In the case of universities, it can

In the case of universities, it can be fairly confidently stated that they have all too often offended against substantive justice as a result of their preoccupation with procedural justice. This itself stems from fear of litigation. The institution has seen that it is vulnerable to charges of neglect, irresponsibility, etc., and has responded by creating procedures that conform to contemporary prejudices which are wrongly assumed to be moral (e.g. the requirement of student representation on all committees, boards, etc.; the requirement of diversity; the requirement that the committee be quorate; the requirement that the accused have a right of reply). It has then further assumed, and been allowed by the wider community to assume, that procedural justice, i.e. following these rules, is sufficient. But it is clearly quite insufficient if the result is a flow of unjust, immoral, unfair, or simply silly and unwarranted decisions. This is not the place to establish that such has often been the result, but there is plenty of evidence available to show that it has. When a newly appointed president of a university appoints his partner to a highly paid advisory position, complete with free housing; when a president is hounded into recanting the observation that there may be many reasons why women are not well represented in science faculties besides culpability on the part of the universities; when a senior administrator is fired for no apparent reason and then paid $400,000 on condition that he remains silent; when a university allows a professor to continue in employment while aware that he is guilty of fraudulent research; when two students who both purchased the same essay from a third party are given pass grades and not penalized for cheating – when such practices are rife, it is not morally acceptable to observe that procedural justice has not been compromised in any of these cases. Whether due process has been observed or not, what has happened has proved to be substantively unjust – to be immoral, and that, at the end of the day, is what counts. Morality is better served by a just outcome, even following some procedural glitch, than by smoothly working procedures that deliver unjust conclusions.
The language of both rights and procedural justice are aspects, though not exclusively and not necessarily the outcome, of so-called political and moral correctness. This (for they can be conflated for present purposes) is a movement that has more to do with moralizing than genuine morality, and has on more than one occasion proved to be downright immoral, as for example in its baneful effect on free speech and its promotion of censorship in many forms. It is concerned with advocacy rather than the dispassionate pursuit of truth, with coercing people into a preferred pattern of behaviour and set of beliefs rather than with exploring the grounds for that behaviour and those beliefs. The driving force behind the political correctness movement is ideology. There is no serious philosophical debate about, for example, the role of gender, the relationship between the sexes, what is and what is not inherently offensive, or whether freedom may or may not be more important than conformity; instead there are merely prescriptions for conduct and belief imposed on others by force of will, political pressure, intimidation, and shaming. But the use of the language of rights and procedural justice are powerful weapons for the politically correct. It is difficult to withstand for long the insistent cry that somebody’s rights are being denied or that procedures have been abused, whether they have or not and whether it much matters whether they have or not. As I have said, in themselves rights and procedural justice do matter; but the terms are very often being used as little more than slogans, and they are not the only things that matter.
It is worth remembering that wrongdoing is not the only enemy of the moral; we should also guard equally strongly against inappropriate ‘moral’ indignation, moralizing, proceduralism, misuse of moral language, ideology, indoctrination, dogmatism, and censorship, to name but a few. A self-righteous, literal, and inflexible adherence to a specific moral code is inherently antithetical to true morality, which necessarily involves, in practice, a flexible and generous adherence to fundamental principles: nothing less, but also nothing more. As we shall see in Chapter 7 below, one of the sources of confusion in the moral domain is the unwarranted presumption that there is always a clear right or wrong to be discerned and that we should judge people by what they do rather than by their reasons for doing what they do, and judge moral theories by how much clear practical guidance they give us rather than by how convincingly they explain morality. To approach morality by focusing on rights or on procedural justice is to miss the intricacy, subtlety, and complexity of morality, and it is to substitute dogmatism and mechanistic thinking for understanding.