Le 13 mars 2025, de 12h00 à 13h30, Theron Pummer (University of St. Andrews) et Ben Sachs-Cobbe (University of St. Andrews) donneront une présentation intitulée « Taking Jobs and Doing Harm », dans le cadre des activités du Réseau de philosophie du travail.

Les activités du Réseau de philosophie du travail sont ouvertes aux chercheur.es et aux étudiant.es diplômé.es ayant des intérêts de recherche dans ce domaine. Merci d’écrire aux organisateurs, Denise Celentano (denise.celentano@umontreal.ca) et Pablo Gilabert (pablo.gilabert@concordia.ca), pour recevoir le lien zoom.

Résumé

One can, and often does, do harm or commit to doing harm by accepting a job offer. Yet in popular discourse and in the philosophical literature there is almost no reflection on the morality of such decisions. To the contrary, workers are valorised simply for having a job. It is as if the moral domain is discontinuous, such that certain activities that would be morally questionable when done not as part of a job are exempt from moral examination when done as part of a job. Our paper’s target is one sharpening of this discontinuity thesis. We call it Permissivism and define it as follows: one does no wrong by accepting a job offer, and thus committing to doing a certain kind of work, unless the work is cartoonishly evil. We sense that there are two potential justifications for Permissivism, and that therefore two versions of it can be articulated. According to Structural Permissivism, the institutional nature of the market economy substitutes for the moral agency of the offeree; it makes it so that she need not consider the moral consequences of her decision (except in cases of cartoonish evil). On Situational Permissivism, by contrast, the circumstances of the job offeree matter morally and it happens that in almost every case of doing-harm-by-accepting-a-job-offer those circumstances provide a defeater of the wrongness of doing that harm. We consider multiple arguments for both versions of Permissivism and conclude that all but one of them are fatally flawed. We concede that there is an argument for Situational Permissivism that establishes something important, though nothing as strong as Situational Permissivism.