Interesting press release came out this week. It's full of implications for the more philosophical recruiter:

• Imagine a business executive who thinks: “I know that this new policy will harm the environment, but I don’t care at all about that – I just want to increase profits.”
• Is the business executive harming the environment intentionally?
• Faced with this question from a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill philosopher, 82 percent of people polled said yes.
• But then UNC scholar Joshua Knobe changed the word “harm” to “help.”
• This time, the executive thinks: “I know that this new policy will help the environment, but I don’t care at all about that – I just want to increase profits.”
• Is the business executive helping the environment intentionally? This time, only 33 percent of respondents said yes.

These questions are linked to a new movement called experimental philosophy. A new book by Knobe and Shaun Nichols discusses the approach that sees philosophers leaving the ivory tower to talk to people about their values and morals. They then perform psychological experiments to get to the root of what is primarily a philosophical problem.

• “If you look back through the history of philosophy – all the way from the ancient Greeks to the 19th century Germans – you find in-depth discussions of how ordinary people actually think and feel,” said Knobe, an assistant professor of philosophy in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. “The aim of experimental philosophy is to return the discipline to this more traditional approach. The only difference is that contemporary experimental philosophers address their questions by actually going out and running experiments. Experiments like these are beginning to suggest that people’s ordinary way of understanding the world is suffused through and through with moral considerations.”
• “This sort of research is important not only for its philosophical implications but also for what it tells us about how people ordinarily think,” Knobe added. “The more we know about how people make moral judgments, the more we will be able to understand how people come to blame each other and enter into conflict.”

Obviously recruiters need to learn as much as we can about how people think and how conflicts arise in the workforce, but there are also huge parts of assessment tests that are based on psychological/philosophical experimentation. Maybe we should be conducting our own experiments on ourselves.

Here's my experiment. Comment to reveal your philosophical position.

Let's look at the difference between lip service and practice.  How many companies do we work for that say they want to attract and retain a diverse workforce, but have then turned away every candidate with an accent that you have sent them?

What kind of impact do these clients have on your behaviour? Do they make you send the kind of candidates they actually hire rather than the kind they say they want? Does it make you have a sensitive and worried conversation with client rep about what diversity is? Do you force (gently, sensitively) them to articulate their behaviour so that they can think about it?

What is the moral way to respond to these clients?   

Can you behave according to your moral judgement or do you have to get the job done and get paid?