The Hypocrisy of Forgiveness

Why Revenge Works Better

Every now and then (but with increasing frequency) I see an article in the news that goes something like this. Some criminal (typically a black male, not that it’s relevant) commits an atrocious crime that permanently impacts other people’s lives. Upon being released from prison, one of the people impacted by the crime (typically a white woman, not that it matters) goes on to forgive the criminal, and shows her forgiveness by taking him into her life in some way and trying to rehabilitate him. The criminal inevitably ends up committing the same crime again on the person who forgave him. The article always end up describing the person who showed forgiveness in glowing terms, while making the criminal seem like an utter monster.

I don’t like this style of reporting very much. The issue I take with it is not that the criminal is demonized, but that the person practicing forgiveness is viewed as some sort of saint or martyr, instead of a dangerous self-righteous moron. After all, their forgiveness of the criminal is what permitted the criminal to reoffend in the first place: keeping him behind bars would have solved the problem entirely. It’s simply good luck that the criminal’s behavior targeted the person who forgave them, when it could easily have been somebody else. For example, if a woman forgives her rapist and pleads to the court for his clemency and afterwards he rapes her again, I think it’s actually very fortunate that she’s the one who got targeted. He could have targeted some other innocent victim in society, rather than the moron who enabled him. When she forgives him, she is basically saying that she is willing to gamble with other people’s lives in order to show what a good and compassionate person she is. After all, it’s what Jesus would do! Yet for some reason, we overlook her sanctimonious hypocrisy and laud her as a hero for her willingness to risk other people’s lives.

I loathe this kind of attitude, partially because it symbolizes the quintessential problem with virtue-signalling: doing things that are destructive to society in order to show one’s own magnanimity. Criminals should actually not be forgiven, because society is safer with them behind bars. When you advocate forgiveness for people who commit crimes, what you are actually advocating for is a more dangerous society. When we forgive robbers, we are encouraging more robberies. When we forgive rapists, we are encouraging more rapes. And when we forgive murderers, we are encouraging more murders. This kind of forgiving behavior is not praiseworthy: on the contrary it is contemptible. If people want to take risks with their own lives to virtue-signal forgiveness, I am entirely OK with that. But when their virtue-signaling risks other people’s well-being, it’s an unequivocally evil act. When I read an article about the stereotypical white woman who practices forgiveness and ends up getting killed as a result, I don’t think to myself what a tragedy it is that their kindness was rewarded this way. I’m actually happy that they’re dead, because they’re the kind of person who is happy to risk other people’s well-being to maintain their own smug sense of self-righteousness, and on this one occasion the universe saw fit to punish them for it instead of some innocent third-party. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If you don’t PUNISH this, you get more of it.

This is the eternal battle between retributive versus rehabilitative justice. Advocates of rehabilitative justice point out that criminals are much less likely to reoffend if they are genuinely remorseful and taught how to integrate into society. But advocates of retributive justice point out that criminals who are punished by death have a recidivism rate of 0, which is phenomenal. I have never seen a dead man rob, rape, or murder somebody. If our goal was purely to make society safer, then logically our best option would be to simply kill the worst criminals, since not only would they be unable to reoffend, but their genes which produced such criminal tendencies would also be removed from the gene pool. It’s a win-win.

Furthermore, rehabilitative justice is predicated on the idea that the criminal is genuinely remorseful for their crimes. But how do we accurately measure and verify remorse? It’s easy for somebody to fake tears and feign regret: in fact this is the main reason that women tend to get much lighter prison sentences than men do. Studies show that 80-90% of people believe that they are “better than average” at detecting when somebody else is lying to them, but when they actually are tested on their ability to detect lies, their skill doesn’t match their own perception. In other words, if you think that you can’t be fooled by fake remorse and crocodile tears, it’s statistically much more likely that you’re simply an easily manipulated idiot. In fact, 15% of the world’s population are not even capable of feeling remorse, a troubling statistic that our legal system totally fails to account for.

What is the best way to detect genuine remorse, if intuition is such an unreliable guide? In my opinion, the best way is to observe people’s behavior. Emotions can always be faked, but actions reveal the real truth of who we are. For example, in a previous post I mentioned how one characteristic of a narcissist is the trickle-truth. The same principle applies here as well. Somebody who is genuinely repentant for their actions will seek to atone for them before they get caught. However, somebody who is faking remorse to avoid punishment will continually switch their story around, and only express remorse once they realize that they have been caught lying. Similarly, a person who has committed a crime and feels genuinely bad about it should be willing to let the victim of their crime abuse them in exactly the same way. If you rob somebody and you genuinely feel bad about it, you should be willing to allow them to rob you in order to show your remorse. If you break their arm, you should be willing to let them break yours. After all, if you want the punishment to be less severe than the crime, you’re saying that the criminal should have more protections than the victim! That’s not remorseful behavior at all.

This is why I’m a big believer in retributive justice rather than rehabilitative justice. Rehabilitative justice relies on the false assumption that most criminals feel remorse for their actions. Often that’s completely untrue, and even on the rare occasions when they do feel remorse, they inevitably prioritize their own well-being over the well-being of their victims. True remorse is saying to somebody “I wronged you and unjustly made you suffer, so to demonstrate how sorry I am, I will willingly accept the same punishment and suffer along with you.” How often do you ever see criminals saying this? Almost never. This is why I believe that the idea of remorseful criminals is a pernicious myth that our society should dispel.

To be fair to advocates of rehabilitative justice, they do occasionally make some good points. For example, from a retributive justice perspective capital punishment is a good thing, since everybody who takes an innocent person’s life should be forced to lose theirs in return. But it’s no mystery that our legal system is broken and occasionally innocent people are wrongfully convicted. When the sentence is death, that’s a penalty that’s impossible to undo, which is why I don’t currently support the death penalty. If we had a legal system which was much more accurate when it came to determining guilt or innocence, then I would be completely fine with capital punishment.

My overall point is that rehabilitative justice is a dysgenic cultural norm because it encourages crime, and it is largely based on the false idea that criminals feel genuine remorse when in fact many do not. In order to create a functional society, we need to base our systems and laws on an accurate understanding of human nature, rather than the wishful thinking that we currently use.