Then answer the question. Does the bank have the right to make a values judgement on something that is against a person who is not a protected class, as long as they accept the market responses of that judgement?

Already answered your question.
They have the legal right.
Doesn't make it right morally.

Now, if that bank has as depositors or customers hotel chains that make a lot of money retailing porn - are they still being moral ?

Are you saying it is immoral to refuse service to someone for being a porn star?

I am not saying anything about others morals. If the bank chooses to not take a hotel's money, that is their choice, and I support their right to do that.

bbauska

Are you saying it is immoral to refuse service to someone for being a porn star

I'm saying that applying the moral standard selectively, disqualifies it as a moral stand.

A bank that takes money from retail purveyors of porn, but won't take it from a performer is selectively applying its morals.

Glass houses.

Then the bank would have to answer for it's "lack of moral stand". Suppose the bank did not accept money from the hotel (or anyone who is known to sell porn, lest we have that as a back-up rebuttal), do they have the right to choose not to do business with someone the disagree with on moral grounds?

A simple response to the yes or no question will suffice.

Does anyone have the right to choose not to do business with another person they disagree with based upon their own values?

bbauska

A simple response to the yes or no question will suffice

You got one before...
It didn't seem to make you happy.
ricky

Already answered your question.
They have the legal right.
Doesn't make it right morally.

bbauska

It got me thinking why can this business make a values judgement against a person and this be allowed. I guess I wanted to know if there are values that others find socially worth standing for in the marketplace.

The answer would be yes. Of course. But you seem to be looking for some over arching rule as it applies to morality and the law.
And every decision must be weighed upon its own merits.

Which is why I asked you to consider the target in this case. An individual who performs in porn movies, legally, is being withheld service from a bank because of the way she is making her money.
Its an easy target for a bank. It costs them next to nothing and they may believe that it will provide them with public good will.
To me it seems bullying and petty. And, if we look through the list of customers and clients they prefer to do business with, I'd bet we'd find plenty of longstanding relationships with people of much lower character.And yet, the bank turns a blind eye to them..And if you knew the extent to which a great many businesses profit from the work of women like the one the bank is discriminating against, you'd sense the hypocrisy. .
But the bank has a legal right to discriminate in this circumstance as far as I know.
Doesn't mean they aren't a corporate ass for doing so.

I agree that they are trying to make a point. It is up to society to judge them via the market on that point.

I did not mean to belabor the point, but your dancing around a definitive answer was difficult.

Brad, the difficulty I have with your stance is the fact that you felt the need to qualify it by adding that you think it's wrong to discriminate against the protected classes. In effect then what you're saying is that it's morally permissible to discriminate against anybody so long as the law allows it but it suddenly becomes wrong to do so once the law says you can't. That's not really a very solid basis for a moral argument. I'm quite sure that you don't regard it as morally acceptable to discriminate on the basis of race, faith or gender, but if you were to follow the logic of your own stance then presumably back in 1950 you'd have said it was fine, because at that point it wasn't against the law. I don't think this is what you're intending to say but this is the intellectual cul-de-sac you've talked your way into.

Ultimately I don't think it's always helpful to mix legal and moral judgements in this fashion. The answer to yolur question about whether businesses have the right to refuse servive on matters of personal ethics is quite obviously yes (insofar as the law permits them to). This doesn't mean to say though that we all have to accept their moral right to do so. It's quite possibly to hold the view that somebody is exceeding their moral/ethical rights without necessarily feeling that the law should forbid them from doing what they do.

Sass, I agree that the 1950s were a different time, and the protected classes were different. In America we have evolved beyond that, and I thank God we did.

The reason I felt the need to qualify is due to the concern that it would open up claims against me that I did not care about discriminations that are against a protected class. Surely you can see that the comments would have been forthcoming. After all, I had the following brought up.

Segregation
Gay Marriage
Womens Rights

All I was asking was about a person making a choice not to service a client who was a porn actress. She is feeling discriminated against, and does a business have the freedom to not serve a client based upon personal values. I did feel that I needed to clarify with the protected classes based upon the response with the three areas above.

My take about this particular example.
If this "actress" (note the quotes) were dressed like a porn starlet while in the bank ...fine to ask her to leave. If she made her money illegally, fine to deny her the banks services. But if she works a legal job, pays her taxes, and blends in with the masses, then they have no right to deny her the banks services. I see no grounds for the bank to do so. She may make someone feel uncomfortable while waiting in line? How do they know what she does unless they happen to be a fan of hers? You could argue that a black person standing in line made some old white lady uncomfortable. Some gay guy made a redneck uncomfortable, a "little person" made someone uncomfortable, someone with a large birthmark on their face made someone uncomfortable. It goes on and on. And if you want to say the bank does not want to support this porn business, then can they start to deny services to those who they find rent porn videos? Seems stupid and illegal to me.

In all honesty I'm not sure how I see this situation. My instinctive kneejerk reaction is that i situations olike this one where an individual has chosen to engage in certain behaviour that some business owner regards as being contrary to their personal code of ethics (as opposed to things beyond their control like race, age, gender or sexuality), then the business owner does have the right to refuse to have a business relationship with them. On superficial level it isn't really any different to if the business owner had chosen not to engage with them socially. I'm not sure it's that simple though. What if all banks were to decide that they won't serve porn actresses ? Access to banking services is something that's absolutely essential to everybody in the modern economy after all. Should banks collectively conspire to deny vital services to somebody just because they engaged in activities which are not against the law ? That doesn't seem right to me.

We could extrapolate this further. What if the porn actress lives in a small community where there's a monopoly supplier of gas, electricity, water etc ? These things are absolute essentials of life. Do the suppliers of these services have the right to use the threat of the withdrawal of these essentials to effectively dictate the personal lifestyle choices of others where those personal choices are not illegal ? That certainly doesn't seem right, in fact it seems like a much greater wrong than it would be to force the supplier of these services to do business with somebody whose lifestyle they dislike. I realise that this is a hypothetical situation, but it's certainly relevant.

Exactly what I have been thinking, Sass. It is a freedom vs choice decision.

We all know my position on Abortion. If I choose to not hire person X because I have knowledge they have aborted a child/fetus/clump of tissue; is it discrimination? I would not think so, but the person may feel discriminated against. I see the porn actress case as the same sort of case. Is the actress' right to have a banker supersede the banker's right to pass value judgement. I do not know where true discrimination falls, so I stick with the protected class model, and let the market decide otherwise.

I think you're trying to be a bit too prescriptive Brad. What you're seeking to do is to set out a definitive position that will let you be consistent in your approach to all similar issues, but I don't think that's really possible here. It clearly doesn't make sense to conflate the moral and legal 'rights', as I demonstrated earlier. You're doing it just for the sake of convenience but in doing so you lead yourself into territory that you really ought not to be comfortable with. If the 'protected classes' were to be altered next year to exclude say, gender discrimination, then by your own logic you'd then have to accept that discrimination by gender is suddenly ok. I know this is extremely unlikely, but the point stands. Perhaps it could be better illustrated if you step outside of the US prism for a moment. In Saudi Arabia, far from being a 'protected class', women are actively discriminated against (some might say oppressed) by the law. Would you therefore say that in Saudi it's morally acceptable for businesses to discriminate against women ? By conflating the moral with the legal what you're doing is drifting into moral relativism, which I'm sure you didn't intend.

IMO this is a massive grey area and it isn't really possible to come out with a consistent stance that you don't ever need to deviate from. If we return to the porn star example, my stance would vary a lot depending on the circumstances. If this porn star was denied service by one particular gas station in a town where there are dozens of them to choose from then while I'd feel the owner of the gas station was being a bit petty and wouldn't agree with his choice, I'd accept his moral right to make it. If however she were living in a town where the only supplier of gasoline for 50 miles was refusing to serve her I'd feel very differently, because he'd be denying her a vital service that she couldn't acquire elsewhere, imposing his own morality over hers in a situation where he had enormous leverage.