Anthony

Posted Friday, March 31, 2023

1y

INTJ

8

7

Justice vs. Mercy

“Mercy” is a concept that applies to, and is called upon, only by the evil, never by the good. If a man has committed a heroic or a virtuous deed, what he asks is justice, not mercy. If a man has committed a despicable or vicious deed, what he dreads is justice, and what he cries for is mercy. The desire for mercy is always the desire to escape from the objective facts of reality. . . . Now, the logical question to ask yourselves is this: who would have a vested interest in upholding this sort of view? Who would have reason to long for an escape from morality, and to hope that a deserved retribution may somehow be diverted from his head? Only the man who is guilty and intends to remain guilty. Only the man who has committed evil and intends to continue committing evil. Mercy is a blank check on, and a license to, evil. As in the case of any other vicious, irrational concept, the men who uphold “mercy” long for both sides of the coin and see themselves in both roles—as the judged and the judges, as the recipients and as the dispensers of unearned favors. They expect the chance to be in both positions, according to where they might land in the future—a chance to dispense the undeserved to groveling wretches, as insurance against the day when it will be their turn to grovel. “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Now, who has no interest in this view of existence? Whose interests are not included in the concept of “mercy”? Who is eloquently absent from the definition of “mercy” that I read? The innocent and the virtuous. They are the men who do not need mercy, but who do need justice. It is the men of innocence and the men of virtue who need acknowledgment and recognition, who need to be treated for what they are, who need no favors, only the justice of receiving that which they have earned and deserve, that which is theirs by right. These are the men whose existence the concept of “mercy” blanks out. There is a reason for that blank-out. All evils are committed against men, not against physical nature or inanimate objects. You cannot be evil toward a table, a chair, or a chunk of stone, only toward a human being. Every act of evil has victims, and if one is to give an undeserved benefit, any kind of undeserved benefit, to an evildoer, one has to take it away from his victims; one has to do it at the expense of his victims. Consider this carefully. There is no exception to this rule. You can now appreciate more clearly the meaning of Rearden’s thoughts in the following passage from Atlas Shrugged: “When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good one punishes for the sake of the evil. When one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice. Nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit; and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.” [quotes added] Such is the meaning of “mercy”: the penalizing of virtue for being virtue, the rewarding of vice for being vice, the sacrifice of the good to the evil. And such is the full meaning of the slogan that mercy is superior to justice. . . . It is the virtue of justice that represents the most profound cleavage between the Objectivist ethics and mystic-altruist-collectivist. “Justice” is the concept they cannot accept or touch or approach, not any inch or part of it, because the whole of the altruist-collectivist doctrine rests on injustice to human ability and achievement—rests on the concepts of “mercy,” “charity,” “expropriation”—rests on the necessity of unpaid supporters, unrewarded producers, unacknowledged keepers of, and sacrificial animals to, the weaknesses, flaws, defaults, and depravities of others. . . . Today, as you know, there is a very strong animus against passing moral judgments of any kind whatsoever. Anything can be forgiven or tolerated in our culture, except somebody who will pass moral judgments. Let anybody pass an uncompromising moral judgment about anything, and I don’t have to tell you that it’s upon his neck that all of the humanitarian axes will fall. It is an age of extreme moral cynicism, of mawkish sentimentality towards evil—and an age in which anything is to be forgiven, anything is to be understood except, as I say, anybody who dares to point out that the evil is the evil. . . . In other words, and to summarize: in our age, anything is to be forgiven, except justice. That, more than any other single issue, is what the Objectivist ethics is attacked for and criticized for, and that’s central to its war with the prevailing values of our culture. (Nathaniel Branden; "The Basic Principles of Objectivism," Lecture 11.)