Posts Tagged ‘justice’

“The Grammar of Punishment”

December 16, 2025
Ricardo Morin
The Grammar of Punishment
10″x12″
Watercolor
2003

Ricardo F. Morín

November 2025

Bala Cynwyd, Pa

Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor

Author’s Note:

Societies respond to harm in two fundamentally distinct modes of action.    One unfolds through the slow, cumulative patterns of behavior and belief that shape collective life; the other through the deliberate, codified interventions undertaken by institutions in the name of order.    The Grammar of Conflict and The Grammar of Punishment are companion essays, each devoted to one of these modes of action.   The Grammar of Conflict traces how hatred, victimhood, hypocrisy, tribalism, and violence intertwine into a self-perpetuating system—one that is sustained through repeated explanation at every turn and is endured not through necessity, but through the stories societies choose to tell.    The Grammar of Punishment concerns the authority of the State, viz. a formal, structured exercise of power that imposes consequences within boundaries defined by lawful interpretation.   The Grammar of Conflict traces how civic and political antagonism becomes habitual and self-justifying.   The Grammar of Punishment addresses cases in which the State that exceeds its limits can turn injustice into a system of unreasoned laws.    Taken together, the two essays offer complementary perspectives on the forces that perpetuate harm and on the deliberate choices that may interrupt its recurrence.

Abstract:

The Grammar of Punishment addresses the consequences a society imposes for wrongdoing and how the consequences shape the political order and the moral landscape.    The essay treats punishment as a limited civic instrument and punishment as an entrenched practice.    It describes conditions under which the same punitive act can either uphold shared rules or weaken these rules when the scope and purpose of the punishment exceed the original moral and civic justification for imposing them.   The drift beyond that justification often occurs because punishment extends beyond accountability:   when punishment becomes a vehicle for revenge, a demonstration of power, and a means of perpetuating the authority or moral narratives that allow it to continue long after the original violation has been addressed.   This essay does not oppose punishment; it addresses conditions under which punishment displaces justice.    At a time when punitive measures increasingly shape political discourse and public policy, understanding the internal logic of punishment is essential to preserving the boundary between justice and power.

The essay will trace how punishment evolves from a measured response to a specific wrongdoing into a self-perpetuating system of governing.    It will show how institutions originally created to restore justice will come to assert authority, to sustain narratives of legitimacy, and to conceal the principles they were established to defend.    The analysis will identify the conditions under which punishment remains credible (when the exercise of punitive authority is bounded by reason, procedure, scope, proportionality, time, and review) and the points at which punishment ceases to protect social order and begins instead to perpetuate harm.    The essay, however, will neither dictate specific policies nor condemn the use of policies.    Its purpose will be to clarify the roles attributed to punishment, the points at which those roles break down, and how continued reliance on punitive measures discloses deeper social choices about authority, responsibility, and the impulse to respond to injury—choices that reveal as much about a society’s values as about its fears.

1
Punishment is a public act that imposes a cost in response to a breach of law or shared norm.    Punishment marks a boundary, declares a rule, and demonstrates its enforcement.    This definition distinguishes punishment from prevention, restraint, accountability, and repair.    Prevention concerns events that have not yet occurred.    Restraint limits the capacity of an individual or group to cause harm.    Accountability establishes facts and assigns responsibility.    Repair addresses loss and attempts to restore what has been taken away.    Punishment differs from these responses because punishment addresses a specific violation after the fact and imposes a consequence.

2
Any serious assessment of punishment must answer three questions:    What is the purpose of punishment?    To whom is punishment directed?    And, what is the outcome of punishment?   The first question concerns a reasoned intent as opposed to a vague one.    The second question concerns the target and scope of the punitive act.    The third question concerns its manifestation as opposed to the original intention of punishment.    A punishment that claims deterrence yet produces recurrence, or resists compliance, errs not in degree but in comprehension of punishment as a tool.    By ignoring cause, the application of punishment can mistake reaction for resolution and enact justice without insight—a cycle that corrects nothing because it understands nothing.

3
Four primary purposes of punishment are commonly recognized:    boundary-setting, deterrence, incapacitation, and recognition.    Boundary-setting defines the limits of acceptable behavior and affirms that rules retain meaning only when their violation entails consequence; those limits must be defined with clarity.    Deterrence seeks to prevent future harm by making the cost of wrongdoing visible and measurable.    Incapacitation protects society by restricting the offender’s ability to inflict further injury.    Recognition satisfies the moral need to acknowledge that a wrong has occurred and that the community has responded to it.    These aims are conceptually clear, yet their success depends on interpretation and application—each revealing whether the pursuit of order remains faithful to the idea of justice.

4

A penalty first intended to correct a specific wrongdoing can, over time, be turned by institutions into an instrument of government.  This transformation begins when authorities broaden the reach of the penalty, apply it repeatedly as a mechanical demonstration, and treat its continuation as proof of the authority of the institutions and the legitimacy of the system.  What begins as a targeted reaction applied to a specific violation is repeated, extended, and maintained beyond its original scope.  Over time, the expectation of punitive action acquires a life of its own, and support for punishment becomes a marker of allegiance to the prevailing order.  Actions that once aimed to correct behavior evolve into assertions of dominance, and dissent is recast as disloyalty.  As this process deepens, penalties grow harsher, the circle of responsibility expands, and temporal limits dissolve.  Punishment, once applied to resolve conflict, is continued under conditions that reproduce the same conflict.  When a punitive measure must be repeated indefinitely merely to prove that a rule still holds, the measure is no longer reinforcing the rule; the measure itself becomes the rule.   When punishment is applied habitually, its function changes—no longer of law but of power.   Habit grants power a moral vocabulary that disguises its interest as principle.
When law borrows the tone of justice itself, punishment is presented as restoration.

5

Once power begins to speak in the place of law, the line between what is and is not permitted may remain obscure, but the penalty for transgression is certain.   Such obscurity transforms the law from a boundary of understanding into a field of intimidation.   Power gains elasticity by refusing clarity; it rewards those who conform and isolates those who interpret too freely.   In this inversion, the rule of law survives only in form but its grammar—definition, proportion, and foreseeability—has been erased.

6
Legitimacy is the foundation on which punishment stands. Without legitimacy, punishment no longer functions as justice and becomes an imposition of unchecked power—an exercise of power without lawful foundation. Legitimacy demands definition; tyranny thrives on ambiguity. For punishment to be legitimate, the rules it enforces must be established in advance, written in language that the public can understand, and open to examination and review through lawful procedures. To write rules in advance is to bind power to reason; it makes punishment a civic act—foreseeable, accountable, and shared—rather than the decision of whoever holds command. When these conditions are met, punishment serves a civic purpose, reinforces the rule of law, and secures its own legitimacy instead of weakening it.

7
Time limits are essential safeguards that prevent punishment from becoming a permanent condition.  A consequence without a defined endpoint ceases to address a specific violation and becomes a permanent structure of power.  When the duration of punishment is not limited by purpose, punishment no longer serves the law, but replaces it.  This principle applies both within societies and among them:   a sanction imposed on an individual, a community, or a State follows the same moral and structural logic.  In foreign relations, punitive measures such as sanctions or embargoes function as instruments of discipline between States, and they risk the same transformation—from response to domination—when no path toward resolution is defined.  The possibility of restoration—whether through legal standing, political recognition, or the end of hostilities—is not an act of leniency but a precondition for stability.  Without a defined point of closure, the punished party has no reason to change course, and opposition becomes the only rational response.  Durable orders, civic or international, therefore require an exit from punishment if they are to secure lasting peace.

8
Deterrence is often described as the most rational purpose of punishment, yet its logic frequently is invoked under conditions that include other motives.  Under vague statutes, however, deterrence no longer warns; it confuses.  Political authorities often invoke deterrence to justify harsher measures and claim that fear of consequence will prevent future harm.  But fear imposes compliance without addressing underlying conditions that give rise to transgression.  A punitive policy designed to frighten rather than to understand or correct those conditions becomes less an instrument of prevention and more a mechanism for asserting control.  It teaches not respect for the rule of law but submission to power.  When deterrence functions in this way, it ceases to serve justice and instead sustains the very instability it claims to prevent.

9

Uncertainty is an inherent condition of every system of punishment.  Facts are often incomplete, motives are mixed, and consequences can rarely be predicted with precision.  When the absence of reason is institutionalized under the pretext of uncertainty, the temptation arises to punish not for actions already committed but for those merely expected.  Measures such as preventive detention or deportation are imposed not on verified conduct but on assumptions about future behavior.  These actions, though defended as safeguards against possible harm, risk turning suspicion into verdict.  This form of preemptive punishment blurs the distinction between justice and prevention, replacing evidence with prediction.  As the reach of punishment extends beyond proven acts into the realm of conjecture, the obligation to justify its use must grow correspondingly heavier.

10
There are cases in which punishment is not only justified but necessary.  Certain violations—treason, systemic corruption, sustained violence—break the foundation of shared order.  Ignoring violations signals that common rules no longer carry consequence; this breakdown in enforcement creates the conditions for further harm.  In such circumstances, punishment functions as an act of preservation:   it re-establishes lawful boundaries and affirms that no person or group stands above the rules that govern collective life.   Yet the legitimacy of this response depends on proportion and restraint.   When punishment becomes the automatic answer to every offense, it ceases to serve justice and instead entrenches a culture of retribution.  Punishment fulfills its purpose only when it is applied after reasoned explanation, fair procedure, and tangible repair have failed to resolve the violation; under those conditions, punishment restores the boundaries of order without extending harm beyond necessity.

11

Mercy functions as a limiting condition within systems of punishment rather than as a negation of justice.  Where legal systems retain mechanisms for clemency, review, or proportional adjustment, punishment remains bounded by its original civic purpose.   Systems that apply punishment without the possibility of mitigation or termination treat duration as authority and convert consequence into permanence.  Under such conditions, punishment ceases to respond to a specific violation and instead establishes an enduring relation of domination.

The availability of mercy alters the operation of punishment by introducing temporal and proportional limits.  These limits prevent punitive authority from extending beyond the circumstances that justified its initial application.  When legal procedure excludes such limits, enforcement persists independently of the conduct that prompted it, and legality is reduced to repetition rather than judgment.  Under such circumstance, punishment is administered as a continuous practice rather than as a reasoned response.

Systems that incorporate mercy preserve a distinction between law and command by allowing punishment to conclude once its stated purpose has been met.   Where that distinction is maintained, punishment remains an instrument within the law rather than a substitute for it.  Where it is not maintained, punishment operates without reference to restoration, and civic membership is replaced by continued exposure to sanction.

12

These principles are not abstractions but safeguards that keep the exercise of power subject to the law. When institutions apply punishment within those limits, the law retains its credibility because the consequences remain connected to reason. When institutions exceed those limits, punishment replaces the law as the source of authority, and conflict grows within the space that reason has abandoned.   Under such circumstance, punishment no longer resolves the doing of wrong; it reproduces it.   Justice survives only when the law speaks with a clarity that power cannot rewrite.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Political Philosophy, Ethics and Public Life, Political Culture, Civic Agency, Structures of Power, Modernity and Conflict, Essays (English) | Leave a Comment »

“The Grammar of Conflict”

October 9, 2025
Ricardo F. Morín
Untitled #2
Watercolor
10”x12”
2003

By Ricardo F. Morín

Oct. 9, 2025

Bala Cynwyd, Pa

Abstract

Conflict endures not only because of the grievances that ignite it, but also because of the internal logic that sustains it.    Hatred, victimhood, hypocrisy, tribalism, and violence do not operate as separate forces; they form an interdependent system that is justified at every turn.   This essay examines a system of conflict as a grammar—a set of rules and patterns through which antagonism shapes thought, legitimizes action, and perpetuates itself across generations.    The objective is not to judge but to expose how conflict becomes self-sustaining, how violence evolves from an instrument into a ritual, and how contradiction becomes the very foundation upon which societies act in ways that betray their own professed values.

1

Conflict, when stripped down to its structure, is less an event than a language.   Conflict is learned, repeated, and transmitted—not as instinct alone but as a structured framework through which people interpret events and justify actions.   Violence is only one expression of conflict; beneath the act lies a sequence of ideas and reactions that not only precede violence but also weave hostility deliberately into a fabric of continuity.   Understanding this grammar of conflict is essential, because it shows how human beings can remain locked in cycles of harm long after the original reasons have disappeared—not by accident, but because the rhetoric sustaining conflict extends the original violence far beyond its initial cause.    What appears spontaneous is often scripted, and what seems inevitable is, more often than not, the cumulative result of choices that have hardened into reflex.

2

Hatred is the first syntax of this grammar.    Conflict does not erupt suddenly but accumulates over time, layer upon layer, through memory, myth, and selective narration.    Conflict is presented as a defense against a perceived threat or subordination; yet its deeper function is preservation.    Hatred sustains identity by defining itself against what it is not.   Conflict, once entrenched, ceases to depend on immediate threat.   Conflict becomes self-justifying.   It becomes a lens that reinterprets evidence in conformity with its narrative and expectations.    Conflict prepares the ground on which it thrives and provides ready-made explanations for future disputes.

3

Victimhood gives hatred an enduring vocabulary.   It converts the suffering from a past event into a permanent political and social resource.   Suffering is a condition we all inhabit.    Yet to make suffering the core of collective identity is strategic.    Suffering allows communities to claim moral authority and to legitimize otherwise illegitimate actions.    The story of injury becomes a foundation for retaliation.    Herein, however, lies a trap:   identity anchored in victimhood threatens the cessation of its narrative.    Without the presence of an adversary, legitimacy loses potency.    The original wound remains open—remembered and weaponized for all that follows.    Each new act of aggression is framed as a defense of dignity and as a reaffirmation of suffering.

4

Hypocrisy is the structure holding this system together.    Hypocrisy enables simultaneous denunciation and deployment of violence.    It is a proclamation of ideals systematically violated.    Hypocrisy not only conceals contradiction; it embodies it.    It is, in fact, a vain attempt to invoke justice, to speak of universal rights, and to decry cruelty.    The resulting duplicity is essential.    Hypocrisy presents violence as a legitimate principle, domination as protection, and exclusion as necessity.

5

Once hatred, victimhood, and hypocrisy have aligned, violence becomes a ritual—not a reaction.    This ritual can claim instrumental goals:    the recovery of lost territory, the righting of past wrongs, or the assurance of safety.    But over time, the purpose fades and the pattern remains.    Each act tries to confirm the legitimacy of the last and to prepare a justification for the next.   The cycle no longer requires triggers; conflict sustains itself through momentum.    Violence becomes a means through which the collective is used to consolidate identity and to institutionalize memory.

6

Tribalism is a ritual of emotional power.   Conflict reduces the complexity of human experience to affiliation and exclusion.  Within this framework, radically different standards judge shifting actions according to who commits them.   What outsiders called terrorism becomes a defensive force within the tribe.   The tyranny of an enemy becomes the tribe’s strength.   Tribalism turns contradiction into coherence; it makes hypocrisy acceptable; it transforms violence into allegiance and reprisal into obligation.    The more deeply divisions define a society, the more indispensable conflict becomes to its sense of purpose.

7

Violence is no longer a response; it is a condition.    Violence persists not because it serves immediate goals, but because it affirms permanence.   Ending a cycle means dismantling its sustaining narratives; it means acknowledging an enemy is not immutable; victimhood is no longer unique; ideals no longer coexist with betrayals.

8

The illusion of inevitability is insidious.    If conflict frames destiny, accountability dissolves.    Reaction explains every action as defensive.   Herein, recognition diminishes agency; violence becomes not a choice but a forced external condition, an illusion allowing the cycle to continue.

9

Breaking the continuation is neither difficult nor mysterious.   Hatred as an explanation simplifies and legitimizes the narrative; it offers ideological reassurance; it sustains a false sense of control.    Together they form a system that seems natural, but familiarity is not fate.    The grammar of conflict is learned; what is learned can be unlearned.   The first step is to elucidate and to recognize what seems inevitable is only a choice disguised as a reaction.   Thus societies can construct new grammars, without enmity, without vengeance, and without domination.

10

To diagnose conflict is not to diminish suffering or to excuse violence.    An understanding of how suffering and violence endure reveals that each helps to sustain the other.    Profound injuries are not those inflicted once but are those kept alive by stories repeated about them.    The cycle endures because unreason has its own reason; it preserves the stories that keep us injured and persuades us of their necessity.    It is not that people act without reason, but that they rationalize the irrational until irrationality itself becomes the organizing principle of their behavior.    Exposing their grammar is not a solution, but it is a beginning:   a way to make visible the architecture of antagonism and, perhaps, to imagine forms of coexistence that no longer depend on perpetual conflict for their justification.

Edited by Billy Bussell Thompson, Oct. 9, 2025, NYC, NY

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

“Between Law and Conscience: What Justice Omits”

July 10, 2025

*

Scroll Silence Two
Oil on linen
Size: 45 by 75 by 3/4 inches
2010

Author’s Note

This story forms part of a narrative triptych alongside In Tenebris [2021] and In Darkness [2022], three pieces that explore the same murder trial through a different angle.

In Tenebris addresses the deliberation from within; In Darkness proposes an open-ended reimagining; Between Law and Conscience returns to the experience from a reflective distance—to examine what the justice system leaves out.

*

The trial took place seven years after the murder.

It was difficult to grasp how something so grave could have waited so long.    No weapon had been recovered.    The witnesses gave halting, conflicted testimony.    The victim had been fourteen when he was shot.    The defendant—who looked barely older than twenty at the time of trial—must have been about the same age back then. Both boys, really.    What had unfolded in those missing years—before and after—was never addressed.

We were told the crime stemmed from a turf dispute between youth gangs.    Not a premeditated act, but a flare of violence born in a world where survival, for some, is its own daily labor.    Children—some no older than primary school age—trapped in loops of retaliation, where fear and poverty set the rhythm.    None of that—none of what might explain how violence germinates where options vanish—was part of what we were allowed to consider.

There may have been earlier proceedings.    Maybe the case began in juvenile court. Maybe there were appeals, delays, witnesses who refused to testify.    Or maybe the file just sank, for a time, under the sheer weight of the judicial backlog.    By the time we—the jury—entered, none of that background was available to us.    Our task was to begin where the case file did: with the event.    As if time had left no mark.    As if the intervening seven years had not eroded memory or reshaped the young man who now sat before us.

The purpose, formally, was to determine guilt or innocence.    But from the outset it felt like we were being asked to apply a blunt question to a situation that resisted such clean edges.    This was not just about what had happened—but about what could not be said.

We were instructed to confine ourselves to the evidence. And we tried. But the questions kept tugging—quietly, steadily.    How could we not see that this was a killing between teenagers?    That it unfolded in a context already stacked against them? How could we not feel that something vital had been left out of the frame?

No one spoke of the defendant’s time in custody—how long he’d waited for trial, whether he’d been offered a plea, or had access to counsel early on.    And that expression on his face—unreadable to some, unsettling to others—may have carried traces of confinement, of growing up inside a system that offers little room for grace. I couldn’t know. But I kept wondering.

Despite our best efforts to remain disciplined, the questions kept returning.    What chances had that boy really had to escape the fate that claimed him?    What might his life have looked like if different choices—his or others’—had been possible earlier?    Was it fair, even legal, to weigh his guilt without considering the conditions that had shaped him?

But those thoughts were not admissible.    They weren’t in the record.    The judge’s instructions were clear: such context, however compelling, was irrelevant to the task before us.    Justice, we were told, required a kind of tunnel vision—stripped of background, stripped of time.

So the proceedings followed their course: objections, testimony, forensic accounts, cross-examinations.    The weapon was never found.    Both the prosecution and the defense had their lapses—moments where arguments frayed or confidence gave way to fatigue.    But what lingered wasn’t the strength or weakness of the case.    It was the feeling that something essential remained unspoken, unreachable.    That the full truth—if such a thing existed—had been sealed off long before we arrived.

Some jurors were ready to decide quickly.    For them, the evidence presented was enough to convict.    Others, myself included, were less sure—not out of sympathy, but because the case felt incomplete.    I kept returning to a quiet unease: were we being asked to judge a person, or only the narrow outline the system permitted us to see?

During deliberations, the tension thickened.    One juror said that the defendant’s withdrawn posture looked like guilt.    Another saw in it exhaustion.    I couldn’t say.    But I kept asking myself—what does innocence look like after seven years in pretrial detention?    What shape does presence take in someone who has lived under constant suspicion?

On one afternoon, before we adjourned for the day, the youngest among us—barely twenty—spoke up.    His voice was low but certain:

“I grew up in a neighborhood too, where you were more likely to be stopped for how you looked than to be seen as someone worth protecting.    I don’t know if he did it.    But I do know what it feels like to be judged before you understand who you are.”

No one responded.    But something in the room changed.    The atmosphere softened.    Our conversations grew less defensive, more reflective.

It took us nearly three weeks to reach a verdict.    Not because the case was complex in a technical sense, but because we all—each of us—had to confront not only the facts but our own expectations of justice.    Doubts lingered.    The discussions were civil, even quiet, but weighted.    It was as if the jury room had become something else—a kind of confessional, where what we revealed was not just about the case, but about ourselves.

I thought of my father, who used to say that justice must be blind, but never deaf.    That one must listen for what’s withheld, not just what’s claimed.    That memory stayed with me as we signed the verdict:    not guilty.

There were quiet cheers from the defendant’s side.    The victim’s mother wept.    We, the jury, didn’t feel resolution—only the tremor of uncertainty.    The judge thanked us for our service.    We exited through a narrow corridor, shielded from the public, down a service elevator, then out.

I don’t know what became of him after that.    Maybe he disappeared again into the margins of a city that had already marked him.    Maybe he tried to begin again. I can’t know.    But I do know this:    that trial was not only about one act of violence.    It was about the quiet violence of exclusion—of what the law, in its procedures, often refuses to see.

And it is that omission—silent, sanctioned, systematic—that places justice itself on the stand.

*

Ricardo F. Morin

Bala Cynwyd, PA — July 10, 2025

Editor: Billy Bussell Thompson

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »