Julian Jonker

Julian Jonker (2026), The Case for Correlativity, Law and Philosophy.

Abstract: I defend the correlativity of rights and wrongings against Nico Cornell's array of counterexamples. I pursue three strategies. First, Hohfeldian accounting dispels putative counterexamples by showing that they often conflate claim-rights with other normative incidents such as powers and immunities. Second, the method of abstraction allows that rights and duties can be ascribed using wh-descriptions that pick out indefinite persons, and accommodates cases in which rightholders appear too numerous or too few. Third, I argue that not all relational grievances constitute moral wrongings. Some complaints are grounded in special relationships lack the generalizability characteristic of moral accountability; others are better understood as social critique and should not be shoehorned into the form of interpersonal wronging. These strategies suggest that correlativity plays the valuable normative role of reining in our practice of ex post accountability by tying it to ex ante justification in generalizable terms.

Julian Jonker (Work In Progress), Stability in Contract.

Abstract: Contract law involves the public and therefore coercive enforcement of private claims. The coercive nature of contract consists in the fact that contract enforcement goes beyond acknowledgement that the underlying claims are binding. This coercive element stands in need of justification. This Article develops a justificatory criterion of reflexive adequacy: contract law doctrine that is otherwise substantively just is nonetheless defective if its enforcement materially contra- dicts its public rationale. The state lacks the normative authority to rely upon an enforcement rationale that depends for its success upon opacity, effective suppression of remedial claims, or burdens that cannot be justified to those who bear them as participants in a reciprocal arrangement. This criterion operationalizes that feature of a just society that Rawls described as stability for the right reasons: just institutions must be capable of informed, reason-responsive support through their ordinary operation. The criterion of reflexive adequacy can be applied to contract doctrine as both justification and critique. The Article illustrates the justificatory use of reflexive adequacy by reconstructing unconscionability doctrine as a response to two potential failures of stability to which contract is vulnerable. A failure of publicity is one that makes a consequential contractual term or mechanism practically inaccessible to a contracting party. A failure under the strains of commitment imposes a recurring burden that free and equal participants in the practice of contracting cannot reasonably be asked to bear. These failures cut across the orthodox procedural and substantive prongs of unconscionability doctrine. Either failure independently justifies withholding or limiting enforcement, but neither adhesion nor unequal bargaining power is sufficient on its own to establish such a failure. The Article illustrates the critical use of reflexive adequacy by diagnosing the recent history of mandatory arbitration in consumer and employment contracts. Failures of publicity and excessive strains of commitment both arise within the regime established by the Supreme Court’s reading of the Federal Arbitration Act. The emergence of mass arbitration, with claimants filing individual demands in the thousands and firms resisting the fees assigned by the arbitration clauses they have drafted, is a stress test for stability. Whether contemporary arbitration practices are consistent with reflexive adequacy depends upon whether, empirically, contract drafters depend on counterparties not exercising their contractual rights, or instead genuinely seek to avoid exploitation of arbitration fee structures. The Article proposed that the Federal Arbitration Act be amended so that the enforcement of arbitration clauses in consumer and employment con- tracts is made conditional on use of federally certified providers who publish rules, outcome data, and redacted reasons for rulings disposing of statutory claims or affecting other cases. The proposal establishes a minimum standard for achieving the publicity that makes drafters and providers publicly accountable and informs further interventions aiming at substantive fairness.

Julian Jonker and Violet I. VIctoria (Work In Progress), Chaos Contracts.

Abstract: Prediction markets are ordinarily defended for their ability to aggregate dispersed information into a price that tracks an event’s probability. This defense assumes act-state independence: that trading a contract does not influence the probability of its outcome. Where this assumption doesn’t hold, contracts are act-sensitive, and the price of an event contract is not a forecast but an incentive. We call such instruments “chaos contracts” because they incentivize traders to disrupt settled institutions. The incentive created by such contracts is especially high when the act of influencing the outcome is otherwise innocent. We argue that three common regulatory strategies are insufficient to deal with chaos contracts: classifying contracts by subject matter, policing the conduct of traders, and excluding parties from trading them on the basis of their ex ante identifiable roles and relationships. Attempts to classify subject matter miss the long tail of chaos contracts that do not obviously involve problematic activities. Policing the conduct of traders either misses innocent acts of influence, or is overbroad and prohibits useful activities and contracts. Unlike insider trading law, it is difficult to identify ex ante who will be in a position to influence an outcome. We propose instead that regulators aim to constrain act-sensitive contracts using principles of contract design inspired by the history of insurance law. While event contracts lack the equivalent of an insurable interest, we suggest tools for increasing the costs and decreasing the payoffs of influencing outcomes, ranging from hardening resolution bases to position limits and ultimately nonlisting. This approach fits comfortably within the existing commodities regulatory framework, and requires only being explicit about this novel threat and the tools available to contain it.

Julian Jonker (2026), A Dilemma for Expressive Arguments Against Markets, Ethics, 136 (2), pp. 273-296.

Abstract: An expressive (or semiotic) argument holds that some social practice is objectionable because it has an objectionable meaning or is required in order to express something valuable. Such arguments have been particularly popular among anticommodificationists. Yet expressive arguments against markets face a dilemma, which we can initially put in terms of a familiar Gricean distinction between two uses of ‘meaning’. Can the dilemma be avoided by a third use of ‘meaning’ to characterize the performative dimension of action? The performative account provides a promising conception of expressive arguments in ethics, but it does not vindicate their use in anticommodificationist claims.

Julian Jonker, “Price, Risk, and Exploitation”. In Just Price Theory, edited by Matías Petersen and Joaquín Reyes, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2025), pp. 48-66

Abstract: How should market participants set prices in the presence of risk? Some business ethicists argue for minimum safety standards for work and for consumer products, but risk can seldom be entirely eliminated. So there remains an open question whether risks that remain after minimum standards have been achieved should be priced in or mitigated. For example, a firm may face a choice between selling a dangerous product at a low price and selling a safer product at a higher price, or it may face a choice between hiring a worker for a dangerous job at a high wage and hiring the worker at a lower wage but under safer conditions. Expected utility theory counsels a risk-neutral approach to such choices. I argue against this approach on the basis that there are moral reasons for a degree of risk aversion in cases in which pricing in risk threatens to be exploitative.

Julian Jonker (2025), Is Data Labor? Two Conceptions of Work and the User-Platform Relationship, Business Ethics Quarterly, 35 (2), pp. 153-186. https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2024.25

Abstract: Some observers of the data economy have proposed that we treat data as labor. But are data contributions labor? Our folk conception of work emphasizes its importance and effort, such that work has a special interpersonal priority and deserves appreciation and compensation. The folk conception does not generally favor counting data as work, and so it serves as an error theory for reluctance to regulate data as labor. In contrast, labor regulation and policy focus on the political economy of labor, and in particular the bargaining dynamics that participants in a labor market face. Labor regulation aims to protect workers against the threats characteristically posed by such bargaining dynamics. Data-transferring interactions between internet platforms and users share similar bargaining dynamics, and so there is a promising functional similarity between labor regulation and proposals for data regulation that would facilitate data strikes and data unions.

Julian Jonker (2023), Automation, Alignment, and the Cooperative Interface, Journal of Ethics, online (). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09449-2

Abstract: The paper demonstrates that social alignment is distinct from value alignment as it is currently understood in the AI safety literature, and argues that social alignment is an important research agenda. Work provides an important example for the argument, since work is a cooperative endeavor, and it is part of the larger manifold of social cooperation. These cooperative aspects of work are individually and socially valuable, and so they must be given a central place when evaluating the impact of AI upon work. Workplace technologies are not simply instruments for achieving productive goals, but ways of mediating interpersonal relations. They are aspects of a cooperative interface i.e. the infrastructure by which we engage cooperative behavior with others. The concept of the cooperative interface suggests two conjectures to foreground in the social alignment agenda, motivated by the experience of algorithmic trading and social robotics: that AI impacts cooperation through its effects on social networks, and through its effects on social norms.

Julian Jonker and Grant Rozeboom (Eds.), Working as Equals. Relational Egalitarianism and the Workplace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023)

Abstract: Relational egalitarians propose that the ideal of equality is primarily an ideal of social relations. Yet contemporary workplaces are characterized by hierarchical employer-employee relationships. This raises an urgent practical question: are the employment relationship and other workplace arrangements consistent with the relational egalitarian ideal? That in turn raises a theoretical question: what precisely does relational equality consist in? This book collects papers by moral and political philosophers and normative business ethicists addressing these questions, which are particularly urgent at a time of widening inequality and rapid changes in the nature of work. Contemporary moral and political philosophy has not paid enough attention to the workplace as a site where political power is wielded and questions of moral standing are raised. Business ethics has not paid enough attention to whether and how the relational egalitarian ideal applies to the ethics of workplace arrangements and organizational leadership. Bringing the relational egalitarian ideal to bear on the workplace promises to address these shortcomings. To this end, the contributors to this book respond to two overarching questions. First, they consider whether the relational egalitarian ideal really applies to the workplace; and second, they consider what workplace relations and workplace actors would have to be like in order to realize this ideal. In examining these two questions, the contributors illuminate a number of fraught topics: religious liberty and worker entitlements, the comparative view of discrimination, the distribution of human capital, the value of self-employment, the legitimacy of employer directives, and the ideological underpinnings of hierarchy.

Julian Jonker, “The Workplace as a Cooperative Institution”. In Working as Equals: Relational Egalitarianism and the Workplace, edited by Julian David Jonker and Grant Rozeboom, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 174-193

Abstract: How should workplace authority be exercised in the face of disagreement? This chapter begins by outlining a positivist conception of workplace authority, such that employees lack a moral obligation to obey employment directives without more, but may have reason to adopt a workplace perspective that treats such directives as authoritative. There is reason to adopt such a perspective to the extent that the workplace can be seen as a cooperative institution. Workplace authority can be made compatible with the cooperative conception of the workplace if it is subject to a workplace justification constraint, i.e., if workplace directives are justifiable to all reasonable participants in the workplace. This criterion allows workplace authority to accommodate disagreement to the degree we expect of other liberal institutions. It provides a basis for using workplace authority to achieve the goals of work while respecting the fact that individuals may reasonably diverge in their conceptions of the good. The criterion has an egalitarian justification, but one that aims not at equalizing some dimension of the bilateral relation between employer and employee, but rather at providing an institutional perspective which gives each workplace participant equal standing.

Julian Jonker (2023), Rights, Abstraction, and Correlativity, Legal Theory, 29 (), pp. 122-150. https://doi.org/10.1017/S135232522300006X

Abstract: I survey several counterexamples (by Raz and MacCormick) to Hohfeld's conjecture that a claim-right is correlative to a directed duty and (by Cornell and Frick) to Bentham's suggestion that a claim-right is correlative to a wronging. We can vindicate these claims of correlativity if we acknowledge that entitlements like claim-rights and directed duties admit of degrees of abstraction: that they may be general rather than specific, unspecified rather than specified, or indefinite rather than definite. I provide an error theory consisting in linguistic and practical reasons for why we articulate normative incidents in ways that threaten correlativity. And I deny that abstraction imposes a heavy metaphysical cost on rights theory, though I leave open whether abstraction excludes certain explanatory accounts of rights such as the interest theory or will theory.