Making More Room for Mercy and Forgiveness

Abstract

Malcolm Bull. On Mercy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, 191 pp., $24.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780691165332 Martha Minow. When Should Law Forgive? New York: Norton, 2019, 252 pp., $27.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780393081763 Most political theorists would agree that the abuse of power is a bad thing, and that a political system should try to prevent it from occurring or, when it can’t, at least limit it and then somehow remedy or ameliorate it. Whether the power is legislative, judicial, or executive— or, indeed, of other kinds beyond that familiar trinity—it is important that the system that generates (and possibly legitimates) that power has ways of constraining or directing it, so that its wielders don’t use it to oppress those who are subject to it, or to inflict cruelties or humiliations upon them, or to enrich themselves at the expense of the powerless. In that task of thwarting the abuse of power, some conception of justice has usually had some central role to play. Justice might help to define— and thereby limit—the power itself (e.g. judicial power might be defined in terms of the power to do justice according to law, in particular cases brought to the court by a plaintiff or prosecutor), and it might help to constrain its application (e.g. through rules of procedural fairness). At the core of most conceptions of justice are ideas of equality, consistency, impartiality, desert, and rights, among others. These in turn often get cashed out practically in terms of rules (legal or extra-legal) that, among other things, set standards for the wielders of power so that an abuse of power is understood as a breach of those standards and can thus be more readily identified and its correction or amelioration more readily conceived. (Whether there is practical capacity and the will to put such correction or amelioration into effect is another matter). There is little doubt that, in modern Western polities at least, justice must play some sort of central role here, but the two books under discussion here, Malcolm Bull’s On Mercy and Martha Minow’s When Should Law Forgive? S.tudor@latrobe.edu.au Criminal Justice Ethics, 2021 Vol. 40, No. 2, 152–163, https://doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2021.1943845