Card 6.22 · Root VI — The Philosophy of X Family
Philosophy of Work
Is work a cost to be minimised or a good in itself?
Philosophy of work asks what work is, what it does to the person doing it, and what a society owes workers.
On this card
Where it sits
Under VI. Philosophy of X. Borders 3.3.3 Business ethics, 6.4.1 Distributive justice, 6.21 Meaning in life, 6.16 Philosophy of technology.
New to the fields of philosophy? Read the guide
The rival answers
| Position | Work is |
|---|---|
| Instrumentalist | A means to income; its value is what it buys |
| Perfectionist | A site of development; good work exercises human capacities |
| Alienation critique | Potentially a good, made a harm by how it is organised |
| Craft tradition | Valuable through mastery and the standards internal to a practice |
| Anti-work | A historically contingent institution that could be much reduced |
| Work as vocation | A calling; work as a form of service |
Where do you stand?
Is work a cost to be minimised or a good in itself?
One tap, no sign-up. You can change your answer at any time. Answers are counted anonymously.
Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aristotle | 384–322 BCE | Greek | Leisure as the condition of the highest activities |
| Ibn Khaldun | 1332–1406 | Islamic | Labour as the source of value |
| Karl Marx | 1818–1883 | European modern | Four forms of alienation under industrial production |
| Hannah Arendt | 1906–1975 | Continental | Labour, work and action distinguished |
| Matthew Crawford | b. 1965 | American | Manual competence and the knowledge it involves |
Talk about it here
Conversations about this question in Economy & work:
- Does philosophy make you better at your actual job, or just more annoying at it? 7 replies
- Skilled manual work demands more thinking than most office work 6 replies
- Markets are morally neutral tools 5 replies
- Epictetus was a slave and I drive the 413. What counts as ‘up to us’ at work? 5 replies
- Kirat karni: is honest work a form of worship, or is that just a nice story about work? 5 replies
Join free to ask about it Everything in Economy & work
Connections
→ 3.3.3, 6.4.1 · ↔ 6.21, 6.16, 3.5, 6.7 · ◇ alienation, perfectionism about work, anti-work · ○ Axial Age; Islamic golden age; Modern; Table 7
→ depends on · ↔ borders: genuine overlap, neither prior · ◇ answered by: points from question to answers · ○ appears in: points to the timeline and the comparisons
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 319.