Consider the following paragraph from Beauty:*
“Kant (The Critique of Judgement, 1795) took up the point, building from the idea of disinterest a highly charged aesthetic theory. According to Kant we take an ‘interested’ approach to things or people whenever we use them as means to satisfy one of our interests: for example, when we use a hammer to drive in a nail or a person to carry a message. Animals have only ‘interested’ attitudes: in everything they are driven by their desires, needs and appetites, and treat objects and other animals as instruments to fulfil those things. We, however, make distinction in our thinking and behaviour, between those things that are means to use, and those which are also ends in themselves. Toward some things we take an interest that is not governed by interest but which is, so to speak, entirely devoted to the object.”
The paragraph made me think of a worker who labours endlessly in a factory. A European, an American working three jobs, a Bangladeshi in a sweatshop. We know that many workers work more than forty hours per week. We know that their human rights are being violated to a lesser or greater degree. We know, and this is the crucial part, that most corporations don’t care.
The idea of a corporation is to generate a profit for the owners of that corporation. In that framework, workers are one of the means to generate a profit.
Now, workers are also humans. As humans, they have human needs and desires. They have a desire for safety, love, beauty. People in corporations, in theory, know that. (They, also, have desires such as summers on yachts.)
Self-actualisation, the agency to make his or her own decisions, the expansion of the mind that comes with meaningful interaction with other people, as well as through books, films and meditation, are, I think, aspects of the beauty of the human condition. Laborious factory work is the antipode: corporations see workers as a means for profit and workers see work as a means for livelihood.
Let us return to Kant. He praised humans for their ability to distinguish between those things are that are a means and those than are and ends in themselves. Animals do not have that conscious ability.
When corporations see workers as only a means, ignoring their human condition, they no longer behave like humans, but like animals. Everything is subject to their desires, needs and appetites.
Maybe it is these reasons that explain why, when I argue against exploitation of labour, I sometimes fall short of finding the words. Understanding that the capitalist only sees the human as an instrument and denies what is beautiful in the human condition per se, I think that the word I have been looking for is ugly. The capitalist’s mindset is ugly.
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*Scruton, Roger, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, 2011.
Think! 