On Mercy: A Book Review
Mercy and justice live in conflict with each other. Justice is upheld by strict, standardized, agreed-upon rules of conduct, and submission to the power a sovereign state, leader, or simply one who holds power over others. Those who have power enforce justice through justified means, such as rules, laws, and cultural norms. Mercy, in contrast, can only be dispensed by a person who has power over another, and is an uncommon, and often unnecessary, virtue among wise rulers.
This is the story told about justice and mercy in classical political history and thought. The classical tension between mercy and justice can be seen throughout popular literature and cinema. To see this tension in action, take the following scene from an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
[Enter Ziyal, daughter of military leader Gul Dukat, into the Gul’s office]
Ziyal: “I want you to free Rom”
Dukat: “You’re joking”
Ziyal: “Not at all.”
Dukat: “I can’t free Rohm, Ziyal. He’s been sentenced to death by the Dominion.”
Ziyal: “You can pardon him. Don’t you see, father? This is your chance to show everyone-the Bajoran people-Major Kira!-who you really are. A compassionate man. A great man!…Show us that you are capable of mercy.”
Dukat: “Rom is an enemy of the state, and enemies of the state do not deserve mercy.”
Ziyal: “Spoken like a true Cardassian…”
Gul Dukat reprimands his daughter, Ziyal, for asking for a pardon for an enemy of state.
This scene quickly shows the inherent conflict between justice and mercy. Rom, a Ferenghi resistance fighter found guilty of sabotaging the space station, has been sentenced to death by a cruel regime called The Dominion. Gul Dukat, himself the leader of the Cardassian military and government, is found in a difficult situation. While he has power over Rom and may be able to pardon him, he also vulnerable to the whim of The Dominion. Any attempt to pardon Rom and provide mercy would provoke a retaliatory, destabilizing action by the Dominion toward Dukat. However, Ziyal argues that a pardon would show the conquered Bajoran people that he is a virtuous, merciful, good ruler, and is worthy of respect as a responsible ruler. Dukat is unpersuaded by Ziyal’s pleas and remains steadfast in his decision not to pardon Rom, himself a strong believer that enemies of the state should be executed and not provided mercy.
There are deeper theoretical questions about justice and mercy that are not discussed in this episode. What constitutes mercy, and what circumstances allow it to arise in political life? What effect does mercy have on society? Is mercy more central to the formation and sustainability of a society than justice? What if justice, instead of mercy, was found to be disposable? These bold questions about mercy are posed by Malcolm Bull his in book titled On Mercy (2019). Bull takes on these questions and explores them deeply, ultimately arguing that mercy creates the most stable and sociable society, and is a more fundamental creative force for peaceful, long-lasting societies.
In this essay Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and the History of Ideas at Oxford, goes through (aptly enough) the history of the ideas of justice and mercy, outlining their respective proponents from Greco-Roman antiquity into the modern age, providing summaries and insights into the political thoughts of Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and David Hume, and explores the implications of influential modern 20th century philosophers, such as Judith Sklar, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, and others.
Bull opens his book with a powerful passage from Soldiers of Salamis, in which a soldier shows the narrator of the story, an enemy soldier, an indisputable act of mercy. Instead of calling over his friends and capturing or killing the narrator, the soldier simply says “There’s nobody over here!”. He leads his group away, leaving the narrator alive.
This act of mercy was an act that meant life or death for the narrator. The soldier held power over the narrator’s fate and could have killed him without a second thought. Not only would that be an option, but it would also be a completely normal, morally justified action. Soldiers kill enemy soldiers every day. Bull’s central thesis is that the act of mercy shown in this short passage is part of the fundamental makeup of our everyday social and political lives.
There are many preexisting social conditions that must occur for the circumstances of mercy to arise, and Bull convincingly lays them out in his first few chapters. For mercy to occur, one must hold power over another to either inflict or prevent harm to a vulnerable party and be able to use that power to those ends. Furthermore, the vulnerable party must be in situation they do not have the power to resist the harm that would be inflicted. For example, someone arrested for sabotaging a space station could be brought to justice by a sentence of death, life in prison, or could have these punishments commuted pardoned. Whether the guilty party is sentenced to death or receives a full pardon is not something he has any power over. That power resides with the people or institutions that have power over him, and he is, quite literally, “at their mercy.” Each of the subsequently less harmful punishments entails more mercy, which undermines justice.
The fact that mercy must, by definition, constantly undermine justice leads Bull to cast suspicion on the proposition that these forces must coexist indefinitely. The power of mercy to undermine justice is, according to Bull, “unlimited,” causing a feedback loop over time that softens a cruel and harsh justice system with less cruel, less harmful, and more merciful outcomes. From these outcomes, mercy further softens justice, continuing until mercy exists within a “radical sociability” where justice does not exist.
Bull introduces the concept of “radical sociability” in Chapter 2, where he argues the existence of the state is not a requirement for society, and that instead of a state, one can imagine a series of relations based on radical sociability, where society’s obligations are not generated by laws, codes, rules, agreements, or contracts, but instead by a ‘principle of mercy.’ This principle of mercy would be a self-imposed constraint of your actions to maximize sociability between yourself and others. There is a limit on how much harm one can do while still remaining sociable. By maximizing this principle, a society would be governed by “individual acts of mercy.” If this hypothetical scenario is possible, Bull claims, then the traditional story told about justice as foundational for society is false, or at the very least it is not a prerequisite for society to form.
One concern with Bull’s proposed radical sociability as an alternative to the conventional narrative is that mercy still requires some standard against which one can be judged to have been merciful as opposed to something else (i.e. cruel, harmful, neglectful, etc.). As Bull explains later in his book, mercy is an imperfectly obligatory duty, which means that it is not something that everyone everyone is required to provide in all situations. At most, it is only required by some people in some circumstances, namely by those people who hold power over another where they could prevent cruelty or substantially reduce harm with mercy. If Bull’s radical sociability is to be a stable form of society, upon which the principle of mercy restrains or influences action, there still must be an alternative, more harmful action that is still acceptable, but which mercy undermines. Without any form of justice, rules, contracts, laws, or other reasonable guides to navigating harms suffered, how would one measure the mercifulness of an action? If the reduction of harm when one would be justified in causing harm or allowing it to happen is the only guiding principle of such a society, then that seems to no longer be an act of mercy, but a different act altogether, perhaps a utilitarian calculus.
Bull makes strong assertions in the final chapter of the book that he has proven that mercy, as a political virtue, can exist without justice. He brings the book to a close by showing how a principle of mercy impacts politics in several dimensions, including moral luck, how we should make decisions that benefit future generations, and he even brings mercy to the topic of A.I. ethics, arguing that mercy as a primary virtue in AI could help avoid catastrophic results of the singularity.
I would highly recommend reading through this book to anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, political theory, and somewhat dense logical arguments. The book itself is beautifully designed, with a soft baby blue hardcover and a sleek white book jacket. While I remain skeptical that mercy can be a sole driver of society and our relationships in the world, it is inarguable that mercy is a key factor in our political and moral lives. Let’s all try to be merciful to those over whom we have power.
Works Cited
Berman, Rick, and Michael Piller. Oct 27, 1997. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Favor the Bold. Netflix. Directed by Winrich Kolbe. Performed by Melanie Smith and Marc Alaimo. Accessed January 18, 2022. https://www.netflix.com/watch/70205934.
Bull, Malcolm. 2019. On Mercy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
