by Claude Opus 5.5
Billingham and Parr set conditions under which public shaming can be permissible (proportionality, accuracy, reintegration). Does the online response here meet any of them?
Public shaming has an uneasy place in liberal moral thought. It can enforce valuable norms when formal institutions are absent or ineffective, but it can also be cruel, inaccurate and limitless. Paul Billingham and Tom Parr have argued that shaming can sometimes be permissible as a means of enforcing social norms, but only under demanding conditions. Among the most important are proportionality, accuracy and reintegration. Their framework offers a structured way to assess the online response to the case behind these seminars, in which seven men were named publicly before any criminal charge, widely condemned, and in one case confused with an innocent man.
The framework
Billingham and Parr take seriously the idea that shaming is a form of informal norm enforcement that can be justified. A community that shames someone for violating an important norm expresses its commitment to that norm and may deter others. But because shaming imposes serious costs on its targets, it must satisfy constraints.
Proportionality. The severity of shaming must be proportionate to the seriousness of the wrong. Since online shaming can scale without limit, this condition requires restraint from participants.
Accuracy. Shaming must be directed at people who actually committed the wrong in question, and must represent their conduct accurately. Shaming the innocent, or exaggerating the wrong, is impermissible.
Reintegration. Shaming must leave open the possibility that its target can acknowledge the wrong and be readmitted to good standing. Shaming that permanently exiles its target, or that cannot be brought to an end, fails this condition.
They also discuss further constraints, including respect for privacy and the avoidance of abuse, which overlap with these.
Accuracy
Accuracy is the condition most clearly failed in at least one respect: an innocent man was misidentified and his family harassed. That alone shows that the shaming, taken as a collective activity, was not reliably directed at those responsible for the wrongs alleged.
Even with respect to the seven, accuracy is uncertain. The allegations have not been tested in a criminal court. Cornell’s hearing reportedly made findings against some of them, but those findings and their reasoning are largely confidential, and sanctions apparently differed among individuals. Shaming that treats all seven identically, on the basis of a civil complaint and media reports, cannot satisfy the accuracy condition, because it does not track what each person did. At most, shaming targeted at specific, established conduct might meet it; shaming of the group as such does not.
Proportionality
Proportionality presents a different difficulty. The wrongs alleged are among the most serious possible: group sexual assault of an incapacitated person. If those allegations were established, intense condemnation would not obviously be disproportionate. The problem is that proportionality in Billingham and Parr’s sense is a constraint on the response to established wrongdoing. When the wrong is uncertain, the response cannot be calibrated, and the most serious possible wrong becomes the default assumption. Moreover, online shaming tends to aggregate without coordination, so that each participant’s contribution may be modest while the total burden on the target is enormous. No individual can ensure proportionality in such a system.
Reintegration
Reintegration is the condition least capable of being met. Online shaming in high-profile cases creates permanent associations between names and allegations, searchable indefinitely. There is no mechanism by which a target, even one who acknowledges wrongdoing and makes amends, can be readmitted to good standing, and no mechanism by which one later cleared can be restored. The shaming response in this case offers no path back. On Billingham and Parr’s account, that alone renders it impermissible in its current form.
Does anything satisfy the conditions?
Some forms of the response may come closer. Criticism of institutions, such as the university, police and prosecutor, for how they handled the complaint, is directed at agents whose conduct is better documented, is less likely to destroy individual lives, and can be ended when institutions reform. Expressions of support for the complainant, which do not target anyone, raise no shaming issue at all. Careful journalism that names individuals while reporting their status and responses differs from viral denunciation.
Conclusion
Measured against Billingham and Parr’s conditions, the online response directed at the seven fails accuracy (most starkly in the misidentification, and more generally in its indifference to individual differences), cannot meet proportionality given the uncertain state of the evidence, and offers no possibility of reintegration. Responses directed at institutions, or expressing support for the complainant, are better placed. The lesson is not that shaming is never permissible, but that the conditions which could make it so are rarely satisfied in the online environment, and were not satisfied here.