#456: Denouncing Wrongdoing
What to do when fraternal correction fails
Few questions are as nettlesome as those surrounding fraternal correction. When a friend does something wrong, it is hard to know how to respond: will intervening cause them to become defensive and so solidify them in their wrongdoing, or will it cause them to repent? What are the conditions under which fraternal correction is necessary, much less wise? Friends and family members might have obligations to call each other to account—but what about co-workers or neighbors, or social media acquaintances? How should the one who is going to fraternally correct another prepare themselves, so that they are not entangled in the spiritual hazards of making another’s wrongdoing known to them?
At the same time, a community cannot flourish for long without embodying a culture of fraternal correction. Institutional mechanisms of justice are incapable of dealing with every type of wrongdoing. Even if they were, we would not want to so burden them with the types of wrongs that do not require police or the quasi-police structures that Human Resources departments increasingly provide. The absence of fraternal correction allows low-grade vice to go on in ways that, over time, will prove corrosive to the institutions and communities that abide it.
If you will suffer me a sweeping generalization, Americans are not especially prone to meddle in each other’s business. Unless the wrong we observe is especially acute, most of us are inclined to gossip about it to our neighbor rather than address it with the wrongdoer. One ought not become a busy-body, who is hunting for ways to correct the people around them—a kind of quidnunc, which is an archaic but arresting word. Yet the surest way to avoid doing so is to undertake a real, intentional effort to call someone to repentance. It is an extremely unpleasant task, which makes us less inclined to hunt out evils that are not our business to know. Gossip can be an extraordinarily cowardly way of undertaking social control, as it allows us to pass judgments on each other without bearing the burdens of confronting them for their sin. Even in the rare cases where gossip is appropriate, it should only be undertaken with a complete willingness to tell the wrongdoer about their sins to their face should occasion arise or make doing so necessary.
Sometimes, though, fraternal correction itself is not enough. We might confront our friend with their wrongdoing, only to discover they callously do not care. What then?
This is the kind of case Kwame Anthony Appiah took up recently tin his ethics column at the New York Times. Wealthy people fraudulently secured their son a free ride to college, by having a poor step-mother claim him on their taxes. Their friend wants to know what she should do.
As Appiah notes, the fraud harms third-parties: colleges often have a fixed amount of aid, which means this student took money that another student in real need might have secured. Appiah sanctions both the friend’s indignation and resentment, as being told about the fraud implies they thought she would sanction it. He rightly proposes that she confront her friend and tell her their scheme “is abhorrent, as well as unlawful, and that they shouldn’t do it next year.”
Yet he declines to endorse exposing the scheme, but proposes that the woman should sever her friendship. As he notes, it might bring fines, jail time, and the child’s expulsion from college. “So your friend,” he suggests, “her husband, her son and the stepmother would all be exposed, potentially, to life-upending sanctions.” While those penalties might be just, he suggests they are a “very substantial burden to lay on a friend on the basis of information she supplied because she trusted you.” We ought not be too meddlesome, it turns out: “We can be appalled by behavior without wanting to be the ones to police it, and I expect that’s where you come out.” His conclusion? “Maybe this isn’t a friendship worth holding onto.”
Now, perhaps this is right. The obligation to expose wrongdoers might not extend to rectifying harms that are already committed, as they would to ensuring that people in danger of being harmed by the wrongdoer are protected.
In such a case, though, fraternal correction would likely be more successful if the threat of exposure was meaningfully on the table. Imagine a friend saying that they take the fraud so seriously that they will call the college in a month to expose it, which gives their friend the chance to do so “voluntarily” in advance. The burdens of punishment are often mitigated when people preemptively confess their wrongdoing. Without the possibility of denunciation, the friends have no real incentive to repent besides an intrinsic love of integrity or honesty. As that is what they have already rejected, appealing to it alone seems like it would hardly be successful. (The friend could also make repentance a condition for friendship, which would be an appeal to something beyond integrity—but the threat of exposure brings penalties that directly counteract the reason for the fraud—$$$—in ways that I suspect would make repentance more likely.)
One consideration might be whether the child knows about the scheme. While we ought not assume their complicity, we should also not necessarily rule it out. In the case of USC’s admissions fraud, many of the children knew the game and were willing to play it. Which, to my mind, offers a reason to expose the wrongdoing, rather than cover it up: nothing good can come from teaching the children of wealth that they can flout the rules without penalty.
Is such a stance too moralistic, too legalistic? Should we simply not expose wrongdoing of this sort? Maybe. My confidence level for the above is not terribly high. If anything, it highlights the need for more careful attention to the conditions under which we should denounce wrongdoing when our attempts to correct it privately fail.
Around the Web
I mentioned this already for full members, but my forthcoming book on questioning and faith is now available for pre-order on Amazon. If you are confused because I already wrote one such book, this is a very thorough rewrite of The End of Our Exploring. More on this later this summer.
This is a very good essay by Ryan Anderson on the abortion debate. I appreciate the endorsement of incrementalism, and hope that the pro-life political apparatus listens.
Speaking of abortion: I have a new philosophical essay out on why the problem of embryo death does not undermine the pro-life position. As a bonus, it considers why pro-lifers will likely reject artificial wombs as a solution to the abortion debate, and why we should not punish women who seek abortions. It is an academic argument but, I hope, readable.
First they came for Roald Dahl, and now they are rewriting Jeeves and Wooster.
I enjoyed this from Michael Sacacas on ‘apocalyptic AI.’
Raise your hand if you have heard of the Evangelical Outpost. My friend Joe Carter is reviving ‘33 Things,’ which a decade ago was one of the most entertaining and eclectic gatherings of arcana and insight on the internet. Joe is a terrific curator, who made listicles cool before Buzzfeed existed.
The Penultimate Word
“Now what is mercy, and in regard to what is it practised? And how 1s he blessed to whom is returned what he gives? For He says, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. The obvious meaning of the words calls men to mutual charity and sympathy, which are demanded by the capricious inequality of the circumstances of life; for all live not in the same conditions, neither as regards reputation nor physical constitution nor other assets. Life is in many ways divided up into opposites, since it may be spent as slave or as master, in riches or poverty, in fame or dishonour, in bodily infirmity or in good health—in all such things there is division.
Therefore the creature in need should be made equal to the one who has a larger share, and that which goes short should be filled by what has abundance; this is the law mercy gives men in regard to the needy. For unless mercy soften the soul, man cannot arrive at healing the ills of his neighbour, since mercy is defined as the opposite of cruelty. The hard and cruel man is inaccessible to those who would approach him; whereas the merciful person is, as it were, predisposed by his attitude to give the sympathy that is needed, so that he can become to the afflicted exactly what the distressed mind is looking for.
To sum up the explanation in a definition: Mercy is a voluntary sorrow that joins itself to the sufferings of others.” — Gregory of Nyssa