Articles by Matt Zwolinski

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PBS‘ Frontline this week aired an interesting episode on the credit card industry, which began with a discussion of some of the controversial practices initiated by Providian and soon adopted by the bulk of its competitors. I think the episode raises some interesting philosophical questions about the nature and moral force (to borrow Alan Wertheimer’s term) of exploitation.

For instance, one of the practices Providian is said to have developed involved substituting what they called “stealth pricing” for explicit annual fees. Instead of charging all its customers a flat fee of, say, $50 per year, Providian offered cards with zero annual fee but with steep penalties for late payments, going over your credit limit, etc. To many customers, Providian’s cards thus appeared to be free. But Providian knew that many of its customers - especially the low-income, high credit-risk customers it was targeting - would wind up paying much more in penalties than they would have with a flat annual fee, even if most customers (wrongly) believed the opposite to be true.

So, at least at first glance, it looks like Providian was exploiting several kinds of vulnerability on the part of these customers.  First, the customers were vulnerable insofar as they were likely to do the things that would incur penalties. And secondly, they were vulnerable insofar as they tended to underestimate the extent to which they would do this, and hence underestimate the true cost of the cards Providian was offering. Providian took advantage of these vulnerabilities to enhance its own profit (which, at its peak according to the documentary, were around $1 billion per year).

Is this a case of wrongful exploitation? It might be, but the story raises a few questions in my mind.

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Though I’m a political philosopher, Marxism/Socialism is not my area of expertise.  Still, I was surprised when, while teaching an essay by Kai Nielsen the other day, I discovered that I really don’t know what a means of production is supposed to be.

The claim that the means of production ought to be owned publicly, rather than privately, seems to be one of if not the defining characteristics of socialism.  So it seems pretty important to be clear on what it refers to.

On the most natural reading, a “means of production” would be anything that’s used to produce.  But that seems very, very broad.  Sure, factories are means of production, but so are muffin trays.  So is my brain, and my muscles.

Do socialists hold that even these things should be publicly owned?  Does it depend on how we use them?  Nielsen says that a socialist will allow for personal private property - and muffin trays seem about as personal as one could get.  Does this mean that we’re allowed to bake muffins for ourselves?  For our neighbors?  For our neighbors in exchange for wine?

How, in other words, does a socialist (Marxist or otherwise) demarcate legitimate personal property from means of production?  Or can the two be reconciled in a principled way?  If public ownership of the means of production can be reconciled with private personal property, can it also be reconciled with some notion of self-ownership?

I’ve been working for a while on a entry on libertarianism as a political philosophy for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s meant to explain the theory and some of the most common objections to it to a undergraduate/graduate student audience. My main goal in writing it was to move beyond the standard Nozickian/self-ownership varities of libertarianism and provide an overview of consequentialist versions of the theory as well. Some mention is also made of teleological and contractarian approaches as well, but mostly just to alert the reader that they exist. At any rate, I think the piece does better than most existing summaries at reflecting the diversity of libertarian theories, even if it isn’t always able to go into great depth regarding the arguments for and against.

The work is still under some revision, so I’d be happy for any feedback I can get. If you think it’s a useful resource for your students, please feel free to share it with them (and I’d be happy to hear about it!). If you think it’s horribly biased, poorly written, conceptually sloppy, etc., I guess I’d be happy in some sense to hear that too.

The article is not up yet on IEP, but can be accessed off of SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1069042.

Thanks!