Spheres of Justice #8

Chapter 6 is about hard work. By this he means work that people don’t look for and wouldn’t choose to do if there were better alternatives. It is a “negative good” and usually carries with it poverty, insecurity, ill health, danger, or dishonor. Yet it is socially necessary work; it needs to be done, and somebody must do it. Soldiering, at least sometimes, is a special kind of hard work. It may be dangerous, with rank-and-file soldiers often recruited from the lower class, outcasts, foreigners. Mining is usually dangerous. Hard work is often done by slaves, resident aliens, and "guest workers."

Rousseau thought hard work such as soldiering, cutting sugar cane, or picking lettuce should be shared by many, tying it to being a citizen or member of a self-governing community. But he was vague about how wide the sharing and the range of work. Road building was a good example for Rousseau and his era. It was degrading work usually imposed on the poorest and politically weakest people. Men of noble birth and the bourgeoisie were exempt.

Dirty work is another variety of hard work, such as done by the untouchables in India. Walzer says it is not an appropriate goal for social policy that all dirty work that needs to be done should be shared by all. That would require an extraordinary degree of state control and interfere radically with other kinds of work. He has argued for a partial and symbolic sharing, the purpose being to break the link between dirty work and respect.

Walzer gives lengthy descriptions about Israeli kibbutzes and San Francisco Scavengers, a worker-owned cooperative that collects the garbage.

Chapter 7 is about leisure. Leisure is a good thing for part of one’s time and the freedom to have some – in the form of vacation, holidays, days for religion, and after-work hours -- is a central issue of distributive justice. Too much leisure for some, such as the idleness of those privileged with wealth and power in past centuries is a form of tyranny. I don’t know why Walzer didn’t also mention royal families, such as in Saudi Arabia, or theocracies, that exist even currently. Another topic related to leisure that he barely mentions is retirement. He gives more extended discussions of vacations and the Sabbath and their similarities and differences.

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