Felt Indignity, Restorative Responsibility, and the Limits of the Law

In modern criminal law, wrongdoing is treated primarily as an offense against the legal order. Although individuals are harmed, their perspective largely recedes as attention centers on the perpetrator, the violation of norms, and the determination of guilt. Yet victims and their families experience crimes less as transgressions of abstract rules than as personal injuries—violations of dignity and recognition—that neither punishment nor compensation can fully redress.This lecture examines how different cultural contexts address such experiences of disrespect and argues that modern Western societies lack what may be called restorative responsibility: a moral obligation that extends beyond the allocation of criminal or civil liability to include acknowledging harm, recognizing victims, and restoring their social dignity. I further contend that this deficit is not fully remedied by the recent shift toward trauma-focused therapeutic responses to victimization.