Reference reading
Favoritism
Letting the badge decide what the evidence and the person’s legitimate claim should decide.
Persistent, unjustified favoritism in the weight given to people's claims, evidence or opportunities.
Imagine this: A public meeting offers the same opportunity to everyone until the organizer notices who wears the matching rosette.
How the pattern works
The same entry token becomes more effective when the organizer sees a matching rosette. Favoritism is the public name here for canonical Partiality: persistent, unjustified preference in the weight given to people’s claims, evidence or opportunities. Its political reach includes factional excuses, insider appointments and special access as well as the distribution of material benefits.
A party exists partly to advance shared purposes, so preferring its policy or supporting its candidates is not inherently unfair. The question is what should decide this particular claim. Political compatibility can be relevant to choosing a campaign spokesperson; it does not automatically justify changing the evidential standard for misconduct or letting a favored person skip a public process.
What it costs public life
People outside the circle have to satisfy a standard that insiders can bypass. Their distrust may concern the process itself rather than an inability to accept defeat. Within the group, a matching allegiance can become more valuable than a useful contribution, and correcting one’s own side becomes harder because correction threatens membership privileges.
A distinction worth keeping
Loyalty, solidarity, cultural identity and special responsibilities are not vices by themselves. Reasons can justify different treatment. Cronyism and nepotism name insider and family expressions of the same disposition; Tribalism, in the supplied faction-above-truth sense, needs no new canonical identity. Venality sells responsibility for a reward. Favoritism can give an unwarranted advantage freely, without payment or deliberate deception.
What a useful response can change
Name the relevant criterion before deciding whom it favors. Would the reason still count if the same conduct, qualifications or request belonged to another faction?
Distinguish support for a group’s defensible purpose from protection of every act performed in its name. An internal correction can express serious loyalty to that purpose.
Where a process has given someone unjustified preference, address the affected opportunity rather than merely changing the language used to describe it. Appropriate reconsideration should consider the legitimate claims of everyone who relied on the process.
Questions for reflection
- What makes the matching badge relevant to this decision?
- Which criticism of my side would I accept immediately if it concerned another?
Other perspectives
We have learned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for the will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest which deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we say that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow and unprogressive issues.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source
Addams connects a restricted field of concern with a restricted moral outlook. Her own broad language about selfishness is not a diagnosis; the token case asks whether affiliation has displaced a relevant criterion.
The positive evils and dangers of the representative, as of every other form of government, may be reduced to two heads: first, general ignorance and incapacity, or, to speak more moderately, insufficient mental qualifications, in the controlling body; secondly, the danger of its being under the influence of interests not identical with the general welfare of the community.
John Stuart Mill · Considerations on Representative Government · Read the source
Mill separates questions of capacity from interests that diverge from the general welfare. The present collection does not adopt his exclusions from suffrage; it asks how a relevant public claim becomes subordinated to a favored circle.