Mercy

Note: This blog post has been retracted, since I no longer think of it as a good representation of how I think about its topic. I may, or may not, have written a better post about the same topic since; check the full list of posts.

Mercy should clearly be defined in relation to justice, on which I have already written. That blog post left a gap for some further explanation of mercy, which I will now try to give. (This post is a sequel to that one, and §§1–3 of it apply here too.)

A brief excursus on the physician theory. As I said, most clearly in the fifth footnote of that post, “mercy” to criminals is unjust according to that conception, if it is conceived of as involving not punishing them, or lowering the degree of their punishment from the amount you think they need. Someone holding the physician theory might therefore define “mercy” differently – I have once heard one such person say that “mercy” would be to punish an evildoer, while “justice” would be to not punish him, since this leaves him with his just desert, viz., the injustice in his soul which comes from his evil act. I will no longer entertain physician notions in this post.

Mercy, then, according to my view of the debt theory of justice, should be defined as destroying a right that you have, whether this right be a monetary debt or a ‘debt of justice’ – a right to punish. A right, in turn, is defined simply as another person’s obligation towards you, which means mercy can equally be defined as the relieving a man of his obligation. If it is the case that some rights are indestructible, i.e., some obligations cannot be relieved, then mercy is simply impossible with respect to those rights.

It can then, in my opinion, never be unjust to forgive a debt or a criminal – your rights, like your property, may in justice usually be done with as you like. I think it may be wrong to do so, but the mode of its being wrong is that it is imprudent, or unwise. And the reason of its being imprudent is that it fails to fulfill certain conditions of prudence. I have been able to think of two of them, which I currently believe to be exhaustive; what follows is my statement of them.

1. The will condition: It is imprudent to forgive a man if that man is more likely to do further wrong if forgiven than if not forgiven.

I believe this one is uncontroversial. It is often held to be a purpose of punishment that it incapacitates the criminal, or removes him from society. I do not believe that this is a requirement of justice, but of prudence. If punishment may be demanded in a way that protects society from further harm, it is unwise to demand it in another way – e.g., to inflict corporal punishment when the criminal may be better prevented from doing further wrong by being jailed –, or to fail to demand it by way of forgiveness.

This is also true with monetary debts, although it is more difficult to apply to them. Prudence demands that you do not forgive a debtor if you know that he is likely to use his money to do wrong.

2. The knowledge condition: It is imprudent to forgive a man who will not acknowledge that he is in debt.

I believe this one is very controversial. Yet, it seems self-evidently true to me. I can think of a few considerations that may support it, but neither amounts to an argument:

1. Doing this is bad for the debtor, since it tends to allow him to get into the vicious habit of neglecting his debts.
2. It tends to have the appearance, to onlookers, of rewarding the behavior of forgetting or denying a debt, which encourages this bad behavior in them.

Even if neither consideration seems to apply to a particular case, though, I would still find it imprudent to forgive a criminal who does not acknowledge that he did wrong, or to forgive a debtor who does not acknowledge that he is in debt. I hope to one day be able to better explain this impression that I have.