Relationships between grant-maker and grantee or professor and student are violations of professional norms. We rightfully blame the grant-maker and professor for them and we don’t blame the grantee and student.
“Consent Isn’t Always Enough” is a misleading phrasing to make this point: It mixes the personal and professional level. We may want a norm on the professional level that certain relationships are not accepted. The norm that there should be consent in the relationship happens on the personal level – we don’t expect a manager to investigate consent in the relationships of their staff, nor is lack of consent mostly an internal disciplinary matter.
This isn’t limited to professional contexts, though I do think some of the situations there are clearer.
An example norm for a context in which no organization is involved is that I don’t think people (especially organizers) should be hitting on first-timers at EA meetups.
Not hitting on people on their first meetup is good practice, but none of the arguments in OP seem to support such a norm.
Perhaps less charitably than @Huluk, I find the consent framing almost tendentious. It’s quite easy to see how the dynamics denounced have little to do with consent; here are two substitutions which show how the examples are professional ethics matters, and orthogonal to the intimacy axis:
- one could easily swap “sexual relations” with “access to their potential grantee’s timeshare” without changing much in terms of moral calculus; - one could make the grantee as the recipient of another, exclusive grant from other sources. In this case, flirting with a grantmaker would no longer have the downstream consequences OP warned about.
All in all, the scenario in OP seems to call not for more restrictive sexual norms, but for explicit and consistently enforced anti-collusion/corruption regulations.
Once again: this is limited to the examples provided by @jefftk, and the arguments accompanying them. It’s possible that consent isn’t always enough in some contexts within EA, for reason separated from professional ethics—but I did not find support for such thesis in the thread.
Possibly reflective of a wider issue in EA/rationalist spaces where the two are often not very clearly delineated. In that sense EA is more like hobby/fandom communities than professional ones.
In my opinion, the more money (or other resources, or power) flows through someone’s hands, the less excuse that person has for saying “hey, this is just a hobby, we do not want the boring professional norms”.
Hobby is when you do it in your free time, and if someone does not respect your boundaries, you can easily find a different hobby. If it is your only or major source of income, when denying “consent” might mean losing your income, it is de facto a job.
And if someone believes that the people in positions of power who get lots of “consent” from their underlings are evaluating this situation impartially… I may have a bridge to sell you.
Relationships between grant-maker and grantee or professor and student are violations of professional norms. We rightfully blame the grant-maker and professor for them and we don’t blame the grantee and student.
“Consent Isn’t Always Enough” is a misleading phrasing to make this point: It mixes the personal and professional level. We may want a norm on the professional level that certain relationships are not accepted. The norm that there should be consent in the relationship happens on the personal level – we don’t expect a manager to investigate consent in the relationships of their staff, nor is lack of consent mostly an internal disciplinary matter.
This isn’t limited to professional contexts, though I do think some of the situations there are clearer.
An example norm for a context in which no organization is involved is that I don’t think people (especially organizers) should be hitting on first-timers at EA meetups.
Not hitting on people on their first meetup is good practice, but none of the arguments in OP seem to support such a norm.
Perhaps less charitably than @Huluk, I find the consent framing almost tendentious. It’s quite easy to see how the dynamics denounced have little to do with consent; here are two substitutions which show how the examples are professional ethics matters, and orthogonal to the intimacy axis:
- one could easily swap “sexual relations” with “access to their potential grantee’s timeshare” without changing much in terms of moral calculus;
- one could make the grantee as the recipient of another, exclusive grant from other sources. In this case, flirting with a grantmaker would no longer have the downstream consequences OP warned about.
All in all, the scenario in OP seems to call not for more restrictive sexual norms, but for explicit and consistently enforced anti-collusion/corruption regulations.
Once again: this is limited to the examples provided by @jefftk, and the arguments accompanying them. It’s possible that consent isn’t always enough in some contexts within EA, for reason separated from professional ethics—but I did not find support for such thesis in the thread.
Possibly reflective of a wider issue in EA/rationalist spaces where the two are often not very clearly delineated. In that sense EA is more like hobby/fandom communities than professional ones.
In my opinion, the more money (or other resources, or power) flows through someone’s hands, the less excuse that person has for saying “hey, this is just a hobby, we do not want the boring professional norms”.
Hobby is when you do it in your free time, and if someone does not respect your boundaries, you can easily find a different hobby. If it is your only or major source of income, when denying “consent” might mean losing your income, it is de facto a job.
And if someone believes that the people in positions of power who get lots of “consent” from their underlings are evaluating this situation impartially… I may have a bridge to sell you.
This is an interesting point. And the pitfalls become obvious when put in that context.