>So, if my CEO were to consider people who vote for republicans subhuman (not an entirely unlikely scenario today), but otherwise conducted themselves fairly, I'd be OK with it.

So, lets pretend you work for Mozilla, you like the mission statement* and seriously believe in it/that your work is helping that cause. You also think it is a relevant part of your branding.

You really wouldn't have a problem with your CEO saying repub voters are subhuman? No clash between "open and accessible to all" and "subhuman"?

You wouldn't be upset at that violation of the creed/mission statement?

You wouldn't think it to be harmful to your companies branding? (And therefore to your company)

You wouldn't think it harmful to the "team spirit"/motivation?

I find that surprising, to be honest. ("Reason to fire" questions aside)

*

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."[1]

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

> You really wouldn't have a problem with your CEO saying repub voters are subhuman?

If Brendan Eich has ever described gay people as subhuman, post a link. If he hasn't, this is a terrible and misleading analogy, and a violation of the Principle of Charity.

>If he hasn't, this is a terrible and misleading analogy, and a violation of the Principle of Charity.

It is using an analogy the parent made in their argument.

Take it up with them if you don't like it.

Marriage is a human right. Denying marriage is denying human rights, thus explicitly labelling that group sub-human.

QED.

No. It's too difficult to get into disagreements that are essentially arguing over the definitions of terms. You just shouldn't police beliefs, period.

They wouldn't say they consider republicans subhumans anyway, they'd find some existing objectionable term and rationalize the expansion of that to include mainstream republican views.

Okay, not the poster above, but lets get you a more concrete example:

You are the CEO of Bread Inc. You make bread. You sell bread. As the CEO of Bread Inc., you make statements in the public about bread being terrible, that no one should eat it, and how you're only selling it because you like taking money from carb-loving hyper-idiots.

Would you consider removal from your post as justified in that situation?

This model, like nearly all of them, loses many details of reality in order to be satisfying.

Of course that CEO is working counter to his organization's goals. That's the perfect cleanliness of having organizational goals that are not subject to the religion, decade, loneliness, or stomach contents of the person currently interpreting them.

If your "mission" is nearly unusable as a mission, in that probably even the people in your organization can't uniformly agree on its application, the model breaks down. That's what you signed up for with fundamentally subjective pursuits.

So, if the CEO of Freedom, Inc said she hates freedom, that's bad optics and fire-able. If she applies her understanding of freedom in a way I don't agree with, that's a tough shit moment for me. And these are the situations we debate.

Sure. That's why it's a model. It is used to isolate an element of the factual situation for analysis.

In this case, you concede the point that if what a CEO does causes bad optics, that is potentially fireable. To loop this back to the parent comment, this means sustaining an objection to Eich's firing, you would need to conclude that what Eich did was bad optics.

I hope you recognize that this position is contradictory with your previous statement: "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period."

A CEO saying "people shouldn't buy our product" ("no one should eat it") isn't just a belief, or just bad optics. That's a CEO doing the exact opposite of their job (selling the product).

1) I don't agree that a CEO's job is "selling the product". That's literally the job of the sales team. But that doesn't really matter.

2) It is obviously the apex of bad optics. My initial point is to demonstrate that the position that "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period" isn't founded in reality. Obviously you should. No one will defend the CEO of Bread Co.

Since we've established at the apex of bad optics that removal is permitted, the rest of the discussion isn't about whether or not removal is an option, it is a discussion of where along the spectrum of bad optics should it be permissible to remove an executive.

This makes the honest question to be explored "When should you police beliefs". At that stage of discussion, the context that we're complaining about removing matters. It doesn't at the level I'm criticizing.

Telling people not to buy your product is clearly an action, if anything a CEO does can be called an action.

The action/belief dichotomy is illusory. You're never going to police something inside someone's head, so the reaction will be in respect of an action and what it signals.

Yes, I'd just written that myself as an edit. It's impossible to police beliefs, since we only know other people's beliefs through their actions. We're always policing actions.

What does it mean, then, to say we shouldn't police beliefs? I'd say it means we shouldn't police actions that are only expressions of personal belief.

"Personal" is important when we consider people, like CEOs, who speak for the company. The board has a right to expect the CEO to speak for them, and the shareholders, in turn, to elect a board that speaks for them. A CEO who officially says "bread is terrible, no one should buy it" has failed to perform that job. A CEO who says the same thing unofficially, or before being hired, won't be able to credibly perform the job.

A salesperson would have the same problem. The job demands saying "you should buy bread". Saying the opposite makes it impossible to perform the job, if the people you're dealing with learn about it.

OTOH, if a bakery worker or secretary, for example, says "bread is terrible, no one should buy it, I only work here because I need the money", I would defend their right to express their beliefs. If they were fired I'd consider that unjust.

I think I'm probably 95% on board with this, and I agree with the conclusions and most of the framework, with one exception. A personal belief held by a public representative is still a personal belief. So, the personal nature of the belief alone isn't what exempts it from scrutiny or action. There have to be other factors as well.

There's some productive digging to be done there, but I've got work to get back to! Maybe another time.

> A personal belief held by a public representative is still a personal belief.

I agree with that, but I also think a public comment about a personal belief can interfere with a job that involves speaking on behalf of others. When ones publicly known personal beliefs conflict with the beliefs one expresses while doing ones job, it causes a severe credibility problem, at least.

I'd say the other factor you mentioned is the conflict between "personal" statements and "official" statements. Some people do seem to be able to manage that, in part by avoiding uncompromising statements like "bread is terrible, no one should buy it". In your example, the conflict was so obvious and so provocative that it would be untenable and render the job of CEO impossible.

It also feels like it crosses the nebulous line between belief and action

More specifically, I said that in a situation constructed to make the somewhat orthogonal point you're making, it works, and falls apart nearly everywhere else.

You do realize that my argument directly mirrors a real-life occurance... right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

My point in making the example isn't to establish a framework for evaluating the Eich situation, but to indicate that it can be evaluated in the first place by showing an example in which a clear judgement can be made. This is contrary to your original emphatic position that "you just shouldn't police beliefs, period"

Defending Eich requires you not believe with enough conviction that his actions harmed the organization sufficiently to warrant removal. That's fine. You can fiddle with the conviction and harm knobs according to your beliefs. It does not, however, preclude anyone else from doing the same and coming to a different conclusion, which your policing argument would do, oddly enough.

If you want to go a different route and instead justify non-firing on completely separate grounds - that censuring political positions is, if consistent and widespread, noxious to society, or perhaps that the ambiguity in applying these standards is too high and might cause a chilling effect, etc - that raises different issues, but not those I was discussing.

>If she applies her understanding of freedom in a way I don't agree with, that's a tough shit moment for me.

And if said application of understanding is strongly disagreeable not just for you, but with a significant part of both the customers and the workforce?

That depends. Does profit increase or decrease after the statements?

Honestly it's way simpler than most people make it.

It's worth noting that opposing gay marriage is not substantially different than opposing any other sort of human rights. Would you have been fine with Brendan Eich donating in support of an anti-miscegenation law, or funding an effort to revoke women's suffrage? If so, that's at least consistent, and I suppose I can respect that. But too many people acted like gay rights are just a minor thing, not worth getting fussed about, compared to other human rights.

There's no difference between an "action" and "taking a position". If speech were meaningless, had no effect on peoples' lives–why would anybody care about free speech?

There is clearly a distinction that can be made, and arguably making it has great value.

If speech is either not distinguished, or is indistinguishable from action, then there can be no free speech... or else initiating violence could not be a crime. It could get worse too. You could end up with no free speech and with initiation of violence by elites being legal or effectively legal. These cannot be desirable outcomes! Of course, if you don't value free speech at all, then you might not see a problem with these outcomes.

The distinction is obvious: you don't have to listen to a speaker, but you don't get a choice if they throw a punch your way. The distinction is about freedom on your part.

That said, we're all constrained in what we can say because we cannot stop others from judging us based on our speech, then acting on their judgements.

Imagine a CEO who never once behaves inappropriately at work, but on social media says that they have no problem with what Weinstein did (for example). Now how can subordinates not feel uncomfortable in that CEO's presence? Maybe we should say "tough", but real damage will have been done (to the company's brand, to its culture, and so on). The board of directors surely would have a cause to replace the CEO.

It is a fact of life that the higher one's social position, the more constrained (by the Overton window) one's speech is. But that's not the same as saying that speech is not distinguished from action. If there's an Overton window as to acceptable actions, it surely changes much more slowly than the Overton window for speech -- perhaps that's the real distinction to be made?