The unexpected moral dilemma of sharing recruit successes
In the minutes after 5:00 p.m. on March 4, I, like a number of other fortunate law students, learned that I had secured a summer job through the Toronto recruit. I was overcome with joy. Naturally, I wanted to share the good news with the family, mentors, and close friends who had supported me throughout the process.
I also thought, “Hey, this is a major career development. People share major career developments on LinkedIn. Maybe I should post about this on LinkedIn.”
I did just that. The post read, “Excited to begin my journey in law as a Summer Student at ______ in May!”
At the time, I didn’t have a care in the world. Since then, the burgeoning conversation about the merits of posting successful recruit results has forced me to (re)consider the ethics of this category of public speech more carefully.
Some LinkedIn users, their feeds inundated with recruit posts, have shared their concerns and dismay over this new trend. They say that there’s a custom against publicly sharing one’s recruit results, at least initially, to which previous cohorts of law students had adhered — and for good reason. The common thread in their arguments is that seeing these posts could be devastating for students who weren’t able to land a job through the recruit. This is a time for respecting others’ feelings, they say, not for (humble) bragging.
After the initial shock of realizing that there were people out there who disapproved of my conduct, some reflection on their criticism led me to two competing intuitions.
On the one hand, I recoil at the prospect of letting someone’s envy dictate my conduct. Make no mistake, envy is the relevant culprit in these students’ suffering. It couldn’t be mere self-directed disappointment; for, if it were so, others’ success would be a non-factor.
While envy may have some productive value for the envier in terms of motivating her to do better, envy, per se, is not a valid basis for claims on others’ conduct. The envier thinks, “I am less successful than you, and I wish it were otherwise.” When asked why it should be otherwise, the envier qua envier has no answer other than “Because I wish it were so.” For the complaint to be reason-giving for others, i.e., to factor into their deliberations by moral necessity, it would have to be rooted in right.
Supporting this intuition is the more general principle that “raising the floor” is preferable to “levelling down.” That is, even if we feel for our less fortunate peers, our response to the wellbeing gap shouldn’t be to keep those who are feeling good about themselves from continuing to feel good about themselves; rather, we should be doing whatever we can to ensure that the students who weren’t able to secure jobs feel like the valued, competent, and capable members of the legal community that they are.
My own (totally anecdotal) experience participating in processes similar to the recruit tell me that it’s possible to foster an environment in which students — even those who, themselves, have not yet found success — can revel in others’ success, yet also find in each other a network of support and encouragement for when they are feeling disappointed or inadequate. In particular, I’m thinking of graduate school admissions, which share with the recruit several relevant features: simultaneous results following weeks of stress and hard work; the “next big step” mentality; and the prospect of years of occupational security.
Isn’t this the kind of environment that we would like to foster? The love, sympathy, and mutual admiration involved therein seem to be virtues much more worthy of cultivation than the envy apparently driving the custom against posting recruit results.
In response, some critics have pointed out that the days following hiring day, which caps a grueling week of interviews, are particularly ripe for stress. On top of having had their expectations crushed at the last minute, students may be mentally drained from being “on” for three days straight, behind on schoolwork (apparently for nought), worried about the law school debt they took on to get these jobs in the first place, or all of the above. I take this point. But the fact that envy may be an expected or ordinary reaction under these unusually stressful circumstances does not necessarily make it a justified reaction.
On the other hand, my outlook necessarily shifts when faced with the prospect that the envy resulting from my public speech has led beyond the temporary, relatively trivial suffering typically associated with resenting others’ success, to outright depression, anxiety, or other serious mental health issues. Whatever benefit one derives from posting recruit results cannot be worth the cost of someone seriously being harmed or harming themselves.
While I doubt that respect for persons requires me to account for others’ envy, per se, in my conduct, I’m much more confident that I ought not act so as to impair others’ capacity for experiencing feelings of self-respect. I take myself to be doing so when my speech foreseeably causes someone severe psychological damage, potentially leading to further forms of harm. If that is a foreseeable consequence, I am duty-bound to speak with appropriate care and sensitivity. Sometimes, that may entail refraining from speaking at all.
Full disclosure: I deleted my post after leaving it up for nearly two days — largely for the above mentioned reasons. Under non-ideal circumstances, I acted in a manner I believed to be right, yet still non-ideal. In an ideal world, we would all feel free to publicly share our successes, and no one would be devastated by our doing so. However, people are, for now, foreseeably devastated by our doing so, so we cannot feel free to publicly share our successes so carelessly.
How do we get from the non-ideal to the ideal? That’s undoubtedly an inquiry beyond the scope of this piece. I can only imagine that it would entail a major shift in the culture surrounding law school and law hiring, as well as potential changes to the actual practices involved in the recruit. It may take much more than all of that. It may be impossible.
I can’t say with any certainty what the custom regarding publicly sharing recruit results should be, because I’m not, myself, convinced one way or the other. I’m not sure what we should be telling future cohorts who are bound to encounter the same quandaries. What I can say is that I hope that they will be familiar with this conversation, and that, whatever they choose to do, their choices will be informed by this year’s experience.
