greenber@acf4.UUCP (11/16/84)
<> Ron Rizzo asks: > Forgive me for being blunt, but what if the propsepective employee > were Jewish, insisted on wearing a yamulkah to work, & on taking > time off for Jewish holidays (say, as sick time)? Or if the prospec- > tive employee were black? Would you have entertained the argument > you outlined in your posting at all? Or would you rather have immedi- > ately thought that the ONLY valid issue was discrimination? Something strange here.... I've read the article a number of times, and I thought I made myself 'perfectly clear'. Guess not, sigh, sigh. I don't care if the reason that the guy was fired was because he chewed his nails, wore mismatched socks, or decided that Berkley wasn't better than SysIII. The client has some rights, say I, and one of those rights was to determine who shall and shall not work for them FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER. Now I might not like it, but that doesn't matter, for I'm not paying the bills. Now, Mr. Rizzo, what would you have done, and why?? Ross M. Greenberg @ NYU ----> allegra!cmcl2!acf4!greenber <----
rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (11/16/84)
The client has the right to determine who shall work for him, no matter what? According to who or what, besides the power of the buck? & even the buck's power fails if laws prohibit discrimination AND those laws are enforced, whether by legal authorities or by the atti- tudes of the industry. Not to mention the threat of consumer boycott (eg's, Florida OJ, Coors Beer). The self-regulating amoral laissez faire market is a myth; the real market has constraints of all kinds, including moral & legal ones. You COULDN'T GUESS what I'd do? I'd probably tell the client to get f*cked, & promptly report him to local (Cambridge has compre- hensive anti-discrimination laws), state & federal civil rights & business regulatory agencies, the Better Business Bureau, mino- rity or anti-discrimination organizations, and even attempt to publicize the client's bigotry in newspapers, TV & radio news, & trade publications. Finally, there are "political" actions: picketing & boycotts. But your posting is more than the presentation of a practical business dilemma. It insinuates matters of principle by its use of the term "rights". These "client rights" aren't "rights" at all, in any sense of that word (look up "right" in the dictionary), but merely the "power", here economic, to hurt me by depriving me of potential profit. "Right" always implies the idea of a "just claim". The pertinence or force of your implicit appeal to principle is illusory, for it's based on an equivocation (or rather a confusion) in your use of the word "rights": 1. Possessing a right (a just claim to something, eg, pro- perty) enables the possessor to exercise a power (eg, dispose of property as he/she sees fit). Thus the word "right" is occasionally used in a kind of abbreviation to refer to the consequence of a right, namely a "power". But valid use of this abbreviation requires that a right (a just claim) already exists. 2. You use "right" to mean "power", & echo the above abbre- viation without meeting its requirement for valid usage, thus invalidly linking the nonmoral idea of power with the moral notion of just claim, lending to your posting an air of moral cogency. (If you meant to evoke something like the libertarian "right to discriminate", you first have to make a case for libertarianism, & particularly for the special interpretation it gives the term "rights".) I have to echo what Steve Dyer's said: your posting displays an extraordinary ethical callousness. It also makes me wonder whe- ther "laissez faire" has replaced god, science, & the Great Gahuna as the source of all wisdom. "There's nothing fair about laissez faire" Ron Rizzo