Abstract
This paper argues in favor of the end user thesis, which holds that the fundamental goal of the firm is to create products and services that provide a benefit to the people who ultimately use them. The argument turns on the interest that employees have in work that is meaningful, in the sense that it is an activity worth spending time doing. I argue that a person’s life is diminished to the extent that work constitutes a central feature, but is not meaningful in this way. I argue further that an employee’s work is fully worth doing only if her fundamental aim is to provide a benefit to the people who ultimately use what she produces, and that this is not possible within an organization that aims to maximize profits. The paper concludes by considering arguments that the efficiency gains generated by assigning the firm the goal of profit-maximization justify structuring the firm in a way that does not enable employees to have work that is fully worth doing.
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Notes
While Ciulla identifies the importance of having work that is worth doing, Raz makes the more general point that an agent’s satisfaction with her life’s events and activities depends on her “belief that these actions and events are worthwhile.” (Raz 2004, 271).
By advocating for a normative understanding of the firm that affords each employee the possibility of work that is fully worth doing, this paper rejects a variant of the “separation thesis”. In Freeman’s original formulation the thesis holds that “x is a business decision” has no moral content. (1994, 412) The version of the thesis that I address holds that it is appropriate to hive off work from the meaningful parts of our lives.
In calling for a person’s work to positively engage a world of normative value, I echo themes from Fox, who holds that true work involves participation in the great unfolding of the universe. (1994, 2) Underlying this view is a spiritual conception of the human being, in which a person only truly flourishes by positively engaging all things of value throughout the universe, which are cosmically united. The view I put forward holds that the flourishing human being respects all sources of value in the universe, but only needs to positively engage some of them in her work.
This view thus agrees with Michaelson (2019) that we can experience work as meaningful only if we judge it actually to be normatively meaningful.
Moral individualism can be contrasted with what Scanlon calls “philosophical utilitarianism”. (Scanlon, 1982, 110 ff.) Scanlon takes the latter thesis to encompass moral theories which are concerned with aggregative patterns of wellbeing. I take moral individualism to be a competing, non-aggregating thesis about how the human good functions within moral theorizing. It holds that we owe things to each other as individuals, and thus embraces what Wallace (2019) calls a “relational approach” to moral theorizing.
The value navigating conception of rationality draws upon Raz’ account of the relationship between reasons, objective values, and human well-being, in which he holds:
(a)The reasons that a person has stem from a kind of responsiveness to the world of objective value. (2004, 288), and
(b) There is a direct connection between a person’s relationship with sources of objective value, and the wellbeing or good of that person. (2004, 275).
In addition, Raz suggests that:
A person's wellbeing is diminished to the extent that one of the central components of her life does not positively engage something of objective value. (2004, 294, fn 24).
Graeber (2018) notes that, other things being equal, meaningful jobs pay less well. It is thus intelligible why people don’t always choose meaningful work.
Radzik (2005) gives a feminist defense of the presumption of mutual disinterest specifically on the grounds that women are more motivated than men to seek meaningful work.
I don’t mean to imply that competitive markets always protect workers from domination and exploitation. Indeed, we must often turn to market regulation—including ones that safeguards employees’ rights to engage in collective bargaining—in order to protect workers; however, even the combination of competitive markets and regulations can leave workers vulnerable, and in such cases businesses must voluntarily refrain from taking advantage of their situation.
One could imagine re-arranging society such that individuals do not identify with any particular job or role. It is a separate question, though, whether it is morally problematic to structure work such that people identify with their jobs, roles or professions. See Kandiyali (2020, 559) for a discussion on Marx on this point.
Veltman, for example, argues that people must engage in work, at least at some point in life, in order to develop the self- and other-regarding virtues that are partially constitutive of a flourishing human life. This is due to her view that “deliberate and sustained efforts directed at self-development or others’ development are forms of meaningful work”. (2016, 16).
Kim & Scheller-Wolf (2019) imagine a time when, due to automation, productive work is not widely available to human beings. They maintain that in such circumstances firms should re-orient their purposes in order to recognize the need to provide humans the opportunity to meaningfully participate in productive work.
Compare with Wolf, who argues that the contribution of personal relationships to the meaningfulness of one’s life depends on one’s active affirmation of “something the value of which is independent of and has its source outside of oneself.” (Wolf, 2010, 19).
See Schnell et al. for a discussion of some of the factors which correlate with workers’ experiencing of meaning in their work. In particular, note their finding that “Meaning can arise from being part of something that is valuable to others, the society and/or nature.” (2013, 550).
Recognizing that market exchanges can be simultaneously be other-directed and rationally motivated by self-interest provides a response to Marx’s charge (see Kandiyali (565 ff.)) that market-based exchanges necessarily separate human beings from each other.
To use Bratman’s terminology, an organization is a group of persons engaged in a shared cooperative activity. (1992) That being said, it is also important to remember that corporate personnel are individuals who must create meaningful lives for themselves. The resulting picture is that an organization is a place where individuals who otherwise hold a wide plurality of values pursue a particular kind of valuable activity together. The joint activity both provides a shared source of meaning for all workers, and allows space for each individual to understand how the work contributes to the meaningfulness of her life. (Yeoman, 2020, 127).
An employee can take on the role of reforming an organization that lacks a value-creating purpose. This reforming work can be fully meaningful, where the relevant “end users” of this work are fellow employees, customers, etc. I thank Steve Scalet for pointing out this path for having fully meaningful work.
It might not be possible to arrange jobs that are meaningful, in every sense of the term, for everyone who desires it. (Michaelson et al., 2014, 86) It is possible, however, to arrange for each person in society work that is worth doing, in the sense of having a worthwhile purpose.
While I argue that managers must simultaneously manage for considerations of purpose and profit, I maintain that the pursuit of profit is subordinate to the pursuit of purpose. My view is thus not subject to the “two masters” objection raised against stakeholder theories, which object that such theories don’t specify how to resolve the inevitable conflicts between the interests of shareholders and other stakeholders. (Easterbrook & Fischel 1991, 38).
Firms also have an obligation to honor the reasonable expectations of other stakeholders. While a corporation’s purpose may evolve over time, employees and other stakeholders often associate with a firm because of its particular purpose, and may reasonably expect that that purpose not be arbitrarily changed.
Kandiyali wonders whether “making decisions about what to produce on the basis of where one will make money [is] compatible with the requirement that people produce with the motivation of satisfying another’s need”. (2020, 570) I answer this question in the affirmative.
Michaelson et al. note that there is “limited agreement as to what, in addition to non-exploitation, constitutes meaningful work.” (2014, 78) My claims in this paper concern a necessary condition of fully meaningful work, and do not preclude the existence of other components of fully meaningful work.
Sometimes the argument that the market is justified due to its superior productive efficiency is intermingled with claims that the market is justified because, under certain ideal conditions, it generates Pareto optimal results. See, for example, McMahon (1981, 255). I note here that claims about Pareto efficiency are not comparative claims; that is, even if one were to show that that a certain arrangement of the market generated Pareto efficient outcomes, this by itself would tell us nothing about the comparative value of the market over non-market arrangements.
It is worth noting that having a fundamental purpose in line with the end user thesis can even give firms a competitive advantage over profit-maximizing firms with respect to certain consumers, employees, investors and communities.
A variation of this argument holds that it is justified to structure the firm with the goal of profit-maximization because it maximizes the benefits that each of the corporation’s stakeholder groups can gain from their participation in the firm’s activities. (Boatright, 2006) Even if we understand end users to constitute one of the groups whose interests are maximized, this fact would not be sufficient to make work at a profit-maximizing firm worthwhile. The claim of this paper is that in order for a person’s work to be fully worthwhile the aim of the work must be to create things that benefit end users. On this view, it would be beside the point that there was a justification available for having some other sort of aim, even if that justification turned on the ability of that aim to advance the interests of end users.
One might also argue in favor of the productivity-maximizing argument by appealing to theoretical results concerning perfectly competitive markets; however, we cannot extrapolate findings regarding the efficiency of perfectly competitive markets to actual markets, which fall short of the ideal in so many ways.
Perhaps firms with a purpose in line with the end user thesis would engage in less anti-social behavior than their profit-maximizing counterparts, and thus a society full of such firms might have superior social productivity over one filled with profit-maximizing firms.
That assessment would examine whether profit-maximizing firms are more likely than ones that aim to benefit end users to overlook or rationalize away their duties to direct stakeholders such as customers or employees, or to violate laws safeguarding the environment or protecting the stability of the market. (cf. Heath (2014, 6)) It would also examine various social and political effects of assigning firms a profit-maximizing purpose, including whether profit-maximizing firms are more likely to capture and weaken democratic institutions; or whether assigning a profit-maximizing purpose to the firm impedes the ability of societies to successfully address matters of distributive justice.
It could also reflect a different strategic ambiguity that allows them to adhere to a purpose in line with the end user thesis but not run afoul of those who believe that they have a legal and moral obligation to aim to maximize profits.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was presented to the Pacific Business Ethics Network, the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Society for Business Ethics, Seattle University, and Fordham University. I am grateful to all the participants. I am also indebted to Kimberley Brownlee, Rahul Kumar and Steven Scalet for their comments on prior versions.
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Silver, D. Meaningful Work and the Purpose of the Firm. J Bus Ethics 185, 825–834 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05342-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05342-y