“Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument” Against the Employer-Employee System and for Workplace Democracy
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
This article discusses how the contemporary system of labor relations treats employees as things rather than persons thus denying their humanity, and violating rights they have because of their personhood. Instead, work should be democratically controlled by the people doing it
Responsibility’s inalienability is a descriptive fact not a moral claim. Giving up de facto responsibility is impossible.
The moral basis here is the principle that legal and de facto responsibility match. The legal system applies this principle when it holds the person that actually committed the crime legally responsible for it. When an innocent is held legally responsible, that is a miscarriage of justice.
The fact that the workers are oppressed is what the argument is establishing
I am not rejecting the sensibility or agreeability of the principle on its merits as a moral principle, but I do reject your characterization of any representation of responsibility as being a “descriptive fact”.
I feel, unfortunately, that such conflations represent a thematic flaw latent throughout the argument.
Simply because we approve of particular facets of social relationship and social structure, we may not assert them as facts, transcending our preferences, whether individual or shared, except as that they are facts of our preferences.
Responsibility has many meanings. We are referring specifically to de facto responsibility, which is descriptive concept about who intentionally did an action. De facto responsibility’s meaning combined with facts about humans imply its inalienability. We can imagine fictional scenarios where the facts about humans are different such that de facto responsibility is alienable.
In reality, the whole product of the firm is a premeditated and purposeful result of the workers’ actions. @workreform