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DTSTAMP:20260802T150626Z
DTSTART:20260804T131500Z
DTEND:20260804T144500Z
SUMMARY:Our Jobs and What They Say About Us
LOCATION:The Grapes
DESCRIPTION:Saved in Palaner as: saved\n\nPalaner match: 27% · why: lots of
  people going\n\nOur Occupations and What They Say About Us\nWhat we have 
 done - or currently do - is often seen by others to define us\; whether as
  the student\, parent\, teacher\, employer or employee. These roles occupy
  us for a very large part of our lives. How important are they?\n\nOur Own
  Experiences Of Work\nHow did you come to be in the main occupation of you
 r life? If you specialised at all\, then how did you arrive in that subjec
 t or role? Have you occupied many roles? To what extent did you occupy a r
 ole by accident?\n\n"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence\, then\, is 
 not an act but a habit." This quote is often attributed to Aristotle\, but
  the wording is actually from historian Will Durant summarising Aristotle'
 s ethics. To what extent has any role you have had influenced how you are 
 as a person? Given that we have often occupied a role for a long time\, it
  must surely have molded how we approach problems and our thought processe
 s. For example\, does an author obsess about grammar? Does an IT worker li
 ke technical problem solving? Another example: do you think a lawyer would
  refer first to rules and then intentions? Or is it the other way around a
 nd do we occupy jobs based on our characters?\n\nAristotle's idea of eudai
 monia suggests that meaningful activity lets us exercise our distinctive h
 uman capacities - reason\, judgment\, skill - rather than performing rote\
 , undemanding tasks. Hegel argued that labour is where humans first come t
 o recognize themselves through their effect on the world and through the r
 ecognition of others\; work becomes meaningful partly through mutual recog
 nition\, being seen and valued by other people for what you contribute. Ca
 re ethicists (Nel Noddings\, Virginia Held) similarly emphasize that meani
 ng often comes from the relational impact of work\; feeling that what you 
 do matters to someone else. What makes work meaningful to you?\n\nOne of M
 arx's most famous ideas on labour comes from his theory of alienation\, la
 id out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He argued that
  under capitalism\, the worker becomes estranged from their labor because 
 the product they create doesn't belong to them\; it becomes\, in his words
 \, "an alien object\, a power independent of the producer." If you have re
 tired\, are you still interested in what you used to do as an occupation? 
 I think this is one test of if your job was a vocation\, or if you have be
 come alienated from your work.\n\nTo what extent do we currently - or have
  we in the past - taken up a profession solely for the gain of money?\n\nS
 ome jobs are perceived as being cool (e.g. perhaps a sportsperson) while o
 thers are seen negatively\, perhaps such as being an investment banker. Ju
 st suppose you are at a party and have to introduce yourself: what\, ideal
 ly\, would you wish to say your job is and why?\n\nHow Society Values Work
 \nHow does society put a value on a role\, and is there a sort of hierarch
 y\, perhaps based on education or other criteria? Does a capitalist societ
 y value output\, rather than work?\n\nMost canonical philosophers - Aristo
 tle\, Kant\, Locke - wrote about "labour" and "work" in ways that implicit
 ly excluded domestic and reproductive labour from serious consideration. F
 eminist philosophers like Genevieve Lloyd and Susan Moller Okin have argue
 d this exclusion wasn't incidental - the "public/private" divide in Wester
 n philosophy was built partly to keep domestic labour\, including motherin
 g\, outside the frame of what counts as meaningful work or civic contribut
 ion. De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is more skeptical. She worried th
 at motherhood\, as constructed in patriarchal society\, was often imposed 
 on women as their primary source of identity and value\, foreclosing other
  paths to transcendence and selfhood. How can we better reward parenting a
 nd value contributions towards society?\n\nIdleness Versus Work\n"The time
  you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." is a popular unattributed quote wh
 ich reflects the thoughts of Bertrand Russell\, although the exact wording
  does not appear in his published works. It reflects the themes of his ess
 ay In Praise of Idleness. "The morality of work is the morality of slaves.
 " is a quote from this essay. Russell argued that advances in productivity
  should allow people to work fewer hours and devote more time to education
 \, art\, and leisure. Would we benefit from a shorter working day as sugge
 sted by Bertrand Russel in his essay In Praise of Idleness?\n\nThe Future 
 Of Work\nHow have roles and occupations changed in our lifetimes? What fut
 ures do we see for the world of work?
URL:https://www.meetup.com/bath-philosophy-debate-group/events/315875381/
CATEGORIES:palaner,saved
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