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What Is Moral Repair?
A woman is at home in an isolated house by the sea. It is night, and she sits on the terrace. When a car turns in toward the house, the woman gets a gun. When she hears her husband’s voice, she puts the gun away – until later. This is the opening of Ariel Dorfman’s play about Paulina Salas, an imagined survivor of political violence by the former military government of her Latin American country. Under that regime she was kidnapped, secretly detained, repeatedly raped, and otherwise tortured.1 Paulina’s husband Gerardo Escobar is a distinguished lawyer; Paulina surmises correctly that her husband has agreed to head a truth commission that will investigate those – and only those – human rights violations that ended in death; those that are, as the play describes them, “beyond repair.” Because Paulina survived her torture, her story will not be heard and her case will not be investigated.
Gerardo, who, returning home in a rainstorm, had a flat tire on the highway, invites the stranger who drove him home to stay the night. Paulina believes this “good Samaritan” is the physician who raped her and presided over her torture when she was kidnapped and held in detention by the state. Paulina believes she recognizes his voice and phrases, and, when she gets closer, his scent. While Gerardo sleeps, Paulina takes Dr. Roberto Miranda captive; she knocks him unconscious, binds him to a chair, mocks and humiliates him with sexual taunts, and proceeds to interrogate him and terrorize him with threats of death if he does not confess. Gerardo is horrified and terrified when he awakes to find Paulina holding Miranda at gunpoint. He cajoles, pleads, and remonstrates with her that her behavior is “crazy,” but she is not moved. In the middle of the play, Paulina tells Gerardo what she wants. She begins with the thought of doing to Miranda, in exact detail, everything that was done to her; she says that she wants to have him raped. But she concludes that what she really wants is for him to confess, in his own handwriting with his own signature, to everything he has done, so that she can keep the copy for her own protection and satisfaction. When Gerardo reminds her she might be making a mistaken identification, and so might be holding and tormenting an innocent man, Paulina replies, “If he’s innocent? Then he’s really screwed.”2
Gerardo tries to conspire with Miranda to produce a plausible enough confession to win his freedom; he feeds Miranda details of Paulina’s torture that he has wrested from her for this purpose. But Paulina is one step ahead. She has fed Gerardo small inaccuracies in order to see if Miranda will correct them; he does, and thus reveals himself as in fact her torturer. The penultimate scene ends in ambiguity, with an increasingly agitated Paulina threatening to kill an unrepentant and evasive Miranda. In the concluding scene Paulina and Gerardo are attending a concert of Shubert’s Death and the Maiden when Miranda appears to enter the theater. The Commission has done its work. Paulina is finally able to listen to Shubert’s piece, her favorite, which Dr. Miranda had played while he raped her. It is unclear in this scene whether Miranda is real or is an apparition of Paulina’s. She turns to look at him, then turns back to face the stage.
Paulina Salas is a fiction, but her experience of violation and its political context is not. Dorfman, a Chilean citizen in exile during Pinochet’s rule, knows the facts of Pinochet’s brutal regime and the voices of its victims. Investigations of Pinochet’s rule by Chile’s National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation and its successor Reparation and Reconciliation Corporation found 3,197 cases of disappearance leading to extrajudicial execution or deaths under torture.3 Like the commission in Dorfman’s play, Chile’s National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation was charged to investigate and document only the cases of victims who were killed or are presumed dead. So, like the imagined Paulina Salas, the real surviving victims of torture in Pinochet’s Chile had no opportunity at that time to testify about their violation or to have their cases investigated, and the numbers of those surviving torture were uncertain. In 2004, the Chilean government commissioned a new investigation, and the report issued in November 2004 reflected, at last, the testimony of 35,000 torture survivors.4
Since opening in Chile in 1991, Death and the Maiden has been performed in at least thirty countries in many productions; it has been made into a major motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.5 The play is morally disturbing and dramatically gripping. But what does the play depict as the reaction and reality of the victim? Dorfman’s Paulina is unstable, wounded, crazed, and vengeful, and it is her aggressive, threatening, and violent acts that drive the story. She has been confined, tormented, and violated; she in turn confines, torments, and violates her torturer, threatening him with death and shrugging off the possibility that he is an innocent man wrongly under suspicion. Paulina not only needs and desires to inflict in return what she suffered at the hands of Dr. Miranda, but she seizes the first opportunity to act out her vengeful desires with startling ferocity. The scenario of Death and the Maiden embodies, up to a point, a stock plot and a popular genre: righteous fury and retaliation turned on wrongdoers with grim inevitability. “From the ancient Greeks to the evening news, every age has been transfixed by the spectacle of people driven to exact blood for blood,” says Jeremiah Creedon.6 Does this familiar and mesmerizing plot and favored motif of journalism capture some truth about what victims of serious wrong and injustice need and want?
Dorfman has said of the victims, “I am not their voice: I make a space for those voices, a bridge.”7 Some people who have suffered detention and torture like Paulina’s, however, do not see the reality of “the victim” or hear her voice in Dorfman’s play. Poet and human rights activist Alicia Partnoy, author of The Little School, stories based on her own months of secret detention and torture in Argentina in the 1970s, objects to the “thriller’s devices” in Dorfman’s play by which the victim of political torture becomes “a victimizer and a mad woman...We hear a victim that is out of her mind and committing an act of violence totally out of context...Where is the acknowledgment to the stories and lives of all the women who did not need to resort to a gun and did not appear as – however justifiable – crazy as Paulina[?]”8 Partnoy also notes the presence of disturbingly titillating details: Paulina, who has been raped and sexually tortured, is portrayed in both the play and the film versions as gagging Miranda by removing her underpants and stuffing them in his mouth. Ana Roca, in an essay on the movie Death and the Maiden, observes as well that “the film manipulates viewers’ allegiances, making us doubt the victim herself to make the evening’s entertainment more suspenseful and exciting.”9 No doubt Death and the Maiden is performed widely because its dramatic excitement draws attention to political realities from which people would otherwise rather turn away. Yet the depiction of the victim of disappearance and torture in the play and in the film follows too well a stylized generic formula: the victim wants and justice requires “payback,” and that means visiting on the offender equivalent violence or suffering, or vengeance compounded with interest.
This tried and “true” – not to mention exciting – formula threatens to overwhelm the other important details that are worked into Dorfman’s drama. Paulina’s racing for a gun at the sound of a car reveals terror, not rage. Paulina has just learned that her case will not be investigated and her story will not be told as part of the official truth the new commission seeks. Paulina is suspended between the power Gerardo believes inheres in the legal system’s standards of proof and due process, a system that remains powerless to deliver justice to her, and the power to demand some satisfaction, which Paulina has learned belongs to the person with the gun. Once Miranda is captive, Paulina first makes him listen to her story, before she insists on exacting a confession from him. Paulina recites a litany of violent reprisals that she has, to her own horror, imagined turning back on him. In the end, however, it is Miranda’s accountability in a full and signed confession – a durable and publicly accessible testimony – that admits everything he has done, and so confirms everything she and others have wrongly suffered and endured, that Paulina seeks. In the final moments of the penultimate scene, Paulina asks only for Miranda’s repentance as the price to spare his life; and she asks why it is always “people like me” – victims of violence – who are forced to make concessions in seeking a resolution to an episode or era of violence.10
Paulina’s needs for validation, voice, and vindication go unanswered. The character of Paulina is not only a victim of horrible violence; she is also a victim who is abandoned and isolated. Dorfman’s play troubles us with the tension between a fantasy of vengeance that is dramatically exciting and the reality of victims who deserve and need some kind of justice in a world that typically offers them little or none. If Paulina is driven to a crazed vengeful rage, is this solely because of the terrible violence done to her by Miranda and others? Or is it also because, given the brutal, terrorizing, and humiliating violence she has endured, no other way has been available to reclaim her equilibrium, her safety, her dignity, and the recognition of her loss, pain, and blamelessness? Would Paulina be driven to act out that rage violently if there were other ways to claim what she needs? What difference would it make if her membership in a community – as a neighbor, a citizen, a fellow human being – entitled her to make these claims, and if it assured her that she would be respected and supported in pursuing them?
There is no simple answer here, for there is no one thing victims of serious wrongdoing feel and want. Yet there is a pattern of evidence that suggests that many victims of wrongful harm face similar terror, grief, affront, and distress, and that victims are deeply sensitive to the ways provided or denied them in coming to terms with the wrongful harm others have done them. The question arises: what does it mean, in moral and human terms, to respond adequately in the wake of wrongdoing and serious harm, both individual and large scale, and both personal and political? What does it mean to respond to wrongdoing and wrongful harm in a way that serves justice in an ancient and enduring sense, putting individuals in right relationship with each other and communities as a whole into a sustainable order of reciprocal expectations by which their members measure what is due to each other?
This book is an examination of an unavoidable human task: moral repair. As human beings, we need, over and over, to decide how to respond to wrongdoing and wrongful harm in our midst, whether we are the victims, offending parties, or others. Moral philosophers following Immanuel Kant have often described ethics as answering the question: “What ought I to do?” This seems to imply a set of choices on a fresh page. One of our recurrent ethical tasks, however, is better suggested by the question “What ought I – or, better, we – to do now?” after someone has blotted or torn the page by doing something wrong. I am seeking here to understand how responses to wrong and harm, in personal and political cases, can be ways to repair and sustain the grip of morality as a force in our shared lives. The chapters that follow try to clarify the moral psychology of stable and disrupted moral relations, finding what the relatively stable ones consist in, and what has been lost in the damaged or shattered ones. Moral repair is the process of moving from the situation of loss and damage to a situation where some degree of stability in moral relations is regained. This process of restoration or recreation is not always possible; in cases of serious wrong, if repair is possible in some degree, it will usually be at some cost – for the victim, the cost of absorbing some irreparable loss, pain, and anger; for the wrongdoer, the cost of some shame, vulnerability, and compensating action; for communities, the costs of providing acknowledgment and vindication for victims, placing responsibility and its demands on wrongdoers, and showing that standards are affirmed and enforced.
I want in this book to keep a focus on the victim, the one who has experienced wrongful harms and losses for which human actors bear responsibilities, the one who has been brutalized, terrorized, insulted, demeaned, or diminished by violence, mistreatment, disrespect, contempt, or negligent disregard. Although the roles of victims, wrongdoers and other responsible parties, bystanders, and communities are all key to repairing moral relations, I orient my discussion to the victim’s plight, need, and desert, for if moral repair means anything it means the attempt to address offense, harm, and anguish caused to those who suffer wrong. It is about “setting things right,” in the first case, for the victim. In the cases of serious, violent, traumatic, and shattering harm that most concern me here, it is a simple and poignant fact that no wrong is ever undone. At best, it is the sequel to the wrong that either “does right” by the victim or does not do so. In the end, no matter what others do or fail to do, no one who suffers grave wrong is relieved of the considerable burdens and pain that the sufferer alone must struggle to absorb or transcend. It is true that there are situations in which the same people who are victims of wrong in one respect are responsible for wrongs to others in another. While this is an important feature of some situations, I will still speak of “the victim,” for two reasons. In many cases, both personal and political, there is a blameless victim. In those cases where wrongs are done mutually or all around, however, the same person may be a victim and a perpetrator (or a complicit or negligent bystander), but that person is a victim of some particular wrong and a perpetrator of another distinct one. I understand that reciprocal violence and disrespect in real cases creates practical difficulties for reparative efforts. Clarity is not served, however, and justice cannot be attempted when these matters are not distinguished. People need to get what they deserve as victims, and to be called upon to do what they are obliged to do to make amends as wrongdoers.11
I will also emphasize the responsibilities of communities to demand and support repair. Communal responsibility is nothing exotic; it figures in familiar and everyday practices in which a public supports institutions that are charged to maintain, reiterate, and enforce social order. Communities also can be harmed by serious wrongdoing, because it may shatter individual members’ sense of security and call into question the authority of standards and the effectiveness of protective institutions.
Of course, wrongdoers will also be central to the discussion. Certainly, those most directly responsible for wrong are also those with paramount and unique responsibilities for attempting to make amends for it. Yet there might be less concentration here than some might expect on the offending party or parties. In fact, repeated hard experience shows that often it is in the gravest cases, including cases of mass violence and terror, that wrongdoers are least inclined to accept responsibility. I begin my discussion of amends in Chapter 6 with this sad fact. Even in fairly ordinary matters, there is a human propensity to evade and diminish responsibility. Those responsible for wrong and harm must remain at all times clearly in the frame, but moral repair is too essential to our lives to be left entirely to wrongdoers: why should victims be left to the double jeopardy of injury and then the insult of wrongdoers’ denial and refusal to repair?
Philosophical discussions of responding to wrong, have tended to center on the wrongdoer, and on society’s punitive responses to those who break laws or violate moral norms.12 There are long-running debates on shame, guilt, blame, and, above all, punishment in the history and contemporary literature of philosophy. By comparison, bodies of philosophical writing on apology, reparation, or forgiveness are fairly small, although recently growing. Traditional exceptions to this pattern are discussions of “righteous anger,” “resentment,” or “indignation” experienced by those who are wronged or by others on their behalf. There is a long philosophical history to the idea that anger at wrongdoing (called either resentment or indignation or both indifferently) usefully prompts us to defend ourselves when we are treated ill and suffer injury, disregard, disrespect, or insult.13 Often this anger, in turn, is used to explain or to defend retribution, retaliation, or revenge – socially organized or freelance punishment.14 I share the view that anger is a defensive response to wrongdoing and is something most victims feel intensely at some points. However, anger at wrong is not all that victims feel, and the distinctive kind of anger in question – resentment – requires a more complex account. In Chapter 4 I present an account of what resentment tries to defend and what resentment is likely to dispose people to do and to seek. Retaliation, punishment, and retribution are only some of the responses that victims seek and are not always or only the ones that lead a victim to experience vindication.
I would not deny that punishment, when proportionate and humane, is one indispensable response to wrongdoing. But I do not intend here to add to reams of discussions on the nature and justice of punishment. Philosophers, politicians, jurists, penologists, and the rest of us continue to debate the issue of what justifies punishment as a social practice, and almost everyone intuitively knows the main (not necessarily exclusive) rationales include retribution, deterrence, re-education or rehabilitation, and the unequivocal expression of society’s negative judgment. Yet whatever is an occasion for punishment is just as much an occasion for alternative or additional responses to come into play, sometimes seeking the same ends, and sometimes seeking different ones.15 It’s important to remember that when people behave wrongly and hurt others, we don’t always think, or only think, of punishing them. Spouses and lovers are unfaithful, children selfish, associates unfair, friends deceitful; there are slights, insults, lies, acts of indifference, betrayal, aggression, or violence among us, and in some instances these dent or shatter lives. While we do sometimes seek to punish people who wrongfully harm us or others (or wish that we could), there are a lot of alternatives to punishment that in fact are always there, and we often need and use them. Some of these responses exclude each other while others can be combined or deployed in sequence.
We can “let it go,” by accepting the offense or forgetting it. We can blame or reproach the offender, resort to public denunciation or censure, or simply turn away, pushing those we no longer trust to the margins of our lives. We can demand acknowledgment of responsibility and wrongdoing, a show of guilt, shame, or remorse, and reparative acts such as apology, repentance, and amends. Sometimes we pardon or excuse, deciding that the offense does not require redress, or that it is better to forgo redressing it, or that although redress is in order, there are reasons to be merciful and demand less than is owed. Those who are injured may forgive, and may in turn seek to restore connections with those who hurt them or to let those connections go. In some cases we feel a need to insist on a truth’s being established “for the record,” whether that record is the formal one of history books or the shared understanding of a friendship, a marriage, an institution, or a nation. Some historic wrongs call out for memorials or commemorations that preserve a rebuke to wrongdoers, the dignity of victims, and a warning to others. We might, finally, aim at the prevention of like wrongs in the future, whether by severing contact with untrustworthy parties, selectively withholding trust, extracting promises, passing legislation, or creating new institutions. All of these alternatives have personal and public versions and variations. Any of these responses might in some situations be reparative while in other cases might not be. Can we explain why?
I intend my discussion of moral repair to bear on the whole field of ways to address and redress wrongdoing, including punishment and other responses that can replace punishment or accompany it. While I mention punishment in these pages only in passing, I do not mean to rule it out or to imply it is unimportant, either as a social expedient or as a morally reparative process. I do, however, intend my discussion to provide a resource for questioning whether and when punishment is morally reparative, just as I intend it to provide a background for asking the same question about telling the truth about wrongs or memorializing them, or publicly denouncing wrongdoers or forgiving them, or compensating victims or extending apologies to them. My project here is to expose the conditions of moral relationship that are a reference point for assessing whether an intended repair of moral relationship achieves its aim. This is a crucial part of understanding when responses to wrongdoing are morally reparative, and some reasons why those responses can fail. First, I want to explain where my own project fits into a current preoccupation with repairing wrongs that is emerging on several fronts.