Firing a worker is usually a serious harm. Sometimes it’s devastating. But we can still wonder, “Is firing someone morally wrong – and if so, how morally wrong?”
If you’re puzzled, ponder this: Ending a romantic relationship, too, is usually a serious harm. Sometimes that, too, is devastating. Yet few moderns attach much moral blame to someone who dumps their romantic partner. Even if you’re married, we rarely claim anything like, “If you break up, your ex-partner will wallow in misery for years, so you have a moral obligation to stay.” (Close family members might privately maintain otherwise if you have kids together, but even then…)
In my view, firing is morally comparable to ending a romantic relationship. In the absence of a formal agreement to the contrary, both kinds of relationships are – and should be – “at will.” Yes, insiders might have some grounds to morally criticize the termination. Ultimately, however, close relationships – whether professional or personal – are complicated, riddled with misunderstandings. Hence, outsiders should not only affirm that people have a right to unilaterally break up; they should practice the virtue of tolerance by remaining impartial in thought as well as in action.
To repeat, that’s my view. The normal view, in contrast, is that romantic and professional relationships should be governed by diametrically opposed standards. In matters of love, the heart wants what the heart wants. On the job, in contrast, governments should protect workers from employer abuse. And even if the law says otherwise, firing someone who’s performing their job adequately is morally suspect.
While this “normal view” is now widely-shared, it’s still closely associated with the left. When “freedom of contract” had more appeal, the left strongly argued that employers’ “freedom to fire” was tantamount to “the freedom to oppress workers.” Back in high school, my social science teachers often philosophized, “Sure, physical coercion is bad; but so is economic coercion. If your employer can fire you whenever he likes, you’re not free.” This outlook naturally inspired the left to advocate a wide range of employment regulations, especially anti-firing rules. While most non-leftists also favor such regulation, the left has long been more intense about it. Their attitude is more radical – and so are the regulations they support.
Which makes sense. If you earnestly believe that firing a worker is a kind of economic violence, you’re going to firmly support stringent legal scrutiny of this violence.
From this perspective, the rise of “cancel culture” is deeply surprising. Over the last decade, many leftists have not just moderated their former stance against firing. They have become enthusiastic advocates of firing people they dislike. “He’s performing his job adequately, so you have no right to fire him” has strangely morphed into a right-wing view. If you don’t believe me, just start making insensitive remarks about race, gender, and sexuality on social media and see how your career goes. “I was perfectly civil at work; I only offended on my own time” is now a frail defense. Even if your boss and co-workers adore you, plenty of left-wing activists will still pressure them to sack you.
Again, I have no principled objection to firing workers for their political views. Indeed, I’ve long defended the blacklist of Hollywood’s Communists; while I tolerate a wide range of opinion, totalitarians are beyond the pale. While we have no right to jail them, they don’t belong in polite society. But if, like most people, you embrace the view that firing a worker is “economic coercion,” the left’s newfound love of firing their enemies should weigh on you. Consider: Their revised stance amounts to something like, “Firing a worker who’s performing his job adequately is a form of violence. And if anyone crosses us, we advocate – nay, demand! – that this violence be done.”
To be fair, many leftists have yet to revise their stance. Yet as far as I can tell, very few leftists are publicly reaffirming their opposition to firing workers for what they do and say on their own time.
Perhaps because they’re afraid of experiencing economic violence at the hands of the many other leftists who don’t take kindly to such talk.
READER COMMENTS
Seth A Green
Jul 13 2020 at 10:09am
I think that a charitable take on the position you’re critiquing is, in the case of racism: a racist person *cannot* perform their job well, especially if they have the authority to hire/fire others (presumably, they’ll do so in a racist way); if they are in a client-facing role, they’re more likely to discriminate against their clients (e.g. a racist barista at Starbucks’ calling the cops on two black men who are there for a meeting).
Another underlying belief, I think, is that a company’s obligations extend beyond “maximize value to shareholders,” e.g., employers have positive moral obligations to weed out racist employees to help create a more equitable society. Libertarians typically respond that maximizing value to shareholders might be the *best* known mechanism for aligning private and public incentives, but that argument has (clearly) not been persuasive to many.
Matt C
Jul 13 2020 at 10:58am
Seth, it seems that you’re saying that the owners of a business are obligated to use their property for the benefit of others, beyond what’s necessary to earn a profit. I would disagree.
Yes actual racists probably don’t belong in most job. The problem here is that the Left now defines racists as anyone who doesn’t agree with their positions on race.
Separate from my reply to you, I would point out that the harm of these firings goes well beyond the particular employee; when people see others being fired for disagreeing the Left’s dogma, they are often cowed into supressing their own opinion, even if they are only mildly controversial.
Tom Powdrill
Jul 14 2020 at 2:56am
Shareholders aren’t the owner of the business, they are the owner of shares. I think it was Eugene Fama who said said dispelling the notion that shareholders are “owners” is fundamental in understanding companies.
Shareholders are an important stakeholder in companies but not the only one.
Seth A Green
Jul 14 2020 at 7:15am
Matt — I am not saying this, I am saying that other people believe this 🙂
Floccina
Jul 13 2020 at 11:27am
More like:
A charitable take would be, in the case of racism, the evil of Racism outweighs the evil of firing. After all not even the left most leftist would get upset over the firing a person who murdered someone, so it must be scaled against the offense and racism is a great ofence.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2020 at 1:48pm
The idea that the proverbial Twitter mob is demanding that people be fired out of concern that their target’s alleged racism would prevent them from doing well at their job might be “more charitable”, but it doesn’t seem even remotely accurate. To use one famous case, I don’t think it’s even slightly plausible to say that the public hatred piled on Justine Sacco, and her subsequent firing, was the result of her employer realizing she had actually been bad at her job all along, in a way they had somehow failed to notice up until her Twitter blew up. I doubt very much that the people who were demanding that Carson King be fired because he had tweeted two racist jokes when he was 16 years old were simply concerned he wasn’t doing a good enough job at his work. And ironically, the reporter who broke the story about King’s teenage tweets was later discovered to have emitted some boneheaded tweets of his own when he was a teenager, and was then subsequently fired from his job. The demands in these and all similar cases was the same – it was explicitly demanded that they be fired because they are bad people. There is no mystery about the mob’s motives forcing us to speculate they’re simply trying to ensure the highest quality work is being done for the employer. They are openly advertising their motives, and I think we should believe them, especially since their actions make perfect sense in light of the motives they express.
If you have 15 minutes to spare, you really should follow that link I posted. The video is five years old, but everything in it is even more relevant today than it was when it was originally posted.
Tom W.
Jul 13 2020 at 10:41am
The verb “to be fired” is outmoded. Now we say “to be deplatformed”. It is almost the same. They are almost the same as the employees of Youtube. Except they think they are their own boss. I think it is morally right for a “social media” company to deplatform anyone for any reason, provided that a clear and truthful reason is given, as a necessary courtesy even with the people one dislikes the most. They are both correct and misbehaved, just like a spoiled lady raised without any financial shortcomings, who begins in 2020 to learn what poverty means.
I do not recall who said that a conservative is a progressive who has just been mugged, and a progressive is a conservative who has just been arrested. In the same vein, it is funny to see how many defenders of the free market just discover the superior morality of syndicalism and worker’s inalienable rights right after being kicked out.
I dislike ideological deplatforming and firing from an actual job, but I dislike exaggeration of the harm received too. Too much exaggeration these days, from almost everyone, from almost anywhere.
Nick
Jul 13 2020 at 11:22am
I would say that employment is rather more similar to marriage than it is to a relationship. Like a marriage, employment is formal, contractual, and intended to involve obligations on both parties, in the moral and practical sense.
There are of course some forms of payment for labour that are informal and intended to be temporary; tipping in restaurants (in those countries where it is expected) does not involve any lasting obligation on either party. And there is a large grey area in both relationships and contractual labour hire. But it is thought sensible to have a legally binding form of long-lasting romantic relationship, sanctioned, subsidised and encouraged by the state. I think the same thing applies to employment.
robc
Jul 13 2020 at 1:39pm
It is pretty rare to end a marriage with 2 weeks notice and still be on good terms with the other party.
I don’t think they are much alike at all.
Nick
Jul 14 2020 at 4:19am
Yes, I suppose what I’m saying is that because it makes sense for the state to support a formal, semi-permanent and difficult-to-get-out-of arrangement in both its’ citizens employment and romantic relationships, then the default form of employment encouraged by the state should involve a lot of worker protection, in a manner that is analogous to the huge amount of support given by most (all?) states to the institution of marriage. Where this isn’t the case, that should change.
robc
Jul 14 2020 at 9:32am
I don’t see this as a good thing. I like being able to give 2 weeks notice and walk away on good terms with my former bosses (it has come in very handy over the years…my boss from 1997-2000 still gives me great letters of recommendation).
It is a two way street. I want the ease of leaving, my employer wants the ease of firing. Win-win. I have been both and getting rid of poor workers with little pain was also a very good thing. Having good employees leave isn’t fun, but there are more where they came from.
Rob Weir
Jul 13 2020 at 11:31am
I wonder how much of this is due to the government monopoly on unemployment insurance?
Imagine a world where unemployment insurance was private, and premiums varied by both the foreseeable risks of the employee as well as the employer, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of government unemployment insurance.
One result might be that companies that tended more to fire employees based on the whims of mob opinion would, all else being equal, need to pay their employees more to account for their higher insurance premiums. A company, on the other hand, that had a written policy that workers can only be terminated for on-the-job performance, might be able to pay its workers less because of their reduced insurance costs.
Of course, this approach also creates incentives for the workers. It is unclear to me how they would interact. At the very least it would not socialize the cost of firing employees.
Scott Aaronson
Jul 13 2020 at 11:32am
Bryan, isn’t there often extreme moral opprobrium for men who break up with women — particularly if they’re considered to have done so for selfish reasons? My experience has been that, as hard as an earnest steelmanner might try, there’s no abstract moral theory (in the sense you or I would recognize) onto which you can map the modern social worldview. Their view is much more radical: that the world is divided into oppressed and oppressor classes in a state of war. They favor anything that increases the power of the oppressed and decreases the power of the oppressors. I get the feeling that, in their frame of reference, to accuse them of inconsistency over general rules about firing, in the way you do here, makes as little sense as for a football team to complain about the other team tackling them.
Josh
Jul 13 2020 at 12:39pm
Doesn’t your former co-blogger’s three axis model explain this perfectly? Progressives see workers as oppressed by employers and so workers need to be protected. Minorities are oppressed by racists so minorities need to be protected. To explain what you observe, all we need to do is imagine that progressives see minorities as needing more protection from racists than workers need from employers. Which is likely to be true.
I don’t agree with their views at all, but I do think Kling’s oppressor/oppressed axis explains most of what we see from progressives, and this seems entirely consistent with that.
Mark
Jul 13 2020 at 1:08pm
I think a key distinction is monopolistic power. The position that firing people is never morally wrong or a suppression of free speech seems problematic—what if an industry is dominated by a couple large companies or a monopoly and they could agree not to hire people of a certain political viewpoint, or be pressured by the government into it? Even in authoritarian countries, repression of free speech often takes the form of government-pressured or mandated employment consequences rather than outright being sent to jail.
If you reject a romantic partner, there are still millions of other people who the spurned lover could potentially date, so you lack monopoly power in the market.
Based on this monopolistic power distinction, I would say there is nothing morally wrong with consumers and employees boycotting a business even for outright discriminatory reasons because individual consumers and employees never have monopolistic power. However, it could be wrong for businesses to fire people for discriminatory reasons, and the more powerful the business is, the more wrong such firings should be. I’m not really concerned if a mom and pop business decides it only wants employees of a certain political bent, as there are plenty of other equally good businesses those employees could work for. But if an industry or profession is dominated by a few large employers (like the Hollywood studios), I’d be concerned if those employers were using a political purity test to hire.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2020 at 2:03pm
I’m not sure I’m convinced, because even if there was monopoly power in the dating market that wouldn’t seem to make a difference about the “at will” nature of relationships.
If John is head over heels for Susie, has eyes only for Susie, and would never be happy with anyone other than Susie, then Susie would, in that case, have monopoly power over John in the dating market. But it still seems to me that Susie has every right to reject John, even if for no particular reason or for bad or stupid reasons. Even if it means John will spend the rest of his life pining for Susie, never have another relationship, and be alone until the day he dies, Susie still has every right to turn John down. And this doesn’t seem too unrealistic to me. There are people in the world who have their heart set on one person, get shot down, and spend the rest of their lives miserably alone, unable to get over it.
Obviously trying to identify those cases for some kind of “dating policy” would be all but impossible in practice – people’s internal lives are too complicated and too inaccessible. But I would still reject the idea in principle, not just due to the difficulty of applying the practice. To say otherwise would commit me to saying “While we can’t know for sure in the real world, if we could find and accurately identify cases that fit the Susie/John dynamic above, then it would be the right thing to do to prevent Susie from rejecting John.” That seems obviously false, so it’s not clear to me that monopoly power makes a moral difference.
Mark Z
Jul 13 2020 at 3:16pm
This is a good point, dating may resemble monopolistic competition more than one would think. If one finds >99% of members of the opposite sex as incompatible with oneself for a relationship or unavailable (which I don’t think is that farfetched a number), taking into account ‘transaction costs’ of finding and establishing a relationship, I could easily see it more resembling monopolistic competition than perfect competition. How many people would agree that finding a good relationship is easier than finding a good job? Maybe some, but many wouldn’t I think.
Thomas Mulligan
Jul 13 2020 at 1:13pm
A plausible (I argue correct) moral principle is that it is wrong to discriminate against a person–hire him or fire him–on grounds irrelevant from the point-of-view of merit. We have learned over past decades that it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation. On this meritocratic line, these are merely special cases of a general rule (and so it’s also wrong to discriminate on the basis of appearance, family connections, etc.)
The moral danger that “cancel culture” poses is that it will violate the meritocratic hiring principle. But, as Seth A. Green suggests above, this depends on the facts of the case. It’s important that police officers enforce the law in an unbiased way, and so if you find out that an officer advocates for white supremacy in his off-time, that casts doubt on merit as a police officer. When you fire him, you are firing him not for his extramural conduct but because he is insufficiently meritorious (which you learned from his extramural conduct).
But insofar as people are being fired for political dissent, or because of their religious beliefs, or because they wore some Halloween costume or told an off-color joke: that is wrong, and it is wrong because it violates the meritocratic hiring principle. One may trust one’s intuitions in these matters; they rarely lead us astray.
Jake Thompson
Jul 13 2020 at 1:33pm
I don’t think the comparison between romantic relationships and employer-employee relationships is valid. Romantic relationships (usually) entail intimate use of and access to your partner’s body. An employee, by contrast, has no such implicit claim upon the body of her employer. The cost of retaining an employer is nowhere near the cost of retaining a romantic partner, and this difference gives either party more license to unilaterally abrogate.
I agree with the overall substance of this post, but I think your comparison between employer-employee relationships and romantic relationships opens you up to unfair strawmen; many critics would take this argument as somehow foundational rather than incidental to the larger point expressed in this post.
Swami
Jul 13 2020 at 2:53pm
I think freedom to end the relationship is reasonable for both employer and employee. Employment should be mutually beneficial, and one way to promote this is to allow exit options for both parties.
That said, one political party has decided that they should use peer pressure to prevent the hiring, or acceptance in the case of college, or to encourage firing based on political purity tests. This is an extremely dangerous idea, which is going to either lead to the immediate ascendency of said political view, or to a backlash from the other political views as they seek to survive being driven out of all key institutions (the cancel culture has thoroughly infiltrated academia, schools, government agencies, HR departments of big business, media, law firms, etc.)
This issue could get really, really ugly if it continues, in several different ways. Christians, conservatives, libertarians and other non-woke ideologies are not going to take this nicely. I could even argue that the Trump Phenomenon is greatly explained as their first strike back.
Sebastian H
Jul 13 2020 at 3:30pm
The problem is that if it is really true that these people deserve to be fired for who they are, they shouldn’t be hired either (until they are rehabilitated). Do we have a method to certify rehabilitation? The evidentiary bar for them to be permanently (or long term) unhireable seems to be rather low if someone like David Shor counts as a racist.
nobody.really
Jul 13 2020 at 3:57pm
Really?
KevinDC
Jul 13 2020 at 4:55pm
I checked out the link you posted and I don’t think it does much to support your seeming incredulity. Bryan’s claim was that very few leftists are actively voicing opposition to the idea of firing people for controversial opinions. The open letter in support of free speech referenced in that article was signed by about 150 people from across the ideological spectrum. At first glance, I’d say maybe a few dozen of the signers qualify as being called “leftists” in a ideological sense. A few dozen leftists openly protesting cancel culture seems perfectly compatible with saying that very few leftists are doing so.
By contrast, the counter-letter in the article you linked to also contained 150 signatures criticizing the contents of the original letter. As far as I can tell, the group that put their names to the counter-letter seems to be made up exclusively of leftists.
Granted, those petitions are only two data points, and my count about the relative proportion of leftists on each one can probably use some refinement. But if you think that article disputes Bryan’s central point, I just don’t see it. That article just suggests that the balance of opinion among those on the left is exactly what Bryan is suggesting – or at least the balance of the openly expressed opinion.
nobody.really
Jul 13 2020 at 5:53pm
For what it’s worth, Caplan is a piker. People who REALLY defend freedom of association defend it for everyone–even members of the KKK–at least so far as to embrace a Market Power Affirmative Defense to civil rights laws.
john hare
Jul 13 2020 at 7:20pm
I have a problem with the whole idea that firing someone is automatically the serious harm. I have fired quite a few people that were causing me and my company serious harm. At some point, it is reasonable to consider the actions of some employees as sabotage. Deliberately skipping steps in a construction process because they “think” it unnecessary, based on a whopping two weeks experience and no research. Not showing up or disappearing when the hard work is going on. Faking time reports. I could go on for pages.
Firing someone for something they said decades ago as a teenager is equally insane. In most law there is a statute of limitations. Firing qualified people is seriously harmful to a company as there is a perennial shortage of high quality employees. There is a business opportunity here for companies with backbone to acquire qualified people from companies without enough backbone to defend their people from external pressure.
Jonathan Monroe
Jul 14 2020 at 12:24pm
I think the “standard view” cited by Bryan Caplan is sincerely held by a small minority of WIERD people (and hypocritically professed by a larger minority of WIERD people). In my RL social circle and the internet communities where I see this sort of thing discussed, most people are happy to condemn someone for leaving a non-abusive spouse to move in with a lover. (Per Scott A, this condemnation is sotto voce if the guilty party is a woman)
I also see people who are not familiar with divorce law as it actually exists acting surprised when the courts ignore fault (including clear-cut cases of fault like notorious adultery) when dividing up property. People expect the courts to protect the innocent partner. If you ask why this is, the normal defence you hear is the pragmatic one that a court lacks the knowledge to assign blame for breakups, not the principled one that the cheating partner has done nothing wrong.
I actually think the majority view (I don’t know if at-will employment enjoys majority popular support in the US, but it certainly doesn’t in Western civilization as a whole) is consistent between jobs and romantic relationships on these three points:
It is okay to try someone out before making a long-term commitment (dating, temping, probationary periods for new hires etc.) and dump them for basically any reason if it doesn’t work out.
After making a commitment, it is morally blameworthy to end the relationship in a way which causes severe harm to the other party, unless they are abusing you. (People’s willingness to take weak or implausible claims of abuse seriously increases with the “opressedness” of the claimant, with “salary below market” counting as abuse for most employees)
It is not okay to string someone along for multiple years (through an on-again off-again relationship or a series of temporary contracts) without making a commitment unless both sides have some equality of power and are fully aware of what is going on.
D
Jul 20 2020 at 4:20am
I’m left wing as are most of my friends and relatives. I’m in my thirties and live in the UK. Voted for Corbyn. Mostly as, in my view, better than the alternative, but still pretty left for the US I would guess.
Neither I or any of my friends are for the what’s being called “cancel culture”.
That said, I see no *hypocrisy* between supporting workers rights not to be fired at will, and wanting prominent/rich/powerful people to be fired or have shows cancelled for – as the cancel culture people see it – unacceptable views or statements. The two are clearly not the same.
Mr Caplan’s desire to apply single underlying moral principles is understandable amongst the young idealistic college students seeking to cancel, but a bit childish when it’s a 50 year old professor.
More generally, the reason most people support workers rights is that it helps balance bargaining power between workers and employers. Where too much power is on one side it gets abused. Mr Caplan can see this very clearly when that power rests with governments, but not so much when employers have it.
(Likewise when unions are too strong their power is abused. As pretty much everyone I know on the left would agree…)
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