A hypothetical candidate walks into a hypothetical job interview...

I'm more curious about the following hypothetical candidate/interview:

In casual conversation the candidate reveals he's a member of an online forum, the subject matter of which regularly revolves around elaborate torture scenarios, freezing the heads of the recently deceased, making decisions on behalf of our counterparts in parallel worlds and the pressing concern that thinking machines may either harvest our atoms for their strange alien purposes or trap us in a virtual Hell for the rest of eternity. He also emphasises the point of this forum is about having as accurate an understanding of reality as possible.

I think anti-discrimination law has a different idea of what constitutes "religion" than we do.

What if you are a conservative catholic, and you learnt during a job interview that someone was a member of a website that seems to be some crazy end-of the world anti-religious cult?

Would that be a justifiable reason not to hire?

Would you support making it legal to refuse employment for reasons like that?

It is usually weird religious minorities like atheists that benefit most from laws prohibiting religious discrimination.

As for the country club question, I certainly feel a desire to punish this person for views I find repugnant but that isn't a very good grounds for not hiring him. As long as his membership isn't going to interfere with his ability to do the job I'd like to think I would hire him. To do otherwise seems like ineffective business practice.

"Member of a country club" implies deliberate choice, at adult age, with full assent.

Mentioning in passing that you're a Catholic Christian has entirely different implications - it's most likely to be a set of values you got willy-nilly from your parents, that may have little practical implications on how you go about your life and work decisions. It would be absurd to rule someone out of a position based solely on learning that they're a member of this or that religion.

Maybe a workable tactic, if you're concerned, would be to say something like "Oh, by the way, some folks on the team you'll join are practicing Satanists, are you OK with that?". Let the narrow-minded select themselves out, religious tolerance goes both ways. ;)

Voted up for an important topic.

I thought you were going to go the other direction here -- one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens.

In other words, if we tolerate Catholics, we should tolerate holders of other opinions that we find equally outrageous and offensive -- explicit racists, for instance. Here "tolerate" means something less than "agree with" but more than "refrain from throwing in jail" -- it means we should associate with them, offer them jobs they're otherwise qualified for, etc.

There has to be some mechanism for sharing a society with people whose opinions seem truly horrible to us. We seem to do this naturally when it comes to religion, perhaps because we have a three-hundred-year-old tradition of religious toleration. But toleration more broadly is a difficult thing and it's not always obvious how far it should be taken.

For instance, for all I said above, I probably would not date someone whose beliefs bothered me (and yes, this includes devout Catholics.)

If I were conducting interviews for a lighthouse guardian-type position, I would be fine with hiring a Nazi zoophiliac bug-chasing rapist with a scatological fixation and a fondness for Beck's beer, as long as he could do the job well. Arguably, I might even be somewhat happy to have a chance of reducing the social presence of such a distasteful person.

But if I were hiring a personal secretary, I (or whoever they will work with) would need not simply to tolerate, but to actually like the guy or gal. Good personal chemistry is a key part of that job, and if there was a law forbidding me from discriminating against, say, Scientologists I'd make a serious effort to circumvent it (hardly a difficult feat; I probably wouldn't even have to lie).

Other jobs fall somewhere in the spectrum between those two extremes, and would be treated accordingly.

I would hire him if there was no superior candidate when it comes to job-relevant criteria.

The secret to toleration is realizing that, generally speaking, everyone is a horrible person by your standards, and so your standards are generally not useful in determining whether or not you should associate with people (all you do is punish people who got caught). They may be useful in picking your friends- but that's an entirely separate issue from who you hire.

There's a Mencken quote- "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. " - that seems appropriate. Let's say you find out in passing that your employee's wife is hideously ugly, and you work someplace where people sometimes bring their spouses to office parties or the office itself. How strongly would you be willing to act on your desire to avoid seeing his wife at office parties?

How is this a question about anything but rationalization of the value judgements that people already possess?

You might be interested in this old comment of mine where I touched on this question from a different angle:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2d9/open_thread_june_2010_part_4/26dm

On further reflection, this post highlights an important omission in TDT (aka the categorical imperative): how do you judge the similarity of other agents to you? If each of your actions establishes a universal law, exactly how wide and universal does it become? You may think of yourself as optimizing your little corner of the world, because you feel uncomfortable around some people; or you may think of yourself bringing about a brave new world where the accursed papists must starve because nobody hires them; or maybe a not-so-brave new world where people are routinely denied jobs for ideological reasons. Right now I see no rational arguments to choose between these different perspectives.

I was inspired to write this post after conversing with a real candidate for a real job.

I realize the analogy doesn't perfectly map. Having rare crazy beliefs is a bigger red flag than having common crazy beliefs. But that doesn't eliminate discrimination entirely. Given two comparable candidates, one religious and one an atheist, I'd favor the atheist.

Interesting, and semi related - as of 2009 Nazis are recognized group which can suffer from hate crimes in Toronto. So don't yell at Adolf for wearing Swastika; you'll be violating his human rights (as interpreted by the Human Rights tribunal). Citation: http://www.mytowncrier.ca/story-15821-1-1.html

Freedom of Religion - which primarily supports minority groups such as us Atheists - originally meant that the government couldn't force you to adopt different beliefs, and that believing in X was not valid grounds for assault. It never meant that you had to hire people regardless of their beliefs.

Descrimination can be morally disturbing at times, but not all immoral behaviour necessarily needs to be legislated.

I think you do have a right to discriminate based on religion, however you must recall that this is a two way street. If you have this right expect atheists to be discriminated against as well.

I recommend you fight the right to discriminate based on religion based on selfish considerations since most of the worlds employers are religious and Atheists are for example one of the most most disliked "religious" groups in the US.

Also my own position is that all forms of hiring discrimination by private enterprise should be allowed since the market should self correct if the standards by which they discriminate are unfair. It also gives a neat symmetry that Robin Hanson commented is lacking (discriminating against potential employers).

I'm fine with others discriminating against religious people (or non-religious people).

Personally, I don't feel a big desire to avoid association with religious folks, so I don't discriminate. I don't have any seriously religious friends, but I suspect that has more to do with selection effects than characteristics caused by their religious beliefs.

Downvoted. This hypothetical situation might have been an good discussion about what evidence of irrational beliefs and behavior such a club-membership implies, and to what degree such traits would make the candidate ill-suited to be your corporate minion (i.e. how to rationally make use of such a person). However, the scenario is too bare-bones and open-ended to be interesting as it stands; top-level posts should not rely on comments for elaboration to the point of usefulness. Worse, this post is asking us for our opinions on a political topic (discrimination legislation) and taking potshots at the Catholic Church, thus setting the discussion up for a mindset which is unlikely to be healthy and productive.

If it's OK for the religious to discriminate against people, it ought also to be OK for people to discriminate against the religious.