The daily news provides us with many examples of people who are treated unfairly. African immigrants who are racially abused and discriminated against, for example, or people seeking protection dumped on Manus Island. If we are appalled by their plight we may want to change public attitudes and policies.
We shall then soon be challenged by realising that some members of the group whom we represent do bad things. Some young African immigrants may invade homes; some people seeking protection may sexually abuse local women. This recognition encourages deeper reflection on the basis of our advocacy.
If we wish to persuade the public that a group of people is being treated unjustly and that this injustice should stop, we naturally portray them as innocent victims. We represent them as a class and as virtuous in order to change public opinion.
Stories of violent and brutal behaviour by members of the group, however, reveal the reality that no group is uniformly composed of virtuous and innocent victims, but comprises both law abiding and law breaking people. If such stories are not to discredit the group in the eyes of the public, we need to respond to them.
A common way of doing this is to ignore the stories. We will continue to portray the group as innocent victims of unjust treatment, and will highlight the virtues and plight of attractive members of the group. We try to drown out the bad publicity.
If governments are hostile to the group or popular media are feral this strategy will not be successful. Public opinion will identify the group with its members who have acted badly. We may then adopt a fallback position, explaining the bad behaviour of members of the group by referring to the effects of a traumatic childhood, the loss of relatives, of a dysfunctional family or of the mental illness that long incarceration in dehumanising detention centres brings on. By speaking of their sufferings we try to reestablish the status of the group as innocent victims rather than as callous criminals.
This approach may satisfy people who are already sympathetic but is unlikely to satisfy the general public. They will be more strongly moved by the details of the brutal behaviour than by the exposition of its context, no matter how pertinent that exposition may be.
"To advocate for human beings on the grounds of their inalienable human dignity is a long game in which there are more defeats than victories."
Nor may it satisfy ourselves. It may lead us to reflect on the shifts in our own argument. We shall ask ourselves about the discordance between our personal understanding of the people whom we represent and the way in which we represent them in our advocacy. Do we need to persuade ourselves that all members of the group are innocent victims? Do not people who act criminally also matter to us? If they do matter, why do we shy away from acknowledging their presence in the group? Would it make a difference to our advocacy if we could not find extenuating considerations in their personal and social history?
These questions might lead us to ask about the basis of the solidarity that links together people who behave badly, ourselves and the people whom we try to persuade. What commands us to see the member of all three groups as 'us' rather than as separate?
If our advocacy for the group is more than emotional or strategic, it must be based in the conviction that each member of the group and of the public has a unique and inalienable value by virtue of being human. This value underlies their religion, political views, race, position and behaviour. It commits us to respect even people who have committed crimes. They are not an embarrassment but the rock on which our defence of rights is built.
Because all human beings matter by virtue of being human, the circumstances of their lives, including their social and personal histories, also matter. We do not explore these to prove that they are innocent victims but to fill out the picture of them as real human beings like ourselves.
This insistence on the human dignity of each human being presumes also that we are responsible to one another. That follows from the preciousness of each person. If we advocate for one group of people to other groups, we assume that we all form a community within which we have responsibilities to each other. Underlying the pragmatic choices we make about how to represent the people for whom we plead is a moral universe that connects us all.
If our advocacy for people who behave badly is based the unique dignity of each human being, it will naturally collide with the working assumptions that govern our society. It presupposes that people who have done bad things can change, pay for their crimes, be forgiven and become fully part of society. It also presupposes that all human beings often act badly. These corollaries of human dignity are encapsulated in slogans like 'We are all sinners', 'There but for the grace of God go I', and 'Everyone deserves a second chance'. They encapsulate the understanding of the human condition that underlies advocacy.
They run counter, however, to attitudes that make even youthful misbehaviour a cause for automatic disqualification from later public office, that adopt a one strike and you are out policy, that divides people into good Australians and monsters, winners and losers, and sees humility as an affront to aspiration.
To advocate for human beings on the grounds of their inalienable human dignity is a long game in which there are more defeats than victories. But are there any other grounds?
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.