The heart reaches out, the conscience recoils. The result is the quiet gaze of the onlooker, the bystander’s posture. Seeing harm, feeling its weight, but remaining still. It is not lack of care that stops them, but fear of the moral work that true empathy would require.

Proportionality is why we instinctively feel it’s wrong to, say, banish someone from society just because they failed to pay a parking ticket or because they relapsed into addiction. There’s a deep human intuition that responses to wrongdoing or hardship should not destroy a person’s basic dignity and prospects. The law isn’t always so compassionate, but the ideal persists as a guiding light.

Demanding optimism from someone in crisis is like demanding a patient recover by attitude while we hold back the medicine, backwards and, even when well-meant, cruel in effect.

If punishment isn’t meant to help me understand what I ought not to do, then what was it for?