Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 1, No.

1, 1984 141

Work and the Human Essence

ROBIN ATTFIELD

ABSTRACT Jenkins and Sherman hold that belief in the value of work is
artificially inculcated and that a 'leisure society' is desirable and possible,
as well as being necessitated by the introduction of microprocessors. After
distinguishing between meaningful work and labour (first section), I reply
obliquely to their case by contending that meaningful work affords most
people their best chance of the necessary good of self-respect (second
section), and that it constitutes the exercise of an essential human
capacity, the development of which is necessary to human wellbeing (third
section). Because of the contingent connections between employment on
the one hand and meaningful work and self-respect on the other, we should
recognise the value of work and plan for full employment (fourth section).

It is likely, though far from certain, that by the late 1980s towards four million
workers in Britain alone will lose their jobs as a result of the introduction of micro -
processors, and that unemployment will increase sharply in other developed coun -
tries for the same reason. Clerical staff would be those principally affected. The
prediction is a controversial one: some hold that micro-processors will in fact create
jobs. But even their case predicts some increase in unemployment: for it is held that
micro-processors will help Britain to outdo its competitors, who will in varying
degrees be driven out of business. So whether it is located in Britain or exported, on
all accounts there would be a diminution in the number of those employed.
One reaction to this likelihood is that the affected nations must become leisure
societies. "First", Mr Clive Jenkins, General Secretary of ASTMS is reported as saying
[1] , "we must destroy the work ethic": and elsewhere he and Barrie Sherman make the
following claims:
People have two fundamental needs: to live and to reproduce. For this
food and the ability to maintain a constant body temperature are essential
and this implies a need to obtain clothing and shelter. It is to this end that
work is aimed and anything beyond is a luxury in excess of survival. [2]
We do not believe that work per se is necessary to human survival or self-
esteem. The fact that it appears to be so is a function of two centuries of
propaganda and an educational system which maintained the 'idea' of work
as its main objective, but which singularly failed to teach about leisure and
how to use it. This is not to say that lack of work ... would be acceptable
to society as it stands at the moment; indeed this would be patently
untrue ... This need for work is, we would argue, an ingrained and
inculcated attitude of mind. [3]
... people believe that they should work, irrespective of the income prob-
lem. Patterns of identity-loss, vandalism, depression, apathy, and increas -
ingly, anger are the symptoms of unemployment. But we cannot believe
that these reactions to loss of work are inherent in human nature. Instead
142 R. Attfield

these symptoms represent a series of conditioned responses which even today

are being reinforced by (the) establishment. [4]
Rather the work ethic must itself become redundant [5] , and people must be enabled and
educated to cope with lives of leisure.
Whether or not our current attitudes to work are conditioned in the ways related, these
passages raise the prior question of how far it is desirable or acceptable that a large
proportion of those in a society able to work should have no opportunity to do so. Many
of the reasons for answering in the negative would take me too far afield: I shall
concentrate almost entirely on the issues of what is good about work, and what harm is
suffered by the individual who lacks it.

Meaningful Work
First we must distinguish between work and labour. P. Herbst, whose apposite
account I for the most part follow [6] , begins by classifying them as unalienated and
alienating respectively: "Roughly speaking, work is conceived to be a species of
unalienated action, labour is activity tending to alienation". Without dissenting from
the implicit evaluations of work and labour, I mean to employ less controversial
terms, and after characterising work and labour without reliance on notions such as
`alienation', to introduce arguments about their merits and demerits in the two
sections following.
As Herbst says, work and labour have much in common, however they are
distinguished. They consume people's time and energies, may be done more or less
quickly, competently and conscientiously, tend to exclude other simultaneous pursu -
its, and are commonly directed to production, so long as production is construed
broadly enough to include services. But work may be contrasted with labour in that
the product of work is the objective of the worker, whereas the point of labour is the
rewards that it brings. These largely consist in pay and what it will buy, though they
may also include friendships formed at the workplace. Labour or toil is the price paid
for these advantages.
Thus labour is justified, on this account, by quite contingent and extrinsic
advantages, and can lose its whole point when they lapse. Work, on the other hand,
can itself be a pleasure, just as, on Aristotle's account, pleasure consists in various
unimpeded activities. Besides this, work is justified, at least in part, by a product to
which it is non-contingently related. Often, of course, it has extrinsic and contingent
justifications too: but these do not distinguish it, as it shares them with labour.
Accordingly work, unlike labour, must have a point which the worker can
endorse, involving standards of excellence which he or she can also endorse for the
kind of product to be produced. With labour, however, this often fails to be the case
—though not always: when it is the case, labour temporarily becomes work. The
worker, to put things another way, can always identify with his or her work: and
works, or can work, autonomously. Before the implications of this are explored, it
is worth drawing attention to Herbst's conclusion about the descriptions under
which work is best understood.
Herbst here criticises the view on which none of the many alternative descriptions
of an activity is more basic than any other. On this view, frustration in one's work can
be avoided by endorsing any re-description of one's work which it will bear, such as
making money, so long as one's efforts are successful under that description: and one
is then achieving what one is about. In actual fact people cannot care about
 Work and the Human Essence 143

their work under just any description, such as making money, much as they can
desire to make money. Since in work, as not always in labour, the worker cares about
the excellences of the finished product, he or she has reasons for directing effort and
energy accordingly: and his or her endeavours will not be understood unless they are
described in a manner equal to these facts, in such a way that their accomplishment
under that description is necessary for a product of quality. For 'good workmanship is
constitutive of good work' (i.e. of a good product) but not constitutive of money -
making.
Now as 'work' is commonly used of both work and labour in Herbst's senses of
those terms, I propose from now onwards to use 'work' in its ordinary sense, and to
call what has so far been characterised as `work' meaningful work'. Andreas
Eschete, who discusses meaningful work [7] , relates that an important part of its
meaningfulness has to do with its object, and this is also the basis of Herbst's
distinction; so it is reasonable to introduce his phrase 'meaningful work' for 'work'
in Herbst's sense. It is, moreover, worthwhile to pursue his further claim that "a
central feature of meaningful work is that it is autonomous".
"The fact that a piece of work bears the distinctive stamp of the worker", he
continues, "is a source of the satisfaction found in it." Indeed the context suggests
that Eschete means no more by 'autonomous work' than work which "displays our
part in its making". Now it might be doubted whether such a distinctive stamp is
really a necessary condition of autonomous work, at least in the more usual sense of
`autonomy', i.e. that of self-determined activity on the part of the agent [8] ; but it
is clearly at any rate part of a sufficient condition, where the other part is, perhaps,
that one's stamp or distinctive contribution complies with one's freely adopted
standards. Eschete's own account of some of the conditions of autonomy in
productive work serves to bring out what is required if work is to be done according
to such standards; and indeed it may well be a necessary condition of autonomous
work in the usual sense, as well as in Eschete's sense, that it should involve at least
the attempt to comply with such standards.
Thus where tasks have been reduced by others than the worker to a routine, little
or no room is left for autonomy, and autonomy can be introduced only by either
eliminating them or by consolidating them in ways which call for a greater degree
of skill and judgement. Routine labour, certainly, can have its own enjoyments,
particularly as a holiday from thought; but only where the activity reflects skill or
judgement on the labourer's part can it embody the worker's own standards. Indeed
the presence of skill or judgement is, I should maintain, a necessary condition of
meaningful work, for otherwise there is no scope for the worker to introduce
standards of his or her own, about which he or she can care.
But the existence of such standards is insufficient for work to be meaningful.
Even in tasks which are not reduced to a routine, autonomy may, as Eschetd says,
be lacking if the worker has little or no say in planning the work. Work need not
have an intrinsic point for the worker just because it is demanding, or just because
(another of Eschete's requirements) it is varied. The worker will not be likely to
endorse the point of allotted tasks or the standards required for good workmanship
unless he or she is enabled to have some say in deciding how their work is to be
executed.
Such, then, is meaningful work, on the basis of an account which Eschete derives
from Karl Marx. It is interesting that it tallies so closely with the more traditionalist
account of workmanship supplied by Herbst. Certainly the exact limits of meaning -
ful work have not been specified: more needs to be said, for example, about which
144 R. Attfield

activities count as production. But enough has been said to allow the questions to be
raised of what is desirable about meaningful work and whether people need it.

Meaningful Work and Self-Respect

Eschete treats it as obvious that meaningful work confers self-respect, and argues that
this benefit can be in conflict with the good of maximising welfare. But does
meaningful work confer self-respect, does it confer it uniquely, and in what way is
self-respect beneficial? I consider the last of these questions first.
John Rawls contends that self-respect is a primary good, something which it is
rational to want whatever else is wanted [9] . Under self-respect Rawls includes both
of the following elements: "a person's sense of his own value, his secure conviction
that his conception of the good, his plan of life, is worth carrying out" and also "a
confidence in one's ability, so far as it is within one's power, to fulfill one's
intentions". From this account it is easy to see why Rawls considers self-respect a
primary good. "Without it", he remarks, "nothing may seem worth doing, or if some
things have value for us, we lack the will to strive for them. All desire and activity
becomes empty and vain, and we sink into apathy and cynicism."
Now if the Aristotelian claim is granted that in the right conditions unimpeded
activities are as such intrinsically desirable, then Rawls' remarks, if true, indeed
show that everyone has reason to want self-respect and to be glad of it if they have
it: for, according to Rawls, without self-respect everyone stands to be deprived of
these activities and the pleasures they constitute. Further, Rawls' account of self-
respect does indeed imply that those who lack self-respect will lack either the
conviction that the standards they endorse are worth caring about or the will to
comply with them, and that they may lack both the conviction and the will. Indeed
my only reservation with Rawls' account is that in requiring people to have a plan
of life if they are to have self-respect, he seems to deprive of self-respect and its
benefits the many people who have no plan of life. It is in fact enough if a person's
conception of his or her own good involves their having a more-or-less consistent
scheme of priorities for living: for this is enough to ensure that they endorse
standards affecting their own actions. This modification of Rawls' account of self-
respect leaves his argument for its being a primary good intact, while also
representing it as accessible to a much wider range of agents. (There are, no doubt,
other reasons, connected perhaps with the development of a personality, why self-
respect is a primary good and constitutive of a worthwhile life, but I cannot go into
them here.)
Our modified account of self-respect also upholds Eschete's assumption that
meaningful work confers self-respect. For the agent of meaningful work has standards
and aims about which he or she cares; and also is able to apply them and carry them
out. For his or her work is constitutive of its products, so if these products have the
qualities looked for, the standards and aims are being satisfied. Meaningful work,
then, actually satisfies the requirements of self-respect itself, except where work goes
badly, or, there again, except where the agent lacks a scheme of priorities for living:
but for work of this kind to go badly is at least often a sign not a lack of self-respect
but of the dissatisfaction with imperfect work or conditions which self-respect
occasions; and again, though meaningful work does not entail that the worker has a
scheme of priorities, it tends to generate rather than to retard the growth of a sense of
what in life is worth doing.
But is meaningful work indispensable for self-respect? Many people exhibit self -
 Work and the Human Essence 145

respect who are not in paid employment. But this is not a conclusive objection to the
indispensability claim. For the requirements of meaningful work can be satisfied by
many activities besides paid work, such as study in school or university, care at house
of the young, the old and the sick, voluntary work for charities, housework, gardening
and, in many peasant communities, subsistence farming. It should, all the same, be
granted that it is possible to have self-respect without having meaningful work, and
some elderly gurus may be in this position. But the possibilities are limited, if only
because, as Rawls points out, self-respect is liable to collapse without others' esteem,
and accordingly without the belief among his of her neighbours that an agent is
complying with accepted standards for worthwhile activities. Moreover it is hard to see
how these standards could change so as to accommodate activities which involved no
meaningful work, at any rate if they involved no effective contribution to society
either. So in all probability meaningful work is the principal, though not the invariable
basis of self-respect in most people's lives.
Work that is not meaningful, however, does a good deal less to foster self-respect.
For the worker who has to earn a living at this kind of work is compelled to
undertake tasks which are either too routine, too repetitive or too much dictated by
others to identify with his or her work, and has to see himself or herself as using
prime time and energies on work about which he or she does not care. Indeed points
such as these are central to Jenkins' and Sherman's case. There may still, however, be
self-respect arising from the awareness of ability to support one's dependants, so
self-respect may not be wholly undermined, and may to this extent be sustained.
Moreover the loss of employment brings with it the loss both of what is for many
people their main opportunity for self-respect in meaningful work and of the sense of
the ability to support oneself and one's dependants. The blow to a worker's morale can
often, combined with the frustrations consequent on diminished income, undermine
self-respect too much for it to be regained through alternative kinds of unpaid but
meaningful work such as those mentioned above. Thus the desirability of a 'leisure
society' is already cast in doubt because of the diminished opportunities for self-
respect.

Production and the Human Essence

Perhaps, though, the self-respect which it confers is not the only way in which
meaningful work is inherently beneficial. The argument linking meaningful work and
self-respect turns on certain formal features of the former, but not on its
productiveness. I now wish to investigate whether it is good because humans are in
some way essentially productive, and are only fulfilled by productive activity. To do
this I need first to summarise an argument which I have expounded more fully
elsewhere [10] .
Let the essential capacities of a species be those capacities in the absence of which
from most members of a species it would not be the species which it is. In this sense,
of course, what is essential need not be distinctive but may be common to several
species, just as what is distinctive may be quite inessential. Now it is, I maintain, a
necessary truth that to live well, develop, or flourish as a member of a species
involves being able to exercise the essential capacities of that species. Thus to
flourish as a jaguar requires command to many faculties common to mammals, plus
others such as the ability to run faster than most others can. And similarly a human
only lives well if he or she is able to exercise essential human capacities; and is
benefited by being enabled to do so. These capacities include among others the
146 R. Attfield

capacities for linguistic communication, for experiencing the wide range of emotions
which that makes possible, for some measure of reflection about both practical and
theoretical matters, and for forming plans and decisions on the basis of reasons of
one's own. If so, then to live well as a human requires the development in some
degree of these (and other less distinctive) essential powers.
This argument about the desirability of the ability to exercise essential human
powers has the advantage over those employed by Rawls about primary goods
that its conclusion is necessary. Rawls' arguments about what is good for people
all depend on contingent premises, mostly about what people prefer, and thus
have the weakness that if, in some Brave New World, everyone's preferences
were caused to change out of all recognition, his conclusions would cease to
apply. No doubt there would actually, in such a society, be liabilities in the ability
to think for oneself. Yet those lacking it would still have failed to develop as
people, and this the argument from essential capacities brings out.
Arguments from essential capacities have recently been criticised by Anthony
Quinton [11] and by Mary Midgley [12] . In particularly Quinton criticises
Aristotle, and Midgley criticises Marx, for arguing from people's differentiating
capacities. If this approach were correct, the healthiest and happiest humans
would be those in whom ratiocination and language, together with cooking and
laughter, were well developed, whether or not the capacities which humans
share with other animals, such as those for physical fitness and natural
affection, were developed at all. So the argument from differentiating capacities
fails. But the objection has no weight in connection with the argument from
essential capacities presented above. Indeed there is considerable sympathy,
from Midgley at least, for the view that what is good for people is largely
determined by their nature, a nature of course which is in some measure shared
with other animal species.
Accordingly it remains possible that important conclusions can be derived from
Marx's belief that production is of the human essence. The conclusions would not
include what Quinton calls 'ethical Stakhanovism', the belief that the best person
is the most productive, for, as Quinton points out, Marx avoided Aristotle's
mistake of arguing from human capacities directly to ethical conclusions. But the
argument from essential capacities concludes not that good people exercise their
capacities in a high degree, but only that the ability to exercise these capacities is
necessarily good for people, and that in this sense they live better if they have it.
Whatever moral, social and political implications this conclusion has (and I shall
draw attention to some of them in the fourth section), it does not of course imply
that these same people are morally good. By the same token Marx's premise
remains of potential relevance to the argument from essential capacities. Besides,
as Quinton says, it is clearly superior to Aristotle's account, treating man "as a
natural object and not as a pure intelligence". (Though Aristotle has at times a
broader account of human nature than this, it cannot be denied that the account of
human excellence in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics lends substance to the
charge.)
Now Quinton and Midgley both consider two interpretations of Marx. On one of
these, Marx's point is that people are productive in that, unlike the animals, they
process materials and provide the means of subsistence by the use of tools, rather
than just gathering what they need. Here Midgley points out that bees, beavers
and termites process materials too, a sound point which Marx himself had in fact
made before her about the very same species [13] . Quinton for his part interprets
Marx's understanding of production as including productive activity in the realm
of ideas, including theories and works of art; and his interpretation is plausibly
upheld by
 Work and the Human Essence 147

Marx's claim that "... man constructs also in accordance with the laws of beauty" and
that he more than "reproduces himself intellectually" (which suggests that he at least
does this) [14] . Granted this interpretation, Marx's point cannot turn on the
processing of materials or the use of tools, for theories can be produced without
either.
The second interpretation supplied by Midgley is of production as the free and
deliberate planning of what one does, whether it be gathering, processing or anything
else. As Midgley comments, this could be applied to all human activities, and not only
to what we mean by 'production'. It would follow that if Marx is looking for the
differentiating mark of people, 'production' is the wrong concept, for sport and
worship are among the range of activities which can be freely and deliberately
planned, but are not production. But when we consider Quinton's presentation of
Marx's conclusion, we find that a differentiating premise is not required: "the good
life is a life of free and creative productive activity, a life in which men's productive
essence is actualised without alienation". This account is well supported by the
passages cited by Quinton, and may be accepted for present purposes, as long as it is
realised that other interpretations besides it remain possible. It requires as a premise
that humans are essentially capable of free and creative productive activity, which can
issue in material goods, services, theories, or works of art. (I take 'alienation' to mean
to non-actualisation of one's generic essence, and thus to require no extra premise to
justify its insertion in Marx's conclusion.)
Quinton in fact maintains that Marx's account of the good life for a human requires
that his or her essence be actualised freely, "and this is to introduce something that is
not intrinsic to his conception of the human essence at all". But the text of the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts suggests otherwise.
They (sc. nonhuman animals) produce only under the compulsion of
direct physical needs, while man produces when he is free from physical
need and only truly produces in freedom from such need.... The products
of animal production belong directly to their physical bodies, while man
is free in face of his product.... This production is his active species-life.
[15]
So when Quinton holds that Marx's conclusion is "rather a large and perceptive
empirical generalisation about the real conditions of long-lasting human satisfaction
than a consequence of his account of the essential nature of man" there is reason to
dissent. Indeed even if free and creative activity failed to produce long-lasting
satisfaction (perhaps as a result of the demoralising effects of pollution), Marx's
conclusion would not be undermined. For it concerns not the generation of
satisfaction but the good of people as people.
But is Marx's premise true? Is free and creative productive activity an essential
human capacity? The inability of infants and of some mentally defective and some
senile people to be productive is not itself an objection: for it is not a requirement
for an essential capacity that all members of the species concerned should currently
be able to exercise it. The question is rather whether a species of which not as many
as most members possessed this capacity or potential would be human. The only
ground for hesitating over a positive answer is the possibility that not enough
humans may have creative potential.
On the other hand, most humans do manifestly possess a capacity for meaningful
work. Is meaningful work creative? It need not be innovatory, and, as we have seen,
it need not even bear its agent's distinctive stamp. But it is creative in that it is
148 R. Attfield

autonomous, and that the products do depend on the skill or judgement and, to some
degree, on the planning of the worker, and take their shape from his or her
conception of the operation; and this remains true even if an identical product could
have emerged from the work of someone else with the same conception. So, in the
derivative sense in which 'creative' is applied to humans, a sense which does not
require originality any more than it requires ex nihilo reification [16] , we may truly
assert that meaningful work is creative.
Can we then construe Marx as holding that the capacity for meaningful work is an
essential human capacity? Marx, as we have seen, was probably thinking of free and
creative productive activity, including the production of theories and of works of art
as well as of services and material goods. But there is no difficulty in extending the
application of 'meaningful work' to the production of theories and works of art. Thus
it was with complete consistency that Herbst, after rejecting (cogently enough) as
descriptions of work (or, in the usage of this paper, of meaningful work) `earning a
living', 'making a reputation for oneself', 'earning promotion' and even `serving his
company' and 'doing his duty', accepts as work descriptions proper `building a house',
'composing a quartet', 'working at a philosophical problem' and `educating a student'.
Now the production of theories and of works of art, like that of goods and services,
was probably, as Quinton claims, included by Marx as productive activity, and, as we
now see, the same range of cases can also count as meaningful work. So Marx's
premise can indeed be taken as signifying that an essential capacity of humans is the
capacity for meaningful work.
But if so, it follows by the argument from essential capacities that the ability to
exercise meaningful work is necessarily a benefit to people, and that they are harmed
by the failure to come by it, the harm lying in their failure to develop as people.
Indeed, so long as 'creative' is construed as above, Marx's conclusion is vindicated
that "the good life is a life of free and creative productive activity, a life in which
men's productive essence is actualised without alienation". Or rather the conclusion
is established that this is one constitutive feature of a good life.

Self-Respect, Self-Realisation and the Leisure Society

Is there a right to work? As we have seen, it is impossible to leap from essential
capacities to obligations, rights and virtues. But some bridging premises can be
supplied. Thus I shall take it for granted that a natural right exists if any only if
there are moral reasons for a certain treatment just because of the nature of the
species of the individuals affected; and that there are moral reasons for supplying
people, where possible, with those benefits in the absence of which they suffer
harm and those needs but for the satisfaction of which they are stunted as people.
There is no need for present purposes to discuss the status of these propositions:
for as long as they are accepted, and it is also granted as following from the
argument in the second and third sections that to lack the opportunity for
meaningful work is to be deprived of a constitutive element in the good life for a
person, then there is indeed a natural right to meaningful work. (Marx himself, of
course, rejected a rather stronger notion of natural rights: but his beliefs about
unalienating work are consistent with there being needs of the fulfilment of which
no-one should be deprived. So long as we are aware of the conceptual leap
involved, there is no harm in transposing Marx's ideas into the apparently
incongruous conceptual framework of natural rights.)
Now micro-processors and other forms of automation eliminate jobs many of
 Work and the Human Essence 149

which involve comparatively little scope for meaningful work, and others of which
afford considerable such opportunities. (It is all too easy for those who are not
clerks to assume that the threatened jobs are mostly soul-destroying, and leave no
room for initiative: my own experience of a clerical job does not bear out this
view.) Nonetheless, as Jenkins and Sherman might maintain, in some cases the
threatened jobs are ones which have on balance failed to maximise self-respect,
even allowing for the awareness of the worker that he or she was supporting self
and dependants: and in cases where the loss of a job releases time and energy for
unpaid meaningful work, the worker actually benefits by being made redundant.
Perhaps, then, they might say, if people could be persuaded to attach less
significance to employment, there might actually be an overall gain to people's
self-respect. There again, the new jobs which result from automation tend, or so the
Soviet writer G. Volkov claims [17] , to be varied, skilful and reflective ones, and
are thus a gain to the self-respect and self-realisation of those fortunate enough to
be allotted them; though Jenkins and Sherman refer to research in Scandinavia, the
USA and the UK which suggests the very opposite [181.
As against all this, most work embodies traces of autonomy and meaningfulness,
and its autonomous and meaningful content could in the great majority of cases be
increased in some of the ways mentioned by Eschete. Again, besides the non-
contingent connections for which I have been arguing between meaningful work on
the one hand and self-respect and self-realisation on the other, there is also, as we
have seen, a contingent connection between paid employment and self-respect.
Moreover a great many people are unable to any significant extent to perform
meaningful work outside regular employment, whether through lack of the esteem,
encouragement or fellowship of others, the loss of morale which usually accompanies
the loss of a paid job, or the lack of an ability to envisage the value which meaningful
work could have for their lives. Education might help here: but I doubt whether it
could help enough.
Thus for most people the best hope for meaningful work lies in paid employment:
and unless automation and micro-processors maintain the total number of jobs,
which as we saw at the outset appears unlikely to happen, this hope is going to be an
empty one for a large and growing number of discarded workers. Indeed their
natural right to meaningful work is not going to be respected.
This right is not, of course, the only moral consideration, and the other considera -
tions may make it imperative to introduce micro-processors. Nevertheless, since
there is a strong moral case against avoidable unemployment, their introduction
should be gradual, phased, and restricted to workplaces where the other considera -
tions make it strictly necessary. Moreover, as Clive Jenkins has also said, every
moment is precious in the search for new working arrangements, arrangements
which will generate additional jobs involving meaningful work. Encouragement is
also needed for unpaid work such as ancillary help for the social services, literacy
programmes and the keeping of allotments, not only because of the beneficial
consequences but also because of the increased opportunities for meaningful activity
outside employment.
In practice only the state is able to devise such arrangements on a sufficient scale. It
should devise jobs which are creative in the sense used above and which are also
socially useful, even where the market value of the goods or services produced does
not maximise the worker's productivity in purely economic terms. There is in many
cases, of course, an economic case for keeping workers in employment rather than
having to pay them unemployment benefits: but my case is quite independent of it.
150 R. Attfield

Rather than laying off workers and preventing school-leavers from finding oppor-
tunities to work, societies such as Britain which have the resources to do so should
aim at full employment, and seriously set about the devising of opportunities for
meaningful work for all those able to take them up [19] .

Correspondence: Robin Attfield, Department of Philosophy, University College,

Cardiff, PO Box 78, Cardiff CF1 1XL, Wales, United Kingdom.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[1]The Guardian, 13th September 1978. ASTMS is the acronym of the Association of Scientific, Technical
and Managerial Staffs.
[2]jENKINS, CLIVE & SHERMAN, BARRIE (1979) The Collapse of Work, p. 16 (London, Methuen).
[3]Ibid., p. 141.
[4]Ibid., p. 158.
[5]Ibid., p. 182.
[6]HERBST, P. (1973) Work, labour and university education, in: PETERS, R.S. (Ed.) The Philosophy of
Education, pp. 58-74 (London, Oxford University Press). He derives the distinction between work and
labour from ARENDT, HANNAH (1958) The Human Condition, chapters 3 and 4 (University of Chicago
Press).
[7]ESCHETE, ANDREAS (1974) Contractarianism and the scope of justice, Ethics, 85, pp. 38-49.
[8]This is the sense employed, for example, at p. 146 of DOWNIE, R.S. & TELFER, ELIZABETH (1969)
Respect for Persons (London, Allen & Unwin).
[9]RAWLS, JOHN (1972) A Theory of Justice, section 67 (London, Oxford University Press). Rawls once
mentions meaningful work as a human good (p. 425), but otherwise says little about it.
[10] In ATTFIELD, ROBIN (1974) On being human, Inquiry, 17, pp. 175-192.
[11] QUINTON, ANTHONY (1975) Has man an essence, in Nature and Conduct, pp. 14-35, Institute of
Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8 (London, Macmillan).
[12] MIDGLEY, MARY (1979) Man and Beast: the Roots of Human Nature, pp. 206-209 (Hassocks,
Sussex, Harvester Press).
[13] In the first Economic and Social Manuscript, translated and edited by BoTromoRE, T.B. (1963) Karl
Marx, Early Writings, p. 128 (London, C. A. Watts).
[14] Ibid.
[15]Ibid.
[16] The sense of `create' and 'creative' from which this sense is derived and the relation between the two
are discussed in ATTFIELD, ROBIN (1980) Religious symbols and the voyage of analogy, International
Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 11(4), pp. 225-238.
[17] Voi..Kov, G. (1972) Man and the Challenge of Technology, pp. 36f (Moscow, Novosti Press Agency
Publishing House).
[18] The Collapse of Work, p. 146.
[19] I am grateful for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper to various colleagues and
commentators, to the Philosophy Seminar, to the Royal Institute of Philosophy (Northern Branch),
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and in particular to Barry Wilkins and to Mary Midgley.