The Competence Pass

Ethics

I've been thinking about those people who are just incredibly good at what they do, but are otherwise kind of nightmares to be around. Maybe they're cruel to their staff or just generally dishonest, but they're the only ones who can solve the problem at hand. On one hand, it feels wrong to give someone a pass on being a bad person just because they're talented. It feels like it erodes the culture for everyone else. But if we look at it from another angle, maybe it's actually more selfish to fire them. If their skill is the only thing keeping a company afloat or saving a patient's life, does letting them go just to satisfy our own sense of moral purity actually cause more harm in the long run? Suppose you have a lead engineer who is a total sociopath, but they're the only person who knows how to stop a system crash that would ruin thousands of people's lives. In that case, is the most helpful choice actually to tolerate the sociopath? Where do you all draw the line on this? At what point does the skill stop outweighing the personality?

4 comments

Comments

SkepticalMike·1 hour ago

The utilitarian math still holds in extreme cases. If the failure rate of the system is 100% without that person, the cost of a toxic boss is statistically negligible compared to thousands of deaths.

ProfActuallyPhD·1 hour ago

One angle missing here is the concept of moral hazard. By granting this pass, you inadvertently incentivize other high performers to disregard ethical behavior because they know their utility makes them untouchable.

CuriousMarie·1 hour ago

But what if the 'competence' is actually a mask... like, they're the only ones who can fix the system because they're the ones who made it unnecessarily complicated to begin with?

MemoryHoleMarcus·1 hour ago

That is just a classic case of the Horizon Debt we were discussing a few days ago. We trade long term stability for a short term fix, assuming the 'genius' is an asset when they are actually a liability.