Sunday, July 27, 2014

The Ethics of Lines in the Sand

It’s probably important to remind anyone reading this blog (assuming that anyone reads this blog) that I’m not actually that old – I have not yet reached half a century on this increasingly weird planet, despite appearances to the contrary – I’ve just lived through chaotic and rapidly-changing times. A good example popped up this week with the Equal Time crisis in Warren, Michigan, where an atheist group requested equal time at City Hall to present its views along with various religious groups doing the same. Whether you personally agree with atheism or not, it’s impossible to deny that a lot of people do, and that in the US they have the same right to practice and promote their belief structure as anyone else. Unfortunately, the Mayor of Warren apparently doesn’t think so, since he refused to allow the atheists to have their access and stated publically that he would also deny such access to Nazis or the KKK…

Even granted that Warren isn’t exactly one of America’s largest cities, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could get elected to be mayor of anything and not grasp that people would be offended by the comparison. It’s also hard to imagine what harm the atheists could possibly do anybody in the first place. Faith by definition is not susceptible to arguments of logic or reason; that’s kind of the point. Any true believer in any faith would be no more likely to give it up in favor of atheism than they would to adopt any other religion, and possibly much less so considering that the atheists are effectively trying to prove a negative. But it does raise the issue of what we are supposed to do as managers when two or more people of incompatible belief systems fall under our jurisdiction…

Traditionally, most managers have dealt with this situation by telling all of the true believers in their company, department or work group to just leave it outside of work. This does not give any favor to any one faith or discriminate against any other; it also has the advantage of getting the employees to stop spending their work days trying to prosthelytize each other and go back to work. Increasingly, however, we have seen push-back from people who insist that not being able to display religious iconography wherever and whenever they want to is a violation of their First Amendment rights, and demand to be allowed to turn their personal workspace into a shrine of whatever their faith happens to be. But as bad as that is, the recent fighting between the atheists and the religious groups is taking the whole problem to a new level…

Regardless of what your personal beliefs might be, it’s easy to understand how you might be angered by a demonstrator who is proclaiming that your beliefs are only held by simpleminded, gullible fools – or by people who are comparable to the KKK or the Nazis, depending on which side of this conflict you happen to be. In a very real sense, any form of atheist propaganda is a vicious attack on the beliefs of any person of faith who has to look at them. And increasingly, any overt attempt to prosthelytize someone about your faith, or even display it openly, is becoming just as harsh an attack on the atheists. The question isn’t so much where this is going to end, since that is out of our hands; the question is what we as managers can be expected to do about it…

Which brings me to the question: Do we, as managers, have an ethical responsibility to allow anyone who works for us to practice all aspects of their faith at all times, including the ones that would prevent them from doing their jobs in the first place? Do we have a responsibility to allow people to display iconography, celebrate holidays, or attempt to convert their coworkers if their personal faith demands such things of them? No one wants to be the Grinch who forbids the employees from putting up cut-outs of Christmas trees or pastel eggs, but do we have an obligation to allow such rituals? Or does our responsibility to the owners of the company, the stakeholders in our enterprise, and ultimately the community itself outweigh our responsibility for our employees’ personal happiness and religious fulfillment, and require us to go on telling everybody to keep it out of the workplace?

It’s worth thinking about…

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