Can there be justice without mercy?

"Is that even a question?" you will say. It turns out it is, and I think that if you follow such a question, you may arrive at very important discoveries about many of the problems from which we have long suffered, and may reach the traces of some of our very fundamental values that we have lost.

For some time now we have been reading in this newspaper a series of articles containing a very interesting, thought-provoking and instructive account by an intellectual, in pursuit of the genealogy of a concept, of the course of his own thinking. The series I am speaking of describes the own experience of our esteemed friend, our thinker Erol Göka, in his search to find the connection and relation between justice and mercy.

Although he places the dilemma between the two concepts of justice and mercy, the real concept he is trying to discover is actually mercy. Perhaps in our culture the two need not be opposites in any comparison, but it is evident that, within the Western mental world that we have perhaps unwittingly internalized thoroughly, we have been made prone to adopting a kind of merciless justice.

Since ancient Greek philosophy, mercy has been seen as unnecessary, even as an unnecessary feeling that obstructs justice. For instance, as Göka relates, for Aristotle mercy, seen as "pity", "is nothing but selfishness. For what leads us to feel pity for the condition to which others are exposed is the anxiety we feel for ourselves". When the attitudes toward mercy of famous Western thinkers such as the Stoics, Spinoza and Nietzsche, as well as of the Enlightenment thinkers, are considered together, the situation is quite thought-provoking.

Seeing among Western conceptual dichotomies the presence of an anti-mercy discourse sufficient to diagnose an opposition between justice and mercy can of course be considered an important starting point for understanding today's Western world.

Can a merciless world be just? After such a negative discourse against mercy or pity, what kind of motivation can be provided for treating people justly? Might the fact that the value of justice, which in the West today has been subjected almost to mathematical measures, is sometimes unable to protect against the fascistic, genocidal practices it produces within itself, and against the colonial, massacring practices it produces toward the rest of the world, not stem from the lack of a feeling called mercy? In the context of the mercy-justice dichotomy, does a justice-centered attitude not in total destroy justice as well?

So how has this opposition to mercy against justice in the West been internalized, by saying "mercy breeds malady"? While describing his search, in which, in Islamic culture and philosophy, instead of such an opposition, the two feelings or values would arrive at a point where they complete each other and one is not possible without the other, Göka nevertheless realizes that, like everyone, he too set out on the road under the influence of this anti-mercy discourse.

Indeed, there is a possibility that unnecessary mercy may prevent necessary punishment and thus prevent justice. The punishment withheld from the criminal in the name of mercy destroys mercy in a broader sense, through the injustice it will bring about toward the victims of the crime.

However, taking the feeling of mercy only with this negative function in the context of its relation to justice prevents us from seeing the much deeper and more rooted place of this feeling and value in human existence. Justice is a thing being in its proper place; its opposite, oppression, is a thing not being in its place.

In Göka's adventure of thought, the warning that prompted him to rethink the opposition on justice and mercy came as a one-sentence objection from a listener whose profession was judge, to his speech at the Justice Council in which he explained that "the only virtue that is good in the absolute sense is justice", that the excess of all feelings can be harmful, but that there is no such thing as an excess of justice, since the more we try to be just the better, with which he concluded: "Professor, when you say excess is harmful, I think you are doing mercy an injustice; think it over well," said that judge.

That the judge, from whom, owing to his profession, we would be inclined to expect more focus on justice than on mercy, put emphasis on mercy here, set Göka thinking considerably afterwards, and pursuing this warning he set out on the path of rethinking the subject from beginning to end.

This anecdote alone is an excellent example of how the course of a thought can be influenced and changed. At that moment no very different argument or datum that could cancel existing ideas was actually put forward. Just an objection; but that a one-sentence objection on justice, coming from someone whose profession is law, had the first effect of a paradigm shift in all of a thinker's ideas, and this account of it in this way, I do not know about you, but it excited me quite a lot.

"How did our judge, who by his profession was expected to reduce the question to the context of crime-punishment-pardon, manage not to fall into this trap while I had stumbled?" asks Göka, and as he pursues this question he is caught, as the first stop, on the concept of the "heart". The meaning of the concept of heart in Islam is of course very different from the heart as a biological organ. The heart is the center of all intellect, conscience, discernment, and also the sense of justice. The human being thinks not with the brain but with the heart, and this heart is in constant motion. It is the field of movement and action of all negative feelings as much as positive feelings.

The etymological relation between heart and change, revolution, is of course not coincidental. A person's thoughts, concepts, intellect, conscience, friendship, enmity are all under the influence of this turning, revolving dynamism. Under which influences, and by causing which influences?..

At the point where Göka discovers mercy for a better justice, while expecting his course of thought to continue, one does not expect to read the last paragraph of his last piece on this subject also as news that he is taking a break from his articles in the newspaper.

A feast of thought whose taste is still on our palate, so to speak. If an opportunity arises, let us go a little further in the future on this road that Göka has started.

I reached for the phone to ask why he took a break from newspaper writing after such beautiful pieces. I found nothing to say in response to his answer: just to be able to spare a little more time to write his books, which he has been neglecting for some time. Let us at least await with curiosity the book he will write on this subject.