[ABCLAW]

Sure. That's why it's a model. It is used to isolate an element of the factual situation for analysis.

In this case, you concede the point that if what a CEO does causes bad optics, that is potentially fireable. To loop this back to the parent comment, this means sustaining an objection to Eich's firing, you would need to conclude that what Eich did was bad optics.

I hope you recognize that this position is contradictory with your previous statement: "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period."

[leereeves]

A CEO saying "people shouldn't buy our product" ("no one should eat it") isn't just a belief, or just bad optics. That's a CEO doing the exact opposite of their job (selling the product).

[ABCLAW]

1) I don't agree that a CEO's job is "selling the product". That's literally the job of the sales team. But that doesn't really matter.

2) It is obviously the apex of bad optics. My initial point is to demonstrate that the position that "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period" isn't founded in reality. Obviously you should. No one will defend the CEO of Bread Co.

Since we've established at the apex of bad optics that removal is permitted, the rest of the discussion isn't about whether or not removal is an option, it is a discussion of where along the spectrum of bad optics should it be permissible to remove an executive.

This makes the honest question to be explored "When should you police beliefs". At that stage of discussion, the context that we're complaining about removing matters. It doesn't at the level I'm criticizing.

[leereeves]

Telling people not to buy your product is clearly an action, if anything a CEO does can be called an action.

[ABCLAW]

The action/belief dichotomy is illusory. You're never going to police something inside someone's head, so the reaction will be in respect of an action and what it signals.

[leereeves]

Yes, I'd just written that myself as an edit. It's impossible to police beliefs, since we only know other people's beliefs through their actions. We're always policing actions.

What does it mean, then, to say we shouldn't police beliefs? I'd say it means we shouldn't police actions that are only expressions of personal belief.

"Personal" is important when we consider people, like CEOs, who speak for the company. The board has a right to expect the CEO to speak for them, and the shareholders, in turn, to elect a board that speaks for them. A CEO who officially says "bread is terrible, no one should buy it" has failed to perform that job. A CEO who says the same thing unofficially, or before being hired, won't be able to credibly perform the job.

A salesperson would have the same problem. The job demands saying "you should buy bread". Saying the opposite makes it impossible to perform the job, if the people you're dealing with learn about it.

OTOH, if a bakery worker or secretary, for example, says "bread is terrible, no one should buy it, I only work here because I need the money", I would defend their right to express their beliefs. If they were fired I'd consider that unjust.

[ABCLAW]

I think I'm probably 95% on board with this, and I agree with the conclusions and most of the framework, with one exception. A personal belief held by a public representative is still a personal belief. So, the personal nature of the belief alone isn't what exempts it from scrutiny or action. There have to be other factors as well.

There's some productive digging to be done there, but I've got work to get back to! Maybe another time.

[menacingly]

It also feels like it crosses the nebulous line between belief and action

[menacingly]

More specifically, I said that in a situation constructed to make the somewhat orthogonal point you're making, it works, and falls apart nearly everywhere else.

[ABCLAW]

You do realize that my argument directly mirrors a real-life occurance... right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

My point in making the example isn't to establish a framework for evaluating the Eich situation, but to indicate that it can be evaluated in the first place by showing an example in which a clear judgement can be made. This is contrary to your original emphatic position that "you just shouldn't police beliefs, period"

Defending Eich requires you not believe with enough conviction that his actions harmed the organization sufficiently to warrant removal. That's fine. You can fiddle with the conviction and harm knobs according to your beliefs. It does not, however, preclude anyone else from doing the same and coming to a different conclusion, which your policing argument would do, oddly enough.

If you want to go a different route and instead justify non-firing on completely separate grounds - that censuring political positions is, if consistent and widespread, noxious to society, or perhaps that the ambiguity in applying these standards is too high and might cause a chilling effect, etc - that raises different issues, but not those I was discussing.