Abstract
I offer a solution to an old puzzle about how God can be both just and merciful at the same time—a feat which seems required of God, but at the same time seems impossible since showing mercy involves being more lenient than justice demands. Inspired by two of Jesus’ parables and work by Feinberg, Johnson and Smart, I suggest that following a “principle of merciful justice”—that persons ought to receive what they deserve or better—delivers mercy and justice simultaneously, certainly in cases of distributions of goods, and even in cases of distribution of harms as well, if we can accept some qualifications.
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Notes
Anselm, for instance, raised this problem in the Proslogion, Chapters 9–11 (1973).
Emphases added, from Matt 16:27, Rom. 2:6, and I Pet. 1:17 (respectively). See also Rom. 3:6, 2 Cor. 5:10, 11:15, Eph. 6:8, and Rev 20:12. All biblical quotations taken from May & Metzger (1973)
Eph. 2:4; I Pet. 1:3. See also e.g., Rom. 9:16.
Feinberg's examples of someone suffering a noncomparative injustice: when a commercial promise is made to her and then broken, or when she is innocent but pronounced guilty, or when a reviewer says of her genuinely witty book that it is dull (1974, 301–2). In all these cases the injustice is noncomparative since it stands no matter how others have been treated. I emphasize here the parts of Feinberg’s distinction between comparative vs. noncomparative justice that best survive Joshua Hoffman’s scrutiny in Hoffman 1993.
To clarify: on the face, the elder son and the early laborers are demanding a kind of noncomparative justice, that they get what they deserve. But they calculate what they deserve comparatively: divide us by the relevant similarity—how much we have done for you—then give each class proportionately what it deserves. If prodigal sons deserve fatted calves, certainly those who stay at home deserve more; if late laborers deserve a denarius, early ones deserve far more.
Note that the first disjunct expresses justice; the second, mercy.
Hoffman disagrees with me: “[The principle of treating relevantly similar cases similarly] does not say that we cannot do more for some people than justice requires unless we do the same for every person. In cases of supererogation, doing more for someone than justice requires is not doing something for him which justice requires not to be done for him. I conclude that [such] cases do not describe treatments which are comparatively unjust” (1992, 175). However, the instances of the term ‘justice’ here are crucially ambiguous and should be modified by ‘noncomparative’. Once done, the conclusion about comparative justice will be a non-sequitur.
Thank you to Susan Purviance for pressing me to see this point.
Johnson 1989, 556. She is citing work by Michael Davis.
Thank you to Stephen Layman for pressing this objection, and to an anonymous commentator for suggesting the seeds of the reply.
Quote from 1968, 359, italics mine. In support of narrowing the obligations she references to avoiding suffering, see these: “The reason for advocating mercy is that it avoids suffering and this is desirable whenever it can be morally justified” (1968, 349–50); “the main point of exercising mercy, namely to avoid suffering…” (350); “we regard mercy as deciding, solely through benevolence, to impose less than the deserved punishment…” (358, italics mine). To offer one of her many examples of benevolence at work: she says we might decide to cut a man’s deserved fine in half after discovering that his “wife was an invalid and the children frequently ill” (1968, 354). Here we extend mercy out of benevolent concern for innocent third parties.
Smart characterizes other cases that manifest the limits of mercy: “mercy will be unjustified if it causes suffering of an innocent party, is detrimental to the offender’s welfare, harms the authority of the law, or where it is clear that the offender is not repentant or not likely to reform” (350).
Think of the decimation case above. I said it had the form of mercy since people were getting at least what they deserved or more. But it seemed to lack the stuff of mercy, precisely because it was motivated by preservation of the fighting force instead of by the welfare of the beneficiaries of mercy. Though this is essentially argument by exhaustion, I am hard-pressed to identify a case of genuine mercy that does not involve benevolence as motivation.
Smart suggests something like this with her phrase that mercy can “harm the authority of the law” (350) and her long excursus about comparative injustice on 351–2.
The law of marginal utility says that benefits heaped on benefits have increasingly less value. If so, the total value of the benefits given to those who already have them would be less than the total value of the costs.
Feinberg agrees: “noncomparative justice is not done to a person by the expression of judgment that treats him better than he deserves….He has not been wronged; he has no personal grievance, no complaint coming” (1974, 306). This suggests that noncomparative injustice occurs only when someone is getting less than they deserve, or at least that this is the important kind of noncomparative injustice.
Smart echoes this sentiment: “It is important to notice the distinctions that should be made between condoning and showing mercy. When we condone an offence we do not act merely as if it happened, but rather as if it didn’t matter….[mercy] acknowledges the seriousness of the offence….When a man exercises mercy, what he does is acknowledge that an offence has been committed, decides that a particular punishment would be appropriate or just, and then decides to exact a punishment of lesser severity than the appropriate or just one” (1968, 350).
This quotation and others below from Kant (1981).
I am indebted to David Hills for this grasp on maxims and for much of what is right in my explication of Kant here.
Kant echoes the point again at AK 427 after explaining that a lie told even for the best of intentions could backfire and create the very harm you were trying to avoid, and that you could be blamed for this in court “regardless of how unforeseen those consequences may be. This is because truthfulness is a duty that must be regarded as the basis of all duties founded on contract, and the laws of such duties would be rendered uncertain and useless if even the slightest exception to them were admitted” (italics mine).
In her influential “A Defense of Abortion,” reprinted in Munson 1996, 74.
Recall that this is my formulation of what makes us want to be merciful from page 8 above.
Even if it did not, merciful justice is justifiably exercised only sometimes (per conditions C), so a world in which everyone followed it would still be filled with plenty of occasions to shore up the practice of and public confidence in sheer justice.
It is conceptually possible that, when someone has sinned against both God and people, on occasion one party might forgive the perpetrator and the other might not. In such cases, the non-forgiving party should do their best to forgive, out of respect for the enormous internal action it likely took to reach the point of active forgiveness. I expect in light of such respect and to encourage this internal action, every time humans forgive in such situations, God would forgive as well.
Matt. 7:2ff, Jas. 2:13, Matt. 18:22. See also 2 Cor. 9:6 and 2 Thess. 1:5–7.
My thanks to Susan Purviance, Walter Stepanenko, Father James Bacik and an anonymous commentator for their helpful thoughts on this essay.
References
Anselm (1973). The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm with the Proslogion. (Trans: Sister Benedicta Ward, S.L.G.). London: Penguin Books. (Original work written between ca. 1070 and 1080).
Dostoevsky, F. (1999). The Brothers Karamazov. Trans., Constance Garnett. Online. The Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Calvin College, Michigan, USA. http://www.ccel.org/d/dostoevsky/karamozov/htm/. Accessed 21 Mar 2013.
Feinberg, J. (1974). Noncomparative justice. Philosophical Review, 83(3), 297–338.
Hick, J. (2004). An interpretation of religion: Human responses to the transcendent (2nd ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hoffman, J. (1993). A new theory of comparative and noncomparative justice. Philosophical Studies, 70, 165–183.
Johnson, C. (1989). Seasoning justice. Ethics, 99, 553–562.
Kant, I. (1981). Grounding for the Metaphysic of Morals. Second edition: (trans: James W. Ellington). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Smart, A. (1968). Mercy. Philosophy, 43, 345–359.
Thomson, J. J. (1971). A Defense of abortion. Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1. Reprinted in Intervention and reflection: Basic issues in medical ethics. R. Munson (Ed). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996. 69–80.
Walker, N. (1995). The quiddity of mercy. Philosophy, 70, 27–37.
All Scriptural Citations are Taken from
May, H. G., & Metzger, B. M. (Eds.). (1973). The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Diller, J. Merciful Justice. Philosophia 41, 719–735 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9445-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9445-2