Taking Jobs and Doing Harm

In popular discourse and in the philosophical literature there is almost no reflection on the morality of doing harm in the context of doing one's job. To the contrary, workers are valorised simply for having a job, and typically individual workers are spared from blame, even when they cause significant harm as part of their job. In this essay we define and argue against a position, which we label permissivism, that renders more precise a popular yet inchoate attitude toward the domain of job-taking. Permissivists believe (by definition) that one does no wrong by taking a job, and thus committing to doing a certain kind of work, unless the work is cartoonishly evil. We distinguish between two versions of this view. According to Situational Permissivism, in almost every case of committing-to-doing-harm-by-taking-a-job, particular situational details (such as personal costs) provide a defeater of the wrongness of doing that harm. On Structural Permissivism, the institutional nature of the market economy substitutes for the moral agency of the job-taker. We consider multiple arguments for each version of Permissivism and show them all to be flawed.