S. Chris Zhang
20 May 2026
Law and Philosophy, UPF
Doctoral Thesis Defence / Viva
Justice, Autonomy, and Self-Employment
Supervisors
Iñigo GONZÁLEZ-RICOY (University of Barcelona)
Jahel QUERALT (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Examiners
Anca GHEAUS (Central European University)
Pablo SCOTTO (University of Barcelona)
Tom PARR (University of Warwick)
The Bifurcation
Two Divergent Realities
The Freelance Professional (Opportunity-Driven)
- Voluntary exit from corporate life — "pulled" by the promise of autonomy.
- Sets own rates, genuine independence.
- A vehicle for self-authorship, enabled by capital and skills.
The Single Mother (Necessity-Driven)
- "Pushed" into self-employment as a precarious survival strategy.
- Bears risks shed by the formal economy.
- An illusion of independence — disguised subordination.
Key Takeaway: This "bifurcation" reveals self-employment as a "deeply fractured social form." The same label describes both genuine independence and disguised subordination — a normative puzzle demanding philosophical attention.
The Puzzle
The Question
How can the self-employed be wronged, particularly when they have chosen their path and lack a specific boss who is responsible for their plight?
The Central Claims
Relational and Institutional Achievement
Meaningful work is not a purely individualistic pursuit. Celebrated ideals of self-employment are hollowed out if the worker remains an "unsupported self" facing market forces alone.
Structural Injustice
The meaninglessness and precarity faced by millions is not a personal misfortune or fair price of freedom. It is a form of structural injustice — patterned disadvantage arising from institutional design, resistant to individual exit.
Structure
Roadmap
- 1. The Invisible Half of the Workforce
- 2. A New Compass: Meaningful Work
- 3. Ideals and the "Unsupported Self"
- 4. The Four Asymmetries of Injustice
- 5. The Dual Guarantee
Context
The Invisible Half
01
A Pervasive Reality
Nearly half of the global workforce is self-employed.
02
The Philosophical Gap
An excessive focus on the employer-employee relationship ("private government" — Anderson), rooted in the "parallel case" argument: if democracy is legitimate for the state, it must also be for the large corporation.
03
Exclusion by Omission
Major works on justice in the workplace fail to mention self-employment at all — rendering this vast group theoretically invisible.
The Ideology of
"Self-Employment"
The label flattens crucial power dynamics and obscures underlying structural vulnerabilities.
- Flattens Power Dynamics: Treats all independent workers as powerful market actors.
- Individualises Risk: Treats systemic risks as personal preferences or entrepreneurial failures.
- Narrativises Dependence: Frames economic dependence as "independence" — masking disguised subordination.
- Legal Exclusion: Employment-centric frameworks treat the self-employed as anomalies, denying them standing to claim employee rights.
Methodology
Beyond the Statistics: A Philosophical Lens
Normative Political Philosophy (Non-Ideal Theory)
- The Starting Point: Confronting the complicated empirical reality of the modern labour market.
- The Dialogue: Weighing real-world evidence against ethical principles (Rawlsian reflective equilibrium).
The Approach
- The Threefold Aim: Conceptual clarification, normative evaluation, and normative prescription.
- The Goal: To neither romanticise the entrepreneur nor pathologise the gig worker, but to evaluate the justice of their conditions.
- The Method: Self-Employment is often taken to be meaningful.
Structure
Roadmap
- 1. The Invisible Half of the Workforce
- 2. A New Compass: Meaningful Work
- 3. Ideals and the "Unsupported Self"
- 4. The Four Asymmetries of Injustice
- 5. The Dual Guarantee
Framework
Beyond Subjectivism
Meaningful work isn't just about feeling fulfilled. Pure subjectivism can mask exploitation and injustices.
A Non-Reductive View
Meaningful work is a value-laden practice combining subjective resonance and objective worth.
Neither pole alone is sufficient; they are mutually reinforcing conditions.
The Construct
Four Dimensions of Meaningful Work
Synthesising Gheaus & Herzog's "central goods" account, Veltman's "meaningful life" account, and Michaelson's normative account into a cluster concept:
1. Developmental
Growth, skill cultivation, and the exercise of complex capabilities.
2. Contributive
Producing objective value for others; connecting effort to a larger, worthwhile project.
3. Relational
Fostering community, social recognition, and mutual respect.
4. Integrative
Resonance with core identity and life narrative.
Analysis
The Ambivalent Promise
When applied to self-employment, the dimensions reveal hidden perils:
Developmental
"Navigational intelligence" vs. "expertise dilution" and burnout from the "Generalist's Dilemma". "Life composition" as a distinct excellence.
Contributive
Two avenues: job and idea creation. Transformative "visionary" creation vs. "situational" problem-solving or "aspirational" creation.
Relational
Building alternative communities vs. structural fragmentation, competition, and isolation. Success requires a "relational infrastructure".
Integrative
Occupational freedom vs. social misrecognition. Suspended between the "independent innovator" and the "precarious outcast".
Structure
Roadmap
- 1. The Invisible Half of the Workforce
- 2. A New Compass: Meaningful Work
- 3. Ideals and the "Unsupported Self"
- 4. The Four Asymmetries of Injustice
- 5. The Dual Guarantee
Why Endure It?
The pursuit of self-employment is often driven by powerful ideals.
01
Autonomy
The desire to be answerable to no one. Distinguishing autonomous choice of work, autonomy through work, and autonomy within work.
02
Individual Commitment
Four forms — calling, self-realisation, self-provision, and self-respect.
03
Care
Flexibility for accommodating care (restructuring work) and enacting care (ethos of attentiveness).
The Critique
The Hollow Ideals
Without institutional support, these ideals turn against the worker:
Autonomy
A "double-edged sword": hierarchical dependence on a single employer is replaced by diffuse dependence on a constellation of clients, platforms, and volatile markets. Autonomy alone is insufficient.
Passion
Instrumentalised as a mechanism of self-exploitation (e.g., unpaid self-branding). Where fair background conditions are absent, passion becomes a vector for exploitation.
Care
Corroded by the anxiety of survival — care cannot be authentic when the worker lacks basic security.
The Core Claim
The "Unsupported Self"
When granted formal legal status of independence, but denied material and relational infrastructure, work cannot be meaningful.
Meaningful work is a relational and institutional achievement.
Structure
Roadmap
- 1. The Invisible Half of the Workforce
- 2. A New Compass: Meaningful Work
- 3. Ideals and the "Unsupported Self"
- 4. The Four Asymmetries of Injustice
- 5. The Dual Guarantee
Structural Injustice
The Four Asymmetries
Not random misfortunes but systemic flaws in institutional design that generate relations of inferiority (Kolodny):
1. Basic Security
Exclusion from the welfare state ("risk individualisation") and lack of collective voice.
2. Legal & Social Recognition
Misclassification, the false employee/entrepreneur binary, and the "broken bargain".
3. Substantive Role
Degraded roles, contributive injustice (outsourced menial tasks), structural fissuring, rent-seeking.
4. Long-Term Risk
Concentration of disadvantage, entrapment ("neo-villeiny"), and "temporal poverty".
Structure
Roadmap
- 1. The Invisible Half of the Workforce
- 2. A New Compass: Meaningful Work
- 3. Ideals and the "Unsupported Self"
- 4. The Four Asymmetries of Injustice
- 5. The Dual Guarantee
The Solution
The Dual Guarantee
Securing the "Supported Self" in a democratic marketplace requires two mutually reinforcing pillars.
Together they counter the security gap, correct the recognition deficit, provide means to refuse degrading labour, and disrupt the concentration of long-term disadvantage.
Robust Collective Capabilities
The capacity to contest.
Right to organise, bargain, and strike (exempt from anti-cartel laws). Without material independence, these rights remain hollow.
Right to organise, bargain, and strike (exempt from anti-cartel laws). Without material independence, these rights remain hollow.
Substantive Material Independence
The capacity to exit.
An unconditional income floor (e.g., UBI). Without collective rights, material independence risks entrenching isolation.
An unconditional income floor (e.g., UBI). Without collective rights, material independence risks entrenching isolation.
Next Steps
Future Research Horizons
Emerging directly from this thesis, my postdoctoral agenda expands on these themes:
The Inversion of Meaningful Work: How normative ideals are weaponised as disciplinary mechanisms. (Target outlet: Journal of Applied Philosophy; recently presented at CEU)
How Self-Employment Alienates: Solo self-employment structurally generating new forms of isolation.(Target outlet: Philosophical Studies)
Justificatory Meaningful Work: Constitutive goods of work vs. foundational conditions.(Target outlet: Business Ethics Quarterly)
The Fractured Collective: Collective responsibility in a post-firm economy. (Target outlet: Journal of Social Philosophy; presented at Groningen)
Meaningful Work as Reciprocity: What duties of contribution do the self-employed owe to society? (Target outlet: Politics, Philosophy, and Economics)
Is Well Done Enough?: The normative force of meaningful work beyond mere proficiency. (Target outlet: Journal of Business Ethics; presented at UPF)
Post-Work and Self-Employment: Self-directed work as a model for meaningful activity if paid labour's necessity is reduced. (Target outlet: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Justice for the Self-Employed: Diagnosing systemic disadvantages as four asymmetries of structural injustice (Target outlet: Journal of Applied Philosophy).
Summary
Three Academic Contributions
01
Centring Self-Employment
Corrects a significant oversight in political philosophy by challenging the exclusive focus on the employer-employee relationship.
02
A Multidimensional Framework
Provides conceptual tools sensitive to power and precarity to navigate the deep ambivalence of independent labour.
03
The Illusion of Independence
Reveals how formal occupational freedom, when stripped of material and relational support, actively generates new forms of structural subordination.
A just society must critically evaluate the distribution of meaning in work — building the relational and institutional infrastructures that make a genuinely meaningful working life a possibility for all.