> I don't exactly follow you here (can't quite identify the assumptions
> you're working with).
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My bad; drifting somewhat from what Woj. and Carrol were lamenting regarding the bogusness of individuality and choice under contemporary capitalism, I'll be explicitly non-creative and tell you I'm lazily following Wittgenstein's repudiation of meaning determinism.
>Things can have value or worth, even if people
> do not have free will.
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Agreed, yet it seems the problem with Woj. and Carrol is the pessimism and related assertions regarding the determinism of worth-individuality-choice under capitalism as subversive of the free will we would indeed have if we could use the latter to get rid of capitalism. This creates a tension and can lead to tired assertions of 'false consciousness' etc. I have problems with that but we have gone too many iterations on the gordian knot of the dialectics of agency-institution[s] to resolve the issue via email or even journal articles.
>Yes, for the determinist, people did not
> choose the worth, but that's irrelevant to the worth of the thing.
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Ok, but it seems from what Woj. and Carrol are writing that the commodities [school uniforms and the like] and individualities that are produced and experienced under contemporary capitalism don't refer or have worth precisely because they claim consumers don't *really* choose them, which, it seems to me, sets up a bogus opposition between constraints and choice that I questioned earlier. That kind of pessimism is boring and self-defeating. I'm happy to be wrong if that is not what Woj. and Carrol are asserting.
> Why tangle up the worth of the thing with the question of
> free will? --This seems like a strange imposition of free-
> market principles onto a philosophical argument (if people
> freely choose something, then it has worth/exchange value)!
>
> Miles
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Well after studying lots of economic history-theory whathaveyou I don't think the term 'free-market' refers to 'anything' we can recognize. However, the worth of many things are dependent on our relatively free choices. One need not follow neoclassical econs. theory of consumer choice to realize that this is so. Catholic parents obviously think that the tradeoffs involved in having their kids wear uniforms in order to get them the education they hope will be of worth as they grow up is worth the choice they make [ I went to a Catholic school for K-2nd grade, I was too busy enjoying kick ball and learning how to spell to care about clothing, but then I was living in Hawaii at the time so I was usually as close to naked during the day as a Catholic could get :-)]. To tell them they haven't really made a choice will come across as a form of patronizing "my description of what you are doing trumps your description of your own behavior" that was prominent among the practitioners of EST.
Ian