Coming clean on getting even: Murphy on hatred and criminal justice

I Introduction "I was born a natural hater" writes Jeffrie Murphy in the final pages of Forgiveness and Mercy (1988). (1) That is only the most unadorned of the many confessional statements in Murphy's body of written work on the topics of retribution, vengeance, forgiveness, mercy, and hatred--topics which Murphy has fortunately returned to the limelight of philosophical exploration. In addition to the analytically incisive and plainly erudite aspects of Murphy's philosophical work on these topics, there is also something of a cathartic quality in them. From Forgiveness and Mercy, through several of his essays and Getting Even (2003), right to his 2006 presidential address at the American Philosophical Association, one has the sense that this body of work expresses a desire for self-purification. This self-reflective attribute was made famous by Augustine, and it is found in certain thoughtful writers throughout philosophical history. As the good cop member in an interrogation team might say, it expresses a desire to "come clean." What is it that Murphy wants to come clean on? (2) At the simplest level, as he suggests above, he sometimes feels passions like hatred and vindictiveness intensely and, more particularly, he knows what the passions to get even, to settle a score, to give a wrongdoer "what is coming to him" feel like because he sometimes has them. I am the kind of person who really desires revenge seems to be the secret he wants to let out. But it appears to be more than that, because accompanying these personal desires there seems to be a philosophical conviction as well. In this essay I entertain the conjecture that what Murphy wants to come clean on is the belief that perhaps these passions of hatred, vindictiveness, and resentment toward wrongdoers are genuinely justice-seeking passions. Perhaps these are not just feelings to be embarrassed about having and then to get over. On the contrary, what liberal thinkers usually dismiss as regrettable barbaric sentiments are not in fact those at all. Perhaps such passions even offer a glimpse of the moral truth: wrongdoers really should be getting the response that the vengeful victim in some sense wants to inflict. Perhaps the redneck's belief that his vengeful passions are passions to see that justice is done really are passions to see that justice is done (Murphy discusses the idea of "redneck revenge" in Getting Even). Worse yet, Murphy seems to harbor the suspicion that perhaps a legal system that in some sense acts upon these vengeful passions is a legal system that does justice. In the 1960s and '70s world of liberal moral and legal thought, the idea that state-enforced enactment of vengeful passion could be both understandable and legitimate--maybe even commendable or in some sense right--was almost unspeakable. Perhaps the suspicion that such an idea is partly true is the dark secret that Murphy has gradually tried to come clean on over the past thirty years. Of course, it is not a personal coming clean to which he seems to be aspiring--it is coming clean on behalf of those who engage in the enterprise of trying to explain and justify what our vocabulary and institutions of punishment and responsibility are all about. As we all know, there is often something at least partially illusory about the prospect of coming clean (as there is with getting even). The desirability of "having come clean" is frequently greater before than after the act. The criminal suspect, encouraged by the good cop to "come clean"--to confess it all--has a temporary feeling of relief, perhaps, but in the long term he may come to believe that it was not worth it. Coming clean in an interpersonal relationship is not necessarily all that it is cracked up to be, either. Of equal concern, one does not need to be an obsessive compulsive to feel the unattainability of true "cleanliness," an observation that of course runs very deep in both Christianity and Judaism. …