So far, most cases have been mercifully unambiguous
Fairness should be strived toward, and seems to be
Ilike to think I am as defensive and obtuse as your average straight white male, with a healthy dollop of paranoid libertarianism for good measure.
So ever since the #metoo thing arose I have been waiting for the promised descent into excess, the feminist reign of terror wherein perfectly decent chaps are hauled off for the kinds of minor indiscretions — the misconstrued remark, the harmless flirtation, the moment of madness in an otherwise blameless life — of which anyone might be guilty. I am still waiting.
With perhaps one or two exceptions, all of the cases of which I have read have been mercifully unambiguous.
The stories emerge not from the shadows of the dark web, but from meticulous reporting in mainstream news outlets. There are, almost invariably, not one but multiple accusers, unrelated to each other, who in most cases told someone about it at the time; the behaviour alleged is not debatable or borderline, but of a kind nearly everyone could agree was way over the line. And, as one has learned, where there is room for doubt, it is best to wait: the first-day story is almost never the end of it.
Such is the case, at least, with Patrick Brown. If both his caucus and his closest advisers were so quick to break with him, scant hours after the CTV broadcast that brought him down, it may be because they found the allegations, strenuously though he denies them, both credible and, shall we say, unsurprising. Certainly there were rumours, and certainly at least some of his people knew of them, though I doubt anyone knew how serious the actual allegations would prove to be.
Still, I wonder if we know exactly where we are going with all this. Are we comfortable that careers should end, names be blackened, all but instantaneously, on the basis of unproven and in some cases anonymous accusations? If the allegations that have surfaced to date have generally seemed credible, that does not mean every future allegation must necessarily be, especially where politics are involved. We are making it up as we go along here, and I’m not sure any of us have worked out what to do when the situations are not so clear-cut.
It is true, as others have said, that the presumption of innocence is a legal concept, not necessarily applicable in other walks of life. The courts are properly required to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before convicting someone of a crime, but that does not mean the rest of us cannot form reasoned inferences from the evidence available to us. The proper course, in the face of uncertainty, is not always to suspend judgment, but to apply it.
No one is guaranteed, after all, the right to lead a political party; leaders are commonly toppled for all sorts of reasons, without the faintest hint of due process. If only as a matter of political calculation, the notion that the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario could campaign for election, in 2018, under a leader accused of making unwanted sexual advances on drunken teenagers, one of them his employee, was obviously unthinkable.
And if it was unthinkable, best that he be removed as quickly as possible. The contrast between Brown’s fate and Roy Moore’s is striking, and to the relative credit of his party and our political system, though that is admittedly a low bar.
But if “beyond a reasonable doubt” need not be the standard, what should?
Maybe we are not obliged, in the court of public opinion, to apply legal standards of proof, but we are still obliged to be fair. A person’s liberty may not be at stake, but jobs, reputations, and relationships are.
Some of the more enthusiastic #metoo activists have pronounced themselves untroubled by the thought of an innocent man being falsely accused: payback, they say, for all the women who have been victims of real crimes that went unpunished.
But human beings are not averages. They do not live their lives in the aggregate, but one at a time. To answer one injustice with another does not cancel the first but compounds it.
It cannot be, as the prime minister unhelpfully suggested, that we should “believe all allegations,” merely for having been made. Rather, we should believe credible allegations.
Indeed, we do not have to wholly subscribe to either possibility, to believe or disbelieve with 100-per-cent conviction. If we are unable to draw a firm conclusion one way or the other, that does not mean simply throwing our hands up in the air. Most judgments are a matter of probabilities. We can say that one story is more likely than another.
How to judge? As always, context is crucial. Again: is there more than one accuser? Did they tell anyone at the time? How detailed are the accusations? What reason would they have to lie, and how likely are they to be mistaken? An accusation may of course be true independent all of these, but our confidence in it will be the greater.
We are, it is said, in a moment of reckoning. That is to the good. If there have seemed to be an avalanche of such allegations of late, that is not necessarily evidence of a “witch hunt” or “lynch mob.” It may simply be because there has been a great deal of misconduct hitherto unreported: not misheard signals, or clumsy come-ons, but vile and seemingly chronic abuse of power. If those responsible are now being held to account, so be it.
But to be an accuser at this time comes with its own sort of power. And all power is open to abuse.