W. Jared Parmer

In this chapter, I develop an account of meaningful work that unifies existing findings (philosophical and empirical) about meaningful work by clarifying why the goods of work commonly identified are the goods of work, and why, when this bundle of goods is realized in someone’s work, her work is meaningful in a distinctively valuable way. This unifying account begins with an analysis of what we mean by meaningful work, which draws on ideas from Bernard Williams to suggest that meaningful work is good work that the worker (appropriately) values in a way not conditional on her economic need to work. When someone’s work is meaningful for her, she would do it even if she did not need the money, benefits, insurance, and so forth that it provides. I then sketch a naturalistic, perfectionist conception of meaningful work to complement this analysis. I argue that what makes meaningful work meaningful, and what makes meaningfulness in work valuable, is that such work exercises our natural capacity to cooperate with one another, especially in the mode of expert specialization and division of labor in coalitions built on trust. This account can clarify why bullshit jobs are especially opposed to meaningful work, and be a framework for assessing various future-of-work scenarios.

This papers responds to a recent argument by Sophie Gibert concerning the wrong of wrongful manipulation. I argue that the more serious explanatory question is whether manipulation is wrong by default, not whether, when manipulation is wrong, this wrong is ‘basic’. The former better elucidates the significance of Gibert’s arguments. I then respond to her argument, construed as the argument that manipulation is not wrong by default. First, the putative counterexamples she presents are drawn from areas of work and play – legal advocacy, negotiation, and gameplay – where the moral status of manipulative tactics is very much in dispute; thus, her reported intuitions are not persuasive. Second, even if we grant that manipulation in these contexts is morally permissible, we can explain how it remains wrong by default by appealing to competitive conventions that realize common epistemic, aesthetic, and hedonistic goods. I also show why Gibert’s reply to this conventionalist maneuver fails.

Nudging works through dispositions to decide with specific heuristics, and has three component parts. A nudge is a feature of an environment that enables such a disposition; a person is nudged when such a disposition is triggered; and a person performs a nudged action when such a disposition manifests in action. This analysis clarifies an autonomy-based worry about nudging as used in public policy or for private profit: that a person’s ability to reason well is undermined when she is nudged. Reasoning well is a component of self-guidance, which is an aspect of autonomy and so something there is reason to promote, preserve, or respect. However, a person can reason well when she is nudged: Many of these heuristics are good rules to reason with, and she can be flexible with respect to them when she takes there to be a better way to reason. Along the way, this paper uncovers several design specifications for responsible nudging, and discusses open empirical questions. However, nudging’s being compatible with reasoning well crystallizes a distinct worry about manipulation: that nudge designers can rely on nudged people guiding themselves toward the designers’ own ends. Manipulation of this sort exploits one aspect of autonomy (namely, self-guidance) to undermine autonomy in other respects.

As automating technologies are increasingly integrated into workplaces, one concern is that many of the human workers who remain will be relegated to more dull and less positively impactful work. This paper considers two rival theories of meaningful work that might be used to evaluate particular implementations of automation. The first is achievementism, which says that work that culminates in achievements to workers’ credit is especially meaningful; the other is the practice view, which says that work that takes the form of an open-ended practice is especially meaningful. Of the two, the practice view is the better tool for assessing the future of meaningful work, because achievementism is explanatorily inadequate in two ways. Moreover, the practice view can explain why the most meaningful forms of work cannot be automated. A procedure can only be automated as long as the steps are defined, whereas, in such work, which steps to take is indefinitely open to redefinition. This reveals the real threat to meaningful work to be a political-economic one. The relevant ethical questions there have to do with how much creative control workers retain in crafting their own jobs, when those jobs involve meaningful work in collaboration with machines; and how to liberate workers from jobs that do not involve meaningful work, which should be left to machines anyway.

Gamification calls for cogent philosophical analysis and is a valuable opportunity to explore manipulative design, in which users are manipulated into doing something by using an artifact just as it is designed to be used. This chapter analyzes gamification as the implementation of inducements to striving play in artifacts that are not themselves games. Implementing such inducements is a species of a more generic form of design in which users are provided with tools for reasoning, along with scaffolding that putatively justifies using those tools in particular ways and for particular purposes. This chapter further argues that gamification, and this more generic mode of design, is manipulative when, and because, using these tools in such ways serves the designers' hidden purposes. Finally, this chapter argues that using manipulatively gamified or designed artifacts typically hinders us in making our lives more meaningful.

Subjectivism about meaning in life remains a viable option, despite its relative unpopularity. Two arguments against it in the literature, the first by Susan Wolf and the second by Aaron Smuts and Antti Kauppinen, fail. Pace Wolf, lives devoted to activities of no objective value need not be pointless, unproductive, and futile, and so not prima facie meaningless; and, pace Smuts and Kauppinen, subjectivism is compatible with people being mistaken about how meaningful their own lives are. This paper elaborates a novel subjectivist view according to which becoming more fulfilled makes a life meaningful for a person. Becoming more fulfilled is a process that has being more fulfilled as its endpoint, and, as with any process, it can come to a halt before it is complete. More substantively, becoming more fulfilled by some x is a matter of aiming to do various activities well, where doing them well at least partly constitutes benefiting x, and requires that one be more fulfilled by x than one presently is. Finally, this paper shows why the becoming more fulfilled view is to be preferred to the standard subjectivist theory, the fulfillment view, and how it produces intuitive results.

This article explains Nietzsche’s high regard for cruelty. After offering a conceptual analysis of cruel acts, it argues that they are an apt means of expressing one’s power, drawing from work on Nietzsche’s psychological views and doctrine of the will to power to do so. In addition to the benefit that perpetrators of cruelty can enjoy in virtue of expressing their power, victims, by enduring cruelty, can cultivate qualities essential to overcoming the terrible truths of existence. Finally, central to most of Nietzsche’s remarks on the matter, self-directed cruelty has deep connections with the process of sublimation, which makes possible greater and more varied modes of life. In light of this picture, the liberal equation of suffering with harm becomes questionable, as does the insistence that cruelty deprives an individual of her agency. Self-cruelty, in particular, comes to look like one of the best expressions of agency.