A twenty-first century challenge : how to lead an active life whilst contributing to sustainable and equitable development

Abstract

In this beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is experiencing such severe crises that the future of mankind might be threatened. Although these crises are of various kinds—demographic, ecological, extreme inequalities of wealth and so on—they all nevertheless appear to be interconnected, in as much as one of their main causes appears to be the active lives of human beings, as these lives unfold within the framework of the dominant forms of work and exchange of the products of work. The resolve to cope with these crises and to promote sustainable and equitable global development requires a number of responses: first, it requires an investigation into the forms of life that might lead to such a development and, second, it calls for the development of new kinds of life-and-career design interventions to prepare individuals and groups to engage in such new forms of life. Given the limits of an article, this chapter cannot possibly give definitive answers to these two complex questions. It therefore modestly sets out to sketch out some avenues for reflection on such issues. The chapter is organised in three parts. The first part recalls two of the main critical perspectives on work and its consequences from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These criticisms, which mobilised such concepts as ‘decent work’ and ‘humane work’, tended to consider only one kind of work—i.e. that which was remunerated—and moreover generally remained blind to the deleterious consequences for the planet of the present forms of work organisation and exchange. The second part of this chapter thus proposes a more general definition of work, one that does not reduce it to its current dominant association with paid work. Given the major role played by work in the construction of both the world and individual subjectivities, the different forms of organisation which work can give rise to must therefore be evaluated in terms of their potential consequences for the future of the human species, and more generally, for the continuation of life on earth. As will be seen in the third and final part of this chapter, such an evaluation can be firmly embedded in an ethical principle drawing on the philosophical reflections of Jonas and of Ricoeur. This principle announces the urgency and importance of articulating interventions that help people construct active lives in ways that contribute to a sustainable and equitable development.