A Piece on Restorative Justice and Forgiveness over at Slate

In response to Eddy's recent piece on compatibilism and punishment, Tamler suggested that a selling point of compatibilism is that is can accommodate restorative approaches to wrong-doing--which focus on rehabilitating the offender via atonement and making amends with the victims--in a way that skepticism about free will cannot. I sketched out a few responses in the comment thread on behalf of the skeptic. Then, this morning, I stumbled upon a recent piece over at Slate entitled, "He Killed Her Daughter. She Forgave Him." It's about restorative justice. Given that it's a concrete case, I thought some readers might be interested in checking it out. The question I have is whether the skeptic about free will can capture all of the salient features of situations like these. I think they can.  What do others think?

Related articles

Punishing with a Compatibilist Heart

Free Will Skepticism and Criminal Behavior: A Public Health-Quarantine Model

Comments

[Tamler Sommers]

Thanks Thomas. As a companion piece, check out this NY Times magazine piece which I think might pose a tougher challenge for the skeptic...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/can-forgiveness-play-a-role-in-criminal-justice.html?_r=0

[Tamler Sommers]

And actually, now that I've read the Slate piece more carefully, I'm curious to see how skeptics frame this one as well...

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

And I, for one, would be happy to hear how compatibilists--with their conditional capacity to do otherwise--would frame these. See my last comment on Eddy's post for some issues I think compatibilists would need to address. For while I see how the libertarian can frame these issues in a way that doesn't involve any fancy metaphysical footwork, it's not clear to me the compatibilist is a whole lot better off than the skeptic (especially if the compatibilist is a revisionist) when it comes to restorative approaches (for the reasons I have already tried to enumerate).