Savannah Guthrie Issues New Public Plea in Mother's Kidnapping Case
A Kidnapped Mother, a Public Plea, and the Duties of Justice
When a daughter begs her mother’s kidnappers on a public stage to “tell us where to look for her,” the question is not of markets but of the sovereign’s oldest charge: to protect the innocent from injury.
A woman of some public eminence has turned to the modern equivalent of a town square to address those who, it is said, have carried off her eighty‑four‑year‑old mother from her home. Nearly six months after the disappearance, she records a message in which she speaks of an “unending nightmare,” of a family “in agony,” and of their resolve that they “will never stop looking for her.” She tells the unseen offenders that “the world can be a cruel and unforgiving place,” and adds that her family has offered a reward for information. It is a scene at once novel in its instruments and very ancient in its sentiments: grief, fear, hope, and the demand for justice.
When I wrote that society may subsist without beneficence, but never without justice, I had in view precisely such injuries as violent seizure, confinement, and terror. Charity ornaments life; security of person and property sustains it. A family who believe their mother to have been kidnapped do not complain of inadequate generosity; they complain of the most fundamental wrong, that the innocent be left at the mercy of the violent. The first duty of any government, as I argued in my inquiry into the wealth of nations, is defence and the exact administration of justice. Where persons may be stolen with impunity, trade, trust, and tranquillity soon follow them into the darkness.
In this case the private exertions are remarkable. The daughter employs her public voice; the family, we are told, has posted a reward as high as a great fortune for most people. Here we see self‑interest and fellow‑feeling acting together rather than in opposition. The hope of gain may move some to bring intelligence; the sympathy felt for an aged woman, and for children tormented by uncertainty, may move others more. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I observed that we often take on the sorrows of those whom we will never meet, carried to us by mere report. A video, seen by multitudes, greatly extends the reach of this natural fellow‑feeling, though it does not thereby supply handcuffs or prison walls.
For there is a limit to what private offers and public emotion can achieve. The benefit of the crime is, alas, concentrated; the kidnapper enjoys, or imagines he enjoys, the power, the ransom, the wicked thrill. The costs, by contrast, are widely and silently diffused. They fall first on the victim and her family, but they spread also through a neighbourhood that now feels unsafe, through the elderly who ask whether their own doors suffice, through children who learn that an “unending nightmare” can in fact occur. When the price of insecurity is thus dispersed and unpriced in any market, the correction cannot be left to the higgling and bargaining of private persons. It is the work of public justice, paid for by public revenue.
The daughter’s appeal has another character which the impartial spectator must notice. She does not merely threaten and denounce; she entreats, and even acknowledges, in some degree, that the offenders “have tried to do things the right way.” She asks them at least to “tell us where to look for her.” This is not an approval of their conduct, which would revolt every well‑informed observer, but an attempt to give them some path, however narrow, back toward humanity. We are often disgusted by criminals, and properly so; yet if a few words can awaken in them a dormant conscience, the spectator would judge those words prudent as well as compassionate. To move a villain one inch toward remorse is no small achievement.
Some will be tempted, upon seeing public horror, to propose ingenious private contrivances: new securities to be sold, new insurances to be mandated, new guardians to be hired at great expense, often at other people’s expense. Of such projectors I have long been suspicious. When merchants or contractors come forward wrapped in the language of safety and benevolence, their schemes deserve the most suspicious attention; too often the true design is merely to convert general fear into particular profit. Any plan that rests upon unusual virtue in its administrators, or upon boundless credulity in those who must pay for it, is one which the man of common sense, let alone the philosopher, ought to view with cold reserve.
Yet my own doctrine has its limits. I wrote as a spectator of small towns and rising commerce, not of vast cities, electronic signals, and anonymous malefactors who may be half a world away. I may underestimate the scale and subtlety of such dangers. But even if the instruments alter, the principles do not. To seize and conceal an aged woman is to strike at the very root of social order; to plead publicly for her return is a natural exercise of sympathy and of rightful self‑love; and to provide, at common expense, institutions capable of pursuing, punishing, and thereby deterring such injuries is not an optional embellishment of opulence, but the very condition of a civilized life.
From the works cited
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Justice is the pillar whose removal crushes society; beneficence is the ornament that embellishes it — society can subsist without generosity, never without justice.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The state has real duties — defence, exact administration of justice, and public works and institutions that profit society but could never repay a private undertaker — and they must be paid for.