Kant on Bullshit Jobs – Mere Means and True Means

Following David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs there has recently been academic and public discussion about useless work. Immanuel Kant maintains that we ought to be means for others and that there is a duty to be useful. Graeber and Kant are both concerned with a form of harm often overlooked in contemporary ethics and political philosophy, namely, enforced uselessness. The phenomenon of bullshit jobs can help us understand better what it means to have a duty to be useful or function as others’ means. In this paper, I argue that for Kant agents ought to function as true means for others. I propose that a true means is an agent who functions as a means to others’ ends regardless of whether the agent is motivated by respect for the moral law. I will call this the External Beneficence account of usefulness. One of the reasons why bullshit jobs are morally problematic is because they do not allow us to exercise external beneficence.