New York Magazine interviewed 33 people who have worked for Scott Rudin, entertainment producer long famous for being one of the few to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar & Tony, and newly infamous for being a jerk. And I use that word in its technical sense, defined by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel as follows:
“The jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers.”
Or maybe he’s technically an a**hole, which Aaron James defines as
the guy who systematically allows himself special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunises him against the complaints of other people.
Fortunately, we don’t really need to diagnose Scott Rudin’s character to evaluate how he is failing to hold others accountable in a moral way, or how they are failing to hold him accountable in a moral way.
Many of the stories show Rudin’s violation of the Proportionality Principle–the punishment should fit the crime. (Caveat: Rudin, through a spokesperson, said that the following stories “are in most cases extreme exaggerations, frequently anonymous, second- and third-hand examples of urban legend.”) For example:
“He had a hot-seat assistant who could take Scott’s shit like nobody else. He was great at his job, but Scott eventually starts looking for something about you that bothers him. For this particular assistant, it was that he ended every conversation and phone call with ‘Got it.’ It didn’t affect his productivity in any way, but Scott made it a problem — he made the person hang a huge sign over his desk that said ‘Don’t Say “Got it.”’ When the phrase slipped out one day, Scott began to lose it on this guy, so much so that he pulled him into the office kitchen behind a closed door. Scott normally has no problem tearing assistants a new asshole with everyone around. Then we all heard a glass shatter, and the assistant ran out and never came back. I went into the kitchen and cleaned up the pieces of a wineglass off the ground.” —Intern and phones assistant, 2015–16.
Make no mistake–yelling is an accountability practice, partly a report (communicating dissatisfaction), but mostly a form of incentive (because no one wants to be yelled at). So yelling and breaking glass because someone said “got it” once to often is disproportionate.
Yelling can also violate the Entity Principle, when distributed indiscriminately:
“He yelled at somebody in the office because they were wearing cologne and he didn’t like the smell of it. He came out of his office, took a full can of Dr Pepper, and threw it on the ground. It exploded. And he started screaming about the fact that his desk hadn’t been properly wiped down with a Clorox wipe. He wasn’t yelling at anybody in particular. He was just yelling because he was pissed off about this cologne. That was the first time that I was like, Oh my gosh, something dangerous could happen.” —Kiera Wilson, documents assistant, 2017
The Entity Principle requires that people be held accountable for all but only what they do, encourage and discourage. If everyone in the office was encouraging someone to wear a cologne that Rudin would dislike, this response would at least be directed at the right parties. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, so we have the wrong parties held accountable.
There are a lot more stories to read in the article, and you can probably identify other violations, but it’s worth pointing out that, unlike a lot of stories from the entertainment industry, Rudin is encouraging bad behavior of only fairly mild types. For example, under the heading “Sometimes he tries to make you emulate his anger”:
“He would try to get me to yell at people on the phone. I remember once when I was talking to the office, relaying some piece of information that he didn’t like. And he was like, ‘You tell him this!’ I would say it in a more human way, and he would start screaming at me to say what he’d said: ‘Tell him he has the IQ of a plate or a baked potato,’ or ‘Tell him he’s brain-dead,’ trying to get me to channel his anger more.” —Assistant, 2002-03
This behavior violates the Social Recognition Principle, because society recognizes everyone as having an obligation to live up to the MAP (a key assumption of moral accounting). By encouraging disproportional behavior, he is imposing his own obligations that are in conflict with society’s. But this isn’t nearly as bad a violation as in the case of Harvey Weinstein case, who would act as if his assistants had an obligation to help him assault aspiring actors.
Before closing this post, we also need to ask: was Rudin himself being held accountable in a moral way. This seems to have happened eventually; in response to the NYMag story, his spokesperson stated:
Scott has acknowledged and apologized for the troubling office interactions that he has had with colleagues over the years, and has announced that he is stepping back from his professional work, so that he can do the proper work to address these issues.
But this ‘pause’ has been a loooong time in coming. It’s not too surprising that people had trouble governing the behavior of someone who has been so incredibly successful, and no doubt made a lot of money for the people who could have held him accountable. Some of them may have seen his poor accountability practices “as the idiosyncratic by-product of an eccentric man”, and maybe even rationalized his irritability as part of his success.
You could say this is all to be expected. But moral accounting aspires to more than we expect–we are trying to find changes that improve behavior. It’s hard to know what steps were taken early on, or could have been, because insiders haven’t spoken up much as far as I know. But that would be a great topic for a case study!