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Contributive Justice: An Exploration of a Wider Provision of Meaningful Work

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Abstract

Extreme inequality of opportunity leads to a number of social tensions, inefficiencies and injustices. One issue of increasing concern is the effect inequality is having on people’s fair chances of attaining meaningful work, thus limiting opportunities to make a significant positive contribution to society and reducing the chances of living a flourishing life and developing their potential. On a global scale, we can observe an increasingly uneven provision of meaningful work, raising a series of ethical concerns that need detailed examination. The aim of this article is to explore the potential of a normative framework based upon the idea of contributive justice to defend a fairer provision of meaningful work.

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Notes

  1. Adrian Walsh (1994, 248) concludes that “meaningful work (i.e., eudaimonian activity in the workplace) is a legitimate distributive good, which should be included alongside other distributive goods such as wealth, education, leisure goods, and income”. Yet while we may be able to identify jobs that in their job description offer opportunities to exercise and develop skills that demand engagement with theory, in practice we can only distribute such jobs within a small group provided all commit to do a fair share of tedious tasks as well. At a global level, the task of distributing meaningful work fairly becomes unfeasible. This type of practical impediment pushes the distribution of meaningful work beyond the realm of what can be addressed through principles of distributive justice (cf. Lamont & Favor, 2013).

  2. See Yeoman (2014, 237) for a discussion, primarily questioning the real freedom people have to choose the work they will do in the labour market.

  3. For strong scepticism that the principle of equality of opportunity shall ever be more than a mere ideal, see Mijs (2016).

  4. For an excellent discussion of the job market for academic philosophy and its effect on diversity and well-being, see Behrensen and Kaliarnta (2017).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants at workshops in Mexico City, Budapest and Campinas, Isabella Trifan, Georges Félix, the journal’s editor and the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback and Michael Pockley also for careful language editing on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

This study was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship UNAM-DGAPA [National Autonomous University of Mexico, no grant numbers are given] and a postdoctoral fellowship by FONDECYT/CONICYT No. 3170068.

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  1. Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios en Bioética, Universidad de Chile, Diagonal Paraguay 265 - Of. 806, Santiago, Chile

    Cristian Timmermann

  2. Instituto de Estudios Internacionales, Universidad de Chile, Av. Condell 249, Santiago, Chile

    Cristian Timmermann

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Timmermann, C. Contributive Justice: An Exploration of a Wider Provision of Meaningful Work. Soc Just Res 31, 85–111 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0293-2

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