Kant and Work Culture
It seems to me that modern workplace cultures are inherently transactional by nature. However transactional culture is robotic, non-humanistic, and formal. It takes up most of human life so isnt a small thing either. This transactional culture in fact, is downright immoral. It involves dehumanizing a person to a work-place object.
Kant had a notion of not using people as a means to an ends or merely as a means. But I think his examples are simply too weak. The one where you are absolved from unethical interaction if you make small talk with the waiter serving you, is too pat. Its so easy to gloss over the robotic depersonalizing of the modern work interaction as absolved via small talk.
Instead I would have to invoke the framework of Julio Cabrera who posits that life entails being unethical interactions. That is to say if modern work requires a sort of robotic non-humane or natural forms of human interaction to get shit done it is simply telling of what it reveals about modern life or life in general. We are always violating Kants second principle of categorical imperative despite Kants claims otherwise.
Also, Im not just talking obvious abuse by corporations and owners but even most worker interactions.
Kant had a notion of not using people as a means to an ends or merely as a means. But I think his examples are simply too weak. The one where you are absolved from unethical interaction if you make small talk with the waiter serving you, is too pat. Its so easy to gloss over the robotic depersonalizing of the modern work interaction as absolved via small talk.
Instead I would have to invoke the framework of Julio Cabrera who posits that life entails being unethical interactions. That is to say if modern work requires a sort of robotic non-humane or natural forms of human interaction to get shit done it is simply telling of what it reveals about modern life or life in general. We are always violating Kants second principle of categorical imperative despite Kants claims otherwise.
Also, Im not just talking obvious abuse by corporations and owners but even most worker interactions.
Comments (54)
Trade has been occurring throughout human history. So the transactional culture is inherently human. Transactional conduct, therefor, is not inherently immoral on the grounds that it is non-humanistic. Rather, what is immoral is the way you treat it, how you speak of it, and your motives for doing so, in combination with your conduct towards others during the transaction.
This certainly isn't true for me. I worked for almost 30 years with good bosses and competent coworkers. We did good work and took care of each other. I liked almost everyone and came to love some. Still, you gave me an opening, so I'll post this quote from one of my favorite essays - "Compensation" by Emerson:
Quoting Emerson
Well put.
Yeah, but how is managing a business and dealing with coworkers a natural way that you would talk with a friend or family or a member of your in group? Its not. Its depersonalizing the person because you need them as a means to your ends.
Not saying you cant make friends at work or people cant override this transactional nature, but that is a contingency and not the essence of how these arrangements work. The work would go on and make its profit whether you were ok with that particular team/company/set of people that you were a part of that you mention here in this anecdote.
Not to mention the very nature of some work is god awful boring activities you simply do cause you need to survive. Much work not related to artistic creative content would never get done without an impersonal transaction of compensation. You might find it better than other work but even that better than x work wouldnt have been done in the first place if there was no compensation involved in the first place.
Not everyone is a friend or family member, though. Treating someone as a means to an end is just as perilous in business as it is in any social context, and one can form friendly relationships and treat people morally in business as they can anywhere else.
But they cant. You do job or you get fired. You do something for a friend because they are your friend. You do something for an employer because you need to be compensated. You need to live. This is why people just dont say not today or fuck off whenever they dont want to.
:up:
:up:
Friends and family are a means to an end as well.
You're using your friends and family for your psycho-social wellbeing, for your socio-economic status, your reputation, your emergency safety net.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's the same with friends and family. Failure to do your job as a friend or family member will get you fired from the friendship or family.
It's why people get divorced, disown their children or other family members, why friendships break up.
Noone simply likes you for being you.
Not the same. You both hopefully enjoy the company for friends. And you can leave friendship and your material well-being isnt entailed by the relationship. Not so with business relationships. There is a known threat of leaving for the worker or insubordination loss of income, loss of a means to survive. You are there to do this thing and you are the tool to do that thing.
Dont get me wrong, its a no win situation. You cant really get out of it. Free ride, homelessness, suicide, die slowly from destitution.
But your psycho-social wellbeing is.
Friendships/family relationships and business relationships have different ends, but they are both means to an end.
It is not true that a person is a means to an end only in a business relationship, but not in a friendship.
Anyone who does "artistic, creative" work knows that much of that work will be "awful boring activities." Sanding wood, printing and binding documents, cleaning up when you're done, bookkeeping, etc., etc., etc.
You seem to be unwilling or unable to accept that many people just don't see things the same way you do.
Guess not. Better go kill myself whilst you enjoy bookkeeping for no money for 8+ hours a day :roll:.
I don't think so. Pessimism reveals what is intractably negative about life. One of them is the entailed transactionism, especially of the modern economic system.
You are not dehumanizing your friend though to an object. A true friend is someone presumably, who you would care for their well-being and vice versa. Let's look at some other differences:
1) A friend you can leave if the friendship is no longer beneficial. Leaving does not automatically entail that you cannot survive. Businesses know they can threaten your very survival. They can dictate you act according to their demands. If a friend demands of you and is being too demanding, you can leave without such dire hardship.
2) (Perhaps 1a) A friend is someone you are "natural" around. That is to say, you can be truly yourself without any pressures of conforming to a policy. It is the way most humans are when not pressured or molded to get a task done with incentives that will be taken away otherwise.
3) Presumably, you want to be around your friend. In a business, often you are subject to personalities, styles of interaction, and hierarchies, that you would simply not choose otherwise. You are "stuck" until you find another "fiefdom" to migrate to (if that's an option).
4) Presumably, you aren't looked at solely because of some gain they are getting from you. Rather it is enjoying their company as a person. You are not being taken advantage of based on your position. Going back to point 1, you do and act a certain way around employers because if you don't they will disapprove and fire you.
All of these come back to a main point which is that employers understand that employees are in a position of precariousness. That is to say, they need the employer usually way more than the employer needs them. Understanding this, the employer can simply dangle the possibility of termination to motivate the worker to comply with demands of the company. It is NOT a reciprocal transaction as is the case with true friends (not friends of convenience or "friends" that are clearly predatory or abusive relationships).
So yeah, you can make the case that friendships are "transactional" but I don't think in the same "means" that a company is doing. Your argument reminds of arguments that go like this:
Person 1: "You should eat more natural foods as they are healthy for you".
Person 2: "Oh silly goose, ALL foods are natural because they are made of compounds and atoms that are natural to the universe".
That is obviously an absurd point. Whilst true that technically all matter is "natural", that is a distinction that makes no difference. There are differences in the ways you are forced to interact in a business relationship that are not the same as friendships, and they are often because of the nature of how you are used as a means that violates Kant's second principle.
Now, that being said, to be a bit of devil's advocate, I can agree with you that ALL interactions are using people but then this would simply provide more evidence for Cabrera's point that human life ENTAILS being immoral.
Also, if you truly want to stop sanding the wood on your spare time, you can. If you want to keep going you can. If you want to keep doing something to gain experience you can or to get better at it. It is fully up to you and not contingent on a disincentive of not surviving.
Life itself of course means you will have to do things you may not want to stay alive, but that's a broader issue that does lead to AN, which if I bring up will get this thread booted to the ghetto of Antinatalism thread, so I dare not say it.. But I will stick to simply the fact that companies are using people and it is contingent whether the workers like the arrangement or not, as was your anecdote. Also my point with the 8 hours of bookkeeping is that it is indeed absurd for certain tasks to be done other than the arrangement of getting paid for it. Use another task if you want if bookkeeping for long amounts of time is a hobby of yours just for the fun of it or because it is meditative for you or because you just like balancing books and such.
Why is it immoral to use people? What does Cabrera say, what do you say to this?
You need to put more effort into understanding what people are saying rather than immediately crumpling it up to fit in the odd-shaped little boxes your ideas fit in. Everything worth doing includes work that, in itself, is not fun or interesting but is necessary for the full enterprise to work. As I said, sanding wood, bookkeeping, cleaning up. If you value what you are doing, you come to value even that more tedious work. And where did I say you don't get paid for it?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ah, yes. The dreaded "AN." I sympathize.
But thats my point, it all depends if you are valuing what you are doing or you are doing it because you need a paycheck. Huge difference. My hunch is most people would drop bookkeeping as a pastime once they dont get paid for it. Certainly sitting in a space X for a period of time to do task Y, much of all that would be dropped. So I refer you back to my previous posts about the nature of work and how it threatens you with no survival and this makes it different than other relations like friendship or even relations to your own interests like hobbies.
Oh please, man, we've done this dance before ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/578914
As usual, we've reached a dead end in our argument. To close the discussion out, I'm going to try a new catch phrase - That's the name of that tune.
Your relations become a skewed version of yourself to get shit done. How the negatives of this arrangement are not recognized is beyond me. Do you not see any negatives in how workplace culture manifests?
What part of "That's the name of that tune," don't you understand.
I just dont see what you were or are getting at. Cabrera as far as I can interpret, is saying that life entails violating the minimal ethical stance. If Kant is right about not using people, the workplace always violates this.
Not sure.. What is the "that" and what is the "tune"?
Kant would say if it is "merely" treating someone as a means. I would say that the arrangement of the workplace is exploitive by it's very nature because even though it is in theory "contractual", work itself is de facto not an "opt out" option lest death or severe suffering. A friendship, even family after adulthood is not so tied to survival.
Cabrera seems to say that life itself entails a certain amount of being unethical. Mixing this with the de facto arrangement of the workplace.. It is simply entailed that we must be unethically treated at the workplace. We need it to survive, and thus we must encounter it if we are to survive in this particular economic form (though I am not suggesting another form is better necessarily). The workplace doesn't care about us. They care about our capacity for production. We aren't treated as peers, but as units in a hierarchy.
I am not saying it can be another way, only this is what is the case.
Mind you, some workplaces can have better "benefits" or even "cultures" but this is contingently part of the package of the arrangement. The arrangement always means that you are still a unit and treated as a means. The package is not because you are you, it is contingent on how valuable they think you are.. When you are not valuable, they will just fire you because you are no longer a means for their end.
Mind you, you can possibly say that you "quitting" would screw the company over, but that is almost never the case. It's almost always rather the worker who "needs" the company and so puts up being used by them, than it is the other way around. The Lord doesn't just fold up shop if a serf leaves (dies), he just finds more serfs.
Kant can be wrong in some things and still be right in others.
Kant can be wrong on Kant.
Sure, as the nature of life in this world is one of eating.
You, too, eat others. But how concerned are you about the morality of that? You think that being lower on the food chain makes you more innocent?
Kant's categorical imperative, does it apply to natalism? What if everybody did that (procreated)?
Antinatalism is paradoxical - it values life & joy and for that reason promotes a 0 child policy (you would've been quite at home in the China of the 80's with its 1 child policy, just 1 tiny, babystep away from your dreams :cool:).
Not really, because ironically, FORCING a population to do something, even if to prevent ANOTHER forcing (that is to say procreating someone into the burdens of life), would be a contradiction of using a similar moral violation of forcing upon someone (in this case a personal decision to procreate) to solve the issue other moral violation (of forcing unnecessary harms onto someone). And also, of course, that isn't the reason at all why China has done that.
I see, but I thought we're arguing for antinatalism i.e. making people aware of the immorality of bringing children into this world (re your forced-to-play-the-game argument). We had a very strong case thousands of years ago when life was short, brutish, and nasty (Locke?), but now with science & technology the argument from suffering has weakened and is gonna be unsound in another (say) 500 suns. In other words the immorality of birthing children has to shift base from consequentialism to the next closest harbor viz. Kantian ethics.
Is life intrinsically immoral in the Kantian sense? Should everyone make babies (re the categorical imperative)?
Fine by me as my argument has been deontological for a long time.
Yes, I've made the case.. See backlog of hundreds of posts relating to not forcing unnecessary suffering absolutely (as is the case prior to someone's possible birth).
We can't use a consequentialist argument.
It is a violation to cause unnecessary suffering onto someone. It would be using them, even for good intentions. Prior to birth, one can prevent unnecessary suffering onto someone absolutely.. Once born, it is impossible to cause unnecessary suffering absolutely, but certainly prior to birth this rule can be followed and someone's dignity/worth/being used (by being born and thus suffering unnecessary) would not be violated.
The deontological RULE is to not cause unnecessary suffering onto others.
So you propose a combo (Kant + Bentham/Mill). :up:
Sort of, if you want to think of it that way.. I think our language in "consequential" versus "deontological" can be a bit tricky..
Clearly, "not lying" with fully understanding that the outcome would be a lie, seems to violate the principle of "not lying" so consequences matter in a certain way in deontology.. However, consequences as THE Summum bonum, I think is what distinguishes the two not that consequences should not be a consideration en toto.
And as far as unnecessary suffering being a deontological rule.. Suffering seems intuitively to be a major part of ethical consideration. And justice is often at base, not being used (not having rights violated, etc.). Combining this, one way of not "using" someone, and valuing dignity (in hypothetical or actual terms) would be not to intend to bring about situations of unnecessary suffering for someone else.
I conjecture that life is inherently/intrinsically immoral i.e. it's unethical to have children ... even in svargaloka.
Oui monsieur.
Good day.
Antinatalists like David Benatar and @schopenhauer1 value life over morality (not unlike Kierkegaard's 'teleological suspension of the ethical'), that is, they argue, in effect, it is better to prevent life than to struggle with both the personal and the public moral problem of preventing and/or reducing the suffering in individual lives as much as possible. "Destroying the village in order to save the village" does not save the village, only rationalizes an atrocity in the case of antinatalism, it only rationalizes evading moral engagement with the problem of the suffering of the living by, in effect, proposing to eliminate sufferers themselves. Why not advocate total nuclear war (or unleashing the most virulent lethal pathogens from all biolabs) engineering an extinction-event in order to "prevent bringing any more offspring into the world"? :mask:
Actually, it's more a simple solution and elegant. Don't create the burdens to overcome in the first place. Keep it simple.
But I was discussing earlier.. It's not about suffering simpliciter. It's about not violating the principle of autonomy nor causing unnecessary impositions onto others. The end result might be no person, but no person cares about no-thing, including your lament.
Also, how would an antinatalist who cares about unnecessary harm advocate what is possibly the most harmful event (nuclear war)?
Yeah, but this antinatalist evasion is too simplistic, schop ...
[quote=Louis Zukofsky, 1950]There is also the other side of the coin minted by Einstein: Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler a scientists defense of art and knowledge of lightness, completeness and accuracy.[/quote]
... which I've pointed out previously and you continue to (or can't help but) ignore.
Antinatalism is a trivial solution to the problem of suffering just like, as you said many suns ago, if happiness is everything, put everybody on a morphine drip!
That said, I conjecture thst life is inherently/intrinsically immoral. There's something not quite right about life, but I haven't got me finger on it ... yet. It might, for example, fail Kant's categorical imperative. Should everybody have children? No, right?
Right! Only those who want to have children for no other reason but to love them and bring them up strong. My (panglossian) guess is that's only about one in four, if thst many, who actually have a children. :smirk:
The rest, three-quarters of the species, however, needs to be sterilzed! :brow:
:lol: Rational reproduction, like rational medicine (it works) or like rational spending (epic fail).