Abstract
Adherents to reconciliation, restorative justice, and related approaches to dealing with social conflict are well known for seeking to minimize punishment, in favor of offenders hearing out victims, making an apology, and effecting compensation for wrongful harm as well as victims forgiving offenders and accepting their reintegration into society. In contrast, I maintain that social reconciliation and similar concepts in fact characteristically require punishment but do not require forgiveness. I argue that a reconciliatory response to crime that includes punitive disavowal but not necessarily forgiveness is supported by an analogy with resolving two-person conflict and by relational facets of human dignity. I also specify a novel account of the type of penalty that is justified by reconciliation, namely, burdensome labor that is likely to foster moral reform on the part of wrongdoers and to compensate their victims, which would serve neither retributive nor deterrent functions. I illustrate this under-considered conception of punishment in contexts that include having cheated on an exam at a university, engaged in criminal behavior such as robbery, and committed atrocities during large-scale social conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
After composing this essay I encountered Bill Wringe’s (2016) piece in which he aims to show that reconciliation can include punishment. One major difference between us is that he does not advance the view that penalties, even when part of a reconciliation, should be productive in the sense of fostering compensation of victims and moral reform of offenders. Another is that he eschews analogies between individuals and institutions of the sort I draw below in support of some central claims.
- 2.
On another occasion South Africa’s Constitutional Court articulated reconciliation in terms of establishing the “proper rule of law” and “strengthening peace, democracy and justice” (Constitutional Court of South Africa 2009: para. 21).
- 3.
Although it will not follow that, where there is no punishment, there is no reconciliation whatsoever, on which see the concluding section.
- 4.
I avoid systematic reflection on how to understand the nature of forgiveness, working with what is probably the most common––even if contested––approach.
- 5.
It is hard for me to pin Radzik (2009) down. She clearly denies that the concept of reconciliation analytically includes forgiveness, but seems to hold that a desirable kind of the former would normally include the latter.
- 6.
The next few paragraphs borrow from Metz (2019: 125–126).
- 7.
In the following, I assume that the degree to which an offender should express remorse and the degree to which a political community should express disapproval align, although I recognize that this assumption may be questioned and might deserve an extended defence elsewhere.
- 8.
- 9.
And not necessarily restore her to a position she would have been in had the offence not occurred.
- 10.
There is therefore a resolutely “objective” dimension to reconciliatory sentencing, where there are presumed to be facts of the matter about how bad a crime was, how severe a penalty is, and which penalties would track a given crime. Ultimately, the proponent of reconciliatory sentencing must provide accounts of them, but some headway can be made for now without them.
- 11.
Though I naturally intend reconciliatory sentencing to appear prima facie attractive to friends of punishment. For some defense of it relative to standard forms of retributivism and deterrence theory, see Metz (2019: 128–133).
- 12.
Some of the following borrows from Metz (2019: 131–132).
- 13.
If the reader continues to think that a genuine reconciliation between two romantic partners requires forgiveness (even if consequent to burdensome accountability), then it is indeed one limitation of the analogy––albeit one that is readily explained: the restoration of a relationship between intimates in which there had been good feelings may well differ from that of a relationship between strangers in which there was not.
- 14.
I am grateful to Krisanna Scheiter and especially Paula Satne for comments that have improved this essay.
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Metz, T. (2022). Why Reconciliation Requires Punishment but Not Forgiveness. In: Satne, P., Scheiter, K.M. (eds) Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge, and Punishment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1_14
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