Rectificatory Justice and/vs. Business-as-Usual

This is part 4 of a five part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here.

In part 2 of my post, “Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity,” I discussed the common objection that activist demands for rectificatory justice like divestment are objectionable because they disrupt business-as-usual. As I say there, I don’t think disrupting business-as-usual is necessarily objectionable. If business-as-usual is sufficiently unjust, then a continuation of business-as-usual is just a perpetuation of some terrible injustice. We can reasonably argue about the threshold that must be crossed before it’s reasonable for an injustice to disrupt business as usual, or argue about the kind of causal contribution that a given institution has to make before it can be regarded as complicit in injustice. But absent such a discussion, pleas to continue business-as-usual should not strike anyone as persuasive. They should be regarded as rationalizations for moral complacency, and dismissed as such.

That said, there is something potentially misleading about the contrast between rectificatory justice and business-as-usual. Critics often insinuate that a campaign of rectificatory justice is bound to affect an institution’s daily operations in some dramatically adverse way that overturns whatever good is being done there. The issue is then cast as though we faced some excruciating trade-off between preserving the regrettably imperfect good that the institution is doing right now, and wrecking the institution in the name of some ill-conceived utopian project. The latter is then glossed as wrecking the institution without discernible reason.

Our choice then becomes: should we continue with the status quo, preserving the regrettably imperfect good that the institution is doing right now, or wreck it without discernible reason? Since it’s absurd to wreck an institution without discernible reason, we’re pushed by the structure of the choice into maintaining the status quo. Since maintaining the status quo is incompatible with rectificatory justice, rectificatory justice gets what appears to be a self-evident veto. And so, we move on. So much for justice! 

Such arguments ignore the obvious alternative. A sufficiently wealthy institution can set aside resources for rectifying injustice, and can do so without interfering greatly with daily operations. Doing so is technically speaking a departure from business-as-usual, but really not the big deal that’s often made of it. It may require trade-offs, but it doesn’t necessarily require any great disruptions to business-as-usual. And of course, it better realizes justice, which the status quo ex hypothesi fails to do. 

Every major corporation has a department of regulatory compliance as well as house counsel dedicated to handling or pre-empting litigation. Until recently, many had diversity offices and officers intended to promote policies of affirmative action. Less controversially, most large corporations have reporting divisions that make no direct contribution to revenue generation, but simply report on the productive efforts of other units of the corporation. It’s not credible to say that the sheer existence and operation of such departments subverts the operations of, say, a major corporation. 

Consider in this context the most modest of the Stakeholders’ demands in the scenario that structured my post: disclosure of the nature of the Institution’s investments. Disclosure is a mere reporting requirement. This particular demand can easily be met in a manner that’s perfectly consistent with the operations of, say, a major university. It’s a matter of access, not of labor-hours or tricky logistics. Doing so would at most take a few days’ work by a a data analyst or two in the reporting division of the university’s investment vehicle.  As a business analyst myself (who’s worked in corporate quality assurance/regulatory compliance as well), I do research of this kind just about every day. My salary amounts to $23/hr, call it $30/hr if we want to monetize my benefits. 

Imagine that a university receives a demand to disclose the nature of its investments relative to a particularly objectionable type of investment. A university genuinely interested in disclosing the nature of its investments might assign the task of tracking its investments to a single data analyst, who might (very generously) spend a whole workweek on it. $30 x 40 hours = $1,200. If we insist on adding opportunity costs to the figure, we might call the overall expenditure $2,400. Feel free to round up and throw another $600 in there for fun. Call me crazy, but an institution with a $34 billion endowment should be able to spend either $1,200, $2,400, or even a whopping $3,000 on the rectification of an injustice involving complicity in genocide. If it refuses, it refuses because it prefers concealment to disclosure, not because $3,000 breaks the bank. If so, the imperative of concealment should be our focus, not the fake “disruption” that would arise by satisfying the demand for disclosure. 

Nassau Hall, Princeton University (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

Granted, the Stakeholders’ larger, more challenging demands would of course require more in the way of resources, but even here, there’s nothing that would bring the operations of any large-scale institution to a halt or even slow it down very much. Put it this way. Either the Institution’s contribution to injustice is relatively marginal, or it’s more than merely marginal. If the contribution is marginal, then divestment may involve some marginal trade-offs but will not involve so large a loss of revenue as substantially to threaten the overall operations of the Institution itself. 

This, I take it, is what most of us take to be the case. If so, the issue of divestment is, in a university context, operationally on par with many of the other responsibilities assigned to a Board of Trustees and delegated to a branch of administration.(1) Any Board of Trustees is tasked with guarding the fiscal integrity of the institution, for instance, ensuring the Institution’s adherence to “fund accounting rules” in the management of its finances, maintaining revenue diversity, scrutinizing expense/financial aid ratios, debt ratios, liquidity ratios, and so on.

The moral status of an investment should simply be seen as a constraint on the investment process and integrated into it, even if doing so threatens the loss of some revenue. Complicity in injustice can’t be monetized, but constitutes a real cost, arguably a much higher cost than the opportunity costs of lost revenue. So the task of avoiding it has to be institutionalized, in just the way that the avoidance of other financial risks is institutionalized.

Operationally, this may involve an increase in administrative costs. Financially, it may involve a loss of revenue. Practically, it may involve some painful trade-offs. But increases in administrative costs, losses in revenue, and trade-offs are business as usual. They’re not some revolutionary alternative to it. The avoidance of complicity in injustice is only a total disruption of business-as-usual if we treat it ipso facto as a form of Jacobinism that can’t possibly be institutionalized in any orderly way. This is how administrators often describe activist demands, but such descriptions are tendentious and self-serving. 

There is thus a sense in which the “disruption” scenario discussed in the text is fanciful to the point of being preposterous. In a realistic sense, the Stakeholders’ demands could easily become (and should become) business-as-usual. 

Suppose, by contrast, that it turns out that the Institution’s contribution to some serious injustice is more than merely marginal–so large that its subtraction would threaten operational functioning. If so, we reach the flabbergasting conclusion that the Institution has, all this time, been thriving on severe, even bestial, injustice. If this turns out to be the case, we have to wonder about the brazen shamelessness of those who would insist that we take no action for fear of disrupting the Institution’s daily operations.

What these people are telling us, by implication, is that we dare not discover the degree of the Institution’s complicity in bestial injustice for fear of discovering that the Institution’s very existence depends on this complicity, and that the discovery would require corrective action. It’s as though one were told not to look too closely at an institution’s reliance on theft, lest we discovered that most of its assets was stolen, and would have to be returned. I admit that that would disrupt business-as-usual, but only because business-as-usual turned out to be a criminal enterprise.

At any rate, any institution that wants to claim that a demand for divestment from injustice would wreck the institution or gut its endowment is free to produce the numbers to prove that. But what such institutions really seem to be saying is that they refuse to contemplate any trade-offs of revenue for justice. In other words, as far as they’re concerned, a commitment to injustice is part of the institution’s Standard Operating Procedures; justice only has value to them if it makes them richer, otherwise not. Such an attitude is basically an engraved invitation to any disruption of the Institution that the Stakeholders can dream up. An institution of this kind can’t legitimately complain when Stakeholders break its rules or show disrespect for its executive leadership. The Institution has at this point forfeited any entitlement to respect. And it should, without complaint, expect whatever disrespect is forthcoming. 

For part 5 of this series, go here.

Endnote

1. See the helpful discussion in Robert A. Scott, How University Boards Work: A Guide for Trustees, Leaders, and Officers in Higher Education, chap. 2, particularly pp. 49-52. Unfortunately, Scott’s discussion of divestment is notably weak and superficial (pp. 51-52).