REMORSE AND RETRIBUTION

Remorse in many ways parallels retribution. Like retribution remorse is a boomerang of the crime The offender gets his own law thrust back upon himself to experience for himself the pain of the crime the world as it would be if his act were a universal law The offender must live with his biting deed.

Here is a second parallel with retribution Accepting responsibility for one’s actions the key to moral responsibility presumed by theories of retribution also requires owning them as mine While remorse is often understood as disassociating oneself from a crime or, as Jeffrie Murphy puts if from those aspects of one’s character that led to the crime (Murphy 1997), too much disassociation amounts to evasion of responsibility The skepticism one feels for a person who too quickly declares himself to be ‘‘a new man’’ stems from this source Michael Moore expects that we all look askance at a murderer who argues that a few years imprisonment is sufficient punishment, as he has seen the error of his ways and reformed (see Moore 1987) We do not trust if the disassociation from one’s ‘‘old self” seems an evasion Ther­apeutic approaches have this potential flaw: explaining one’s past behavior as the product of outside influences or old behavior patterns that have been ‘‘fixed’’ may make one feel like a ‘‘new person’’ only by refusing to own the old one Sherri Colb for example suggests that sex offenders may be more amenable to therapy when they are given the chance to distance themselves from their past acts by seeing them as ‘‘caused’’ rather than chosen (Colb 2003) This stance does not look like remorse On the other hand Colb argues that owning the acts fully means that they continue to bite again and again causing repression and denial not rehabilitation There seems no way to exorcize the past without evading responsibility for it.

Nietzsche says that it would take a truly heroic being to will ‘‘the eternal return of the same’’ yet that is just what responsibility demands (Nietzsche, 1966, p. 68) To own and live with each of our actions through an eternity of lives would be the ultimate heroism and the ultimate horror It would in short, be remorse - the rebite of our deeds Each of our actions we must own, hold to us keep with us though they bite and sting To deny responsibility is to deny our own will our own freedom and our own power To acknowledge our free will is to experience remorse to own all our worst deeds completely without cavil, yet at the same time to be disgusted by them and to feel them bite us over and over again Accepting responsibility requires accepting the life imprisonment of remorse Remorse is then the perfection of retribution.

Usually however retribution is thought to require proportionality - the criminal should suffer only the rebound of the crime and no more Remorse, on the other hand recognizes no such proportionality for the past cannot be undone How does retribution achieve a proportionality that remorse does not?

One traditional way to think of proportionality in retribution is to imagine that the crime is a debt from the past that can be paid in the present and thereby undone Nietzsche points out that this way of thinking makes the infliction of pain a good - pleasure in another’s suffering is the ‘‘repayment” (Nietzsche 1969, pp. 91-92) If we wish no longer to treat cruelty as a luxury item or admit that we experience pleasure at an offender’s suffering which compensates for the pain of the crime equal pain is not justice it is only twice the suffering So this account of proportion­ality is not satisfying

If we refine retributivism, as in Hegel’s view punishment mends the will of the offender by treating that will as free Giving the errant will the con­sequences of its own law renders it human once more by treating that will as a universal will· But, I have argued that treating the criminal as fully human, requires exactly not giving the offender the full consequences of her crime (Meyer 2002) To give the offender the full consequences of her crime the criminal would be abased and humiliated and disgusting to herself just as she humiliated the victim in willing the commission of the crime Remorse then is more perfect as retribution for it makes the offender feel disgust at her own act But Hegel’s view of retribution in which we treat the criminal as a full member of the human community with dignity is necessarily mer­ciful in this respect It does not give the criminal the full measure of the pain she inflicted but accepts her once again as a member of the community So, the proportionality supposedly required by retributivism is really a form of mercy not justice (Meyer 2002)

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