Aceticon
It’s a second order variant of the same logic:
- The original was: responding to a criticism of A doing 1 by saying “yeah but B did 1”
- This one is: “A did 1, because when B did not do 1, B’s boss replaced them with somebody that did 1”.
Instead of “whatabout those other guys” it’s “whatabout what those other guys’ boss did when those other guys didn’t want to do what this one just did”.
Whilst it’s more convoluted, it’s still whataboutism because there is no causal relationship between the choices of A and the choices of B’s boss, hence it’s not logical to pull that into the argument about the morality of A’s choices.
This lady had the option to “do evil” and keep getting the benefits she has been getting (money, prestige, career advancement), to leave and not do evil or to stay, not do evil and see how the boss reacts. She chose the option of doing evil. Guess both her own Moral and Ethics as well as her opinion of the boss’ own Moral and Ethics (relevant for choosing or not option #3) defined her choice - one can only expect that she’s a better judge of the boss’ Moral and Ethics than most people in this World.
The whole “I shall do evil lest the boss fire me and replace me with somebody that does Evil” twist is just a variant of what the Nuremberg trials determined to be invalid as an excuse, only this variant is even weaker because it’s about what some other boss did to some other people.
I pity you for living in a system were you don’t have a real choice and to salve your conscience have to finding excuses to justify some evildoing over other evildoing so that you can feel that the incredibly narrow and highly managed “choice” you have is a real choice rather than meaningless theatre.
I would hope that if I myself was in that situation, my reaction wouldn’t be to rush out in defense of the evildoing of the “side” I chose when the nature of their actions is pointed out but instead just shut up - just because one has a “choice” of A, which will shaft you, or B which will shaft you, doesn’t mean one has to like it or rush out in defense of a specific kind of shafting by pointing out that “yeah, but those other guys will shaft you too” when somebody points out that it is, indeed, a shafting.
Nobody can be blamed for the conditions they were born into, but they certainly can for how they reacted to it.
Oh, I absolutelly agreed that there should be a way for it to be possible to do it as long as it was paid for and trully optional for the worker.
My point is that, from my experience working in the UK most of which in that Industry, the guys currently in Government there and who have announced this measure, are and have long been totally in the pocket of the Finance Industry and will do the bidding of that Industry, so I suspect that even the fair version of this which you suggest will not be done because it means more costs to the kind of people New Labour really represents (which isn’t actually “labour”).
Your reusing of the exact same argument with different wording doesn’t magically make it a better argument - an honest person judges others on the quality of their actions, and such moral judgment is wholly independent of their tribe.
The “what about those people of that other tribe” is not an argument about the quality of the actions of this person because there is no chain of causality linking them - she is not doing it because the past actions of those others forced her to act like this now. Pulling such unrelated events up is morally dishonest and means you’re a Tribalist first and foremost, hence you are also unethical and immoral as you put tribe-membership above Ethics and Moral when judging such actions.
There is no such thing as being Honest, Ethical or Moral if a person’s Tribe changes your judgement of their actions: the supporting of Genocide by a member of the Democratic Party is not made any less or any more deserving of condemnation by their membership of the Democratic party or by there being members of the Republican party who did or would do the same or worse - the actions speak for themselves, PERIOD.
Yours is the kind of excusing of Evil that makes Zionists go around mass murdering Palestinian children or supporting those who do: they do the Evil they do with such gusto and intensity that it amounts to Genocide and then claim it’s only because of what Hamas did before: i.e. the greater evil done by “my side” they justify with the evil done by “the other side” even though causally the latter does not cause the former - there really is no need to kill tends of thousands of children to get at Hamas.
No matter what their tribe, any person commiting such actions whilst saying such things as this lady deserves exactly the same opprobrium, and that includes this lady. Her tribe and those other people’s tribe is irrelevant for anybody who is an Ethical, Moral and Honest person.
Considering just how close they are to the Finance Industry where this stuff is 100% standard, I doubt it will go ahead or there will be exceptions done for the Finance Industry just like New Labour did in the past for other pieces of legislation.
My discovery about how the human cognitive system works on this some years ago has led me to the conclusion that everybody defaults to being prejudiced via this pathway - we all just assume shit about people we don’t know purely based on how they look and talk - hence racism is the default.
So not being racist isn’t a simple passive act of not being so, it’s the active trying to stop one’s natural tendency to prejudge others on how they look and prejudge entire groups of people whose “membership” is defined in our minds by things that have nothing to do with their actions or ideologies, and spotting when we do fail to stop ourselves doing it and walking back those prejudgements we made about other people.
This is why so many people who think they’re not racists still go around prejudging entire groups of people, but they only do it on the positive side (ex: “Jews have Modern Values”) or reserve their racism for groups against which it’s not unfashionable to be racist (ex: " Muslims are violent"), when the real non-Racist posture would be to not even consider group “membership” in passing judgment, only the actions and words of the individual or ideology you’re judging (so both Zionists and Islamists are violent and do not have Modern Values, because that’s their ideology - something they chose, not something they were born with or into - and you can’t prejudge entire ethnicities or religions based on some people in those having certain behaviours or ideologies)
The answer for that exists as a superposition of multiple possibilities but as soon as somebody manages to read it it will decohere into just the one.
There was a pipe going from the window all the way down to the Hama’s Tunnel under it with the terrorists.
The fighter jet of the brave Zionist tresistance just thread its way at low level between the rocket launchers of the evil Palestinians and hit that small hole causing the destruction of the entire evil outpost.