What they actually said was "people who condone or advocate either violence or the denial of rights towards myself or people I care about"
Yes situational ethics is messy, no they are not invalid because they are messy.
I would like the parent commenter to consider how much comfortability they are willing to sacrifice in order to get along with someone who is extremely useful. This is a scenario with real world applicability which is not as easy or convenient to say, “I’ll simply not work with them.”
I’m not attempting to invalidate their stated position, I’m trying to understand how they react when it becomes messier.
There are not grey areas about "usefulness". I don't care if you're Albert fucking Einstein, I'm not going to let you scare off the other high performers or even cleaning crew that make my business productive and livable.
Okay, that’s a fair position and that essentially answers my question. I don’t really have an argument for or against what you’re saying here, I was just curious to see if there is any level of utility at which you’re okay with someone being disliked by the rest of the staff.
But seriously, how am I supposed to hire and retain anyone if the workplace is hostile? Turnover and rehiring has costs, even if it's turnover of minimum wage staff.
And as a hiring manager I don't have any particular interest either in working in an environment that is hostile towards me. Or are you saying that I have an obligation to spend the majority of my waking hours with people who suggest that I have no right to be alive; or that I belong pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen?
And if I'm not willing to accept a workplace that's hostile to me, how can I ask the people I hire to accept one that's hostile to them?
Yeah, you want them to give you a predefined, quantified, model of their behavior.
A quantitative assessment isn’t reasonable here, and I haven’t requested that. It’s fully possible to examine questions like these in an exact manner without getting to a point of precision. Philosophy does it all the time.
Eh. I don’t see how this statement is justified without heavy qualification.
Maybe the word “intolerant” is what you disagree with. I think that word is useful because it forces us to examine situations in which we are reacting as strongly to someone as others react to us. In other words, I think it’s helpful to consider “intolerance” to be a symmetrical position, not an asymmetrical one.
If we take this abstraction and pull it back down to reality: many people are sufficiently intolerant of gay people that they actively work against them having particular rights. Gay people are generally intolerant of this view, in that they actively work against that one.
Now, personally I believe gay people should have the right to get married. But if I initially consider these conflicting positions as symmetrical disagreement, I force myself to rationally derive which one is the “bad” one. “Intolerant” is therefore a helpful, generalizable placeholder for any given pair of conflicting viewpoints, positions, values, etc.
Please leave this sort of thing out of comments on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
Now can you tell me what amount of difference in views you are willing to tolerate for the sake of working with someone brilliant and productive? If you eat meat and one of the most accomplished physicists in the world is militantly opposed to eating meat, would you work with them? What if they refuse to eat lunch with you if you eat meat? What if their views on abortion are diametrically opposed to yours, and they actively vote against your ideals? What if they believe all human beings with mental defects should be aborted in the womb?
In other words, I want you to haggle with your position a bit so I can understand how you react in the more real world scenario, in which an otherwise useful individual’s views are very different, but not cartoonishly different from your own.