Osler's Razor

At the lenten retreat this week, Susan Stabile and I had an interesting exchange (which she has described already on her blog). She had mentioned that lawyers sometimes have a problem with forgiveness because we are focused on justice; in response, I noted that the problem might actually be our focus on process. That is, we think that there should be a process, a dialogue, which creates an outcome, but forgiveness, at least as Jesus modeled on the cross, doesn't have that. For him, the first step was forgiveness, and there was no repentance first by those who were killing him.

Part of what I was saying was that we should not assume that process is the same as justice. It can create justice, certainly-- but often does the opposite, while giving injustice the appearance of evolved civilization.

I probably could describe this as another false proxy-- that we often view process as a proxy for justice. We should not be so quick to do so. For example, what I have worked on so hard, the federal sentencing guidelines, is a process which has created injustice.

One reason that process can be so amoral is that it serves to remove the powerful force of individual morality from the way we address moral conflicts. Instead of engaging with a problem with our own heart and mind, we hand it over to a machinery that is already in place, an assembly line of decision making.

There is tragedy in that. In sentencing, it results in judges telling a man how many years he will be locked away with her eyes down, doing math calculations. How wrong is that? Plucking out the humanity from the process of judging is like plucking the eyes from a bird-- it does not create blind justice, but a moral blindness that denies the very presence and imperative of God in our midst.