The Desire For Work As An Adaptive Preference

Abstract

Many economists and social theorists hypothesize that most societies could soon face a ‘post-work’ future, one in which employment and productive labor have a dramatically reduced place in human affairs. Given the centrality of employment to individual identity and its pivotal role as the primary provider of economic and other goods, transitioning to a ‘post-work’ future could prove traumatic and disorienting to many. Policymakers are thus likely to face the difficult choice of the extent to which they ought to satisfy individual citizens’ desires to work in a socioeconomic environment in which work is in permanent decline. Here I argue that policymakers confronting a post-work economy should discount, or at least consider problematic, the desire to work because it is very likely that this desire is an adaptive preference. An adaptive preference is a preference for some state of affairs within a limited set of options formed under unjust conditions. The widespread desire for work has been formed under unjust labor conditions to which individuals are compelled to submit in order to meet material and ethical needs. Furthermore, the prevalence of the ‘work dogma’ in contemporary societies precludes nearly all individuals from seeing alternatives to work as live options.

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Autonomy
The Desire For Work As An Adaptive Preference
By Michael Cholbi
A journal space for theoretical and
empirical research, aimed at critiquing
work and speculating on its future
Autonomy ISSN 2515-9852
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The Desire For Work As An Adaptive Preference
Michael Cholbi
Abstract
Autonomy
Many economists and social theorists hypothesize
that most societies could soon face a ‘post-work’
future, one in which employment and productive
labor have a dramatically reduced place in human
affairs. Given the centrality of employment to
individual identity and its pivotal role as the
primary provider of economic and other goods,
transitioning to a ‘post-work’ future could prove
traumatic and disorienting to many. Policymakers
are thus likely to face the difficult choice of the
extent to which they ought to satisfy individual
citizens’ desires to work in a socioeconomic
environment in which work is in permanent
decline. Here I argue that policymakers confronting
a post-work economy should discount, or at least
consider problematic, the desire to work because
it is very likely that this desire is anadaptive
preference. An adaptive preference is a preference
for some state of affairs within a limited set of
options formed under unjust conditions.
The widespread desire for work has been formed
under unjust labor conditions to which individuals
are compelled to submit in order to meet material
and ethical needs. Furthermore, the prevalence
of the ‘work dogma’ in contemporary societies
precludes nearly all individuals from seeing
alternatives to work as live options.
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Many economists and social commentators
predict that coming decades will mark a
decline in work — or at least in jobs — as
we have come to know them. Automation
and the increased use of robotics; stagnating
economic growth in advanced economies;
an aging population; declines in employer
and employee loyalty; continued reductions
in the power of labour unions; continued
growth in contingent or piecework and
the gig economy; and the emergence of a
‘millennial’ generation that values flexibility,
engagement, and personal development;
all of these trends form the conditions for
an economy and culture in which fewer
individuals work, where fewer of those
who do work have traditional jobs, and
where work in general has a less prominent
role in organizing personal and social life.
Disagreement exists about the magnitude
of these developments taken individually,
as well as about the exact extent to which
work or jobs will decline in the future.
Nevertheless, there is a growing consensus
that we are headed toward a world that, in
comparison with recent decades at least,
will be ‘post-work’ — or at least ‘post-jobs’.
(Frey and Osborne 2014, Brynjolfsson and
McAfree 2014, Thompson 2014, Srnicek and
Williams 2015, Stern 2016)
The prospect of a post-work or post-jobs
future raises many critical questions
for policymakers and political leaders,
including: shall societies subsidize or
guarantee work? Shall societies reduce the
workweek or take other steps to distribute
work opportunities more broadly? Shall
income be made less dependent on work,
such as via the provision of an unconditional
basic income? In the background of each
of these policy questions, however, is an
arguably more fundamental philosophical
question regarding work and workers: to
what extent should these policy decisions
reflect individual citizens’ desire to work?
The desire to work is after all widespread
and well entrenched. Lottery winners and
retirees often continue to work despite
having virtually no need for the income
work typically provides (Arvey, Harpaz,
& Liao 1996). Few developments appear
worse for individual physical well-being,
mental health, and sense of self-worth
than continual unemployment.1 Work is a
potent source of meaning (Veltman 2016)
and identity for many people (Fryers 2006),
as work is a primary arena through which
individuals develop and manifest their skills
and character. And while job satisfaction
predictably dipped during and immediately
after the Great Recession (HITC.com 2013),
many people report being at least somewhat
satisfied with their jobs (Pew Research
Center 2016b, Society for Human Resource
Management, 2017).
Ordinarily, policymakers can and do
take individuals’ desires into account in
their decision making. By giving people
what they desire, we are likely to make
them happier, advance their interests, or
improve their quality of life. Honouring
their desires is also a way of respecting
their individual autonomy or recognizing
them as holders of certain rights. Thus, for
policymakers across the political spectrum,
one of the state’s central aims is to enable
people’s desires to be realized. But if the
aforementioned predictions concerning
1 On unemployment’s adverse effects on overall health,
see Brenner 2005, Herbig, Dragano, & Angerer 2013,
Margerison-Zilko et al. 2015. For the adverse effect of
unemployment on mental health and self-worth, see
Karsten & Moser 2009, Rutgers University Heldrich
Center for Workplace Development 2009, Goldsmith
and Diette 2012, Pharr, Moonie, & Bungum 2012, and
Calvo, Mair, & Sarkisian 2015.
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the emergence of a post-work economy
are correct, policymakers will increasingly
struggle to satisfy citizens’ desire to work.
Full employment, so long a cornerstone of
modern economic policy, will come to be
seen as a Sisyphean pursuit. Indeed, the
confluence of the socioeconomic trends
mentioned above will make it harder for
governments to craft policies that place
work (or at least desirable or worthwhile
work) within citizens’ reach.
The question I shall therefore investigate is
whether or not the desire to work is one that
the state should help its members realize,
especially given (if the aforementioned
prognostications are correct) that
individuals will find it harder to realize this
goal, and, on a wide scale, states will find it
harder to facilitate it.
Since the 1980s, many scholars have argued
that there is a particular class of desires 2
that policymakers should not take at face
value when they consider how to craft a
just society, i.e., a class of desires that can
rightfully be discounted, or even ignored,
in policymaking. Feminist philosophers,
for example, have observed that there is
something amiss about taking desires that
women sometimes form when acculturated
within sexist or misogynist societies as
the basis for subsequent policy choices.
Imagine women in a sexist society who
(for example) are denied access to higher
education. It would not be surprising to
learn that many women in such a society in
fact have little desire for higher education,
so that its being denied them would not feel,
under these conditions, like a deprivation.
There might, hypothetically, be a resulting
indifference to whether their societies
provide women access to higher education.
But to craft education policy based on
such indifference seems suspect: a desire
for an arguably unjust state of affairs —
unequal educational access for men and
women — that individuals have in no small
measure because they have been socialized
under unjust conditions that encourage
or ratify this desire seems tainted. Such a
desire appears epistemically corrupted,
inasmuch as it does not seem to reflect
what individuals ‘really’ want. As Ann Cudd
(2006, p. 181) elaborates, “the oppressed
come to desire that which is oppressive to
them…[and] one’s desires turn away from
goods and even needs that, absent those
conditions, they would want.” We may
suspect that women in a sexist society of the
sort just described lack the desire for access
to higher education not for any reason
(or any good reason) related to higher
education or the goods or opportunities it
provides. Rather, their desire stems from
ignorance of, or an insufficient appreciation
of, those goods or opportunities. From
the policymaker’s perspective, such
desires appear uninformed, and a
policymaker would therefore be reluctant
to unproblematically treat the realization of
such desires as a policy objective.
Philosophers have come to call desires
of this sort — at a first approximation,
desires concerning some option where
the individual’s preference concerning
that option is psychologically traceable
to its having been acquired under unjust
conditions — adaptive preferences.
Adaptive preferences are an active area
of research in philosophical ethics, and
while I will here lay out what strikes me as
a credible account of adaptive preferences
and why they should not be accorded the
same respect in policymaking as other
desires are, this is intended only as a sketch,
2 “A particular class” since it is likely that there are other
classes of desires (desires rooted in addiction, say, or
sadistic desires) that also should not be given their full
due in policymaking.
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rather than a comprehensive philosophical
treatment, of how we might vindicate the
intuition that adaptive preferences should
not enjoy the same role in policy making
as other preferences. Not everyone shares
this intuition or believes that the fact that
preferences can be adaptive provides a
compelling explanation on its own for why
they ought to be treated with suspicion in
policymaking. (Baber 2007, Bruckner 2009,
Dorsey unpublished) I do not aim to answer
fully the worries of such skeptics here, but I
hope that my discussion will introduce new
considerations into the debate and give such
skeptics food for thought.
My larger objective is to argue that the
widespread desire to work should itself
be classified as an adaptive preference,
and as such, policymakers confronting a
post-work future should not assign this
desire as much weight as they would
assign to individuals’ standard or non-
adaptive preferences. The desire to work
ought be seen as the by-product of unjust
social conditions that both enable and are
propped up by what David Frayne (2015)
has called the “work dogma.” In advancing
this thesis, I engage with an epistemic issue
that has, so far as I am aware, been largely
neglected in prior discussions of adaptive
preferences: Individuals often live under
unjust conditions and so form desires
under those conditions. But how are we to
distinguish desires merely formed under
those conditions, which presumably should
merit the ordinary amount of respect in
subsequent policymaking, from desires
shaped by the injustice present in such
conditions, which presumably should not
merit the ordinary amount of respect? An
examination of extant literature on adaptive
preferences hints that what troubles many
scholars is the fact that individuals come
to have these preferences because of prior
unjust conditions. Here I propose that
adaptive preferences have two features,
which I will call unthinkability and
underdetermination, that distinguish them
from more benign preferences formed under
unjust conditions. And because the desire
to work, having been formed under unjust
conditions, also has these two features, it
ought not be accorded the same weight as
other preferences would receive in policy
making. I conclude with some brief remarks
concerning what policies are best pursued
in relation to the prospect of a post-work
economy given that the desire to work is an
adaptive preference.
1. Adaptive preferences and unthinkable
options
Examples of adaptive preferences
have been more abundant than precise
characterizations of such preferences or of
what renders them suspect. Remaining in
abusive marriages believing that such abuse
is part of women’s lot (Nussbaum 2001a, p.
112); a willingness to tolerate a lack of clean
water supplies (Nussbaum 2001a, p. 113);
accepting wages below what members of
another gender receive for the same forms
of labor (Nussbaum 2001a, p. 113); rejecting
diagnoses of illness and thereby foregoing
needed medical care (Sen 1999a, p. 53); and
not opposing tyrannical governments (Sen
2002, p. 634); all have been put forth as
instances of adaptive preferences. Theorists
disagree about the psychological histories
of adaptive preferences, i.e., whether
they must be formed non-autonomously,
unconsciously, via habituation or
internalization, on the basis of deficient
rational reflection, etc.3 They agree, however,
that adaptive preferences are shaped by
facts about what options agents have
(or believe they have). As Rosa Terlazzo
(2015, p. 179) explains, “the idea behind the
3 See, among many discussions, Elster 1983, Nussbuam
2001b, Friedman 2003, Khader 2009, Taylor 2009, and
Colburn 2011.
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concept of adaptive preferences is roughly
this: that when persons have limited option
sets, they can come to prefer things within
those sets that they would not prefer
otherwise” (See also Elster 1983, p. 229;
Rickard 1995, Bruckner 2009, p. 307, Dorsey
forthcoming, pp. 3-4.).
Yet this characterization does not capture
what renders adaptive preferences
troubling. For the fact that a preference is
shaped by one’s options, or the perceptions
thereof, does not render a preference
problematic. Quite the contrary: Our
preferences should adapt to our available
options. Upon learning that one’s favourite
coffee shop has closed, the yearning to dine
there might linger, but the rational response
is to relinquish that preference. The fact that
such a preference has been “formed through
adjustment to reality” hardly impugns
its credentials (Nussbaum 2001c, p. 78).
Furthermore, that a preference was formed
in response to “deprivation” or “adverse
situations” does not by itself suggest it
should be looked upon sceptically (Sen
1999a, pp. 62-63).
Thus, the fact that adaptive preferences
are adaptive in the narrow sense of being
preferences shaped by choosers’ options
does not provide a basis for concluding that
such preferences are morally or politically
problematic such that they are not entitled
to the same respect or weight in our
deliberations about what to do or how to
fashion our institutions or policies. What
further features must adaptive preferences
possess, then, in order to render them
problematic? Why, as in our earlier example,
should policymakers work to provide access
to higher education to women despite
women having no apparent desire for it?
We can home in on these further features
by considering the work of Jon Elster,
the philosopher most responsible for
introducing the concept of adaptive
preferences. Elster (1983, p. 123) used the
well- known fable of the Fox and the Grapes
to articulate the concept, so returning to
that fable can help illuminate what makes
adaptive preferences worryingly ‘adaptive’.
There are many versions of the fable. My
own favourite takes the form of a limerick by
W.J. Linton:
This Fox has a longing for grapes:
He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.
So he goes away sour;
And, ’tis said, to this hour
Declares that he’s no taste for grapes.
(Crane 1887)
We are not told whether the grapes in
question were in fact sweet and ripe, but
they were at least tempting enough to attract
the fox. Yet upon finding himself unable to
leap high enough to reach the grapes, the fox
departs, having apparently relinquished his
desire for the grapes.
As we just noted, there seems nothing
obviously troubling, irrational, etc., about
this shift in the Fox’s preferences. The Fox’s
set of options, he learns, is narrower than he
thought. And his desires (and ours) ought
to adapt to our available options. Indeed, we
may conclude that in the Fox’s case, his not
being able to reach the grapes is not itself
an irrational basis for him to relinquish his
desire for them. In terms made familiar by
economists, the Fox’s expected utility from
pursuing the grapes is in fact zero. Since
the apparent probability of his attaining
the grapes is zero, his expected utility (the
product of that probability multiplied by
the strength of his desire for the grapes) is
also zero. Rather than being an irrational
response, the Fox’s response is exactly how
a rational chooser should respond to an
option being foreclosed to her. Thus, the
fact that an adaptive preference represents a
response to one’s options being constrained
is at most a necessary condition of its being
adaptive. But it does not shed much light on
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why it should be discounted or ignored by
policymakers.
Recall, however, that upon discovering
that the grapes are just out of reach, the
Fox not only walks away, he re-evaluates
the desirability of the grapes. What seems
troubling about his change in preferences
is that the Fox rationalizes his revised
preferences not by reference to the
impossibility of attaining the grapes but by
recalibrating his appraisal of the grapes. The
fox does not sour on the grapes because the
grapes soured. Rather, he seems to project
his frustration with his inability to reach the
grapes onto the grapes themselves. He thus
reaches a correct practical conclusion (‘I
shall not continue to pursue these grapes’)
via an unsound deliberative route (Watts
2009).
Such projection probably does not occur in
most cases of actual adaptive preferences.
Women in sexist societies probably do not
discover that higher education is off limits
to them and then become averse to pursuing
higher education, for example. Rather, those
who hold adaptive preferences are, through
the forces of socialization etc. exerted under
unjust conditions, disposed to some options
as unthinkable. To prefer some option A
within some relevant set containing A, B, C,
etc. because B, C, etc. are unthinkable is not
to literally perceive B, C, etc., as conceptually
impossible. Indeed, those with an adaptive
preference for A are probably fully aware
that others, either within their community
or outside it, prefer B, C, etc. to A. But for
those with an adaptive preference for A,
alternatives are at least ‘not for them.’
4
Adaptive preferences are therefore likely to
have a strongly indexical or agent-relative
character.
That a chooser might come to find an
option intrinsically undesirable in part
because she cannot realize that option may
seem strange. But I take this to rest on the
all too common human tendency toward
optimistic self-appraisal, and in particular,
the psychological need to maintain a sense
of one’s agency as the locus of control over
significant outcomes.5 That an option is
unattainable may be understood (or in
many cases, misunderstood) as the result
of one’s own inability to attain it. Yet if the
option ‘turns out’ to have been undesirable
all along, then its unattainability represents
no threat to the agent’s self-image. Better,
or at least more emotionally tractable, to
disdain the option. Hugh Breakey provides
a vivid description of how such a process
might unfold:
As the Fox’s change of mind illustrates,
unthinkability seems to capture part of why
adaptive preferences should be treated as
suspect: Their apparent rationality conceals
the fact that one premise responsible
for their formation is false, or at least
unjustified. The Fox does not know the
grapes are sour. Indeed, he has no particular
evidence for that claim at all.
4 This is not to preclude the possibility of options varying
in their degrees of unthinkability.
5For the introduction of the concept of locus of control, see
Rotter (1966).
What is at work here, I think, is a
colouring of mood and habituation
of thought. Emotionally, we work
up a state of dislike, hatred, disgust,
resentment orscorn (perhaps fuelled
by our incapacity toattain the object)
and we direct it at the unattainable
object itself. We smear it internally
with ugly emotive connotations.
Cognitively, we develop a habitof
stressing its defects to ourselves
whenever we consider it. In this way,
we mentally paper over the genuine
desire that remainsfor the object.
(2010, p. 32)
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Similarly, in the case of actual adaptive
preferences, their holders do not seem to
have a good reason for them, even if their
inability to attain the objects of those
preferences might otherwise be a good
reason to hold such preferences. The
preferences in question turn pivotally on
normative or evaluative judgments for
which they lack sufficient evidence. And if
only those preferences that meet minimal
standards for rationality merit full respect by
policymakers, then adaptive preferences do
not merit such respect.
In addition, it is morally significant that
those with adaptive preferences have false
beliefs regarding the normative premises
incorporated into their practical reasoning.
Those with adaptive preferences engage,
like all agents, in practical reasoning. And
though their reasoning (again) may land on
the correct conclusion in the circumstances
(that the unattainability of B, C, etc., justifies
a preference for A), they land on those
conclusions on the basis of unjustified
normative premises. And it does seem to
be more objectionable or lamentable for
individuals to engage in practical reasoning
that rests on unjustified normative premises
— the premises concerning their goals,
ends, or values — than it does for them to
engage in practical reasoning on unjustified
non-normative or empirical premises. The
normative attitudes that constitute what Rawls
called our conception of the good form the
agenda for our practical pursuits, and so, in
this respect, have a kind of normative priority
over the non-normative attitudes on which
we rely in order to pursue our conceptions of
the good. As I argue elsewhere (Cholbi, 2017),
we have stronger reason to object to treatment
that interferes with our capacity to rationally
will ends than we have to object to treatment
that interferes with our capacity to identify
the best means to those ends (or to determine
whether there are any means sufficient to
our willed ends). Interference of this first sort
engages with those capacities with which we
more closely identify as practical agents and
so reflects greater mistrust of us as practical
agents. In the case of adaptive preferences,
those holding them have had their attitudes
manipulated so that though they reach
justifiable practical conclusions about what
they ought to do under the circumstances, they
do not appreciate how they have mistaken
the unattainable for the unthinkable. In terms
akin to those popularized by Rawls, those with
adaptive preferences have come to think that
the pursuit of certain options is unreasonable,
when in reality the unjust conditions under
which they live have made the pursuit of
certain reasonable options irrational.
We have established therefore that adaptive
preferences are preferences formed under
conditions of injustice wherein an individual
prefers some option over some set of
relevant alternatives, where alternatives
to the preferred option come to be viewed
as unthinkable. That adaptive preferences
are unthinkable in this way is a claim that
several have gestured at. Amartya Sen, for
instance, remarks that the poor may “come
to terms with their deprivation” by adjusting
“their desires and expectations to what they
unambitiously see as feasible” (Sen 1999b,
p. 30).
Still, we have not yet teased out all the salient
features of adaptive preferences. That this
is so becomes evident when we confront an
epistemological difficulty associated with
the identification of adaptive preferences.
That a preference reflects limited options,
whether in reality or in choosers’ perceptions
thereof; that the preference was formed
6 This account of adaptive preferences also needs to be
limited in one specific way: An individual living under
unjust conditions may prefer to have those conditions
overturned and view extant conditions as unthinkable.
Thus, adaptive preferences probably cannot have the
unjust circumstances themselves as their objects.
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under unjust conditions; and that the
preference holder rules out alternatives
to her preference as unthinkable;6 even
when all of these hold true, we might still
wonder whether individuals’ preferences
satisfying these criteria have been formed
because of those individuals living under
unjust conditions. It is after all possible
that individuals have the preferences they
do for reasons unrelated to those unjust
conditions, that is, that the injustice of
the conditions is merely incidental to the
preferences having been formed under those
conditions. We thus seem to need indicators
of preferences whose ‘adaptiveness’ is due to
unjust background conditions. Fortunately,
an examination of the desire to work
highlights the evidence needed to ascertain
that an adaptive preference is due to unjust
conditions. But we must first address
whether the present day desire to work has
in fact been formed under unjust conditions.
2. Injustice and the desire to work
That the desire to work meets one of the
conditions for an adaptive preference
— that it has been formed under unjust
conditions — is no doubt contentious. All
the same, establishing such a claim does not
depend on endorsing any comprehensive
theory of justice, so long as we draw upon
considerations that nearly any such theory
would recognize as speaking in favour of
the injustice of the present-day conditions
in which the widespread desire to work has
been formed.
The considerations relevant to the desire to
work are the conditions of contemporary
work and of the workplace itself. The first
class of such considerations are broadly
material. One general way in which
these conditions can be unjust is if work
(understood primarily as paid employment)
does not offer workers a fair balance of
effort and reward. Certainly workers receive
some goods through their work – wages, at
a minimum. But the rewards for their work
are often more meagre than justice would
mandate. Thanks to stagnating wages,
recent decades have seen an explosion in
‘working poor,’ individuals whose work does
not offer adequate monetary compensation
to remove them from poverty. In the U.S., 40
percent of those in poverty work full time
(Dalaker, 2017), and three-fifths of those in
poverty in the UK live in households where
someone is employed (Butler, 2017). That a
large number of the working poor receive
public assistance only highlights how
working often fails to provide a fair reward
for workers’ efforts.
Simultaneously, we often underestimate
the burdens associated with working. The
most obvious burden is the opportunity
cost associated with time spent working.
Workers in most countries spend around
2,000 hours per year on the job, the
equivalent of working ‘24/7’ for 11 weeks.
These statistics do not include the time
spent travelling to and from work sites.
In the U.S., an average commute requires
180 hours per year (Ingraham 2016). The
time associated with working is time not
spent on leisure, social relationships, or
community activities. And what time
workers retain for themselves is increasingly
devalued by the expectation that they will
remain electronically “connected” to the
workplace through e-mail, text messaging,
etc. (Gregg 2011). This expectation results in
the fragmentation of workers’ ‘free’ time and
makes wholehearted engagement with non-
work activities more elusive.
Another neglected burden associated
with work is that it costs money to work.
Consider commuting again. In addition
to being a source of stress and ill health
(Ingraham 2016), commuting can be
costly; Vasel (2015) notes how it costs,
on average, $2,600 per worker in the US.
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Workers can also bear monetary costs for
clothing or equipment required or expected
in the workplace, as well as costs to pay
other people to do work that one might be
able to perform oneself (child care, home
repair, house cleaning, etc.) were one not
working.
Work, then, is not all that it is cracked up to
be: often less remunerative than is needed
to provide for individuals’ basic needs and
encumbered with costs we too often ignore.
These observations make recent research
finding that unemployment is sometimes no
worse, or even better, than holding certain
jobs far less surprising (Kim and von dem
Knesebeck 2015, Chandola and Zhang 2018).
A second category of considerations,
indicating that workers today operate in
an unjust labor environment, are what we
might call moral considerations. Here it is
worth noting that most workplaces today
insist that workers submit to infringements
of their liberties in order to obtain, retain, or
maximize the value of paid employment. To
require background checks and drug testing,
to utilize visual and electronic surveillance,7
to ask employees to forego legal rights and
agree to employer-instigated arbitration
(Colvin 2017), to mandate dress codes,
to police suitable subjects of workplace
conversation (or the language in which
those conversations are conducted), or to
penalize workers for their political activities;
these Foucaultian maneuvers represent
employers infringing on employees’
freedom as a condition of their working.
Elizabeth Anderson has recently likened the
American workplace order to a communist
dictatorship, with unaccountable superiors
(management and ownership) enjoy largely
arbitrary authority to govern employees by
nearly unchecked fiat. As Anderson (2017,
p. 37ff.) observes, workers thereby appear
to tolerate their employers functioning as a
form of ‘private government’ with powers
that exceed the powers that most workers
would view it as justifiable for their elected
‘public’ government to possess.
In tandem, these material and moral
considerations imply that the widespread
desire to work has been formed under
labor and workforce conditions that are
unjust insofar as they embody an unfair
balance of burdens and benefits for workers.
Compounding this arguably unjust balance
of burdens and benefits is that work is
effectively compelled or coerced in most
societies. To achieve a decent lifestyle, nearly
everyone must work for a significant portion
of their lives. The aforementioned burdens of
work are thus tolerated despite the fact that
a society that essentially mandates work
places weighty constraints on what Phillippe
van Parijs calls “real freedom.” To be really
free, van Parijs proposes, an individual
must not only be able to act on her choices
without others’ interference. She must also
possess the capacities and resources to carry
out those choices and realize her objectives.
(van Parijs 1995) Being compelled to work
turns real freedom against itself: by requiring
individuals to work in order to acquire the
material resources needed to pursue their
ends, a society places significant limitations
on how individuals can effectively use their
resources, material and otherwise, in the
pursuit of their ends.
Again, I have not offered a theorization of
justice here in support of my claim that
the desire to work has been formed under
unjust labour conditions. But I imagine that
adherents of a wide range of conceptions of
justice (libertarian, communitarian, liberal,
socialist, etc.) will agree that a set of societal
arrangements into which individuals are
effectively compelled; makes extremely
extensive demands on their time, energy,
attention, and material resources;
often offers them economic rewards
7 For a useful general overview of the ethical issues raised
by workplace surveillance, see Pitesa (2012).
Autonomy: 04 : July 2018 10
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inadequate to their needs; and mandates
that they submit to violations of their
personal freedoms they would not likely
tolerate in other sectors of life, is highly
suspect from the standpoint of justice. This
conclusion should not be exaggerated:
workers, their employment situations, and
the political situations in which they work
vary, and there are many workers (the well
compensated, the skilled, the unionized,
etc.) whose work-life represents a fair
balance of benefit and burden, does not
require violations of their freedom, etc. The
conditions under which we have come to
desire work are therefore not uniformly or
homogenously unjust. Nevertheless, the
workplace and the labour market as we
know it falls well short of nearly any credible
ideal of just exchange.
3. The desire for work: Limited options,
unthinkability, and underdetermination
Having shown that the desire to work has
been formed under unjust conditions and
that the desire to work depicts alternatives
to work as unthinkable, let us now use the
desire to work to identify a final condition
on a preference being adaptive.
The desire to work is clearly ‘adaptive’
in a minimal sense. For it is a preference
for an option formed in contemporary
industrialized societies wherein the primary
alternatives to working have been foreclosed
by a combination of policy and culture.
Over the past generation or so, many
societies have increasingly insisted that
their members work, adopting ‘workfare’
policies making the receipt of various
forms of public assistance contingent
upon employment (or short of that, the
conscientious pursuit thereof) (Peck 2001,
Brodkin and Larsen 2013). And while one
might think that the central goal of politics
should be to expand human freedom or
augment human happiness, the Left and
the Right converge in supposing that the
primary goal of economic policy is to create
jobs. Evidently, once everyone is employed,
freedom, happiness, and equality take care
of themselves.
Culturally, work has a near sacred status
in most prosperous nations. The remains
of Weber’s ‘Protestant work ethic’ continue
to exert their power over popular attitudes
toward work, enticing individuals toward
“the identification with and systematic
devotion to waged work, the elevation
of work to the centre of life, and the
affirmation of work as an end in itself”
(Weeks, 2011, p. 46). Work is widely seen as
the mark of independence and the central
responsibility associated with citizenship.
Unsurprisingly, few events are more
psychologically traumatic than long-term
involuntary unemployment. Striving is
superior to slacking, and even in the face
of considerable evidence that hard work
and industriousness are at best necessary
and clearly far from sufficient for material
success, the belief persists in work’s capacity
to ensure such success. “Grit”, passion,
perseverance, and self-confidence are thus
the central virtues of what Frayne (2015)
has coined the “work-centred society”.
So pervasive is the belief in the necessity,
both prudential and moral, of work that
we increasingly struggle to describe
activities that are arguably not work in
terms dissociated from work. Exercising
is ‘working out’. Troubled couples need to
‘work on’ their relationships. Parenting is
‘a job’ (Malesic 2017). And while educators
may hope that education provides goods
other than improved job opportunities, to
argue that (say) public education should
not make children into “job ready” adults is
suicide in today’s political climate.
Of course, few fail to recognize that
Autonomy: 04 : July 2018 11
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refraining from, or refusing to work, is at
least conceivable. But it takes considerable
audacity to do so, since doing so labels
the non-worker as deviant, as someone
effectively removing themselves from the
essential precondition of participation in
shared public life. As Frayne (2015, pp. 2-5)
notes, the cultural power of work is such
that modern societies lack any serious
debate about the merits of work and seem
constitutively unable to imagine modes of
social organization in which work is less
prominent.
Hence, we may reasonably conjecture that
even if not working remains in some sense
an abstract possibility, it is what William
James called a “live hypothesis” for very
few. Hence, citizens of advanced societies
nowadays frequently find themselves
in a position akin to the Fox’s after the
grapes proved unattainable: They have
adapted their preferences in light of the
unavailability of economically and culturally
viable alternatives to work. And as with
other adaptive preferences, the desire
to work does not rest on a substantive
engagement with, or consideration of,
alternatives. Just as the Fox, unable to attain
the grapes, turns against them, so too have
many members of modern societies, unable
to attain (or even coherently envision) an
existence without work, turned against non-
work. The desire to work is thus a desire
forged in ignorance of relevant alternatives.
Alternatives to work are thus unthinkable
for most.
The desire to work thus satisfies the
conditions for adaptive preferences
adumbrated in section 1. Yet there is another
dimension to the desire to work that
enables us to grasp the nature of adaptive
preferences.
As noted above, an adaptive preference
will be one its holders have because of their
having acquired it under unjust conditions.
We thus need indicators of when this is so.
In the case of the desire to work, I suggest
that we see such indicators in the apparent
discord between the global or generic desire
to work and the conclusions individuals
reach regarding the specific attributes of
work. As we shall enumerate momentarily,
individuals view many aspects of work (or
at least of their work) as bad or unsatisfying
and yet retain a desire to work nonetheless.
In my estimation, this betokens the sort
of irrationality we would expect from an
adaptive preference: If one judges that X
is bad in numerous ways but nevertheless
desires X —indeed, finds not pursuing X
almost unfathomable — this suggests that
one’s overall judgments have been distorted
by socialization under unjust conditions.
When a global judgment regarding X is
thereby underdetermined by the particular
judgments relevant to that global judgment,
the judgment is likely to have been shaped
by unjust conditions. To desire work and
yet find nearly every aspect of the actual
practice of work undesirable is to have a
preference that outstrips, and is arguably
at odds with, the evidence relevant to that
preference. Only potent social conditioning,
I propose, can engender this sort of discord.
Many people desire to work and find
involuntarily not working to be painful or
distressing. These attitudes are surprising,
given how negatively individuals often
appraise the various aspects of work
that should presumably influence global
appraisals of the desirability of work. A
2008 study (Jenkins, Kopicki, Van Horn
& Zukin) found that with respect to six
main determinants of job quality (hours,
education and training, health and
medical benefits, retirement and pensions,
retirement age, and income), fewer than half
of American workers were “very satisfied”
with any of these six determinants, this
despite 51 percent reporting being satisfied
with their jobs as a whole. A similar
gap between global judgments of work
satisfaction and judgments of particular
determinants of work satisfaction has been
observed in more recent studies. A RAND
Corporation survey of over 3,000 American
workers summarized its findings as follows:
Autonomy: 04 : July 2018 12
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the American workplace is very physically
and emotionally taxing, both for workers
themselves and their families. Most
Americans (two-thirds) frequently work
at high speeds or under tight deadlines,
and one in four perceives that they have
too little time to do their job. More than
one-half of Americans report exposure
to unpleasant and potentially hazardous
working conditions, and nearly one in five
American workers are exposed to a hostile
or threatening social environment at work
(Maestas et al 2017).
The same study reports that at least
two-thirds of workers report “mismatch”
between the working conditions they desire
and the working conditions they have. Still,
the respondents’ faith in work is intact,
as four out of five respondents indicated
that their work is meaningful in some way.
A UK survey likewise found that half of
British workers find their work meaningful
(Dahlgreen/YouGov 2015).8 This same
pattern — positive global appraisals of
work alongside largely negative appraisals
of the factors on which those global
appraisals ought to be based — recurs in a
Pew Research Group (2016b) study of US
workers. Again, only a small fraction (15
percent) report being at least somewhat
dissatisfied with their jobs, and about half
report that their jobs offer them a sense of
identity. But underneath the surface, anxiety
and dissatisfaction loom: A majority report
that they do not receive the ongoing training
or education needed to succeed in the job
market, that desirable jobs are increasingly
hard to find, and that their wages are not
adequate to ensure themselves a decent
retirement. Meanwhile, both hours worked
per week and weeks worked per year have
climbed over the past generation. In sum,
“many Americans think jobs in the U.S. are
less secure, more pressured, less rewarding
in terms of benefits, and less built on worker
loyalty to employers than in the past.” The
vast majority expect such conditions to
worsen over coming decades (Pew Research
Center 2016a). Studies of European
workers have reached similar conclusions
(Eurofound, 2017).
A number of caveats are in order here.
Societies and workplaces vary, and
unsurprisingly, workers with higher
levels of income, education, workplace
autonomy, and job benefits view their work
more positively, both globally and in the
particular. Moreover, much of what workers
find undesirable in their work is contingent,
set by employer or government policies
that, if reformed, might improve working
conditions.
Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that, on
balance, today’s labourers seem to love
work in principle or in the abstract but
seem to find their actual work conditions
disappointing, even worthy of resentment.
Their global judgments regarding work’s
desirability are thus underdetermined by
their judgments of the particular factors
on which such global judgments are
presumptively based. This, I suggest, is
what we would anticipate if the desire to
work were maintained by an aversion to
alternatives such that those alternatives
have become unthinkable thanks to the
baleful influence of social conditioning
under unjust conditions. Getting individuals
to acknowledge that their living conditions
could be inherently unjust works against
the deep seated human tendency to view
the world as just by nature (Furnham 2003).
At the same time, workers’ attitudes toward
the particular facets of their work suggest
that they would not, upon full reflection,
conclude that they work under just
conditions. The most viable way to reduce
this tension — to reduce the cognitive
dissonance between work as it should be
in a just society and work as it is in most
actual societies — is for the desire to work
to be psychologically and epistemically
cordoned off from the evidence relevant to
it. That is to say, it is necessary for many
people to successfully desire work very
8 Intriguingly though, 37% of British workers in that
same survey said their jobs do not make any meaningful
contribution to the world.
Autonomy: 04 : July 2018 13
Autonomy

much against the tide of evidence against its
desirability under present day conditions.
Only if the value of work has been elevated
to a dogmatic ideology can it plausibly be
immune to the abundant counterevidence
offered by the contemporary workplace.
4. Conclusion: Policymaking and the desire
for work in a post-work future
We have seen, then, how the desire to
work is an adaptive preference: a desire
formed under, and in response to, unjust
circumstances of work and labour wherein
many in modern societies to view (a) work
as indispensable, despite often viewing
their own work as unsatisfactory, even
meaningless, and (b) alternatives to work as
essentially unthinkable.
If I am correct and work is an adaptive
preference, then as we approach the
possibility of an increasingly ‘post-work’
future, policymakers ought not to be as
fixated on satisfying individuals’ desires to
work as they are now. To aim at satisfying
this desire may not only be fruitless, it
is also to satisfy a preference that is in a
fundamental sense a preference for an
unjust state of affairs, namely, one in which
limiting one’s work efforts, or refraining
from work altogether, is neither materially
viable nor socially sanctioned.
An obvious rejoinder to this conclusion
is ‘easier said than done.’ The emergence
of post-work economies could result
in widespread moral distress. As large
numbers of individuals become incapable
of accessing work, they are likely to be
deprived of sources of meaning or identity
and may feel guilt or resentment at their
inability to fulfil their perceived obligation
to materially contribute to the larger society
through their work efforts. In democratic
societies, only a very brave elected official is
likely to challenge her constituents’ desire
for work.
Policymakers facing a post-work future
thus confront a difficult balancing act:
having recognized that the desire to work
is an adaptive preference, they should be
hesitant to craft policies aimed at satisfying
that desire (even assuming that they could
manage to craft policies that can withstand
the tide of trends making its satisfaction
harder), while at the same time attending to
the adverse psychological and eudaimonic
consequences of the emergence of the post-
work society. Policymakers must engineer
a soft landing, one in which individuals can
‘un-adapt’ from the work-centered society
and begin to adapt to a post-work society. As
Serene Khader (2011, p. 42) observes, adaptive
preferences, while often deeply entrenched,
can be dislodged if individuals are exposed
to alternative possibilities that foster their
scrutiny of those preferences. A central pillar
in preparing us for a post-work future will
be to steadily acclimatise individuals to a
society in which work is more peripheral.
This can be achieved through an array of
reforms including de-emphasizing vocational
goals in the educational process; lowering
retirement ages; reducing the length of the
work week and/or work year; validating
(rather than shaming) adolescents who
engage in self-exploration and delay entry
into the workforce; and detaching public
welfare initiatives from conditions related to
work or the seeking thereof. By dissociating
work from social status, such reforms would
expose the adaptive preference for work to
greater scrutiny and invite individuals to take
work reduction or refusal more seriously as
Millian ‘experiments in living.’ Obviously, the
reforms needed to mitigate the moral distress
that would likely accompany the emergence
of the post-work economy are profound. But
the slow dislodging of entrenched attitudes
regarding work is clearly preferable to ignoring
the likely detrimental consequences that such
attitudes will lead to should the predicted
post-work world materialize.9
9 My thanks to my colleagues Alex Madva, Katie
Gasdaglis, and Peter Ross, and to my students in my
winter 2018 seminar “The Ethics and Politics of Work”,
for feedback on earlier versions of this essay.
Autonomy: 04 : July 2018 14
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