Is Working From Home Immoral?

Among bad takes on working from home — it’s bad for your health, bad for society, etc. — this might be the worst. We’ve already talked about the first two points_{Work From Home. It’s Good for the World.} (and how working from home is also good for the environment_{Work From Home. It’s Good for the Environment.}), but let’s get to the root of the issue. 

Throughout each of these articles, the point has been the same: your aspiration to switch to a tech career to work from home is valid, reasonable, and nothing to feel guilty about.

So let’s put a bow on this. Is working from home immoral? No. Here’s why.

Working from the office: background

Working from home isn’t actually the anomaly it might seem to be. Before the industrial revolution, bakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and many more people lived in the same building where they worked. But then industrialization happened.

With the proliferation of factories, people shifted where they worked. Instead of going downstairs or into a front room that served as a shopfront, people started commuting to open-plan factory floors dominated by new machines.

And yes, open-plan offices are nothing new. In fact, Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of “scientific management” first championed these arrangements in the nineteenth century. Critically, he was not interested in encouraging spontaneous idea generation, but rather he wanted to combat what he saw as “the natural laziness of men.”

For him, the most useful quality of in-office work was how easy it made surveillance.

The office as panopticon

This is the inheritance of in-office work, even in our modern world that is supposed to have more flexible, understanding management styles. No matter what, an in-office worker operates under the assumption that they could be under surveillance, and thus they are constantly under strain to engage in the optics of productivity. 

So effective work is not the intention of open-plan offices. Performative, monitored work is.

Let’s take the inverse of the assertion that working from home is immoral. Logically, the conclusion is that working from the office is therefore moral. Following that reasoning, in-office surveillance and its resultant productivity theater are also moral. 

That just isn’t coherent.

Approaching the question from four schools of morality

But even if it isn’t coherent, let’s give the assertion the benefit of the doubt anyway so we can really examine it. Is there a school of moral philosophy that would agree that working from home is immoral? Well, let’s look at a few.

In consequentialist ethics, outcomes matter most. So what are the outcomes of in-office work? More work done? Better work done? More moral work done? None of those results have been observed (quite the opposite, in fact). And depending on how you look at it, the ethical implications of requiring people to burn fossil fuels to come to work could actually make working in-office fall solidly under “immoral” from a climate-conscious viewpoint.

Okay, so no go there. What about consequentialism’s usual sparring partner: deontology? According to this philosophy, morality is achieved by acting according to universal laws regardless of circumstances and outcomes. So does it follow that working from home is immoral because not everyone can? Not quite. This is about principles, not ability. Consider the principle that donating to charity is a moral act. People with more resources can also give more. For deontology, if the governing moral law for work is that people should be allowed maximal flexibility, those who are allowed to work from home and do so are simply applying their principles to a more open set of capabilities. Here, the restriction is immoral.

So strike two. But there’s another school of thought, virtue ethics, that says both of the previous approaches are beside the point anyway because moral decisions are irreducibly context-dependent. Is it moral to work from home? Well, what’s your specific situation? If you know you’re going to be slacking off all day at home and dragging down the rest of the team, that seems pretty immoral. If you can still do your work, then there’s no problem. Again, the immorality of working from home doesn’t wash.

The closest the sentiment gets to merging with established ethical thought is when we talk about distributive justice, which examines how advantages and disadvantages are spread across a society. Typically, researchers in this area are interested in how to properly compensate people for their labor and how to fairly distribute the effort required to achieve a goal. And even here, it’s hard to find a case for the morality of requiring superfluous drudgery across a workforce. It would be more moral to remove unneeded labor than to impose it unilaterally.

It’s simple.

What it comes down to

But maybe all this still isn’t assuaging your moral hesitance about pursuing opportunities that are unequally distributed. Just like we said about your urge to work from home: that nagging discomfort is fully valid. 

But here’s the thing: commuting won’t reduce labor inequality. We already know what will: systemic changes protecting the dignity of all sorts of work as well as increased opportunity and better education.

There’s much, much more to do, but those last two solutions are what we’re addressing. And if you want to pursue that education and that opportunity, we’re here to help: TripleTen.