by Stephen Soukup
Justice has become the means by which revenge is extracted rather than the means by which a good society is promoted.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the post-Lindsay Clancy media frenzy is that much of the language being used is careless, imprecise, and, in some cases, even flatly incorrect. Words matter. As Orwell noted (and as I repeated quite recently), “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Among those with the most foolish thoughts are the three female jurors in the case, who spoke openly, unashamedly, and rather sanctimoniously about their experiences to NBC10 Boston. One of the three described her “excitement” at thinking that they would acquit Clancy and about the “emotional roller coaster” she experienced over the course of the deliberations. Another spoke about the “arrogance” of the holdout juror, the lone man who refused to sign off on Clancy’s acquittal. Perhaps most notably, the third juror actually complained that the holdout “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” As if that wasn’t horrifying enough, she also disparaged the prosecution as “biased right out of the gate,” “unprofessional,” “harsh,” “very, very harsh,” “cold,” and “without a heart.” “We didn’t find any compassion in the prosecution,” she said, implying that this was a complaint among multiple jurors. “I know it’s their job, but in a case like this, you expect a little bit.” By contrast, she praised defense attorney Kevin Reddington, whom she said showed “amazing” compassion for Clancy.
What we see here in all three jurors is confusion about right and wrong, good and evil, and the definitions of terms like “compassion.” Moreover, because of that confusion, they radically misunderstand their role in the judicial process, not to mention the role of that process more generally in the maintenance of civil society.
In this sense, these women are emblematic of our culture, divorced as it is from anything approaching a formal moral structure and from its own history, which provided that structure its foundation. They exemplify two problems from which we, as a people, suffer—interconnected and originating from the same source, but nevertheless distinct.
The first of these is our societal collapse into emotivist morality. As I have noted in these pages before (and so will not dwell on it), the recently deceased moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s most enduring observation about the state of morality in the post-Enlightenment era is its lack of absolutes and its consequent devolution into chaos. MacIntyre described the chaos as a breeding ground for emotive expression, a condition in which feelings and sensations are elevated above objective reality and traditional conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, and so on. Morality is, more or less, defined by one’s feelings. That which one likes is defined as good, while that which one dislikes is defined as bad or evil. Or, as MacIntyre put it, “all evaluative judgments and, more specifically, all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”
The female jurors were “excited” to acquit Clancy. They saw their experience in the deliberation room as an “emotional roller coaster.” They didn’t like the holdout male juror. They thought he was “arrogant” and “didn’t interact properly” (whatever that means), and therefore, he was wrong. They also didn’t like the prosecution because it was too “harsh” and wasn’t “compassionate enough” (to the child killer). On the other hand, they liked Clancy’s attorney, finding him “entertaining” and “amazingly” compassionate. All of these are “expressions of preference … attitude or feeling.” None is based on any actual moral principle. None is an accepted, traditional measure of right and wrong. It’s all just nonsense.
As for the second issue, clearly these jurors—and presumably their supporters, Clancy’s supporters, and countless others—misunderstand the notion of “compassion” and the role it should have played in their deliberations and in the legal system more generally. To be clear, compassion is a virtue, but it is one that must be guided and supported by other virtues—namely prudence and especially justice. In and of itself, separated from the other virtues, compassion becomes little more than another emotional reaction, another pretext to apply preference over moral reasoning.
Justice is one of the core foundational virtues passed down over millennia from the ancient Greeks to today. It was the virtue that occupied Socrates’ mind and inspired Plato. It is the virtue that enabled the development of the social and political system that constitutes Western civilization’s primary achievement—the notion that all men are created equal and must be treated so by the institutions they create to manage their social interactions. Without justice, none of the other virtues can have much value to a society. More to the point, when it’s practiced and applied appropriately, justice enables other virtues, like compassion, to be applied appropriately as well.
In his Republic, Plato catalogs a conversation between Thrasymachus and Socrates. The former proclaims that “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger,” to which the latter replies:
We have admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and injustice the defect of the soul? … Then the just soul and the just man will live well, and the unjust man will live ill? … And he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who lives ill the reverse of happy? … Then the just is happy, and the unjust miserable?
Socrates’ point here is that the virtues only work effectively when practiced in concert. Justice, perhaps the most important of virtues, is rightly understood only when it is tempered by mercy. And vice versa.
This idea, this notion that true justice must be tempered by mercy, by compassion, by redemption, by that which James Q. Wilson called the “universal aspiration,” is more than just one of a handful of foundational principles of Western civilization. It is, rather, the singular principle that separated the nascent West from all of its predecessors and contemporaries. This combination of justice and mercy, forged together in the Mediterranean over the span of the last four thousand years, undergirds the entirety of our common history. It provides the foundation for our beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil, the rights of man and the necessity and limitations of government.
Again, however, beginning with the Enlightenment, the notion of justice underwent revision. Justice tempered by mercy was replaced in the philosophical lexicon of the Left by “rational justice,” which connotes something entirely different. Rational justice became a hallmark of the Left, from Robespierre and Marat to the proto-anarchists, from Hegel to Marx and Engels, and so on. Even Nietzsche himself, the intellectual godfather of nihilism and a ridiculer of mercy, understood this and was disdainful of the bastardization of the notion of justice as applied by those who followed in the Enlightenment’s wake. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche addressed socialism and the Left more generally and their propensity to pervert the natural understanding of justice. He wrote:
[S]ince it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work automatically to eliminate piety (because it works on the elimination of all existing states), [socialism] can only hope to exist here and there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word “justice” like a nail into the heads of the semieducated masses, to rob them completely of their reason (after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its semieducation), and to give them a good conscience for the evil game that they are supposed to play.
In our contemporary society, the principle of justice has lost all of its historical nuance. Today, justice is exclusively a measure of power, precisely as Thrasymachus had understood it. Worse still, this notion of justice revolves around a necessarily shortsighted interpretation of power, one derived from the aforementioned nihilism, which posits that there is nothing eternal, nothing transcendent, nothing that points to anything beyond the immediate gratification of the opportunistic exercise of power. “Social justice,” the preeminent virtue on the cultural Left, does not utilize justice in the sense of seeking eudaimonia, the “good life” that Socrates saw as the virtue’s proper end. Rather, it utilizes justice as a tool by which to modify power relations and thereby to rectify historical wrongs. Justice has become the means by which revenge is extracted rather than the means by which a good society is promoted.
Again, all of this has its roots in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment destruction of the teleological framework that created Western civilization in the first place. Without a purpose, without an order constructed specifically to facilitate the acquisition of something beyond narrow human existence, the idea that justice must facilitate a broader purpose becomes antiquated and useless. Without belief in the transcendent, nothing needs to transcend shallow, sectarian ends.
What we wind up with, as a society, is a conception of justice that actually serves to promote anger, frustration, distrust, and ultimately bifurcation. Justice becomes cynical. It represents the abuse, rather than the effective use of power. It drives a wedge between groups, encouraging each to believe that the other is “privileged” and that they are, therefore, victims.
The Clancy jurors and Clancy’s supporters more broadly saw her as the victim here. They saw her as the wronged party, someone who was abandoned by society, ignored by her husband, and maliciously prosecuted by a “harsh” and “cold” system that was “without a heart.” In turn, they extracted their interpretation of “rational justice” by attempting to liberate her, ironically basing their evaluative judgments not on anything rational but on the emotions that others in the courtroom and deliberation room made them feel.
Again, as I noted last week, the forgotten players in this drama are Callan, Dawson, and Cora Clancy. Where is the jurors’ compassion for them? Where is the justice for them?
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/14/the-lindsay-clancy-jurors-and-the-perversion-of-justice/
