Sec 5 6
- 1. Sec 5-6 The Liberal Model of Work
- 2. • Liberal Model of Work: middle ground between the conventional model and the human fulfillment school. • Liberals: individual workers should be free to choose the ends of their work. People choose to work for many reasons and may willingly accept undesirable jobs simply as means to earn money • Liberal deny there is some single human end that all work should serve.
- 3. • Like the human fulfillment school, liberals recognize that humans can be significantly influenced by their work and argue that we should make ethical assessments of work on the basis of how work affects workers. • Liberal part company with the fulfillment school when they specify the grounds on which that assessment is made • Human Fulfillment school makes that judgment on the basis of some vision of what makes a good, a meaningful human life. • Liberals make that judgment in terms of how work affects a worker’s ability to make free and autonomous decisions about their own life.
- 4. • Norman Bowie: explains his own theory of meaning full work as middle ground between those who think the value of work is to be left to the whim of workers and those who defend an “objective normative definition” of meaningful work. He believes: “ that that one of the moral obligations of the firm is to provide meaningful work for employees. However, just what constitutes a meaningful work has been a contentious matter. What is a meaningful work? Meaningful work defined as what worker define it? Should it be given an objective normative definition which would permit managers to provide it even if the employees do not agree? Why should each manger provide each worker a meaningful work as he or she defines it? On the other hand, a standard problem with the objective normative definition that can be given.”
- 5. • If the meaning and value of work is whatever the worker determines it to be, then we cannot say that workers have any right to, nor management any duty to provide, meaningful work • Then workers right fail to distinguish rights from mere desires • Range of management duties would be impossible to fulfill • Defender of this hedonistic model, sympathetic of the free market, workers have no right to meaningful work • The meaning and value of work, like all the conditions of work, should be left to the free choices that emerge from individual bargaining between employee and employer. • Liberal approach to work reject this view as too impoverished an understanding of human freedom • Individual may choose to work tedious, difficult, depressing, low paying, even dangerous jobs. • If there are few alternatives available, we shouldn’t honor this as a “free” choice.
- 6. • Bowie argue that the more people are compelled to work, the greater the responsibility to ensure that workplace conditions are as humane as possible. In such cases the very necessity of work obligates us to investigate what work does to workers – What kind of people are being created in the workplaces? • Liberal do not believe that there's some substantive, objective norm to determine the kind of person one should be. – Would managers be permitted to create such people even if employee do not agree? – Should we design workplaces that force people to be creative, or sociable, or that force them to fully develop their talents and abilities? – Who should decide such matters?
- 7. • Liberal theories of justice: individual freedom is a fundamental and necessary element of social justice. • Liberals have always rejected classical political theories that specify some common, specific, and particular way that all people should live. Even if we could specify what that life should be, it would seem that the only way to achieve it would be by forcing individuals to live lives other than the ones they choose. • Most liberals also reject the subjective and relativistic implication of more libertarian versions. It is not good for humans to do just anything they want. Some ways of living are morally better than others. • Liberals resolve this tension by reference to such general characteristics and goods as autonomy, rationality, and physical and mental health (primary goods). These goods are necessary in order to achieve whatever other goods an individual choses to pursue.
- 8. • Work can be valued as a means for attaining whatever ends an individual chooses. However, if in the process of work these primary goods are destroyed or undermined, individuals have little chance of attaining their other ends. The liberal model argues that individuals have certain right in the workplace and that these rights function to protect certain central and primary goods.