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Notes -
You are literally describing the same situation. Manager/Superstar researcher is using his superstar influence in order to secure job for somebody he fucks is the same as saying:
Yeah, that is the point. Manager is negotiating with the company (hiring manager) to secure new business relationship (for his mistress and for himself to the extent of getting potentially a good fuck as a result) and it is in best interest of the company (or else he leaves in the middle of the most important project to competitor or whatever) and he is utilizing various tools at his disposal (e.g. a lunch with hiring manager and his manager etc.) to secure that relationship.
I understand corporatespeak, no need to remind me that "spousal hiring" and "best interest of the company" means "hire somebody I fuck" and "do as I say or else something bad happens". Nobody with IQ more than 80 falls for this shit.
Do you think it is wrong for Superstar Researcher to use his superstar influence to just straightforwardly secure a larger paycheck? Or other terms of employment concessions?
If he tries to secure larger paycheck, then I see nothing wrong. If he tries to secure hot assistant that will give him a blowjob whenever he feels like it or he requires that university signs contract with his brother's firm for security services or that the university hires his nephew for new research vacancy - then yes, I think those concessions are wrong. I hope I will not have to go into the weeds of why I see it as wrong.
Some differences: 1) She would not be his assistant. 2) The number of blowjobs provided is not any sort of thing the university is involved in (i.e., there is zero amount of, "Hey, ya know, you really ought to blow this guy more often to help us out."). 3) The nature of the relationship is ontologically prior to anything having to do with the business relationship.
Let me ask you about this scenario. Think not a university. An employee at some company says he wants to move away, because his spouse took a job in a different city. He asks to go to remote work. They oblige and extend that benefit in order to retain him as an employee. Do you think that this is the same thing as the company arranging to provide him with some quantity of blowjobs in order to retain him? Do you think it is impermissible for him to negotiate this employment concession?
I do not have interest going into technicalities. Leveraging my position and asking my employer to hire somebody I fuck is nepotism, period end of story. Arguments involving softening the language by euphemisms like "spousal hiring", defending it on the grounds of values of family formation like somebody above or digging up these other examples like remote work are unnecessary sophistry.
I guess if you don't want to even try to get into the details and understand the nature of things, we don't have to. We can just observe that this is one of those moments that highlight Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great. We can just see which arguments are theologically held as impervious to scrutiny.
I can't find the direct quote off-hand. But I throw my lot in with Scott when he said (paraphrased), 'Understanding where our intuitions clash is its own reward.'
I have my own peeve with said comment, this supposed "rationalist Cross-Examination" makes people even more stupid and in the end everybody retreats into their own aesthetics of the situation. It is more stupid discussion the more basic the moral intuition is - like for instance "why murder is bad". I can put you on the spot here and it will be up to you to come to defense of your view that murder is bad ranging from defining murder to exceptions like war and whatnot. It almost always degenerates into sophistry (AKA dark arts) as the situation is of course nuanced and complex and you can spend lifetime cross-examining, unless of course you have certain end in mind. So in the end, it all comes down to normalcy, murder is murder and nepotism is nepotism.
So I guess intuition is very powerful and it is not always easily accessible to rational discussion which quite often leads to wrong conclusions depending on what path you take. Which is kind of a point even here in this discussion - you already see how people invent all kinds of defense to this, including this call of yours. To me, if I see a person pushing to hire somebody he fucks, this is nepotism. I do not understand what does temote work do with any of this, laid out your argument.
That is kind of the point. Some people notice that our intuitions clash and retreat into their own aesthetics. Others notice that our intuitions clash and think, "Huh. That's interesting. I wonder why." I happen to think that the latter is a useful endeavor for understanding the underpinnings of our intuitions/aesthetics. It can lead to great works that are clarifying. To refer to a somewhat-related but pretty different topic, there are lots of intuitions/aesthetics around consent to sexual relations. I view works like the books of Wertheimer/Westen to be incredibly valuable discourses that dig in to those intuitions and to try to understand what the hell is going on. I obviously still don't agree with everything they think; they likely don't completely agree with each other. But it fleshes out useful language to explore the cruxes and help navigate the real world where people do just hold various intuitions/aesthetics, and we have to figure out how to come to some agreement on some set of particulars when they arise.
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