(03-30-2014, 09:56 AM)garvin link Wrote:If the Eagles leaked this stuff and it's false, that's reprehensible. If it's true, then what's the problem? Is being a gang member just another alternative lifestyle that we have no right to judge? Does anybody think that the Dolphins or the NFL should have kept quiet about Richie Incognito's behavior?
It's not that you don't have the right to judge, it's that the information is not relevant to the reasoning for which the decision was made.
For example, let's say an executive gets let go for merely average performance and someone were to leak to the media that it was because "she's a slut." This may or may not be true, but it's irrelevant to what really went on, which is that the company didn't like the executive's performance. Instead, it reads as a distraction, to make it about the personal qualities of the executive in question.
Or let's say someone were meeting you for coffee; just before that, a third party informs you that that someone is an awful alcoholic.
In all three stories the information imparted may be true. But of course we don't insist on perfect truth for all our interactions anyway, as I think my two examples show. I think most people would be put off were we discussing those two stories rather than Jackson. The source of that instinct is that when making decisions we want to be making them based on relevant factors -- we want to filter out the noise. Similarly, when evaluating decisions we want to evaluate them strictly with respect to relevant factors.
In this case, what reporting seems to bear out is that the Eagles made the decision based on business factors -- they didn't think Jackson delivered value for money. Fair enough. The gang stuff reads as a distraction: what, precisely, is that doing to affect Jackson's performance? It's not crime; no one is accusing him of that. It's just, "Jackson has friends who are in a gang." Which isn't a crime and may not even be particularly immoral. Instead it exploits the presumption that people who have friends who are in gangs are probably not up to much good. But that's no crime. If we're honest with ourselves, we can all think of friends or associates who are up to no good -- and I don't think we'd like judgments to be made about us based on that. Pretending that's relevant looks like guilt by association. No, what we really care about when judging a person are the actions of that person specifically. So if the Eagles have evidence of actual criminal and/or immoral behavior related to Jackson, they should divulge it. Otherwise they should STFU.
