One of the reasons addressing harm is so difficult, at least in my corner of the United States, is that the frameworks I grew up with for addressing harm fail both parts of what I call the “Doctrine of Limited Consequences.” This states:
“It is important for people to experience the consequences of their actions, AND those consequences have limits.”
It is true that human beings learn from experiencing the consequences of their actions. We try something, look around at the reaction we get, and decide based on that whether to do it again. This isn’t a perfect process. Feedback is often inconsistent, someone may not have the ability to act differently, it make take time to break or develop a habit, etc. But feedback, both social and by observing the physical consequences of our decisions, is one of the main mechanisms by which human beings learn. This is most obvious in children, who are busy learning that being mean to someone results in them not want to play with you (a natural consequence) or that trying to paint the cat results in having to clean the living room (a logical consequence) and scratches (a natural consequence) or that being kind to others results in smiles and praise that feel good (a natural consequence).
What often gets lost in discussion of consequences, however, is that there are and should be limits. No matter how rebellious a teenager is, dying in a car crash is not an appropriate consequence. There are certain outcomes that no one deserves and that everyone should be protected from regardless of what they have done. This includes death, permanent injury, lack of basic necessities, denial of medical care, unwanted sexual contact, etc. These things may well happen – we live in an imperfect world – but they are never deserved, and when they happen it is a failure on the part of society that we were unable to prevent it. Visually, we can think of those limits like this:
There may be disagreement on where exactly those limits are and what should and should not out of bounds, but in a healthy society some sort of limits should exist, and they should be consistent for everyone.
Unfortunately, the United States exists in the context of hundreds of years of determined effort to create and justify highly exploitative systems. Whether in the context of slavery or factory work or mining or prison labor, humans have created powerful stories and rationalizations for why it’s okay to break and use up the bodies of their fellow human beings in order to allow a few people to hoard wealth and power. A powerful tool in this attempt has been narratives about “deservingness.” Often based on race, gender, ability, “deviance,” or criminality, these narratives divide a common humanity into one group for whom there are no boundaries on what negative consequences can be justified and another group for whom the range of negative consequences that can be “deserved” is almost nonexistent.
This is often most visible in the context of race. In policy debates, once basic necessities like housing, food, healthcare, not being shot, or not being kidnapped become racialized, they cease to be human rights and become conditional. It is considered “within bounds” to take them away if those receiving them are “lazy,” “criminal,” imperfect, or insufficiently grateful and deferential. In contrast, the window of acceptable social consequences for someone who is perpetuating a racial harm is often extremely narrow. Even as minimal of a consequence as the person being harmed failing to provide affirmation to the person who is actively harming them is commonly considered out of bounds. The controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel for the national anthem in order to draw attention to police violence is instructive. For many white people, a silent, public expression of grief that made them uncomfortable was out of bounds. Black people being killed by the police was not.
This pattern is hardly surprising given that much of the narrative about who deserves what developed specifically in order to justify vastly different treatment of slaves versus their masters. Setting different boundaries for what is “beyond the pale” creates a mechanism that gives a veneer of equality and justice to situations that are, at there core, unjust. After all, if you transgress against me in a way that violates the boundary of what I could possibly deserve, then surely it is my right to retaliate? I will even show restraint and stay with in the boundary of what someone like you could deserve. But if a transgression against me means “someone talked back to me” and nothing up to and including cutting off your hand counts as a transgression against you, then the result is terrible.
Slavery is an extreme example, but versions of this bifurcation occur regularly. The key is to watch for imbalances in terms of which harms are taken seriously and/or seen as deserved, and under what conditions those imbalances occur. The discussion above gave an example specific to one dimension of identity, but exploitative systems are not a layer cake with a single group on top and a single group on the bottom. Rather, they are flexible pyramids whose purpose is to concentrate as much wealth as possible in the hands of as few people as can be gotten away with without the whole thing becoming unstable. The more different ways there are to create hierarchy in terms of who is said to deserve what (race, gender, caste, merit, criminality, deviance, immaturity, etc.), the more likely it is that any given person will be tempted to wield one of those divisions against their fellows and, in doing so, will reinforce the system that traps everyone.
On a micro scale, this phenomenon has significant implications for attempts to implement negative consequences as a way respond to harm. The key feature of the boundary between which consequences can be deserved and which cannot is a deep seated psychological feeling of injustice when that boundary is crossed. The closer a potentially deserved consequence gets to this line, the more concern and hesitation there will be about implementing it, and the more safeguards will get put in place to make sure it only happens to someone who “really deserves it.” Think about a consequence like imprisonment. Sending someone to prison who didn’t deserve it is widely recognized as a grave injustice because of the harm it causes, and the U.S. justice system is set up to put the bulk of its time and effort into attempting to determine whether the person accused is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” before imprisoning them. This slows down the speed of implementing consequences and reduces the likelihood that they will be implemented at all. The risk of doing unjustified harm rises with the severity of the consequence, so how certain one needs to be before bringing down the hammer rises as well.
What this means is that increasing the severity of consequences may make it less likely that those with higher social status get held accountable at all. As the severity of the consequence moves closer to the boundary of what is considered to be never deserved, there will be greater and greater hesitation to pull the trigger, and it is more likely that it won’t happen. To the extent that imposing a severe consequence is held up as the only just or righteous option if a harm has been committed, people who are unwilling to implement that consequence commonly resolve their cognitive dissonance by refusing to acknowledge that a harm occurred at all. This is incredibly frustrating for the people being harmed, as often what they need does not require the perpetrator to be hurt. They simply want the harm to stop. Yet even simple acknowledgement and a willingness to try to help figure out what can be done is too often blocked by fear that taking that first step will inevitably lead to a place that the person who could intervene refuses to go. In this way, increasing the severity of consequences can shield more people by pushing the only “thing that can be done” far enough out that be will refuse to use it on them.
Paradoxically, being able to intervene effectively when harm is being done sometimes requires not harsher consequences, but rather doubling down on minor ones. The smaller and more robust to error a consequence is, the more likely it is that the right people will feel comfortable enough to repeat it consistently often enough for it to get through. A person’s friend doesn’t need to have everything figured out and get on a moral high horse to greet a disturbing comment with, “wait, could you repeat that?” or any of the numerous phrases lifted up in bystander training. A kid who tries out being mean only to be met with an expression of minor disapproval from every single friend they try it out on stops the behavior very quickly. Consequences do not need to be large to have an impact. In fact, most of our learning takes place via attending to and responding to small pieces of feedback and minor consequences. The key is consistency and that the consequences are delivered by the right people.
The challenge comes when the window of acceptable consequences has closed so much that even minor expressions of disapproval is beyond the pale. When this is the case, the first key step is to start by norming around the fact that deserved consequences do exist. That when I say something hurtful, someone else saying “that was hurtful” is an appropriate consequence that does not deserve retaliation. Similarly, finding out that someone has a lower opinion of me than I do of myself is an interaction of my behavior and whatever’s going on with them, and I don’t have a right to their good opinion. Being called racist, whether the person is correct or not, is not a violation of human rights.
There is undeniable complexity in sorting out what true fairness looks like, complexity that is amplified by the way that the impact of an action changes based on how often it repeats and how many people do it. Furthermore, the process of negotiating boundaries on how it is acceptable to treat each other and how it is not is often weaponized to close off any possibility of higher status people getting feedback and to shift the burden of dealing with the fallout of bad behavior onto people lower down in the social hierarchy. Sorting these things out certainly requires people to attend to the ways that boundary setting has been weaponized, but it is very much possible to do, at least as long as people bring their social brains to the task. And when we choose to do so, we do our part to create a world where we don’t have to twist ourselves into knots to justify the unjustifiable. We heal ourselves into a world where we can connect as human beings without being warped by systems of exploitation. We work toward a world where everyone can thrive.
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