For longer than I care to admit, I have been writing a book that takes aim at our unforgiving society. We are far too quick to cast people out in this country, an impulse that leaves us dogmatic and cruel. Each chapter of my book tells the story of a different person, but all the people I write about have one thing in common: They have all done something horribly wrong. Yet I believe, and have often said in these pages and elsewhere, that all of us can do monstrous things, which means that none of us are monsters. If the book is successful, it will challenge our toxic impulse to demonize, in the hope that we might become more understanding of humanity’s frailty.
But now that I’m nearing the finish, I’ve hit a mental roadblock and am coming to you for help. All the people I write about were racked by guilt. They deeply regretted the harm they had done and the pain they had caused, which softens society’s attitude toward them. But what about someone who has done a terrible thing but feels no remorse at all?
Remorse is complicated. Not right away, but later, when you start to turn it over in your head. At first, it’s simple. When we hear about someone who has done something godawful, we hope or insist that they express some regret. Their remorse signals to society that they recognize the wrong they have done, and gives us some reason to believe they will behave differently in the future. And if they don’t express this remorse, it rubs us the wrong way. Intuitively, we feel there is something wrong with someone who does not acknowledge when they have caused pain, and whatever that something is, we feel society has a right, and maybe an obligation, to take it into account when it decides how to respond to what the person has done.
But it quickly gets very complicated. What about people who have done something very wrong in the eyes of one community but not another? As I was writing this, a grand jury in Louisiana indicted Dr. Margaret Carpenter for “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.” The grand jury alleges Dr. Carpenter sent abortion pills through the mail that were used to abort the pregnancy of a minor in West Baton Rouge Parish. The local district attorney says Dr. Carpenter violated state law. “I just don’t know under what theory could a doctor be thinking that you should ship your pills to Louisiana to abort our citizens’ babies. The pill may be legal in New York. It’s not legal in Louisiana.” But in response to the indictment, New York Governor Kathy Hochul vowed that the state of New York would “never, under any circumstances, turn this doctor over to the state of Louisiana under any extradition request.” To some communities, Dr. Carpenter is a hero; to others, she is complicit in murder. Some of us think she should never express remorse because she has done nothing wrong; others would insist upon it, and might punish her much more severely if she did not.
Remorse thus signals a desire to be part of the community that made the rules a person has been accused of breaking. And that’s how scholars describe it; they conceive remorse as a request to join or rejoin a “moral community.” Yet sometimes, the person is fighting against that very community, and sometimes, that fight is righteous; few of us today would say, for instance, that Rosa Parks should have expressed remorse for failing to move to the back 0f the bus in Birmingham, Alabama.
So, it looks to me as though remorse acknowledges the legitimacy of an existing order, which means it can smack headlong into a competing desire to protest and change that order. Who is right: those who would preserve the existing order or those who would tear it down? Who gets to decide? And how should the rulebreaker be treated in the meantime, while this struggle is taking place?
This is not merely an academic exercise. Many of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol January 6, 2021, insist they are revolutionary patriots whose wrong, if any, pales in comparison to the far more grievous wrong they were trying to prevent. President Trump apparently agrees with them. Should they express remorse for what they did? Should they acknowledge the pain they caused and the harm they did? If they do not, should society cast them out? If so, what would that look like, given that imprisonment is no longer an option? I confess I do not know the answer to these questions, but I have learned over the years that the best way for me to answer my questions is to listen very carefully to those at the center of the debate.
So, if you were convicted for what you did January 6 and do not regret it, I want to hear from you. If you are prepared to share, openly and candidly, your thoughts about what you did and why, I want to listen. I can promise you a respectful audience for your thoughts, and you can decide how and whether those reflections will be shared.
And of course, the events of January 6 are only one occasion that might present this conundrum, so I would extend the invitation more broadly: If you were condemned for something you did but that you do not regret, I want to hear from you.
In the interest of narrowing this request, let me put some bounds around it. Some people are condemned for things they did not do; they do not express remorse because they believe they have been wrongly accused. These people accept the existing rules but don’t think they violated them. That’s a different category and not my focus. I’m interested in the cases where a person was condemned for what they actually did—they knowingly broke the rules—but they nonetheless do not regret it and do not feel remorse.
If that’s you, I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me at the email below.
As always, and in the spirit of thoughtful conversation, if you have any reactions to this or any of my essays, feel free to share them with me at jm347@cornell.edu.
