Horrible events and horrible crimes: how are we to judge the last two years? Getting by has meant adjusting to the constant outrages, and not thinking too much about the enormity of it all. But there have been extraordinary crimes, big enough to overwhelm not just the legal system, but also everything the law is there to preserve. Looking at these events is painful: crimes are violations, and the worse the violation, the harder it is to think about. But there is still a need to step back and sort the criminal events from the merely horrible.
It's nothing new to have to make sense of cases like these, and history can inform our current thinking. For example, Adolph Eichmann was tried for acts of a similar scale and severity. In this compelling lecture, Yale Professor Ian Shapiro talks his students through that trial, and the moral reasoning involved. Roughly, that reasoning is: What is a just response in these extraordinary circumstances? and What can the legal system deliver?
https://oyc.yale.edu/political-science/plsc-118/lecture-2
Nothing is ever perfect. At worst, lawyers and judges are paid dissemblers, or handmaids of the powerful. Crimes that cannot satisfy the requirements of the process are not tried. Victims and accused often seem lost, or caught, in the legal machinery.
At best, lawyers and judges give substance to the idea of our law: that it is justified by the moral sentiments of the people whose lives it regulates. That's an ideal. Even the best, most just, response is a real world compromise based in moral, legal and practical considerations, such as:
Is mercy appropriate?
Is it justice to forgive the guilty, if they are insane, or unrepentant?
How can further harm be avoided?
Can they be rehabilitated? Can they pay their debt, or repair the harm they have done?
Is redemption possible? Can they credibly become members of the moral community again?
What message is given if they get away with it?
What punishment is appropriate?
How much revenge is justified?
The attempt at justice seeks to mend what has been violated, and to fit unpleasant truths into a story we can live with. It needs to determine what harm was done; and say why it was wrong; say who is culpable; and say what the response should be.
Victims are often left with nothing but the losses that have been forced on them. And if justice is not possible, what would you settle for?
Yale Course PLSC 118: The Moral Foundations of Politics
Lecture 2 - Introductory Lecture