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This is by far the most important point that is completely missing from the ethics course I took. Sexual harassment is bad. Victims have an ethical obligation
by hayst4ck 4y ago
This is by far the most important point that is completely missing from the ethics course I took.
Sexual harassment is bad. Victims have an ethical obligation to report the harassment. The result will be HR protecting themselves, likely via moving the harassed person to a new team or making their life suck in other ways. The only path forward after is to fight, likely in/with the threat of courts. Social fall out (because a manager or their skip level's life got harder) is almost guaranteed. A product deadline may be missed. The blame is often directed at the victim and not directed at the person who was harassing. I have watched this play out multiple times.
In this way, reporting someone for sexual harassment is a sacrifice. So while there may be a moral impetus to report, there is a cost to do so, and the end result is not an ethical question, but a cost benefit analysis.
The cost benefit analysis is then hampered by short term vs long term thinking. If nobody reports it, the abuse continues. If everyone reports it, then some of the abusers would likely be punished. The individual cost of reporting is high, and so a person would rather move on than fight. The abuser then continues to abuse.
The end result is that the ethics themselves are obvious and uninteresting, but it is the economic factors and game theory factors that bring all the meaning to any type of pragmatic discussion of ethics.