Occupational choice is for many an existential and deeply personal matter. An avowed goal of liberal societies has always been to permit citizens to make a choice about occupation freely, according to their talents, but also according to their personal inclinations, values, and preferences—unconstrained by the state, the family, or another authority. Distinct from many socialist countries, liberal states do not postulate a duty to be socially productive, and they refrain from fostering a robust, detailed view of the common good. Occupational choice, according to a liberal understanding, can only be steered indirectly by incentives and market mechanisms.
Originally intended as a freedom from authorities, the liberal freedom of occupational choice has started to produce structures that are increasingly disrespectful to people with a particular type of motivational psychology. Willingly stepping up for work that we all need but that is especially risky or burdensome gets increasingly difficult to rationalize in the highly individualized and economically complex societies of today. When stepping up for such tasks, people need to take their personal preferences to be irrelevant and simply respond to what needs to be done. Work in the military, but also in health care, elderly care, or humanitarian service may involve tasks that require such an attitude. I call the problem which this attitude poses for liberal societies the problem of strongly pro-social work. People I call strongly pro-social workers do not necessarily have stronger pro-social preferences or interest in community than others. Instead, they take their personal preferences to be irrelevant and simply respond to what people need in taking up risky or burdensome tasks they would personally prefer to avoid.
To understand the distinctive wrong which I think liberal societies commit towards strongly pro-social workers, we must first understand the fundamentally different structure of motivation and rationality that distinguishes strongly pro-social workers from the individualistic figure presupposed by liberal thinking. In poor, agricultural subsistence communities, the strongly pro-social type of motivation is the rule. In this type of economic organization, people do not perceive their daily work as a choice for which personal preferences are relevant. Most of the time, they simply respond to obvious necessities in their role as members of their families or close-knit communities. Affluence and progress have freed many people from such a life. For many, at least for the citizens of wealthy countries, there is now room for choice, personal development, and self-realization in their occupations. However, strongly pro-social motivation, bracketing individual preferences, seems still important for human life to function.
Contrary to what an individualized model of rational choice purports, not all our decisions are rationalized and motivated by the satisfaction of a personal preference. You can picture the absurdity of such a model by imagining you are presented with three lots: (1) staying home to care for a sick, elderly family member, (2) withdrawing in a solitary cabin to write a book, or (3) going to the cinema. Which of these would you prefer?
Depicting this as a choice between different lots representing fungible options essentially on a par, to be chosen according to preference, seems awkwardly artificial. As many people might, I would respond that my choice depends. I would stay home if I needed to but would prefer something else if I were free to choose. Not being free to prioritize my own preference, however, is not the same as being forced to care. I step up voluntarily. A rational choice theorist could conclude that this in fact reveals a preference to care—the utterance that you “would prefer” something else expresses a more superficial desire that you have decided to bracket for a deeper, weightier preference in this moment. This interpretation saves the rational choice model but seems ad hoc. Examining the choice between the first and the third option, which involves a more superficial, as opposed to a presumably more substantial, value, we may eventually find the reference to an inner hierarchy of preferences plausible. It is plausible that one cares more for their family’s well-being than for an evening in the cinema. Now, picture a person torn up between caring responsibilities and intellectual, scientific, or personal projects, which are of high personal value to her. Having to forgo opportunities and make sacrifices for family needs can feel like a tragic loss of personal value, not like a free decision to be more of a social and caring person than, say, an intellectually inclined person. In some urgent situations, we simply see, as family members, that this is what the good of the family requires, and we stop reasoning in terms of our personal preferences.
Raimo Tuomela elaborates a distinctive model of reasoning that helps us understand what is at play here: reasoning in the we-mode, as opposed to the I-mode. When we reason in the we-mode, we identify a scheme of activity as a joint action, regulated by a shared goal, in which the individual group members do not pursue their individual intentions but act directly on a shared intention promoting the group goal. It is possible to have an I-intention at the same time, but this is not necessary for the rationalization and motivation of the action. We can reason in the I-mode whether we want to be members of a particular group or not, but we do not need to have reasoned in that manner for being capable of we-mode thought. The two modes are equally fundamental, and which one we operate in may be more of a response to social cues than a rational decision. We learn through socialization when we need to function for others and when we are free to pursue our personal preferences.
The professed liberal might now argue that we-mode reasoning is appropriate in the private life of (voluntary) family and group members but is not—and should not be—the mode in which citizens are expected to make their occupational choices. You can ground your choice on social motivations—held in the I-mode, in the mode of an individual who identifies a social goal as their most important personal project—if this is how you personally prefer to spend your life. Alternatively, you can pursue a more individualistic type of motivation for excellence or self-realization if you so prefer. My impression is that this reflects how many modern people, especially from the middle class upwards, think about occupational choice. In socioeconomically disadvantaged classes, by contrast, occupational choice is more often shaped by we-mode thinking. This is suggested by the many reports of upwards mobility through education (see, for example, this book by Jennifer Morton about upwards mobility in the US higher education system). Upwards mobility often comes with an ethical struggle and irritation about the fact that one’s more advantaged colleagues are comfortable understanding their daily work primarily as a promotion of their individual career and personal interests, while being tormented oneself by a sense of urgency in acting pro-socially. This phenomenon is also acknowledged in Germany and in South Africa, where it is exacerbated by severe racial oppression.
While redistributive measures may be more urgent in many cases, class differences in the extent and frequency of we-mode reasoning should also be taken seriously as a cause for the above-described struggle and perceived injustice. Now, is there a real injustice—apart from the economic injustice that pushes some people, but not others, into jobs or roles they do not prefer? I think there is indeed a distinctive kind of wrong when a society fails to understand that not all pro-social workers are social I-mode reasoners but that some are we-mode reasoners. The wrong occurs as long as we accept services that would not be performed voluntarily and we do not assume that there is a joint commitment for all to engage in necessary work.
Recognizing strongly pro-social workers not only as individual citizens but as the we-mode reasoners they are requires the collective to make explicit that what they do is part of a joint action—that we are all in this boat together, that we all share an understanding of our common good and we all take responsibility for it. This is only the case if nobody is free to simply opt out and choose more individualistic pursuits instead. The problem I address is not that some of the strongly pro-social workers might be coerced by economic deprivation or a lack of alternative options. The problem can also occur when people opt for strongly pro-social work voluntarily because of a deeply ingrained understanding that there are services which society needs—and that picking one such responsibility is simply what occupational choice in the life of an adult citizen is about. They have a justified complaint to feel violated, even betrayed, if they go to work in that spirit and then learn that many of their fellow citizens understand occupational life as the realization of personal preferences and engage in individual projects in lieu of strongly pro-social work. Discovering the clash of assumptions about what occupational choice is about seems to be an important part of the ethical struggle that often accompanies upwards mobility. When young adults, after an upbringing which primarily fosters pro-social responses, start to learn about the individualist occupational choices typical in more privileged spheres, irritation is an understandable response.
As an alternative to cultivating work as joint action, we can also avoid the wrong by telling strongly pro-social workers explicitly that there is no joint action—that occupational choice is about best realizing your own preferences, that their we-mode attitude is based on a false assumption and therefore poorly rationalized. If this is explicit, we may be entitled to call strongly pro-social choice propensity, if it persists after all, a dysfunctional or maladaptive psychological relic from premodern times.
But should we do this? Would it be viable and preferable for a society to go down that road? All over the world, the need for elder care and health services is going to increase tremendously. This need is not likely to disappear through automation. Furthermore, it turns out that in the absence of exploitative conditions, labor markets face significant difficulties to recruit enough people. The same may count for harvesting and other essential services that currently rely heavily on exploitation. This suggests that strongly pro-social attitudes are not superfluous under conditions of global justice and gender equality.
As soon as we allow ourselves to depend on people who can only rationalize their service by what is in fact an inaccurate we-attitude, we commit the distinctive wrong: We let people engage in what they understand to be a joint action with shared responsibility while, in fact, this idea is only in their own head. The real deal of the group in which they act is that everyone is on an individual project. In theory, we can envision a fair setting in which this is common knowledge and people only do pro-social work if community and social service is really their strongest personal preference. I doubt, however, that all parts of healthcare, elder care, humanitarian service, or the military could function without the psychological propensity to simply respond to social necessity. If we decide to benefit from this, we must cultivate the climate in which this choice propensity is rationalized.
For this to succeed, it is important to include everyone into a social ethos constraining occupational choice—and make sure not to let the strongly pro-social choices be made only by those with a specific type of upbringing, which can be disadvantaging in professional spheres that come with a lot of power, autonomy, and recognition in the public sphere. We should not assume, however, that everyone simply wants more occupational autonomy and is unhappy with having to serve community needs. By contrast, we can assume that it is in the nature of many to voluntarily make strongly pro-social choices. But they want to do it with the awareness that the whole community shares responsibility and helps together to do the work well. They do not want to commit on the premise that they individually choose this because it is what they personally prefer the most, while others prefer other things, such as athletic, aesthetic, intellectual, or other personal goals that permissibly motivate actual occupational choices in modern affluent societies. Strongly pro-social workers feeling resentment against those types of workers may feel it rightly so—and this is not remedied when we establish equality of opportunity for entering the more individualist spheres. It is only remedied if there are no longer any professional spheres in which you thrive best when you pursue your personal interests and projects at the expense of service to the common good. If it turns out that such individualistic spheres are indispensable to prosperity, we need to decide whether the benefits of not constraining occupational choice by the common good are great enough to accept the injury to strongly pro-social workers. The state may not have to intervene that much, if most people can simply trust others that they do their jobs for the greater benefit of society and face their respective share of the burden.
If individualistic career paths and socially necessary labor drift apart too much, however, an active design of job bundles may be inevitable. Spheres including creative or experimental tasks that are damaged by a too-strong and immediate demand for social utility, for example, academic research, could include service-oriented, administrative, or other immediately useful tasks within the job profile—or complement jobs with mandatory services. How to make each job bundle form a sensible option within the framework of a broad ethos of social service is a complex and difficult question (for more on designing job bundles to meet productive justice requirements, see Lucas Stancyzk). It may involve breaks with basic commitments of liberal labor markets. Those breaks will be less severe the more trust there is in others’ contributions being valuable. In this case, we can allow for more discretion in deciding how each one deems himself to best serve the common good. However, making occupational choice about best serving the common good—for everyone—is crucial to avoiding a distinctive wrong to strongly pro-social workers—workers on which we still depend, and on whom we will eventually depend to an even larger degree if multiple crises, wars, and demographic developments challenge the functioning of liberal labor markets
Gloria Mähringer
Gloria Mähringer is a practical philosopher at LMU Munich and currently also holds an interim professorship at the University of Augsburg. She is the academic director of LMU’s postgraduate program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, which is targeted at active professionals from different parts of society. In her philosophical writing, she deals with work, productive justice, class differences, and the possibility of an egalitarian social ethos of work, but she also has various other interests concerning practical reason, social epistemology, and questions related to neurodiverse functioning.
