey the main proposed instruments to achieve this effect, some of which have been attempted in polities such as Israel, Philippines, Wales, Finland, and Chile. We first review recent normative work on the idea of representing future people in climate governance: The grounds on which it has been advocated, and the main difficulties that traditional forms of representation have encountered when applied to this particular case. We then survey existing institutional means to represent generations to come. We separate out representation in courts, in parliament, and by independent bodies, and review specific instruments including climate litigation, parliamentary commissions, future representatives, youth quotas, and independent offices for future generations. We examine the particular forms whereby each of these may suitably represent future people, including audience representation, sur-rogate representation, and indicative representation, and discuss the main challenges they encounter in so doing.
Workplace democracy is often defined, and has recently been defended, as a form of intra-firm gov... more Workplace democracy is often defined, and has recently been defended, as a form of intra-firm governance in which workers have control rights over management with no ownership requirement on their part. Using the normative tools of republican political theory, the paper examines bargaining power disparities and moral hazard problems resulting from the allocation of control rights and ownership to different groups within democratic firms, with a particular reference to the European codetermination system. With various qualifications related to potentially mitigating factors, such as workforce and shareholder composition or the allocation of risk aversion, the paper contends that forms of workplace democracy in which workers control and own the firm, such as cooperativism, are preferable to other forms, such as codetermination, in which ownership and control rights are formally separated.
This paper examines the link between political liberties and social equality, and contends that t... more This paper examines the link between political liberties and social equality, and contends that the former are constitutive of, i.e. necessary to secure, the latter. Although this constitutive link is often assumed in the literature on political liberties, the reasons why it holds true remain largely unexplored. Three such reasons are examined here. First, political liberties are constitutive of social equality because they bestow political power on their holders, leaving disenfran-chised individuals excluded from decisions that are particularly pervasive, coer-cively enforced, hard to avoid, monopolistic, and final. Second, they are constitutive of social equality due to their positional value, such that those who are denied such liberties are socially downgraded because and to the extent that others enjoy them. Third, they are constitutive of social equality due to their expressive value, in the sense that, by disenfranchising some individuals, the state publicly fails to recognize their equal moral agency. While unpacking these reasons, we address some criticisms of this constitutive link recently raised by Steven Wall and Jason Brennan.
The paradox of persisting opposition raises a puzzle for normative accounts of democratic legitim... more The paradox of persisting opposition raises a puzzle for normative accounts of democratic legitimacy.
En respuesta a problemas de cortoplacismo político e inconsistencia temporal, durante las últimas... more En respuesta a problemas de cortoplacismo político e inconsistencia temporal, durante las últimas décadas se han producido numerosas reformas y propuestas de reforma institucional dirigidas a extender el horizonte temporal de la toma de decisiones políticas, promover su consistencia temporal e incorporar los intereses de las generaciones futuras a tales decisiones. Este trabajo es una contribución al análisis normativo de dichas instituciones, analizándolas de acuerdo con su capacidad para tratar los diversos determinantes del cortoplacismo político y la inconsistencia temporal. Para ello, tras una introducción, se presentan los problemas intertemporales que dichas instituciones tratan de resolver. A continuación, se introduce una muestra de dichas instituciones atendiendo al tipo de mecanismos que emplean así como a su grado de independencia, sus competencias, sus tipos de poderes y la amplitud del mandato al que están sujetas. Finalmente, se analizan las instituciones presentadas anteriormente en función de su capacidad para tratar los determinantes motivacionales, epistémicos e institucionales de dichos problemas.
The republican case for workplace democracy (WD) is presented and defended from two alternative m... more The republican case for workplace democracy (WD) is presented and defended from two alternative means of ensuring freedom from arbitrary interference in the firmnamely, (a) the right to freely exit the firm and (b) workplace regulation. This paper shows, respectively, that costless exit is neither possible nor desirable in either perfect or imperfect labor markets, and that managerial discretion is both desirable and inevitable due to the incompleteness of employment contracts and labor legislation. The paper then shows that WD is necessary, from a republican standpoint, if workers' interests are to be adequately tracked in the exercise of managerial authority. Three important objections are finally addressed-(i) that WD is redundant, (ii) that it is unnecessary provided that litigation and unionism can produce similar outcomes, and (iii) that it falls short of ensuring republican freedom compared to self-employment.
The paper discusses the structure, applications, and plausibility of the muchused parallel-case a... more The paper discusses the structure, applications, and plausibility of the muchused parallel-case argument for workplace democracy. The argument rests on an analogy between firms and states according to which the justification of democracy in the state implies its justification in the workplace. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the argument is illustrated by applying it to two usual objections to workplace democracy, namely, that employees lack the expertise required to run a firm and that only capital suppliers should have a say over the governance of the firm. Second, the structure of the argument is unfolded. Third, two salient similarities between firms and states regarding their internal and external effects and the standing of their members are addressed in order to asses the potential and limits of the argument, as well as three relevant differences regarding the voluntariness of their membership, the narrowness of their goals, and the stiffness of the competition they face. After considering these similarities and differences, the paper contends that the the parallel-case argument provides a sound reason in favor of democracy in the workplace -a reason, however, that needs to be importantly qualified and that is only pro tanto.
The paper makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, it advances a preliminary account of the conditi... more The paper makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, it advances a preliminary account of the conditions that need to obtain for constitutional rights to be democratic. Secondly, in so doing, it defends precommitment-based theories from a criticism raised by Jeremy Waldron-namely, that constitutional rights do not become any more democratic when they are democratically adopted, for the people could adopt undemocratic policies without such policies becoming democratic as a result. The paper shows that the reductio applies to political rights, yet not to nonpolitical rights, such as reproductive, environmental, or privacy rights. The democratic status of the former is process-independent. The latter, by contrast, are democratic precisely when they are adopted by democratic means.
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Books by Iñigo González Ricoy
Papers by Iñigo González Ricoy
Daniel Jacob and Christian Neuhäuser (2018) have recently submitted these views to careful criticism in this journal.1 Jacob and Neuhäuser (JN, for short) argue, on the one hand, that the parallel between firms and states is unwarranted. For, unlike managerial authority, state authority is final. The state grants firms their legal status and subjects their authority to its regulations, which citizens in democracies already control, such that they could render democracy in the workplace mandatory if they wish. They also argue, on the other hand, that suitable workplace regulation alongside meaningful exit options may suffice to prevent, with no need for democratization, objectionable forms of workplace subjection. Neither view offers, they resolve, compelling reasons to believe that justice requires that firms be democratic. I here inspect these criticisms in turn, and offer reasons for skepticism.
Daniel Jacob and Christian Neuhäuser (2018) have recently submitted these views to careful criticism in this journal.1 Jacob and Neuhäuser (JN, for short) argue, on the one hand, that the parallel between firms and states is unwarranted. For, unlike managerial authority, state authority is final. The state grants firms their legal status and subjects their authority to its regulations, which citizens in democracies already control, such that they could render democracy in the workplace mandatory if they wish. They also argue, on the other hand, that suitable workplace regulation alongside meaningful exit options may suffice to prevent, with no need for democratization, objectionable forms of workplace subjection. Neither view offers, they resolve, compelling reasons to believe that justice requires that firms be democratic. I here inspect these criticisms in turn, and offer reasons for skepticism.
Sara Amighetti (Goethe Universitat Frankfurt)
Jonathan Boston (Victoria University of Wellington)
Paul Bou-Habib (Essex & Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Simon Caney (University of Oxford)
Paula Casal (ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Iñigo González-Ricoy (Universitat de Barcelona)
Axel Gosseries (Université de Louvain)
Graham Smith (University of Westminster)
Isa Trifan (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Andrew Williams (ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra)