Abstract
My relationship with Jean Hampton was generally that of friendly adversary.1 We disagreed on a great deal—her Christianity against my then militantly secular worldview, her assumptions of trust and love against my more cautious and even cynical assumptions, her refusal to endorse the vindictive feelings that seemed (at least in some circumstances) so very right to me. And yet we agreed on a great deal as well—a tendency to get philosophical inspiration from Kant and the Kantian tradition and the belief that some form of retribution has an important role to play in the practice of criminal punishment. We were engaged by each other’s perspective and would frequently argue with each other—most extensively in the dialogue we conducted in our co-authored book Forgiveness and Mercy, published in 1988.2
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Reference
This paper was presented at a special session held in honor of the late Jean Hampton at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Berkeley, California, on March 29, 1997. The session was chaired by Jules Coleman, and the other papers were presented by David Gauthier and Frances Kamm. Both during the session and in later discussions and correspondence, several colleagues made valuable criticisms and suggestions for improvement in the paper. I had originally planned to deal with these criticisms and suggestions in the present draft but found, as I attempted to do so, that I was moving further and further away from Jean Hampton’s work and simply pursuing independent ideas of my own—hardly the appropriate thing for a memorial paper. I have thus decided to publish here, with only a very few minor changes, the paper in essentially the same form in which I presented it in Berkeley. If I have the opportunity to return to these issues in a future paper, I hope that those who shared their ideas with me will see that their valuable suggestions did not fall upon utterly deaf ears.
Forgiveness and Mercy, by Jeffrie G. Murphy (Chapters 1, 3 and 5) and Jean Hampton (Chapters 2 and 4), Cambridge University Press, 1988.
As an example of the degree to which talk about self-forgiveness has entered popular culture, consider Dave Robicheaux—the recovering alcoholic detective who is the central character in a widely read series of novels by James Lee Burke. In almost every novel, Robicheaux speaks of his own need for self-forgiveness and frequently offers such counsel to others. The following is a representative passage (from the 1990 A Morning for Flamingos): “I think you want forgiveness. From somebody who counts….It’ll have to come from somebody who’s important to you. God, a priest, somebody whose experience you respect. Finally yourself, Tony. A psychiatrist with any brains would have told you that.”
See Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics, Volume 99, Number 1, October, 1988, pp. 77–97.
Nancy Snow, “Self-forgiveness,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Volume 27, 1993, pp. 75–80.
Social Philosophy and Policy, Volume 7, Issue 1, Autumn, 1989, pp. 22–44. She expanded the ideas of this essay and applied them to issues in legal philosophy in her essay “Mens Rea” in the same journal, Volume 7, Issue 2, Spring 1990, pp. 1–28.
In structuring my own thinking about immorality, I have been greatly assisted by reading again Ronald D. Milo’s book Immorality (Princeton University Press, 1984)—still, to my knowledge, the best starting point for thinking about this topic. she understands that she is supposed to be inside its scope and rejects its power over her (“The Nature of Immorality,” pp. 39–40).
An important metaethical issue, which I shall not here have space to pursue, is the legitimacy of using the capacity to explain our reactive attitudes as a test for theoretical adequacy in moral philosophy. If we take these attitudes as they actually are, then many theoretical accounts—otherwise quite plausible—will surely fail. (Suppose that some of our actual reactive attitudes are a product of our now irrelevant evolutionary history, for example.) If, on the other hand, we use as our test not all of our reactive attitudes but only those that are first subjected to some kind of theoretical laundering, then we run considerable risks of circularity.
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, University of California Press, 1993, esp. pp. 219–223. I realize that the interpretation of Kantianism discussed in this essay is not the only one and is, perhaps, not the most plausible one. I am, for example, drawn to the kind of Kantianism developed by Barbara Herman, who interprets Kantianism in such a way as to provide proper moral space for the moral values of family and intimacy. I do not, however, think that this was Jean Hampton’s kind of Kantianism or that Herman would be tempted to stress so heavily a defiance account of immorality. Thus these matters, interesting and important as they are, will not be pursued in the present context except to say this: I think that Hampton’s conception of Kantianism is (unlike that found in Herman and others) greatly under the influence of—and perhaps distorted by—a certain Protestant vision of Christianity. For an example of Barbara Herman’s way of interpreting Kantianism, see her “Agency, Attachment, and Difference,” Ethics, Volume 101, Issue 4, July 1991, pp. 775¬797.
Hampton’s thoughts on the retributive centrality of victim vindication, first suggested in Forgiveness and Mercy, received their final and fullest statement in her “Correcting Harms Versus Righting Wrongs: The Goal of Retribution,” U. C.L.A. Law Review, Volume 39, Number 6, 1992, pp. 1659–1702.
Penguin Books, 1988/1990, pp. 143–144.
See my “Human Decency and the Limitations of Kantianism,” Rechtstheorie, Beiheft 15, 1993, pp. 215–222.
Herbert Fingarette, “Punishment and Suffering,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Volume 51, 1977, pp. 499–525.
Herbert Morris, “Nonmoral Guilt,” in Responsibility, Character and the Emotions, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 220–240.
The more I think about it, the more I want to consider the possibility that even Hampton’s preferred phrases “self-hatred” and “self-loathing” may be too strong for some of the ordinary cases she is concerned to illuminate. Wilson (in the passage quoted) spoke of the feelings of guilt that will remain with him all his life. Is it correct to say (is anything important added by saying) that he also feels (some) self-hatred or self-loathing, or is talk of guilt and shame enough?
Michael Moore, “The Moral Worth of Retribution,” in Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 214. The Gaylin-Herrin interview is quoted by Moore from Gaylin’s book The Killing of Bonnie Garland, Simon and Schuster, 1982, pp. 325–7.
Oxford University Press, 1995.
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Murphy, J.G. (1998). Jean Hampton on Immortality, Self-Hatred, and Self-Forgiveness. In: Character, Liberty, and Law. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9066-2_11
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