Turned Around

I’ve related the story before about growing up Roman Catholic, and eventually drifting away from that over the understanding that Satan wasn’t real. One of the side effects of coming to the conclusion that supernatural Evil wasn’t real was questioning its more mundane counterpart, and an arrival at an agreement with Socrates’ belief that no person, knowing good, willingly does evil. And that brings us to this:

I don’t believe that people who understand justice willingly turn a blind eye to injustice, either. And so for me, aphorisms like this encourage people to see themselves as unsafe in situations in which there are differing definitions, or understandings, of justice and injustice, because underlying this is are a number of assumptions. And because this is a two-sentence aphorism, rather than a detailed philosophical examination of theories of justice, there isn't room to surface those assumptions.

But even if we take a very simple definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and consider justice to be “what we owe to each other,” it’s not a given that every person has the same understanding of what every other person is owed, and who owes them. Or, perhaps more importantly, whose claims to being owed something come first. For instance, what does it mean to tolerate misconduct, for instance? When I was a freshman in college, it was understood that being a football player came with certain privileges... like the ability to strike another student without being expelled. Looking back on that earlier post, I realize that I said that the player was never disciplined... but I don’t know that they weren’t, simply that it had been communicated to the student body as a whole that assault was grounds for expulsion, and the football player wasn’t expelled. Was this the college “turning a blind eye to injustice,” or deciding that it owed someone else more than it owed the student who the football player had struck? With the benefit of several decades of hindsight, I’ve come to suspect the latter. And the problem with the school, therefore, isn’t that it failed to live up to it’s conception of justice, it’s that the idea of justice it presented to the students was simplified to the point of being inaccurate.

And this is, in part, I suspect, due to not wanting to openly deal with the disagreements over the definitions that it would have caused. Because it’s easy for people do decide that a school should prioritize the rights of the general student body over the football program; making the case that the school’s dependence on that program should be allowed to manifest itself as an openly different set of rules is more difficult. And I suspect that the school didn't see anything unjust in avoiding that disagreement.

I will stand by by understanding that the school felt that it owed someone else more than it owed the student that the football player had assaulted, although I realize the disadvantage I place myself at in not being able to offer any sort of informed opinion of who that other party might be. This is the danger in taking what may look like a cut-and-dried case of injustice, and arguing that there’s more to it than meets the eye.

But still, I make the case that the school did not willingly ignore its obligation to the students as a whole; instead, its obligations were structured in such a way that maintaining the football team was the most important consideration that it faced from that incident.

But since safety is also a concern here, that should be addressed. I left after that freshman year, not over the school’s revealed preference for the football program over other considerations, but because I felt that the academics were garbage, and if I was going to have to suffer through three more years of education, it may as well have been a decent one. For me, it wasn’t a matter of justice; it was that, even on a scholarship, the place didn’t seem to be worth the money.

But I would say that students would be correct in feeling unsafe about the school’s behavior. Not because the school was willing to ignore open injustice, but because it wasn’t willing (or able) to be open and honest about what its understanding of justice actually was. And so to return to the graphic, safety shouldn’t depend on aligned definitions of injustice, but it does depend on known definitions of injustice. It’s like due process of law in a legal setting. A person who goes into a situation with the understanding that their lived experience of an event is going to carry the most weight is unsafe, because their misconception of the hierarchy of obligations will lead them astray.

And in this, the habit of conflict avoidance that “obvious” instances of injustice tend to create works against society as a whole. Concealing, rather than owning, differences with the mainstream over what people are owed creates active misunderstandings of what people should expect. And that is where the danger lies, even though it’s often not what people are told to be on the lookout for. To go back to my college example, the student was let down, not by the school tolerating misconduct, but by not being clear on what constituted misconduct, and that it differed for different students, in the first place. That knowledge would have allowed her, and all of us, really, to make more informed choices concerning education.

P.S.: I never found out if the student who had been assaulted went to the police and sought a legal remedy against the player who struck her. If she did, nothing came of it, for one reason or another.