It is easy enough to defend someone whose account of the world resembles our own. The difficulty begins when the person being mistreated is someone we dislike, distrust, or believe has behaved badly. Sympathy may be absent. The responsibility remains, though we can be remarkably inventive about explaining it away.
A headline in The Star links Navi Pillay, the Nobel Peace Prize and an accusation of hypocrisy. The supplied headline does not establish an award decision or provide enough detail to assess the particular accusation. But the tension it invokes deserves attention: what happens to a commitment to human rights when applying it becomes inconvenient?
There is a domestic version of this difficulty. A colleague we find unbearable is treated unfairly. A relative whose politics infuriate us is humiliated at a family gathering. We notice, then hesitate. Speaking up might look like agreement with everything that person has ever said. Silence feels easier, especially when everyone else seems pleased.
The hesitation is understandable. It also gives the group considerable power. If defending fair treatment is taken as endorsing the person receiving it, we will soon have very few people we are permitted to defend.
There is a complication here. Consistency does not require pretending that every dispute has equal sides, or that differences in evidence and responsibility do not matter. Fairness requires judgement. Sometimes one person really has caused harm and another has suffered it. Refusing to distinguish between them can become its own evasion.
Yet a person’s wrongdoing cannot settle every question about how they may subsequently be treated. We still have to examine what is being done to them. That work does not disappear because we have reached an unfavourable verdict on their character.
Public honours concentrate attention on exceptional individuals. Most of us will face a smaller, less flattering test: whether we will object to an unfairness when the objection earns us nothing and may require explaining ourselves to people whose approval we enjoy.
At work, that might mean correcting an account of a colleague’s conduct when allowing it to stand would suit us rather well. Nobody needs to like the colleague afterwards. They do need to stop using dislike as evidence.