Showing mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent: Adam Smith & the right kind of compassion

One of my five favorite movies is Abraham Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. When I watch that movie, I feel more sentiment for Abraham Lincoln than I do for the entirety of Americans who died in the Civil War. This is not sensible, but it is human.

Mathematically and historically, my impulses could not be more wrong. Over 600,000 people died in the American Civil War. It was not uncommon for mothers to have lost multiple sons. There is no reason to think that the suffering of those mothers or their sons bleeding out in muddy fields suffered any less than Abraham Lincoln. But I can’t keep track of all the characters during the third season of a Netflix TV show, let alone over half a million men. But Abraham Lincoln is one character. He is the right amount of finite for thorough comprehension.

He is in company with Jesus Christ and Napoleon as one of the most written-about people in the world. If I had to read a depressing book, I’d usually prefer to read a book about Abraham Lincoln than about a mass of people. Still, I don’t think that Abraham Lincoln’s suffering counts more than anyone else’s. It’s just that my imagination can more easily wrap itself around one interesting guy and his presidency.

But here is where I take a different path from the Communists and crazy ladies on TikTok. I realize that my imagination is not reality. And here, by imagination, I don’t just mean fiction in the mind. Imagination comes from the Latin word ‘imago,’ which means likeness, representation or copy. Image comes from the word imago as well. The image in a photo can be absolutely terrible, or it can be, well, picture-perfect. Photographic evidence, if determinative, can be used in court to prove innocence or guilt. But if the evidence is blurry or doesn’t have a time stamp or was tampered with somehow, then that image should be thrown out of court.

Which brings us to Lindsay Clancy’s case, which I'm sure you are familiar with. I will say that I have not heard of any law enforcement doing anything less than their professional duty—something for which I am grateful. Even in cases with overwhelming evidence, some cops or prosecutors do a sloppy job, allowing the guilty to walk free. The problems with the Lindsay Clancy case are much worse.

There, many women on the jury wanted to project the imagination in their head into the world rather than absorbing the images received by their eyes into their mind. They have sympathy for a mentally ill women who struggled with postpartum depression and that sum. They can’t relate to the children killed as easily as they can relate to Lindsay, so they want to let Lindsay walk.

To demonstrate how ridiculous our biases are, let’s run through some alternative scenarios with Lindsay Clancy. If she had killed three dogs along with her children, no women would sympathize with her. If she was exceptionally ugly or exceptionally beautiful, she wouldn’t be relatable and would most certainly be found guilty. If her husband was a black man and she killed half-black kids, then a guilty verdict would be a safer bet.

None of these scenarios have anything to do with justice. It is as relevant as writing an interesting book about Abraham Lincoln. Murder is murder, and you should be punished whether or not I like you or your work. Some feelings in one’s own small imagination are not relevant to perceiving the greater image of justice.

For generations a strong romantic impulse has flourished throughout the West, encouraging the celebration of personal feelings against outside moral standards.* In modern fiction, the quirky character is perfect just as they are, and the outside order is suspect because it restrains the eccentric's innate decency. Such a character may have to go on a journey to become more confident and accepting, but they don’t really have to struggle against their own vice or folly. In better older fiction, whenever a hero offends the moral order, he has to go on a quest to atone and become a better person.

Often the hero in those old stories takes his sense of justice too far and punishes someone or some group of people too severely. But mercy can also offend the moral order. Many commentators are quoting Adam Smith's dictum that “showing mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Justice, Smith explains, requires people to balance the compassion they feel for a particular person with “a more enlarged compassion they feel for mankind.”

We don’t always feel a more enlarged compassion for mankind. Some of us are particular toward presidents or artists rather than the greater needs of mankind. I know I am. But civilization requires us to think about a greater justice, one we may not have the strongest feelings for. If Lindsay Clancy is let go, there will be copycat murders by other mothers of their children. Adam Smith understood that letting people go based on whimsical pathos leads to a more destructive and cruel society. Letting the obviously guilty go free encourages others to commit crime. Even if we are sentimentally inclined toward mothers, a comprehensive compassion for mankind demands we protect children by punishing the guilty.

*Cannot recommend this essay enough.

P.S. All art is either in the public domain or AI of my own creation. The Scottish Grey Knights shall destroy French chaos.