CHRISTIAN COTTON AND ANTHONY PALAZZO
We may feel a certain sense of satisfaction, even pride, in one of the show’s unusually strong female characters, Ava Crowder, for putting a bullet in her bitterly abusive husband, Bowman, while he sat down to supper. After Ava explains her life with Bowman to Raylan—how he blamed her for his failures and then took out his anger and frustration with himself on her, even causing her to miscarry (which he also blamed on her)—she says to Raylan:
I got up off that floor knowin’ that he was never gonna hit me again. Next night? He came in. I had his favorite supper on the table. Ham and yams and cream-style corn and leftover okra fixed with tomatoes? I waited till he was shovin’ food in his face. Then I got his deer rifle from the kitchen closet, and I went in there, and I did what I had to do.
It gets us to thinking: Could it ever be morally justified to take the law into your own hands and enforce a little “extra-legal” justice? Many of us might say (if only to ourselves and even then under our breath) that Bowman had it coming to him or that he got what he deserved. But, getting what you deserve is one thing; having it handed to you from the barrel of a gun is another.
Domestic violence—and its often tragic consequences—is a difficult topic. To help me sort it all out, I, Christian, called on a therapist friend of mine, Anthony, hoping he could give me some insight into the nature of abusive relationships and maybe even my own reaction to this particular incident. We had met as undergrads in college. We were suite mates. We were both into Black Sabbath and religion. He became a professional therapist, and I became a professional philosopher. We’ve kept up a pretty lively intellectual relationship over the years, and I hoped this would be no exception. So, we sat down one day at a local pub, The Misty Thicket, to dialogue about it.
Pub-lic Discussion
The Misty Thicket seemed an appropriate name for the spot we’d chosen to discuss the psychological and philosophical dimensions of domestic violence. Plus, they have fine food and even better brew. The dying light and chill of the late-winter evening hinted at the coming sunset. I arrived first and settled into a booth tucked away from the growing crowd of patrons. It wasn’t long before he made the scene, a black wool coat and muted, multi-color scarf slung across his arm.
“Cotton.” That’s what he’s always called me, as far back as I can remember.
“Tony. Thanks for meeting with me.”
“It’s not a problem, old friend. This little . . . incident . . . it has you pretty worked up, does it?”
“You watched the episode. Didn’t you want to give a little ‘cha-ching’”—I motioned with my fist—“when she told Raylan about it? We already knew she’d killed him; but, when she described her life with him and then laid out how it went down? I mean, how common is it for a victim of domestic violence to stand up for themselves like that?”
“It’s not common for long-term abused women to lash out lethally, but it happens often enough for it to be an issue. Sad to say, the system still punishes those women pretty heavily, even with the presence of mitigating circumstances. Of course, Ava didn’t present the most sympathetic of cases: A day after she shot a man through the heart with a rifle, she was ready to nail our hero when he came to her door, and she was vivacious, happy, and seemed very unconcerned over her deed. A case could be made that Bowman ‘got what was coming to him’. No doubt there; but the issue that arises here is more complex.”
I raised an eyebrow in uncertainty. He continued.
“Bowman was often gone from their home. They had no children. She had ample opportunity to leave him. There are major difficulties that many abused women have with leaving an abusive system. But, she didn’t come off as the ‘defeated’ type; she came off defiant, empowered. He wasn’t holding her hostage. He was killed while eating—a meal she knew to be his favorite—not while he was threatening her or abusing her. The fact that she made his favorite meal could be seen to imply a certain foreknowledge of what she was planning to do. She did plead to manslaughter, but it didn’t seem like manslaughter. It seemed a planned killing.”
“No doubt. She even tells Raylan, ‘I got up off that floor knowin’ he was never gonna hit me again.’ Then she tells him, ‘I did what I had to do.’ That tells me that she either felt like she had no other options—that it was the only way she saw to stop the abuse—or that she was giving him what he deserved—a just punishment for his transgressions.”
“No one could blame an abused woman who was under an immediate threat—as opposed to the diffuse but still dangerous threat abused women constantly live under—for shooting her husband. But if he wasn’t being aggressive, and he was just home from work, and she had total freedom of movement—not injured or incapacitated in some way—that’s a less sympathetic case. If she had the spunk to kill a guy at supper, then surely she had the energy to get in a car and leave, go to a protected location, file for divorce, and seek shelter in other ways.”
“Obviously she didn’t feel that way. The fact that she says she did what she had to do suggests that she felt these other options were not feasible for her. Maybe fixing him his favorite supper was a way to get him into as vulnerable a spot as she could, to make him as defenseless as possible. That way, she stood a better chance of ‘taking care of business’ before business took care of her.”
“Well, statistics are on her side: Abusive men do tend to kill their partners eventually. But, it takes more than just statistics to justify a pre-emptive killing. Long-term abuse may lead to these sorts of wife-killing-husband situations; but, it’s still killing, and before we’re justified in killing people, we have to meet certain conditions, and a history of abuse just isn’t enough. I mean, it counts in the sense that it lends support to her actions and helps us understand motive. It may even be something we agree with, at the emotional level. The world hates a bully, after all. But, legally speaking, none of this excuses the killing without the situation being legitimate self-defense.”
“Set to the side the question of the legal system for just a minute. Not that it’s not important; but I’m really here to discuss the extra-legal dimensions of this.”
Bullies Might Be Assholes
“Cotton, if you’re planning to ask me if I think she was morally justified in taking the law into her own hands and killing him—”
“That’s precisely what I want to ask,” I interrupted. “But not just that—”
“—I have to say no. She was certainly morally justified to work against his social and legal interests; to part ways with him; to return abuse for abuse physically if she could get away with it, though clearly she couldn’t (as most women can’t); and to kill him in immediate self-defense. But, as atrocious as beating women and forcing them to live in a state of fear is, I don’t believe that a death sentence—legal or extra-legal—is justified. Death’s a big deal, a penalty we reserve only for those who have knowingly and willingly taken life in unjustifiable circumstances. Bullies might be assholes, but I don’t think we should just kill them.”
“Even if the threat of abuse is ever-present and could in any instance—and statistically will, eventually—result in death itself? Even if the victim of abuse feels the weight of necessity upon them, that they have no other viable option to stop the violence?”
“Death’s a pretty high-level penalty, and I don’t know that abuse should call for it, any more than rape calls for death anywhere in our laws. This isn’t to say that abuse and rape aren’t egregiously bad things; there’s just a social consciousness here that doesn’t connect rape or abuse with the need for death. So, I’m suggesting that, morally speaking, taking a life when one wasn’t taken, or wasn’t about to be taken, isn’t quite congruent. And I think that society largely agrees. The harm of rape or abuse—with therapy, healing, and support—can be ameliorated, undone to a large extent. Ain’t no undoing death, and we shouldn’t be ripping the branches off of trees if we can’t put them back on.”
“Okay Tony, but let’s think about it from Ava’s perspective. Why should she—the victim—be the one who’s forced to leave? That does nothing to redress the abuse she has suffered. In other words, there’s no justice for her in leaving him. She may be safer if she left him—the threat on her life if she tried to leave notwithstanding—but, Bowman essentially gets away with it. I’m a solid proponent of the notion that justice in cases of moral wrongdoing requires a retributive response: You have to pay for your sins, as it were. So, in the end, I’m left wondering, ‘Where’s the justice in all this?’”
Homeostasis
“Okay. Thinking about it from her perspective means digging into the nature of the abusive relationship. And, in abusive systems—in any system, really—there is a component called homeostasis.”
“Homeostasis? Like a thermostat that controls the temperature of a room?”
“That’s right. Homeostasis is a basic property of systems that keeps internal conditions relatively stable in response to changes in external conditions. The temperature goes up, and the air conditioning kicks on until the room reaches a set temperature. Then, it kicks off. The term was coined in 1932 by physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon—who, incidentally, also coined the phrase ‘fight or flight’ to describe an animal’s response to threats.”
“Interesting. I always wondered where ‘fight or flight’ came from. It seems to fit in here pretty nicely, don’t you think? Ava was certainly under a real threat from Bowman, and she could have chosen fight or flight, right? First, she did choose flight; we learn in a later episode (“Blind Spot”) that she left Bowman and moved to Lexington to escape. But, eventually she came back to him. So, you’re saying that an abusive relationship can be understood as a homeostatic system?”
“Yes. Systems theory itself was born from the insight that organic systems—like the abusive relationship between Bowman and Ava—appear to work by the same rules as non-organic systems—like the thermostat. Similar mechanisms behave similarly in both. It also recognized early on that small systems are just tiny reflections of much larger ones. In this case, individual abusive relationships reflect larger sets of relationships that are abusive, such as in the family or in larger social systems, like patriarchy. What’s unique here is the particular content of the system.”
“Right. So, abusive systems exhibit certain features that make them ‘abusive.’”
“Exactly. And the first feature is helplessness. Women (and people generally) homeostatically frozen in an abusive system are typically subjected to overpowering feelings of helplessness—the sense that they cannot escape or change the system. Abused women have an extra helping of helplessness tossed in on top of that because of the traditional patriarchal domination of, and condescension to, women. For the longest time, beating your wife was perfectly legal. For an even longer time—before laws were even drawn up to address the issue—abuse may have been frowned upon, but it was nonetheless isolated by the legal system as a ‘family matter’ that was nobody else’s business, and the law would seldom intervene. As far as women have come, there remains the inertia of centuries of their plight being ignored by the community and the system. To this day, it still happens.
“Abusive systems always contain these self-esteem destroying features. I don’t know that it could be ‘abuse’ if it didn’t. Abuse is directed harm, and it can take many forms; but it always discomforts a person, may harm them physically, psychologically stresses them, and makes them feel of lesser status—weak, pounded down, inferior, even deserving of the abuse. They lose the natural esteem they have for their own well-being and begin to consider the abuse natural, normal, even deserved. As ugly as this may sound, even our minds can betray us. In an attempt to spare ourselves the awful truth of our situation—that injustice is heaped on us by another person who has no moral right to do so—our minds may normalize the abuse in an attempt to ‘fit it in’ to daily experience, to make it somehow less of a psychological burden. It’s like a chronic illness: you suffer because of it, but you accept it, eventually. It might even kill you; but, after enough time, it’s just ‘the way things are’ for you.
“In abused women, that normalization—nearly always, in my experience—is connected to a second feature: a false sense of hope—a kind of denial of the reality of the situation—that they can change their abuser for the better, or that if they are conciliatory and obedient enough, then they can allay the abuser’s wrath and spare themselves abuse in the future. Again, women’s traditional role of being passive and compliant creates a form of unconscious inertia in many women, typically conditioned into them by their families and the modeling of their own mothers or female relatives. So, instead of reacting with alarm, anger, and the energy to fight the threat, they do the exact opposite. That’s why it’s no surprise that abused mothers often have daughters who get caught in abusive relationships. It’s another terrible layer of the whole puzzle. Plus, daughters look to the father figures around them to see how men are supposed to treat women, and even a young girl can learn to accept the abuse of her mother if it’s all she knows and if her mother fails—or refuses—to teach her that it’s wrong. This is one example of how smaller systems are really reflections of larger ones.”
Breaking the Cycle
“Wouldn’t Ava’s leaving Bowman only to return to the abusive system be part of the homeostasis of their relationship? All that history, the inertia, that the system created? Maybe even real feelings of love she felt for him? And only after continued abuse did she finally choose to fight?”
“That may well be. We know Ava’s history with Bowman—from the young, energetic, idealistic kid who was going to make it big in sports to the disappointed and frustrated man who began taking his frustrations out on her. She became his only avenue of stress-relief, the scapegoat for his woes, the tourniquet for his bleeding dreams. And she suffered greatly for it. But, unlike most women—stuck in that cycle of helplessness and denial—something in Ava finally stirred and broke to the surface, a great energy of rebellion that she embraced. Ava’s what most of us wish these abused women would become—energetically devoted to breaking the shackles of oppression, to the point that they’ll stand up for themselves in a really hardcore way.”
“That’s it! That’s exactly how I felt after we learn ‘the rest of the story.’”
“To even dream of killing a husband flies in the face not only of our basic human conditioning which leads us to intuitively shy away from killing, but also of our conservative social conditioning which deifies husbands. So, it’s rare. Having said that, I haven’t seen the recent statistics on how often abused women kill their husbands; but as I said, it happens enough to put it on the map. It’s far more common for the husband to kill them or harm them badly enough to compel the system (and usually her family) to step in and separate them. These days the system has very broad power to charge an abusive husband with everything under the sun, even if his wife refuses to. And that’s good. It should.”
“But, in this case, that system failed. And I think that’s important. But, go ahead.”
“Ava’s story’s a pretty optimistic one, stating out loud that the human spirit—in women or men—isn’t always so easily subdued, even in situations of long-term abuse with all the fear and paralysis it brings. Like a wild tiger that might suddenly strike out at the man who keeps it caged and beaten, and luck up and bite out his throat, there’s something—deep down—in abused people that never really accepts it and remains a lurking threat.”
“The nugget of your therapeutic analysis, for me, is that Ava’s what we wish abused women would become, that person devoted to breaking the cycle and standing up for themselves in a really hardcore way. The ‘wild tiger’ image really pulls it together: caged and beaten, but not broken, with something deep down that remains a lurking threat. But, why is it that we feel compelled to root for the underdog in the first place? I would argue it’s just that deep seated sense of fairness, desert, justice, whatever term you want to use. There’s a wrong that needs to be made right, a balance upset that needs to be restored.”
“I guess it goes without saying that you think it’s morally justifiable for a person to take the law into their own hands if the system fails them?”
“I think so, yes. But . . .” I paused. “Maybe it isn’t . . . that’s why I’m here! I can’t help but feel that what Ava did wasn’t just excusable; it was the right thing to do. And I’m interested in exploring why I have that feeling.”
“Let me say this then.” He shuffled in his seat awkwardly. “I have a feeling that, if I was really wronged in some epic way, and the system failed me, that I would seek redress in extra-legal ways. I am just emotional enough to get sucked into that; but, I have a pretty idiosyncratic view of honor and right and wrong. So I might; probably would.”
“So, I’m not crazy? You just admitted that you would pursue extra-legal means!”
“Having said that, though, I think that my personal emotional urge to do so really has no place, no recognition in our system, which is designed to dis-empower the individuals wronged, and allow a more dispassionate system to handle it, to make sure that people don’t fly off the handle and kill the wrong person when they believe that they or their loved ones have been wronged. The individual person doesn’t matter as much to our system as the general public. And you can debate the merits of that all night. On the one hand, it seems dehumanizing, like the human person to whom a debt is owed in the face of injustice is passed over, while the offender ‘pays his debt to society’—to society, as though he wronged the collective, and not the individual.”
“And that’s just how the system fails Ava.”
“On the other hand, I think that I’m not the only emotional loose cannon out there. And if we didn’t have a dispassionate system, then we’d have a lot more ‘street justice,’ and that’s not really a better option.”
“See, I don’t think it’s being an emotional ‘loose cannon.’ I think it digs into what we truly feel is the ‘fitness’ of things. That’s why we like it so much when we see it acted out on screen. What goes around comes around; you’ll get yours. That evinces a deep set of values. Children understand that kind of fairness. Besides, we’re only talking about using extra-legal means because that system you mentioned—the dis-empowering, dispassionate legal system—fails sometimes to deliver the goods. When it works, it may work fine; but it doesn’t always work. Like you said, this particular issue is still treated, in many cases and in many places, as a ‘family matter’ that’s nobody else’s business. So, when the system that’s designed to be blind turns that blind eye to the victim, what recourse does the victim have except taking the law into their own hands?”
Anger Is a Gift
“I will tell you this: One of the chief therapeutic tactics for downtrodden clients is to provoke a reaction in them playing on the hope for justice that they may feel deep down. With sexually abused females, for instance, there’s usually a long period of inertia for them after the abuse ends because most victims have gotten used to the abuse over the years. The inertia keeps them in that normalized state. Eventually, they go through a ‘sleep stage’, in which they’re ravaged by the various other problems the abuse causes; but a point may come when they become angry over what happened to them, and they seek justice. They learn that the person who did this was never right and it was never normal.”
“It’s interesting that you mention anger. I’ve done some philosophical work on anger, and what we see is that anger is arguably the most common response to perceived wrongdoing. In cases of abuse, of course, the wrongdoing is more than just perceived; it’s actually wrong. But, even in cases where no wrong has been done, the perception of a wrong tends to provoke an angry response.”
“Cotton, it may shock you, but many victims of sexual abuse aren’t angry, or angry enough, at what happened to them. Most of them blame themselves, and rather than anger, they feel guilt or shame. Just their mind playing tricks on them, in an effort to cope with the circumstances. Usually, they’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the wrong. They can’t connect that enormity with the contrary feelings of love or acceptance they might have for the abuser—such as if he was a father or a husband. But once they can acknowledge their anger, therapeutic transformation can really happen.”
“I think that’s what happened with Ava; but I also think it’s what happens with us as viewers, too. We hear Ava’s story, and it makes us angry. We want her to stand up for herself. Where it gets tricky, philosophically, is when we ask if Ava is acting on that anger in order to placate it, or if she is acting from that anger to bring about justice. It may seem like splitting hairs, but the distinction is important: to act on anger is to seek to satisfy the feeling itself rather than to see justice done; to act from anger is to be moved to action by it for some other end besides satisfying the feeling.”
“Anger in this case is a bridge to therapeutic change, a pool of energy victims of abuse can use to summon long-lost self-esteem and seek reparation. For the first time, they can be honest with themselves about what happened, they can confront their abuser, and they can begin to own the situation. Before they access that anger, they aren’t really capable of these things.”
“That’s acting from anger. So, anger is a gift, a gift that motivates us to seek justice.”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘justice’.”
“Retribution.”
“You mean vengeance? Payback?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘payback’.”
Getting Your Just Deserts
“The core of retribution, or retributive justice, is the notion of desert: People ought to get what they deserve. That’s simple fairness. It’s only fair that people who work hard and do good should reap the fruits of their labor, while those who break the rules should pay for it. Moreover, people deserve to be treated the way they choose to treat others. So, if we behave well, then we are entitled to fair and decent treatment from others; but, if we behave poorly, then we deserve punishment in return. We call this ‘getting your just deserts’.
“The German philosopher Immanuel Kant uses the metaphor of debt to discuss just desert. He says that citizens in a society enjoy the benefits provided by the rule of law. So, we’re indebted to society and its laws, and we pay that debt by ‘respecting’ the law—doing our part in a system of reciprocal restraint, where we all agree to abide by the same set of rules. An individual who tries to benefit from that system without actually following, or respecting, the rules or laws is called a ‘free rider.’ They have helped themselves to undeserved advantages, and created an imbalance that is unfair and therefore unjust. So, the state intervenes to punish the offender and to restore the balance.
“In cases of wrongdoing, someone’s been harmed at the expense of someone else being benefited, someone who doesn’t deserve those benefits. Punishment removes the undeserved benefit by imposing a penalty, or a harm, to balance the harm inflicted by the offense. It’s suffered as a debt that the wrongdoer owes her fellow citizens. Retributive justice aims to restore both victim and offender to their appropriate positions relative to each other. So, it’s essentially backward-looking. Punishment’s a response to a past act of injustice or wrongdoing. Whatever we do moving forward, whether it’s stricter laws and penalties for deterrence or programs designed to rehabilitate offenders, or even therapeutic attempts to provide healing for victims, retribution serves to reinforce rules that have been broken and balance the scales of justice. But, what do you do when that system of laws fails to benefit you?”
“Okay, and so, having brought us to that one sharp point, it appears that you think Bowman could owe his life because of his wrongdoing, and that because the legal system has failed Ava on this matter, that she’s justified in dispensing the just punishment instead.” He paused. “That’s hard core, man. I mean, this puts you out of step with the entirety of our legal system.”
“‘Legality alone cannot be the talisman of moral people.’”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s Walter Williams, libertarian economist and academic. The full quote is something like: ‘How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it’s done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality alone cannot be the talisman of moral people.’ It means the law isn’t some magical device that moral people can rely on to protect them from harm and bring them good fortune. That’s why I keep saying it’s not about the law; it’s about justice . . . specifically, enforcing justice by extra-legal means, if need be. You yourself mentioned earlier that wife-beating was once legal.”
“Yeah, but in most people’s minds, morality and the law are inseparable. I mean, we want to believe that our laws and the penalties attached to breaking them are grounded in morality, that rules and punishments have some kind of moral justification.”
“True. But, everyone also believes that laws can be unjust—you just implied that they do when you said, ‘We want to believe our laws are grounded in morality’—and so, everyone also believes that the law and morality are both separate and distinct. But, in this case, the issue is that the law has failed Ava. It has failed to protect her from Bowman, and it has failed to punish Bowman for the harm that he has unjustly inflicted on her. Ava was wronged, and she needs to be made whole again. . . . plain and simple.”
“Yes, but are we really going to advance the idea that killing Bowman was a way to be made whole? I agree that Ava needed justice, and that she needed healing and reparation and support. And trust me, if a case was really convincingly made to me that killing him would accelerate those things in her, I’d be all for it.”
“The presumption here is that being ‘made whole’ involves healing. But, maybe all it means from the moral—and not merely the psychological—point of view is that justice has been done and balance in the moral sense has been restored. ‘Healing’ is something else and only comes with time and effort on Ava’s part, and maybe then only after justice has been done. The sense of closure that justice provides opens up the way to healing.”
“This is hard because few people are willing to boldly stride over the social shunning that we all have for the naked reality of death and announce that someone just needs to die in a case like this. Death is that super-packed moral quandary; no one wants to touch it. It’s a ‘grave’ decision . . . literally.”
“But, if her only alternative was to live in constant fear and under constant threat, then killing Bowman would certainly neutralize that, while letting him live would not. So, it boils down to whether or not you believe that she was morally justified in taking the law into her own hands and dispensing justice as she felt necessary, even if that means that Bowman dies.”
“In the end, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over Bowman getting his chest turned into a funnel. Not a wink. I think he deserved to have his ass kicked, to know what being trapped in a terrifying situation for years felt like. But, I’m feeling a ‘stop’ in me, just short of saying he deserved to die.”
Eye for an Eye, However Blind
“Fair enough. And I think I agree with you. It’s hard to say that someone deserves to die unless they’ve knowingly and willingly taken life in unjustifiable circumstances. But, when the legal system turns a blind eye to the punishment of perpetrators of domestic violence, it seems our response—morally as well as legally—is to turn a blind eye also—to the victims of domestic violence ‘doing what they have to do’—by not punishing them for their retaliation. And there’s a kind of justice in that: an eye for an eye, however blind, still settles the score. So, why do I still feel like he deserved it?”
“Bowman’s death and Ava’s triumph are one and the same. So, it’s understandable that your feelings for the one may get confused with your feelings for the other. And so, your reaction to the story about what happened to Bowman wasn’t a reaction to Bowman’s ‘getting what he deserved’, much less a feeling of satisfaction in one person killing another. It was, in reality, a reaction to Ava’s standing up for herself, in this case in the only way that she could see to really and truly break free of the abusive system. So, you see, you feel proud of Ava for fighting back—even though it means Bowman’s death—because she’s owning the situation and taking control of her life while at the same time punishing Bowman for years of abuse where the local law has simply failed her.”
“I like that. It nicely wraps up both issues—the justification of using extra-legal means and the explanation of the feeling of satisfaction and pride in Ava. On that note, I think we ought to call it a night. This has been really helpful. Thanks for helping me work through it.”
“Not a problem. What are you going to do now that we’ve discussed all of this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll write an essay about it. I could call it “I Did What I Had to Do.”
He cracked a devilish smile. “Well, you do what you have to do!”