Ask a student why they’re in college and their answer will most likely include something about securing a well-paying job, expanding their career options, or acquiring the knowledge necessary to be successful in life. The cultural narrative that has been fed to so many college students is that receiving higher education is just what you do to get a good job. You earn good grades in high school so that you’re a more competitive college applicant, and you earn good grades in college so that you can secure a stable, well paying, and (if you’re lucky) fulfilling career. Despite the strong connection students cite between college and future career success, it’s rare that students are ever challenged to think critically about the role career should play in their futures, or how this squares with their other priorities, values, and personal convictions.
Philosophy graduate students are often uniquely suited to help their undergraduates consider how college can contribute to a fulfilling career. As philosophers, they can help students explore what might make for a meaningful worthwhile life, while as students, they can identify with their students in understanding the challenges of identifying promising career opportunities. Due to this fact, I experimented with implementing a philosophy of work unit as part of a course I recently taught called “Ethics in the 21st Century.” This course is intended to fulfill a general education requirement, and thus most who take the course are not intending to be career philosophers, but instead possess a diverse range of professional goals.
I used the philosophy of work unit to give students introductory exposure to a number of issues in moral and political philosophy, including Marx’s theory of alienation, the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic goods, theories of well-being, and the ethics of markets. The unit on the philosophy of work occurred after we covered the major metaethical positions and normative ethical theories. This allowed students to draw connections between their metaethical and normative ethical viewpoints and the role they take to work to play in their lives. Class sessions were roughly 70% lecture and discussion and 30% writing exercises designed around some of the following questions (Some of the following questions I owe to Dr. Paul Blaschko’s “The Working Life” class at the University of Notre Dame.):
- How do you define career success?
- What sacrifices are you willing to make in order to obtain what you define as career success?
- How do you see your moral philosophy influencing your career, both at the level of which career you choose and how you conduct yourself within that career?
- Identify some of your main passions, values, and strengths, and identify some potential careers that you think align well with these traits.
- What are some measures of success that people commonly focus on in their working life that you think are ultimately bad measures of a successful career? How do you plan to avoid falling into using these bad metrics to measure the success of your own career?
- Identify at least one person that you view as an exemplar in the area of work. Describe why you think this person is an exemplar, and what features of their approach to work that you want to emulate.
There are also multiple, well-developed online resources to use for teaching the philosophy of work, including projects such as 80,000 hours affiliated with Oxford and Ethics at Work at the University of Notre Dame. Using these resources, I found a number of helpful articles and videos for prompting students to think through the implications of their future career choices.
At the end of the course, I received detailed feedback from many students who found the unit one of the most valuable parts of the class. Given the topic’s amenability to both theoretical and abstract questions, as well as to very concrete questions that students have about their futures, graduate students should consider implementing a unit on the philosophy of work either within their role as a primary instructor or as a teaching assistant.
Laura is a PhD student at the University of Southern California, where she specializes in social, moral, and political philosophy. She is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on the implications that increasing sociological diversity has for public reason liberalism.
