Law and Compassion

This entire blog post from Love Joy Feminism is worth reading, but there's one part I specifically want to focus on. Specifically, I want to talk about the roles of logic and emotion in our decision making, particularly when it comes to legal issues.

Law is certainly a field that does not generally lend itself to emotional appeals, and there are good reasons for that. Given that the extent to which people react to emotional appeals varies depending on the situation and the person, they aren't usually a good fit for a system that needs to treat people in similar circumstances as equally as possible.

However, our laws don't exist just to perpetuate themselves, nor are they always perfect and applied perfectly. Meeting the purpose of a justice system and accounting for its fallibility often will require some degree of mercy from the people enforcing it. Managing to do so while still treating everyone at least mostly equally is extremely difficult, but the other option (no mercy at all) leads to problems that are at least as bad in the long run.

Which brings me back to the original post and its remark:

Sessions’ insistence that his interpretation of the law is logical while others’ interpretations are polluted by emotions is no more reality than is the stereotype that men are “logical” and women are “emotional.” The reality is that we all have access to both, and that no one makes a decision based solely on one or the other.

Many people have trouble understanding how it's possible for arguments like Sessions' to include emotion when they're the ones (ostensibly) arguing for strict logic and reason while their opponents are making emotional appeals, as this point alleges. However, as I noted above, there are some very good reasons to temper justice with mercy... which means the decision to abandon any hint of compassion often has more to do with the desire to punish people or the desire to present a certain image than it does with a logical assessment of what best serves our justice system. Those may be a different type of emotional appeal than the typical stories you get out of criminal justice reform advocates, but they are still emotional appeals.