Freedom Of Conscience & Work: Part 1

Over the years I’ve thought a fair bit about political discrimination, especially in the economic sphere. I always found it strange/shocking how normalized and widespread it was. When my previous girlfriend was applying to PHD’s, she applied to a few American universities. They required what were basically declarations of ideological conformity to DEI principles. I guess there are a few key things I want to explore here

1. Why is political discrimination bad?
2. Could it be wrong to restrict it? Could it be the case that it’s morally fine to do?
3. Is it symmetric? Are there different standards for workers and firms or not?

Okay. First, what are the main reasons to object to companies doing political discrimination? I think there are two broad categories: innate and instrumental (consequentialist). The innate one is simpler so let’s discuss it first. Imagine John lives in a democracy. He subscribes to ideology/party/position X. The majority position is Y. In a world without discrimination, John being an Xer has no impact on his ability to work, make money, create value etc… On the other hand imagine a world where it is acceptable for people/companies who believe Y to not hire/discriminate against Xers. Here John would have a harder time finding a job, being promoted, buying a home, etc… I have gut feeling that this is bad. If I narrow it down, there are a few different intuitions as play. Those intuitions are:

• Meritocracy/fairness. It feels like jobs/etc… in the economic sphere should be allocated based on who is best able to do them. Doing it on another criteria, e.g: personal connections, bloodline, ethnicity,  feels distinctly unfair. Note that this is distinct from a consequential meritocratic argument. I would still feel this if John is applying to a job I consider to be zero-sum (e.g: high frequency trading)
• Freedom of conscience. The extent to which holding belief X is punished by less opportunities, John is less free to believe X. This is bad because people should be free to believe what they wish

Now, there are some obvious arguments against these.

• I tend to feel that the fairness intuition has standard flaw common to all desert based intuitions: the birth lottery anti-desert argument. the fact that someone is smarter/faster/stronger is not something that makes them more deserving. Those traits are all a product of genetics/upbringing/a fundamentally uncaring mechanical universe. No one deserves anything. Meritocracy is wrong because it equates productivity with moral worth. This isn’t warranted. Meritocracy is only good because it promotes good outcomes which raise average utility, not because it is “just”.
• The freedom intuition has another major problem. If being “free” requires other people to give you things, then that’s a bit weird morally because surely that makes those other people less free. Also, why does your desire to get something qualify as “freedom” but their desire to not give it to you not? If women choose not to sleep with obese men, than are men less “free” because being obese is punished. You could object here and say that no one has an obligation to give sex to anyone else/no one is morally entitled to sex. Sure, cool. But why is there a specific obligation to give a job, especially a high paying prestigious job to a person you dislike? I think the only options here are to
  • retreat to some weird ad-hoc rights based bullshit about how certain things you are entitled to and other things you aren’t and how those totally real rights line up just so happens to align with my case by case intuitions
  • admit that the reason we care about employment non-discrimination and not other kinds of non-discrimination (e.g: social) is because of consequential reasons where certain rules ensure we don’t decend into civil war/rampant factionalism/something else bad.
• There’s a countervailing intuition I have that, roughly speaking, people should be allowed to do what they want. If a jewish accountant doesn’t want to hire a neo-nazi to work for them because they find their beliefs repulsive, or a muslim doesn’t want to hire a gay person or anything else like that, that preference seems valid to me and like something that also matters and warrants some weighing.

Okay, so TLDR while I do have Liberal non-consequentialist intuitions for this, I’m not sure they’re really justified. On to consequentialism! (Okay, actually that’ll be in part 2)