Company Policy

At one point or another, many workers, at least in America, will find themselves having to live under overtly counterproductive, invasive, gratuitously inconvenient, or otherwise irrational company policies.  Some of these rules or expectations might be introduced for no reason other than just to change things for the sake of changing them, beyond the likely objective of appeasing the egos of deluded corporate leaders who think that whatever they want must be rational, morally permissible, or pragmatically useful.  When an employee does not submit to them, employers or managers might react harshly, but there is a sharp distinction between policies that all workers are rationally and morally free to honor at will and those they can disregard at whim.

Demanding that people do irrational, immoral, arbitrary, preference-based things is itself irrational and unjust (irrational in itself and unjust if moral obligations exist, that is), but workers, like employers, are free to do any permissible thing they wish.  If a policy benefits an employee monetarily or otherwise, but they do not believe anything irrational (anything contradictory, false, or assumed) or do anything immoral in the process of complying, they can act as they please for their own sake.  This is not selfishness unless they forsake truth or obligations in order to gain.  Inversely, if a policy does not benefit them in some morally permissible way, they cannot be in the wrong merely for disobeying it or only selectively carrying it out.

The employer or manager who makes irrational or non-obligatory demands, however, is in the wrong no matter what.  They are refusing to align with reason by believing or doing that which is irrational and are violating moral obligations by trying to force people to do things they are not in error for forgoing.  Thinking their goals or preferences justify whatever worldview or course of action they are subjectively inclined towards, they treat workers as a means to their own ends when it is really the jobs they offer which are only a means to an end for the workers.  This is yet another way an employer could manifest their irrationalism or egoism: expecting an invalid reverence for company policy.

Because they would have to assume that something false or unverifiable is true, there is an additional layer of irrationality in that even if a policy wasn't itself problematic, they are only driven by assumed ideas and subjective preferences that they think others should bend to.  Of course they might and probably would dislike a worker citing company policy when it benefits them and then intentionally disobeying another policy, but since company policy is a social construct with no inherent philosophical validity or authority whatsoever, this is not hypocrisy if a worker is thoroughly rationalistic.  This difference feeling unjust to an employer does not make it so.

Having a preference as a worker and acting in accordance with it, and with reason and morality at the same time, is not the same as this kind of employer's subjectivism in pretending like their perceptions correspond to reality by default or that their wishes are morally binding.  Again, workers cannot be in the wrong for doing what they wish as long as they do not betray reason or morality (the latter of which would in turn also be a betrayal of the uncaused cause).  Policies of any major corporation or small business, or government or family or club, at that, are of no veracity or significance if they are not perfectly consistent with the nature of truth itself.