HRM AND THE ETHICS OF COMMODIFIED WORK 111three distinct types of commercial activity, all of which involve theprofit-
seeking motive.
Lucrepathic action: here seeking profit is the sole or dominant consideration
in an agent’s all-things-considered judgements.
Accumulative action: here whilst the profit motive is the (or a) primary aim of
action, its pursuit is moderated either by moral goals that have weight or
by moral side-constraints.
Stipendiary action: here the profit motive is not a goal, but rather functions as
a side-constraint on action directed by other non-commercial goals.
Here, I focus on actual profit motives where the agent is a commercial agent
engaging in standard commercial practices of buying and selling. (It would
be possible to broaden the analysis to encompass monetary motives more
generally, which would include such things as, for instance, being motivated
by a monetary wage, but for purposes of simplicity, I do not do so here.)
Exploitative and unjust work relations are underpinned by lucrepathic action.
In cases where exploitation occurs, it is not so much that a specific rate of
profit is overstepped, but rather that employers place financial ends ahead of
the morally significant needs of their employees. What is objectionable is pure
profit-seeking.
The responsibility of employers then is not to act lucrepathically. In so
far as their aim is the pursuit of profit as an end in itself, then employ-
ers should act as ‘accumulators’. In their pursuit of profit they should not
ignore or override the significant other-regarding needs of their employees.
Of course this is vague. What counts as a significant other-regarding concern
and how we might balance various other-regarding concerns with those of the
employee are issues which are not addressed here. But this is to be expected
since the aim is not so much to provide the concrete details of such respon-
sibilities, but rather to provide the general contours of such an ethic. The
concrete details would need to be filled outin situ.
There is one final point worth mentioning. It is sometimes thought that
endorsing self-interest as a legitimate motivation—to argue that self-interest
is not necessarily immoral—commits one to laissez-faire liberalism. This is
part of an unfortunate division commonly encountered between self-interest
and other-regarding action.Ex hypothesi, to be self-interested is to lack other-
regarding motives altogether whilst to be altruistic is to lack any self-interested
motives. Accordingly, if one accepts self-interest as morally permissible, one
must be opposed to any moral constraints on what self-interested activities
people undertake within the sphere of the market. But this is anon sequitur
and the mistake is a consequence of identifying self-interest with selfishness.
The upshot is that we should not think that we must choose between the
Scylla and Carybdis of, on the one hand, laissez-faire liberalism which rules