Pardon powers are common but difficult to justify. A pardon power is, roughly, a power that is (a) possessed by a non-judicial official, (b) used to cancel legal liability to a criminal sanction in a particular case without thereby altering the law, and (c) unconstrained by law. So defined, pardon powers seem to be at odds with two constitutional principles. Contrary to the separation of powers, the pardon power gives to someone other than a judge a (...) decisive role in determining criminal liability in particular cases. Contrary to the rule of law, the pardon power is neither constrained nor ruled by law. -/- Here I provide a novel defence of pardon powers, in three steps. First, even an optimal legal code requires suboptimal results in some cases. In such cases there is a “gap” between what is required by the code we should have and what we should do absent that code. Adhering to the code in every gap case is undesirable: while it would avoid suboptimal results, it would create too much unpredictability. Deviating from the code in every gap case is also undesirable: while it would ensure predictability, it would produce too many suboptimal results. The best strategy is to adhere in some cases and to deviate in others, that is, to selectively deviate. The most important thing about selective deviation is that it leads to like cases being treated differently. This is the second step in the argument. Third, pardon powers are an appropriate vehicle for selective deviation. Selective deviation calls for a power that can be used to set aside the code without changing it. It calls for a power that can be used inconsistently. Moreover, it calls for a power that is not in the hands of a body institutionally disposed towards consistency in decision-making, such as the judiciary. That is, it requires a power with features (a)-(c) – a pardon power. -/- This argument overcomes the various objections to pardon powers. Contrary to the objection from the separation of powers, selective deviation is a task better carried out by non-judicial officials. Contrary to the objection from the rule of law, a power of selective deviation must be unconstrained to preserve the law’s guiding function. Overall, the features of pardon powers that seemed to be in tension with the separation of powers and the rule of law turn out to be favoured by those same principles. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse au problème de la maintenance, c’est-à-dire au moment où les membres d’un collectif social tentent d’assurer dans le temps l’existence de leur collectif en instituant des règles pour réguler leurs comportements. Ce problème se pose avec acuité lorsque certains membres ne respectent pas ces règles communes. Pour maintenir la coopération sociale, les membres peuvent décider d’instituer des règles secondaires visant à sanctionner les transgressions des règles primaires déjà établies. La maintenance d’un collectif peut ainsi reposer sur l’émergence (...) de pouvoirs déontiques qui donnent aux membres l’autorité de légitimement punir et expulser les transgresseurs. Mais d’où viennent ces règles ? On peut penser qu’elles émergent des émotions éprouvées par les membres envers les transgresseurs. Je le démontre à l’aide d’une étude de cas qui établit que, dans le collectif Occupy Geneva, l’institutionnalisation de normes pour punir, exclure et réintégrer les déviants s’ancraient respectivement dans l’indignation, le mépris et le pardon. -/- This article focuses on the problem of maintenance; that is the moment when the members of a social collective attempt to ensure the existence of their collective over time by instituting rules to regulate their behavior. This problem becomes critical when certain members do not respect the common rules. To maintain social cooperation, members can decide to institute secondary rules aimed at sanctioning the transgressions of the already established primary rules. The maintenance of a collective can thus rely on the emergence of deontic powers that give members the authority to legitimately punish and expel transgressors. But where do these rules come from? The hypothesis is that they emerge from the emotions felt by the members towards the transgressors. I show this with the help of a case study, which establishes that the institutionalization of norms allowing the punishment, the exclusion, and the reintegration of deviants within the “Occupy Geneva” collective, was grounded in indignation, contempt, and forgiveness respectively. (shrink)

This work studies the philosophical and political meaning of the concepts of pardon and promise as a remedy for preserving human affairs from their constant fragility, according to the premises of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. The function of pardon is analyzed as that which redeems us ..

A pardon is an act of mercy according to the law, but is a pardon mercy in an ordinary or genuine sense? What distinguishes a pardon from a lenient judicial sentence, which is not mercy by the law’s lights? These are questions about what mercy as it is understood in law has to do with mercy as it is understood outside of law, and about who in government acts mercifully and when, if indeed anyone in government ever (...) does. Here I propose a general analysis of mercy, then bring that analysis to bear on government action. Three features of my analysis are noteworthy. First, almost all existing analyses say that mercy is unconstrained in a normative sense, but I argue that mercy is unconstrained in the way that arbitrary power is unconstrained. Second, although it’s often assumed that mercy must be motivated by compassion, I show that mercy only requires acting with the intention to benefit the recipient. Third, my analysis says that mercy requires the giver of mercy to overcome a motivation to treat the recipient harshly. Given this analysis, few government acts are merciful, but pardon is an institutional approximation or analog of mercy. -/- . (shrink)

Aristotle claims that in some extenuating circumstances, the correct response to the wrongdoer is sungnōmē rather than blame. Sungnōmē has a wide spectrum of meanings that include aspects of sympathy, pity, fellow-feeling, pardon, and excuse, but the dominant interpretation among scholars takes Aristotle’s meaning to correspond most closely to forgiveness. Thus, it is commonly held that the virtuous Aristotelian agent ought to forgive wrongdoers in specific extenuating circumstances. Against the more popular forgiveness interpretation, I begin by defending a positive (...) account of sungnōmē as the correct judgment that a wrongdoer deserves excuse since she was not blameworthy. I then argue that since sungnōmē is merited on the grounds of fairness, this shows that both the forgiveness interpretation and a third, alternative interpretation of sungnōmē as sympathy mischaracterize both the justification for sungnōmē and its nature. Moreover, I argue that Aristotle not only lacks an account of forgiveness but in fact, that his account of blame is incompatible with forgiveness altogether. (shrink)

Recent work in social psychology suggests that people harbor “implicit race biases,” biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do we punish discrimination regardless of how it comes about? The present experiments investigated the impact such theories have upon moral judgments about racial discrimination. The (...) results show that different theories differ in their impact on moral judgments: when implicit biases are defined as unconscious, people hold the biased agent less morally responsible than when these biases are defined as automatic (i.e., difficult to control), or when no theory of implicit bias is provided. (shrink)

The question of justice in Western philosophy finds its humble beginnings in the interplay of life and death. I am referring here to Plato’s Apology. The Apology is not only a text tracing the fate of the great philosopher Socrates by recounting his final speech before the judges of Athens, but it is also a text that, on a more subtle level, announces the advent of a promising justice that is birthed from death, or, to be more precise, from a (...) specific kind of death. Socrates, here, develops a justice that does not surge from the defence of one’s determination as a singular accused, or from the reconciliation of the criminal singularity into the ethical social body through pardon or punishment, but which rather derives from a negation, a radical annihilation of the category of pure singularity. Socrates does not defend himself as an accused who is determinately and definitively singular, but rather affirms the fact that, in some sense, there is no such singular to be defended, that he is not even one (οὐδείς), less than one, nothing. It is, precisely, in this affirmation of a negative, in this opening of a chasm, that a radically other conception of justice and its relation to the singular is subtly proposed. By pushing the singular to the margins of its possibility, by challenging, bending, pushing the question of the singular and its defence to its outmost limit, Socrates redeploys justice not as a remedying balance, but as the abysmal economy of the bottomless question, a fall into the void, in which life, death, the singular and justice co-incide to burst all definitive determination, substantial opposition and the possibility of establishing a firm ground for any such categories to hold as such. In gradually shedding off the substantial presuppositions of his singularity (knowledge, self-relation and relation to others), he unleashes a modality of the singular which deploys a kind of justice, a wholly other justice, which has shaken the tradition ever since, and, as this article will seek to show, reverberates again in what Jacques Derrida called deconstruction. (shrink)

Suppose that it can be right to grant amnesty from criminal and civil liability to those guilty of political crimes in exchange for full disclosure about them. There remains this important question to ask about the proper form that amnesty should take: Which additional burdens, if any, should the state lift from wrongdoers in the wake of according them freedom from judicial liability? I answer this question in the context of a recent South African Constitutional Court case that considered whether (...) an officer having been granted amnesty for apartheid-era killings should be held to mean that the police force may not discharge him on the ground of having been convicted of a serious offence. The Court ruled that, despite amnesty having been granted to the guilty officer, the police force was permitted to discharge him. I distinguish the major ethical reasons the Court gives for its conclusion, which ultimately appeal to the value of national reconciliation, and I argue not only that the reconciliation-based rationales rest on empirical contingencies for which there is little evidence, but also that their logic in fact provides some reason to reject the Court’s conclusion. Then, I sketch an attractive new theory of right action, grounded on salient sub-Saharan values often associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’, that I maintain provides a stronger, unitary foundation for the Court’s key pronouncements. I conclude by discussing some of the broader implications of the moral theory for related matters, such as the rights of victims in the processes leading up to presidential pardons of those who have committed atrocities and the duties of newspapers with regard to the reputations of the latter. (shrink)

This essay attempts to render intelligible (you will pardon the pun) Kant's peculiar claims about the intelligible at A 539/B 567 – A 541/B 569 in the first Critique, in which he asserts that (1) ... [t]his acting subject would now, in conformity with his intelligible character, stand under no temporal conditions, because time is only a condition of appearances, but not of things in themselves. In him no action would begin or cease. Consequently it would not be subjected (...) to the law of all determination of everything alterable in time: everything which happens finds its causes in the appearances (of the previous state). In a word, his causality, in so far as it is intellectual, would not stand in the series of empirical conditions which the event in the world of sense makes necessary. (A 539/B 567 - A 540/B 568) ... in so far as it is noumenon, nothing happens in him, no alteration which requires dynamical determination in time .... One would quite rightly say of him, that it of itself begins his effects in the world of sense, without the action's beginning in him himself ... (A 541/B 569)2 What does Kant mean by claiming that intellectual causality is such that in one's intelligible character as noumenal agent, actions neither begin nor end, nor does anything happen in one? Do these claims have meaning merely by contrast to the familiar experience of empirical causality, in which actions have discrete durations and events occur? Is he merely inferring from this familiar sensible experience an ontologically and metaphysically independent, epistemically inaccessible "world," which can be conceptualized only through the negation of those terms and propositions that characterize this one? Or is he offering a.. (shrink)

Fumiko Kaneko was a female anarchist philosopher born in Japan in 1903. With her Korean partner Pak Yol, she founded the anarchist collective “Futei-sha” which published many articles arguing for anarchism and direct action (“Futei-sha” is named after “Futei-Senjin”, a government term for malcontent Koreans). Both Fumiko and Pak were pre-emptively detained during the major earthquake in 1923. During the detention, they testified that they had plotted to bomb the emperor’s son, which resulted in a death sentence for them. Though (...) they were pardoned, Fumiko refused the pardon and killed herself in prison at the age of 23. Her life is candidly written in her autobiography which has been translated into English (Kaneko 1991). In this book, we can see her powerful ego which was developed throughout her extremely oppressed life. Her philosophy is more explicitly expressed in her testimony at her trial. Also, I must note that there is a fantastic Korean film on Fumiko and Pak called Anarchist from Colony in which Korean actress Choi Hee-seo fabulously portrayed Fumiko, expressing Fumiko’s joyful aspect. -/- This article will examine her life story as well as her anarchist philosophy which I will refer to as the anarchism of truthfulness. -/- . (shrink)

À l'aube de la troisième décennie du XXIe siècle, l'existence de l'humanité est devenue hautement périlleuse. Nous abattons nos forêts, épuisons nos aquifères d'eau douce et perdons nos sols vitaux. Nous enlevons la vie de nos océans et la remplaçons par des centaines de millions de tonnes de déchets plastiques. Nous inondons notre environnement de produits chimiques industriels toxiques. Notre pollution est à l'origine du changement climatique qui provoque des vagues de chaleur, des sécheresses et des incendies de forêt qui (...) déchirent le tissu de la vie sur les continents. Et nous mettons au monde de nouvelles générations, des millions qui ont besoin d'accéder aux ressources d'une existence digne. La portée et l'ampleur des menaces à la vie augmentent jour après jour. Ce n'est pas un mode de développement durable. La cause profonde de nos maux provient d'une façon de penser erronée. Qu'est-ce que cela signifie exactement? cela signifie que nous nous considérons principalement comme des êtres matériels, tout en niant notre nature spirituelle. Parce quenous pensons que nous existons en tant qu'êtres matériels et rien de plus, nous accordons la importance à la protection de notre corps contre les dommages et à la prolongation de notre existence matérielle. Notre nature spirituelle, si elle est considérée du tout, est traitée comme un aspect secondaire de notre être physique, quelque chose à ne pas prendre au sérieux. Pour nous, les seules choses qui comptent sont les phénomènes qui apparaissent dans le monde matériel - des choses qui peuvent être vues, ou entendues, ou touchées, ou mesurées, mais nous savons que nos sens nous trompent, les sens sont une construction du cerveau . Ce que nous considérons comme un monde réel est une illusion. La domination de la pensée positiviste et matérialiste conduit à l'irrationalité et à la destruction. Mais où cette approche nous a-t-elle menés ? Cela nous a-t-il apporté un sentiment de bonheur et d'épanouissement ? Plutôt que de vivre chaque jour dans un esprit de coopération joyeuse, avec nos cœurs remplis d'espoir brillant et d'anticipation heureuse, nous avons isolé la -/- TRADUCTION 1 prépublication des Lettres académiques. nous démarquer des autres et les considérait comme des rivaux ou des ennemis. Nos pensées sont inondées de suspicion, de peur et de cupidité, conduisant à un cycle sans fin de guerre, de pauvreté, de famine et de destruction de l'environnement. À moins que nous ne nous réveillions bientôt et que nous ne prêtions attention à notre nature spirituelle, il n'y aura pas d'avenir pour l'humanité sur Terre. Les mots sont la vie. Les mots sont légers. Les mots sont le pouvoir. Les mots sont énergie. Les mots sont la vérité. Les mots peuvent animer et les mots peuvent aussi tuer. Les mots peuvent donner de l'espoir ou nous plonger dans le désespoir. Les gens utilisent des mots pour construire la paix et utilisent des mots pour faire la guerre. Les mots peuvent créer des murs entre les cultures, les religions et les nations. Et les mots peuvent aussi construire des ponts. L'existence d'un individu, d'une famille, d'une communauté, d'un pays et de notre planète est conduite au bien ou au mal par le pouvoir des mots que nous prononçons. Les mots que nous prononçons sont responsables de tout ce qui se passe dans ce monde. Nous devons donc être responsables des paroles que nous prononçons. Au nom des générations futures, j'espère que chacun de nous fera tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour ne dire que des mots clairs et lumineux, afin qu'un jour, nos descendants naissent dans un monde rempli de lumière. Il n'y a pas de temps à perdre. À partir de ce moment précis, j'espère que nous examinerons tous de près les mots que nous avons utilisés et que nous ferons des efforts constants pour les remplir de luminosité. Personne ne changera nos vies à notre place. Personne ne changera le monde à notre place. Il est temps pour chacun de nous de reconnaître le pouvoir créatif prodigieux qui se dégage de chaque mot que nous prononçons et de ne prononcer consciemment que des mots remplis de gratitude, d'encouragement et de bonnes intentions. À partir de ce moment, choisissons des mots qui résonnent d'amour et de pardon pour nous-mêmes et pour les autres. Nous pouvons certainement le faire si nous ne faisons qu'un pas en avant. Un pas à la fois, un mot à la fois, nous pouvons déraciner les germes de la tragédie et de l'isolement dans notre conscience et les convertir en vagues de bonheur et de réconciliation. Pour nousmêmes, pour la Terre Mère et pour les générations futures, utilisons des mots qui contribuent à l'évolution positive de l'humanité sur Terre. (shrink)