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I'm gonna go out on a limb here and take what may be an unpopular position: If you're a financial services firm, you should be forbidden from refusing services

• yock 9y ago
  Doesn't this open up the door to using legality as a proxy for morality? Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?
  • mars4rp 9y ago
    morality is relevant, rarely people that is doing something that we think immoral see their acts as immoral too. "Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?" like a restaurant in south refusing to serve blacks? with restaurant you have at least some options, but with businesses with monopoly finding an alternative is very hard or expensive.
    • EpicEng 9y ago
      >like a restaurant in south refusing to serve blacks? Which would be illegal as race is a legally protected status.
      • Danihan 9y ago
        Isn't sexual identity / orientation protected as well? These companies are banning clients for simply talking about sex. That seems like a grey area but it's treading pretty close to discrimination in my mind. Then again, should Google be forced to put adsense ads on a porn site? Really murky territory.
        • sparky_z 9y ago
          > Isn't sexual identity / orientation protected as well? Nope. As I understand it, sexual orientation is not officially a protected class[0]. Seems like it should be, but it isn't. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
        • dragonwriter 9y ago
          > Isn't sexual identity / orientation protected as well? It is not protected under federal public accommodation law like race is. Gender identity and sexual orientation are each protected under minority of state laws (overlapping but not identical minorities, IIRC.) > That seems like a grey area but it's treading pretty close to discrimination in my mind. It's absolutely discrimination. The question is whether it is or should be illegal discrimination.
      • forgottenpass 9y ago
        Yes. It is now. Legislation to make it illegal was an act of society deciding that an otherwise-legal business decision was so unpalatable it must be prevented. -- That's what makes it such a good hypothetical. You can ask yourself "if such business decisions were legal, should they be prevented or discouraged? And what mechanisms would be appropriate?" So I don't understand your point. Yes, it's illegal now. Are you arguing for companies to always operate as they see fit, as long as it's legal, and regardless of moral opinions of anyone other than themselves? Are you arguing that there shouldn't be any moral-based laws to stop discrimination like this one? Are you making a point that companies should be stopped from making immoral decisions with the force of law beyond the current limitations? Are you making a point that the current set of groups legislation gives legal protection perfectly overlaps with the set of groups that that morally should have protection from otherwise-legal business decisions? Are you simply being a pedant about the current boundaries of law without meaningful contribution to clean up the hypothetical or clarify the questions raised by the conversation at hand?
      • mars4rp 9y ago
        It was legal when they were doing it! Legal != ethical
    • k_sh 9y ago
      Race, being an immutable characteristic of a human being, is quite different from restrictions on the nature of created content.
      • andrewfong 9y ago
        What about religion? Religion is, strictly speaking, mutable. But, for me at least, saying "no Muslims" or "no Sikhs" is the same level of badness as saying "no blacks".
        • k_sh 9y ago
          Religion is a tricky one.... It is mutable, but most people (a) don't change their religion in their lifetime and (b) use religion as a proxy signal for social identity, including many things that aren't mutable. In practice: I'd take the bet that a white person of Muslim faith could get around a "no Muslims" rule most of the time. "No Muslims", then, can be a proxy for "no middle-Eastern looking folks".
  • SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    That's not how the US presently works -- see things like the ADA or discrimination laws, which regulate how a business may deny service and what accommodations for customers they must provide. It's not absurd that an essential civil service -- payment processing -- should be regulated to uphold our collective standards of freedom, and not use their privileged position to impose their private moral standards on society.
  • Analemma_ 9y ago
    It's strange that you would make a slippery slope argument in this context, because a slippery slope is the situation we're already in. If there are going to be circumstances in which a company refuses service, I'd rather they be a) decided on democratically and b) visible to everyone in the RSA, rather than behind an opaque corporate structure. The current situation is much worse.
  • coralreef 9y ago
    Until your private education or health services starts turning people away based on race/religion/political affiliation
    • klodolph 9y ago
      There are already laws against discrimination by protected status (race/religion count), and laws about access to health services.
      • kbenson 9y ago
        To my (admittedly weak) understanding, those laws affect employment, government agencies, and the ability to get any sort of government funding/aid. Are there laws that actually require organizations to allow membership in or provide services for all people? That doesn't seem workable.
        • klodolph 9y ago
          Not only is this workable, but there was a whole movement around these issues in the 1960s called the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the results of that movement, and this law makes it illegal for a store to refuse service on the basis of race, for example. This is why you don't see signs saying "No Coloreds" in stores any more. Other laws, like the ADA and FHA, have expanded on this, and individual states have broader protections. Look at the case of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Oregon, which was fined for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex couple. For emergency care, look up the EMTLA. There are many other regulations centered on discrimination and health care, that's just one of them.
    • kbenson 9y ago
      Which gets really complicated really quickly. There are plenty of cases of benign exclusivity, and plenty of cases of less than benign exclusivity, even in those areas you specifically pointed out.
  • dilap 9y ago
    How about refusing to sell someone a cake?
  • lr4444lr 9y ago
    The horse has LONG left that barn since the "public accommodation" doctrine of the Civil Rights Act. Should Christian bakers be able to refuse catering a gay wedding?
    • droopyEyelids 9y ago
      We've got specific exceptions written into law for the things society deems appropriate. Thats a lot different than 'allow everything with no judgement'
      • lr4444lr 9y ago
        Obviously, but that doesn't really mean anything other than reiterating the OP's point.
      • AnthonyMouse 9y ago
        At which point you have the government making the decision what to mandate. If the service is important enough that it has to be mandated in some cases then why shouldn't it be mandated in all cases? If it isn't that important, why should it be mandated in any case?
      • yock 9y ago
        I'm a big fan of "allow everything with no judgement" to be honest. The principles and morals of some will always offend the sensibilities of others. What gives us the right to codify into law which reasons are just and which are not?
  • dabockster 9y ago
    Didn't the Supreme Court already decide this? Something along the lines of "prioritize the law, not morals"?
• wyager 9y ago
  Personally, I think on that (on balance) it's preferable to have freedom of association. However, I can respect and understand the opposite view as long as it's consistent. A lot of people I know who were of the opinion that bakeries should be legally obligated to bake wedding cakes are now the same people defending cloudflare et al. for refusing access to critical infrastructure (not just cake!) for political reasons.
  • seabird 9y ago
    This inconsistency completely rubs me the wrong way. There's nothing that pisses me off more than hearing people rail against a business's right to refuse service instantly double back when the company did something they like. These are not muddy waters where it's hard to tell you're contradicting yourself; people are outright encouraging things they'd otherwise argue against just because it's going their way.
  • danso 9y ago
    Ask your friends, but I'm assuming that the cake baking cases that they argued about referred to sexual preference being a protected class. Political mindset is not a protected class. Assuming someone will ask, "Why do we talk about what is (law) rather than what could be (ideals)", you're perfectly fine to hold the ideal that political beliefs should not be discriminated against. But you probably aren't happy with just believing in an ideal, and so you want to know why political belief is not a legally protected class like age, religion, sex, race, etc. This means we have to include real world considerations, including legal history/precedent and the realistic implementation of law, when arguing whether political beliefs should get legal protections. To make a quick initial argument, I think political belief is hard to protect because it is nearly indistinguishable from any kind of belief. At that point, how sensical is a legal system after it becomes impossible to discriminate on any kind of assertive opinion? The line is already difficult and blurred with religion (which is protected because of centuries of prior belief and political situations), as we see in the case of a religious baker refusing to bake for gay customers. I'm not saying there's an easy or happy answer to this and similar disputes, just that protection of political beliefs would make things even worse without much benefit. The other thing to consider is that as someone who has political beliefs and wants to assert them, you have the entire U.S. political system to participate and effect the change you want. But being political is not necessary when following a religion, and in some religions, it's outright antithetical. These folks would have little recourse to petition politicians and lawmakers.
• gaius 9y ago
  Financial services firms benefit from the regulatory framework provided by the State therefore it's not unreasonable that the State should make some stipulations of its own. If you steal from PayPal we don't say "they're a private company, they knew the risks" do we?
• redm 9y ago
  To make matters worse, Paypal has extreme platform lock-in. For example, you can't move your users billing to another platform; you have to get the user to sign up all over again. On top of that, you have to hope they have another form of compatible payment (i.e. mobile payments, credit card direct, etc). Paypal holds all the data and when they ban you for whatever reason, they keep it, so even if there is another option, once you commit to Paypal, you are committed.
• jdavis703 9y ago
  This is really tough. There are all kinds of reasons why a financial services firm wants to deny services. They could range from trivial (this customer keeps trolling our customer service reps) to more serious (this customer serves an industry with a high fraud rate and we don't have the system or processes in place to handle this) to legally ambiguous situations (marijuana being legal in some states but not others, or arbitrary measure of what constitutes illegal porn).
• mikeash 9y ago
  Why shouldn't a company like PayPal be able to pick and choose who they work with? It's not like they have anything close to a monopoly. If you're selling something controversial and PayPal doesn't want it, shop around until you find somebody who does. If every single financial services company rejects you, there's still bitcoin and cash.
• seany 9y ago
  I feel like that's a reasonable position given the realities of the near monopolies these kinds of companies have. It would probably be better if there was real freedom of association in these kinds of cases, but you'd actually have to have other options for that to work right.
• pmarreck 9y ago
  Yeah, it's almost like there's a market for an all-digital decentralized monetary system that does not suffer from flawed and ever-changing human morality judgments, and is only so happy to work in the place of human-driven entities. "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore Banks: Whatever legal business you turn away, you basically give away to crypto; and once it's there, it will never come back. Decide carefully.
  • lr4444lr 9y ago
    That's a GREAT quote.
    • pmarreck 9y ago
      One of my faves, it's applied time and again to things. It's why Apple made the right move in removing DRM from their music and simply providing a better service- they knew they were up against a darknet that did not care about these rules (but also did not care about service quality/consistency). And he said this in 1993 (!) How prescient was THAT? People need to realize that risk is itself a market. If everyone avoids risk (such as banks avoiding doing business with any remotely-risky business, such as legal marijuana sales), the first person (or entity) who doesn't shy away from risk stands to gain a lot more than if people were generally less fearful of risk. So cryptocurrencies, being completely fearless, will always fill the financial spaces that have been left vacant by more fearful living entities. ;) Perhaps there is even an entity that has realized this and is working to instill fear in the hearts of everyone in order to reap greater rewards from their own risk-taking. But I'm off into tinfoil-hat territory, there.
• JohnHaugeland 9y ago
  the fundamental issue here is that paypal is actually following russian anti-gay laws
• cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  I think that any financial institution that has FDIC insurance should not be allowed to turn away business unless it would force them to commit an illegal act.