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| Source: INC |
There are people living among us who have done terrible things to other human beings – murder and rape, for example – yet who nonetheless deserve society’s forgiveness.
They have been convicted for their crimes and punished by the laws we collectively agreed such moral transgressions deserve. Now they deserve something other than punishment. They deserve to be treated with respect rather than resentment, contempt, and suspicion. They deserve a real chance to overcome their history and make something of their life.
I. Endless Punishment
The last point is essential. We have a duty to punish the people who do bad things, but we have no right to punish them more than they deserve. For the same reason that it is wrongful to punish the wrong person for a crime, it is wrongful to punish the right person in the wrong way. This is why it is important for us to leave the judging to specialist institutions with the resources and authority to do it properly. When we try to do it ourselves we get mob justice – i.e. punishment that only stops when those with the most extreme feelings about the case are satisfied.
In most developed countries the criminal justice system is trusted well enough to decide who is guilty and deserves punishment, i.e. who is a criminal. However, it seems that some people hold a lingering belief in their personal right to decide how much punishment criminals deserve to receive, and to inflict that privately if they have the chance. These are the kind of people who enjoy unleashing their moral prejudices on easy victims in the name of justice.
The outcome is that people with convictions for murder and other serious crimes are routinely denied employment or access to opportunities like university education. They are subjected to personal harassment and hate campaigns for daring to assume that they have the same right as any other citizen to try to make something of themselves, while institutions that dare do recognise their civil rights also risk being targeted. Murderers are thus deprived of their basic civil rights, not by any law that purports to represent society's considered moral views, but by our tacit (sometimes fearful) consent to endless punishment by self-appointed moral vigilantes.
The outcome is that people with convictions for murder and other serious crimes are routinely denied employment or access to opportunities like university education. They are subjected to personal harassment and hate campaigns for daring to assume that they have the same right as any other citizen to try to make something of themselves, while institutions that dare do recognise their civil rights also risk being targeted. Murderers are thus deprived of their basic civil rights, not by any law that purports to represent society's considered moral views, but by our tacit (sometimes fearful) consent to endless punishment by self-appointed moral vigilantes.
Here’s an example of a murderer who found a job at a charity (often the only organisations willing to employ such stigmatised people). He was scheduled to make a presentation about adolescent addiction to a teachers’ conference, but a teacher spotted his name and called the press to prevent such a terrible thing from happening.
“I just think of the family of the murder victim”
This moral vigilantism does particular harm because prejudice against ex-convicts is so widely accepted. Here’s a different example, of a murderer rejected from all but one law school he applied to, and almost chased out of that one by student protests:
“I think felons should get a second chance. But why at Tulane? What are we, the law school for murderers?”
People convicted of serious crimes are particularly vulnerable to mistreatment not only because a substantial minority hold lingering feelings of malice and resentment against them, but because many others feel disgust or fear towards them, and almost no one is willing to step up and defend them. This resembles old fashioned systemic racism, in which a minority of bigoted people were able to determine the treatment non-whites received by leveraging the silent complicity of the majority. It resembles racism further in the rage that vigilantes feel at ex-convicts attempting to raise themselves above the state of abject humiliation that is their proper station in life - for example by seeking a professional career or recognition for their achievements as if they were a real person.
II. The Duty to Forgive
What does forgiveness look like?
It may seem that the way we treat ex-convicts is a private matter. That students, for example, have a right to their own feelings of indignation or anxiety or even mere distaste at the idea of interacting with a convicted murderer, and that they also have a right to act on those feelings. But even where people refrain from campaigning for murderers to lose their jobs or studentships, prejudice against ex-convicts doesn't stay private.
Where the rights of an entire group of people are at stake, the cumulative effect of many people’s private but shared prejudices is gross injustice. In such cases we don’t have the right to act on feelings like disgust or fear however sincerely we feel them and however compelling they may appear. For example, you don’t have the right to refuse to share an office at work with a black man or complain to management about him on the grounds that you think ‘they’ are dangerous. We all share a positive responsibility not to let our workplaces turn into Jim Crow, and that means evaluating our feelings by our moral standards rather than allowing our feelings to dictate our behaviour as if it were just our personal business where our own tastes and preferences are trumps. Likewise, the cumulative effects of many people’s shared prejudices is that those with the word ‘murder’ attached to them will never get a fair chance to get a job or succeed in what they attempt – whatever values they are now trying to live by. Ex convicts' vulnerability to collective prejudice creates a duty on all of us to ensure they are treated fairly, and this requires setting aside - 'forgiving' - the irrelevant fact that they once murdered someone.
Where the rights of an entire group of people are at stake, the cumulative effect of many people’s private but shared prejudices is gross injustice. In such cases we don’t have the right to act on feelings like disgust or fear however sincerely we feel them and however compelling they may appear. For example, you don’t have the right to refuse to share an office at work with a black man or complain to management about him on the grounds that you think ‘they’ are dangerous. We all share a positive responsibility not to let our workplaces turn into Jim Crow, and that means evaluating our feelings by our moral standards rather than allowing our feelings to dictate our behaviour as if it were just our personal business where our own tastes and preferences are trumps. Likewise, the cumulative effects of many people’s shared prejudices is that those with the word ‘murder’ attached to them will never get a fair chance to get a job or succeed in what they attempt – whatever values they are now trying to live by. Ex convicts' vulnerability to collective prejudice creates a duty on all of us to ensure they are treated fairly, and this requires setting aside - 'forgiving' - the irrelevant fact that they once murdered someone.
What does forgiveness look like?
Forgiveness does not mean condoning what the criminal did. When we condone something we mean that there was nothing to forgive in the first place. We discover that the transgression was not bad (or not so bad) after all, like Alan Turing’s conviction for homosexuality or a conviction for smoking weed. What makes forgiving serious crimes like murder so difficult is that we have to acknowledge that this person really did do something truly terrible and yet still deserves a fresh start.
Forgiveness has negative and positive requirements. The negative requirement is to renounce lingering feelings of resentment and malice towards criminals who have served their sentence and to refuse to act on such feelings if they continue to occur to us. Criminal justice is a collective endeavour by the whole of society in defense of moral civilisation. It is not the aggregation of individual moral reactions against criminals. We as a society have a duty to punish those who do terrible things but that includes a duty upon us as citizens not to subvert the criminal justice system by trying to punish criminals ourselves. We need to remember our proper place. Unless we were personally harmed by the crime we should not claim to speak and act for those who were. Our moral indignation should be limited to what the good citizen feels about a murderer's transgression of the basic moral law, an abstract idea of wrong that we should be able to set aside when required.
The positive requirement of forgiveness is to do our part in restoring the relationship between the criminal and society that was ruptured by their behaviour. A murderer who has served his sentence shouldn’t have to prove anything to deserve civil treatment and respect. He deserves not just basic human rights to subsistence, but also fair and equal opportunity to participate in and contribute to society, to achieve meaningful goals such as a professional career, and to have any achievements publicly recognised.
We are a long way from that. A first step would be to think of ex-convicts as a suspect class because (like members of sexual and racial minorities) they are subject to hostility and discrimination on the basis of features they cannot change, and because they are politically powerless to defend themselves. This suggests a blueprint for protecting convicts from discrimination by the state itself (such as voting restrictions) as well as new laws curtailing the public’s right to inflict their prejudices on them (such as workplace discrimination and hate-speech on social media).
We are a long way from that. A first step would be to think of ex-convicts as a suspect class because (like members of sexual and racial minorities) they are subject to hostility and discrimination on the basis of features they cannot change, and because they are politically powerless to defend themselves. This suggests a blueprint for protecting convicts from discrimination by the state itself (such as voting restrictions) as well as new laws curtailing the public’s right to inflict their prejudices on them (such as workplace discrimination and hate-speech on social media).
In all this I have been talking of the responsibility of the ordinary citizen to forgive murderers, as an implication of organising our response to such moral atrocities via a criminal justice system. My analysis does not automatically extend to those who knew and loved the murderer’s victim, the people who actually suffered from the crime. For those people, forgiveness may have additional value for healing their moral trauma: renouncing justified anger so that their own lives can move on. Yet it may also depend much more closely on the moral progress of the criminal and his relationship with those he harmed, particularly his ability to sincerely repent for what he did. It is not reasonable to reduce the development of such relationships to a simple recipe or set of duties (such as I have outlined for the ordinary citizen). Nevertheless a criminal justice system that genuinely cared about repairing the harm wrought by violent crime would foster and encourage such relationships far more than it does at present.
Note
This essay was previously published on 3 Quarks Daily
