Firm Responses to Mass Outrage: Technology, Blame, and Employment

Boundary Conditions and Scope

Before moving forward, three points of clarification are in order. First, there are manifold reasons that may ground a decision to fire an employee: incompetence, disloyalty, cost, redundancy, disagreeability, malingering, and so on. Identifying which reasons (or combination of reasons) provide decisive justification to dismiss an employee would require developing a comprehensive theory of firing. The task I take on is more modest: I am concerned with how the fact that a firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context brought about by the employee’s off-duty conduct affects the ethics of the firing decision. (Hereafter, for expository purposes, when I write “firing in a mass social media outrage context,” it should be understood to be short for “firing in a mass social media outrage context brought about by the employee’s off-duty conduct”). I acknowledge that there may be other ethical considerations, including considerations that might tell in favor of firing the employee, beyond those that my argument brings to light; sometimes these considerations might even be more ethically significant than the ones raised by my argument. This is why the thesis I defend should be understood as generating one strong ethical reason weighing against firings in mass outrage contexts, but this reason need not be one that is decisive. Still, if I am correct, the argument I present illuminates a weighty consideration against firings in mass outrage contexts that has not been adequately appreciated.

Second, my purpose in this article is not to settle whether the kind of cases I offered at the outset in fact involve unethical conduct.⁷ Instead, I will argue that even if we suppose that all such cases involve unethical acts, or alternatively, if the manager thinks (perhaps mistakenly) that these acts are unethical, nevertheless, the fact that the firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context can provide one important moral consideration weighing against firing the employee. Going forward, for expository purposes, when I refer to an employee’s unethical conduct, it should be understood to also include allegedly unethical conduct. Also, what matters for our purposes is not that the wrongdoing occurred on the internet, but rather that the wrongdoing, wherever it occurred, was met with mass social media outrage.

That being said, certain sorts of wrongdoings are ones that most, if not all, plausible accounts of employment ethics would recognize as generating sufficient justification to fire: these are cases in which the employee’s off-duty act is also of a serious criminal sort (e.g., domestic violence, assault, possessing child pornography, child abuse, burglary, kidnapping, rape, murder, and so on) or is an act that wrongs an entire victim class through, for example, blatant sexism or racism (e.g., addressing someone using a racial slur, participating in a white supremacist rally such as the 2017 Charlottesville rally, and so on).⁸ I too consider these sorts of cases, as well as cases of sexual harassment, as ones where an employer is often plausibly justified in terminating the employee. This is so regardless of whether the conduct occurred on or off-duty, though the justification to fire is plausibly even weightier when the wrongdoing occurs on-duty. Moreover, this would be just as true even if the employee skirted criminal sanction due to a legal technicality. This is not to say that the arguments I offer are irrelevant in such cases, but rather that there are different, weightier, ethical considerations, that may dominate in such cases.⁹ This is why the view I defend should be understood as presenting one strong ethical reason weighing against firings in mass outrage contexts, but this reason need not be one that always defeats other ethical considerations.

Third, I assume that there was no reason to fire the employee prior to the alleged misconduct. In other words, the employer was not weighing the decision to terminate the employee prior to the act that generated mass outrage. More precisely, the justification to fire was not overdetermined, or even partially determined, by the employee’s behavior prior to the act that generated mass social media outrage.

With these clarifications behind us, let us now discuss some of the current perspectives in employment ethics that relate to the present investigation. I will first touch on the issue of employment at-will.

On Employment At-Will

In the United States, the overwhelming majority of states presume employment at-will. Insofar as there is a presumption of employment at-will, some might think that a manager can fire an employee for whatever reason or even no reason (Epstein 1984; Maitland 1989). From this perspective, one might think that asking what justifies a particular instance of firing is simply out of place and confused. I offer two points in response.

First, we cannot simply presume employment at-will as a necessary feature of the employment relation just because it is currently the legal presumption in the United States. In much of the developed world, employment at-will is not the presumption. Moreover, the theoretical grounds for employment at-will have come under sustained criticism over the last several decades. Some influential critics of employment at-will have argued for certain general employee rights (McCall 2003; McCall and Werhane 2009; Radin and Werhane 1996; Werhane and Radin 1999; Werhane et al. 2008). Others have argued for certain specific rights, for example, the right to a safe work environment (Arnold 2009), privacy within and outside the workplace (Moore 2000), and the ability to freely exercise speech on political matters (Barry 2007a, b).

Second, even if we suppose that a manager has a right to fire an employee in the way employment at-will permits, there are better and worse ways in which the manager can exercise this right. Consider the following:

The manager’s exercise of employment at-will is not plausibly well justified. There is a distinct set of ethical considerations that a manager must attend to even if there is a legal presumption of employment at-will. Insofar as there are better and worse ways in which one can exercise employment at-will, this is what is minimally needed for the present investigation to get off the ground.

On Why Due Process and Procedural Justice are Not Enough

Some might think the wrong in firing in response to mass social media outrage lies in a flagrant disregard for due process. This is plausible. There are often violations of procedural justice and due process when employers fire in response to mass social media outrage. But this, I will suggest, is not what is at the core of the issue.

It will help to first clarify the concept of due process. There are two types of due process: procedural and substantive. Roughly, procedural due process involves a right to a hearing, appeal, or other mutually agreed-upon grievance procedures (Scanlon 1977; Werhane 1999), and substantive due process involves the manager giving “good reasons for employment decisions” (Werhane 1999, p. 238). In Tara Radin and Patricia Werhane’s view, “[D]ue process in the workplace is a moral requirement consistent with rationality and good managerial decision-making” (1996, p. 269), and elsewhere Werhane argues that it is a “moral minimum for fairness” (1999, p. 239).

To be clear, I do not deny that there are procedural justice or due process violations involved when a firm fires an employee in mass social media outrage contexts. On the contrary, it seems likely that there are both procedural and substantive due process violations: Procedural due process is plausibly violated because employees are often fired without having had the opportunity to share their side of the story. Moreover, given how soon after the alleged wrongdoing the employee is often fired—frequently in less than a day—we have prima facie evidence that the employee was not afforded procedural due process in any meaningful sense.¹⁰ Substantive due process is also plausibly violated: when the manager’s decision to fire is grounded in information stemming from a barrage of social media posts, important contextual details will often be lost, and the manager may reason on the basis of hearsay and other epistemically corrupt sources of justification. Furthermore, a psychological bias that can incline a manager to violate substantive due process is the just-world fallacy (Lerner 1980), an inclination to think that the bad things that occur to a person must be deserved due to that person’s previous untoward behavior. As a result, the manager may come to think that the mass social media outrage surrounding an employee is justified, even if the collective outrage is in fact unjustified or premised on falsehoods.

Despite the relevance of due process and procedural justice to the topic at hand, I suggest that focusing on them presents three problems. First, defenders of employment at-will who are skeptical of the notion of employee rights will not be moved by appeals to such rights. What is required is an argument that both defenders and critics of employment at-will must engage with, an argument that does not adopt premises concerning the legal justifiability of employment at-will and does not stipulate the existence of due process rights in employment.

Second, and more importantly, even when the employee is granted due process, firing in response to mass social media outrage may nevertheless be wrong. This is because respecting these rights is a moral minimum. Employee rights do not carve up the moral possibility space exhaustively—managers can act wrongly without violating any employee rights.

Third, firings do not occur in vacuums and our theories of employment ethics should not treat them as though they do. Certain contexts in which a firing might occur, including mass outrage contexts, can affect the firing decision in morally significant ways. Importantly, recent advances in technology, most notably social media, make it much easier to create such morally significant contexts than ever before. Yet our present approaches to the ethics of firing do not adequately account for these developments.

If the account I advance is correct, then this will be a significant result: there is a distinctive ethical concern that is raised by firings in mass social media outrage contexts that is not captured by standard explanations pertaining to procedural justice or due process. The point is that even if an employee was extended due process in the form of a legitimate hearing, and the hearing resulted in the verdict that the employee did in fact act unethically (perhaps the employee even admits to the wrongdoing), this does not mean that the manager has satisfied the demands of morality and can now justifiably terminate the employee. This is because there are ways in which the manager can act wrongly beyond those associated with the requirements of procedural justice and due process. One of the ways a manager can act wrongly, as I will argue in the next section, involves violating the requirements of the ethics of blame. Crucially, the fact that a firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context would bear on the ethics of firing by way of affecting the appropriateness of blame.

The Firing Claim

Many acts of firing are not acts of blame. Firing an employee because one can no longer afford to pay his/her salary or because he or she has become redundant, and so on, are not acts of blame. But in some circumstances, firing is an act of blame. Specifically, in my view, when a business fires an employee in response to his/her conduct that gives rise to mass social media outrage, this constitutes an act of blame.¹¹ The act of firing is always the act of terminating employment, but sometimes it also is an act of blame.

Supporting the contention that firing in response to mass social media outrage constitutes an act of blame is the purpose of this section. To be clear, I will not offer a positive argument for this claim, but will instead defend it against one significant worry and motivate the plausibility of the claim. Lastly, my aim in this section is merely to defend the claim that it is an act of blame; the argument for why mass outrage contexts contributes to it being an inappropriate act of blame will follow.

Let’s briefly discuss the concept of blame. I am concerned with the ethics of blame expressed through an act that is under our voluntary control; typically, this involves overt blame (McKenna 2013).¹² As for what precisely constitutes blame, there are many conceptions discussed in the literature. Unfortunately, as Michael McKenna aptly states, “Despite the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in ordinary life, blame is an elusive notion. It is maddeningly hard to nail down a theory that gets the extension even close to right. This is shown by the diversity of strikingly different views about its nature” (2013, p. 119). The difficulties associated with theorizing about blame have even brought some philosophers to abandon the project of providing a conceptual analysis of blame (Fricker 2016).

With that said, I am sympathetic to the thought that “Blame would not be blame…absent the core emotions of anger, indignation, and resentment…” (McGeer 2013, p. 167). So, my sympathies lie in an understanding of blame that resembles a broadly Strawsonian reactive attitudes account in which blame is understood to involve a negative emotional response to another’s wrongdoing (Strawson 1962). Two important features of such an understanding of blame are the following: (1) it involves the negative reactive attitudes (e.g., resentment or indignation) that typically bring about in the recipient some form of unpleasantness (“the normative force of blame—the sting it putatively ought to have when directed at one who is blameworthy” (McKenna 2013, p. 121)), and (2) there is a directedness to these attitudes (“…blame includes an attitudinal aspect, where the attitudes in question have a distinctive content and focus” (Wallace 1994, p. 75)).

Some readers might worry that because blame within the reactive attitudes framework involves certain emotions, if the person doing the firing is not experiencing these emotions, we might not properly call it “blame.” However, it is a mistake to think that expressing emotions requires experiencing the emotion. A novelist can express emotion through his/her words, without having to experience the emotion (Anderson and Pildes 2000, p. 1508). So, the agent/medium channeling the expression of the emotion need not have the phenomenological experience associated with the emotion.

In any case, it seems plausible that we can have a productive discussion of the ethics of blame, even if we do not have a fully worked-out account of the concept of blame.¹³ Importantly, I am claiming that when a business fires an employee who is subjected to mass social media outrage, it is an expression of indignation directed at the employee in a way that counts as an act of blame.

Some might think that this claim is mistaken, that the business is not really trying to blame the employee; it is merely seeking to disassociate. For example, in the Vancouver Riots case, the president of the company stated, “I just didn’t feel like what was said was appropriate, and I didn’t want any affiliation towards my company with the things he said on Facebook” (“Man fired for applauding Vancouver riot on Facebook” 2011). While the president here does deem the employee’s remarks inappropriate, the intention to disassociate is also plain. It seems plausible that in many cases the intention to disassociate plays a prominent role in the reasoning of employers who fire an employee who is at the center of mass social media outrage.

I note two points in response. First, one important feature of blame is that it is not wholly determined by a person’s intentions. Acts in certain social contexts are acts of blame, regardless of one’s intentions (Anderson and Pildes 2000).¹⁴ For example, when a judge hands down a prison sentence, it is a form of condemnation that expresses blame, regardless of whether the judge’s intentions were entirely unrelated to blame (e.g., if the judge’s intention in sentencing the defendant was to help the ailing defendant in abject poverty secure access to the health care provided in prisons). Similarly, when a business fires an employee immediately after conduct that has generated mass outrage, the act of firing is a form of blame, regardless of whether the business intended only to disassociate.

Thousands of such tweets create a context in which the act of firing is no longer merely employment termination, it also is an act of blame.¹⁵

Second, businesses in mass outrage contexts often couple the firings with condemnatory press releases. For instance, in the AIDS-tweet case, the employer publicly announced: “We take this issue very seriously, and we have parted ways with the employee in question. There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally.”¹⁶ Her firing was not only an expression of blame, it was also explicitly communicated as such. If a business wants to claim it has fired an employee for non-moral reasons related to disassociating, coupling the firing with a condemnatory press release would be dishonest and disingenuous.

When a business fires an employee in mass social media outrage contexts, especially if a business pairs the firing with a condemnatory press release, it is engaging in blame. But this alone does not license the conclusion I am arguing for: that mass outrage contexts can contribute to the firing being an inappropriate act of blame. Indeed, there are many instances of blame that most think are well justified and appropriate in response to wrongdoing. As such, the next section concerns why the business blaming through firing in mass social media outrage contexts is of particular ethical significance.

The Dependence Principle

The ethics of blame is still a nascent area of inquiry with many unsettled questions, including, for example, why, if at all, hypocritical blaming is inappropriate (Cohen 2006; Fritz and Miller 2018; Todd 2017; Wallace 2010), how “moral standing” is a sensible notion if morality is universal (Smilansky 2006), and so on. Despite the lively ongoing debate, one aspect of the debate remains uncontroversial: it is wrong to blame a person who does not deserve blame or blame a person beyond what he or she deserves. Consider the following example:

Returning to the employment context, let us consider two possibilities. First, suppose the employee’s conduct is not unethical, and he/she does not deserve blame. In such cases, if the business blames the employee through firing, then the business acts wrongly (and so, too, do those blaming the employee on social media), because it is wrong to blame someone who does not deserve blame. For example, a college student appeared to have posted racial slurs to her Facebook aimed at the participants of the 2014 Ferguson protests. The AMC theater at which this college student worked began receiving phone calls with demands that she be terminated (Scheff and Schorr 2017, pp. 72–73). As it turns out, the student’s ex-boyfriend had hacked into her Facebook page and it was he who had posted the slurs. In this case, if AMC had blamed her through firing, the fact that one should not blame someone who does not deserve blame, would have contributed to it being an inappropriate act of blame.

The second possibility is more interesting: Suppose the employee’s off-duty conduct is wrong and he/she does deserve blame—perhaps the employee even admits to the wrongdoing. At first blush, it might seem that the employee can clearly be blamed without the blame being inappropriate. Nevertheless, the fact that a person deserves blame does not settle whether one ought to blame him/her. Here is the critical point:

Suppose that, while seated on a commuter train, Camila angrily berates an adjacent passenger in a way that is clearly wrong. We might think that the other passengers in the vicinity ought to blame Camila. Still, if these neighboring passengers have blamed her, there is the further question of to what extent it would be appropriate for the other passengers to blame: should passengers in adjacent train cars now cross over into the car with Camila and proceed to blame her? When she exits onto the platform, should commuters waiting, the turnstile attendant, and custodial staff blame her as well? Once she leaves the station, she passes the honey-roasted peanut vendor, the halal food truck vendor, and several cab drivers waiting for passengers: Should they all blame her too? Answering these questions affirmatively is implausible.²⁰

Similarly, even when the employee has acted wrongly—suppose even that there is strong evidence of this wrongdoing and the employee is extended due process, or perhaps the employee even admits to the wrongdoing—it does not settle whether the employer ought to blame the employee through firing. This is because, in mass social media outrage contexts, given that the employee has already been blamed by thousands, an employer’s added blame is likely to subject the employee to blame beyond what he/she deserves. If one fails to acknowledge the significance of the dependence principle, this would suggest that one wrongdoing, however major or minor, justifies subjecting a person to blame from a limitless number of people for an indefinite amount of time. This would be an implausible result. It would erode our ability to treat certain acts of wrongdoing as deserving more blame than others. Critically, it would plausibly render violence to the fundamental principle that it is wrong to subject a person to undeserved blame.

At this point, one might raise what we might call “the epistemic demandingness objection,” the worry that the view I have advanced is too epistemically demanding for prospective blamers. That is, if deciding whether to blame requires comparing how much blame happens with how much blame is deserved, this imposes too onerous of an investigatory burden on prospective blamers and may require the prospective blamer to make potentially unjustified empirical assumptions.²¹

Still, the epistemic demandingness objection does seem to have force, especially from the perspective of someone who is considering blaming: “How could I possibly know how many people are going to also blame this person, how strongly, and for how long?” Insofar as I am making claims about an agent’s character, moral responsibility, or blameworthiness, for subjecting another to undeserved blame, the thrust of this objection is troubling and may seem to undermine the plausibility of my position.

This is not, however, what I am claiming. I am instead concerned with whether the fact that the blaming through firing occurs in a mass outrage context figures into the deontic status, or permissibility, of the act itself. I am not making a judgment about the character, blameworthiness, or responsibility of the agent performing the act. While the epistemic worries raised by this objection may affect claims about a manager’s moral responsibility or character for the firing, it has less of an effect on the moral status of the act itself; that is, whether the act of blaming through firing in a mass social media outrage context contributes to the act being wrong in the first place.

Moreover, even with respect to judgments pertaining to an agent’s moral responsibility or character, the epistemic demandingness objection has greater force in the context of ordinary interpersonal blaming than it does in the context of the business blaming through firing in mass social media outrage contexts. This is because when an employee is at the center of mass social media outrage, the business is already aware that the employee has been harshly blamed by thousands of people.²³ Knowing this fact should provide strong reason for the business to come to see that its added blame will be undeserved and thus can contribute to the firing being an inappropriate act of blame.²⁴

It is now worth flagging two limitations to the scope of my argument. First, for my argument to generate a reason against firing, the act of firing must be an act of blame. This is why the fact that the firing happens in mass outrage contexts is especially significant (“The Firing Claim”).²⁵ So, the argument is not an argument against firing as such, but rather against blaming inappropriately, which can be done through firing. Second, I am not suggesting that the mass social media outrage cases that we are examining are ones where nobody should have blamed the wrongdoer. Nor am I claiming that any chance of undeserved blame is unacceptable; this would render nearly all acts of blaming too risky to take on and may result in an implausible account. But considering the extent to which a person has already been blamed, does seem to be a reasonable exercise of moral caution.²⁶

To conclude, there must be a limit to how much blame a person can justifiably be subjected to in response to the sorts of conduct we have been considering. However, social media allows thousands of individuals to participate in the blaming of any other individual, with few limits in terms of intensity or duration. If a person’s perpetration of some wrongdoing provides sufficient justification for a limitless number of parties to express blame, this would undermine a fundamental aspect of desert in blame, namely, that one should not subject a person to undeserved blame. The dependence principle thus urges the manager to recognize that the extent to which others have already blamed a wrongdoer can affect the appropriateness of his or her decision to blame the employee through firing. The fact that a firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context generates an important ethical reason weighing against the act: it contributes to the firing constituting an inappropriate act of blame.

The Economic Burden Consideration

Some might reasonably worry that an employee’s being the focus of mass social media outrage imposes significant economic burdens, and will always, or almost always, constitute good financial reason to fire. While whether this is so will of course ultimately turn on further empirical investigation, there is some reason to think that this worry is at least not obviously correct.

Given the notoriously short attention spans of outraged social media participants (Ronson 2015a), it is difficult to conclude that retaining the employee will be too economically burdensome. Moreover, it is not clear that the outraged social media participants are motivated or influential enough to harm the business, especially when the business has a customer base that does not overlap with those outraged. Also, there can be significant costs involved in finding a replacement candidate and training the newly hired employee (Allen et al. 2010; Dube et al. 2010). Until a suitable candidate is hired and trained, others in the workplace may need to pick up the slack, as it were, and this might adversely affect their productivity (Bauer et al. 2007). These are non-trivial costs that may ultimately outweigh the costs of continuing to employ the subject of the mass social media outrage. By hypothesis, the employer knows the subject of the mass outrage to be a productive employee.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that there are never economic disruptions in mass outrage contexts; this is implausible. Rather, I am suggesting that we need not think that the economic case for termination is somehow obvious, or a priori justified. Of course, there may be circumstances in which there is a strong economic case for firing the employee. But, even if the firing in such cases is all-things-considered justified, the manager should be aware that there may still be some ethical costs associated with the decision—for instance, subjecting the employee to undeserved blame.

The Habitual Wrongdoer Consideration

One might argue that managers are justified in firing in the sorts of cases we are considering due to the fact that humans are habitual and are thus prone to repeat wrongdoings. A manager might think, “I just cannot risk this happening again, and if the person did it once, what’s to stop it from happening once more, or worse yet, while at work.” One might point out that even in institutions that are typically seen as moral exemplars (or at least ought to be seen as moral exemplars) such as universities and churches, there have been repeated instances of serious wrongdoings, often by the same individuals.³⁴ While I am sympathetic to this worry, there are a few things to say in response.

The peculiarity of using a statistical generality about a population (e.g., that humans are habitual), absent evidence, to justify treating someone as though that he/she instantiates that generality (e.g., that this employee is a habitual wrongdoer) is brought ought vividly when considering other moral phenomena. Consider the case of forgiving. We might make the following plausible generality: humans are forgiving. However, after I wrong someone, it would be odd for me to presume that I have been forgiven, merely because of the generality that humans are forgiving. I should neither act as though I have already been forgiven, nor that I will be forgiven, even if it is true that humans forgive another as a statistical matter—I need to in fact be forgiven. Similarly, in considering our response to an employee’s alleged wrongdoing we should not assume that he or she is a habitual wrongdoer, without evidence of the person in fact being a habitual wrongdoer.

Perhaps more importantly, presuming a person to be a habitual wrongdoer due to one instance of wrongdoing seems to disrespect that person’s agency: it fails to treat the person as an autonomous agent with the capacity or freedom to change. It seems to write off the possibility that the person has “turned a leaf,” as it were. These are significant moral costs. Though we might point to statistical generalities when describing the behavior of populations, presupposing that the generality is true of a particular person, absent evidence, disrespects that person: it treats the person as a predetermined statistical pattern, rather than as a person who has the capacity to choose.³⁵

The “Business Should Not Tolerate the Conduct” Consideration

A different consideration that may lead some to believe that the business should fire the employee in mass outrage contexts may go something like this: while the woman’s tweet in the AIDS-tweet case may not be as bad as assault or other heinous wrongs, it is still abhorrent and should not be tolerated. Perhaps some may even regard the tweet as blatantly racist. For this reason, the thought may go, the business should blame through firing.³⁶

Even if we grant that businesses should not tolerate conduct like in the AIDS-tweet case, we still face the question of just what not tolerating something requires. Does not tolerating conduct like in the AIDS-tweet case require the employer to respond with one of the most severe sanctions it has available? I suggest that plausibly not.

As a general matter, not tolerating misconduct does not seem to necessitate responding with a severe sanction, let alone one of the most severe sanctions available. For example, suppose Arjun does not tolerate being disrespected. Perhaps some would understand this to mean that if disrespected, Arjun will punch the person who disrespected him. But not tolerating disrespect certainly does not seem to necessitate (or permit, for that matter) this severe a response. Simply asserting that one will not stand for being disrespected in many instances will suffice. Moreover, the conceptual connection between the extent to which we do not tolerate X and the severity of our response to X may not be as tightly linked as we might initially suppose; just because Arjun punches a person in response to disrespect does not mean that Arjun tolerates being disrespected less than someone who responds to disrespect by verbally articulating that he/she will not stand for being disrespected.

Consider also the context of punishments disbursed by the state. It is true, the state should not tolerate shop lifting. But not tolerating shoplifting does not require that the state respond with its most severe available punishment. Of course, state-imposed punishment is different in several important ways from business responses to employee wrongdoing. But what’s surprising is that some of the very features that make it an imperfect analogy point in favor of a more tempered response in the business context: With respect to the state disbursing punishment, there are various safeguards, protocols, and so on, that mitigate against the risk of unjustly disbursed punishment. But these safeguards are missing in the context of sanctions disbursed by employers.

To summarize, it does not seem at all clear that not tolerating the employee’s misconduct requires termination. In any case, even if one insists that the business ought not to tolerate the sorts of conduct in the kinds of mass social media outrage cases we have been considering, there may be other ways for a business to respond in lieu of firing.

Reflections Directed at Those Who Insist on Firing

Those who insist that businesses should blame the employee through firing in the kinds of cases we have been considering face at least two difficulties to account for. First, many believe that those who have completed prison sentences for committing serious crimes should be permitted to reintegrate into society; some even think we owe it to such persons to help them reintegrate into the workforce. If we do indeed owe it to such persons to help them re-enter the workforce, what do we, as a society, owe to those who were once fired in response to mass social media outrage for comparatively less serious misconduct? Should one instance of wrongdoing of the sort we’ve been considering make one permanently unemployable? A view that supports termination in the cases we have been considering should offer a response to these questions.

Second, the point about not tolerating racist, sexist, or other unethical conduct cuts both ways. Whatever one may think of the ethics of the woman’s tweet in the AIDS-tweet case (“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”), many of the responses to her tweet by outraged social media participants were unequivocally appalling:

Others were more explicit in their demands about her employment:

It is not clear that aligning one’s organization with the demands of outraged individuals on social media who would make these sorts of unambiguously sexist remarks and threats is appropriate. These sort of remarks, especially when it is a woman at the center of social media outrage, are not uncommon. The woman who was fired in the Dongles Case, in addition to being subjected to various racial slurs, faced similar remarks: “…Let’s crucify this cunt,” “Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife,” “I hope I can find [her], kidnap her, put a torture bag over her head, and shoot a .22 subsonic round right into her fucking skull. Fuck that bitch make her obey” (Ronson 2015a, p. 120). She also had her home address posted to the internet along with a photograph of a decapitated woman with duct tape covering her mouth (Ronson 2015b). Women in a wide range of other cases involving mass social media outrage have been subjected to similar threats and remarks.³⁷

So, in the way that it is common wisdom that in many instances one should not capitulate to threats or demands to avoid encouraging repeat instances of demands (or escalations in demands), we might think that firms acquiescing to the demands of outraged social media participants who would subject another to comments of this sort may help sustain or even encourage this very sort of vile behavior.

Suppose one now acknowledges that firing the employee in mass outrage contexts is not necessary and may also be morally inappropriate but still thinks inaction is unacceptable and that the employee should be blamed for the misconduct. That is, suppose a manager thinks blame is all-things-considered justified but wants to blame without firing. Is there a way to do this? Surely, there is.

Blaming Without Firing

Suppose a business insists on the moral importance of blaming an employee at the center of mass social media outrage in the kinds of cases we have been discussing, but wants to do so without terminating the employee. How could the business do so? While space does not permit a full discussion of this topic, I will briefly discuss some possibilities.³⁸ First, a business could issue a statement of condemnation, without coupling the statement with an additional sanction or penalty. For instance, a business might take the kind of response that the president of Boston University took in response to a tweet—“why is white america so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?”—by one of its incoming assistant professors:

That being said, while such a statement of condemnation may be less harsh than firing, managers should recognize that authorizing a press release in response to an employee’s action is a decidedly ethical act, not merely a PR decision. When reprimanding an employee, it is generally considered good practice to pull the employee aside and address him/her privately rather than reprimand him/her in front of peers: failing to do so would humiliate the employee. Yet with press releases in response to social media outrage, the reprimand of the employee is unabashedly public. Managers should not merely consider the PR dimensions of the decision to issue a press release, but should also consider how such a press release can affect the employee and consider whether one act of wrongdoing justifies a permanent, publicly viewable stain of condemnation on the internet.

Second, even if one thinks that not tolerating the employee’s conduct requires a more severe sanction than a statement of condemnation—that for the blame to be effective, it must be coupled with something that will materially harm the employee—this still does not necessitate termination. A business might issue a sanction that falls short of termination, but is still more severe than a statement of condemnation. For example, when an ESPN reporter was caught on video berating an employee at a car towing office and subsequently became the focus of mass outrage, she was put on a 1-week suspension (Scheff and Schorr 2017, p. 114). Businesses have several options available other than termination: the business might demote an employee, pass over the employee for a promotion, place the employee on temporary suspension or leave, move the employee to a different role, cut the employee’ salary or bonus, and so on.

While I don’t believe these alternative sanctions are required in order for the business to blame an employee nor to show that it does not tolerate certain forms of conduct, they are some ways a business can blame, without having to resort to termination as a blanket response to employee misconduct in mass social media outrage contexts.

Standing Up for the Employee

Finally, could an organization that purports to respect and value its employees have an obligation to stand up for or protect an employee at the center of mass social media outrage? While the argument in this article cannot withstand the weight of answering this question affirmatively, it seems to be a thesis worth exploring. What might it look like for an employer to stand up for an employee at the center of mass social media outrage? In August 2018, soon after a young Asian-American journalist was appointed to the editorial board of The New York Times (The Times), her earlier social media activity was unearthed, including tweets like the following: “White men are bullshit,” “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” and “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” These tweets generated mass social media outrage, placing significant pressure on The Times to fire her. Instead of firing her, The Times offered the following statement:

Firms often expend considerable time and resources to vet an employee during the hiring process; upon hiring, firms also often have an opportunity to build a relationship with the employee in various capacities. We might plausibly think that this better equips firms to appreciate the moral complexity of the employee at the center of mass social media outrage than distant, outraged social media participants who may not have (or be disposed to seek out) a fuller picture of the employee. This more complex picture of the employee is something an employer might draw attention to when standing up for an employee at the center of mass social media outrage.

The woman who was fired in the Dongles case spoke of her former employer as follows: “[My employer] threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone” (Ronson 2015a, p. 121). When an employee is the focus of mass social media outrage, he or she is likely to feel a debilitating alienation from his or her community; this is when an employee most needs support and an ally. Perhaps the firm could fulfill this role: rather than offering a condemnatory, moralizing press release, the firm could speak to the employee’s virtues that it has come to appreciate during the employee’s tenure—virtues that outraged social media participants are poorly positioned to recognize.

Implications and Future Avenues of Research

The argument I have presented, while structurally simple, has important theoretical and managerial implications. First, even when an employee has done something wrong (and there is clear evidence of this fact and the employee has been afforded adequate due process), there are considerations external to this fact that must be considered in the decision to fire. Notably, the fact that firings have the potential to be inappropriate acts of blame in mass outrage contexts has not to date been fully appreciated in employment ethics. In making this argument, I have brought the employment ethics literature into contact with the growing scholarship on the philosophy of blame. I drew attention to a novel dimension of the ethics of blame, the dependence principle, which holds that the appropriateness of an act of blame depends in part on how much others blame. While this article does not amount to a full defense and articulation of the dependence principle, it does illustrate a significant implication of it for employment ethics.

Second, I argued that in firing decisions in mass outrage contexts, a manager’s intent in firing may be irrelevant to the question of whether an employee was wrongfully fired. That is, even if the manager saw the firing strictly as a decision concerning PR or profits, and indeed even regretted having to fire the employee, this does not necessarily justify the firing. One implication of this is that theorists must pay more attention to how the context of an act affects the moral status of the act; for example, the context in which a firing takes place can change it from being merely an ordinary firing to also being an act of blame. Attending to issues in philosophy of language concerning the expressive dimensions of actions, and issues in metaphysics concerning action individuation, can help theorists toward this end. If an otherwise ethically inert act takes on a new significance in certain contexts, this can trigger additional moral requirements.

Third, this article can also serve as an example for how recent technological advances might raise new issues in business ethics debates that may seem well worn. I showed how widespread adoption and use of social media makes it worth revisiting certain questions in employment ethics—in particular, questions pertaining to the ethics of firing. Social media allows for large numbers of individuals to come together and subject a person to blame with much greater ease than ever before. When an employee is at the focus of this outrage, I argued that this has ethical implications for firing decisions. Moreover, before social media, these sorts of firing decisions were found in a realm of managerial decisions that remained largely insulated from such external pressures. In short, this article aimed to serve as an example of how it can be theoretically and practically fruitful to return scholarly attention to certain well-trodden topics in light of technological advances, especially given that technology can in some circumstances open up issues that managers may never have encountered in the past.

This article also opens several further questions for scholars to investigate. While there are many empirical questions that remain uninvestigated—such as how customers, suppliers, investors, and partners alter their interactions with a firm that fails to fire an employee who is at the center of mass social media outrage, or whether a firm might be perceived as a bully due to firing the employee in response to mass outrage, in the way that individuals sometimes can be seen as bullies for contributing to mass social media outrage (Sawaoka and Monin 2018)—I will here focus on normative questions.

First, what role should the victim of the employee’s wrongdoing (when there is an identifiable victim) play in a manager’s decision? If the victim says, “I don’t want her to lose her livelihood; I just want an apology,” it seems inappropriate, perhaps even disrespectful, to override this request. In criminal trials, whether the victim forgives is often immaterial to whether the criminal is punished, but it does often figure into the severity of the sentencing. While the victim’s voice may not always matter when it comes to responding to wrongdoers, perhaps it should matter more than the vicarious outrage of social media participants. A key task for scholars will be to investigate how to take seriously a victim’s claims in the context of managerial decision-making with respect to employee wrongdoing.

Second, are firms justified in terminating relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners due to their misconduct that generates mass social media outrage? Developing an account that covers such a wide variety of relationships (and it is not clear that a unified account will emerge) may require engaging with fundamental questions concerning the legitimacy and scope of managerial authority, the nature of relational morality when there is a power asymmetry in the relationship, and the morality of imposing a corporate culture so strict that any ethical transgressions make one a misfit.

Third, if—contrary to what I have argued—one’s off-duty misconduct does usually justify blaming through firing in mass social media outrage contexts, should one’s off-duty exemplary conduct be considered in decisions pertaining to hiring, promotions, and bonuses? For example, should an employee’s off-duty volunteerism and charitable donations be determining factors in decisions about who to promote? These questions turn on deeper issues pertaining to whether the distribution of harms and goods generate asymmetrical (or perhaps even entirely distinct) moral requirements in the manager.