Content area
Full Text
The Decline of Mercy in Public Life BY ALEX TUCKNESS AND JOHN M. PARRISH CAMBRIDGE, 318 PAGES, $29.99
Though mercy is a Christian virtue, our post-Christian society shies away from relying on it. Lenient criminal sentences, pardons, and debt forgiveness all seem to undercut the demands of justice and public safety. We now speak the language of rights, instead of mercy, to justify helping the needy. Social programs have displaced Christian charity, and generic do-gooder benevolence has supplanted mercy. By making benevolence bureaucratic and impersonal, we have suppressed human kindness and empathy, the direct personal contact that stirs the heart. Debt relief, welfare programs, and criminal sentences become political footballs in a zero-sum game. Any show of mercy seems to sacrifice justice.
It was not always thus, as Alex Tuckness and John Parrish show in their intellectual history of the decline of mercy. Aristotle understood mercy as tailoring justice to the needs of the particular case, and
other ancients emphasized mercy as restraining one's vengeful...