Guest post: How long a chain of logic do you have to use?
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Without forgetting her nursing training.
I’ve been trying to sort out my views on when someone’s statements or behavior outside of their work capacity should justify disciplinary action. (I mean morally justify, not what the legal lines are.)
It’s hard to come up with a formulation that doesn’t involve a lot of case-by-case judgment. The extreme bright-line rules don’t seem workable to me. It just can’t be the case that an employer should shrug and ignore a manager who is posting statements about how members of group X are intellectualy inferior, etc. — that obviously raises concerns that such a person can’t fairly make hiring/firing/employee evaluation decisions. Ditto for someone who is the “face of the company” but has made themselves toxic to the general public and/or your customer base, etc. Conversely, I’m also uncomfortable with the notion that people can’t have separate existences from their job, and that every employee’s every utterance is fodder for HR.
There’s obviously a lot of factors to consider (is it a public-facing job, how far beyond the pale are the statements, etc.), but one thing I think matters is: how long a chain of logic do you have to use to reach the conclusion that this affects someone’s ability to do the job?
When you have to make arguments like “Employee X made statement Y. Statement Y is contrary to the position of advocacy groups for minority such-and-such. Therefore Y constitutes ‘violence’ against that group, and members of that group would be justifiably ‘afraid’ to be treated by X even if X would never utter Y on the job, therefore X can’t do the job and must be fired or disciplined,” I think something has gone wrong.
This is an important topic, and the above take seems sensible to me.
My own best attempt at a “bright line” is that non-work statements should be fine, unless they clearly indicate a tendency or desire to treat certain people unfairly and/or to wish them ill, owing to their identity group.
Merely saying things (outside a work context) that members of that identity group might disagree with or dislike should not be relevant.
Ah, but trans activists have rigged the game so that “saying something they disagree with or dislike” = “a desire to do or wish them ill.” Criticism and questioning is violence; discussion is genocide. This is the essence of “NO DEBATE!”
Of course, if the reasoning is sound, and the premises are solid, even a long chain of logic can lead to a justified conclusion. Too often, however, the conclusion is simply claimed to follow while the actual premises and inferences are best left unspecified.
It’s very similar to the way “worker’s rights”, “egalitarianism”, “solidarity”, “anti-imperialism”, “anti-colonialism”, “anti-fascism” etc. in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China were basically just synonyms for “whatever the party/the leader does” (e.g. living like emperors while the workers were living off scraps). It’s easy to be in favor of, say, “worker’s rights”, but how do you get from that to uncritical support for autocracy, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, thoughtpolice, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, forced collectivization, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc.? How does criticism of the latter translate into rejection of the former? Of course, you might as well forget hoping for an answer. Just by asking the question you would have marked yourself as “anti worker’s rights”, as well as “pro-fascism”, “pro-colonialism” etc. No need to spell out the intermediary steps.
Likewise, it’s easy to be in favor of “trans rights” (e.g. there isn’t a single “right” – properly formulated* – that I’m granting myself that I’m not also granting every trans-identified person on the planet), but how do you get from that to uncritical support for sex denialism, biological males in women’s sports/bathrooms/changing rooms/showers/jails/domestic abuse and rape shelters, forced teaming, the idea that it’s bigoted for lesbians to not be into “lady-cock”, automatic “affirmation” and medicalization of children etc. etc. etc.? How does disagreement with the latter translate into denial of the former? Once again, all the major premises are unstated, and all the critical inferences are left unspecified.
* By “properly formulated” i mean formulated in the most generally applicable way possible. E.g. I don’t recognize any universal right to use the “men’s room”, although I do claim that right for myself. Nor do I recognize a universal right to use “the bathroom appropriate to one’s gender identity”. What I do recognize is the right of everyone to use the bathroom intended for their biological sex. My own right to use the men’s room is just what follows from this more general right.
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