More on Conscience at the Cash Register

Last week I noted the controversy over the Muslim cashiers at Target who refused to handle customers' pork purchases.  (They have since been reassigned by the company.)  I asserted that "it would be hard to discern an institutional mission that rises or falls on the requirement that cashiers handle all products."

Antonio Manetti responds:

It's actually not that hard. The act of refusing to touch pork products thus forcing the customer to scan the item herself or call another clerk to do so can be taken by the customer as annoying at best and offensive at worst implication being that contact with 'unclean' food makes one unclean). I wonder how a customer might feel when the checkout clerk effectively proclaims that repugnance to everyone within earshot.

Also, when I go to the store, I don't expect to be subjected to gratuitous moral judgments from checkout clerks. In my opinion, the desire to avoid needlessly annoying or offending customers is a legitimate part of the stores' 'institutional mission'.

I agree that a store could reasonably conclude that customer sentiment weighs in favor of not permitting the objecting Muslims to remain as cashiers.  But in my view, something more than that is required if we're serious about honoring conscience.  (Let's assume for the moment that there aren't other available positions in the company, so the choice is between accommodating the cashiers as cashiers or terminating them.)  When I argue that employers should be empowered to maintain their own moral identities, I contemplate particular moral claims being made by the employer.  I do not mean that an employer should be able to overcome the employee's own moral claims by constructing a moral identity defined only by the negation of the employee's claims.  In other words, if Target wants to define itself as the anti-vegetarianism store (just as some pharmacies have defined themselves in pro-life terms), then talking about institutional mission -- in the way I mean it -- seems appropriate when dealing with these objecting cashiers.  But if the employer's institutional identity consists only of a requirement that cashiers handle all products, that seems akin to identity-by-negation, rather than one grounded in any affirmative claim of moral truth.  There is, of course, a moral dimension to the claim "we value our customer's ability to make their own purchase decisions," but it is so sweeping as to preclude any product-related request for accommodation by the cashier.  I want a person's conscience to be taken seriously in the marketplace; I just want to make sure that institutions still have the ability to function as venues for the common articulation and pursuit of conscience.  I am skeptical that customer autonomy should be sufficient to serve as a categorical trump of contrary moral claims.

Nothing that I've said suggests that employers are helpless to take action if the number of cashiers objecting to certain products becomes so high that accommodation would cause an undue hardship to the employer.  Target is dealing with a relatively small number of objecting cashiers, a single product, and a large pool of non-objecting cashiers who could scan the product without significant disruption to the business.  If this becomes a bigger problem, the analysis could change.

I'm still thinking my way through all this, so I welcome other perspectives on these questions.