As its title suggests, Just Work is an attempt to articulate an account of the justice of work. But the title is not just descriptive, it is also imperative – just work! – and this leads Muirhead to examine the question, why we work. Muirhead argues that although Americans work for the instrumental reasons of monetary and material sustenance this cannot entirely explain our working life.Footnote ¹ For besides how much money we make, we also evaluate our work in terms of how it fits us – the way it brings meaning to our lives through developing our talents and capacities. For Muirhead, the justice of work requires not just that we fulfill socially useful roles, for example teaching as opposed to stealing, but also that our work personally fits us in a certain way.

Marx is famous for bringing to our attention the expressive and formative experience of our working life, as well as the alienation that occurs when our work is at odds with our distinctly human capacities. He understood the source of alienation in terms of capitalist modes of production and he sought a solution to the problem in a social revolution, which would return production to the hands of the workers. The apparent failure of Marxist-type experiments in the modern world has meant that many reformers and politicians forego issues of fulfillment in work and focus instead on contractual relations between employer and employee. Contractual relations are attractive because they require mutual consent, specifically an employees consent, and thus express a respect for individuals as autonomous human beings, while at the same time they fall short of the coercion and bias involved in naming individuals to jobs to which they are ‘ideally’ suited. Liberal democrats do not deny that our jobs are formative, but they leave it up to the individual to decide which jobs to take and when to leave them; that is they leave it up to the individual to decide who they want to be.

Thus Muirhead's ideal of a personal fit with one's job is not new, but as an element of the justice of work in liberal democracies, it is contentious. In the first few chapters of Just Work Muirhead argues for the relevance of personal fit to liberal democratic notions of justice and in latter chapters he explores what such a personal fit might involve. In what follows I want to canvass some of his reasons for situating personal fit into the philosophy of liberal democratic justice, briefly look at a few different interpretations of personal fit, and finally introduce Muirhead's solution.

Muirhead argues that at the heart of liberal democracies exists a tension between, on the one hand, the affirmation of the individual and her ability to conceive of and follow her own conception of the good life, and on the other hand, the fact that just democracies cannot be neutral “between ways of life that contribute to economic productivity and those that do not.” (Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson1996: 280) Just democracies ask that we are self-reliant and that we do our share of the work to keep ourselves and society afloat. Whatever this amounts to, just democracies cannot support a class of people who exist because of the work of another class. But the affirmation of work is potentially at odds with the affirmation that we are free to conceive and follow our own conception of the good life. Because jobs undeniably shape the kind of people we are and the sort of life we live, and because not all jobs are open to all people – due to, for instance, education, natural ability and luck – the working life represents a constraint on our ability to conceive and follow a conception of the good life.

That our freedom as democratic citizens is constrained in various ways is not controversial, but just how and when those freedoms are constrained is. Muirhead's contribution is to suggest that our freedom to conceive and follow our own conception of the good life may be reconciled with work if our work fits us; if we could endorse our work as part of the good life. This does not require, Muirhead argues, a Marxist restructuring of the economy or governmental control of what counts as the good life – in other words, the ideal of fitting work need not overshadow the freedom it was meant to save.

Muirhead further argues that if we ignore the ideal of fitting work, and focus – as most liberals do – on informed consent, freedom of exit and mutual benefit, then we cannot articulate the real problems with many jobs. Muirhead offers up a myriad of convincing examples to make this point, but he tends to focus on the problems of domestic service, be it servants of the late nineteenth century or the nannies of today. For instance, think of the woman who leaves her own family in the Philippines to travel to the UK to care for another's family. She comes willingly, receives a wage which she hopes to send home so that her children can get an education, and so she and her husband can one day afford a home. Moreover she can quit whenever she likes, she receives time off from her work and the family in the UK treat her well. What is the problem with such work?

The problem for Muirhead seems to be that while in one sense, such a person can be said to have chosen this job, her choice is predicated on the fact that her other options were even worse – perhaps the inability for her family to stay together, the inability to pay for basic education and healthcare etc. Thus even though she made a choice, it is not a choice that represents her conception of the good life. Just because she chose the best of a bad lot does not mean that she deserves what she chose.

Liberal democracies recognize that we each have a claim on a life that is, in some sense, our own. But in order to realize that claim we need more than the formal freedom to choose, we also need to pay attention to the choices available to us. Choice is important not for its own sake, but because it makes it more likely that we will find fitting work. But this crucially depends on there being valuable things to choose from. To realize our own conception of the good life we need a set of options that allow for the cultivation of our human capacities and individual purposes. Just what those capacities and purposes are is a matter for debate, but some will come from the conception of a person implicit in liberal democratic theory. For instance, jobs need to support and not undermine a sense of dignity and equality something that, arguably, is lacking in the above example.

If liberal democracies can support some notion of personal fit or meaningful work it must be one that allows for individual difference in what one might find meaningful and one that is potentially open for all to achieve. In the last four chapters of his book Muirhead looks at different ways the concept of fitting work has been understood. He begins with the Protestant work ethic and the notion of a calling. Here one finds fitting and meaningful work by exercising the talents and capacities given by God and intended by his design to serve the greater good. You are called to your work by God and it is a sacred duty to perform it faithfully. All honest work, however common, is filled with divine purpose. You work, not for riches and comfort, but to fulfill an obligation to God, and in the face of predestination, to manifest signs of salvation. But as America became more secular this meaningfulness of work was lost. While in a God-fearing world we work to fulfill God's purposes now we just work from habit and to fulfill the desires that money can meet.

From the Protestant work ethic Muirhead turns to Mill's philosophy for a secular articulation of what might count as fulfillment or meaning. Muirhead seems to appreciate Mill's emphasis on the development of higher human capacities, and the importance of individual choice to their development. But for Mill fulfillment of those capacities only comes to those with the courage, foresight, dedication, education and talent to disregard social expectation and live by the light of their own choices. Because these qualities are rare, those individuals capable of fulfillment are also rare. Muirhead concludes that this conception of fulfillment is too limited for a democratic culture, which understands meaningful existence as possible for all citizens.

From Mill Muirhead turns to Betty Friedan's careerism. Echoing Muirhead's earlier concerns with domestic labor, Friedan's solution to the lack of meaning in such work is to turn housewives into career women. Friedan imagines a working world in which personal purposes find articulation in the purposes of one's work. This ideal fit between an individual and what she does as completely expressive of who she is reminds us of Marx. Although Freidan does not call for a restructuring of the economy, for Muirhead, the problem with both of them is the same: in requiring work to be the sole source of expressive meaning they set the bar so high that no job can attain it – whatever the economy. Even the best careers are still jobs and require discipline as well as creative expression.

When we make the notion of fit unrealistic, for instance, because it requires a metaphysical belief that few people still hold, or because it entails a life very few people can acquire, or because it asks that all careers fit us completely, then the category of fit appears impossible and the tendency is to disregard it for something less difficult to implement. In light of this, Muirhead suggests that the most realistic way to think about fitting or meaningful work is in terms of Alasdair MacIntyre's understanding of a practice. For an activity to be a practice it must be coherent, complex, cooperative and socially established, but most importantly it must motivate the people who do it in terms of goods that are internal to the practice. An internal good is something that is acquired through learning to do an activity well, and which only through dedication to the activity can one grasp the goods involved.

An internal good is never fully understood outside of participation in the activity in which it is made manifest, but this is not to say we cannot recognize internal goods that we personally do not have. For instance, we can recognize the particular grace and prowess that comes from being an athlete, or the sense of style and design that comes from working with art. But the point is that internal goods are the sort of things that, through dedication and practice, shape us in their image, and then insofar as we identify with them, they become expressive of who we are. This is different from a model of fit or meaningful work in which we first have a passion or talent for something, and only then look for a job to engage it. On the model of internal goods the job, via its internal goods, creates the passion or particular talent.

A good fit requires that a job have internal goods to acquire, that we indeed acquire them and finally that the goods we acquire shape us in ways that coincide with our understanding of the good life. Unlike the Protestant work ethic, Mill's fulfillment or Freidan's careerism, work as practice connects the ideal of fit with the actual experience of work. You do not need to be particularly smart, wealthy or courageous to achieve the internal goods specific to a job – practicing law as well as fixing cars and teaching philosophy can bring internal goods to the right person. You do not need to believe in God to find purpose in your work, the purpose now comes from how the work allows you to be a certain kind of person, to express yourself in ways that you identify as good. And finally, work as practice does not promise a perfectly expressive experience, rather it says that there is hope to partially enrich our lives with our work. But that enrichment will take discipline and hard work, and even then it is only work – one aspect of our life, not the entire thing.

If the justice of work is to include the concept of personal fit or meaningful work, then it is essential that we have some way of identifying work that fits our human capacities and our democratic policy. It is only if we can identify such work that we can begin to present all individuals with choices of value and thus give ourselves and others the opportunity to honestly pursue respective conceptions of the good life. But the problem with this is twofold. First, as I mentioned earlier, the internal goods which develop our capacities are never fully understood from outside a practice and although we can sometimes recognize them we cannot be sure to always appreciate them. As Muirhead cautions we must be careful not to dismiss or attempt to reform a job merely because we are unfamiliar with its internal goods. To combat this tendency Muirhead says that we must sometimes accept on faith the testimonials of those who do the job. Beyond just accepting what others say, he suggests that we might look at the habits that the job instills and try to evaluate how they contribute to doing the job well, but also how they contribute to living well in general. This brings us to the second difficulty: a liberal democracy requires that different conceptions of the good life coexist, but if we evaluate a job's internal goods partially in terms of the life it enables, then we are always in danger of dismissing a job because it enables a life which we do not understand or do not appreciate.

In the case of work as practice it happens that on both levels, that of evaluating the job itself for internal goods and how various internal goods instill qualities for general living, we encounter places where personal, cultural or societal prejudices may make seeing the “good” of the internal good difficult. I do not think Muirhead would deny this although he says little about how we might deal with it. Nor do I think it is a problem that necessarily undermines his suggestion that we think of meaningful work as a practice. But certainly it is a difficultly that deserves more attention and one that we might have expected Muirhead to address in a more straightforward fashion especially since this is the crux of the problem with any attempt to implement substantive accounts of the good into theory. One solution for these sorts of difficulties is to engage in hermeneutic dialogue, but it is unclear what particular form it might take here.

Overall, Just Work is an interesting and ambitious attempt to grapple with the myriad concerns that affect us in our working life. Muirhead is to be credited for his unflinching insistence that personal fit is necessary to the justice of work and indeed necessary to liberal democracies and their conception of a person. This is especially true in the current climate where Americans vote in ever greater numbers for representatives who privilege market forces over government controls in the workplace. But just for this reason we may wonder if Muirhead's arguments about the value of choice in relation to freedom can really overcome, what seems to be the dominant belief, that the market itself can make us richer and more free. Although I agree with so much of what Muirhead says, I worry that it is not enough to alter our present course.