The Justice of Privilege

"How diligently privilege ha[s] to work to remain oblivious to its cost."
America, America by Ethan Canin

Book smarts probably has little to do with the leadership skills necessary to fight fires successfully, but that’s not the point, according to the latest Supreme Court decision in the New Haven firefighters’ case that recently came before them.

Apparently, according to the 5-4 decision, you can’t throw a test out after you have already given it if the results don’t yield the city’s desired outcome. Regardless how arbitrary or irrelevant a test might be, once the rules to the contest are set down in advance, you have to stick with the game plan and live with the results. That’s only fair to the individuals who passed the test. And I mean that in both senses.

The Swiss government is currently upholding the long-held principle of identity security in the face of the demand by the U.S. government to turn over the names of U.S. clients of Swiss bank UBS who may be avoiding U.S. taxes by squirreling away money in identity protected UBS accounts. In this case, Swiss protection of privacy trumps U.S. income tax cheating. What is one country’s sense of justice is another’s crime.

The U.S. split-estate law has been on the books for over a century and a half. The gist of it is that sub-surface owners’ rights trump those of surface owners whenever they might conflict. In the animal world, split-estate would mean worms and gophers would have power over bison and elk in land use.

In all three of these cases, ultimately privilege triumphs over actual justice. The written test is irrelevant to the actual necessary qualities of leadership; the protection of privacy interferes with the greater good of financial justice; and the notion that sub-surface ownership is somehow a greater good than surface ownership is clearly arbitrary and disregards the whole concept of ecology, a modern view of nature that did not even exist when the law was written.

Privilege has many faces, some visible and some not. To say that justice is progressive in the long run may be true. But these three cases indicate that justice often has an inertia that protects privilege first before it finally evolves to serve the greater good.