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Discussion
1.
Before lawyers, political scientists and other experts settle down to the questions awaiting them of rights and the putative right to work, I am to say something about work itself - its moral meaning or import. Such is the behest of the organisers. But, proceeding by indirection, I shall reach that destination by a detour.
Long before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) asserted a right to work and a right to just and favourable remuneration for work, the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) and the American Declaration of Independence (1776) each asserted a human right to the pursuit of happiness. 'All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights . . . among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' No one is uninterested in happiness, or the right to pursue it, but how does the pursuit of happiness connect with work? Well, if you look hard enough, you will find one part of an answer to that question in Aristotle. Or so I shall claim.
Aristotle says that happiness is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue in a complete life. In order to understand this properly we must gloss virtue. To judge from Book 1, Chapter 7 and Book 2, Chapter 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle thinks that the arete or virtue of a human being is the disposition by whose exercise that being carries out the ergon that is proper to man and engages in activities and acts of the soul that arise from reason (1098a14):
We state the ergon of man to be a certain kind of life and this to be activity or actions of the soul applying a rational principle . . . the ergon of man is the good and noble performance of such activity or actions.
So the next thing we need to know is what ergon is.
Traditionally, ergon is translated as function. But can we really say that man has a function? In this connection, Aristotle suggests that man is to his ergon as a flute player is to flute-playing, a builder to building, an eye to seeing, a hand to the things...