Abstract
Richard Weisman’s Showing Remorse: Law and the Social Control of Emotion illustrates how remorse is socially constructed and socially contested and how it serves as an important marker of membership within moral communities. His focus on law highlights the institutionalized nature of these social processes. His analysis reveals how the existence of competing moral communities and their expectations regarding remorse may place contradictory demands on members—including those accused of violating moral norms in gross and, in some cases, unpardonable ways.
Using legal data from courts in Canada, South Africa, and the United States, Weisman’s work demonstrates how the social processes contributing to the social construction of remorse apply across diverse legal contexts. Nowhere is the importance of showing remorse more powerfully illustrated than in capital murder trials within the United States, or in the publicly witnessed amnesty trials within post-apartheid South Africa.
Weisman begins his work with a hat tip to Arlie Hochschild as the founder of the sociology of emotion. However, the bulk of his theoretical frame is built from the insights of Harold Garfinkel, William Gamson, and Erving Goffman. Further, Weisman departs from the majority of sociological studies of particular emotions by focusing on how emotion norms are shaped not by face-to-face social interaction, but rather by legal institutions and professions, and on how these understandings become enshrined in case law and other official accounts.
In Chapter One, Weisman lays out the central premise of the book. Similarly to others who adopt a social constructionist approach to the study of emotion, he argues that “the regulative work of society extends not just to how members act whether in conformity or contravention of agreed upon rules, but also how they feel about their actions or more precisely, how they express their feelings about their actions” (p. 19; italics added). Here, Weisman distinguishes between apology and remorse. Unlike apology, which refers to conscious verbalizations, remorse refers more to unconscious gestures or emotional expressions that are inscribed upon the body. While both apology and remorse are subject to dispute, remorse is typically deemed more credible than apology. Importantly, there is no non-performance when it comes to remorse; failure to show remorse is read as no remorse (e.g., Timothy McVeigh).
Highlighting the distinction between being and doing, Chapter Two illustrates how the judicial process has come to define the “remorseful offender.” Drawing on Canadian case law, Weisman identifies threenecessary conditions for a remorseful offender—that is, someone who engaged in bad behavior, but who is not a bad person. To be seen as remorseful and, thus, a member of the moral community, they must 1) take full responsibility for their deed, 2) show incontrovertible remorse for the suffering they caused, and 3) embody a convincing self-transformation signifying that they are no longer the person who committed the offensive act. If these conditions are contested or rebutted, the individual remains outside of the moral community as someone untrustworthy and dangerous.
In Chapter Three, Weisman examines the history of remorse, its implications for offenders, and how the court came to adopt a primarily “pathological” approach toward its understanding. He begins by tracing the shift in the courts’ understanding of psychopathy as an affliction that could overtake otherwise “normal” individuals with little or no warning to a condition that is biological, congenital, and inalterable. The earlier conceptualization (i.e., moral insanity) understood psychopathy as deserving sympathy, not additional suffering. The latter conception (i.e., antisocial personality disorder) understood psychopathy as something to be guarded against. Notably, the modern reformulation is one of a person who lacks the ability to feel moral emotions, is resistant to therapy, and is a consummate social performer and emotional manipulator. One irony embedded within this understanding is that for anyone who has been deemed a psychopath—perhaps on the severity of their actions—any credible show of remorse can be used as evidence of their affliction and can place them even further outside the community in which they are being tried.
However, not all offenders show remorse (Chapter Four), either because they believe the law is morally unjust or because they are innocent. Offenders in these two cases are, by definition, disallowed from showing remorse. In the first case, offenders who believe that their actions are morally justified often don’t feel remorse, as their framing of the situation, the law, and their own actions places them in a competing moral community. In the second case, defendants who are innocent—and who maintain that innocence in the face of considerable pressure to the contrary—have nothing for which to feel remorse, and expressing remorse would call into question their innocence. Both types of defenders pose serious challenges to the moral authority of the state and are typically met with punitive measures in the court and in subsequent appeals processes.
Finally, Weisman turns to the Truth and Reconciliation hearings of post-apartheid South Africa. This particular moment is unique in that it marked a change in the political regime as well as a transition in moral communities. During this rapid shift, behaviors and people that had been celebrated in one regime were suddenly demonized in another. Notably, the requirement for defendants to show remorse in exchange for clemency was officially removed, on the officials’ belief that taking full responsibility and sharing the extent of the horrors perpetrated upon black Africans was enough. Weisman’s analysis of the South African case, focused almost exclusively on the moral career of Eugene de Kock, highlights the tensions that occur when two moral communities collide and the degree to which stakeholders (e.g., victims’ families and psychologists) are given the moral authority to endorse or discredit claims of remorse.
Showing Remorse is a compelling, well-documented account of the ways in which remorse operates within legal settings. Weisman’s account is full of rich theoretical insights regarding not only remorse, but also about law and the intricacies and double binds inherent to a system that relies heavily on affect. He also illustrates the degree to which emotion is socially structured, socially contested, and significant in the social consequences it carries.
This is a book that deserves to be read more than once. It is thought provoking, and if it is ever published in paperback I would most certainly assign it in a class (the price is prohibitively expensive at $150).
But lest I sound too much like an unapologetic cheerleader, I have one concern that struck me from the outset and which I was unable to shake. Although Showing Remorse is about the social construction of emotion and offers the obligatory hat tip to Hochschild, Weisman fails to address any literature on the sociology of emotion, period. Instead, his work ignores the 40 years of scholarship detailing the relationship between moral emotions and social control (e.g., Shott 1979), how emotions signify one’s place within a moral community (e.g., Clark 1995), and even how emotional displays affect sentencing decisions in criminal court cases (e.g., Robinson, Smith-Lovin, and Tsoudis 1994; Tsoudis and Smith-Lovin 1998). If any one of these studies had been overlooked, I might not have noticed. But by failing to situate himself in the existing literature on emotion, Weisman simultaneously undercuts his contribution to its study and robs his readers of the many well-established social psychological processes that underpin his work.
That said, Showing Remorse is a fascinating book. The data are excellent, and Weisman’s analysis is thought provoking and profound. He illustrates clearly how emotion is socially constructed and contested within the legal setting and what happens when emotions, identities, and institutions collide against the backdrop of both enduring and shifting moral communities.