Punishment, Mercy and Forgiveness, Professor Jonathan Wolff

On Tuesday, 14 April, Professor Jonathan Wolff gave a talk to membership titled 'Punishment, Mercy and Forgiveness'.

The abstract is as follows:
'Within the centenary selection of 100 papers a surprisingly high number are on topics related to the moral response to wrongdoing: punishment, mercy and forgiveness, including some of the most cited papers in the journal. These include the landmark papers by Joanna North  ‘Wrongdoing and Forgiveness’ (1987) and Alwynne  Smart ‘Mercy’ (1968) as well as several on punishment, including one of the earliest papers in the collection, W.D. Ross ’The Ethics of Punishment’ (1929). In this talk I will introduce and compare some of the main themes and arguments from these discussions.' - Professor Wolff

About the Speaker:
Professor Wolff is Emeritus Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, and Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi everyone, welcome and thank you so much for joining us. Today we're excited to welcome Professor Joe Wolfe. He is the emeritus Alfred Lanketer Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavotnik School of Government at Oxford University and the Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Thank you so much, Joe, for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

Well, thank you, Julia and uh Melanie for setting this up. I'm very pleased to be here. Um, so you have if you're here, you have probably seen the link that um advertises a little bit about what I'm planning to do. But let me just um run through what I want to do and how I want to arrange things if that's going to be possible. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna adjust my screen a little bit. Okay. So um, as I'm sure you all know or almost all know, uh, we've been putting together a collection of a hundred papers to celebrate the various different centenaries uh that we have for the Royal Institute of Philosophy. And um, I had the rather challenging job of selecting the hundred papers. And of course, what I didn't do is read 100 years of the journal, but um luckily for us, there are lists now of the most cited papers in the journal. And I began with a list of the hundred most cited, and then I started trimming. Uh, I didn't want more than one paper from any one person, uh, so there's some people with two or three, some seemed less suitable. Um, and there were other major philosophers who had given a talk that was then published as a paper or had replied to another paper in the journal. And so if there were big names, I brought them in as well. And if there were things that I thought were particularly interesting and uh or particularly connected with with TRIP, then I brought those in too. So we ended up with a hundred papers. I think we have just released, is it the 43rd something? 46th. 46th, yeah. Okay. And if you've been following assiduously, you will see each one has a short introduction that I have written. And um, what um occurred to me very soon after making the selection is that for some reason the journal seems to attract uh highly cited papers around punishment, forgiveness, mercy, evil. And so this question of wrongdoing and um our response as human beings to wrongbeing has been a major theme in the journal. So I don't know whether we're unusual as a journal to be uh attracting papers of that type or readers and citations, or whether this is actually what people are interested in, more generally in moral and political philosophy. I haven't checked that, but um there is a cluster of very interesting papers on this topic, including some of the most cited papers. Um, so what I've done is I've picked out five papers of the 40-something that we've already released, and I want to talk about the themes of those papers. So I'm not going to give you a detailed analysis and criticism of the papers. I'm not going to try to do that, but what I'm going to do is bring out the main concepts or the main ideas that we've got in each of the papers. And what I would like to do, if others are willing, but we'll see how this goes, is to do it more as a type of discussion than me giving you a lecture. Because I think what we have are some incredibly stimulating and controversial ideas in some of these papers. Some less so, some are more standard. But um what I want to do is start with a paper called Um The Concept of Evil, which was published in the journal in 2004 by the American philosopher uh Marcus G. Singer. Now, Singer um died in 2016. Uh he was born in 1926, so had a long life, and wrote quite a few important studies in political in moral philosophy. And he was known really for thinking about the topic of generalization in ethics, and to the degree to which, if you make a moral claim, um are you committed to a general moral judgment? And if so, how do you generalize? How will you ever generalize? And those of you who know Kant's philosophy will know the problem of the idea of thinking about a maxim of an action. But in this paper, um, what Singer wants to do is to bring out a dilemma in the definition of evil and to give us his own account. So, what I thought I would start with, and um, this may not work so well, but just to see, um, if anyone has any thoughts about how you might define evil as a concept, and maybe also uh what types of difficulties there might be in doing so. So, this is a question for you to start with. Um, what is evil? Any thoughts? Maybe it's a concept we don't use so much, um maybe maybe it feels a bit almost theological, and it's an old testament concept rather than something we use in day-to-day life. But I think we might think we have seen evil in the last year. We've seen more evil lately than we've ever done before. Uh, we read the newspapers, you probably talk to your family members and say, um this is evil. So I'm now challenging you. Uh what do you mean when you say it? I just saw something come up in the chat from uh how do I see what was in the chat? Seems to have gone from my chat. Um so I'd be very welcome to anyone who wants to make a verbal contribution at this point, bearing in mind I don't seem to be able to see what's in the chat. Um, okay, I've got evil says Graham is going to be something that is, as it were, an expression of pure vice. Okay. Any comments on Graham's definition? No, well, Graham, do you want to expand a little bit more on that? You can do that in person. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Um, yeah, so I mean the thought is from the category of evil, there are going to be many bad things that you're going to want to exclude because they're sort of um an expression of weakness of will or um their you know absent-mindedness that was like, you know, so evil is going to be a kind of intentional acting that is um not subject to kind of mitigation or excuse.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Okay, very nice. So that would it would follow from that you can't be evil by accident, or you can't be negligent, negligently evil. Okay, so there has to be some sort of I mean, unless you can be intentionally negligent. You well, okay. Can you be intentionally negligent? I know many people actually who are intentionally negligent. Um, that they uh there's um the concept of thoughtlessness, I think, is quite interesting from a moral point of view because we normally tend to think things are only bad if you have some sort of um intention. But we often call people thoughtless, and there's no intention. I mean, how can you be intentionally thoughtless? Well, of course, in the short term you can't be intentionally thoughtless, but maybe in the longer term you can. You could cultivate yourself as a thoughtless person, or cultivate yourself as a negligent person. So you could train yourself to be negligent. Maybe that would be that would be evil. So we we've got another contribution from Miss Leigh. I I don't know if you'd like to talk or you'd prefer me to read out. Um, but I I read out one could overcome many of the obvious shortcomings of good and evil by supposing it relative. To be evil is to be acting in a way that opposes your own attempts at being good in the manner in which you define. Okay, so I think we've got something interesting here because both of the definitions, this is a problem with definitions, both of the definitions we've got rely on other words that are desperately in need of definition. So, Graham's, if you look at the chat, uh Graham says it's going to be something that, as it were, an expression of pure vice. You can see where we're going with this. Well, what do you mean by pure vice? That's the next thing. Though Graham did expand on that to say it has to be intentional, and and Miss Leigh, um the opposite of good. Okay, so let me put to you the central dilemma in the philosophy of evil here, as it has been uh discussed by Marcus Singer and other people who've talked about it. So there are two different accounts of evil, and we've we've got sorts of versions of the two of them actually very nicely. So one says um there's a scale that runs from good to bad, and at the top you can get sort of beyond good. I don't know what that would be, saintly or something like that, and at the bottom you get evil. So there's a continuum. So on this view, evil just means very, very, very, very, very bad, as bad as you could get. But there's another view that says actually, evil is something different to bad. It's a different concept, it's not just being very, very bad. There's something distinctive about evil which differentiates it from just being very bad. And we've got another contribution from Zaid Al Saji. The question of evil needing an active act by someone, um, not including accidentally unintentionally, evil is weak as it avoids situations where evil exists and people choose not to act against that evil. A sort of extension of Peter Singer's argument about not doing good. Well, this is a very interesting um reflection because it comes very close to Marcus Singer's actual own view here. So I'll come back to that in a second. So what we've got is this dilemma. Um, evil is very, very bad. Or evil is something distinct, it's a different category to being very bad. And if you think of people who are genuinely evil, so yeah, the least controversial example we could probably have is hit Hitler, someone who is genuinely evil. Was he just a very, very, very, very, very bad person? Or was there something about him that sort of transcends that category? So before we started, Julia and I were having a quick discussion about this. And Julia, you I think you had a view about it, whether you want to come on camera on microphone quickly and say what you were thinking.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Sure. So my thought was that I think that evil and bad are kind of different orders of assessing something. I saw good and bad as opposites. And then evil is more of an antithesis to kind, in that it kind of has to do with the motivations and the character behind your actions, not just the act itself.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

Okay. So you okay, so you're saying there are two contrasting scales, one is good and bad, and the other is evil, and you suggested kind. I mean, kind seems a bit weak to me. I don't know. I I don't know if um that really is the antithesis, but I see where you're going with this. There's there's a different scale with evil at one end and something else at the top. Okay, so so that's another interesting view, and but there's also the view that evil is just transcendent, and that it's not on a scale, it's something completely different, being this. Okay. Uh saintly perhaps we we have as as the end. Um all right, so let me tell you what Marcus Singer thinks. So Marcus Singer says that evil is its own category, it's not on the good, bad spectrum. And I'll just read out his definition. Um an evil act says in it is one so bad, so awful, so horrendous, that no ordinary, decent, reasonable human being can conceive of himself or herself doing such a thing. So let me read that. That's just the first sentence. I'll read that again. Uh, an evil act is one so bad, so awful, so horrendous, that no ordinary, decent, reasonable human being can conceive of himself or herself doing such a thing. And an evil person or organization is one who knowingly performs, that's Graham's point, wills or orders such actions, or, and this is Zaid's point, remains indifferent to them when performed by another in a situation where one could do something to stop or prevent it. So I'm very impressed because between us we've more or less, or you've I knew it in the votes, but you've more or less come up with um Singer's own definition. But um let me read out that first line from him because it it I think it is somewhat problematic.