Julian Jonker

Julian Jonker (2025), Is Data Labor? Two Conceptions of Work and the User-Platform Relationship, Business Ethics Quarterly. 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.

Julian Jonker (2020), Risk and Asymmetry in Development Ethics, African Journal of Business Ethics, 14 (1), pp. 23-41. https://doi.org/10.15249/14-1-244

Julian Jonker (2020), Directed Duties and Moral Repair, Philosophers' Imprint, 20 (23), pp. 1-32.

Julian Jonker (2020), Generic Moral Grounding, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 23 (), pp. 23-28. 10.1007/s10677-020-10074-3

Julian Jonker (2019), Affirmative Action for Non-Racialists, Public Affairs Quarterly, 33 (3), pp. 195-214.

Julian Jonker (2019), Contractualist Justification and the Direction of a Duty, Legal Theory, 25 (), pp. 200-224. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352325219000089