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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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