Extorting Diversity Oaths

Various colleges and universities now require candidates for tenure-track positions as professors to take a diversity oath, in one form or another. (See here, here, and here.)

Diversity is a morally contentious concept that involves subtle kinds of behavior and personal interactions. These should be decided and handled by each person, because of the many individual, personal and moral valuations that are involved. Moral decisions that involve such matters almost always involve personal valuations.

Legislating diversity and tying diversity into jobs turns a moral matter into a legal matter and a matter of force. It amounts to extorting professions of belief and behavior from people, rather than leaving individual interactions up to them.

The philosophy behind using force to stop murder, rape, arson and robbery is very clear and age old. The idea is to stop clear invasions of one’s person and property. This idea is not what’s behind using force or extortion to stop racism or to create diversity. These two situations are not moral equivalents. In fact this difference is an example of how it is that different kinds of interactions call for different kinds of moral appraisals, implying force in some cases and hands-off in other cases.

Moral training is best left to its traditional sources in family, friends, ethical codes, philosophers and religions. In the non-criminal matters being discussed, morality shouldn’t be a matter to be extracted from people by the force of states, social media or colleges.

The moment that force enters the personal domains, it creates immense problems, such as complaints and lawsuits against people accused of not adhering to the promulgated codes and ideals. The enforcement then becomes a big problem. Force generates resentment and cynical regard from those asked to sign on to such oaths, because they are unnatural and most people do not really believe in them. Oaths also lodge power in the hands of the enforcers, the departments of diversity, and then these people have undue power over who gets a job and who is or is not promoted. Power over these matters leads to injustice.

The pursuit of diversity as some sort of good value, to be enforced by means of rules, oaths and force, uses bad means supposedly to attain good ends. The bad means take over. And what if diversity is not really a good value or end in the first place? It’s not at all clear what it means, what it entails and that it’s inherently a good value anyway. A lot of us regard it as nonsense and politically-inspired nonsense at that.

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12:43 pm on April 28, 2019