Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
On the pardon power of the President
The mercy power also triggers philosophical reflection. Any discussion of the mercy power must rest on the fundamental tension between a conception of clemency as a rarely used “act of grace” within the sole discretion of an executive, or a routine, rule-bound process, publicly transparent and amenable to judicial review. Max Weber’s distinction between legitimate charismatic authority and bureaucracy may be relevant here: is a grant of clemency a form of charisma, an other-worldly power outside the
rational world of legal rules, or a routine administrative decision that is repetitive, subject to explicit criteria, and consistent?
