The Perversion of Virtue by Joiner Thomas

Author:Joiner, Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

…charity is more perfect than faith and hope which, without charity, are not perfect. So charity is the mother and root of all virtue.5

This quote from Thomas Aquinas assigns a pride of place to mercy (or to use his term, charity). There is wisdom in this view, at least regarding the interpersonal, other-directed virtues, because without mercy, the other virtues can be immoderate, even to the degree that they lose their essential quality as virtues. For example, justice, in the absence of at least some mercy, can be cruel. Glory, without the leavening effects of mercy, can become self-glorifying and in the process lose the true character of heroic glory.

A potential quibble with Aquinas’ statement is that much the same could be said about at least one other virtue: justice. Virtues like glory, duty, and mercy, absent a sense of what is fair and just, can be transformed into things that are really not virtuous at all. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which an individual feels he is doing the glorious or dutiful thing, but which everyone else views with horror because it is so lacking in basic fairness. Throughout this chapter and the three that follow we will repeatedly encounter exactly this pattern.

Taking together Aquinas’ assertion as well as this one counterpoint, the perversions of mercy—the focus of this chapter—and of justice—the focus of the next—can be viewed as foundational in murder-suicide. Even if in instances in which glory or duty is perverted and leads to tragedy, some undertones of the perversion of mercy or of justice can usually be discerned. If even a small amount of true justice or mercy is added to a situation that perverts glory or duty, the tragedy may be averted. The reverse is not as true: if glory or duty is added to the mix of an unfolding mercy- or justice-related murder-suicide, the process may not be stopped and may even be accelerated (e.g., situations, like the Virginia Tech incident, in which perverted glory accelerates the main process, which was a perversion of justice).

The foundational roles of mercy and justice square neatly with three other facts. First, overall, the majority of murder-suicide incidents involve the perversion of either mercy or justice;6 those involving the perversion of glory and duty are relatively rare, and, when they occur, they often include significant undertones of either mercy (common with duty-related incidents) or justice (common with glory-related incidents). Second, from the standpoint of virtue in general (apart from its role in murder-suicide), many thinkers over the centuries have developed philosophical or religious viewpoints that can be viewed as boiling down to mercy and justice (e.g., Jesus, Martin Luther King, Gandhi). In the remainder of this chapter, we will delve into the role that the perversion of one of these foundational virtues—mercy—plays in the mental process of the individual who has decided to perpetrate a murder-suicide.

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