Multi-level marketing: still a scam
Our old friend Dear Prudence (a.k.a. Emily Yoffe) has some wise words this week for someone looking for marketing advice. (It’s the last letter on that linked page.)
Dear Prudie,
I have a marketing problem. It seems that since the economy has taken a downward slide, many of my friends and customers have turned to enthusiastically selling multilevel marketing products. I find that I am getting pitched every time we meet for lunch, go shopping, or have a cocktail. I have been presented with energy drinks, vitamins, phone services, and travel companies, to name a few. I have also been told by some of my customers that if I don’t support them in their new business venture, I can plan on not getting any future business from them. I believe these people are being taken advantage of and their excitement is only temporary, as they are riding the high of what was promised to them for potential earnings. How can I tell my friends and customers that I do not support multilevel marketing schemes and I don’t want to hear about their newest business opportunity?—Please Stop the MLM Madness
Multi-level marketing schemes are ones where you get recruited to sell a product — it could be something specific, like Herbalife which sells vitamins and herbal “supplements,” or a virtual smorgasbord of different things, like Amway/Quixtar. This is presented as a great opportunity because you can “be your own boss,” and the like. Not only are you a salesperson for this business, earning commissions on your sales, but the person who recruited you gets commissions on your sales. And the person who recruited that person gets commissions on the sales of the people they personally recruited, and all of those people’s recruits (including you). And so on. If you recruit people, they’re sure to recruit others, who will recruit still more, and you too can make a fortune! So goes the claim.
Of course, it’s nonsense. Not only is it impractical — because the products are typically overpriced and are easily beaten in value by something your potential customers would find at the mall before they call you up about it — it’s also nonsensical. It’s different in a tiny technicality from a pyramid scheme (no commissions on recruitment, only on sale of products) but it’s doomed to fail for the same reason. There just aren’t enough people on the planet to sustain it in a way that’ll be profitable. Profitable for you, I mean. This whole thing is plenty profitable for the people that start these outfits, because they’re churning out these cheap silly products for you to buy for your inventory at marked-up rates (and then fail at selling to your friends and family at even more marked-up rates).
Bottom line: this is not a good idea. It may look good on paper, but it is ultimately a false promise. A tiny fraction of people participating in multi-level marketing turn a profit from sales, and an even tinier fraction of them quit their day job and make a fortune off it. The economy has been hard enough on everyone as it is. Don’t take it as an opportunity to throw even more of your money away. And remember that it’s not just yourself you’d be putting at risk, it’s the people you’ll be pressured to rope in with you, and in particular — as this letter reminds us — the friends and family you’ll be putting in a really difficult situation.
Anyhow, Prudie answers:
Dear Madness,
With your friends, you need to say you wish them the best, but like everyone else, you’re on a tight budget and simply can’t purchase these items from them. If they press you, say you’re being approached all the time, and you’ve just had to make a blanket decision in order to keep yourself from going broke. As for your clients, I’m assuming you actually provide a useful and necessary service to them. How nice that they want to exploit that to coerce you into buying useless and unnecessary products. It’s up to you to decide if a firm refusal is the best way to go, or if being more flexible would be better for you. If it’s the former, explain to them you understand how tough it is out there, but you hope to keep them as customers because they value what you offer, and that one way you keep your prices competitive is not going off your budget. If it’s the latter, you can consider buying their junk a cost of doing business. But before you sign up, explain that you are able to spend only a specific amount of money and will not go beyond that.—Prudie
I’m sorry that anyone might have to set aside a budget for playing along with a scam, but I agree with Prudence here that it might be the best thing for business if you can keep your involvement limited. Limits are really the key with this kind of stuff! Don’t let yourself get sucked in. For a lot more information about MLM, including hard numbers such as income statistics, and a bunch of citations, please take a look at Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid episode from last October. It’s great! You might also be interested in Russell Glasser’s site, The Perils of Amway, which has two epic personal accounts of individuals who were involved with Amway but found their ways out.
Disability benefits
I guess disagreeing with others’ conclusions about ethics is a hot topic around here lately. Separate from our ongoing series about “The Ethicist,” today I’d like to direct you to this post at blog.bioethics.net. Summer Johnson asks: will the Down syndrome children disappear?
If current trends continue, it would appear that the answer is yes. Dr. Johnson quotes an article which says there “would have been a 34% increase in the number of babies born with DS between 1989 and 2005, in the absence of prenatal testing. Instead, there were 15% fewer babies born [with DS]….” She also claims that “some 92% of women who know their fetus has Down syndrome choose abortion.” Then, Johnson goes on to reflect about whether or not this is a good thing. (Emphasis in this and subsequent blockquotes is mine.)
But what will our society lose if all the Down syndrome children disappear? There will certainly be a thread of our humanity that would be lost. Moreover, I doubt that there will ever be a time when Down syndrome is ever completely gone from our population. 100% of women will never terminate their Down syndrome pregnancies–nor should they. Their [sic] is a richness and fullness that raising a handicapped child brings to parents’ lives and for some parents that is what they wish to have.
I find this line of argumentation very troubling, and I said as much twice in the comments. There were also comments from two parents of children with Down syndrome, which I found disturbing in the same way. Commenter “jaws” wrote:
…I chose to keep my baby because every reason we came up with for not having her was selfish. Ten years later it was the right decision not just for my family but for the world. Her teachers say we learn more from her than she does from us. One said she was her most memorable student (after 20 years of teaching) and for good reasons. Our children’s minister said that the other children learn more from her than she does from them. I have watched her melt some of the most sinister people in the world who view terminating babies with Down syndrome differently because they know my daughter. … The world is a better place because there are people with Down syndrome here. Not just because we are the parents but just because. That’s not even to mention the scientific break through that individuals with Down syndrome are helping to conquer. Just one mom’s thoughts.
Later, commenter “Mari” posted:
I too have a child with Down Syndrome and we chose to have him with prenatal knowledge. It was a very hard decision but one I do not regret. I now feel that he was brought into this world not just to change me and my family but to touch and perhaps change many. Its not just teachers and therapists that he affects but I see friends of my daughter, his sister, in junior high. I see him melt their so cool facade and show such patience and care and joy just interacting with him. Yes, if these people are marginalized it will negatively affect our society.
So they’re saying that people with Down syndrome give us “richness and fullness.” We can “learn more from” them than we could possibly offer to them, because they teach us “patience and care and joy” and “melt [our] so cool facade.” The mechanism for that is left unspecified, but boy, are they ever sure it is true. People with Down syndrome also allow us to use them for scientific experiments, apparently. And yet! And yet our reasons for having children with Down syndrome are not selfish, but choosing not to have a child with Down syndrome would be selfish in the extreme.
Am I the only person cringing at the contradiction here? These arguments for having a baby you know will have Down syndrome are all based on how we can benefit from that baby, with no consideration at all for the child’s life. That is selfishness if I ever heard it.
Down syndrome is a serious condition. Yes, the outcome for any one person will be somewhere within a broad range of severity. But the most common health implications include “cognitive impairment, congenital heart disease, hearing deficits… and Alzheimer’s disease. Other serious, but less common illnesses include leukemia, immune deficiencies, and epilepsy.” Even a so-called mild case of a list like that is pretty serious. Do you know why children with Down syndrome teach us “patience and care and joy”? It’s a bit like watching a child with terminal cancer laughing at a cartoon. We see how our problems pale in comparison to theirs, and marvel at how they are still able to be happy. Their suffering and disadvantage shows us how to appreciate our relatively good circumstances. Let me repeat: their suffering and disadvantage.
If you are going to make the argument for not aborting a fetus you know will be born with Down syndrome, you ought to base your argument on the fact that the child’s life will still be valuable, will still have positive utility, will still mean a whole spectrum of worthwhile life experiences. We all suffer to varying degrees and in varying ways, and the existence of suffering does not mean that a life should end before it begins (or, as it is just beginning, depending on your point of view). You can make that argument. But these are standard anti-abortion arguments in general. They have nothing to do with Down syndrome in particular.
And this is not the line of argumentation that Dr. Johnson, “jaws,” and “Mari” are pursuing. They say that the presence of people with Down syndrome is important for our “humanity.” They claim it is useful and good for society to have them around, presumably because the rest of us learn about interacting with people different from ourselves. However, we will still encounter lots of people who are different from ourselves, and we can learn from them in the event that someday there are no children born with Down syndrome. The argument that we need to keep having children born with Down syndrome in order to perpetuate this would equally well apply to children born with fetal alcohol syndrome or prenatal lead poisoning. It’s an argument that would justify not fixing cleft palate, and not administering (or even inventing) the polio vaccine.
It’s unethical to use someone else’s suffering as an instrument for your own marginal self-improvement. If it were possible to live in a world where no one suffered from Down syndrome, I’d say that world would be an improvement over our current one.
Questionable Ethics #1
I’m generally a fan of advice columns. They’re sort of my replacement for gossip. I don’t want to scrape around for the dirty secrets of my friends and acquaintances, but it is reassuring to read about other people’s complicated lives and sordid problems, and realize that whatever difficult times I think I’m facing actually aren’t so bad. It’s also interesting to compare my reactions to the advice of the columnists and see how my instincts measure up to the supposed Zeitgeist.
It’s only supposed, though; most advice columnists at least appear to operate under the assumption that they offer just another opinion—perhaps a very worldly opinion, having read hundreds if not thousands of letters about people in similar situations—but an opinion nonetheless. Not Randy Cohen! A columnist for the New York Times Magazine, he purports to explain what is ethical. Period. That’s why he’s called The Ethicist. (Sounds like the most boring possible superhero.)
It’s possible that Cohen doesn’t personally believe that he has the definitive answers on all questions of morality. A Times Magazine focus group may have decided that the column could appeal to its readers’ desire for some pseudo-intellectual snobbery by reminding them of the good ol’ days of Philosophy 101. Or it might be a complete accident. I still enjoy the column anyway. However, I do think it’s worth pointing out that morality is not as clear-cut as it usually sounds in Cohen’s answers. My coblogger A and I are going to start a series which we’re calling Questionable Ethics. Each week, we’re going to examine the complexities of the situations described in “The Ethicist,” with the hopes of elucidating some of the nuances that Cohen ignores.
(We’re not the first people to attempt to supplement this column with an alternative point of view. I used to read and enjoy Gawker’s “The Unethicist,” but that doesn’t appear to be running anymore. And anyway, our approach will be a bit… different.)
I want to say first of all that there’s a lot of dispute about the meaning of “ethics” versus the meaning of “morality.” Are they synonyms, or are they completely different concepts? We’re not going to mess with that one. There is certainly a usage in which they are synonymous. We’ll mean the same thing when we talk about a “moral system” or an “ethical system,” a set of rules by which one determines right from wrong. Being “moral” or being “ethical” will mean taking actions that are considered good. The real point here is that there isn’t one single road map to ethical/moral behavior; there are numerous systems (many written down by philosophers, and theoretically infinite unwritten possibilities) that prescribe the path to follow.
This week, Cohen looks at three questions. The last two are fairly straightforward, so I’ll focus on this first letter. Read more
My two cents on tipping
Here at It’s the Thought that Counts, we try to apply critical thinking to everything we can get our hands on. Often, that ends up being issues related to politics and law, or to science and education. Today, however, I’m not going to talk about anything that’s been formally codified and voted on, or anything that’s been tested and peer-reviewed. I want to discuss a custom that doesn’t make sense as it’s commonly exercised in the US today: tipping.
Let me first say that it’s not my intention to sound arrogant. I have a great deal of respect for people working in service industries. I also have friends and family members who work or have worked as waitresses, taxi drivers, bartenders, and so on; I’m not removed from or ignorant of the situation. Nevertheless, I expect some people will hear me as arrogant anyway, because I think the presumption that patrons must provide a tip is nonsensical and unfair.
When you go to a restaurant in the US, you’re expected to tip your server 15-20%. My understanding is that the range of allowed tips reflects the range of possible service quality. If it was bad, you tip 15%. If it was great, you give the full 20% or even a bit more if you were particularly thrilled. So here’s what I’ve never understood: if I get terrible service, why am I giving anyone extra money? Also, isn’t a gratuity supposed to be voluntary? How can it be if there’s a minimum expected amount? It seems to me that this is the restaurant’s way of achieving two things: having artificially low prices in their menu, and paying their wait staff less than they deserve (often less than minimum wage). Both of those goals are stupid. A message to restaurant owners: don’t tell me that dish is $11.95 if you really expect me to pay at least $13.75 for it, and don’t expect me to pick up the slack for your mistreatment of your employees. My sympathy shouldn’t be a cover for avoiding sales, payroll, and income taxes.
Then there are the situations where the tipping etiquette is completely vague, with no commonly accepted standard — cab rides or food delivery, for example. Most often I end up rounding up the price to some dollar amount that’s at least two over the actual charge, but I never know if I’m being stingy or overly generous. All my complaints above apply in these cases too, but there’s the added downside of ambiguity-induced anxiety. If you’re going to have unreasonable and unfair expectations about what I pay you, at least make those expectations explicit.
Here’s how I think it ought to work. If you expect people to pay you a certain amount for your services, charge that amount officially, on your menu or your signs, certainly on your bill. There are plenty of countries where tipping isn’t practiced or is actually illegal, so don’t think you have some inherent entitlement to our spontaneous generosity. If your customers think you did your job particularly well, I see no problem with them giving you some extra money with their payment. But don’t act on the nonsensical assumption that we’re supposed to feel some predetermined amount of extra appreciation for your work.
Vigilante justice
The ever-fabulous Dinosaur Comics raises some poignant legal issues today. Here’s one panel for a teaser. Go read the rest!
Oh, dear
It seems Italy just wrapped up their own version of the Terri Schiavo case. From BBC News:
Eluana Englaro, the Italian woman at the centre of a right-to-die debate, has died, the health minister has said.
Maurizio Sacconi made the announcement in Italy’s Senate as politicians were debating a law that would have forced doctors to continue feeding her.
Ms Englaro, 38, had been in a persistent vegetative state since being injured in a car crash in 1992.
…Ms Englaro’s father, Beppino, had been battling with the courts in Italy to let his daughter die since 1999, insisting it was her wish.
It’s still a sad story. People so obsessed with their own outlook on life that they assume everyone else must share it, and worse that it’s appropriate to legally mandate it. But that’s old news. Rather than rehash it, I’d like to call your attention to this choice bit at the end of the BBC article.
Italy does not allow euthanasia. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but they are not allowed to give advance directions on the treatment they wish to receive if they become unconscious.
Are. You. Kidding. Me. They agree with the principle that patients should be legally able to refuse treatment. They’re just not okay with allowing those patients to put that refusal down on paper, to remove ambiguity. In other words, patients have the right to refuse treatment, except for the vast majority of cases in which patients might want to refuse treatment.
Oh, dear.
Learning opportunities
I found myself in two frighteningly similar, yet significantly different situations while on winter break. One occurred at the home of a family member I was visiting. I found several books and pamphlets on homeopathy and other associated woo, and naturally became concerned about how deeply the woo had spread. The other happened at a party I was at with friends. I heard one person (a new friend who I don’t know all that well) tell another (a friend of mine for many years) that he had been having some mental and physical problems recently but that thankfully he’d found a “good homeopath.” I was sitting next to the conversation and could have easily jumped in, but I wasn’t being talked to directly.
My proper course of action in the first situation was obvious. Knowing this family member well, I couldn’t believe that they would honestly buy into homeopathy if they knew exactly what it meant. I sat them down and flipped through the books, explaining about dilution and succussion, using ipecac as a cure for nausea, and so on. It took less than two minutes to convince them to get rid of the books, though we talked a little longer about the details because of their curiosity. It turned out that the books were bought used and on sale very cheap, and seemed worth picking up because they looked like medical encyclopedias. We decided to throw the books away rather than donate them or bring them to a used book store, so that no one else would be fooled by them. Later, they asked me to look through a pile of books about medicine and to pull out the ones based on pseudoscience. It would have been nice to have taught them how to identify woo, rather than just how to run potential woo by me for evaluation, but overall I consider it a success.
I had quite the moral dilemma in the second situation, though. I didn’t know the person that well, wasn’t clearly a part of the conversation, and wasn’t sure whether it was actually a teachable moment. I heard him explain that he got worse before he got better — a classic hallmark of issues like a cold or a headache that appear, worsen, and heal on their own over time, and good evidence that homeopathic treatment is unrelated to the healing process. I squirmed in my seat and tried to make eye contact with a known-skeptic friend on the other side of the room. The real dilemma happened when he explained how the mind and body are so interconnected, and how so many ailments are psychosomatic. He used this as evidence for the necessity of “holistic” medicine, but I thought, good point! Maybe if you have a fake medical problem, it’s not so bad to treat it with fake medicine. This may even work for some real but not-too-serious problems — the placebo effect actually does help some people get better faster than they would have without it.
I decided not to say anything. I just complained about it later to that skeptic friend across the room, who never noticed my desperate stares. I think it was the right call because it would have made a scene and made people unhappy and upset (in a way I was safe from while visiting family). People don’t tend to learn from what you tell them, if telling them makes them very upset. Still, I know there is plenty of harm possible from this kind of stuff, and I feel bad about not even trying to intervene.
So, did I do the right thing? When do you step in to teach people about science and pseudoscience, and when should you just let it go?
Like farm subsidies, but for babies
Louisiana state representative John LaBruzzo announced on Tuesday that he is considering a proposal to pay $1000 to poor people willing to undergo tubal ligation or vasectomy so they will not have any children in the future. (I heard about this on CNN, but found a link to the Times-Picayune article via Wonkette.) LaBruzzo says he is concerned that families on welfare have more children than families who aren’t, and thus sap the state’s resources in ever-increasing amounts.
This idea sounds revolting on face to most people. John LaBruzzo is surely not a politician I would trust to formulate reasonable policy, particularly after hearing him say on CNN that he didn’t expect Democrats to support this proposal because people on welfare are the Democratic base. Cute. More importantly, the statistics don’t support LaBruzzo’s fears. While I strongly suspect that LaBruzzo’s intentions are racist and/or classist in nature, and I acknowledge that there is no urgency of an out-of-control welfare budget, I don’t think that that visceral revulsion at the basic idea is really warranted.
The first thing I want to point out is that no one is being forced into this arrangement, unless your definition of “force” is incredibly broad. If a person would rather have $1000 than be able to have children in the future, I see no reason not to allow them to make that trade. Plenty of people seek vasectomies or tubal ligations on their own, so it’s clear they’re not inherently bad operations. No one else would be harmed by the fact of an individual receiving the surgery, so if that individual would prefer the money to their fertility, the trade makes everyone better off. Surely there are people out there who face both unwanted pregnancies and financial problems, and would find themselves killing two birds with one stone in a system of this sort. (I anticipate a claim that this is merely economic coercion, since some people really need the money — but this is a ridiculous argument. Is it coercive for a grocery store to charge you money for food? You need that to survive. Is it coercive for your employer to require you to work according to your contract before you get your paycheck? Clearly not.)
We can also think about the potential children that might have been conceived in the future by someone who signed up for this surgery. If $1000 is worth more to you than your own child, I’m going to hazard a guess that you either would not love and care for that child very much, or that you clearly do not have the financial resources necessary to raise a child in a healthy situation (I mean, with adequate food, clothing, shelter, etc.). In either case, the wisest choice would be to refrain from conceiving a child in the first place, which is what a program of this sort allows for.
I know any hint of eugenics makes everyone queasy, because of how easy it is to invoke a comparison to the Nazi regime. I am not contesting the badness of Hitler here. However — aside from the obvious differences in levels of violence and coercion — it is important to notice that while Nazi eugenics were based on ethnicity, religion, and other qualities having in reality nothing to do with one’s ability to raise a family, the eugenics in a program of this type are almost precisely equivalent to the sort we all employ if and when we look for someone to start our own families with. We ask, will this person be able to love and care for our children, putting their needs ahead of his or her own? Will this person take on the intense level of responsibility involved in raising a child? Will our combined salaries be enough to support a family of the size we want? It’s not exactly “eugenics” to choose to have children with someone you think would make a good parent, as opposed to someone you think would make a bad one — or, if it is, it’s not the hateful sort of eugenics that’s tantamount to genocide.
Claims of eugenics with respect to this program are based on the fact that the payments could only go to poor people. Either the goal is to end poverty by ending poor people, as the Wonkette headline read, or the goal is to diminish the numbers of ethnic minorities who are statistically more likely to be poor. These are legitimate complaints. I’d like to step back and look at the basic idea of paying someone not to have children, though, and ask: is it really necessary to restrict this program to poor people? Everyone’s children impose some burden on the state, since public schools must make room for them, they consume resources and contribute to scarcity, Social Security will (maybe…) make payments to them when they retire, and so on and so forth. Sure, wealthy people are probably less likely to take the government up an an offer like this (since $1000 has less marginal utility to someone with greater financial assets), but for the sake of fairness why not offer it to them as well? Would a plan structured in that way make you feel the same kind of revulsion? I doubt it.
My point is absolutely not that John LaBruzzo is a good guy, or that his particular proposal is a good idea. I simply believe that what I’ve been hearing and reading on this topic is missing a certain level of rational discourse. Of course, in the US we don’t suffer from such severe overpopulation as to make a policy like this worth enacting, and I definitely think we should steer away of programs with central and unavoidable discriminatory effects. If it became practically necessary, though, paying people not to have children would be a legitimate plan, not a reprehensible one.
More on discrimination
Deborah Hellman began a series of guest posts on Balkinization today, on the subject of what discrimination means and when it is wrong. It seems a fitting thing to highlight here, since we’ve touched on those issues a couple times already (see this post on civil unions and this one on religion).
Lots of policies can be accurately described as “discrimination,” and it’s easy — if careless — to assume the normative implication from that description (that is, to assume that any differentiating between people is an immoral action). Hellman argues that the normative use of the word requires a much more specific definition than the descriptive use, specifically that “discrimination is wrong when it is demeaning and not wrong when it is not demeaning.” She goes on to explain that this definition does not exclude individuals who did not intend their discriminatory actions to be demeaning, nor does it except cases in which the affected person does not happen to personally feel demeaned or stigmatized.
I’m not sure I agree entirely with this standard Hellman lays out, but she’s not done explaining it yet. I’m looking forward to her subsequent posts elaborating on her position, and later, dissecting alternative constructions. Hopefully those will include a discussion of using as a criterion the relevance of the attribute being used for differentiation — the subject of my religious tolerance post. Discrimination on the basis of religion may be perceived as categorically demeaning, so I wonder if she would rule it immoral even in cases where it is arguably a relevant consideration.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this reminder from Tom Stoppard that sometimes differentiating between people is the only reasonable thing to do:
Guildenstern: Rosencrantz?
Rosencrantz: What?
Guildenstern: Guildenstern?
Rosencrantz: What?
Guildenstern: Don’t you discriminate at all?!
Thoughts on religious tolerance
I spent a while today thinking about this recent post from Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog. It summarizes the story of a college student who felt she was discriminated against by her philosophy professor, who had asked her to critically examine her religious beliefs. Hemant quotes press releases from the American Center of Law and Justice, which acted on behalf of the student, and from the Center for Inquiry, which is on the side of the professor but doesn’t seem to have been directly involved. Each side tells a pretty different story of what happened, and I don’t claim to know who’s right, but the incident raises some interesting issues about the status of religion in American society.
In the interest of full (yet unsurprising) disclosure, I should say up front that I am an atheist myself. One of the reasons I don’t personally buy into religious doctrines is that, when viewed with a critical lens, I find they come out looking pretty unbelievable. That doesn’t mean I hate religion — just that I haven’t seen any compelling reason to ascribe to one at this time. I think the religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment are of extreme importance, I support the idea of separation of church and state, and I generally try to live out these principles of religious tolerance in my everyday life. Just as the government shouldn’t get to tell me what to believe, I don’t think we should discriminate against each other because of religion.
That sort of platitude about tolerance sounds intuitively right and moral (to the extent that you aren’t caught up in ideas about heathens and/or eternal damnation). Yet the more I think about it, I wonder why exactly we tend to believe in this sort of tolerance in the first place. I mean, as a society we do also generally believe that education, knowledge, and critical thinking are virtuous things — it’s perceived as better to go to college than it is to drop out of high school, to vote based on informed political opinions rather than on the attractiveness of the candidates, and so on. If someone you were casually chatting with in a coffee shop happened to confess to you her belief in a host of invisible fairies who sprinkled fairy dust on her while she slept to make sure she remembered to pay her utility bills on time, you would presumably think less of her for this exact reason. She can’t possibly have her wits about her, you might think to yourself. Anyone who was the least bit rational would realize that idea was absurd. Change the line to one about bread and wine changing into a man’s (or a god’s) flesh and blood, though, and all of a sudden you have a religious belief that must be respected.
We shouldn’t discriminate against people on the basis of things they can’t change about themselves, like ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. It’s my understanding that that’s the basis for the immorality of discrimination like that — if the person can’t help having that characteristic, it’s unfair to treat them differently because of it. This isn’t true about what you believe about the world, though, and we as a society embrace the fact that it isn’t true. If you believe that aliens are bombarding your house with mind control rays and the only way to stop them is to cover everything in aluminum foil, your friends and family will intervene and get you at the very least some therapy, and the conventional wisdom will be that they did a good thing. Most of the time, if you think crazy, irrational things, we don’t have any problem treating you differently.
We also shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of personal decisions that have no bearing on others and no reflection on the merits of an individual. It would be silly if I refused to be friends with anyone who wore flip-flops, for example. That would be arbitrary and unfair. Let’s say I was conducting a job interview, though, and the applicant came in wearing flip-flops. Assuming I’m not trying to hire a lifeguard, flip-flops are generally considered too casual for business attire, so I might fairly make the assumption that the applicant didn’t have a serious enough attitude about the job and weigh this against her when making my hiring decision. Similarly, if the applicant came to my job interview with a fresh roll of aluminum foil for my office to protect me from the aliens, I’d weigh that against her as well.
How is it appropriate to respond, then, when your new friend in the coffeeshop — or your prospective hire, or your neighbor, or whoever — happens to believe that evil exists in the world because a woman ate a magic fruit given to her by a talking snake? I’m not talking about having some vague deist beliefs or a general sense of a benevolent spirit watching over us; I mean adhering literally to religious dogma that directly contradicts, or at least seems wholly absurd in the face of, observations we can make today. If you share my opinion that it’s best to approach life from a rational and logical viewpoint, you’ll probably also reach the conclusion that an atheist or agnostic perspective is the most sensible one. Given that, should I really respect someone who tells me he’s a young-earth creationist, even in the face of all the evidence astrophysicists have accumulated about our universe since the Big Bang and all the evidence biologists have found for evolution by natural selection?
It seems to me that the answer is no, at least in contexts where those specific beliefs are relevant. It’s still unfair to always choose the creationist last when you’re picking kickball teams. But I think it’s perfectly fine to pass over the creationist when you’re looking for a biology teacher (an opinion I’ve already made clear in an earlier post). What about cases where the specific belief isn’t relevant but, say, logical thinking is? We wouldn’t hire our aluminum-foil-crazed friend to be a lawyer or a hedge fund manager, because those occupations require the capability for rational, analytical thinking, and that whole alien issue seems like good evidence that she’s not the most rational, analytical person we can find. Is it unreasonable, then, to treat a dogmatically religious person in the same way? I’m not sure of the answer to this question, but I do think it’s much less obvious than we as a society generally assume.
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