Stakeholders, Politicization, and Standing to Complain

This is part 2 of a five part series. For part 1, go here.

Background context: an institution accused of complicity in injustice counter-accuses its accusers of politicization and lack of standing.

Start with the politicization objection. The Stakeholders have two separate responses here. 

Responding to the politicization objection. First, they point out that it’s not clear that the politicization of a previously apolitical scene is necessarily objectionable. Productiveness, order, and justice are three separate values whose relative value is far from self-evident. Given this, it’s obviously not the case that the value of productiveness and order so outweigh justice as to trump it altogether.

Suppose that the demands of productiveness and justice come into conflict: if we engage in business-as-usual, let’s say, we commit an injustice, but if we pause to rectify the injustice, we disrupt business-as-usual. It’s hardly obvious that the loss of productivity entailed by a disruption of business-as-usual proves on its own that justice makes no claims on us. We can’t expect the demands of justice to be compatible with business as usual. They might not be.(1)

Granted, business-as-usual can’t be disrupted for every grievance, but once an injustice crosses a certain threshold, it seems plausible to think that we have a duty to tolerate disruption in proportion to the gravity of the injustice. To insist on business-as-usual in the face of severe injustice, particularly injustice to which one is making a contribution, is itself an injustice.

In any case, the relevant issue is what balance of goods is, all things considered, the right one. Which grievances regrettably have to be ignored as failing to meet a de minimis standard, and which demand a response, even at the risk of disruption to business-as-usual? This question is not answered simply by pointing at the trade-off between justice and justice-neutral productivity, and insisting on the latter. Nor is it answered by refusing engagement with all substantive moral issues. When values require balancing, someone actually has to go through the trouble of balancing them. That’s the whole point of administrative leadership. 

Second, even if we accept the basic premise of the politicization objection—that politicization is bad—we have to get the order of events right. Doing so requires that we distinguish initiatory acts of politicization from political responses to them. In this case, the prior politicizing act is the Institution’s having invested in various enterprises that facilitate or enable injustice, not the Stakeholders’ calling for divestment from them.

To belabor the obvious (but almost ubiquitously ignored): An investment in something is prior in time to a call for divestment from that thing, and the political character of an investment in injustice is at least on par with the political character of a call to divest from it. So it makes no sense to say that the Stakeholders have politicized a hitherto apolitical scene while ignoring the politicizations of the Institution. It’s the Institution that has politicized the situation by investing in unjust enterprises, suborning consent to its investments, and concealing them. The Stakeholders’ criticisms and demands are less a case of “politicization” than the rectification of the Institution’s sense of an entitlement to politicize while accusing others of doing so. 

In the relevant sense, investment in injustice is politicization; divestment from injustice is de-politicization. If de-politicization is really as valuable as its defenders claim, then the way to accomplish it is to stop investing in politically fraught enterprises, and to divest from politically fraught investments already made. To accuse the Stakeholders of politicization while ignoring the Institution’s prior politicization is to get the arrow of causation so grotesquely wrong as to invite accusations of bad faith. 

Cannon Green, Princeton University: the University shuts down Gaza Solidarity Encampment (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

Responding to the standing objection. Now consider the standing objection. In response to this objection, the Stakeholders respond that the Institution has construed standing too narrowly. As a narrowly legal matter, it’s true that shareholders, trustees, and executive officers have the final authority to make decisions about institutional operation, including investments.

But morally speaking, this restriction is highly questionable. Many parties besides the named ones are affected by an Institution’s investment decisions, and many are asked to contribute to the Institution’s workings. All moral agents and all human institutions have a pro tanto duty (and a corresponding moral right) to avoid complicity in injustice. If we suppose that the Institution really is complicit in injustice, then the Stakeholders are simply demanding adherence to the demands of justice: the Institution should cease its complicity in injustice, and cease demanding that others become entangled in this same complicity. 

Recall that what we have here, ex hypothesi, is a case in which the Institution really is complicit in (real) injustice. The issue we face, then, is not the problem of how to adjudicate between competing conceptions of injustice and complicity in it, but how to deal with the case in which it’s clear that injustice has taken place and clear that the Institution is complicit in it. In a case like this, the Institution is ex hypothesi guilty of a violation of justice, and is ex hypothesi demanding, in a further violation, that its members contribute to this same injustice. It may be controversial when this is happening in a given real-world case, but set that aside for now. The controversy at issue is what’s to be done when it clearly is happening. 

Given this, we can say two things about the issue of moral standing. First, the Institution’s argument is a red herring. It simply doesn’t matter that the Stakeholders lack legal standing to make decisions of internal governance for the Institution. What matters is that the Institution is either requesting or demanding that they facilitate or enable the Institution’s complicity in injustice.

Nor does it matter whether the Institution makes this request as a quid pro quo of membership, or in some other fashion. The request is simply illegitimate no matter how it’s made (or suborned). There is no moral right to request that someone become complicit in grievous injustice. The Stakeholders’ fundamental demand is to induce the Institution to recognize and respect this (moral) fact. No standing is required for that beyond a capacity for moral agency, and the Institution’s having made the request or demand of one of facilitating or enabling injustice. No claim of merely legal standing can supersede this more fundamental claim to moral standing. 

Second, ironically enough, the Institution’s claims about standing involve an exact inversion of moral reality. The Institution is ex hypothesi complicit in injustice, and of suborning further complicity. This is a double injustice. An institution guilty of two injustices of this variety has either forfeited whatever moral standing it might have had, or lacked moral standing in the first place. Such an institution certainly doesn’t have the moral standing to neutralize the Stakeholders’ moral standing to make a complaint against it. Arguably, the reverse is true: it’s the Institution that lacks the moral standing to make complaints against the Stakeholders. Hence invocations of legalities regarding Stakeholders’ lack of legal standing are beside the point.(2) 

For part 3 of the series, go here.

Endnotes

1. I’ll address the tension between rectificatory justice and business-as-usual in part 4 of this series.

2. I’ll discuss some of the literature on (i.e., critical of) stakeholder theory and related matters in part 5 of this series.