I watch the news, so do you. We make judgments on what we see and we comment to our spouses about how we think the perpetrators of the crimes we are told of should be treated, how they would be treated if it were up to us.

I suspect one of the reasons we feel so strongly is that there appears no punishment which is strong enough. Take for instance a nurse that was alleged to have killed some babies, what would locking her in a facility for fifty or so years and making sure she was well fed, warm, and had clean sheets, do to satisfy the idea that she had something to atone for, does she not have to endure something awful to make it right?

The woman in question will be denied the freedoms we enjoy, I understand that, but apart from the inability to call in to Costa to get a pumpkin spiced chai latte, go to the Springsteen gig, or experience the joy of queuing at airport baggage, what is it that she will do without that you and I value? Prisons have televisions, other people to interact with, education centres that provide the ability to grow personally, rapid medical care, nutritious food, board games, they are a home of sorts I suppose. It’s not liberty, and none of us would choose it, but it is also not the hell on earth some of us may think the inmate deserves. She is also now spared the existential dread of an uncertain future, and there are millions of people all over the world that struggle with that foe on a daily basis.

In another case a family kills their ten year old daughter after years of physical punishment abuse, they do this based on some skewed idea of a more important loyalty to their religion than to a person we would expect them to love more than anything in the world. The confused and multiple interpretations, and centuries of revision producing the words written in a book written based on an earlier bronze age mythology, itself a plagiarising of oral traditions dating back to the survivors of the ice age floods, drives them to hate the nature of their naughty child. I find this one sickening, I can’t get my head around the idea that in a comparison between your child and your deity that a person could believe in their own redemption and favour for enacting cruelty. Is this not a mental illness? There is no prison, no punishment, bad enough for this crime.

I’m sure you, just like me, think there is a difference in moral terms between certain actions within the sphere that we might call criminality. I could pose you two cases, and depending on your view you might say that one is minor and the other is major. Each of us will differ depending on the level of exposure we have had to the acts involved. If you have never been robbed you might not think of it as such a personal crime, if you have never been assaulted you might think it’s like a movie scene. We make laws using rationale rather than emotions, this separates us from thugs.

While being rational about law and thinking it may be the best we can do, we still often find it unsatisfying. Movies and TV propose the value of personal intervention, the might has right approach. We may hold a firm belief in a codified system of judgement that we call law, but also the suspicion that it is limited in real situations. Step in the vigilante, the hero that ignores the restraint of juridical rules.

“One day somebody does something unspeakable, and you do something about it because you can” – Robert McCall (character, the equalizer)

“There’s two types of pain in this world, the pain that hurts, and the pain that alters” – Robert McCall (character, the equalizer 2)

The guy at the airport, you remember that one where the policeman kicks him in the head while he’s subdued? The footage of what led up to that incident became available and we all understood why the cop did a Roberto Carlos on the perp’s noggin, but even though we understood it more, that doesn’t make it any more justifiable in legal terms. The problem is that we do not employ police to enact punishment. Did the guy deserve a boot in the head, likely yeah, but should he have gotten one after he was successfully restrained? Absolutely not. The reason is where do you draw the line? If every law enforcement officer was empowered to interpret the law in any way they saw fit, then what would that look like? Duarte is alleged to have done this in El Salvador, he is accused of using death squads to solve the drug problems, and it may have even worked. Secretly I think maybe other governments might have somewhat admired and envied the tactic.

We reserve the right, in a civilised society, of judgement and punishment to be given by representatives of the justice system. This never meets the needs of our psyche. No amount of punishment can ever be equal to the killing of a child, not for the family, not for us either, and we are mostly merely observers of these things. I’m just watching it on the news and I’m affected by the tragedy and injustice of it. I want a Robert McCall or a Batman or a Dirty Harry as much as you do, but it’s not a controllable situation. The vigilante has no agreement empowering them, and that is problematic because if those most able to enact harm become those most empowered to judge where harm is best applied, then we will have a society ruled by the strong, those with the greatest resources of violence, ability to do harm, or the least conscience, and that is not democratic.

“You please yourself, as I please myself. You accept what suits you and you reject what don’t. The law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer” Drax (character – the North Water)

Are there acts that cannot be forgiven, atoned for in any way? And if so then what would we do if we could not punish sufficiently? It uses much resource to incarcerate a person, it is a very expensive business, yet a bullet costs but a few quid. I’m sure we have plenty of people who would happily fire that bullet and feel plenty good about it too, though that sort of person would likely not be the right one to be let do so I fear. In putting a remorseless person into prison, and them then not being in any way made unhappy by that outcome, we achieve nothing other than the prevention of their potential further offending, and this is often unsatisfying because it’s not enough. We want those that caused suffering to suffer, that’s a fundamental of our lust for justice. It doesn’t feel right for them to adapt to almost enjoying their circumstances, to being then looked after by the state and having little to worry about going forward.

The man who killed his child while motivated by his religion will be allowed to practice his religion when he is put into prison. He may even continue to feel that his beliefs transcend the rational laws that man creates or that the normal general direction the western moral compass points does not apply to his need for his deity to believe in him and his obvious commitment. I’m troubled by that if I’m honest, religion does so much real harm and we ignore it because we recognise faith rights in people, and I suppose rightly so, but at what point does a right to a falsehood or a non provable truth become truly problematic? Do wait wait until we witness biblical punishments, do we intervene to stop the pastor from extracting great sums of wealth out of his naive flock, do we prevent people from keeping their children from accessing medicine in favour of prayer?

I followed the news of the American Hurricane recently where the people of Florida were urged to leave the area. Some went, some could not go because of means, some stayed out of sheer belligerence, some did not trust the government warnings. Some folks took a different attitude though, they said that their deity would protect them from harm. I found myself actually kind of hopeful that those people would suffer the most, but I knew that even if they did it would not shake their solid belief because that is what faith is, it’s not something that can be justified and it does not rely on demonstrable data because if it did then it would be science. Should they survive they would not feel forsaken, they’d just spin the narrative to fit their existing thinking. It’s very important to some people to never waver in their faith, even if it might harm someone else.

It is this solid feeling of being correct and justified in the things we do that is most worrying. For the alleged baby killer, the doctor who was bumping old people off with a lethal injection, that famous nun that let many many people die rather than letting them seek real medical professionals, the family that pray for their child while it dies of a treatable disease, the ones that put others in harms way because of their faith, the vigilante that dishes out street justice, the foreign government that empowers summary executions, the nation state that won’t let brain dead people pass but keep their meat alive for years……. they all hold a belief that what they are doing is a necessity and that they are the person/s that carry the burden of doing it.

I wonder is there anyone left that does bad things and knows they are bad, or are we as a species just determined to torture the truth of our actions to find justifications in them so as we feel okay with what we do? I got no issue with what you do to you, but what you do to me and everyone else matters, and nobody exists in a bubble of self regarding action. So our decisions, having implications for others, must be subjected to external scrutiny as well as internal. Meaning that whatever is considered needs to be looked at from at least two points of view, our own, and anyone we imagine would object to them, and why. This way a person makes rational choices within their tribe.

Only ignorance of detail or implications bring certainty, the singular focus of a person who knows no better the facts of their choices than their own rationale, in radical isolation. Intellectual endeavour opens doors to doubt, this is inevitable as the realisation enters that each action has a multitude of consequences, a cascading sequence of things that happen as a result, most of which we cannot envisage beyond the immediate. I’ve heard this described as the butterfly effect, or the ripples of a pond when as stone is tossed into it.

What is unforgivable is then not only the action, it is the lack of attention paid to what the action will result in. Like I said earlier, the moral correctness or otherwise of an action is often judged by the onlooker using the result of that action. Let’s say that I steal £100 from someone that is struggling to pay their rent or just get by, well that is a distinctly different moral happening from stealing the exact same amount from Richard Branson or Alan Sugar. But the law makes no such distinctions in it’s considerations, they are the same crime. The nun caused the death of only poor people who did not matter to society, the doctor killed old people who were in difficulties anyways and in their twilight, the nurse killed very early life, the religious zealot killed a child with her whole potential in front of her. Each stifling action motivated by a disillusioned inner will that didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, but arguable in that they differ in an objective sense.

What can and cannot be forgiven? I cannot forgive what has happened to me, so I cannot be the best judge of it. Nobody could forgive the abuse of the child other than the child itself. Nobody that has lost someone to violence can come to terms with it fully, not ever. We are just not wired to forgive, but society must be so wired that we can put a full stop on the repercussions and revenge that our lust for a justice that can never be satisfied would drive us to perpetuate.

Are there things that cannot be forgiven, very likely yes.

Paul S Wilson