Trade has been occurring throughout human history. So the “transactional culture” is inherently human. Transactional conduct, therefor, is not inherently immoral on the grounds that it is “non-humanistic”. Rather, what is immoral is the way you treat it, how you speak of it, and your motives for doing so, in combination with your conduct towards others during the transaction.

It seems to me that modern workplace cultures are inherently transactional by nature. However transactional culture is robotic, non-humanistic, and formal...

Also, I’m not just talking obvious abuse by corporations and owners but even most worker interactions. — schopenhauer1

This certainly isn't true for me. I worked for almost 30 years with good bosses and competent coworkers. We did good work and took care of each other. I liked almost everyone and came to love some. Still, you gave me an opening, so I'll post this quote from one of my favorite essays - "Compensation" by Emerson:

Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the preachers taught. The documents, too, from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men...

...Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is best to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.
— Emerson

Well put.

Yeah, but how is managing a business and dealing with coworkers a natural way that you would talk with a friend or family or a member of your in group? It’s not. It’s depersonalizing the person because you need them as a means to your ends.

This certainly isn't true for me. I worked for almost 30 years with good bosses and competent coworkers. We did good work and took care of each other. I liked almost everyone and came to love some. — T Clark

Not saying you can’t make friends at work or people can’t override this transactional nature, but that is a contingency and not the essence of how these arrangements work. The work would go on and make its profit whether you were ok with that particular team/company/set of people that you were a part of that you mention here in this anecdote.

Not to mention the very nature of some work is god awful boring activities you simply do cause you need to survive. Much work not related to artistic creative content would never get done without an impersonal transaction of compensation. You might find it better than other work but even that “better than x work” wouldn’t have been done in the first place if there was no compensation involved in the first place.

Not everyone is a friend or family member, though. Treating someone as a means to an end is just as perilous in business as it is in any social context, and one can form friendly relationships and treat people morally in business as they can anywhere else.

Treating someone as a means to an end is just as perilous in business as it is in any social context, and one can form friendly relationships and treat people morally in business as they can anywhere else. — NOS4A2

But they can’t. You do job or you get fired. You do something for a friend because they are your friend. You do something for an employer because you need to be compensated. You need to live. This is why people just don’t say not today or fuck off whenever they don’t want to.

Again, on target OP! You've done your homework and it shows. Transactions, that's all there was/is/will be to life. How disheartening it is, oui mon ami? Any light at the end of this tunnel mate?

If anything, it's Kant's deontology that is "robotic, non-humanistic, and formal" and therefore, IME, doesn't work well (i.e. requires totalitarian/theocratic-like administrative enforcement) amid the messy vaguaries of everyday, social life.

:up:

:up:

Yeah, but how is managing a business and dealing with coworkers a natural way that you would talk with a friend or family or a member of your in group? It’s not. It’s depersonalizing the person because you need them as a means to your ends. — schopenhauer1

Friends and family are a means to an end as well.
You're using your friends and family for your psycho-social wellbeing, for your socio-economic status, your reputation, your emergency safety net.

You do job or you get fired. — schopenhauer1

It's the same with friends and family. Failure to do your job as a friend or family member will get you fired from the friendship or family.
It's why people get divorced, disown their children or other family members, why friendships break up.

Noone simply likes you for being you.

nah just proves cabereas ideas more.

Not the same. You both hopefully enjoy the company for friends. And you can leave friendship and your material well-being isn’t entailed by the relationship. Not so with business relationships. There is a known threat of leaving for the worker or insubordination…loss of income, loss of a means to survive. You are there to do this thing and you are the tool to do that thing.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a no win situation. You can’t really get out of it. Free ride, homelessness, suicide, die slowly from destitution.

And you can leave friendship and your material well-being isn’t entailed by the relationship. — schopenhauer1

But your psycho-social wellbeing is.

Not so with business relationships. There is a known threat of leaving for the worker or insubordination…loss of income, loss of a means to survive. You are there to do this thing and you are the tool to do that thing.

Friendships/family relationships and business relationships have different ends, but they are both means to an end.

It is not true that a person is a means to an end only in a business relationship, but not in a friendship.

Not to mention the very nature of some work is god awful boring activities you simply do cause you need to survive. Much work not related to artistic creative content would never get done without an impersonal transaction of compensation. — schopenhauer1

Anyone who does "artistic, creative" work knows that much of that work will be "awful boring activities." Sanding wood, printing and binding documents, cleaning up when you're done, bookkeeping, etc., etc., etc.

You seem to be unwilling or unable to accept that many people just don't see things the same way you do.

Guess not. Better go kill myself whilst you enjoy bookkeeping for no money for 8+ hours a day :roll:.

Again, on target OP! You've done your homework and it shows. Transactions, that's all there was/is/will be to life. How disheartening it is, oui mon ami? Any light at the end of this tunnel mate? — Agent Smith

I don't think so. Pessimism reveals what is intractably negative about life. One of them is the entailed transactionism, especially of the modern economic system.

Friendships/family relationships and business relationships have different ends, but they are both means to an end. — baker

You are not dehumanizing your friend though to an object. A true friend is someone presumably, who you would care for their well-being and vice versa. Let's look at some other differences:

1) A friend you can leave if the friendship is no longer beneficial. Leaving does not automatically entail that you cannot survive. Businesses know they can threaten your very survival. They can dictate you act according to their demands. If a friend demands of you and is being too demanding, you can leave without such dire hardship.

2) (Perhaps 1a) A friend is someone you are "natural" around. That is to say, you can be truly yourself without any pressures of conforming to a policy. It is the way most humans are when not pressured or molded to get a task done with incentives that will be taken away otherwise.

3) Presumably, you want to be around your friend. In a business, often you are subject to personalities, styles of interaction, and hierarchies, that you would simply not choose otherwise. You are "stuck" until you find another "fiefdom" to migrate to (if that's an option).

4) Presumably, you aren't looked at solely because of some gain they are getting from you. Rather it is enjoying their company as a person. You are not being taken advantage of based on your position. Going back to point 1, you do and act a certain way around employers because if you don't they will disapprove and fire you.

All of these come back to a main point which is that employers understand that employees are in a position of precariousness. That is to say, they need the employer usually way more than the employer needs them. Understanding this, the employer can simply dangle the possibility of termination to motivate the worker to comply with demands of the company. It is NOT a reciprocal transaction as is the case with true friends (not friends of convenience or "friends" that are clearly predatory or abusive relationships).

So yeah, you can make the case that friendships are "transactional" but I don't think in the same "means" that a company is doing. Your argument reminds of arguments that go like this:

Person 1: "You should eat more natural foods as they are healthy for you".

Person 2: "Oh silly goose, ALL foods are natural because they are made of compounds and atoms that are natural to the universe".

That is obviously an absurd point. Whilst true that technically all matter is "natural", that is a distinction that makes no difference. There are differences in the ways you are forced to interact in a business relationship that are not the same as friendships, and they are often because of the nature of how you are used as a means that violates Kant's second principle.

Now, that being said, to be a bit of devil's advocate, I can agree with you that ALL interactions are using people but then this would simply provide more evidence for Cabrera's point that human life ENTAILS being immoral.

Anyone who does "artistic, creative" work knows that much of that work will be "awful boring activities." Sanding wood, printing and binding documents, cleaning up when you're done, bookkeeping, etc., etc., etc. — T Clark

Also, if you truly want to stop sanding the wood on your spare time, you can. If you want to keep going you can. If you want to keep doing something to gain experience you can or to get better at it. It is fully up to you and not contingent on a disincentive of not surviving.

Life itself of course means you will have to do things you may not want to stay alive, but that's a broader issue that does lead to AN, which if I bring up will get this thread booted to the ghetto of Antinatalism thread, so I dare not say it.. But I will stick to simply the fact that companies are using people and it is contingent whether the workers like the arrangement or not, as was your anecdote. Also my point with the 8 hours of bookkeeping is that it is indeed absurd for certain tasks to be done other than the arrangement of getting paid for it. Use another task if you want if bookkeeping for long amounts of time is a hobby of yours just for the fun of it or because it is meditative for you or because you just like balancing books and such.

Now, that being said, to be a bit of devil's advocate, I can agree with you that ALL interactions are using people but then this would simply provide more evidence for Cabrera's point that human life ENTAILS being immoral. — schopenhauer1

Why is it immoral to use people? What does Cabrera say, what do you say to this?

Also, if you truly want to stop sanding the wood on your spare time, you can. If you want to keep going you can. If you want to keep doing something to gain experience you can or to get better at it. It is fully up to you and not contingent on a disincentive of not surviving. — schopenhauer1

You need to put more effort into understanding what people are saying rather than immediately crumpling it up to fit in the odd-shaped little boxes your ideas fit in. Everything worth doing includes work that, in itself, is not fun or interesting but is necessary for the full enterprise to work. As I said, sanding wood, bookkeeping, cleaning up. If you value what you are doing, you come to value even that more tedious work. And where did I say you don't get paid for it?

AN, which if I bring up will get this thread booted to the ghetto of Antinatalism thread, so I dare not say it. — schopenhauer1

Ah, yes. The dreaded "AN." I sympathize.

If you value what you are doing, you come to value even that more tedious work. — T Clark

But that’s my point, it all depends if you are valuing what you are doing or you are doing it because you need a paycheck. Huge difference. My hunch is most people would drop bookkeeping as a pastime once they don’t get paid for it. Certainly sitting in a space X for a period of time to do task Y, much of all that would be dropped. So I refer you back to my previous posts about the nature of work and how it threatens you with no survival and this makes it different than other relations like friendship or even relations to your own interests like hobbies.

↪180 Proof nah just proves cabereas ideas more. — schopenhauer1

Oh please, man, we've done this dance before ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/578914

you don’t agree with which aspect of Cabrera?

But that’s my point, it all depends if you are valuing what you are doing or you are doing it because you need a paycheck. Huge difference. My hunch is most people would drop bookkeeping as a pastime once they don’t get paid for it. Certainly sitting in a space X for a period of time to do task Y, much of all that would be dropped. So I refer you back to my previous posts about the nature of work and how it threatens you with no survival and this makes it different than other relations like friendship or even relations to your own interests like hobbies. — schopenhauer1

As usual, we've reached a dead end in our argument. To close the discussion out, I'm going to try a new catch phrase - That's the name of that tune.

As usual, we've reached a dead end in our argument. To close the discussion out, I'm going to try a new catch phrase - That's the name of that tune. — T Clark

Your relations become a skewed version of yourself to “get shit done”. How the negatives of this arrangement are not recognized is beyond me. Do you not see any negatives in how workplace culture manifests?

I think the link (and the other handle-link on the quote) clarifies my criticisms.

Your relations become a skewed version of yourself to “get shit done”. How the negatives of this arrangement are not recognized is beyond me. Do you not see any negatives in how workplace culture manifests? — schopenhauer1

What part of "That's the name of that tune," don't you understand.

I think the link (and the other handle-link on the quote) clarifies my criticisms — 180 Proof

I just don’t see what you were or are getting at. Cabrera as far as I can interpret, is saying that life entails violating the minimal ethical stance. If Kant is right about not using people, the workplace always violates this.

What part of "That's the name of that tune," don't you understand. — T Clark

Not sure.. What is the "that" and what is the "tune"?

Why is it immoral to use people? What does Cabrera say, what do you say to this? — baker

Kant would say if it is "merely" treating someone as a means. I would say that the arrangement of the workplace is exploitive by it's very nature because even though it is in theory "contractual", work itself is de facto not an "opt out" option lest death or severe suffering. A friendship, even family after adulthood is not so tied to survival.

Cabrera seems to say that life itself entails a certain amount of being unethical. Mixing this with the de facto arrangement of the workplace.. It is simply entailed that we must be unethically treated at the workplace. We need it to survive, and thus we must encounter it if we are to survive in this particular economic form (though I am not suggesting another form is better necessarily). The workplace doesn't care about us. They care about our capacity for production. We aren't treated as peers, but as units in a hierarchy.

I am not saying it can be another way, only this is what is the case.

Mind you, some workplaces can have better "benefits" or even "cultures" but this is contingently part of the package of the arrangement. The arrangement always means that you are still a unit and treated as a means. The package is not because you are you, it is contingent on how valuable they think you are.. When you are not valuable, they will just fire you because you are no longer a means for their end.

Mind you, you can possibly say that you "quitting" would screw the company over, but that is almost never the case. It's almost always rather the worker who "needs" the company and so puts up being used by them, than it is the other way around. The Lord doesn't just fold up shop if a serf leaves (dies), he just finds more serfs.