Public ideas on the morality of work
Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need – Voltaire
Is working from home immoral?
Elon Musk certainly thinks so, according to Dale Tweedle of Macquarie University.
In his Conversation contribution Working from home immoral? A lesson in ethics, and history, for Elon Musk he describes and debunks Musk’s idea that it’s immoral for people in occupations that don’t require a physical presence, to enjoy the privilege of working from home when factory, drivers and warehouse workers don’t have such opportunities.
Tweedle points out that for much of human history, before the industrial revolution, the home and the workplace were one and the same.
He also considers Musk’s criticism in terms of Kant’s and Rawls’s theories of distributive justice. By neither framework does it stand up.
Is working too much immoral?
Something strange has happened in our relationship with work, Simone Stolzoff writes in her Atlantic article The moral case for working less. To quote:
For much of human history, the more wealth an individual accumulated, the less time they spent working. But in the past 50 years, a strange trend has occurred: despite gains in wealth and productivity, many college-educated Americans—and especially college-educated men—have worked more than ever. Instead of trading wealth for leisure, American professionals began to trade leisure for more work.
She puts the argument for working less. Her case is not just about movements such as the four-day week, which many are advocating on the basis of productivity, but rather it is more about the intrinsic value of life that isn’t centered on paid work. “We should work less because it allows us to be better humans”, she writes.