Part of the difficulty in defining work is that whether a person’s actions constitute work seems to depend both on how her actions shape the world as well on the person’s attitudes concerning those actions. On the one hand, the activity of work is causal in that it modifies the world in some non-accidental way. As Bertrand Russell (1932) remarked, “work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.” But work involves altering the world in presumptively worthwhile ways. In this respect, work is closely tied to the production of what Raymond Geuss (2021:5) has called ‘objective’ value, value residing in “external” products that can be “measured and valued independently of anything one might know about the process through which that product came to be or the people who made it.” By working, we generate goods (material objects but also experiences, states of mind, etc.) that others can value and enjoy in their own right. In most cases of work (for example, when employed), a person is compensated not for the performance of labor as such but because their labor contributes to the production of goods that have such ‘objective’ value. Note, however, that although work involves producing what others can enjoy or consume, sometimes the objective value resulting from work is not in fact enjoyed by others or by anyone at all. A self-sufficient farmer works by producing food solely for their own use, in which case the worker (rather than others) ends up consuming the objective value of their work. Likewise, the farmer who works to produce vegetables for market that ultimately go unsold has produced something whose objective value goes unconsumed.