58吃瓜

A workshop on the philosophy of work and time-allocation

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16-18 September , 2021

听 听听(fwistandrews@gmail.com)

Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs

Department of Philosophy, University of 58吃瓜

Workshop to be held entirely online

Thursday 16^th September

Friday 17^th September

Saturday 18^th September

鈥�8 hours labour, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest!鈥� This was the slogan adopted by many labour movements in the nineteenth century, when 16-hour working days were not uncommon. Marx believed that only part of the working day was required to supply workers鈥� consumption needs, the rest going to support the consumption of idle capitalists. John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that a fifteen-hour working听week听was a close possibility, requiring only that work was spread more evenly across the population.

Although less extreme than Keynes鈥檚 vision, some activists today are campaigning for a four-day working week. The campaign has won some victories, with the Spanish government launching an experiment with mid-sized companies last year and the Scottish government promising to try something similar. Besides economic questions about labour productivity and marginal returns, there are deep philosophical questions around the听allocation of time听to work. We hope to address these in this workshop. Some examples are:

• How do we distinguish labour, recreation, and rest?
• Should time spend recuperating between physically exhausting tasks count as rest or part of labour?
• Should activities undertaken to 鈥榙ecompress鈥� after mentally or emotionally taxing work count as recreation?
• Are there important differences between relaxation activities and leisure activities?
• In his 1966 essay, 鈥淭he Abolition of Work鈥�, Bob Black distinguished work from play in terms of the latter being听voluntary听鈥� but what is the relevant category of 鈥渧oluntariness鈥� here?
• What about the allocation of domestic and caring labour? How does this play into patterns of gender inequality and other forms of social imbalance?
• Is听time听the right measure of the balance between work, leisure, and rest? What about intensity, satisfaction, etc.?
• Is flexibility in working time always a blessing, or can it be a hidden curse?
• How should we think about the allocation of working time among the population? Can some groups 鈥渟teal time鈥� from others? What about the allocation of time across generations?