Complicity and the Strategy of Evasion

Imagine that an institution (“the Institution”) maintains a set of investments in various enterprises that make a clear and demonstrable contribution to some indisputable injustice. Now suppose that a set of stakeholders (“the Stakeholders”) objects to these investments, calling on the Institution to divulge the facts in a fuller way, and demanding divestment from the clearly objectionable investments. 

Put in argument form, the Stakeholders are saying something like this. Every one of us has a duty to avoid complicity in injustice. Given their nature, some of the Institution’s investments make it complicit in injustice. Given the Stakeholders’ contribution to the Institution’s aims, the Institution’s complicity in injustice makes the Stakeholders involuntarily complicit (or more precisely, involved in) in the same injustice. Since the Stakeholders have both a right and a duty to be free of complicity in injustice, and have a right to remain members of the Institution without having to alienate the preceding right, they have a right and duty to demand that the Institution free itself of complicity in injustice by divesting from its injustice-conducive investments. The Institution, in turn, has a duty to give an affirmative, truthful, non-evasive response to the Stakeholders’ challenge.

The Institution responds as follows. It begins by asserting an absolute right to the confidentiality of its financial dealings. From this it follows that it has no duty to divulge anything about its investments. Indeed, it continues, it has every right to conceal the nature of its investments, however evil they may be. Concealment (the Institution continues) is in fact its legal and fiduciary responsibility. 

The Institution thus refuses to address questions about the moral character of its investments; refuses to confirm or deny whether the Stakeholders’ charges are accurate; and refuses to discuss what the implications would be if the charges were accurate. It refuses to address the more general question of complicity as well. Questioned as to its institutional views on moral complicity, it avows agnosticism, directing questioners to institutional counsel and the institution’s public relations officer. These individuals, in turn, make canned statements that offer little or nothing in the way of answers to any question the Stakeholders had asked. Listeners are thus left in the dark as to whether the Institution is denying complicity in injustice, or denying that it accepts a duty to avoid complicity. The paradoxical impression is given that the Institution is saying both things at once. 

After suitably muddying the waters, the Institution then proceeds to the next part of its hybrid dismissal/response: it turns the tables on the Stakeholders by issuing two complaints against them.

For one thing, it asserts, the Stakeholders have impermissibly politicized what had previously been a scene of politically-neutral productivity and order. Given the anticipated detriment to the Institution, and the presumptive interest all members have in its benefit, this politicization seems ill-advised (the “politicization objection”).

Second, it asserts, the Stakeholders, not being shareholders, trustees, or executive officers of the Institution, lack legal standing to make any objection to the Institution’s internal operations. Lacking such standing, the Institution has no real reason to take them seriously, doing so only from a sense of magnanimity and noblesse oblige (the “standing objection”).

All things considered, the Institution implies, the Stakeholders are best advised to drop the matter and leave questions of internal governance to wiser and more experienced heads like themselves.

Momentarily caught off guard, the Stakeholders re-group to devise an answer. They begin by pointing out that the Institution’s “response” betrays a disturbing pattern of evasion. The Stakeholders’ original criticism was that the Institution is complicit in serious injustice, and that its institutional complicity in that injustice involuntarily entangles its members, the Stakeholders, in that same injustice. The Institution makes no pretense at addressing this question. On the contrary, it seems to be taking great moral pride in its unapologetic refusal to answer. 

Cannon Green, Princeton University (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

Why? On the one hand, the tone of the Institution’s response suggests that the Stakeholders’ criticisms are naive and juvenile. On the other hand, that very characterization would seem to suggest that the criticisms should be easily answered. Yet the Institution seems oddly unwilling to answer them. 

Regardless of the Institution’s publicly avowed reasons, its unwillingness to give an affirmative response might reasonably be thought to conceal an admission of guilt. If it’s discovered that an institution is invested in certain unjust enterprises, there seem a limited but clear set of direct responses to the accusation. Perhaps there are no such investments. Or perhaps there are, but the enterprises in question are not in fact unjust. The first proposition should be easy to prove. The second is harder to prove, but not hard to affirm. Proving the first and/or affirming the second seem preferable to evading both. Indeed, proving the second should not be beyond the capacities of a major institution. Yet the Institution prefers evasion to response. Surely the question arises: What legitimate purpose beyond a desire for sheer concealment would justify that procedure? 

Notice that the suspicion of concealment doesn’t come from out of nowhere. It’s the Institution itself that insists on concealment. The Institution claims a prerogative to conceal, and exercises it. Some things about internal operations no doubt must be concealed. But why is it operationally necessary to conceal facts relevant to determining the Institution’s complicity in some great injustice? That, in a sense, is the very suspicion that drives the Stakeholders’ demands for disclosure. It hadn’t occurred to them when they signed up at the Institution that they were, in that act, assuming the risk of being enrolled in the Institution’s ongoing project of complicity in massive injustice–a complicity apparently so ubiquitous and entrenched that the Institution can’t operate without it, yet so insidious and dishonest that the Institution can’t disclose its existence.

In failing to disclose the complicity-inducing nature of its investments at the point of consent, the Institution is guilty not just of complicity in injustice, but of a kind of fraud: it entangles others in injustice without ever telling them that it’s doing so, then uses their “consent” to this complicity as a reason for refusing to disclose the complicity itself. Frankly, the Stakeholders suggest, such an institution would seem to deserve a far harsher response than what the Stakeholders are in fact demanding. 

In any case, taken at face value, it seems reasonable to infer that the Institution values adherence to its internal bureaucratic processes more highly than the demands of justice, regardless of the relation of those processes to justice. Taken absolutely literally, this implies that if the Institution is invested in Totalitarianism, Inc., Genocide, Inc., and Torture, Inc., and has cleared any specifically legal hurdles in doing so, it’s fully entitled to invest in these enterprises without challenge by anyone. It’s likewise fully willing to accept complicity in the subjugation, killing, and torture of just as many people as will maximize its revenue stream, and fully willing to deceive others into this complicity, while pretending that they’ve “consented” to it. At best, dissenters are invited into an internal bureaucratic process ostensibly designed to respond to dissent. But if this internal process is actually designed to pacify or neutralize dissent, well, so be it, the Institution seems to be saying. The bad faith involved is part of the process.

The Stakeholders are willing to suggest that all of this is a reductio on its own, prior to and independently of having to answer the Institution’s further claims. The duty to avoid complicity is a real obligation, a moral fact. It can’t be wished away by bureaucratic circumlocutions. Isn’t that what we learned from the trial and conviction of Adolph Eichmann? Eichmann-like compartmentalization can’t legitimately be the price of any form of “institutional advancement” worth having. But this is what the Institution self-righteously seems to be seeking, suborning, and rationalizing. 

The Stakeholders reject the Institution’s further claims as well. I’ll discuss that in part 2 of this series.