[cookiecaper]

Lots of these feel-good initiatives are actually dictated by very real concerns around legal liability. For example, many corporate diversity programs exist because they're trying to protect the company from the unfavorable EEOC decisions that are required before an employee can file a lawsuit alleging discrimination.

When people do things to prevent liability, they can't say they're doing them to prevent liability, or the liability effectively recurs. If such middling statments exist, it's much more likely that judges and juries would consider the action insincere, if not intentionally deceptive and evasive, and disregard it entirely, thus undoing the effect of the program/statement/rule in the first place and potentially inviting additional punishment for the supposed deception.

So why is it a good idea for venues to force events to have Codes of Conduct? Because if the venue gets caught up in a Donglegate-esque scandal, they can point to something and say, "We did everything we reasonably could to prevent such an outcome, we told our customers that they needed to warn attendees against such behavior, we acted according to the documented procedure, and we need to get dropped from the suit and/or not have bad press anymore".

Whereas, if they don't have such a policy, especially if other venues do, there's more ambiguity and it's much harder to make a decisive argument.

This is also a large reason why PR matters so much. Try all you want to find an unbiased jury or a judge totally unmoved by public opinion, couch it in pomp and circumstance until the cows come home, but like it or not, reputations and assumptions matter. You're much more likely to get a positive outcome with a positive reputation v. a neutral or negative one, and PR events frequently become legal props: "Of course we're non-discriminatory, see $LOCAL_NEWS for the story about how we're working so hard to recruit diverse talent!"

[neuland]

Just curious, why does stating that a particular training or policy is purely for liability purposes make it not valid?

[cookiecaper]

It doesn't necessarily wholesale invalidate it, and it depends on the context. The danger is that if the claim is, for example, "they are making a hostile environment for $MINORITY", if statements exist that say "We are just doing this to avoid liability", those could easily be interpreted as indicators of insincerity and that the bias exists. Whereas, if they at least appear to be True Believers, it is harder to call that into question.

It also hurts from the PR angle, for basically the same reasons. News outlets don't want to be seen as tools of the machine spreading corporate FUD and saving BigCo from liability. They want to see themselves as noble soldiers on "the right side of history", and they want the public to see them that way too.

It's therefore much easier to get coverage, which will be useful for establishing your non-bias, if you don't tell everyone "we wouldn't be running this program and enforcing these 'everyone play nice now' codes if we didn't feel there was a meaningful legal risk involved in not doing so".

[Trombone12]

I'm sure lots of safety margins built into bridges are also respected due to liability concerns, but I don't mind the insincerity as long as the margin is actually there to protect me when needed.

You are free to feel different of course, both in the case of bridges and in the case of people.

[AstralStorm]

This is a silly analogy. A piece of paper does not provide safety. Only when the codes are exercised (And well at that) they might be any good.

This is the same fallacy politicians always commit when they pass laws rather than regulations. Or when the regulations are then not observed and penalty is ineffective.

A technical margin of safety is different as it is built into the system and works all the time. A safeguard is different as it requires no action to work at all.

Rules require observance and agreement.