Inclusion, Intention, and the Scapegoat Instinct: Justice and Mercy after the BAFTAs
The 79th ceremony of the British Academy Film Awards was meant to celebrate cinematic excellence. Instead, it exposed a fracture within contemporary moral discourse. During the London event, Scottish Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson — whose life inspired the award-winning film I Swear — experienced involuntary vocal tics, including the utterance of a racial slur while actors presented on stage. The moment, though neurologically compelled, became an international controversy.
The incident was broadcast by the BBC with a delay. The slur was not edited out of the transmission or early iPlayer stream. The corporation subsequently issued an apology, describing the failure to remove the word as a “serious mistake” and confirming an internal investigation.¹ Reporting by Reuters confirmed the broadcaster’s admission and the fast-tracked review.² The film’s distributor, Warner Bros., formally complained and requested the removal of the language from future broadcasts.³ Public figures and commentators expressed anger; a BAFTA judge resigned; political voices demanded explanation. Davidson himself said he felt “deeply mortified,” reiterating that the utterance was involuntary.⁴
The moral significance of the episode lies not merely in broadcast oversight but in what followed. A ceremony that celebrated inclusion found itself recoiling from the unpredictable reality of the very condition it had placed in the spotlight.
Symbolic Inclusion and Structural Inclusion
Modern cultural institutions excel at symbolic inclusion. They curate diverse guest lists, amplify marginalised voices, and publicise commitments to neurodiversity. Such gestures are visible and reputationally advantageous. Structural inclusion, however, demands more. It requires institutions to absorb discomfort without panic. It demands that they defend vulnerable individuals when unpredictability disrupts choreography.
Inviting a Tourette’s activist to an awards ceremony is symbolically powerful. Standing firm when Tourette’s manifests publicly is structurally costly. The controversy revealed how quickly symbolic affirmation can yield to reputational self-protection. Inclusion that survives only under ideal conditions is not inclusion but performance.
Impact-Only Ethics and Moral Coherence
The episode also exposes the instability of moral frameworks that prioritise impact to the exclusion of intention. Certain words carry grave historical weight. That is not disputed. Yet moral evaluation cannot coherently ignore agency.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that responsibility for an action may be diminished or nullified by psychological factors.⁵ Moral culpability presupposes knowledge and consent. St Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, insists that an act is properly human insofar as it proceeds from deliberate will.⁶ Without voluntariness, the moral species of the act changes.
An impact-only ethic collapses this distinction. It treats involuntary compulsion and deliberate malice as morally interchangeable because their audible effects are identical. Such reasoning may satisfy the logic of outrage, but it erodes moral clarity. Justice severed from intention becomes abstraction.
Our Lord’s teaching that sin proceeds “from the heart” (Mt 15:19) grounds moral judgment in the will. Words derive their moral character from what they express internally. Where no hostility is willed, there may be pain, but there is no moral equivalence with hatred.
Justice and Mercy in Public Life
The Christian tradition does not minimise harm. It situates harm within a larger moral order that distinguishes between weakness and wrongdoing. Justice requires proportion; mercy recognises frailty.
St Augustine, in De Sermone Domini in Monte, warns that judgment without charity distorts truth.⁷ Mercy is not indulgence; it is fidelity to reality. It refuses to reduce a person to a moment of incapacity. In public controversies, however, institutions often default to risk management. Apologies are issued, investigations announced, distance signalled. The individual whose condition precipitated the crisis becomes secondary to brand protection.
This pattern echoes an ancient instinct: social equilibrium is restored by isolating the disruptive figure. The scapegoat absorbs communal anxiety. While modern controversies differ infinitely from biblical drama, the psychological mechanism remains recognisable. When vulnerability becomes embarrassment, inclusion has been inverted.
Hierarchy of Goods and the Loss of Proportion
The avoidance of racial offence is a genuine moral good. Compassion toward neurological disability is also a genuine moral good. Mature moral reasoning holds goods in tension rather than absolutising one. Where proportion is lost, discourse hardens into reflex.
A society confident in justice distinguishes intent from incapacity. A culture grounded in mercy protects the vulnerable even when doing so is inconvenient. Where both virtues coexist, public life remains humane. Where either is eclipsed by reputational calculus, moral rhetoric outruns moral substance.
The BAFTA controversy will fade from headlines. Yet it has exposed a searching question. Can institutions that proclaim inclusion withstand the unpredictable consequences of real human difference? Or will they defend principles only until those principles become costly?
Justice requires clarity about agency. Mercy requires steadiness in the face of weakness. Inclusion requires willingness to bear inconvenience. Without all three, inclusion is theatre and justice a slogan.
- BBC statement reported in ITV News, “Tourette’s campaigner apologises to Sinners actors after BAFTA racial slur,” 25 February 2026. https://www.itv.com/news/2026-02-25/tourettes-campaigner-apologises-to-sinners-actors-after-bafta-racial-slur
- Reuters, “BBC orders fast-track probe into BAFTA awards broadcast errors,” 25 February 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bbc-orders-fast-track-probe-into-bafta-awards-broadcast-errors-2026-02-25/
- Deadline, “Warner Bros Complained To BAFTA Over Racial Slur Broadcast,” 25 February 2026. https://deadline.com/2026/02/warner-bros-complained-bafta-racial-slur-bbc-cut-1236734254/
- RTÉ News, “Apology after slur broadcast during BAFTA ceremony,” 23 February 2026. https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2026/0223/1559921-apology-after-slur-broadcast-during-bafta-ceremony/
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1735.
- Summa Theologiae, I–II, q.6, a.1.
- De Sermone Domini in Monte, II.
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