Do you believe in life after work?
a noninstrumental defense of work–life balance
pp. 123-134
in: Maria C. Coutinho de Arruda, Boleslaw Rok (eds), Understanding ethics and responsibilities in a globalizing world, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
The paper is an attempt to provide a normative, non-consequentialist grounding for the claim that life-work balance is morally valuable and should be promoted. The argumentation is based on the extrapolation of the established theories into the new field, the so-called theoretical extension (Snow et al., Ethnography 4(2):181–200, 2003). We claim that given the universal recognition of the intrinsic value of harmonious life, there is a prima facie duty not to hinder life-work balance, and we focus on the search of agents responsible for bringing it about. We come to the conclusion that the structure of responsibility allocation in this case mirrors that of other structural injustices in situations of bounded rationality, and we take the oppression of women as our model of the distribution of blame. Using Claudia Card's "complicity" criterion, we conclude that agents should gradually opt out from the oppressive scheme that renders work-life balance difficult or even impossible.The question of allocation of moral responsibility for work-life balance has not been addressed in the literature so far. Moreover, our perspective is original thanks to the explicitly noninstrumental approach to the question of work-life balance.