The problem is that the firing should have been done as the issues were discovered / brought to light. Waiting to fire perpetrators until after a critical mass of media scrutiny forces you to do so only reveals uber's true motives. Clearly they don't give a shit about actual sexual harrassment, they just want to preserve whatever perceived image they have to the rest of the world (not that an anti-competitive contract-slave-labor company ever had a great image to begin with).

> Clearly they don't give a shit about actual sexual harrassment, they just want to preserve whatever perceived image they have to the rest of the world

You may be right.

But I don't think policing peoples intentions is a good plan for us. It has all kinds of problems, the main one being intentions are generally pretty unknowable. The other one being intentions don't actually cause any harm, so by policing intentions you take away resources from policing harm.

I think a much better plan is to be very serious about what constitutes right action and wrong action for you, to reward right action and to punish wrong action.

Here's what I suspect the problem is for you: I'm going to guess (and this is just a guess, feel free to correct me) that you do a lot of harmful things, by virtue of your position in society, ecology, and the global economy, but that you've forgiven yourself for these things because you believe your intentions are good, and you're doing the best you can.

This is the dominant moral framework today, so I'm not judging you for it. But I have a different moral framework: I think you are responsible primarily for the harm you case, not your intentions. I would rather you be a harmless person with horrible intentions than a harmful person with good intentions.

But I think for you to transition to that worldview, you'd have to face up to your own ongoing unintentioned harm, which would be extremely painful. So there's a lot of pressure on you not to do that.

Apologies for all of the projection/presumption. I don't actually presume to know any of these things about you, I'm really talking about two versions of myself and just casually speculating about where you might fit into that dichotomy. Again, feel free to say "that ain't me".

There is no "policing" of intentions here -- just considering them. We should be careful of those who behave well, merely in response to punishment or in avoidance of it.

The relationship between intentions and actions is rarely so distant as in the example you give -- "I would rather you be a harmless person with horrible intentions than a harmful person with good intentions.". Indeed, I don't know how we would recognize the notion of intention -- thought preceding action -- if they had so little relationship to action.

The importance of intention is nowhere clearer than in the law, where to "knowingly and wittingly" body slam another person is handled quite differently from tripping and falling into them, or slamming into them to push them out of the way of a car and yet inadvertently pushing them into a wall.

I don't think people are literally criticizing Uber for doing this investigation; I think they're just skeptical that it represents a real change of heart on the part of upper management including Kalanick. Until there's been a substantial period of time over which the change in behavior has been clear and consistent, I think that skepticism is warranted.

The criticism is largely because there's no transparency into it. Yes, the proper course of action when you have a harassment problem is to fire people, but you also have to fire the right people. Firing those who commit the harassment is one part, but you also need to fire those who cover up and permit the harassment to happen. We also don't know how high up the people who were fired are. If they only fired a handful of junior engineers, that's not going to help.

People who have decided they dislike uber are unlikely to ever decide to like them again. Firing 20+ people who have sexually harassed other employees is objectively a good thing for a company to do.