Abstract
Prior scholarly approaches to meaningful work have largely fallen into two camps. One focuses on identifying how work can contribute to a meaningful life. The other studies the antecedents and outcomes of workers experiencing their work as meaningful. Neither of these approaches, however, captures what people look for when they seek meaningful work—or so I argue. In this paper, I give a new, commitment-based account of meaningful work by focusing on the reasons people have to choose meaningful work over other options. I draw on philosopher Ruth Chang’s account of voluntarist reasons (reasons that arise from an act of the will) to argue that commitments can create distinctive reasons to pursue certain work. It is the presence of these distinctive reasons that makes work meaningful.
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Notes
Rosso et al. elsewhere distinguish between the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningfulness,’ but here they are referring to both (2010: 95): “Following tradition, we also use the broad phrase ‘meaning of work’ to encompass both meaning and meaningfulness.” In other words, their point here is that the empirical literatures on both meaning and meaningfulness at work center on individuals’ perceptions of their work.
A similar argument is made by William MacAskill (2014), who argues that if one wants to support certain charitable causes, it is in general better to pursue a lucrative career that will enable one to pay multiple other people to do the relevant charitable work than to become a charitable worker oneself. After all, if one only cares about the charitable goal, it should not matter who accomplishes it, and if one can make enough in a non-charitable role to pay the salaries of multiple charity workers, then one can do more to achieve the goal by donating a large proportion of one’s earnings to support those workers than by merely becoming one such worker.
The notion of being on a par I borrow from Chang (2017), and I will discuss Chang’s account in detail in the next section.
Note that this commitment need not be lifelong for it to make the disability activism position a more meaningful job to choose now than the mosquito net job.
I am assuming that if it is objectively worthwhile for someone to participate in some work, then they have objective reasons to participate.
That there is an objective reason to pursue certain work does not mean that there is always, on balance, greater reason to pursue that work. Even if an option has some value, there may be stronger reasons to avoid choosing it.
Chang suggests that we can only generate voluntarist reasons when the relevant normative criteria do not allow fully determinate measurement of the difference in choice-worthiness between the options. However, Chang and others have argued that this is likely to obtain in many, if not most, of the decision-making scenarios we face (Parfit, 2016; Chang, 2013, p. 178; but c.f. Dorr, Nebel, & Zuehl, 2022).
On the other hand, some philosophical discussions of flourishing emphasize the importance of pursuing one’s interests, suggesting that meaningful work may in at least some cases also contribute to a meaningful life (e.g., Feinberg, 1974).
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Acknowledgements
There are many people to whom I owe my gratitude for helping me develop this paper. Special thanks go to Rob Hughes for his mentorship, encouragement, and critical comments at every stage of this paper’s development. I am also deeply grateful to Amy Sepinwall, Katherine Klein, Alan Strudler, Brian Berkey, Christopher Michaelson, three anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting, the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, and the British Academy of Management Annual Conference for their invaluable comments. Any errors remain my own.
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Mortimer, S.A. What Makes Work Meaningful?. J Bus Ethics 185, 835–845 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05356-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05356-6