Meaningful Work and Exploitation from a Kantian Perspective

Project Summary:

Our project is centred around two themes. 

Firstly, we focus on work in the context of the gig-economy and migration. Our guiding idea is that there is a crucial and hitherto overlooked difference between instrumentalization and exploitation. Standardly, coercion and deception are markers of instrumentalization. However, working conditions in the gig-economy, e.g. for Uber drivers, can be exploitative without any overt coercion or deception. These, and other jobs that are predominantly held by migrants, expose blind spots in current normative theories as well as in the burgeoning literature on migrant labour. They do not overtly qualify as instrumentalization of workers as they are freely chosen, but they raise significant ethical challenges around vulnerabilities, structural exploitation and historical injustice.  

Secondly, economic migration challenges many standard assumptions of liberal theory about equal moral worth, equality of opportunity and society as a system of fair cooperation. Frequently, those who migrate start from an unequal position compared to citizens. They often trade this inequality and the work in exploitative migrant jobs for the implicit liberal promise that their offspring will enjoy the benefits of equality of opportunity and citizenship. Standard liberal theory cannot adequately account for this. The extant debate about migration focuses on access to a country without due consideration for the lived reality of migrant workers. Liberal theory also treats migrant labour as exceptional, even though migrant labour, e.g. in core sectors such as health care and agriculture, is the rule not the exception. Some core features of liberal theory, such as the notion of society as a system of fair cooperation, must be reframed. We may have to give up on the ideal of society as a closed system of cooperation, replacing it with the ideal of society as a system of cooperation between those who are already part of it and immigrants, including an intergenerational perspective.  

Visitor Biography:

Corinna Mieth is Full Professor for Practical Philosophy at Ruhr-University Bochum since 2010. She got her PhD from the University of Tuebingen (2002) with a book on "Utopian Thinking in Literature and Philosophy" and her Habilitation from the University of Bonn (2009) with a book on "Positive Duties". She's published on Kant's Practical Philosophy, the Political Philosophy of John Rawls, Positive and Negative Duties, Human Dignity, Moralism, Global (In)justice and Challenges of Migration. She had Fellowships at the Research Institute for Philosophy, Hanover (2006-07), the Ethics Center at the University of Zurich (2008), the Institute for Advanced Studies at Berlin (2020-21) and the Fondation de la Science de L'Homme at Paris (2022). She was a visiting professor at Trinity College Dublin (2019) and the University of Rijeka (2022). Currently she's leading a joint Germany/UK research project with Martin Sticker (Bristol) about "Using People Well and Treating People Badly: Towards a Kantian Realm of Ends and Means" (2023-26) and she is part of the Project Management of the “Digital Kant-Centre NRW“ (since 09/2022). 

Recent Publications:

• Kant, Migration and The Right Not to be Treated With Hostility, in: N.Sancez-Madrid / A. Taraborrelli (eds.), Kant‘s Cosmopolitanism and Migration, Berlin/New York 2025 (in print) 
• Two faces of dignity: a Kantian perspective on Uber drivers’ fight for decent working conditions (with Sophie Bernard), in: The Conversation November 5, 2023, https://theconversation.com/two-faces-of-dignity-a-kantian-perspective-on-uber-drivers-fight-for-decent-working-conditions-202178 
• Beyond Non-Instrumentalization: Migration, Poverty and Dignity within a Kantian Framework (with Garrath Williams, DOI: 10.1007/s10677-022-10288-7), 
  in: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (26/2023), pp. 209-224  
• Poverty, Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends (with Garrath Williams), 
  in: A. Cureton and J.-W. von de Rijt (Hg.), Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends, Routledge 2021, pp. 206-223 
• Kant and Poverty. Special Issue, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 
  (edited with Martin Sticker and Garrath Williams). Springer: Doderecht 2022  
• Migration, Stability and Solidarity (edited with Wolfram Cremer),  
  Nomos: Baden-Baden 2021