A Normative Meaning of Meaningful Work

At the time the film was made, the Three Gorges Dam was the world’s largest hydroelectric project. It was conceived by leaders going as far back as Sun Yat-Sen, China’s first post-imperial leader, and championed by Mao Tse-Tung early in his administration for both its symbolic value (technological and economic advancement, and humanity’s ability to control nature) and its humanitarian value (taming “China’s sorrow”—a river that brought floods, death, and devastation throughout its history—and bringing electricity to millions of rural poor) (Dai and Sullivan 1999). Throughout its construction and since its completion, it has been the subject of controversy because of environmental concerns (despite being the source of so-called clean energy, it disrupted the natural ecology and became the source of potentially unintended consequences such as sedimentary deposits that choked off natural life) and social concerns (including the flooding of cultural treasures and of villages requiring the displacement of millions of people leaving ancestral homes in exchange for modern, sterile apartments) (Hvistendahl 2008). While Up the Yangtze focuses on the narratives of Cindy and Jerry, the narrative of the dam itself and its stakeholders is a larger subject of the film.

Wolf’s demand for objective attractiveness may less familiar to empirical social scientists who endeavor to study what work is experienced and perceived as meaningful, not necessarily whether or why they may be right or wrong to experience and perceive it as such. Among philosophers today studying the meaningfulness of life, however, “a majority…are objectivists of some kind, aiming to detect a common denominator [cf. my generalizability criterion for a definition] among the various ways of living in the physical world that confer meaning at least partially in virtue of mind-independent factors” (Metz 2013, p. 181). However, in meaningful work scholarship, ethicists have not only typically left “meaningful” to be defined by the beholder; they have also typically (with the notable exception of Veltman 2016) used “objective” in a different sense: to refer to the “moral conditions” of work, such as being “treated with dignity and respect” (Ciulla 2000, p. 225)—that is, the “external, objective context that shapes and legitimizes what may be considered meaningful by the individual” (Bailey et al. 2018a, p. 11), in a system in which the worker is treated as a “factor of production” (Pope John Paul II 1981). It is also important to distinguish my use of “objective” from that of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, to which it is in some ways diametrically opposed, including to Randian Objectivism’s precept that the moral purpose of life is to pursue egoistic happiness.