Effective Punishment Through Forgiveness: Rediscovering Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith in the Abraham Story
提出只有具备信仰骑士品格的人才能有效实施惩罚与宽恕相结合的过程，以亚伯拉罕故事和南非真相与和解委员会为例，论证此方法比传统报应性惩罚更能实现和解。
Scheler (1973) proposed a model of punishment intended to re-establish a reconciled relationship between a harm doer and the person(s) harmed. Punishment was followed by genuine forgiveness, seeking genuine repentance from the harm doer, leading to the reconciliation of the relationship. This paper proposed that only a punisher having the character of a Knight of Faith (Kierkegaard 1985) could effectively implement this punishment process. The Abraham story provided an illustration of how a Knight of Faith (God) rehabilitated his relationship with Abraham using punishment and forgiveness. This process is, at an individual level, similar to one applied by Nelson Mandela in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Tutu 2000). It is argued that this process is more effective in achieving reconciliation and re-establishing effective relationships than traditional retributive approaches as typified by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted in response to the Enron and WorldCom scandals.