Suppose a physician advises a woman to delay her planned pregnancy for a few months in order to significantly reduce the likelihood that her baby will suffer with Spina Bifida. If the woman chooses to ignore this advice and conceives soon after, I believe most people would consider it a matter of common sense that the child thus born is a victim of this woman’s negligence, even if it is fortunate enough to not be burdened with Spina Bifida. This common (...) sense judgement appeared to have been done in by the fact that the timing of conception can be identity-influencing, and so the child that is born only exists because of its mother’s decision to ignore her physician’s advice. However, recently, contemporary contractualist theories have been used to make sense of preconception negligence towards persons whose existence is a result of that same negligence. I will briefly discuss this interesting development and then show how this retrieval of the common sense judgement comes at a great cost to prenatal reproductive autonomy. (shrink)

Upon first studying Capital, I believed, as have most Marxists I have known, that the answer to the question posed in the title of this article was obvious. After all, Marx declared that surplus labour is “extorted from the immediate producer, the worker,” and capitalist accumulation involves “the theft of alien labour time.” He also insisted that capitalists “extort” surplus value and divide amongst themselves “the loot of other people’s labour,” so that the wage exchange, in spite of its equality, (...) is “only the age-old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of.”. (shrink)