Most communities – even small ones — have a few larger institutions, and Whitewater is no exception.
The measure of those institutions is not how they protect their leaders’ reputations, but how they support and nurture the many individuals, separate and distinct, of which they are formed. This is true even when those individuals meet with misfortune.
Corrupt or selfish institutions will cast aside a few, supposedly for a greater community good. Every institution confronts this temptation, and deficient ones succumb to it: Do the financial and reputational needs of leaders, expressed manipulatively as a concern for all, justify the sacrifice of a few ordinary individuals?
Most church scandals, and workplace or educational cases of abuse, begin with this impulse. It’s a kind of utilitarianism – an act utilitarianism – that attempts to justify whatever is done in the name of an imagined aggregate community benefit. Act utilitarians have no normative rules: anything can go into the hopper, so long as there’s a claimed net gain.
That’s immoral, of course: there’s a reason that we wouldn’t sacrifice people to make it rain even if those sacrifices would work.
It’s the individual, not the institutional, that matters.
The late William Safire, a truly great man, felt the legitimate subjects of criticism were those in authority, those who held elected & appointed office or positions in the press. He often said that one should be most critical at the height of an official’s power, which he expressed as criticizing officials ‘when they were up.’ It would never have occurred to him to malign an ordinary person for an imagined social gain.
He would never have accepted an act utilitarian’s calculus.
And yet – and yet — every community has a few people who are, at bottom, act utilitarians.