The Google memo and freedom of speech, part 3: how not to make a controversial case.

This is the final part of my reflections on the controversy around the anti-diversity that got software engineer James Damore fired from Google. This part delves into the murky content of the infamous 10-page document at the heart of the affair.

The other two parts dealt with, firstly, with some of the problems that bedevil discourse around freedom of speech and, secondly, the political philosophy underpinning the concept (but you don't have to have read either to make sense of what follows). They tend to lead to the following conclusions:-

(A) Saying something controversial such as suggesting there might be biological differences between men and women should not automatically lead to one's firing. (There is a public interest in a reasonably free and open discussion of ideas). But equally

(B) The fact that such comments could be said to be in the interest of the free exchange of ideas should not automatically protect one from being fired for this. (You don't have a moral, let alone a legal, right to make political/ideological statements as part of your job.)

So what is an employer to do if a 10-page rumination on such a theme, or some similarly controversial topic, starts circulating the office? The following factors might be relevant:

• Does it appear to be good faith advocacy for a change that the employee would like to see implemented? Or is he or she just trying to ruffle feathers and cause a nuisance?
• Is it closely targeted at some particular policy or else is it a generalised attack on the company's values?
• Has every attempt been made, where controversial statements are made, to avoid causing offence (or worse, belittling others)?
• Is it politely written, or is it instead aggressive or insulting?

Let's now turn to what James Damore wrote and circulated.

Here's a link to the full memorandum.

Read an extended sample of a person's prose and you get a sense of the mental world that they inhabit. This is not always an edifying experience. Spending any time with the thoughts of James Damore (as I did to write this piece) is rather like being stuck in a lift with a spotty, know-it-all 10-year old: it's not just the lack of basic emotional intelligence (something that is anyway a badge of pride for people like him: witness his call in the paper to “de-emphasize empathy”) but the pervasive intellectual ignorance, the lack of familiarity with ideas originating from outside of his very narrow fields of interest.

To trot out the line, for example, “[w]e have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner” without recognising how desperately hackneyed this form of argument is, how many millions of times it has patiently been dismantled (not just in the sphere of the New York Review of Books or whatever but in ordinary living rooms, pubs and secondary schools around the world), marks one out as the sort of person who has never had a serious discussion with another adult about politics or read a broadsheet newspaper let alone developed a moderately cultured awareness of the major currents of contemporary thought.

The problem with accusations of pervasive bias

The title – “Google's Ideological Echo Chamber” – sets the tone. Damore certainly didn't hold back in critiquing his employers. He accuses Google of harbouring “several biases” that have conspired to create a “politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence”. They are allegedly “blind” to alternative points of view whilst promoting “encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies”. It's tin foil hat stuff from the get-go. The word “bias” (or “biases”) appears a total of 37 times.

What is objectionable about Damore's use of the notion of bias is more than just a matter of the unbalanced, aggressive tone in which the point is pursued – although this aspect is bad enough and isn't at all ameliorated by the document being peppered with nauseatingly patronising platitudes (“[t]hankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document”). It goes to the substance of his position in several ways.

For one thing, the across-the-board extreme generality of the accusation of bias calls into question the entire bona fides of Damore's complaints. If you are seeking persuade another of anything you clearly have to be careful when suggesting that that person may have overlooked a particular factor: one does not want to be insulting or call into question their intelligence or integrity. If, instead, you tell the person that you are imploring that they have not merely overlooked a particular point in coming to a particular conclusion but suffer from a pervasive, thorough blindness that means that they cannot safely trust their own judgement on anything what on earth are they supposed to with this information? Resign from whatever position they hold? As a litigation lawyer I know that it is never a good move to accuse a judge of bias unless you think this will result in his or her recusal. Because otherwise you just end up with a pissed-off judge deciding on your case; Emerson's maxim “when you strike at the king, you better kill him” applies. My objection here, to be clear, lies not in the mere fact that Damore's approach is offensive to its target – lots of legitimate political writing is precisely that – it is rather that his target is one and the same with the person he is ostensibly seeking to petition, which calls into the question the genuineness of the whole endeavour. Did he really think that Google would respond by saying “hey, yeah, we are fuckwits, aren't we”?

Moreover, it can hardly be Google's management alone that suffers from biases. As Damore himself recognises at certain points in the paper of course we all do. But that being the case, one has to assume that the validity of the positions that Damore himself is advocating may be undermined by an equally pervasive blindness on his part. Ultimately then any suspicion of pervasive blindness ought to drop out of the picture because it appears on both sides of the equation. Whining on about it is therefore at best irrelevant, at worst a tedious diversionary tactic.

Good, bad and neutral biases

Even more objectionably, albeit more subtly, Damore uses the notion of bias in a specious way to attempt to relieve him of the burden of engaging with any of the actual merits of arguments that run against the positions he advocates. This strategy is tied up with the fact that there are at least three, quite radically different meanings of the word “bias” that are implied at different times by Damore's text. Not only does he fail to explicitly distinguish between these different meanings, but, as I will show, his argument relies actively on their conflation.

1. Bias in a distributional sense. People sometime use the word more-or-less neutrally to describe the relative distribution of elements in some state of affairs, eg. “there is a bias in the production of jelly beans towards red ones”; “Tim Greenhat's investment portfolio is biased towards North American small company stocks”.

2. Cognitive biases. The concept of cognitive bias, pioneered by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, describes certain common reasoning processes that lead people to draw illogical inferences or form objectively irrational conclusions in certain circumstances. In simple terms a cognitive bias is a tendency to make certain kinds of mistakes. For example, confirmation bias – which is name-checked in Damore's document – describes the human tendency, confirmed by lots of psychological experiments, to interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preexisting conceptions, including by discounting conflicting information. Cognitive biases are a trendy topic at the moment, with Kahneman (who won the Nobel prize for economics 15 years ago, study of cognitive biases being fundamental in behavioural economics) publishing a bestselling book on the subject a few years back (which is well worth reading). Although some cognitive biases might plausibly be evolutionary adaptive (such as the self-serving bias: the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures) they are generally thought of as bad things. At least they always involve mistakes in the sense that the person suffering from such a bias is attempting to complete a specific mental task (working out which thing is most likely to happen, or determining which course of action will be most profitable, etc) but fails to achieve this.

3. Moral or ideological bias. Bias can also be used to describe our basic preferences, including our moral preferences. In his essay, Damore treats “preference” as identical to “bias”. (Some might think such usage is rather idiosyncratic but I will not quibble on that ground alone.) Hence “compassion for the weak” is a bias (a “Left Bias” according to Damore). It is a bias in a neutral sense because faced with a choice between two options, one of which favours the weak and one of which does not, the person with this preference all other things being equal will select the former. But by this logic there is no need to stop at the preferences that divide us politically. We should also include in the list of “biases” the various preferences that most humans share, for example:

• The aversion to using force or fraud to acquire resources
• The preference for protecting rather than harming children
• The tendency to praise people who act altruistically and conversely to criticise those who act selfishly
• The preference for making profits rather than losses
• The preference for happiness over misery as regards oneself and others

Such biases are essentially the entire content of human motivation and morality. They are very often, albeit not always, regarded as good rather than bad things.

Although not specifically invoked by Damore, there is also a fourth meaning of bias:

4. Bias as a lack of impartiality. I mentioned above the practice applying for a judge to recuse herself for bias. That kind of bias – a lack of impartiality, due to, eg some financial tie to one of the parties – only arises when somebody has a pre-existing duty to act fairly between competing parties because they are performing a specific role such as judging a lawsuit. This kind of bias is definitely a bad thing, although it's really not an everyday concern (unless you happen to be judge).

What Damore does is conflate the first three types of bias whilst trading on the negative connotations of the 2^nd as well as, I imagine, the 4^th in order to belittle any attitude that falls within the 3^rd category, ie moral and political preferences, where this conflicts with his own.

This is childish and absurd. For one thing, category 3 “biases”, as mentioned above, form essentially the whole of morality (as Damore kind of acknowledges: “Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases.”) You can label moral preferences “biases” if you want but if you do you cannot legitimately trade on the negative connotations of the word “bias”. It is a good thing that people favour those who help others. It is a good thing that people abhor violence and harm to children. It is a good thing (I think, at least) where people show compassion to the weak.

One cannot conflate moral/political preferences with cognitive biases because the former are preferences whereas the later are simply tendencies to make mistakes. To take a political preference that I do not myself share, namely “respect for authority” (correctly placed on the right-hand side of Damore's helpful ready reckoner on page 2 of the memo), whatever arguments I might legitimately use to range against maintaining such a preference, I cannot simply condemn it as a mistake, as a mere deviation from some other attitude that is “true” because it sits in the middle of some distribution curve of attitudes that various people hold. A preference for authority cannot be simply mistaken in the way that a judgement, assessment or calculation can be because, being a preference, the person holding it considers it to be a valid motivation. The fact that it leads to a particular weighted pattern of outcomes – bias in the 1^st sense above – can be no criticism: that is the whole point of a preference. It will either be a fundamental preference, ie one that cannot really be justified beyond the fact that it is preference that one holds (love is a common example), or else it is a preference held for particular reasons, in which case I need direct my arguments to those underlying reasons rather than the "bias" caused by the resulting preference itself.

Not only is is faintly depraved to treat all moral preferences (which, again, include wanting babies not to be injured) as equivalent to the kind of mental slipshodery that Tversky and Kahneman identified as leading people to make bad business decisions, it also permits Damore to suppose he can completely ignore the reasons that often sit behind such preferences. It allows him, in short, to put any goal that he does not share in a kind of black box and ignore any sensible rationale that might exist in its favour – to instead treat it merely as a fault to be corrected.

Diversity

To take the central policy goal discussed in the document – that of increasing representation of women and ethnic minorities in tech – there are all sorts of possible underlying rationales for this objective.

One of these reasons actually has nothing to do with long-term social engineering (or social responsibility) and everything to do with directly getting the best people for the job. It goes under the name of diversity. Although Damore uses the word six or seven times throughout the document no-where does he demonstrate that he actually understands what the argument for it actually involves and why it might in fact justify what he calls “discriminatory practices”.

Diversity – having people of different backgrounds and identities – is regarded as a good thing, for one thing, because it broadens the pool of experience that a company can draw upon. It is possibly also broadens – particular if Damore is right that there are relevant cognitive differences between men and women – the pool of skills at the organisations disposal. It is also a good thing if, by making the workplace a more comfortable, less exclusionary place to be for a larger proportion of the population it increases the company's hiring reach.

I do not comment here on the validity or the strength of those claims. But if diversity is a good – and Damore says (genuinely or otherwise) that he agrees that it is – then the only non-trivial (ie not by accident) means of achieving that good will all involve, one way or another, deliberately engineering one's recruitment programme to achieve the hiring of a cohort of employees with a somewhat different gender/ethnic make-up to that which would be achieved had diversity not been a goal at all. In particular, believing that diversity is good necessarily means believing that the best person for the job is not going to be fully independent of the characteristics of the other individuals you have already hired under the same job description.

These points should not be vastly controversial to anyone familiar with basic investment principles. Suppose I run a pension fund and I have $10 million to invest. I do some research and I come to the conclusion that Stock A is likely to produce the greatest return, Stock B will produce the next best return, and Stock C will produce the worst return of the three. Should I put all the money in Stock A, since I think this is the most promising? Almost certainly not: it is generally better, the extent depending on your (or your client's) appetite for risk, to diversify one portfolio and hold a variety of different types of stocks.

One way of conceptualising this is to say that the prudent investor is effectively hedging against the possibility that application of her own preferred criteria for investment are fallible – that they will not, in fact, lead to the best outcome. On her preferred, primary criteria Stock A is the best bet. But the investor know from experience that her crystal ball is of limited power and often the 'best bet' loses. So she effectively suspends her own preferred primary criteria for selection by using a secondary set of criteria, namely those that ensure a diverse portfolio is selected.

Can it not be said that the employer who employs a hiring practices that – shock-horror – “effectively lower the bar for 'diversity candidates'” (per Damore) is doing essentially the same thing, namely showing a prudent scepticism about the objective strength of its own primary selection criteria? Damore does not even consider the possibility. The case for diversity with recruits is even stronger than with stocks because stocks do not, as employees do, have to pool skills to work effectively with one another or attract other stocks to apply for a job. Again, Damore ignores these points. It seems that to his mind the only true, objective criteria to select for whatever job it was that he had at Google were the precise ones upon which he himself happened to be hired.

Girls vs. boys

Finally, onto the most controversial aspect of the memo: the suggestion that differences between the representation of men and women in STEM fields is down to innate biological differences between the genders.

Given that Damore spends so much of his 10-pages of infamy whining on about other people's biases, as I've said above, to no actual purpose, it is ironic that his reasoning on this crucial aspect provides an almost a classic example of one of Daniel Kahneman's favourite cognitive biases: attribute substitution. Attribute substitution occurs when your brain is called upon to make some judgement that will be computationally complex to carry out and it cheats by substituting a slightly different question which is easier to assess.

The question that Damore claims to be answering is: are biological differences the cause of the gender gap in tech? What he actually does is answer the simpler but ultimately irrelevant question: are there some biological differences between men and women?

He starts by trotting off a bullet-point list of alleged personality differences between men and women (some of which are partially supported by proper research citations, some of which aren't). Women are more interested in people, on average, than men. Men like taking physical risks more than women do on average. That sort of thing.

But when he is done with his list, he carries straight on as if he has now fully explained the cause of the gender gap: on page 5, under the heading “Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap” he says “Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's representation in tech without resorting to discrimination.”

Whoah! Hold on. Where was the bit where Damore cleverly explains how men's incrementally higher scores on some or other spatial reasoning test or risk-taking metric means that one should expect the gender ratio in Google tech roles to be more or less exactly the 80:20 split that it is? Where was the bit where he carefully examined at all the other myriad seemingly very plausible contributing causes that have been suggested for the gender gap and showed them conversely to have negligible numerical impact?

These crucial parts of the essay of course don't exist. They don't exist because providing convincing arguments for or against (let alone proving) causation is fiendishly difficult in this context. Damore basically doesn't bother. Instead, he is content to rubbish the concerns of anyone who cares about gender inequality in the industry based on his own unproven pet theories.

Disambiguating the effect of social conditions is important. For even where purely biological factors stand at the beginning of a chain of causation that ultimately leads to a lot less women going into tech jobs that leaves wide open the question whether those biological factors operate through the intermediation of social conditions.

Think about it. Suppose I showed you evidence that there was a particular genetic marker that some people in a particular population had and that others did not and that the majority of people with that marker were illiterate and the majority of the people who lacked it were not. You'd agree that the cause of the gene-carriers' illiteracy was down to genetics, right?

But the situation I have just described would pertain precisely if you were comparing the literacy of black and white Americans circa 1850, during slavery when, of course, education was not generally extended to the slave population. Having the genetic make-up of an African-American would predict illiteracy; having that of a White American would predict literacy. Yes, having African-American genes was then causal of illiteracy. But, for obvious reasons, it was causal in an entirely trivial way.

Interests vs. abilities

In fact, one piece written in the aftermath of the affair that does make a fairly convincing case that biological factors make a somewhat less trivial difference to the tech gender gap is this one by Scott Alexander, which unlike Damore's screed is carefully reasoned and worth reading. It argues that the evidence points to hormonal differences between males and females affecting levels of orientation towards pro-social behaviour (ie helping people). This, it is argued, leads women, on average, to be more interested in activities and career paths that are people-orientated (teaching, medicine, etc) than are men.

Alexander's conclusions are controversial (a nice thing about his piece is that includes, at the end, a detailed response from the writer who Alexander is responding to, which gives a full-circle view of the scientific controversy). But even if we assume his thesis is correct it hardly supports the sort of sweeping conclusion drawn by Damore to the effect that efforts to encourage greater participation of women in tech are worthless.

For Alexander's analysis is that differences in interest, rather than ability, drive the tech gender gap. The logic of this position is that some lower-ability men must be displacing higher-ability women in coding jobs because those higher ability women are peeling away from the relevant career path to do other, more people-orientated stuff like teaching (or, equally, because men, with their weaker pro-social instincts, are failing to do so). Let me say this again: the logic is lower ability people displacing higher ability people. All because of some dumb hormones. Surely the existence of such a dynamic ought to concern us. Surely it ought to particularly upset Damore given his jobs-ought-to-be-filled-with-the-highest-ability-candidates-no-matter-what-the-cost approach. One would think, indeed, that even were it to prove fairly expensive and difficult to overcome such instinctive motivational differences we might want to make the necessary investment.

In fact, there is good reason to believe that it is not all that difficult to overcome such biologically based motivational factors. Steven Pinker makes the point in Better Angels that people (men in particular!) are born with instinctive biases towards aggressive behaviour that in civilised society we do all sorts of things (create and hold to codes of manners, scold our young, etc) to repress. The civilised habits that such social controls instill become, Pinker points out, second nature to us – in contradistinction to our first nature, ie the Lord of the Flies-type barbarism that we would sink into if we were all left to our biological instincts alone.

If we can devise customs, values and programmes of education which constrain successfully (read Better Angels if you have a problem with “successfully”) the natural violent tendencies of men, then it shouldn't be beyond our wit to make a few tweaks to society so that high ability potential female software engineers are coaxed into using their talents to the fullest and ignoring the genetic siren-call towards people-orientated professions (and vice-versa with technically more mediocre men).

Parting with Damore

None of the above considerations got so much as a look in with Damore's manifesto.

He took the view, instead, that flinging together some homilies about gender differences of completely indeterminate quantitative standing and sprinkling the lot with random citations was enough to give him a licence to go off on an Alf Garnett-style rant about political correctness prefaced by a slimy, philosophical incoherent invocation of the right to freedom of expression as a pre-emptive shield against the criticism that he was aware was coming his way right from the start. It wasn't. There was always too much at stake: the sense of empathy and solidarity to which his female co-workers were entitled, his employers' reputation, and ultimately his own job.

I don't buy the line that Damore's sacking will inhibit open debate on the issue. It is evidently possible to make sane observations as to how biological differences between people might affect how we ought to behave to one another, how our companies and institutions operate or how we formulate education policy. The writers mentioned above – Pinker and Alexander – and many others have done so and avoided censure. Why? Because, quite simply, they avoided doing so in a dickish way.

The central reason why Damore deserved to be sacked was because revealed himself in those 10-pages of bile thinly-disguised as a helpful comment-box suggestion to be an unpleasant piece of work. The intellectual dishonesty of the work, the dismissive treatment of weighty considerations counter to his position, and the shockingly arrogant tone would be repulsive enough were he simply asking for a raise or, say, a transfer to another office. But given all of this shit was being leveled at dismantling policies designed at assisting marginalised groups of people become less marginalised these things were unforgivable. Google said, in effect, sorry, but he just wasn't their sort of person, and they were right, I think, to do so.

The Google memo and freedom of speech, part 2: Rights, duties and values

This post forms the second of a three-part set of reflections on the philosophic aspects of the controversy over the anti-diversity manifesto of former Google employee James Damore and his subsequent sacking.

Part 1 poured polite scorn on the suggestion that "The Left" has a particular "problem" with freedom of expression. In this part, I want to pin down what a right to freedom of expression entails so I can suggest an answer to the question: did Google infringe Damore's right to free speech by firing him?

Before starting, let me address the following point: was it not a bit odd to discuss the concept of freedom of expression (ie. in the previous part) before rigorously examining its scope (here)? There is in fact some method to my madness. The earlier part will have highlighted the importance to this sort of enquiry of stable use of terms, of constantly looking over one's mental shoulder to check that one's moral views are consistent with one another. We were reminded just how wide is the range of things that people keenly want to express to each other (everything from questioning how society should be run to bitching about one's boss) and just how pervasive in ordinary life are the practical restrictions on such expressions. Those observations provide some important premises to keep in mind when seeking to understand the nature of the right to freedom of expression. (Deliberately engineering a long run-up to arrival at a definition of the concept you are striking at is a venerable technique in philosophy; it sometimes goes under the name of dialetics, sometimes reflective equilibrium.)

(2) Did Google infringe James Damore's right to freedom of speech by firing him?

A right against whom?

When we invoke the concept of freedom of expression, we are apparently invoking a right of some sort, albeit not necessarily a legally recognised one, ie a moral one. Who has this right? Presumably all of us, at least potentially. But who is it a right against? What is its scope?

Damore's apologists are invariably quick to make the following point: free speech means the right to say things that other people disagree with. They go further and point out that freedom of speech would be pretty meaningless were this not the case. They are correct on both counts, for reasons discussed shortly.

Where they go badly wrong is in telling us what they think the content of the right is before telling us who the right bites against, ie who is supposed to be under the corresponding duty. (Not one of the editorials that I read criticising Google's decision to dismiss Damore so much as acknowledged this issue.) The reason why skipping that step is a big mistake in this context is that we generally find that fundamental (or 'human') rights such as freedom of speech make more sense to most people as rights against the state than they do as rights as against the world at large.

Consider freedom of association. This right clearly entails that the government cannot stop us being friends with the people with whom we would like to be friends. But our peers very much can stop us being friends with the people with whom we would like to be friends simply by refusing an offer of friendship, as every pre-school child must learn (one can see this process of learning this social fact in action in Channel 4's The Secret Life of 4-Year-Olds). The same is true of freedom of expression. Everyone would agree this right entails that the government cannot sanction people for listening to the wrong sort of music. But if I kick a guy out of my band for expressing admiration for Ed Sheeran, equally, I haven't infringed his human rights.

That does not rule out the possibility that private citizens might have duties to help uphold a political environment in which free expression flourishes. Private actors with an oversized influence over public debate – broadcasters, universities, search-engine providers (yes, hence Google, but qua search-engine provider, in that capacity) – arguably might be under a positive duty to give a platform to a wide range of views. (So far as universities are concerned, this is a hotly contested issue at the moment; I'm not going there in this post...!).

Further, organisations with a great deal of practical power over people's lives – such as employers – might be thought to be under duties not to abuse that power in fairly specific ways, for example by not discriminating against potential employees based on their political beliefs or firing them for making political statements outside of the workplace. And employees may have, or be thought to be entitled to, whistle-blowing rights and/or rights to complain about their pay and treatment. But just as the much-debated exceptions to the main state-facing right of freedom speech (such as laws against expressions of support of terrorists or racial hatred) are just that – exceptions – so, conversely, these isolated rights of expression that exist against private citizens are very much exceptions to the rule that private people are generally not considered to be morally or legally obliged to put up with words and attitudes that they find disagreeable.

Crucially, no-one – not any of Damore's supporters – has argued that employees have a general right to freedom of expression on the job, ie within the workplace itself. Some commentators have specifically pointed out that legally speaking, under Californian and US constitutional law, employees very definitely has no such right (I would venture that the same is true under UK employment law). But this is not just a matter of legal rights: my suggestion is that no-one genuinely thinks that employers are under a moral duty to let their workers say what they want in the workplace, certainly not a duty to permit them to express whatever attitude they like on matters that have a direct bearing on workplace interpersonal relations or on the business's mode of operating. For reasons discussed in the previous part, slapping the label “ideological” on such views does not change the position: almost anything that goes on in the workplace is a matter of ideology if (as Damore's supporters do) you adopt a broad conception of ideology.

Rights, reasons and values

This is probably enough to dispose of the narrow question above. But I will go on to discuss the point alluded to earlier, that the right to freedom of speech means a right to say things that the person under the corresponding duty considers to be wrong. This feature is worth considering for a couple of reasons connected with Damore's case even though we have established that he did not in the first place have a right of freedom of expression as against his employer. Firstly, thinking about this point highlights just how onerous a right to freedom of speech actually is and so perhaps underscores how implausible it is that it could be thought to operate as a right against one fellow citizens. Secondly, the discussion will help draw attention to an important aspect of a distinction that I make at the end of this post between a right of freedom of expression and a value in one's views being heard.

The reason why a right to say only things with which others agree would not make any sense is not something specific to the nature of freedom of speech. It goes to the very nature of what is meant by a “right” to do something in everyday moral discourse.

When we say a person has a right to do X – whether a legal or moral right – we mean something rather different to merely “there is a consideration in favour of letting that person do X” / “there is a reason to let that person do X”.

If, say, I have a good reason to throw away a stack of papers (belonging to my firm) at work (maybe the papers are copy documents that are no longer needed) then I may be able to do so without criticism. But if it should transpire that this reason didn't in fact apply (maybe the documents were needed after all), or there were countervailing reasons (one of my colleagues has just asked for copy urgently), then I would be open to criticism. Since I don't have a right to throw away paper at work everything turns on the weight of the reasons for and against such an action. Suppose, instead, I own the stack of papers. In that case, I can throw away the stack of papers for whatever reason I like; everyone recognises that ownership of something like paper entails the right to throw it away. One of the things this entails is that others cannot decide that I was in the wrong, ie. subject to criticism, for disposing of what is my property. Others cannot second guess the balance of the considerations that I was entitled to take into account (such as my need or otherwise for the paper) in making this decision.

As the philosopher Joseph Raz observes (Morality of Freedom, 1986), the function of rights is to place a kind of mental barrier artificially separating our assessment of an action in light of it being protected by a right, on the one hand, and the actual underlying value of that action, on the other. Raz essentially views  the structure of rights in our thinking as being like this:

A right of S to X

=

{A reason to let S (or possibly enable S to) X} + {A reason to exclude from one's consideration one or more categories of reasons which might otherwise tell against letting S or enabling to X}

On this view, which I think is substantially correct, a right/duty is not just a reason for doing or permitting something in the way that an interest or value in favour of that action is. Nor is a right necessarily a particularly important reason or one that touches on fundamental human interests (think about rights to return damaged goods, the rights granted by parking permits, and so on – rights that have fairly trivial subject-matters). Instead, a right/duty operates as what Raz calls as a peremptory reason: a first-order reason for acting in a certain way combined (as above) with a second-order reason for excluding certain other considerations from one's assessment.

It is this exclusionary aspect that distinguishes duties from ordinary reasons to do something. Ordinary reasons for an action (eg: it's sunny today) can be added together with other reasons favouring that action (I haven't been for a walk already) and balanced against all the reasons that exist against it (there's a new Game of Thrones episode out); one then acts on the balance of reasons. But to the extent you recognise a right you are unable to act on the balance of the full panoply of all the first-order reasons that apply because the right forces you to set aside whole categories of such reasons.

In the context of freedom of speech, the categories of reasons that the person subject to the duty must set aside include, in general, all evaluations of the quality, sense, long-term-consequences-if-taken-seriously – the content, in short – of what the speaker/righter is saying. Hence the slogan 'free speech means the freedom to say things that other people disagree with'. (Counter-intuitively, perhaps, on a Razian analysis, commitment to freedom to say disagreeable things does not necessarily entail that there is no good reason to ban people saying disagreeable things – such analysis implies there might well be, at one level – it is, rather, that one has to exclude such reasons from factoring into one's ultimate decision.)

Raz is not saying that rights/duties cannot be subject to exceptions. They might be set up in such a way that they exclude acting on certain considerations but not others. So it is with freedom of speech: we accept that the government can act to censor the publication of a report on the ground that it might place a child's safety at risk but not on the ground that it might seriously embarrass the government.

Interestingly, and somewhat paradoxically, the reasons that a right/duty forces you to set aside typically include ones connected with the very values that underpin the reason why there is a right in the first place. Hence, even though a major, if not the major, consideration for having a system of private property in the first place is that this is assumed to lead, overall, to a more efficient use of resources, I am not allowed to deny you the right to use your driveway on the basis that you are not using it as efficiently as I belief I would be able to use it. Similarly, even though a major, if not the major, consideration in favour of freedom of speech is the value of free exchange of ideas, something which, it is generally assumed, leads overall to better ideas defeating worse ones, the state cannot, consistent with recognition of the right, prevent people expressing views merely on the basis that they are bad ones. This is indeed a rather paradoxical way of thinking, but it is at the heart of how rights figure in our reasoning.

(2A) Even if Damore's rights were not infringed, how should the value of free exchange of ideas have affected Google's decision-making?

In light of the above discussion, have we been too hasty in exonerating Google? After all, freedom of speech is not just a right, it is also (as implied above) an embodiment of certain important values: in particular the value of living in a society where there is free exchange of ideas. Or, less portentously: the value of hearing ideas that are different from your own. Is Google guilty in its treatment of James Damore of failing to do enough to promote this value?

I agree that this is an important value indeed. The sort of behaviour that favours it goes well beyond behaviour that merely complies with (the right of) freedom of expression in a strict sense.

But here is the crucial point. If we are now looking at free exchange of ideas as a value rather than a right it necessarily must figure in our reasoning in a very different way. This value is not going to absolutely exclude other considerations such as the quality of the ideas in question or their consequences. Instead, it can and should be balanced against those considerations.

Thus Damore's supporters should be allowed to plead in the alternative, but they need to accept the consequences of the concession that they are thereby making. Namely, that if the right of freedom of expression is no longer in play they cannot, to that extent, rely on the slogan “freedom of expression means the freedom to say things that others find disagreeable”. At the most they can point to having an interest in saying things that others find disagreeable and that those others have a defeasible reason to hear those things.

What this means in the context of Damore's case is that Google had good reason to listen to what this young engineer had to say, and a reason perhaps to hesitate before sanctioning him even if they found his views to be harmful. We can admit that they had a reason, in other words, to afford a margin of toleration in favour of letting different viewpoints get an airing within the workplace, in favour of avoiding being (as Damore's rather self-serving phrase has it) an “ideological echo-chamber”. But they were perfectly entitled to weigh these reasons for toleration against various reasons for taking action against Damore: the quality, tone, and integrity of what he said, as well as its impact, were all matters that they were entitled to take into account.

There is a balancing act here. It's similar to the balancing act that all responsible citizens perform when they decide what views outside of their own ideological viewpoint to give a hearing too. For none of us have infinite time and resources. Rationally, we should spend this on better rather than worse quality advocates of challenging views. For my dose of right-wing politics I tune into, say, Daniel Hannan but not Rod Liddle, Peter Hitchens not Katie Hopkins, Deidre McCloskey not David Starkey – because I'd rather spend the amount of attention that I give to ideas outside my ideological comfort zone on serious, coherent, and honestly-held ones as opposed to frivolous, incoherent and trolling ones. Your or my discrimination when it comes to casual reading material is, as I say, no more than the result of us lacking infinite time. Employers have additional and rather higher-stakes reasons to be discriminating about the challenging views that they tolerate in the interest of ideological diversity: the need not to damage workplace relations, the need not to damage their reputation, and so on.

Quality is everything, in short, if you are going to say something offensive and you cannot point to a right to say it. And so it is to the quality of James Damore's manifesto that I will turn in the final part of this series...

The Google memo and freedom of speech, part 1: The Left's "problem"?

The sacking a month ago of James Damore, the Google employee who shot to notoriety for his leaked anti-diversity manifesto, caused a storm of debate. Many people were of the opinion that Google was wrong to sack the 28-year old engineer, despite his having used company time to write and distribute a poorly argued tirade accusing his employer of being nothing less than an “Ideological Echo Chamber” and despite this screed having gone viral causing a massive amount of negative publicity for the company.

Because, well, didn't sacking him prove the guy's point? On this view – a view taken not just by alt-right nutjobs but also by commentators in respectable publications such as The Economist – the firing was incompatible with a decent respect for freedom of expression. Conservative commentators, such as Toby Young, writing in The Spectator, went further and treated the episode as evidence of the general intolerance amongst “the liberal left” for views that conflict with their own.

With so many hot-button issues in play it was not surprising the quality of much of the debate was poor. In writing this post, I wanted mainly to untangle the arguments so it's possible to see what in what (limited) respects Damore and his supporters/apologists are right and what respects (generally more important ones) they are being tendentious. I wanted to try, as much as possible, to do this in a sort-of Socratic way of highlighting the logical consequences of the beliefs that other people themselves hold, rather than imposing my own moral instincts on them.

There are three questions that I think are worth pursuing, in one one form or another.

1. Does “the liberal left” really have a problem with freedom of speech?

“No”, I will argue, on any perspicuous rendering of this question. I pose it first because consideration of some of the nonsense exposed in the process of answering it will help tackle the next question, namely...

2. Was the sacking of Damore an infringement of his right to freedom of speech?

“No”, I think. Nor is it so on the interpretation of the right to free speech that most of his apologists would actually subscribe to if pushed for a comprehensive account of their own views.

Finally, the question that necessarily comes last (because the correctness or otherwise of Damore's views shouldn't affect the question of whether his freedom of speech was violated) namely...

3. Was Damore's manifesto a valuable contribution to the debate on diversity?

Again, “no”, at least not directly – although it did indirectly lead to some reasonable good quality discussion of the relevant scientific evidence coming to the fore.

In this first post, I'll stick to the first of these questions and deal with (2) and (3) in a subsequent post.

(1) Does The Left have a problem with free speech?

Before we attempt to answer the question, let's convert it into a more perspicuous one. In fact, before we even do that, let's think a little about why it is weak question. It's weak because, so framed, it's possible to argue too much and with too much consequence over its terms. Does “The Left” mean everyone with leftwing views (even assuming we can reach tolerable agreement on what such views are), including (say) Labour voters quietly sitting at home not ostensibly firing or otherwise harassing anyone, or does it just mean prominent people (elites?) of that political complexion? Either way, what weight, if any, should one give to the fact that lots of people on The Left disagree with the very practices (no platforming, safe spaces, etc) that alt-right free speech proponents harp on about?

And what should we make of the word “problem”? It is very easy to identify the existence of a problem whenever there is any kind of controversy in social life. And it is then very easy to twist that identification into an aspersion on the group to whom that problem pertains. Consider the fact that Die Judenfrage was originally a neutral expression used within C18th&19th debates around Jewish emancipation to encapsulate the issues facing the Jews, as a non-territorially defined ethnic group living in a Europe gripped by rising ethno-nationalism. It was used in this sense by lots of Jews themselves, including Karl Marx. Later, of course, the Jewish Question was adopted as a central tenet of Nazi antisemitism, now meaning the problem that Jews allegedly posed by their very existence to Germany (this lot admit their existence is problematic, see?); it was the problem to which the Final Solution was the answer. A similar risk of conceptual slippage ought to be evident here. Free speech is inherently problematic: it throws up lots of difficulties all the time. Leftwingers are of course concerned with free speech. Hence The Left naturally does have a free speech problem. But, of course, on this basis, so does The Right. So does anyone with a political conscience. This then leads to a second reason why the question is a rubbish one. It is not clear where an affirmative answer actually takes one, because the real issue people are interested in – whether The Left is relatively better, worse or the same as The Right in this respect – isn't encapsulated in the question.

So let's try again:

(1) Does The Left have a problem with free speech? Quite simply, is one, in today's society, more free to express left-wing views than right-wing ones?

Of course, as any natural language formulation must do this still leaves room for debate over terms. But the position is now much improved. Sure, we still need to achieve some measure of agreement on the meaning of right- and left-wing. But we no longer have to augment that with an absurd charade of attempting to arrive at a definitive characterization, or personification, of the entire, diverse class of humanity (“The Left”) who might be said to satisfy the condition of holding such views. Nor does one have to grapple with the problem of determining when someone has a “problem” and what that means. And best of all, the question is fair. It puts right-wing attitudes to freedom of expression in the frame as well. In short, the new formulation captures what is surely the gravamen of the conservative complaint against the (alleged) culture of political correctness in the West, but does so without leaving any room for backsliding over implied baselines.

Let us concede to Damore that the views in his manifesto are right-wing ones. It would be easy to scoff at the little Political Theory For Dummies-style ready reckoner that he gives us on page 2 of the memo, with its three key “left biases” (“compassion for the weak”; “disparities are due to injustice”; “humans are inherently cooperative”)juxtaposed with corresponding “right biases” (“respect for the strong/authority”; “disparities are natural and just”; “humans are inherently cooperative”). But, hey, actually I think this tolerably well summarizes most people's understanding of what is encompassed by the terms left and right wing. And on this basis, as he admits, his views have a decidedly right-wing political flavour.

Let us also concede that Damore was sacked for expressing those views (as opposed to, for example, the snivelling, dickish way that he expresses them – but more on this in a later post) and that hence his sacking can be said to have a political dimension. Many will balk, I imagine, at such concession. They will say that the guy was sacked not because of the political content of his views, but because of what he said caused. Namely upset to his fellow co-workers by implying them to be inferior, embarrassment and harm to his employer, etc, etc. But the better view is that the two things are not mutually exclusive. If you are penalised for the consequences of saying something that is bad for business, and if that something also has the attribute of being a political statement, then to that extent your ability to make a political statement has been curtailed.

In other words, there can be little use here for special pleading around what counts as a political statement. If what we are concerned about here is political expression, and that seems to be the very issue, the fact that a statement may have perceived non-political consequences (eg harm to the bottom line), which consequences are what motivates action taken to inhibit the making of the statement, simply isn't enough to take the statement itself outside the realm of what counts as political speech.

And, crucially, that observation cuts both ways.

Suppose you are hired for a junior position at an investment bank. A few years into the job you decide to write, and circulate to your managers, a l0-page memorandum (which may or may not be entitled “[insert company name]'s Ideological Echo Chamber”) questioning the ethics of capitalist enterprise. Your memo straight up criticizes the firm for putting “profit before people” and for suffering from various conservative “biases” that have led it to assume that its market-based, buying-and-selling activities are worthwhile pursuits. It concludes with a call for the company to consider converting itself into a non-profit making, worker-owned cooperative.

Would you expect anything less than to be told in no uncertain terms that your suggestions were unwelcome?

Or suppose you are an employee at an oil industry consultancy, say one that advises large oil producing companies. You circulate an internal memo complaining that the entire fossil fuel industry is killing the planet and suggesting that the firm redirect its business to advising the wind industry. Suppose, then, your memo is accidentally leaked outside the firm and falls into the hands of one of your company's customers. The customer is outraged that its adviser's employees are expressing such views to one another in the workplace and it demands that the author of the memo is sacked. Your bosses comply with the request.

On those facts, would you have any real ground for complaint?

Given the points made above it would, of course, be outrageous for opponents of Damore's sacking to try to attempt to characterize these imagined anti-capitalist memos as non-ideological given the expansive notion of ideology upon which they themselves so heavily rely. The hypocrisy would be equally great if they were to claim that there would in those examples be no infringement of freedom of expression because the employer in each case would not be motivated by the content of the views but rather their consequences. Again, the same could be said of the Damore case itself.

One can think of many other instances/circumstances where sentiments that can only fairly characterized as right wing are the socially acceptable ones. In those case people who have differing views often have to bite their tongue. Consider attitudes to the (broadly popular) monarchy in Britain; attitudes to the military in the US; the use of French in France; attitudes to the competitive examination system in schools; attitudes to the nuclear family in political debate (think of the compulsory bromides “hard working families”: “the family is at the centre of everything we believe in...”).

And what about what one might call soft social norms: not attitudes to the big political questions but everyday attitudes and behaviours? Let's remember that on Damore's conception leftwing behaviours would potentially include any efforts aimed at aiding traditionalised marginalised groups – a conception which certainly agrees with the everyday usage of the term “politically correct”. Such a conception is broad indeed: it could cover everything from the taboo against the use of derogatory epithets for gay people, to moves towards installing unisex bathrooms, to efforts to translate information into minority languages... lots of things!

Fine.

So, by parity, our conception of rightwing norms needs also to be broad. It should include, for example, a preference for the enforcement of formal dress codes in the work place, justifications of which always end up with appeals to respect for people in positions of power or authority (albeit a bit of Socratic questioning is often required to prise out any justification at all: “why is it important to wear a suit?” / “because it's smart, obviously!” / “but why is it important to be smart at work?” / “it's just being about professional” / “I'm sorry, but it's not self-evident to me that professionalism involve entirely tokenistic acts such as wearing a particular type of clothing...” / “Look. It's about showing respect to the people who employ you and the clients who pay your bills.”

Such attitudes are, depending on the definition used, either political or they aren't. I don't care so long as we are working with consistent conceptions. If PC concern over micro-aggressions is political, then so is traditionalist affinity for formal dress. And that means that lots of people are subject to lots of conservative norms that they can't in practice speak out about, at least not within the workplace itself, just as they are subject to lots of progressive norms which are similarly difficult in practice to challenge.

So back to the question. Are we freer to express left-wing views than right-wing ones? I can't see how anyone can possibly give an affirmative answer without arbitrarily discounting the multitude of ways that progressive views are suppressed where they come into conflict with traditional orthodoxies.

Damore is, as we know, fond of identifying cognitive biases, and, in this spirit, I suggest a couple are in play here. One is the availability bias – the tendency of people to base their judgements preferentially on evidence that is simply easier to recall, for example because it has recently been in the news.

There are frequent reports – lots of them, indeed, if you read the Daily Mail – about people getting in trouble (fairly or unfairly) for falling afoul of liberal norms: using the wrong word for black people, not being sufficiently diverse, promoting gender stereotypes, etc. We've all seen these stories. They colour all of our understandings of what is meant by political correctness.

By contrast, instances of employees being sacked for persistent criticism of their management for failure to distribute pay more fairly, or being told off for looking scruffy, or suffering lack of social prestige for not having a high paying job, are not even newsworthy. Why? Because few people are surprised by the enforcement of traditional, long-standing social norms. Progressive social norms, by contrast, and almost by definition, are new and thus surprising. People are often shocked by their existence and upset by their enforcement. Hence the newsworthiness of a council sending out greetings cards celebrating the “Winter Break”, but the un-newsworthiness of a corporation retaining a board comprised of 90% men. In short, you cannot decide whether right- or left- attitudes are more ruthlessly enforced in society simply by bringing to mind news stories that you've heard about recently. That just doesn't work in this situation.

So next time someone tells you that political correctness is a left-wing problem because left-wing political correctness is what all the news stories are about, see if you can gently make the above point.

You might prefer, though, not to make the following point, which is a little harsher in its implications. This is that conservatives generally suffer from an additional bias, one peculiar to their mindset, namely an inability to see that the way things have long been done even requires ethical justification. That capitalist ventures should remain capitalist ventures is just the way the world is. That men should earn more than women is just “natural”. That one should cater for the majority religious sentiment is “common sense”. So if people are ridiculed (or worse) for challenging such norms, there is no oppression, no infringement of freedom of expression, nothing to get worked up about. Because there is, on this mindset, understood to be nothing ideological about such norms: they just represent the natural order of things. By contrast, to the traditionalist mind, innovations in social organisation (such as gender neutrality) require almost endless justification. They deserve to be picked apart, subject to absurd levels of scepticism. Those who flout them are, therefore, heroic iconoclasts rather than (as anti-capitalists are assumed to be) idiots who can't accept the world as it is.

Put in other words, if you refuse to perceive cast swathes of commonplace human behaviour as requiring ethical/ideological justification, then, yes, on that view, the only significant source of impingement of everyday freedom of expression in the West today is liberal activism. But possessing such an attitude involves a quite alarming degree of philosophic blindness. And it implies a bias more profound than anything that “The Left” has even been accused of in its (sometimes over-enthusiastic) enforcement of liberal social norms.