Content Role
2.5 Other Considerations
In previous sections, I focused on the internal and external benefits and burdens of
work. In this section, I turn my attention towards its independent benefits and burdens. To repeat, these concern the interests that an individual has independently of
her role as a worker. Again, rather than summarise the various possibilities, I shall concentrate on only two: (i) an individual’s interest in living in a productively efficiency
economy, and (ii) an individual’s interest in living in a thriving democracy.
2.5.1
Efficiency
Certainly, individuals have an interest in living in a society whose economy is productively efficient, at least to some extent. Most obviously, every individual has a
very weighty interest in living in a society whose economic institutions are arranged such that there is sufficient wealth to guarantee for her a decent social minimum when
she enjoys her just entitlements. A consequence of this is that she has very weighty reasons to prefer arrangements and distributions of work that deliver this result.
Despite this, we should resist the conclusion that an individual retains an interest in living in a productively efficiency economy once we have met this threshold.
In other words, above a given level, we may have reasons to prefer steady state economies. J. S. Mill’s defence of the steady state economy begins as follows:
the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward... I know not why it should be a matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than anyone needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth.62
Announcing his support of this idea, Rawls states that no reasonable conception of
justice could be committed to the maximisation of wealth, and that ‘We should not rule out Mill’s idea of a society in a just stationary state where (real) capital
accumulation may cease’.63
Our reasons for accepting this conclusion are negative. In particular, it is not
clear why we should aim at wealth maximisation, especially when so few individuals pursue such a goal in their own lives.64 Moreover, perhaps even fewer individuals
would pursue wealth maximisation if everyone enjoyed ethical independence that did not have their ambitions unjustly shaped by parents, schools, and the media. However,
this is just speculation. Of course, there is much more to say about the advantages and disadvantages of aiming at wealth maximisation. I take up some of these complications
in later chapters. For now, it is enough simply to draw attention to the importance of these considerations to our account of justice in work.
62 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. Jonathan Riley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1848]), 127.
63 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 63. There are further complications here, particularly because it is not clear how these claims cohere with Rawls’s views on distributive justice. For discussion of these complications, see Andrew Williams, ‘Linguistic Protectionism and Wealth Maximisation’, in Axel Gosseries and Yannick Vanderborght (eds), Arguing About Justice: Essays for Philippe Van Parijs (Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2011).
2.5.2
Democracy
There is a considerable academic literature that draws upon insights from political sociology to examine how various arrangements of work affect a society’s democratic
credentials.65 Clearly, if there is a link between these two, and if an individual does have
an interest in living in a thriving democracy, then this will register as an independent
interest to which our account of justice in work should be sensitive. In this vein, and following Mill,66 Martin O’Neill writes:
it is plausible to think that, unless individuals have some first-hand experience in the deliberative direction of some collective enterprise (such as a firm), then they will lack the skills that will be needed in order to participate fully in “the free use of public reason” in democratic politics. The idea here is that participation in more local and partial forms of democratic deliberation is a necessary precondition for full and effective participation in democratic deliberation at the national level.67
65 There are too many contributions to mention. Selected almost at random, examples include Robert Dahl, After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Joshua Cohen, ‘The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 6 (1989), 25-50; Waheed Hussain, ‘Nurturing the Sense of Justice: The Rawslian Argument for Democratic Corporatism’, in Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson (eds), Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond
(Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2012); and Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
66 Mill, Principles of Political Economy. See also Helen McCabe, ‘"Under the General Designation of Socialist": The Many-Sided-Radicalism of John Stuart Mill’, (University of Oxford: DPhil Thesis, 2010), 162-9.
67 Martin O’Neill, ‘Three Rawlsian Routes Towards Economic Democracy’, Revue de Philosophie
The present argument aims to provide a justification for workplace democracies and, at least, greater democratic provisions at work. I examine this argument in some detail in
the next chapter. For now, my aim is simply to report this argument and, in doing so, to lay the foundations for the more thorough normative investigation that follows.
Of course, in reporting this justification of workplace democracy, I do not mean to imply that it is the only justification that can, or has been, given. On the
contrary, advocates have provided a large range of arguments in support of workplace democracy, and only a small number of these rely upon claims about the importance of
living in a thriving democracy. Others rely upon claims about domination, about the quality of individuals’ working lives, and about the alleged similarity between the state-
citizen relationship and the employer-employee relationship, for example.68 For the
most part, I do not address these arguments in this thesis. This is because, doing so
adequately, would leave me insufficient space to address a wide range of other questions that have received less philosophical attention.