Of those, the last three didn't suffer any long term consequences (all three were employed relatively soon after they were fired), and the first happened too recently to really analyze.
I never understand these kinds of arguments. Is the idea that "because there are still enough good and decent people resisting the mob in order to prevent long term consequences for their targets that we should not condemn this mobbing at all"? What point are you making?
Presumably something to the effect of "It can't [currently] be a especially horrible problem if all the listed consequences were quickly fixed.". On the other hand, see (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2278).
Justine Sacco still suffers from severe PTSD and has to attend regular counselling.
Adria Richards fell off the face of the planet, was chronically unemployed for a while, then finally ended up at a no name company, probably making peanuts compared to where she was.
James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while, was in several lawsuits with Google, and claims to be working at a start-up, but he may also just be freelancing since he's effectively unemployable.
Those are all long term consequences, so, you're effectively wrong here.
James Damore threw away an engineering job at Google with a long, generalized, and internally-shared rant about women, listing off their "Qualities". He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere.
He sourced things from scientific journals, but he pieced them together to fit a narrative that he knows better about what women want. It wasn't a good argument.
The facts of his case are he went on bizarre and unsupported rant against women. Are you going to support the thesis that women are inherently intellectually inferior and that hiring practices that encourage hiring people from diverse groups are enforcing intellectual idiocacy?
Adria Richards is actually an interesting case. She was "cancelled" for cancelling someone else. One of the major criticisms of the Harper's letter is that people speaking out about injustice have historically faced severe retribution, and that the recent concern about cancellation is only in response to this retributory cannon being pointed toward those "in power".
I can't see the people who are today concerned about Cancellation standing up for Adria Richards were that to happen again today. See the recent argument between Yann LeCun and Timnit Gebru for a somewhat analogous situation.
The backlash against the person perceived as trying to cancel someone else was much greater than the initial "lash", so to speak.
> James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while
Not a very long time though. And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file.
Yes and no. One of the concerns about cancel culture is that it results in people's lives being ruined/ended. This (usually) is not the case, even among the most egregious examples that people can come up with.
And how about the psychological effects on these people of being bullied by a large group of people online?
I don’t know what I’d do if it happened to me, but I know it would leave me in an even worse state mentally than I am in, because I know how it feels like to feel that other people don’t want you around.
Because social protections haven't eroded enough to get to the point where lives are actually ruined. Why wait to speak out against cancel culture until it's actually ruining lives?
If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously, especially when the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now.
"Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy. Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
> If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously
Of course the same argument could be applied to anything, such as covid back in March. "What's all the fuss about? Things are trending in a bad direction, but they're not that bad yet so naturally they will not get worse in the future." I hope the fallacy here is obvious.
> the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now
I could hazard a guess as to what you're alluding to here, but it hardly matters--if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.
> "Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy.
You have it completely backwards. You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).
> Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
"Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.
> Of course the same argument could be applied to anything, such as covid back in March. "What's all the fuss about? Things are trending in a bad direction, but they're not that bad yet so naturally they will not get worse in the future." I hope the fallacy here is obvious.
It is not. We know how viruses work. We also know how they don't do good things. Are you willing to provide specific falsifiable predictions on the harms that Cancel Culture will cause in 6 months or a year and how it will be so great?
Trying to explain away a slippery slope fallacy by comparing it to the well documented and well understood exponential growth of a communicable disease isn't good reasoning.
> if you have some concern about some actual harm that's happening right now that you'd like to express, free-speech has your back with respect to your right to express it.
Exactly! To allude to anther example: someone tweeting "@FSF, you should fire Richard Stallman because he is a bad man" is simply exercising their right to free expression. Why are you criticizing that?
> You can't cancel someone without power over them, and many of the targets of cancellation have had little power and were cancelled by people with literal, explicit power over them (e.g., Lindsay Shepherd).
Lindsay Shephard doesn't fit the definition of cancellation. There was no social media, there was an anonymous complaint to her university, who did something, and when the public was involved the university reversed course. "Cancel Culture" is characterized by a boycott or threat of boycott, or at least distributed criticism. Imagine that instead the members of her class had taken to twitter to urge the university to remove her from her position, and encouraged others to stop donating to the school if they didn't do so. That's cancellation.
What you described is a bad thing, but it's also a non sequitur.
And note the difference: her pupils (the non-authority) pulling in popular support to provide consequences to the authority figure when normal channels of feedback failed.
> "Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and you're observing the fleeting convenience of authoritarianism.
You're going to have to elaborate on how decentralized movements are authoritarian in nature, that's a relatively unique claim.
Compared to the generic "woman at Google", I'd argue yes. But even if you disagree in that one case, that doesn't invalidate what I said. It allows upward facing action.
I would describe having your name included in such a list and immediately recognizable by a huge percentage of the population as a seriously detrimental long term consequence.
Analyzing the consequences is only half the ethical story. Doing the right thing sometimes is different to what the consequences are. If you don't do the right thing in the first place regardless of the outcome, you let weaknesses in the system grow.
James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. It's some people fretting over the consequences who took it, spread it among the company and got a good engineer fired, sowing distrust in the community. Should have just left the memo to be forgotten in somebody's email account somewhere. A deontological ethic will come to bite back if you are determined to ignore the fact that sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
> James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google.
I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.
No he discussed it with peers and it died in discussion
>"There was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored," he wrote, of the initial response to his document.
This is incorrect. I worked at Google at the time and commented on the original document. He posted it in a few small groups related to diversity. Nothing happened. Then he posted it in a relatively large public group unrelated to diversity. There was discussion in that group, and as part of that discussion it went viral (being linked elsewhere and posted around).
It was specifically because of the "mostly ignored" that he chose to escalate to a larger group where he felt he'd get more feedback and response (and agreement).