Who Needs Philosophy?

Sometimes I’ll come across a story in which a person or an organization is behaving in a way that I find personally repugnant – one which deeply offends the philosophy I hold on that subject, or my sense of ethics – but which is legally permissible. The fact is, you can’t legislate moral behavior, and any individual person is going to be offended by something that others in their society might find inoffensive. I don’t write about philosophy, moral or otherwise; I prefer to leave that to people who are qualified for it, and none of my degrees or experiences are in philosophy. But every once in a while I will find a story where even if the person with whom I disagree is correct (in either legal or moral terms), their position is still stupid in terms of business, management, or even logic, and therefore farcical. Such, I believe, is the case with Shorter University, and their new policy of requiring all of their employees to sign a “Personal Lifestyle Statement” rejecting homosexuality…

You can find the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story about it here if you want to, but the basic facts are simple enough. Shorter University, a Christian private university in Georgia, is requiring all of the people who work for it to sign a statement saying they reject all behavior that isn’t approved of in the Bible or by their governing board, including premarital sex, adultery, drinking or promoting the use of alcohol when there are any students watching, and homosexuality in any form. I’m not sure this is legal in the first place; there may or may not be an exemption that the school can invoke as a religious organization. But that’s a case for the courts (and possibly the legislature) to decide anyway; I’m just talking about business – and from that standpoint, this is a farce…

First, and most obvious, how does the administration expect to enforce these restrictions? I suppose if someone comes into the office and starts passing around pictures of themselves engaging in premarital sex or committing adultery you could fire them, but there are already laws about that. A much more likely scenario is that employees will go ahead and sign whatever statement the school insists on, and then continue with whatever their lifestyle was to begin with while avoiding the institution and anyone from it who is likely to report them. Unless, of course, someone within the school has a grudge against one or more of his/her co-workers and decides to denounce him or her as an adulterer (or, one supposes, a homosexual) in order to get him or her fired…

Then there’s the issue of suitability of personnel. It’s possible, of course, that an educational institution that is more concerned with the adherence of its personnel to a conservative Christian code of behavior than it is to the ability or quality of those personnel will also not care if any of its instructors are worth their weight in wet garbage, but eventually their students will – and if the university is accredited by any oversight organization in the world, it soon won’t be. It’s also worth noting that under such a policy the school would have no problems hiring violent criminals, foreign terrorists, racists, ageists, sexists, fascists, convicted felons or sex offenders – provided, of course, that they promise not to engage in adultery or same-sex relationships while employed…

I can’t comment on what is required of someone to be a good Christian fundamentalist (assuming that isn’t an oxymoron in itself), but I’ve picked up a few things about management and education over the years, and I don’t care what sort of organization you’re running or what your agenda might be. If you are selecting personnel on any basis other than merit and retaining them on any basis other than performance, you will eventually employ only those people who agree with your agenda, even if they are completely incompetent by any other possible criteria. Frankly, it’s not a strategy I should care to employ, myself…

But then, I don’t really know much about philosophy…