Many people thought Kevin Rudd rash when he demanded that public servants work day and night. But should the public servants obey him? There are good grounds for saying that overworking is morally unjustifiable. In old-fashioned Catholic terms it may be a sin.
It is certainly not an old-fashioned Catholic sin. Older Catholic moralists were more perturbed by sloth than excessive work. When they responded to the Industrial Revolution, they diagnosed the problem as exploitation, not overwork. Employers forced workers to spend long hours in hard manual work under harsh conditions.
Moralists also defined sin in terms of actions and not of habitual states. To stay away from work all day was an action that was easy to categorise as a sin. To stay up all night working was more slippery.
In fact the whole idea of overworking seems slippery. What one culture considers excessive, another considers normal.
Work, too, has changed. The harm suffered after spending long hours in front of a computer is of a different kind from that resulting from long shifts digging coal. Overwork differs for different cultures and individuals.
I'll leave aside the overwork of low-paid workers, which often involves exploitation under lax regulations, and try out a loose definition of overwork that fits white-collar workers. It is to invest disproportionate time and concentration on what you consider to be work.
This definition brings together two defining qualities of intellectual work — the time we spend on it and the quality of attention that it demands. The definition also recognises that what one person would see as work, another would conceive of as play.
What makes overwork morally unjustifiable is that the time and attention we give to it is disproportionate. Our way of working should be measured by the conditions we need in order to flourish as human beings.
If the way in which we work does not offer us space to nurture the significant relationships in our lives, to explore our other gifts, to contribute to our communities, and to reflect on the meaning and direction of our lives, we are likely to be overworking.
Of course some work, for example crafts and gardening, offers space to nurture some aspects of our humanity.
The metaphor of space brings together the time and the focus we need to bring to the variety of relationships and commitments that shape our humanity. Overwork crimps our space