What do you do when faced with
wrongdoing—do you blame or do you forgive? Especially when confronted with offences
that lie on the more severe end of the spectrum and cause terrible psychological
or physical trauma or death, nothing can feel more natural than blame. Indeed, in
the UK and the USA, increasingly vehement and righteous public expressions of blame
and calls for vengeance have become commonplace; correspondingly, contemporary penal
philosophy has witnessed a resurgence of the retributive tradition, in the modern
form usually known as the ‘justice’ model. On the other hand, people can and routinely
do forgive others, even in cases of severe crime. Evolutionary psychologists argue
that both vengeance and forgiveness are universal human adaptations that have evolved
as alternative responses to exploitation, and, crucially, strategies for reducing
risk of re-offending. We are naturally endowed with both capacities: to blame and
retaliate, or to forgive and seek to repair relations. Which should we choose? Drawing
on evolutionary psychology, we offer an account of forgiveness and argue that the
choice to blame, and not to forgive, is inconsistent with the political values of
a broadly liberal society and can be instrumentally counter-productive to reducing
the risk of future re-offending. We then sketch the shape of penal philosophy and
criminal justice policy and practice with forgiveness in place as a guiding ideal.
Forgiveness is often allied with a range of emotions and reactive
attitudes that express goodwill or positive regard, such as compassion, empathy,
kindness, clemency and mercy.20 Within legal
philosophy, mercy in particular has been singled out as valuable if not indeed essential
to the justification of punishment.21 Our first step
therefore is to distinguish forgiveness from mercy, as the two are easily confused.
On the one hand, the grounds for both mercy and forgiveness
may converge. Both can stem from compassion and empathy, which may occur in response
to offenders who ‘make good’ by expressing guilt, regret and remorse, and apologising
and offering reparation.22 Note that these
various attitudes and actions on the part of the offender are not excuses or justifications:
in themselves they do not bear on degree of responsibility or severity of offence.
But they may nonetheless function to obviate the felt need to inflict punishment,
for they offer evidence that some of the (non-retaliatory) ends that we may hope
punishment serves, such as reduction of risk of re-offending, or atonement and the
making of amends, have already been secured without it. With the exception of theories
such as Kant’s23 that punishment
is not merely justified but necessitated by the ‘justice’
model’s conception of blameworthiness, consideration of these grounds may therefore
incline us to show mercy for the offender or to forgive the offence, and therefore
to punish less if at all. Hence, on the other hand, mercy and forgiveness may converge
not only in their grounds but in their outcome: both may result in the voluntary
withholding of punishment.
Yet mercy and forgiveness are distinct attitudes. Despite
the fact that both can affect the decision of whether and to what extent to punish,
once punishment has been determined and enacted, the question of mercy is otiose,
while the question of forgiveness remains.24 There is no
question of whether or not to be merciful if we are not in a position to punish,
whether that is because we have punished already, or because, more simply, we lack
the power to do so. Mercy is a possible sentiment only for those with power and
authority, exercised necessarily de haut en bas.25 Yet there is
a question of whether or not to forgive, wholly apart from our capacity to punish.
The offender may have been appropriately punished and so paid their dues, and yet
we find we do not forgive. Alternatively, we may find it in our hearts to forgive
when no dues have been paid and we are not ourselves in any position to demand them,
for we are powerless—unlike mercy, forgiveness can in theory be exercised de bas en haut, from powerless victim to powerful
perpetrator...
Full article at: http://goo.gl/VaVkcr
By:
*Departments of Law and Social Policy and Gender Institute,
London School of Economics. Email: ku.ca.esl@yecaL.M.N.
**Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham. Email: ku.ca.mahb@drakcip.h.
More at: https://twitter.com/hiv insight
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