HRM AND THE ETHICS OF COMMODIFIED WORK 105Thesis), it does so necessarily: value and the institutions of the market are
mutually exclusive. Here the ascription of price entails the evacuation of value.
There is also a weaker version of the thesis in which the evacuation is
understood as a causal rather than a logical phenomenon. Two features of this
strong Entailment Thesis are worth noting. First, the Entailment Thesis is not
fundamentally set against markets, unless one assumes—quite implausibly I
would add—that everything is intrinsically valuable. The thesis merely rules
out the ascription of price for those things that should be treated with dignity
or respect. Second, the Entailment Thesis is routinely employed in a deductive
manner to derive unconditional conclusions about the absolute immorality of
certain forms of commodification. A good portion of the practical significance
of the Value Evacuation Thesis resides in the role that it plays in such public
policy oriented arguments.
It should be clear also what relevance this discussion has to the commodifi-
cation of work that occurs in a market economy. Although Kant does not talk
directly about work, a Kantian style objection would focus on the instrumen-
tality of the wage–labour contract. The objection would be that employers
regard employees as a means to profit and that this is morally objectionable
since the profit motive involves regarding the surplus-value producing worker
as a mere means. Equally, employees have what Antony Flew (1976) once
called a ‘wages motive’ and in so far as they regard the employers as a means
to a wage then they treat them as a means that from a Kantian point of view
one might view as morally objectionable.
This has some considerable implications for the ethics of HRM and for
questions concerning the ethics of work in a market economy more generally.
If the claim about mutual exclusivity of price and intrinsic valuation is true
then we should either reject all work for remuneration as morally pernicious
or alternatively forget about ethical attitudes on the part of employers since
they must regard their employees as commodities and employees regard their
employers as means to wages.
However, things are not as bleak as the thesis of mutual exclusivity might
suggest. First, there are extant counterexamples to the thesis that intrinsic
modes of regard and price are mutually exclusive. Think, for instance, of a
case where I produce art works for sale. The mere fact that I produce them
for sale does not mean that I do not regard each work as intrinsically valuable.
Indeed, this is not only a matter of logic but also a fact of much aesthetic
production in the world. Alternatively, to choose an example more close to
home, think of attitudes to certain forms of work that have a vocational aspect.
Imagine that one works as a nurse and that one is committed to assisting
the sick and needy. The mere fact that one is paid for what one does neither
impugns my commitment to the sick and needy nor evacuates the intrinsic
value one accords to one’s work. This point about the possibility of price and
intrinsic value co-existing in certain forms of work is one which Margaret Jane