Let’s say you have an accountant who is a perfectly good accountant, but on her own time she says crazy stuff like this: Transgender activist calls for all children to be placed on puberty blockers until they can decide their gender
Should you fire her from her accountant job?
As long as she keeps it out of the workplace, no, you should not.
Actually, I’d even let her talk about this stuff in the workplace, so long as she’s civil about it and it doesn’t interfere with work.
If a poor lunatic hasn’t the right to speak, what can she do? I know some lunatics personally and they are constantly running off at the mouth. Nowadays that primarily means bellowing forth on the internet, usually in the form of the most repulsive word salad.
This is probably the simplest possible scenario, with a pretty obvious answer. But what if she were doing some job where a basic understanding of cause and effect were important? If she did something where she might possibly have any interaction with people? Something where non-technical judgment about human behavior and what human beings actually are, mattered?
She can be an accountant, do tech support and a few other things. There are a whole lot of other things where her position and her willingness to espouse it publicly would call into question her judgment on very basic matters. I’m not sure I’d even trust someone with a worldview that says “cause and effect isn’t actually cause and effect if we can find a way around it, and if we can, we should in all cases” to do carpentry work. I’d certainly never want her teaching anyone anything or writing for publication on my dime. She certainly shouldn’t work with human beings since she doesn’t understand what they are.
It’s not so much that she should be punished or shunned from society from saying it, it’s that the fact that she says it, says so much about her that shouldn’t be overlooked.
I get what you’re saying, but people also seem to be able to hold completely contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time and still function. For example, “you can’t possibly understand things from my point of view” (because you’re the wrong race, sex, etc.) and “you must understand things from my point of view.”
I have grown skeptical of arguments along the lines of “if you believe this you must also believe (or do) this other thing.” For example, you’ll hear lots of atheists say things like “if anybody really believed in Hell they would crawl over broken glass to save people from it.” Or, on the other hand, I’ve heard believers say things like “I don’t understand why atheists don’t just kill themselves.” In both cases, they don’t have the full picture. They’re drawing inferences from the belief that the other person does not.
People are weirdly complicated. Even someone who claims not to believe in cause and effect puts his keys in the ignition to start the car, and even an existentialist chooses to leave the high-rise by the elevator and not the window.
Having said that, I realize this creates a problem. Are we never to allow a person’s stated prejudices to influence how we think they’ll do in a job? While it’s true that people have an amazing ability to silo their beliefs, and what they think about one thing might not change what they think about another, there has to be a limit. E.g., can a committed communist be a Supreme Court justice?
In one sense, well of course he could, and in another sense, are you crazy?
I suppose what I’m saying is that given the mess we’re living through right now, it’s important to err on the side of “judge their job performance by their job performance and not on what attitudes you think might influence them.”
I understand what you’re saying and I largely agree, but this lady is way over the edge on crazy. Someone who wrote in an academic journal that maybe we should explore the question of whether children should have more agency over their gender identity would be wrong but probably able to go home at night and not necessarily screw up her kids.
Someone who publicly advocates that all kids be given puberty blockers — ALL kids, not just any kid who wants them — is nutso and really can’t be trusted with other people’s welfare. It’s like the difference between a guy who talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat while smoking expensive pipe tobacco and wearing an elbow patch jacket, and a Maoist terrorist. First guy might be a great neighbor, second guy shouldn’t be trusted with anything by anyone.
By “work with human beings” I mean in a service providing sense, like social service, medical care, etc.