Cohen on Socialism, Equality and Community
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article I discuss G. A. Cohen’s account of the principles animating the socialist ideal. In his book Why Not Socialism? Cohen argues that socialism is based on two principles of radical equality of opportunity and community. Although I am quite sympathetic to Cohen’s contribution, I identify what I take to be some problems in it and suggest ways to overcome them. I challenge Cohen’s claim that although the principle of radical equality of opportunity is a principle of justice, the principle of community is only a wider moral requirement. I argue that to fully account for the role and weight of considerations of community within the socialist ideal, and to justify the limitations on liberty that they would impose in practice, we have reason to see some of them as more stringent demands of justice. More specifically, I propose a construal of some of the demands of community as focused on sufficientarian concerns with basic needs and on requirements to protect equal political status and self-respect, and explain how, so construed, the demands of community relate to demands of equality of economic opportunity and to the protection of personal and political liberty. Dans cet article, je discute le point de vue de G.A. Cohen sur les principes qui animent l ‘idéal socialiste. Dans son livre ‘Pourquoi Pas Le Socialisme?’ Cohen maintient que le socialisme est basé sur les deux principes d’égalité radicale de l’opportunité et de la communauté. Même si je partage assez largement cette conception, j’en identifie quelques problèmes de mon point de vue et suggère quelque pistes pour les combler. Contre Cohen, je ne pense pas que le principe d’égalité radicale d’opportunité soit un principe de justice, alors que le principe de communauté serait seulement un impératif moral plus large. Je maintiens qu’afin de rendre compte pleinement du rôle et du poids des considérations sur la communauté dans l’idéal socialiste, et de justifier les limitations sur la liberté qu’elles imposeraient en pratique, nous avons raison de penser que certaines d’entre elles expriment des demandes fortes de justice . Plus spécifiquement, je propose de reformuler certaines demandes des communautés centrées sur des préoccupations d’autosuffisance relatives à des besoins fondamentaux et sur les conditions de protection de l’égalité politique et du respect de soi, et j’explique comment, sous cet angle, les demandes d’une communauté sont étroitement liées à des demandes d’égalité d’opportunité et de protection de la liberté personnelle et politique.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it