By Alex Tuckness and John Parrish Science of Virtues Mercy is highly regarded in theory, but often controversial in practice. The recent furor over Haley Barbour’s should have come as a shock to no one. American Presidents do not characteristically issue
By Alex Tuckness and John Parrish
Science of Virtues
Mercy is highly
regarded in theory, but often controversial in practice. The recent furor over Haley Barbour’s should
have come as a shock to no one. American
Presidents do not characteristically issue pardons and commutations right
before they run for re-election, as they would if they thought it would lead the
public to view them as more virtuous and fit for their job. Instead, pardons are frequently withheld
until the last days or even hours of an executive’s tenure in office. That mercy is praised in the abstract but
criticized in practice is ironic since it is among the least abstract of the
virtues. It is often linked to showing
pity for the weak and vulnerable in their concrete circumstances of need.
That the most
controversial instances of mercy tend to be political is, we think, no
coincidence. For an action to be
perceived as virtuous requires it to fit with other assumptions people make
about what ought to be done. Actually
there are two types of “fit” at work.
When we think of a virtue such as mercy, we often think of it in terms
of a particular metaphor that serves as an archetypal case. Some think of the lenient judge as the
paradigm of mercy, others the forgiving creditor, and others the compassionate
benefactor. These can even be combined
in some instances. The various metaphors
shape our view of what we think the virtue looks like in practice, and thus we
use each to establish whether something we observe fits with mercy. We call this “contextual fit”: does the
context we observe seem analogous to the dominant metaphor that shapes our view
of mercy? The other form of fit is
“moral fit,” by which we mean background assumptions about concepts like
morality and justice that allow us to say not only that something is akin to the
actions of a lenient judge or a compassionate benefactor but that it is also
morally praiseworthy.
In earlier
centuries in the western tradition, all three metaphors held together because
the same word “mercy” could be used to describe a set of actions both by God
and by the king that had a kind of family resemblance to each other. Both God and the king were thought to be the
final judicial authority, and thus also entitled to pardon. Violations of the law were also construed as
a kind of personal wrong done to God or the king that generated a kind of debt.
Finally, God and the king were both thought of as benefactors to the poor and
needy. Mercy could thus bear all of
these meanings at once.
Since the 17th
and 18th centuries, however, the linkages holding these metaphors
together have come apart, and both types of “fit” have thus been compromised in
politics. In terms of contextual fit, far
from seeing our chief executives as the final judicial authority, we instead
view judges as checks on executive power and thus tend to see executive intervention
in the judicial process as an unjust intrusion.
We likewise do not think of chief executives as wronged parties with
standing to forgive a debt. And
similarly, we do not view chief executives as generous benefactors since the public
funds they distribute do not belong to them. In terms of moral fit, the
dominant contemporary conceptions of justice have frequently equated discretion
with arbitrary rule or have elevated retributive justice to a place of
prominence and then defined mercy as the violation of retributive justice. In mercy we thus see an example about how
changing political and philosophical conditions can shape perceptions of what
mercy is and when it is a virtue.
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