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The Case for the Moral Permissibility of Amnesties: An Argument from Social Moral Epistemology

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Abstract

This paper makes the case for the permissibility of post-conflict amnesties, although not on prudential grounds. It argues that amnesties of a certain scope, targeted to certain categories of perpetrators, and offered in certain contexts are morally permissible because they are an acknowledgment of the difficulty of attributing criminal responsibility in mass violence contexts. Based on this idea, the paper develops the further claim that deciding which amnesties are permissible and which ones are not should be decided on a case-by-case basis. Against what seems to be an increasingly popular assumption of some international actors, just as "blanket" amnesties (i.e. very broad and general amnesties that foreclose criminal prosecution for all kinds of perpetrators and all kinds of wrongdoing) are impermissible, so is an absolutist rejection of all types of amnesties.

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Notes

  1. Both pro- and anti-amnesty positions make their case on the basis of legal arguments: the latter focus on the states' legal obligation to prosecute, whereas the former highlight states' obligations to protect human rights and prevent further violations. On the ambiguity of amnesties at the international legal level see Freeman and Pensky (2012).

  2. For taxonomies of such kind see Freeman (2009a, b)

  3. See for instance Charles Trumbull (2007, 320–321) and Louise Mallinder (2007).

  4. For a critique of the instrumentalist approach see Ryberg (2010) and Pensky(2008). For a criticism of retributivism, see Holtermann (2010).

  5. In the rest of the paper, when I talk about ascribing moral responsibility I mean individual moral responsibility.

  6. For a critique of the doctrine of manifest illegality see Osiel (1999).

  7. This is to be distinguished from David Estlund’s (2007) qualified defense of the superior orders justification based on epistemic grounds.

  8. On non-culpable ignorance see Smith (1983)

  9. For an extremely illuminating discussion about types of complicity in wrongdoing, see Lepora and Goodin (2010).

  10. On the under- and overinclusiveness of legal norms see (Schauer 1993).

  11. On the importance of ex ante prevention of mass atrocity and some proposals to achieve it see Osiel (2009, 187–202)

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Allen Buchanan, Rainer Forst, Stephan Gosepath, Jesse Tomalty, Moises Vaca, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous version of this paper. This paper was completed thanks to the generous support of the Justitia Amplificata Centre for Advanced Studies, at the University of Frankfurt; and of the Postdoctoral Fellowship program at the Institute for Social Research in the National University of Mexico.

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  1. Institute for Social Research, National University of Mexico, Circuito Mario de la Cueva s/n, Ciudad de la Investigación en Humanidades, Ciudad Universitaria, Coyoacán, 04510, Mexico, D. F., Mexico

    Juan Espindola

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Espindola, J. The Case for the Moral Permissibility of Amnesties: An Argument from Social Moral Epistemology. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 971–985 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9498-8

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