Lazy Friday, pullin’ a bchad with a long post.
On the Brandan Eich thing, I’m less interested in what the company should do than what a customer should do. In some sense this is personal. Should I, personally, stop using something or liking something if the CEO disagrees with something I like? Alternatively, what advice should I give someone who is thinking of boycotting a product because of something a company or employee has said or done. It seems to be more common nowadays than I recall 10-20 years ago (though it might be recency bias).
I can think of a few different variations of this line of thinking. A firm (or a prominent employee of a firm):
- does something; or
- donates money to something; or
- votes for something; or
- thinks something
that the customer doesn’t like. And the question is should the customer continuing retaining that businesses services (assuming they have alternatives at comparable cost).
I put those in order of what I assume most people would have an issue with. If a firm does something you don’t like, I think most people wouldn’t have an issue finding an alternative. Not that controversial. Things get a little more confused if you someone donates money to something you don’t like, e.g. the Brandon Eich case. I would say that this is similar to the next case of when someone votes for something you don’t like. Finally, I would consider the least controversial to be just where you or the company just thinks something that the customer won’t like.
In defense of the last point, I believe that people in a free society should be allowed to freely hold whatever beliefs they want without harassment or bullying or intimidation. I consider that fairly conventional, but broadly speaking it might be more controversial when you consider things like racism or bigotry. So why do I hold to this rather strong form of freedom of thought. Mainly I think societies need a good process to continually search for new ideas to improve themselves. The best way we have come up with so far has been to let everyone have their own beliefs, say what they want, and then vote to determine overall who has the best ideas. Thus, freedom of thought without harassment can be considered bundled together with freedom of speech and freedom of voting without harassment to a process for the search for ideas on how to govern society. I believe this search is best accomplished freely and that harassment, intimidation, and bullying disrupt this search in a negative manner. Moreover, a harassment-free search for good ideas is a fundamental pillar of good government. Maintaining that is more important than almost any individual issue.
(I would be willing to maintain a few exceptions to the above. First, I would be willing to concede that if the thoughts and opinions are such that they would overturn a free society, then those might be restricted. For instance, in Germany a polical party can’t advocate for the constitution to be thrown out. That’s pretty reasonable, given their history. Second, it can be difficult when one person in the debate does not acknowledge the rights of the other to participate in the search for good ideas, e.g. a white Klan member debating the merits of Jim Crow with a black person. The search for good ideas implies some respect for the fundamental rights of the people you are debating.)
Thus, I think customers threatening to not purchase some companies’ products just because the firm or the employer thinks something they disagree with is this harassment/bully/intimidaiton behavior I don’t support. So just because the firm thinks something, you shouldn’t stop buying the product. If Brandon Eich just said he opposed gay marriage, but wasn’t going to vote to ban it or donate money to support banning it, on these grounds alone, you shouldn’t threaten to stop using Firefox.
It becomes slightly more complicated when you throw in voting. For instance, suppose Brandon Eich said he opposed gay marriage and he was going to vote against it, but not that he was going to donate any money to to oppose it. I would argue that even in this case you can’t threaten to stop using Firefox. The purpose of freedom of thought is to allow society to find the best ideas and implement them in policy. Regardless of whether he is right or wrong on the issue, voting is part of the process of freedom of thought. For society to receive the benefit of freedom of thought, people must be allowed to express their opinions through voting. One response to this reasoning could be that voting is not just thought. If a vote results in a political change, then it may have real world consequences. This is no different than #1 above. It’s a good argument, but it is not completely convincing to me because the underlying processes needed to support a free society (like allowing people to have their own opinions and vote however they want without harassment or intimidation) are almost always more important than policy outcomes.
Coming back to the actual Brandon Eich predicatament, what should a customer do if a firm (or employee) donates money to a cause they disagree with. This is similar to the voting case because the donation presumably could encourage more than one other person to vote whichever way the customer disagrees with. The difference is in scale. However, to the extent that the donations are meant to encourage debate, they are really part of freedom of speech. Just as you shouldn’t intimidate someone for their thoughts or voting, intimidating someone for their contribution to a debate undermines a free society. Thus, you shouldn’t harass people who donate to causes you disagree with.