Setting Things Right

Gunnar Björnsson (Stockholm University); Romy Eskens (Utrecht University) 

Culpable wrongdoing gives rise to obligations, particularly on part of perpetrators, to set things right. Moreover, numerous moral practices can be seen as having this aim:

Perpetrators try to set things right by apologizing to their victims, providing assurance that they won’t repeat their offense, mending what has been broken and minimizing or compensating for whatever distress or material harm they caused. Many think that the perpetrator’s deserved suffering of guilt or other hardships go into setting things right, and many perpetrators feel that self- punishment is part of what is required.

Victims can prompt such actions on part of perpetrators; on some accounts, this is the core function of moral blame, or of moral indignation and resentment. They can also protest the wrongdoing, and elicit support from third parties and assurance that such wrongdoing is not accepted in the community. In addition, victims might feel a need to “get even” with the perpetrator, and to inflict costs deterring from future transgressions.

Like victims, third parties can try to prompt perpetrator action, assure victims—and perpetrators—that the wrongdoing isn’t accepted, help compensate victims for harms inflicted by perpetrators and inflict costs on perpetrators, to deter further wrongdoing, or because such costs seem deserved.

To understand these practices, we need to understand what it is that has been set wrong by culpable wrongdoing, such that apologizing, assuring victims, compensating, or inflicting costs in getting even or deterring from future transgressions can set things right. The literature contains a variety of answers, many of which fall into one of two broad kinds. The first kind understands culpable wrongdoing as creating a moral debt that needs to be repaid. Accordingly, setting things right involves restitution, retribution, or compensation. The second kind understands it as causing damage to relationships, damage that needs to be repaired. Setting things right then involves the wrongdoer’s new commitment to relationship norms, assurance of such commitment, alignment of normative expectations, and reconciliation of the parties by restoration of moral relationship.

Some recent work on these issues has enriched our understanding of these theoretical approaches and their relationships (see e.g. Christopher Bennett’s (2008) The Apology Ritual and Linda Radzick’s (2009) Making Amends and (2020) The Ethics of Social Punishment), and much work has been done on related phenomena like blame, apology, forgiveness, and retributive desert. But we think that many questions remain, about the connection between ideas of moral debt and desert and those of relationship restoration, and about particular ways of setting things right, by particular actors.

We are inviting contributions concerning what it is that culpable wrongdoing sets wrong and what can thus be set right, as well as contributions concerning problems and prospects for modes of setting things right. Contributions can be critical as well as constructive, and focus can be on private morality, on relationships between states or groups, as well as on states’ capacities to set things right through punishment or other procedures.