Lets not bring our religions into this discussion.
I somewhat agree. While it's a good idea to consider religion in morals, it shouldn't be the only thing discussed and that's what I'm seeing here. Cultural and societal influences are the driving forces, and religion is a part of both of them. I would've enjoyed either participating in or simply watching a discussion about aspects of society that creates and affects morals.
Is laziness itself good or bad, and to what degree? How hard ought one work?
Laziness itself is an entirely subjective matter that can't be defined easily. It can deal with mental/physical condition, percentage of work done out of a total workload, financial situation, medical situation, political situation, geographical situation, and a few more things I don't feel the need to mention.
For the mental or physical aspect of laziness, I'd say it's incredibly wide to really say what should be or even can be operationally defined. If a 25 year old man gets about 5 hours of physical activity a week, you'd probably consider him lazy in that context. But if a 70 year old man got just as much, you'd probably say he isn't lazy. That part is understandable. But what
else do these people do? Does the young man have an office job and gets his physical activity from exercise? Does the 70 year old man have a landscaping job and spends most of his time doing work? If that were the case, then we'd
expect each of these people to get about 5 hours, right? And looking at it from the mental perspective, a 5 year old kid would consider a worksheet of addition problems to be crazy hard while a engineer with a Master's would think he's just lazy for thinking so.
Looking at laziness from a percentage-of-work-done-out-of-a-workload perspective, I'd say it's more clear cut than the physical/mental perspective but isn't really clear still. It'll probably be easier for me to explain, though. Let's say you have a single mother (woman A) who takes care of her 3 kids, and she might hypothetically work at a beauty salon. Now, at this same beauty salon, let's say there's another woman (woman B) who's identical in every way except that she lives alone. Let's also assume they have the same amount of workload. Obviously woman A will get less of her overall workload done because she has more of an explicit workload to get done, while woman B gets more work done at the salon because she has less of an explicit workload. If both woman, having the same amount of work at the salon, have 50 units of work to do, and they both work the same amount overall,
and woman A has a larger explicit workload, then woman A will, by logic, get less of it done. Her boss might label her as being lazy if looking at her in a disposition light, but he will say they're equal lazy/not lazy if looking at her in a situation light. I tried explaining that as best I could. =/
The financial situation context is, in my opinion, the most relevant. One of the biggest reasons is because of America's welfare problem, and that's always interested me. I guess you could say I'm a bit biased here, though, haha. So, in republican minds, laziness inversely relates with money and directly with need for government assistance. Meaning that the less lazy you are, the more money you will get; and the more lazy you are, the more you'll need welfare. But in democratic minds, there are more factors to consider: geographical situation, mental/physical situation, and everything else I mentioned earlier plus whatever else that may be related. So depending on your political mindset or even ethical mindset, you'll see it a different way. that basically covers political stance's views and, to a degree, ethical stance's views as well.
The final thing I'm going to mention is geographical situation, and this one is pretty self-explanatory. If you live in a poorer country, you're probably going to be considered less lazy because it takes more work in order for one to sustain themselves. Likewise, if you live in a richer country (like America), then you're probably going to be considered lazy
even if you have the relatively same quality of life. It's society's way of compensating and it relates to the justification phenomenon. But I'm not going to delve into that because it's pretty self-explanatory.
