DISTRIBUTING COMPENSATORY JUSTICE AND JUSTIFYING THE DISTRIBUTION OF RISK

Like Dickens, Conrad explores the contexts in which the law's exemplary economy of norms and precedents may become paradoxical. In similar fashion, he channels this kind of excess towards the question of alternative internal standards for delinquency. Both Dickens and Conrad raise the question of excess in terms of the question as to how much the internalization of guilt in self-imposed isolation is indebted to the very legal assumptions about personality that causes conscience to operate. This question of guilt-as-indebtedness reflects an affinity, unintended by many of their characters, between the renunciation of norms or customs and the alienation from intimacy and social bonds.

Like Dickens, Conrad is concerned to question Bentham's attempt to anchor the calculus of pleasure and pain in a more or less self-regulating circuit of suffering and compensation - the utility principle. In similar ways, he variously suggests this concern throughout his early work: the postutilitarian idea of commensurating pain with its cure is already present in those philanthropic doctrines which advocate character formation as an anticipated compensation for suffering.