Department of Politics at Princeton University

Samuel Arnold is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University.  His research interests include the liberal tradition, distributive justice, and the place of meaningful work in liberal egalitarian theory.  Sam won a Princeton University Center for Human Values Graduate Prize Fellowship in 2009-2010, a Quin Morton Teaching Fellowship in 2010-2011, and was nominated for the Princeton Graduate Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009.  His work has appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy.      

Ph.D., Politics, Princeton University (September 2011); M.A., Politics, Princeton University; M.A., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh; A.B., summa cum laude, Bowdoin College 

Dissertation Title: Work as it Might Be: A Theory of Justice in Production

Committee: Charles Beitz, Alan Patten, Stephen Macedo, Anna Stilz

Dissertation Abstract: Standardly, liberal theory has little to say about "justice in production": its principles do not apply in any obvious way to the division of labor or to the structures of authority and power within firms.  This lacuna undermines liberalism's plausibility.  Surely a complete theory of social justice should address work, given its central place in people's lives.  My dissertation repairs this flaw in liberalism by expanding the scope of liberal egalitarian commitments to democracy, equality of opportunity, and distributive justice.  Properly understood, these liberal commitments apply in novel and far-reaching ways to the realm of production, requiring, among other things, the democratization of workplaces and a more equal distribution of occupational goods (like meaningful work) across workers.  Because the dissertation reaches these radical conclusions using widely shared liberal premises, it revises our understanding of liberalism's implications even as it breaks new ground on the practical problem of justice in production.