Sec 5 5
- 1. Sec 5-5 The Human Fulfillment Model
- 2. • Human Fulfillment Model: work is the primary activity through which people develop their full potential as human beings. – Opposite of the classical model – Both models agree that the good life involves the development and flourishing of the human potential. – Classical model views work as hindering the development of human potential, the human fulfillment school views work as a primary means for this development.
- 3. • Philosophical roots of this school: lie with the classical Greek philosophers who argued that humans had a natural potential, or telos, and that the good life was a life spent developing or fulfilling that telos. – Theological ethics: work can be the process through which this potential is fulfilled. – What is this potential that can be fulfilled through work? • Distinction between work as any general activity requiring perseverance, diligence, and concentration and work as employment. – What is lost if we do not work? » If we are never engaged in activities requiring perseverance, diligence, and concentration. – What happens to individuals when they become unemployed?
- 4. • Example: Student golfer who plays at golf but never works to improve his game? He would get bored, frustrated and eventually lose interest. He becomes apathetic, passive, and the game would lose its value. – We might say that diligence, perseverance, and concentration improve whatever talents and abilities to which we apply them. – Intellectual skills improved when we focus our attention on what is required for performing task. – Diligence, perseverance, concentration are character traits, what philosophers call virtues, that contribute to the improvement of human well-being. You are improved as a person when you have the ability to approach tasks with such a temperament. – People who don’t work at any task risk becoming lazy, careless, and apathetic. – Developing good work habits contributes to a character that is capable, competent, effective and skillful. • Parents seek to instill such good work habits to children to provide them with important lifelong skills. • Psychological study concluded that the willingness and capacity to work in childhood is the most important forerunner, more important than native intelligence, social class, or family situation, of mental health.
- 5. • Unemployment has costs beyond the loss of income – Psychic cost of unemployment: loss of self- esteem, and self- respect, stress, anxiety, depression, isolation, and apathy are common consequences. – Social costs of unemployment are very high. • Employment has disappeared from the poorest neighborhoods in most large cities. • Chronic unemployment can literally destroy a community. • Work can provide psychological goods as high self-esteem and self-respect was well as both stable mental and physical health. • Work also provides workers with social goods such as friendships, companionship, as sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose.
- 6. • Human fulfillment model – Suggests that these psychological and social benefits are more than merely subjective and personal preferences. These are not simply goods that an individual chooses to value. The character traits developed and the ends achieved through work are connected to living a fulfilled and meaningful human life. They are connected to attaining the human telos. – It acknowledges that not every job contributes to the development of human potential. • However the proper kind of work and the right kind of workplace can contribute to this development. – It claims that individuals and work exist in a reciprocal relationship. – Individuals exercise control over their jobs, but jobs also influence and shape individuals . – The challenge for business ethics is to a articulate the type of work that can foster the full development of human potential
- 7. • Hedonistic model of work is simply a means to further human ends. – Work’s value is merely instrumental and worker’s guiding question is “What will this work do for me? • Human fulfillment model challenges us to ask further questions: “What will this work do to me? What kind of person will I become through this work? (even work that does good things for me by providing an income may do bad things to me e.g. lowering my self-esteem, harming my mental and physical health, etc.)
- 8. • E.F. Schumacher (economist) – Bad work: is mechanical, artificial, divorce from nature, utilizing only the smallest part of man’s potential capabilities; it sentences the great majority of workers to spend their working lives in a way which contains no worthy challenge, no stimulus to self perfection, no chance of development, no element of Beauty, Truth, or Goodness… • Karl Marx – Human potential or telos can be drawn out or repressed by work: alienation – Under capitalism: workers face a life of alienation – Different types of alienation occur within capitalist system: from the products of their work, from the creative process of work itself, and from their very essence as social creatures. – Humans are social beings who both create and express themselves through their labor. – Through work humans create not just products, but also the very social world in which they live. – Work is a social activity and as social beings, humans have the opportunity to express this humanity through work. – Social structures also shape and influence human attitude, beliefs, and values, work also serves to create our own character
- 9. – According to Marx in the capitalist economic system, particularly in the division of labor, assembly line production characteristic of industrial capitalism, workers are alienated from the products of their labor, from the activity of work and from their fellow humans. – Workers and their products are treated as mere means to the end of profit. – Workers are separated from what they produce, they lack control over both the products and the productive activity itself and they exist as mere cogs in a machine
- 10. • Pope John Paul II 1981 Encyclical Letter, Laborem Excercens – Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish humans from the rest of creatures. – Only humans are capable of work – Genesis: human are created in the image and likeness of God and humans are called forth to subdue the earth. – Work an essential part of human nature. • Humans create work in order to attain their needs and wants; but work also shape humans
- 11. • Gregory Baum: – It is through labor that people create their world and it is through the same labor that in a certain sense they also create themselves. – Humans must transform a portion of nature through labor to have food and shelter. – In order to improve the conditions of survival, people must invent a division of labor, a social organization, and a system of authority. – Labor creates society. Humans are creating the social and cultural world that socializes them, creates their consciousness, attitudes, beliefs, values, and interests. In this sense through labor humans are creating themselves by determining what kind of person they become.
- 12. • Through work we exercise our freedom and autonomy in making choices and directing our lives • Work provides the occasion for developing our talents and exercising our creativity. • Through work, humans create their own society and culture and thereby create their own identities. • Work is an expression of our nature as social beings; it prevent us from falling into a solipsistic and egocentric life.
- 13. Philosopher Al Gini’s summary of the human fulfillment model Descartes was wrong. It isn’t Cogito Ergo Sum, but rather, Laboro Ergo Sum. We need work, and as adults we find identity and are identified by the work we do. If this is true then we must be very careful about what we choose to do for a living, for what we do is what we’ll become. To paraphrase the words of Winston Churchill- first we choose and shape our work, then it shapes us.