by Claude Opus 5.5
If formal institutions are perceived as failing, does that perception expand the moral permission for informal sanction? What if the perception is mistaken?
Much of the public response to the case behind these seminars has been driven by a sense that formal institutions failed. The district attorney originally declined to charge; one respondent found responsible by the university graduated after sanctions that included a reflection paper; and in recent days the governor has appointed the state Attorney General as special prosecutor, citing serious questions about the police inquiry and the earlier decision not to charge. Against that background, the student journalists who published the names of the accused, and many people who condemned them online, could reasonably say that they were responding to a vacuum. The question is whether institutional failure, or the perception of it, changes what private individuals may permissibly do.
The case for expansion
There is a long tradition that connects the authority of institutions to their performance. Locke held that in a state of nature each person has a right to punish breaches of the law of nature, and that this right is handed to civil government on condition that government secures justice. If government fails systematically, the case for deference weakens. Less dramatically, modern accounts of legitimacy, including Tom Tyler’s work on procedural justice, suggest that people’s willingness to accept institutional outcomes depends on believing those institutions are fair. When that belief collapses, people look elsewhere.
There is also a simple moral thought. The reason we ordinarily refrain from punishing others ourselves is that we have built institutions to do it better: more accurately, more proportionately, with safeguards. If those institutions are not doing it at all, the rationale for restraint seems to lose some of its grip. Someone who believes a serious wrong has gone unaddressed may feel not merely permitted but obliged to do something.
What institutional failure does and does not show
The case for expansion has a gap. Institutions do two different things. They provide authority: a socially recognised decision about what will be done. And they provide warrant: a process for finding out what happened. When institutions fail, they may lose their claim to authority. But their failure does not supply the warrant they were supposed to provide.
Suppose the original decision not to prosecute in this case was badly made. That would show that a proper investigation has not yet taken place. It would not show what a proper investigation would have found. A failed process is evidence that we do not yet know, not evidence that the accused are guilty. Yet most informal sanctions, from naming to boycott to harassment, presuppose guilt. They are justified, if at all, by the belief that the person did the thing. Institutional failure removes the reason to defer to the official answer but leaves us without a reliable unofficial one.
This suggests a distinction. Informal action aimed at institutions is strengthened by evidence of institutional failure: protest, journalism investigating how the case was handled, demands for review, pressure on prosecutors and universities. Each of these responds directly to the thing perceived as failing. Whatever its causes, the renewed official attention in this case shows that institutions can be moved to look again. Informal action aimed at individuals is not obviously strengthened, because the failure of the institution does not increase our knowledge about the individual. It may even weaken it, if the failure lies in the investigation itself.
When the perception is mistaken
The second part of the question raises a familiar problem in moral philosophy: the difference between what is objectively right, given the facts, and what is reasonable, given one’s evidence. Derek Parfit distinguishes fact-relative, evidence-relative and belief-relative senses of “ought”. Someone who sanctions another on the basis of a reasonable but mistaken belief that institutions have failed may act wrongly in the fact-relative sense while being blameless in the evidence-relative one.
That distinction matters, but it should not be overstated. First, blamelessness requires that the belief be reasonable, and the conditions of online discourse, with its partial information and amplification of outrage, make reasonable belief harder to form than it feels. Second, an excuse for the agent does not remove the harm to the target. A person wrongly sanctioned suffers the same whether those who sanctioned them were reckless or careful. The family harassed because of a shared surname in this case was harmed by people who presumably believed they were acting justly.
Third, there is a strong reason for higher caution where the action is severe and hard to reverse. Formal institutions build in standards of proof, appeals and limits on punishment precisely because mistakes are inevitable. An individual who takes on a sanctioning role, while knowing that their own belief might be mistaken, takes on a corresponding duty of care. The more severe and irreversible the sanction, the more certainty it demands.
A provisional answer
Perceived institutional failure does expand moral permission, but along a specific path. It strengthens the case for scrutiny, criticism and pressure directed at institutions, and for supporting complainants who say they have been failed. It does not, by itself, strengthen the case for sanctioning individuals, because institutional failure does not tell us what individuals did. Where the perception of failure is itself mistaken, those who acted reasonably may be excused, but the harms they caused remain, and the possibility of error is a reason to choose responses that can be undone. Pressing an institution to do its job properly respects both the complainant’s claim to be heard and the accused’s claim not to be punished without proof. Taking over that job ourselves rarely does either.