Description: Exploring Ethics and Christianity
It is commonly thought that there is a tension between mercy and justice, and it is indeed not obvious how to make sense of God being both perfectly just and perfectly merciful. In this blog post, I characterize mercy and justice and discuss how God might be said to maximize both of these, building on recent developments in perfect being theology by Yujin Nagasawa, Mark Murphy, and Daniel Hill.
Mercy and justice are responses by an agent to the actions of an individual who is the recipient of mercy or justice. An agent responds to a recipient depending on whether the action is good or evil (positive or negative). A good action deserves reward, and an evil action deserves punishment. In short, justice is getting what you deserve (good or bad), and mercy is not getting something negative (i.e., punishment) you do deserve. [1] We can extend the characterization to add grace, which is getting somethin
The quadrants of answers to these questions can be summarized in Table 1 below. It is just to pay an agreed-upon wage for a job, or to give a misbehaving high school student detention. It is gracious to give someone a Christmas gift, especially one whom has never given you a gift (where there is definitely no obligation). It is merciful for a police officer that pulls you over for speeding to only give a verbal warning, or for a judge to drop or reduce a charge or sentence for someone who committed a crime.