OK, so the first one shows that if you run a business you can get into trouble for discriminating against certain traditionally-discriminated-against groups. And the second shows that in some parts of the business world, giving money to an anti-same-sex-marriage campaign can disqualify you from the role of CEO. I don’t think these examples are good support for worrying about ‘the transformation of “politeness and decency” into enforced mandatory attitudes’, and I’ll (too verbosely, sorry) explain why.
The first of these (which, unlike the other, involves actual legal mandatoriness) seems to me distinctly less dramatic than t.t.o.p.a.d.i.e.m.a., but I can see how you could describe it that way. But I can’t help suspecting that what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency. Imagine a similar case where, instead of refusing to serve a same-sex couple, the business refused to serve a mixed-race couple. This would be illegal in the same way and would meet with the same sanction; and, I suggest, this would be equally a matter of legally enforced politeness-and-decency.
How would you feel about that case? Here’s how I would feel about it, which not coincidentally is roughly how I feel about the same-sex case too. Freedom is important and, were it not for the consequences for others, I would like businesses to be free to operate however they want. However, there are consequences for others, which is why (to take a much less controversial example) in many jurisdictions a shop cannot legally sell what it claims are bread rolls suitable for human consumption that are actually full of metal shavings and strychnine. Some groups of people—e.g., black people, women, gay people—have traditionally been the object of suspicion and hatred and discrimination, and for each of these groups there are plenty of people who would love to discriminate against them. If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage; it’s not like 5% of businesses would say “no blacks” and another 5% “no whites”, 5% “no gay people” and 5% “no straight people”; the discriminations correlate. I think we are all better off if these groups are not systematically disadvantaged, and I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom-to-discriminate for that. This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice (at least in some places; it tends to be localized) that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm. I think there still is, against all the traditionally-disfavoured groups, but maybe in 30 years that will change and we can make some of them not be protected classes any more.
If you feel that way about (say) black people (or, relatedly, mixed-race couples) but not about (say) gay people (or, relatedly, same-sex couples) then I think our disagreement is not about politeness and decency being socially mandatory, it’s about whether there’s more discrimination against one group than another or whether one group’s interests matter more than another’s.
The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them. So I’m not sure that “enforced mandatory attitudes” is a good description; what’s happening is that Mozilla’s employees and most vocal advocates are a rather atypical segment of the population, and there are things they disapprove of more strongly than the population at large. And that companies are generally really keen for their CEOs not to be disapproved of by the people they need to be on their side. I bet there are businesses (ones serving very socially-conservative markets) in which an openly gay person would be at a big disadvantage if they wanted to be CEO.
(I’d guess that the Eich case is highly visible because it’s atypical, in that they actually got as far as appointing him. I would hazard a guess that openly gay people, and major donors to anti-same-sex-marriage campaigns, are both underrepresented among CEOs, but that there’s little outrage about this because those people are just quietly less likely to be appointed. There are relatively few black or female CEOs, too, and while some people are upset about this it isn’t a cause celebre in the way the Eich case is.)
They are not support, the are examples. I am not trying to persuade you to start worrying, I’m explaining my position.
what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency
Well, yes, of course. I’ve been trying to generalize the issue out of the intently-peering-at-the-genitals niche. Yes, I would feel similarly about a mixed-race couple.
If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage;
I think you are mistaken about that. There is a fair amount of literature on the topic, but let me make two brief points. First, baseless discrimination is market-inefficient. Even besides potential social backlash, if you refuse to serve a portion of your market and your competitor is fine with it, guess who has the advantage in the notoriously ruthless darwinian capitalist world. Second, take a look around. Imagine that it becomes legal for store owners to discriminate against, say, Indians and Pakistanis. What proportion of stores do you expect to put up signs “No Paks allowed” in their windows?
The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them.
I’m not talking about the sign of the argument to the function, I’m talking about the nature of the function itself.
Owners of Chick-Fil-A do not (as far as I know) have an ideological litmus test that must be satisfied before allowing people to advance to high positions in the company. Mozilla, evidently, does. A great deal of the US academia, to pick a relevant example, does, too.
My concern is with intolerance, not with which particular sin is deemed worthy of excommunication and burning at the stake.
Firstly, baseless discrimination is market-inefficient.
True, but (1) if the group you’re discriminating against is a minority then the inefficiency may not be large and (2) if your other (potential) customers happen to approve of your discrimination then the gain in their custom may outweigh the loss in the others’.
You may recall the recent case of a pizza place—was it called Memories Pizza? -- whose owners made the mistake of admitting on camera that they would be reluctant to cater for a hypothetical same-sex wedding. They got a lot of adverse comments. They closed up shop. They put up a page on GoFundMe or some such site. … And then they got, I would guess, comfortably more money from donations in a few weeks than the profits their pizza restaurant could have produced in, say, a year.
What proportion of stores [...]
Understood; as I said, “This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice [...] that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm”. I don’t think the issue is that if it were legal then all the shops would put up “No members of group X” signs and members of group X would starve and freeze to death; it’s more an Overton window thing. Some shops would put up those signs; lots of employers would quietly decline to hire people they thought were black/Jewish/female/gay/trans; it would be universally understood that discrimination against those people is normal; people would feel virtuous for being somewhat less prejudiced against them than average; and so members of the group in question would face a constantly harder life than the rest of us. A law saying “nope, not allowed to do that” about the most blatant kinds of discrimination, I think, reduces the subtler kinds too.
I could be wrong. You refer to a “fair amount of literature”; are there studies out there that investigate this and find that anti-discrimination laws don’t have any such effect?
I’m not talking about the sign of the argument to the function, I’m talking about the nature of the function itself.
As you say, intolerance is perennial. It seems to me that what’s changed over the last few decades is the sign (or phase, or something) of the argument, not the function. In other words, I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency, it’s a change in what sort of thing counts as politeness-and-decency.
And if the victims of that now are (e.g.) the opponents of same-sex marriage, it seems clear to me that they have it a lot better than the previous victims did. Brendan Eich can’t be CEO of Mozilla, apparently, but at least he can get married if he wants and no one is sending him to jail or forcing on him a course of chemical treatment designed to change his opinions. Life is more comfortable for opponents of same-sex marriage now than it was for gay people ten years ago, and vastly more comfortable than it was for gay people sixty years ago. So: yeah, intolerance is perennial, and its distribution is changing, but there’s a good case to be made that there’s less of it now and its consequences are milder than before.
To be wrong, first you need to take a falsifiable position :-)
I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency
Well, that’s the issue in dispute here. It’s a complex problem and requires analysis too serious for a few LW comments, but I don’t think you can simply handwave it away. In the UK in particular the recent focus on criminalizing certain kinds of speech is quite troubling.
I don’t know what you mean, nor do I care. The UK has always criminalized some kinds of speech and does not try to pretend otherwise.
(The USA has also always criminalized some kinds of speech. But I think this is because the Supreme Court lacked the real power to remove obscenity laws until after such laws had become “precedent”.)
Owners of Chick-Fil-A do not (as far as I know) have an ideological litmus test that must be satisfied before allowing people to advance to high positions in the company.
I very strongly suspect they do, and I think you should assume that expressing the wrong political views can disqualify you for advancement in any given company. Though usually (I hope) this is less of a deliberate litmus test and more a requirement that “leaders” avoid “drama”. Being feared or loved can be nice, but if your plan is to take people’s money you want to be invisible.
Both in this sense and in this as well.
Of course not. Intolerance is a perennial feature of human societies :-/
OK, so the first one shows that if you run a business you can get into trouble for discriminating against certain traditionally-discriminated-against groups. And the second shows that in some parts of the business world, giving money to an anti-same-sex-marriage campaign can disqualify you from the role of CEO. I don’t think these examples are good support for worrying about ‘the transformation of “politeness and decency” into enforced mandatory attitudes’, and I’ll (too verbosely, sorry) explain why.
The first of these (which, unlike the other, involves actual legal mandatoriness) seems to me distinctly less dramatic than t.t.o.p.a.d.i.e.m.a., but I can see how you could describe it that way. But I can’t help suspecting that what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency. Imagine a similar case where, instead of refusing to serve a same-sex couple, the business refused to serve a mixed-race couple. This would be illegal in the same way and would meet with the same sanction; and, I suggest, this would be equally a matter of legally enforced politeness-and-decency.
How would you feel about that case? Here’s how I would feel about it, which not coincidentally is roughly how I feel about the same-sex case too. Freedom is important and, were it not for the consequences for others, I would like businesses to be free to operate however they want. However, there are consequences for others, which is why (to take a much less controversial example) in many jurisdictions a shop cannot legally sell what it claims are bread rolls suitable for human consumption that are actually full of metal shavings and strychnine. Some groups of people—e.g., black people, women, gay people—have traditionally been the object of suspicion and hatred and discrimination, and for each of these groups there are plenty of people who would love to discriminate against them. If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage; it’s not like 5% of businesses would say “no blacks” and another 5% “no whites”, 5% “no gay people” and 5% “no straight people”; the discriminations correlate. I think we are all better off if these groups are not systematically disadvantaged, and I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom-to-discriminate for that. This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice (at least in some places; it tends to be localized) that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm. I think there still is, against all the traditionally-disfavoured groups, but maybe in 30 years that will change and we can make some of them not be protected classes any more.
If you feel that way about (say) black people (or, relatedly, mixed-race couples) but not about (say) gay people (or, relatedly, same-sex couples) then I think our disagreement is not about politeness and decency being socially mandatory, it’s about whether there’s more discrimination against one group than another or whether one group’s interests matter more than another’s.
The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them. So I’m not sure that “enforced mandatory attitudes” is a good description; what’s happening is that Mozilla’s employees and most vocal advocates are a rather atypical segment of the population, and there are things they disapprove of more strongly than the population at large. And that companies are generally really keen for their CEOs not to be disapproved of by the people they need to be on their side. I bet there are businesses (ones serving very socially-conservative markets) in which an openly gay person would be at a big disadvantage if they wanted to be CEO.
(I’d guess that the Eich case is highly visible because it’s atypical, in that they actually got as far as appointing him. I would hazard a guess that openly gay people, and major donors to anti-same-sex-marriage campaigns, are both underrepresented among CEOs, but that there’s little outrage about this because those people are just quietly less likely to be appointed. There are relatively few black or female CEOs, too, and while some people are upset about this it isn’t a cause celebre in the way the Eich case is.)
They are not support, the are examples. I am not trying to persuade you to start worrying, I’m explaining my position.
Well, yes, of course. I’ve been trying to generalize the issue out of the intently-peering-at-the-genitals niche. Yes, I would feel similarly about a mixed-race couple.
I think you are mistaken about that. There is a fair amount of literature on the topic, but let me make two brief points. First, baseless discrimination is market-inefficient. Even besides potential social backlash, if you refuse to serve a portion of your market and your competitor is fine with it, guess who has the advantage in the notoriously ruthless darwinian capitalist world. Second, take a look around. Imagine that it becomes legal for store owners to discriminate against, say, Indians and Pakistanis. What proportion of stores do you expect to put up signs “No Paks allowed” in their windows?
I’m not talking about the sign of the argument to the function, I’m talking about the nature of the function itself.
Owners of Chick-Fil-A do not (as far as I know) have an ideological litmus test that must be satisfied before allowing people to advance to high positions in the company. Mozilla, evidently, does. A great deal of the US academia, to pick a relevant example, does, too.
My concern is with intolerance, not with which particular sin is deemed worthy of excommunication and burning at the stake.
OK, understood.
True, but (1) if the group you’re discriminating against is a minority then the inefficiency may not be large and (2) if your other (potential) customers happen to approve of your discrimination then the gain in their custom may outweigh the loss in the others’.
You may recall the recent case of a pizza place—was it called Memories Pizza? -- whose owners made the mistake of admitting on camera that they would be reluctant to cater for a hypothetical same-sex wedding. They got a lot of adverse comments. They closed up shop. They put up a page on GoFundMe or some such site. … And then they got, I would guess, comfortably more money from donations in a few weeks than the profits their pizza restaurant could have produced in, say, a year.
Understood; as I said, “This argument works only in so far as there’s enough prejudice [...] that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm”. I don’t think the issue is that if it were legal then all the shops would put up “No members of group X” signs and members of group X would starve and freeze to death; it’s more an Overton window thing. Some shops would put up those signs; lots of employers would quietly decline to hire people they thought were black/Jewish/female/gay/trans; it would be universally understood that discrimination against those people is normal; people would feel virtuous for being somewhat less prejudiced against them than average; and so members of the group in question would face a constantly harder life than the rest of us. A law saying “nope, not allowed to do that” about the most blatant kinds of discrimination, I think, reduces the subtler kinds too.
I could be wrong. You refer to a “fair amount of literature”; are there studies out there that investigate this and find that anti-discrimination laws don’t have any such effect?
As you say, intolerance is perennial. It seems to me that what’s changed over the last few decades is the sign (or phase, or something) of the argument, not the function. In other words, I really don’t think what we’re looking at is an increase in mandatory enforcement of politeness-and-decency, it’s a change in what sort of thing counts as politeness-and-decency.
And if the victims of that now are (e.g.) the opponents of same-sex marriage, it seems clear to me that they have it a lot better than the previous victims did. Brendan Eich can’t be CEO of Mozilla, apparently, but at least he can get married if he wants and no one is sending him to jail or forcing on him a course of chemical treatment designed to change his opinions. Life is more comfortable for opponents of same-sex marriage now than it was for gay people ten years ago, and vastly more comfortable than it was for gay people sixty years ago. So: yeah, intolerance is perennial, and its distribution is changing, but there’s a good case to be made that there’s less of it now and its consequences are milder than before.
To be wrong, first you need to take a falsifiable position :-)
Well, that’s the issue in dispute here. It’s a complex problem and requires analysis too serious for a few LW comments, but I don’t think you can simply handwave it away. In the UK in particular the recent focus on criminalizing certain kinds of speech is quite troubling.
I don’t know what you mean, nor do I care. The UK has always criminalized some kinds of speech and does not try to pretend otherwise.
(The USA has also always criminalized some kinds of speech. But I think this is because the Supreme Court lacked the real power to remove obscenity laws until after such laws had become “precedent”.)
So why did you reply to the comment, then?
Presumably to express disapproval of your making the comment?
For a “Fuck you” this seems rather underwhelming… :-/
To say that your example is a ridiculous one that reveals your status quo bias yet again.
I don’t believe I gave any examples when I mentioned “the recent focus on criminalising certain kinds of speech”.
You seem to be majorly confused and angry.
I very strongly suspect they do, and I think you should assume that expressing the wrong political views can disqualify you for advancement in any given company. Though usually (I hope) this is less of a deliberate litmus test and more a requirement that “leaders” avoid “drama”. Being feared or loved can be nice, but if your plan is to take people’s money you want to be invisible.
Advocating, maybe, but just “expressing”, understood as a non-advertised relatively minor donation to a state referendum that was more or less 50-50?
Can you provide other examples of high-ranking corporate officers being forced out of the company in similar circumstances?