The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Forgiveness (Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy) [1 ed.] 0367030721, 9780367030728

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FORGIVENESS

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Forgiveness brings into conversation research from multiple disciplines, offering readers a comprehensive guide to current forgiveness research. Its 42 chapters, newly commissioned from an internationally acclaimed group of scholars, are divided into five parts: I II III IV V

Religious Traditions Historic Treatments The Nature of Forgiveness Normative Issues Empirical Findings

While the principal aim of the handbook is to provide a guide to the philosophical literature on forgiveness that, ideally, will inform the psychological sciences in developing more philosophically accurate measures and psychological treatments of forgiveness, the volume will be of interest to students and researchers with a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, including philosophy, psychology, theology, religious studies, classics, history, politics, law, and education. Glen Pettigrove is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is the editor – with Christine Swanton – of Neglected Virtues (2022) and the author of Forgiveness and Love (2012). Robert Enright holds the Aristotelian Professorship in Forgiveness Science within the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a licensed psychologist, and is co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute. He is the author or editor of seven books including The Forgiving Life (2012), 8 Keys to Forgiveness (2015), Forgiveness Therapy (2015), and Forgiveness Is a Choice (2019).

ROUTLEDGE H A N DBOOKS IN PHILOSOPH Y

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research. All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indispensable reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications. Also available: THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF FRIENDSHIP Edited by Diane Jeske THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INDIAN BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY Edited by William Edelglass, Pierre-Julien Harter and Sara McClintock THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF BODILY AWARENESS Edited by Adrian J.T. Alsmith and Matthew R. Longo THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF AUTONOMY Edited by Ben Colburn THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FORGIVENESS Edited by Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF IMPLICIT COGNITION Edited by J. Robert Thompson

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FORGIVENESS

Edited by Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Taylor & Francis The right of Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-0-367-03072-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-41897-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36027-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

Contributors ix Introduction Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright

1

SECTION A

Background 7 PART I

Religious Traditions

9

1 The Jewish Journey from Atonement to Forgiveness Charles A. Klein

11

2 Forgiveness from the Christian Perspective Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle

20

3 Dilemmas of Divine Forgiveness and the Reflective Muslim Zain Ali

30

4 Forgiveness in Hinduism Roy W. Perrett

45

5 Forgiveness, Patience, and Confession in Buddhism D.E. Osto

59

v

Contents PART II

Historic Treatments

73

6 Forgiveness in Classical Greece: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Their Background Culture Sophie Grace Chappell

75

7 Stoic Forgiveness Jeremy Reid

87

8 Forgiveness in Augustine and Aquinas Adam Wood

101

9 Joseph Butler on Forgiveness David McNaughton

115

10 Developing a Neo-Humean Account of Forgiveness: A Comparative Philosophical Approach Rico Vitz

128

11 Hegel on Forgiveness Christopher Yeomans

142

12 Kierkegaard on Forgiveness John Lippitt

155

13 Jung and Forgiveness Robin S. Brown

167

14 Simone Weil: The Impossibility of Forgiveness and the Limits of the Human Christopher Hamilton

180

15 The Gift of Forgiveness: Perspectives from the French Philosophical Tradition 194 Christina M. Gschwandtner SECTION B

Current Research

211

PART III

The Nature of Forgiveness

213

16 Feeling Blame and Feeling Forgiveness Lucy Allais

215

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Contents

17 Forgiveness as a Volitional Commitment Kathryn J. Norlock

230

18 Punishment Forbearance Accounts of Forgiveness Luke Russell

243

19 Performative Accounts of Forgiveness Brandon Warmke

255

20 Normative Power Accounts of Forgiveness Christopher Bennett

273

21 Process Accounts of Forgiveness Per-Erik Milam

285

22 Forgiveness and Agency Jada Twedt Strabbing

299

23 Memory and the Scope of Personal Forgiveness Crystal L’Hote

312

PART IV

Normative Issues

321

24 The Standing to Forgive Linda Radzik

323

25 Forgiveness and Oppression Macalester Bell

336

26 Forgiveness and Hope Claudia Blöser

350

27 The Virtue of Forgiveness? Glen Pettigrove

363

28 Forgiving God Daniel Speak

378

29 Collective Forgiveness Katie Stockdale

392

30 Forgiveness in Politics Trudy Govier

407

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Contents

31 Forgiveness in Treatment: The Importance of Careful Definitions and Realistic Objectives Everett L. Worthington, Jr. and Sharon Lamb 32 Begging for Mercy: The Dangers and Hopes of Forgiveness in Criminal Law Nick Smith PART V

418 430

Empirical Findings

443

33 The Measurement of Forgiveness Suzanne Freedman

445

34 Forgiveness: Psychophysiological Side Effects and Pathways to Health Charlotte V. O. Witvliet, Alyssa D. Cheadle, and Lindsey M. Root Luna

461

35 The Development of Forgiveness Etienne Mullet

476

36 Forgiveness with Couples and Families Frederick A. DiBlasio

492

37 Examining Forgiveness and Trauma through Case Study Analyses Jacqueline Y. Song and Shih-Tseng Tina Huang

505

38 Self-Condemnation and Pathways to Self-Forgiveness Lydia Woodyatt

519

39 Forgiveness and Religion/Spirituality: What Science has Discovered about the Relationship between the Two Jichan J. Kim

533

40 What Works in Forgiveness Therapy? Discussing Recent Meta-Analyses Thomas W. Baskin

546

41 Intergroup Forgiveness John Klatt and Robert Enright

559

42 Forgiveness Education: International Perspectives for Children and Youth Jonghyo Park and Peli Galiti

570

Index 583

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CONTRIBUTORS

Zain Ali  teaches religious studies at the University of Auckland and also works as a Spiritual Advisor at Hospice West Auckland. He is the author of Faith, Philosophy, and the Reflective Muslim (Springer, 2013) and various articles on philosophy of religion, including “Concepts of God in Islam,” Philosophy Compass (2016) and “An Evidential Argument for Islamic Theism,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2018). Lucy Allais  works as Professor of Philosophy jointly at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and at Johns Hopkins University. She has published extensively on Kant’s philosophy, as well as emotions related to moral responsibility, such as forgiveness and resentment. Thomas W. Baskin currently does research and writing within the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. His topics include forgiveness therapy, psychotherapy effectiveness, and bio-psycho-social models of human experience. Macalester Bell  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. Her primary research and teaching interests are in ethics and moral psychology, and much of her work focuses on the role of emotions in responding to wrongdoing and injustice. Her published papers take up fundamental questions concerning anger, blame, forgiveness, reparation, personal relationships, love, and inspiration. She is the author of Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt (Oxford University Press, 2013). She is currently working on a project focused on the moral dimensions of photography. Christopher Bennett is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment (Cambridge, 2008), as well as papers on topics such as blame, forgiveness, and apology; retribution and moral responsibility; emotion and expressive action; and criminal law and justice. Claudia Blöser is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her research interests are in ethics and moral psychology, with a historical focus on Kant. Her publications include articles on a Kantian perspective on forgiveness and several articles on hope. She is the editor – with Titus Stahl – of The Moral Psychology of Hope (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). ix

Contributors

Robin S. Brown is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a member of adjunct faculty for the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. His first book, Psychoanalysis beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking towards the Post-Relational (Routledge, 2017), won the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize. This was followed by an edited collection, Re-Encountering Jung: Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018), which was nominated for a Gradiva Award, and his second full-length work Groundwork for a Transpersonal Psychoanalysis: Spirituality, Relationship, and Participation (Routledge, 2020). His most recent publication was a collection co-edited with Marie Brown titled Emancipatory Perspectives on Madness: Psychological, Social, and Spiritual Dimensions (Routledge, 2021). Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, UK. She has previously been Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at St Andrews, and Erskine Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury New Zealand. She has published over a hundred articles on ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Her books include Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom (Macmillan, 1995), The Inescapable Self: An Introduction to Philosophy (Orion, 2005), Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (Hackett, 2005), Ethics and Experience (Acumen, 2009), Knowing What to Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics (Oxford University, 2014), and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience (Oxford, 2022). She is the UK’s first openly transgender philosophy academic, having transitioned in 2014, and campaigns actively on feminist and transgender issues. Alyssa D. Cheadle is a health psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Her recent publications include “Let it rest: sleep and health as positive correlates of forgiveness of others and self-forgiveness” and “Untangling the mechanisms underlying the links between religiousness, spirituality, and better health.” Frederick A. DiBlasio is Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Maryland. He is the author/co-author of very early and current publications on the therapeutic use of forgiveness starting with “Promoting mutual forgiveness within the fractured relationship” (1990). Robert Enright holds the Aristotelian Professorship in Forgiveness Science at the Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was the first to publish a research article focused specifically on the psychology of interpersonal forgiveness: Enright, R., Santos, M., and Al-Mabuk, R. (1989) “The adolescent as forgiver,” Journal of Adolescence 12: 95–110. He was also the first to publish a research article on forgiveness therapy: Hebl, J. H., and Enright, R. (1993) “Forgiveness as a psychotherapeutic goal with elderly females,” Psychotherapy 30: 658–667. Suzanne Freedman is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Dr. Freedman’s areas of expertise include the psychology of interpersonal forgiveness and forgiveness education and intervention. Her publications focus on the psychology of forgiveness with both adults and adolescents. Dr. Freedman has presented at numerous national and international conferences in addition to leading workshops on forgiveness. Peli Galiti is Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison-USA. She is the Director of the Forgiveness Education Program in schools in Greece. Two of her books are Living with Your Best Self (2015) and Conflict and Coexistence (2017) in Greek. Trudy Govier  taught at Trent University, the University of Calgary, and the University of Lethbridge, before retiring. Her special interests are in applied ethics and the theory of argument. x

Contributors

Trudy has a longstanding interest in issues of peace and conflict and has worked extensively with civil society groups. Her many books and papers include A Practical Study of Argument, Social Trust and Human Communities, and Forgiveness and Revenge. Christina M. Gschwandtner teaches Continental Philosophy of Religion at Fordham University. She is the author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Indiana, 2007), Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments about God in Contemporary Philosophy (Fordham, 2012), Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Indiana, 2014), Marion and Theology (T&T Clark, 2016), Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (Fordham, 2019), and Reading Religious Ritual with Ricœur: Between Fragility and Hope (Lexington Press, 2021), besides many articles and translations at the intersection of phenomenology and religion. Christopher Hamilton is Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London. He is the author of six books and numerous articles on ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion, as well as on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Primo Levi, Simone Weil, Alain Resnais, and W.G Sebald. His most recent book is Philosophy and Autobiography: Reflections on Truth, Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of Others (2021). Shih-Tseng Tina Huang is Professor in the Department of Psychology and PhD Program in Cognitive Sciences, National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan. She is the translator for the Chinese version (2008) of Robert Enright’s Forgiveness Is a Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Jichan J. Kim is Associate Professor of Psychology at Liberty University. He also serves as the director of the Master of Arts in Applied Psychology and teaches courses on forgiveness psychology, psychology and Christianity integration, and research methods. John Klatt is Assistant Dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has studied interpersonal forgiveness from developmental, counseling, and educational perspectives. Recently John has explored forgiveness between groups; the goal of this work is to understand group-level attitudes and behaviors in order to identify ways of ending cycles of violence. Charles A. Klein  is an ordained Rabbi who earned an MSW. He is the author of the book, How to Forgive When You Can’t Forget: Healing Our Personal Relationships, published in 1994. He has served as the Rabbi of the Merrick Jewish Centre since 1978 and has lectured and counseled on the issue of forgiveness. Crystal L’Hote  is Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, where she is also Co-Director of the Humanities Center. Sharon Lamb is Professor at the Department of Counseling and School Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston. Her last two books were Cambridge Handbook on Sexual Development: Children and Adolescents (Co-edited with Jen Gilbert), and a memoir, The Not Good Enough Mother (Beacon Press). A practicing psychotherapist, she has also published widely in the areas of girls’ sexual development, sex education, ethics, and forgiveness. John Lippitt is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics & Society at The University of Notre Dame Australia. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Professor at Deakin University. His most recent book is Love’s Forgiveness xi

Contributors

(Oxford University Press, 2020), research on which was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2018–20). His previous books include The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (Routledge, second edition 2016), Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Palgrave, 2000). He has also published articles on topics including forgiveness, friendship, hope, humility, humor, and narrative identity; edited or co-edited two books on Nietzsche and two on Kierkegaard (including The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (2013)); and served as an ethics advisor to police forces in the UK. His current research includes a project on self-righteousness as a moral and epistemic vice of individuals and groups. Lindsey M. Root Luna  is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Her recent publications include “Apology and restitution: the psychophysiology of forgiveness after accountable relational repair responses” and “Forgiveness and well-being.” David McNaughton was Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Florida State University, before retiring. He is the author of Moral Vision (1988) and (with Eve Garrard) of Forgiveness (2010). He is the editor of Joseph Butler: Fifteen Sermons and Other Writings in Ethics (2017) and Joseph Butler: The Analogy of Religion (2021). Per-Erik Milam  is a researcher in practical philosophy at the University of Gothenburg. He studies free will, agency, and moral responsibility and has written on the responsibility practices, including blame, apology, and forgiveness, that we use to address and resolve moral conflicts. He is currently working on a project about the limits of forgiveness, funded by the Swedish Research Council. Etienne Mullet is former Research Director at the Earth and Life Sciences section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, France. Kathryn J. Norlock is Professor of Philosophy and the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University. She is the editor of The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness (2017) and the author of Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective (2009). D.E. Osto teaches Asian philosophies at Massey University. They are the author of An Indian Tantric Tradition and Its Modern Global Revival: Contemporary Nondual Śaivism (Routledge, 2020), Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America (Columbia University Press, 2016), and Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Ga ṇḍ avy ū ha-sūtra (Routledge, 2008). Jonghyo Park is Professor and Dean of College of Education at the Graduate School of Education, Konkuk University, South Korea. She is the author of Healing and Growth through Apology (2020) and Healing and Growth through Forgiveness (2016). Her research topics are forgiveness, school violence and bullying, and prevention and intervention programs. Roy W. Perrett  is retired from the University of Hawai‘i. Among his book publications are Hindu Ethics: A Philosophical Study (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), Indian Philosophy: A Collection of Readings (Garland, 2001), and An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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Contributors

Glen Pettigrove is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on moral psychology and normative ethics. He is the editor – with Christine Swanton – of Neglected Virtues (Routledge, 2022) and the author of Forgiveness and Love (Oxford University Press, 2012). Linda Radzik is Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Ethics of Social Punishment: The Enforcement of Morality in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Jeremy Reid is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University. He works primarily on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and contemporary virtue ethics. Luke Russell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of the books Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (Oxford University Press, 2014), Being Evil (Oxford University Press, 2021), and Real Forgiveness (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Nick Smith is Professor and Chairperson of the University of New Hampshire Department of Philosophy. Before coming to UNH, Nick worked as a litigator and as a judicial clerk for the United States Court of Appeals. Nick published I Was Wrong: On the Meanings of Apologies with Cambridge University Press in 2008 and Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform and Punishment in 2014 (also with Cambridge University Press). Jacqueline Y. Song  is a doctoral student at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid. She is also the Program Director at the International Forgiveness Institute, Inc. in Madison, Wisconsin, where she directs forgiveness programs for those without homes and other populations. Her most recent publication is Song, M. J., Yu, L., and Enright, R. (2020). “Trauma and healing in the under-served populations of homelessness and corrections: Forgiveness therapy as an added component to intervention,” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy. Daniel Speak  is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He thinks, writes, and teaches about free will, responsibility, and the philosophy of religion. In addition to a number of articles on these and other topics, he is the author of The Problem of Evil (2014) and the co-editor (with Kevin Timpe) of Free Will and Theism (2016). Katie Stockdale is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research is focused primarily on the nature and value of emotions in moral, social, and political life. She is the author of Hope under Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2021). Jada Twedt Strabbing is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wayne State University. She specializes in agency and responsibility, moral psychology, metaethics, and philosophy of religion. She has published numerous articles on the nature of moral responsibility, blame, and forgiveness, including “Responsibility and Judgment” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2016), “Blame and Blameworthy Presentation: A (Mostly) Ecumenical Account of Blame” in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (2021), and “Forgiveness and Reconciliation” in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2020). Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in the Diocese of Imus, the Philippines, on February 27, 1982. He is the 32nd Archbishop of Manila. Pope Benedict

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Contributors

XVI named him as one of the Synod Fathers for the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization on September 18, 2012. He was formally made a cardinal on November 24, 2012. Pope Francis appointed him as Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples on December 8, 2019. He was elevated to the rank of a cardinal bishop, the highest order within the College of Cardinals, on April 14, 2020. Rico Vitz is Professor of Philosophy at the Honors College, Azusa Pacific University. He is the author of Reforming the Art of Living: Nature, Virtue, and Religion in Descartes’s Epistemology, co-editor of Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology and The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, and the editor of Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith. His work appears in The Oxford Handbook of David Hume, Journal of the History of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Hume Studies, Faith & Philosophy, The Modern Schoolman, Journal of Philosophical Research, and Christian Bioethics. He has served as the Executive Vice President-Treasurer of the Hume Society and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Christian Philosophers. Brandon Warmke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. He has written widely on forgiveness, moral responsibility, public discourse, and politics. With Justin Tosi, he wrote Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press, 2020). Along with Dana Kay Nelkin and Michael McKenna, he is an editor of Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is currently writing a book on conservative political philosophy, and another book with Justin Tosi on the merits of minding your own business. Charlotte V. O. Witvliet is the Lavern ‘39 and Betty DePree ‘41 Van Kley Professor of Psychology at Hope College. Her recent publications include “Granting forgiveness: state and trait evidence for genetic and gender indirect effects through empathy” as well as “Apology and restitution: the psychophysiology of forgiveness after accountable relational repair responses.” Adam Wood is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Wheaton College in Illinois. He specializes in medieval philosophy, and his recent writing has focused on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, the resurrection, and the problem of hell. Lydia Woodyatt  is Associate Professor in Psychology at Flinders University. Her research is focused on understanding how people work through failure and transgressions. She was the lead editor of The Handbook of the Psychology of Self-forgiveness (2017). Everett L. Worthington, Jr.,  is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is co-editor with Nathaniel G Wade of Handbook of Forgiveness, second edition (2020), and co-author with Scott T. Allison of Heroic Humility: What the Science of Humility Can Say to People Raised on Self-focus (2018). Christopher Yeomans is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He works on German philosophy, philosophy of action, and political philosophy. He is the author of Freedom and Reflection and The Expansion of Autonomy, both from Oxford University Press.

xiv

INTRODUCTION Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright

Over the past forty years, an increasing number of philosophers and psychologists have taken an interest in forgiveness. That interest has blossomed into a productive research program that has generated thousands of articles and hundreds of books. Or, more accurately, it has blossomed into two research programs: one in philosophy and the other in psychology. For the most part, the investigation of forgiveness in each discipline has developed independently of the other. Both research programs have reached a point in their development where researchers who are new to the topic will benefit from a handbook to give them a sense of the current state of the field. And on two previous occasions, Routledge has provided such a handbook for research in psychology (Worthington 2005; Worthington and Wade 2020). The principal aim of the handbook you are currently holding in your hands – or reading on your screen – is to provide such a guide to the philosophical literature on forgiveness which, ideally, could then inform the psychological sciences in developing, for example, more philosophically accurate measures and psychological treatments of forgiveness. Why is forgiveness philosophically interesting? To begin with, there are conceptual questions about what it is. Is it an action, an emotion, a trait of character, a social practice, a combination of these things, or none of them? There are ethical questions about how we ought to react to others when they treat us badly. Is it permissible (obligatory, admirable) to retaliate? Is it okay to let it go and forget about it? Is it acceptable to forgive or does justice require a different response? Contexts in which forgiveness is a possibility also invite metaethical questions. Many people’s intuitions about when or whether one ought to forgive are rooted in the thought that some attitudes are called for by a situation and others are precluded. Perhaps part of what it means to value someone is that one gets angry when they are harmed or disrespected. Alternatively, perhaps part of what is involved in loving someone is that (at least sometimes) one carries on loving them even after they have deceived, disrespected, or in some other way hurt us. Forgiveness raises questions about the nature of emotions. Are they like judgments or like bodily feelings? Are they passive or can we choose, alter, or maintain them? Forgiveness raises questions about personal identity. Often, when asking to be forgiven, a person tries to distance herself from who she was or what she was thinking at the time of her transgression. Is this just a fiction or does it reveal something important about personal or moral identity? There are also juridical questions: When, if ever, should the fact that a victim has forgiven a perpetrator have a bearing on whether (and to what degree) a state punishes a perpetrator? Not surprisingly, given its importance in various spiritual traditions, forgiveness raises questions in philosophy of religion. Can the God of Abraham forgive? Can the omni-god of the philosopher – a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent – forgive? DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-1

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Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright

(Depending on one’s theological framework, one may or may not take the last two sentences to be different ways of phrasing the same question.) If God can forgive, is divine forgiveness like human forgiveness? What implications would the answer have for our understanding either of forgiveness or of divine nature? On the flip side, when people are struck by tragedy, their god is often the one they resent. Does this make sense or is it irrational? (Perhaps there is no god, or perhaps gods exist outside human ethics, or perhaps God is perfect.) Can a god be forgiven? Even this quick sketch of some of the philosophical questions raised by forgiveness reveals that answering them will often require engaging with more than just philosophical literature. So another aim of this handbook is to equip readers with other resources that might enrich their understanding of forgiveness. The handbook is divided into five parts. The first looks at religious perspectives on forgiveness. Even a cursory glance at either the philosophical or the psychological literature on forgiveness will reveal the influence of religious traditions on people’s thoughts about what forgiveness is and when it is appropriate. Sometimes this influence is explicit, sometimes not. The aim of Part I is to alert readers to these influences by looking at how forgiveness is understood within some of the major world religions. Chapters 1–3 explore forgiveness within the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Chapters 4 and 5 approach the topic from the vantage of Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The chapters of Part II turn to other historic discussions of forgiveness – from ancient Greece to twentieth-century France. One advantage of looking at forgiveness through the eyes of people writing in different times and places is that doing so can reveal points at which the assumptions they made differ from our own. In the process, they can highlight things we take for granted that might be worth subjecting to further scrutiny. Some of the thinkers singled out in this part have been chosen because their thought has had a considerable influence on the current philosophical discussion. The writings of Aristotle (Chapter 6), Augustine, Aquinas (Chapter 8), Butler (Chapter 9) and Hegel (Chapter 11), for example, have shaped the assumptions of many people working on the topic. And one cannot understand most French literature on forgiveness without knowing something about the way Jankelevitch and Derrida engaged with the topic (Chapter 15). Other figures – such as the Stoics (Chapter 7), Soren Kierkegaard (Chapter 12), Carl Jung (Chapter 13), Simone Weil (Chapter 14), Confucius, Gregory Palamas, and David Hume (Chapter 10) – have been selected because the relevance of their work for how we might think about forgiveness has received much less attention. There are additional figures who fall into one or the other of these categories who might as easily have been included and whose work would reward careful study. Hannah Arendt’s discussion of forgiveness in The Human Condition, for instance, has influenced many. The same could be said of Anselm of Canterbury.1 However, the ten chapters in this part should be sufficient to showcase how a careful study of historical sources can cast light on the origins of some of our intuitions and challenge other assumptions we make about the nature and norms of forgiveness. Beginning with Part III, the focus shifts from historic to contemporary research on forgiveness. The chapters of this part map the conceptual terrain, presenting competing accounts of the nature of forgiveness. Some theorists take the central, defining feature of forgiveness to be an emotional condition – typically a change from feeling anger, blame, or resentment toward a wrongdoer to feeling less hostility and (perhaps) arriving at a more positive emotional orientation toward them. Views like this (i.e., emotion accounts) are explored and defended by Lucy Allais (Chapter 16), Per-Erik Milam (Chapter 21), and Jada Twedt Strabbing (Chapter 22). Other theorists take the defining feature of forgiveness to be a commitment of some sort. It might be a commitment to foreswear resentment (as Kathryn J. Norlock proposes in Chapter 17) or to forbear punishment (as Luke Russell discusses in Chapter 18). A third group of theorists take forgiveness to be a social practice in which one might engage by performing a speech act (Brandon Warmke, Chapter 19) or exercising a normative power (Christopher Bennett, Chapter 20). These chapters present versions 2

Introduction

of emotion, commitment, and social practice accounts of forgiveness in which one of these f­eatures is taken to be the central, defining feature of forgiveness. However, there are also hybrid accounts which consider two or more of these features to be important. Whether one understands forgiving in terms of emotions, commitments, social practices, or some combination of the above, almost everyone agrees that forgiving should be distinguished from mere forgetting. This raises questions about the role that remembering plays in forgiving, which is Crystal L’Hote’s focus in Chapter 23. In addition to clarifying where forgiveness sits in conceptual space – whether it is best understood as an emotional change, an act of will, or part of a social practice; as well as how it differs from condoning, excusing, justifying, forgetting, and other superficially similar phenomena – ­philosophers are interested in the normative questions forgiveness raises, which are the focus of Part IV. Who should forgive whom for what and under what conditions? What role should forgiveness play in politics or law? Should we encourage others to forgive and, if so, in what circumstances? Conceptual and normative questions are seldom entirely divorced from one another in the philosophical literature on forgiveness, and that remains true of the chapters in Part IV. Nevertheless, in Chapters 24–32, the normative questions come to the fore. In Chapter 24 Linda Radzik looks at who has the standing to forgive. Is forgiving something only victims and their close associates are permitted to do, or may third parties also forgive at least some kinds of wrongs? Macalester Bell (Chapter 25) asks about the difference an oppressive social or relational context makes to the question of whether forgiving is admirable. Claudia Blöser (Chapter 26) considers the role hope plays in forgiving and the difference it makes for how we think about the ethics of forgiveness. Glen Pettigrove (Chapter 27) investigates whether it is virtuous to forgive and, if so, what virtue it manifests. Daniel Speak (Chapter 28) directs our attention to situations in which we might resent God and explores what we can learn from reflecting on the question of whether we can forgive God. Katie Stockdale (Chapter 29) invites us to think about whether groups can forgive and about the normative questions such forgiveness raises. Trudy Govier (Chapter 30) raises ­ verett the question of whether there is a role for forgiveness to play in resolving political conflicts. E L. Worthington and Sharon Lamb (Chapter 31) focus on ethical questions raised by forgiveness therapy: If done well, forgiveness therapy can help patients, but if done badly it can easily become coercive, so they offer guidelines to help therapists avoid the latter. And Nick Smith (Chapter 32) looks at forgiveness in the law, highlighting the pitfalls of some ways of allowing forgiveness to affect sentencing as well as identifying more promising ways for the law to acknowledge the moral significance of seeking or receiving forgiveness. The chapters of the final part focus on psychology. The science of psychology tends to look for regularities about forgiveness by the use of statistical analyses. In other words, it is implicitly assumed in psychology that there is a lawful relationship between certain variables. In the case of forgiveness, the assumption is that if a person forgives well and deeply, then this should have a positive effect on emotional and physical health and on relationships. Such expectations have an underlying, and often unexamined, assumption: Forgiveness as a construct means something in particular that does not vary across historical time or across cultures (although different cultures might express forgiveness differently depending on certain norms and customs). As an analogy, physicists do not assume that the laws of physics only work in Asian countries and not in ­European countries. This underlying assumption within psychology, of finding statistical regularities, presents a formidable challenge: Can we truly develop measures of forgiveness that accurately represent the essence of forgiving while, at the same time, allowing for cultural nuances? Without a firm grounding in philosophy, the field of psychology could degenerate into different “camps” with different researchers defining forgiveness radically differently than others, even though both are seeking statistical commonalities across various populations. In other words, psychologists need to know the philosophy of forgiveness before launching their quest for statistically lawful statements about what forgiveness is and what works when people forgive. 3

Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright

Similarly, it is important for philosophers to be acquainted with the psychological literature. Empirical findings are relevant to how we conceptualize forgiveness. Mapping out a place in conceptual space is one thing. Determining whether a widely used term in ordinary language points to that space is another. And assessing how well that concept fits lived experience is yet a third. To do the latter two things, one needs empirical information – the kind of information psychologists are trained to gather. Empirical work is likewise relevant to the ethics of forgiveness. The extent to which something – be it an emotional condition, a commitment, or a social practice – conduces to a person’s flourishing has a bearing on how we evaluate that thing. Whether a person is flourishing is not merely a conceptual matter. If physical health is a constituent of flourishing – as it is on many accounts – then knowing the effects of forgiving on physical health will be relevant to determining when it might be good for someone to forgive. The same will be true of mental health. Ethical and empirical strands are firmly interwoven in such a way that what counts as mental health inescapably presupposes a normative framework. But judgments about mental health also inescapably involve observing relations of cause and effect that are of particular interest to empirical psychologists. So empirical research will have a bearing on our judgments regarding whether (and under what conditions) forgiveness is conducive to human flourishing. If some people are better at forgiving than others then, as Pettigrove argues in Chapter 27, empirical study can help us identify the kinds of character traits good forgivers commonly display. That information is directly relevant to judgments about the virtue (or virtues) possessed by those who forgive well. If forgiving is a social practice, then cross-cultural observation can help us identify variations in that practice as well as alternative practices that might take its place in some contexts. In these and numerous other ways, empirical work has a bearing on how we think about the normative contours of forgiveness. To facilitate dialogue between philosophers and psychologists, we present ten chapters on different strands of psychological research on forgiveness. Suzanne Freedman (Chapter 33) begins by showing that measures of forgiveness – what forgiveness is assumed to be by psychologists – are not always accurate. She critiques popular measures and calls for clarity of definition and measurement. Charlotte Witvliet, Alyssa D. Cheadle, and Lindsey Root Luna (Chapter 34) discuss the relationship between forgiving and physical variables. Their research suggests forgiveness plays a part in the well-functioning human body. A new approach to forgiveness, derived by psychologists, is to show that forgiveness is not a static entity within people’s minds. What forgiveness is actually develops or matures as people grow in this moral virtue. The statistical laws of forgiveness development are described by Etienne Mullet (Chapter 35). Because psychology is one of the helping professions, we devote four chapters to issues of forgiveness therapy or change within people who forgive. One of these chapters focuses on forgiveness within families by Frederick A. DiBlasio (Chapter 36), and another, by Song and Huang (Chapter 37), focuses on forgiveness for those who have experienced deep trauma and their own descriptions of their forgiveness processes. A third chapter on forgiveness therapy centers on self-forgiveness by Lydia Woodyatt (Chapter 38), and a fourth chapter by Thomas W. Baskin (Chapter 40) summarizes a large body of randomized experimental and control group clinical trials of forgiveness therapy with adults. Examining many forgiveness therapy research efforts allows the social scientist to ascertain whether or not forgiveness therapy tends to work for people who suffer different forms of injustice, in different cultures, and across different amounts of time in forgiveness therapy. A chapter showing the interplay between religion and forgiveness by Jichan J. Kim (Chapter 39) is an added component to the helping professions if transcendent belief is related to and augments a forgiveness response. Klatt and Enright (Chapter 41) investigate a little-explored area of psychology, namely, group-to-group forgiveness. Its relevance to peace movements has drawn it to the attention of 4

Introduction

philosophers and political theorists. But little work has been done to operationalize and measure intergroup forgiveness. The chapter explores ways in which this might be done. We end with a new idea: forgiveness education. If forgiving has been shown by the statistical method of the social sciences to be beneficial for people, then why are we not introducing children to what forgiveness is and how to go about it at a very young age so that they are ready for the injustices that will befall them as adults? This theme is explored by Park and Galiti in Chapter 42. Forgiveness education programs developed by philosophers, psychologists, and educationalists working together promises to be an exciting new frontier for preventive mental health.

Note 1 For a nice introduction to Arendt’s thoughts on forgiveness, see La Caze (2014) and for a sympathetic discussion of Anselm see Rogers (2009).

References La Caze, M. (2014) “Promising and Forgiveness,” in P. Hayden (ed.) Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, 209–222, New York: Routledge. Rogers, K. (2009) “Anselm on Forgiveness, Patience, and Free Will,’ Saint Anselm Journal 6.2. Worthington, E. L. (2005) Handbook of Forgiveness, New York: Routledge. Worthington, E. L. and Wade, N. (2020) Handbook of Forgiveness, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge.

5

SECTION A

Background

PART I

Religious Traditions

1 THE JEWISH JOURNEY FROM ATONEMENT TO FORGIVENESS Charles A. Klein

1.  The Jewish Journey from Atonement to Forgiveness The arc of Judaism is long, with one end of that arc resting upon the Torah—the five books of Moses—and the other upon a rabbinical tradition that remains a never-dying source for the ethical voice of the Jewish tradition. Together, they have nurtured and guided Judaism’s expectations for human relationships. You can search the entire Torah and you will not find the obligation to forgive another human being, or to seek forgiveness from another person. Though the Torah is known for revealing God’s commandments (or Mitzvot), absent is any commandment demanding forgiveness. Although not explicitly commanded, the concept of forgiveness still took root in the soil of the Torah’s value concepts. For forgiveness to emerge in a very unforgiving world, concepts such as the sanctity of all life, the requirements of human kindness, the quality of mercy, and the honor to which all are entitled as God’s children, all had to have been introduced into the world. The bible tells the story of a God who evolved into a Divinity embracing all of those qualities and inspiring them in the Israelite people who were created in His image and charged to follow God’s ways. The concept of forgiveness was born in the text of the Torah narrative as a series of complex relationships unfolded. It is within the great stories that a culture begins to develop as leading biblical characters express the earliest evidence we have that forgiveness need not be commanded for it to be the will of God. Many years ago, I wrote a book, How to Forgive When You Can’t Forget: Healing Our Personal Relationships. In this book, I took my readers on a journey into the world of Joseph and his brothers. The brothers’ monumental betrayal of Joseph begins one of the longest narratives in biblical literature. What intrigued me then, and always has, was Joseph’s capacity to forgive his brothers. In the book of Genesis, we accompany Joseph as he journeys from anger to forgiveness. Thrown into a pit by his brothers and then extracted from that pit only to be sold into slavery, Joseph, at the right moment, chose to forgive his brothers for their treachery. The Torah only hints at why Joseph chose forgiveness, even when he must certainly have been unable to forget the massive wrong they had done to him. Those chapters in Genesis are filled with intrigue and suspense. The reader sees what Joseph observed; his brothers had changed. Joseph came to see a side of his brothers that he had not previously known. They had grown and changed over the years since he had last been with them. He saw them display concern and compassion and that moved him to see the potential for a future with his brothers that would be very different from the past. In one unforgettable moment, Joseph, DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-4

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who had the power and position in Egypt to punish them mercilessly, came to realize that he did not want revenge; he wanted a future with his brothers. He offered forgiveness to them, consigning the past to memory and giving forgiveness a role in human relationships. When seeing his brothers standing before him, the taste of revenge no longer appealed to him. As I have come to understand the story, Joseph realized that hurting his brothers could not heal his wounds. Though he had lived for years in the palace of the Pharaoh, surrounded by servants and palace officials, he had been lonely for family. Hopeful that reconciliation would relieve his own emotional pain, Joseph decided to forgive; he chose the future over the past. There is another story in the book of Genesis that inspired forgiveness. The bible commentaries point out that prenatally, the brothers Jacob and Esau were already in conflict. As a young man, Jacob betrayed his brother. Knowing that Esau, hurt and angry, had determined to kill him, Jacob fled for his life. He traveled to the birthplace of his mother. There Jacob remained for many years, beginning his own family life. With the passage of years, Jacob felt that the time had come to return home to his family in Israel. He understood that returning home would mean encountering Esau. Nevertheless, Jacob began the long journey back. As he approached the land of Israel, Jacob heard that his brother was coming to meet him with an army of 400 men. Naturally, Jacob feared for his life and the lives of his family members. In a long night before their meeting, Jacob anguished over what the next day would bring. That night, after all the years of separation, Jacob wrestled with his own sense of guilt for the wrong he had done to his brother. When the morning light came, it was time for Jacob to face his brother. Jacob had come to realize that only through this encounter could he bring an end to his long night of darkness. The description of Jacob’s meeting with Esau is very succinct. In Chapter 33 of Genesis, we read of their reunion. There it says, “And Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and kissed him and they wept.” Jacob had anticipated reprisal. But surprisingly, Esau’s first impulse was to embrace his brother. This was the first recorded display of affection between these twins. Why did Esau forgive? We will never know why he made that choice. But certainly, the biblical message for all the generations that would read and study this narrative had to be that God created us with the capacity to forgive the hurts we have suffered. God also created human beings with the ability to appreciate the heroism of Esau, who had decided that the hurt must come to an end and that Jacob was courageous to seek forgiveness. A story that began with betrayal concludes with the message that love can conquer hate, that two brothers, or anyone, can choose to leave a legacy of forgiveness. Through these stories and others, the Torah created a culture that encourages forgiveness and reconciliation. We see that in the book of Exodus as God, too, offers forgiveness in the aftermath of the Israelite worship of the Golden Calf. In the afterglow of the revelation at Mt. Sinai, the Israelite reversion to idol worship was a powerful repudiation of the commandments they had embraced only days before. The Torah portrays God as being profoundly disappointed at what God understood to be the Israelites’ rejection of the fundamental covenantal obligations. It was at that moment that God said to Moses (Exodus 32:10), “Now let Me alone that I consume them and make of you a greater nation.” Moses was not compliant. He continued to advocate for the Israelites. Only Moses’ timely and persuasive intervention brought God to forgive the people for their wrongdoing. It was at that moment that the Hebrew word for forgiveness, selicha, entered into the biblical lexicon. Seeking to reconcile God with the Israelites, Moses asked God (Exodus 34:9), “O Lord, be with us, for it is a stiff-necked people and forgive our iniquity and our sin and take us for your inheritance.” Moses asked that God respond to the people’s sin with forgiveness. In that context, the process of forgiveness was not what it would become over the centuries. This was not a forgiveness prompted by the people’s repentance and change. The Israelites had not pledged themselves to 12

The Jewish Journey from Atonement to Forgiveness

cease committing the sin of idol worship. Moses had found the right words to inspire God to respond with grace to the Israelite apostacy. God’s earliest expression of forgiveness was to welcome the Israelites back into the covenant as an act of loving kindness. Whereas forgiveness would come to require the one who had done wrong to speak words of regret, remorse, and the resolve to change, in this instance, the Israelites were gifted with forgiveness by their God of kindness, love, and compassion. Earlier in that chapter (Exodus 34:6–7), God had defined himself as, The Lord, God merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth. Keeping mercy to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin—by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the father’s upon children’s children until the third and fourth generations. The words in these verses were intended to draw God’s self-portrait. He is a God who leads with mercy, moved by the will to forgive and the readiness to offer grace. Forgiveness was once again offered by God in the book of Numbers. When discouraged by the pervasively negative reports presented by the scouts sent out to survey the land of Israel, the ­Israelites allowed their pessimism to overwhelm their faith in God’s promise to bring them into the land of Israel. Their failure was colossal and God’s disappointment in them could not be overstated. Here, too, there had been a seemingly irreparable tear in the covenantal relationship. In Chapter 14 of Numbers, God was prepared to do away with the Israelites and God offered Moses the opportunity to begin again with a new, and presumably more obedient, people. Moses’ words were the magical elixir and God walked back from the brink of carrying out those very ominous threats. What was it that Moses said? He reminded God of the very words God had used to describe Himself in Exodus 34. Moses called upon God to remember that He was a gracious, merciful, and forgiving God, a God of grace and loving kindness. And here God, moved by Moses’ words, declared (Numbers 14:20), “I have forgiven as you have spoken.” Moses had strongly advocated on behalf of the Israelites. The people had offered no words of contrition, nor had there been any expression of remorse. Still, they were forgiven. This gesture of forgiveness was given as a gift, a powerful expression of the place of grace in God’s world. As the Torah reaches its conclusion, the book of Deuteronomy speaks of God whose signature is Chesed (loving kindness). Twice in Chapter 7, in verses 9 and 12 of that book, God is linked to that quality. God “keeps the covenant of loving-kindness.” Chesed came to guide God’s involvement in the world, and God’s judgment of people. With Chesed as God’s North Star, compassion, kindness, and mercy became the qualities God would represent and, at the same time, the qualities God expected from all people. It was not a big move from this powerful association of God with Chesed, to God becoming the exemplar of forgiveness. With that transition, it is understandable that the voice of God insistently urging forgiveness became the clarion call of prophetic literature. God emerged as the champion of forgiveness, offering it to the contrite and encouraging people to treat one another with mercy and ­compassion—the prerequisites for forgiveness. Nowhere in the prophetic literature is the God of forgiveness heard more forcefully than in the book of Jonah. An Israelite prophet, Jonah was called by God to deliver a message to the people of the city of Nineveh whose wrongdoings were egregious. Those who lived in Nineveh were not Israelites. In Jonah’s very parochial mind, their status as foreigners made them unworthy of God’s concern and certainly not entitled to God’s mercy and forgiveness. Jonah could embrace the concept of a forgiving God, but he couldn’t conceive that God’s forgiveness could extend to foreigners. Reluctantly, Jonah took God’s message to Nineveh. He told the citizens of the city that they were facing the apocalypse if they continued to do evil. They 13

Charles A. Klein

heard what he said, took his message into their hearts, and showed a wholehearted regret for their sins. The repentance of the Ninevites began with the people and reached all the way to the King. The words that described the response of the Ninevites tell the story. The entire community expressed contrition as we learn from the text (Chapter 3:5,8,9), The people of Nineveh believed in God. So they proclaimed a fast and donned sackcloth, from their great to their small. The King declared both man and animal shall cover themselves with sackcloth, and call out to God. Every person shall turn from his evil way and from the robbery that is in their hands. He who knows shall repent and God will relent from his anger that we shall not perish. And then came this unprecedented statement (Chapter 3:10). “God saw their deeds, that they had repented from their evil ways and God relented of the punishment he was going to bring down upon them and did not do it.” God at that moment made forgiveness a global reality. God looked beyond the past of the Ninevites because the people there had turned from their sins. The God of forgiveness saw in their remorse and repentance new hope for the future. The book of Jonah is often dismissed as a child’s story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale. In actuality, the book found its place in the biblical canon, in part, because it broke new ground in bringing an unnuanced endorsement of the concept of forgiveness. This book was a turning point in the biblical narrative. No longer was forgiveness born of grace. The Ninevites had made a communal expression that reflected a deep remorse. In my view, theirs was the most powerful statement of regret in the entire biblical record. There was no longer any need for God’s grace— the people of Nineveh had earned His forgiveness. In the words of other prophets, this message was strengthened. They speak of a God who offers forgiveness, not with hesitation but as their God committed to the Divine-human covenant who was ready to choose mercy over justice. The prophets encrypted forgiveness in the vocabulary of the Israelites. They persisted in their often under-appreciated efforts to include forgiveness as an essential teaching of Judaism’s moral code. During the rabbinic period from approximately 200 BCE to 600 CE, the sages of Judaism developed a system of law and lore in which forgiveness found its rightful place in the teachings, ritual, and literature of the Jewish people. Forgiveness became a behavioral expectation within personal and communal life. We see the influence of the sages in the radical transformation of the ritual of Yom Kippur that followed the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE. For well over 1,000 years before that, forgiveness was not at the heart of this most sacred day. The Day of Atonement, in its biblical origins, was a day for the purification of the Temple, the priestly tribe, and the people of Israel. On that day, they were purified of sins and transgressions. It was a day for kaparah, the cleansing of sin. The role of the Kohane Gadol, the High Priest, was to effect the removal of sin from himself, his household, the community, and the Temple. The ritual of the day is fully recorded in Leviticus 16. The Talmud wrote of this ritual (in Zevachim 88b), “That just as the Yom Kippur offerings effect atonement, so too, the Priestly vestments effect atonement.” The day was considered powerful enough to cleanse the entire community of sin. Almost the entire burden for the day was placed on the shoulders of the High Priest. The role of the Israelites was to afflict their souls by fasting and to desist from all manner of work. Together, the sacred work of the Kohane and the people’s fulfillment of what the day commanded of them could effect a purification of the Temple and of the sins of the people. When the day was complete, the people could feel that their sins had been removed and that God had forgiven them for their transgressions of His law. Only in the post-temple times, following the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, and in the centuries that followed, would the Day of Atonement become a day devoted to personal 14

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repentance and forgiveness. The rabbis codified their approach to Yom Kippur in this Mishna from the tractate in the Talmud Yoma 8:9. There it was taught, “transgressions between a person and God, Yom Kippur effects atonement, but transgressions committed against people Yom ­K ippur effects atonement only after one has sought forgiveness from one’s fellow.” Contextually, there is enormous scope to this teaching. With these words, the focus of Yom Kippur ritual shifted from ritual purification to the individual’s search for forgiveness. With the Temple destroyed, Yom Kippur became the day when the Jewish people sought forgiveness from God, aware that God’s forgiveness of interpersonal sins could only be achieved in the aftermath of the individual devoting the day to repairing the brokenness done in the human realm. God offered no absolution for the hurts and wrongs done to others. On the Day of Atonement, the path to God is only traveled by those who commit themselves to seeking forgiveness from the person one has hurt, thereby healing the interpersonal wounds. Only after that could the individual hope that God would be attentive to his or her search for forgiveness from the Divine. The spiritual goal of Yom Kippur, as expressed in the liturgy of that day, is to convince God of the sincerity of our desire to bring forgiveness into our personal world so that God, echoing the works spoken to Moses, will announce, “I forgive as you have asked.” In rabbinic literature, the sages often taught the most significant lessons through the stories they told. In one such story found in the Talmud Tractate of Berakhot 7a, Rabbi Yishmael Ben Elisha told of his encounter with God, in the Holy of Holies, on Yom Kippur day. Rabbi Yishmael related that, when he entered the innermost sanctum of the Temple, he saw God on high on the lofty throne of compassion. He said to me, ‘Yishmael, my son bless Me.’ I said to him, ‘Master of the Universe, may it be Your will that your mercy conquer Your anger, that You behave toward Your children with the attribute of mercy, and that for their sake, You go beyond the boundary of judgment.’ He nodded with His head. It is a remarkable story. Did the sages believe that such an encounter ever took place? I don’t believe they did. But they nonetheless told this story because it offered them the opportunity to inspire their listeners to favor mercy and kindness over anger and hard-heartedness. This story called people to follow God’s path in choosing to incline toward mercy in human relationships so that forgiveness can take root. Through stories such as this one, the sages artfully remade Yom Kippur into a day on which forgiveness is not only sought from a God ready to embrace mercy, but to a day on which contrition and regret can lead to forgiveness and reconciliation from people and God. Over the centuries, people have felt that the Day of Atonement could be the gateway to restoring relationships. Within the Jewish tradition, Yom Kippur is the climactic day of a forty-day period when the individual Jew is directed to focus heart and soul upon teshuvah (repentance). It concludes forty days designated for spiritual introspection. During this time of year, Jews are encouraged to seek forgiveness for the disappointment, pain, and hurt they may have caused to another. There are special prayers that are included in the daily liturgy to encourage honest self-evaluation. Prayers called Selichot, literally prayers of forgiveness, are added to the prayer service to incline one’s heart toward seeking forgiveness from God and from those they may have offended and hurt. For one entire month, the Shofar, the ram’s horn, is sounded each morning. The cry of the Shofar is unlike any other sound one might hear. It is a call that carries the echoes of the ages, creating a spiritual urgency to earnestly pursue forgiveness. Remarkably, the Shofar after over 3,000 years continues to move people to look deeply at the record of the deeds they had done and the words they had spoken since the last Yom Kippur. The Shofar has been compared to a cosmic alarm clock, calling those who hear its call to begin the work of repenting through renewal, growth, and change. 15

Charles A. Klein

For ten days, from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, the work of the Jew is repenting. These ten days are known as the Ten Days of Repentance. They are days like no other in the year. With each day, the intensity grows and the need to seek forgiveness from God and people increases. Finally, Yom Kippur day arrives and normal life comes to a halt. The liturgy of the day is powerful, its message deeply personal. Nine times, both a short and much longer confessional are recited by the community. Nine times, the Jew takes ownership of the wrongs done to others, each repetition a reminder of the sins done and of the urgency to seek forgiveness. When the day of fasting and prayers is over, the Jew hopes that God will grant forgiveness and that, at the same time, the remorse expressed for past wrongs committed will open the door to seeking and offering forgiveness in one’s personal world. In the Shulchan Arukh, the code of Jewish law (Orah Chayim 606:1), we learn what has long been the approach of Jewish law concerning the manner in which forgiveness is sought on Yom Kippur. There it reads, transgressions between people are not the subject of atonement on Yom Kippur unless the offender seeks forgiveness from the offended party. If one cannot effect forgiveness at first, one must return a second and a third time. Only after that may one desist from the attempt to seek forgiveness. As we find in a text called Tanna De-Vei Eliyahu (135), the Jewish people were commanded to follow the path of God who was ready to show mercy to the wicked and accepted them when they repented, so we are to be merciful to one another. As God accepted people who came seeking repentance, so we are to be good, our lives lived with loving kindness and accepting of people who seek our forgiveness. The humility of the contrite, aligned with the compassion of the one who had been hurt, it was taught, ought to pave the way to reconciliation. The spiritual power of Yom Kippur is to bring people to that place where they can look beyond the hurt and see themselves as prepared to bring forgiveness into broken relationships. Beyond these days of repentance and forgiveness, the prayer book of the Jewish people has, for almost 2,000 years, included prayers that inspire the resolve to seek forgiveness from God. Three times each day, the Jew asks for God’s forgiveness, mindful that what one seeks from God, one must be prepared to seek from, and offer to, the people we may have hurt and who have hurt us. Judaism’s approach to forgiveness requires real honesty, abundant courage, humility, and the will to grow. It also requires another human being to respond with mercy, kindness, and an ability to look beyond the wrongs of the past for the sake of the future. Maimonides, who lived from 1138 to 1204, was a brilliant philosopher and scholar of Jewish law. In his Mishnah Torah, his remarkable code of Jewish law (Mishnah Torah: Hilkhot ­Teshuvah), he set forth the requirements for what were the necessary spiritual steps for the one seeking forgiveness. Maimonides believed that the offender had to first acknowledge the sin or wrong that had been committed, make a full confession, resolve to never repeat the sin, and determine that even if tempted once again, he or she would not succumb and repeat the wrong done. One can well surmise that Maimonides believed that for the offended person to offer forgiveness in the absence of a reasonable belief that the wrongs done would not be repeated, would only raise the risk that the very same behavior would be exhibited. Maimonides was a true believer in the value of Vidui (confession). He emphasized the place of Vidui in the journey toward forgiveness. He understood that owning one’s wrong through sincere 16

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confession was essential to achieving a change of heart and soul. Speaking the truth in one’s heart would allow a person to overcome self-deception and embrace a reset of one’s life. However, when these conditions have been met, Maimonides, in his Mishnah Torah ­( Repentance 2:9–11), stated clearly the responsibility Jewish law placed upon the offended party to respond to entreaties for forgiveness favorably. He wrote, “It is forbidden for a person to be unforgiving for he must be easily appeased. When a sinner implores him for pardon he should grant him pardon sacrificially—for such is the seed of Israel and their excellent heart.” When a person can begin to believe that the one who had been the offender had approached him or her moved to sincerely seek repentance, then one ought to forgive. Maimonides believed that offering forgiveness was a virtue that could raise the awareness of the offender and encourage that person to pursue a life of greater sensitivity in the interpersonal realm. The Jewish tradition came to teach that Jews were to be activists in creating peace between people. When the sages developed the list of commandments that set out the most significant deeds a person can perform each day, they included this teaching in the Talmud (Tractate of Shabbat 127a), “creating peace between one person and another.” The text taught that all people have an interest in fostering forgiveness and restoring peace between people. The ever-insistent voice of this teaching studied daily was a reminder that a Jew should always see him- or herself as a potential peacemaker, capable of bringing reconciliation and restoring relationships between people. When it is a matter of bringing peace between people, no one, the sages believed, should avoid entering into the breach. The Jewish tradition looked to Aaron, the brother of Moses and himself a High Priest, to be the poster child for bringing peace between people. In the collection of wisdom known as Pirke Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers, Chapter 1, Mishna 11), Aaron is described as passionate in his commitment to create peace between people. This was elaborated upon in the Talmud (Tractate of Sanhedrin 6b), where Aaron is portrayed as working diligently to encourage forgiveness and reconciliation between people. Throughout rabbinic literature, there is a vast treasure trove of stories in which these influential teachers created a culture of forgiveness. The Talmud in the tractate of Megillah (Megillah 28a) tells of a rabbi named Mar Zutra who would make certain to forgive anyone who may have hurt him before retiring for the night. Mar Zutra would say, “I forgive all who have hurt me today.” In doing so, he removed the burden from the offender for the sake of increasing peace within himself and his community. He understood the imperfections of humanity and was emotionally prepared to offer forgiveness. This wise sage appreciated that he would sleep better having removed the bitterness from his heart. Forgiveness was also discussed in the Zohar, a collection of mystical writings. In Zohar 1:201b, Rabbi Abba, astonished by the miracles which had saved the life of a man he did not know, asked him, “Tell me about your deeds.” The man replied, “All my days, never have I not forgiven and accepted anyone who has wronged me. Once I had forgiven I would try to do favors for those people so they would not think that I carried any hate.” Rabbi Abba saw a man able to offer forgiveness so freely, so generously, and completely. Rabbinic literature included these stories of rabbis who believed that forgiveness could be offered as a gift of grace, but normative rabbinic teaching would nonetheless require that forgiveness would be sought with a full expression of contrition and resolve to not repeat the wrongs of the past. The forgiveness Judaism came to teach and practice does not come from an act of grace. Grace, an offering of underserved kindness, was for God alone to offer. Over the centuries, the Jewish tradition follows God’s evolution on the matter of forgiveness. Where grace characterized moments of God’s forgiveness in the early biblical text, God came to demand more from people. Forgiveness had to be earned and deserved. It required contrition—regret, remorse, and resolve not to repeat the mistakes of the past. God only asked that people acknowledge that they had done 17

Charles A. Klein

wrong and affirm that they were prepared to change. As an act of Chesed (loving kindness), God would be prepared to respond with love to those who accepted responsibility for wrongs done and were committed to change and renewal. God became the God of second chances, always open to repentance. This became the image of God in Jewish literature and it transformed the Jewish people into a community of those who had to similarly offer a second chance to one seeking forgiveness. Forgiveness in the human realm would come to follow the same spiritual process. Wrongs would need to be acknowledged and owned, remorse would need to be expressed, and sincere apologies would need to be spoken. A Jew was expected to seek forgiveness and to be prepared to offer it, both believing that the wrongs of the past, when understood and regretted, could indeed lead to a restoration of mutual respect and a true reconciliation. Forgiveness never required exoneration of the person who had committed a hurtful act. A wrong done had to be owned, acknowledged, and regretted so that there would be an opportunity for trust to be rebuilt. The foundational belief that all human beings are created in God’s image led to the moral necessity to see the offender as potentially worthy of being forgiven. In Judaism, the reality of our common divinity was to stimulate our empathy and compassion that are the emotional fuel driving human beings toward forgiveness. In Judaism, forgiveness is not built upon forgetting what had transpired, the wrong that was done, the hurt that had been inflicted, or the disappointment or betrayal experienced. To the contrary, the Jewish approach is that the wrong must be remembered and addressed. The memory of the past plays a powerful role in the process. Paradoxically, only when the past has been brought into full illumination, can there be the possibility for a future, different from the past. What does Judaism have to say about a human being’s responsibility for the wrong done to others? I will answer that by sharing this story that takes us back to September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the tragic events of that day, a newspaper columnist asked me if, from a Jewish perspective, God would forgive the terrorists who committed that horrific crime. I answered that according to my understanding of Judaism, they would not be forgiven. Forgiveness is not an entitlement in the Jewish tradition. In Judaism, forgiveness is not gifted to those who express no remorse, nor regret to the victim for the wrong committed. Only the victim has the power to forgive. There is no vicarious forgiveness in Judaism. Yes, even God cannot forgive on behalf of the injured, hurt, betrayed, or killed. God can only offer forgiveness for those sins committed against God. As I said to the writer so long ago, “we do not have the right to forgive on behalf of those who were murdered on that day.” The legendary Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, told in his book, The Sunflower, of an encounter he had while he was a prisoner of the Nazis, working as a slave laborer in a German military hospital. A nurse requested him to speak to a dying man in one of the wards. The patient was a Nazi officer who, facing the end of his life, was seeking forgiveness for the crimes he had committed. This Nazi officer told Wiesenthal of the atrocities he had willingly participated in during his years in the military. He had committed acts of barbarity against defenseless men, women, and children. He told of rounding up all the Jews in a village and forcing them into a house. Then the soldiers in his unit were commanded to throw grenades through the windows of that house. He participated in the massacre of 200 people. He turned to Wiesenthal in search of forgiveness. Wiesenthal would not offer the Nazi soldier the words he wanted to hear. Simon Wiesenthal would not give the German the absolution he sought. Wiesenthal would ­ iesenthal not clear the man’s conscience. He departed the room withholding forgiveness. Simon W shared this story with many theologians, philosophers, and writers. In The Sunflower, he collected their reactions to the way in which he had responded to the dying German’s request. Their responses covered the entire spectrum of philosophical and religious understandings about forgiveness. And Wiesenthal, representing the Jewish approach to this issue, took the position that 18

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no one can be empowered to forgive those crimes committed against another human being. Only the victim can forgive. Yes, even God cannot offer vicarious forgiveness. The process of forgiveness requires great courage. It is that courage that the Jewish tradition encouraged and promoted in the literature of the Jewish people. And yet, Judaism could never philosophically accept a forgiveness that did not directly address the pain, the loss, and the agony of the one who had felt the sting of hurt. The path forward for humanity is paved on a foundation of forgiveness. The record of centuries past cannot be forgotten. Still, there is within all of us—people of different faiths, different races, and different nationalities—the capacity to create a new future. We have the potential to conquer hatred, restore decency, and renew ourselves and the world. Judaism asks that Jews understand forgiveness is a sacred and necessary act. It alone offers humanity the possibility of recalling our scared past and not foreclosing on our shared potential to repair the world. Forgiveness was brought into the world for the sake of the future. For over 3,000 years, the Jewish tradition has never relinquished the hope that humanity will embrace it. The insistent voice of God continues to urge humanity to speak the word, Selicha—I forgive you and let us now build our future together. For we know that when, with the passage of time, people look back on our era, they will judge us by what we did to move humanity closer toward the goal of creating a world in which forgiveness and human reconciliation would become an unstoppable force making possible an enduring peace between peoples.

References Machzor—The Machzor is the special prayer book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It includes the prayers, poetry, and biblical readings of the Jewish High Holy Days. Midrash—The Midrash is a collection of biblical exegisis developed through textual analysis. The Midrash presents the writings of rabbis from approximately the year 400 CE–1200 CE. Mishnah Torah—The code of religious law compiled by Maimonides between 1170 and 1180 CE. This code details all aspects of Jewish observance and was intended to provide a full presentation of Jewish law, theology, and philosophy. Siddur—The Siddur is the prayer book which is used on weekdays, Sabbath and Festivals. It includes the full cycle of daily prayers as well as those prayers which are special for the Jewish Holy Days. Talmud—The Talmud is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism which includes the legal and theological discussions of rabbis in Babylonia over a period of approximately 400 years. The Talmud consists of 63 tractates covering all aspects of Jewish observance and law. The full text of the Talmud has been published for centuries as 2,711 double-sided pages. The Talmudic page presents the Mishna, which teaches the essential formulation of Jewish law and the Gemara, which is an explanation of those laws through a full analysis of textual sources. Weisenthal, Simon. (1970) The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, New York: Schockhen Books.

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2 FORGIVENESS FROM THE CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle

1.  Forgiveness from the Christian Perspective I write this chapter from a Christian perspective. As a Bishop and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, I bring the Catholic tradition to the reflection on the topic of forgiveness, fully aware that while we Catholics share many views in common with non-Catholic Christians, differences in viewpoints exist. At the outset I declare that my presentation does not and cannot cover the full breadth and depth of the topic. The importance of forgiving one another according to the Christian faith is expressed by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in a homily he delivered on Pentecost Sunday in 2005: Evil can be overcome only by forgiveness. Certainly, it must be an effective forgiveness; but only the Lord can give us this forgiveness, a forgiveness that drives away evil not only with words but truly destroys it. Only suffering can bring this about and it has truly taken place with the love of Christ, from whom we draw the power to forgive. Forgiveness destroys evil. Given the power of forgiveness to overcome evil, we wish that people across the world would devote more time to reflect on and practice the life-giving virtue of forgiveness. What can the Christian tradition offer to people of good will so they would choose the path of forgiving? To begin answering this question, I will address nine themes proposed by the organizers of this conference, in the hope of shedding light on forgiveness from my Christian background.

2.  Some Ideas about Forgiving in the Hebrew Bible The Christian tradition recognizes the Hebrew Bible as part of our Sacred Scriptures. Christians believe that the self-revelation of God in the events and writings contained in the Hebrew Bible continued and is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. We can say that it is through the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians can fully understand God’s self-manifestation and saving love in Jesus Christ. Conversely, we also bring the Christian vision in our reception and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. According to some scholars, God is almost always the subject of the verb to forgive in its many forms. The Hebrew Bible tells us that guilt incurred by an offense against God and against the covenant relationship with God is annulled by God’s act of forgiving. By that action of God, 20

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-5

Forgiveness from the Christian Perspective

sinners are released from the domination of sin. God’s forgiveness is an act of liberation and, by that, people are released from guilt and restored to a state of reconciliation. This reconciled state brings about spiritual blessings, as well as physical and material benefits, health, security, honor, and even the gift of children or posterity. Exodus chapter 34, verse 6 and part of verse 7, instructs us on how God manifests both mercy and compassion toward people: The LORD passed before him (Moses) and proclaimed, ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.…’1 In contrast to the healthy release from guilt and the restoration of a loving relationship with God brought about by forgiveness, the inability and unwillingness to forgive causes unfreedom or “imprisonment.” We see this in Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:21–35. There is a servant, whose great debt is forgiven by his master. Although he enjoys the blessings of his master’s act of mercy, he still decides to have no mercy on a fellow servant who owes him little, a mere fraction of what he owes his master. His lack of forgiveness toward a fellow servant, a sign that he does not appreciate the gift of forgiveness he has received, leads to his own imprisonment. Now he must pay back all that he owes to his master. The Christian tradition teaches that when we sinners experience the magnanimous and lavish forgiveness from God, we need to relish it and in turn forgive others who have hurt us. It starts with God’s forgiveness of the sins of His people. This mercy then is to flow into the world when those who have been forgiven bring this love and mercy to others as an act of grateful memory. By not allowing God’s mercy to flow into the world, we let sin to continue its ambition to dominate us. Without forgiveness, evil is not destroyed, but permitted to have considerable influence on persons who have been hurt by that evil. Unfortunately, they might transmit the same evil to others. We need an antidote to evil and its spread. That antidote is the love expressed in forgiveness which ends alienation from God, from oneself, from other persons, from society, and from creation.

3.  The Graciousness and Compassion of God As we see in the above section, it is only because God is willing to forgive that forgiveness b­ etween peoples is possible. The forgiving love of God comes from mercy, graciousness, and compassion. The Hebrew word, rachamim, shows this graciousness of God. Consider the following verses in the Hebrew Bible demonstrating graciousness: “The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you…” (Numbers 6:25); “But the Lord was gracious to them…” (2Kings 13:23); “The Lord is gracious and merciful” (Psalm 145:8). In the New Testament, we see the Greek word, splagchnizomai, which is translated as compassion. We cite some examples: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them…” ­(Matthew 9:36); “And out of pity for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt” (Matthew 18:27); “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep’” (Luke 7:13). The compassion of God (rachamim) is related to the Hebrew word for womb, rechem. By analogy, compassion is the maternal attachment of God to the people. I wonder how mothers will react when they read this chapter of mine. When I talk of the tenderness of forgiveness, mothers will probably understand easily because this is a maternal instinct. We might even say analogously that compassion is the maternal instinct of God. Mothers are quick to say to their children, “I may disagree with your decision and disapprove of what you have done, but no matter what you do or what you may have done, you came from my womb. You are my child.” This “thought” comes 21

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from the womb of a mother. Analogously, divine compassion is seen as arising from the inner part of God compared to a mother’s womb. As the Hebrew writer asks in Isaiah 49:15: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?” And to make the point even clearer, the writer gives God’s thought on this: “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Forgiveness, in the Hebrew Scripture, is a manifestation of God’s fidelity to persons who are not considered as other or alien to God but are God’s very own children. This basic truth has entered the Christian tradition. Thus, we do not think of forgiveness merely as substituting something good for something evil. Instead, forgiveness in our Christian tradition is a loving relationship between God and the people. It is the meeting of an “I” with an “I,” a person and another person in a loving relationship. We have a God who is sympathetic, not apathetic, a God who is always linked with those whom God has created and has made His own. It is a relationship of love. The book of Hosea narrates how God nurtured the people as a parent does to a child by clothing and feeding them, yet they turned away from Him. In a fit of frustration God still showed unfailing redemptive love toward the people, first by not punishing them. God ends up saying, “I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy E’phraim…” (Hosea 11:9). In Hosea 14:7, God goes even farther by promising restoration and abundance, fruit of His loving and faithful relationship with Israel: “They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom as the vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.” I have chosen this theme of a relationship or encounter between an “I” and another “I” in the Hebrew Scripture as a path to the New Testament, particularly to the figure of Jesus. This theme illustrates a vital link between the Hebrew and Christian traditions. I find it refreshing to read in Rabbi Sacks’ chapter in this volume, how Jesus was most Jewish when he prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing,” which connects to the Hebrew Bible, for example, the Book of Numbers 15:25–26.

4.  Jesus’ Teaching about Forgiving According to the faith of Christians, Jesus, the Son of God who became human, proclaims in word and deed who God is. Jesus incarnates the merciful, forgiving love of God. He is divine mercy in human flesh. In the New Testament, written in Greek, the word for forgiveness is aphiemi, which is very much in line with the Hebrew scripture, where forgiveness of sins means remittance of a debt or being released from a debt. Thus, we again see the image of liberation. The release of a person from indebtedness is not just a return to the status quo but the beginning of a new existence. God maintains His relationship with a person even when the person fails God. So, there is an important distinction between the person and an evil act committed by the person. The evil act is to be condemned, but the erring person is to be saved. Jesus taught many lessons about compassion, love, and forgiveness by demonstrating these toward others and through concrete stories or parables. Instead of relying on conceptual explanation or clarification, Jesus taught forgiving through action and narrative. Three of the most important parables about forgiveness are found in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to the St. Luke. The three parables follow the same pattern: a person possesses something or someone of value which is lost, then found, and then celebrated. In the first parable of the lost sheep, the shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep in search of the one that is lost. The second parable is about a woman losing a coin. She laboriously cleans up her whole home in search of that one coin. The third parable is that of the Prodigal Son. When we read the parable of the lost sheep, we ask why a shepherd would leave the ninety-nine sheep in search of the lost or probably wounded one? Would a business-minded shepherd be willing to incur the financial risk of losing ninety-nine healthy sheep by pursuing this one weak 22

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sheep? The lost sheep might even be a liability to the business. The only reason why the s­ hepherd pursues the one lost sheep is it is his sheep, it belongs to him. “You are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). The lost one might be wounded, but “you are mine” and if it cannot come home, I will carry it home. Later, Jesus would make this “unconventional” behavior a mark of a good shepherd. Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” ( John 10:11–18). In the parable and in the life of Jesus, the shepherd brings life to the lost sheep by risking his own life. By so doing, the shepherd shows his intimate connection to the life of others, even those who have strayed away from him. Finding again even one lost sheep is enough reason for celebration. The second parable presents the merciful God as a woman in search of a coin that she has lost. We might find the reaction of the woman to that one lost coin quite disproportionate: she swept the whole house in order to retrieve it. For an external observer, that coin does not deserve such amount of attention and work. But according to some interpreters, the coin must have been part of the woman’s dowry. Losing it means losing her chance to get married. For us, it is just a coin. For her, it meant her whole life and future. That is how valuable a sinner is to God. God will search for him or her as though God’s whole life and future was at stake. God throws a party for one coin! The Prodigal Son asked for his inheritance, left the family, and squandered his father’s gifts, only to return home discouraged and defeated. If I were the father of that son, I would have met him at the gate with these words, “Stop there. Do not dare take another step toward the house. Explain to me what you did with the inheritance that I had given to you.” Yet, in this important parable about forgiveness, there are no questions from the father, only loving mercy. Although it is the son who is supposed to restore to the family what he has wasted, it is the father who restores to the son the dignity of being son. It is not important for the father to recover his money. What matters is that his OWN son is safely home. We see once again the priority of the relationship of the father’s “I” with the son’s “I.” The son’s sonship affirms the father’s fatherhood. The father’s words in the parable are significant: “…for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:24). The father’s forgiveness restores the son to the family. And that calls for a feast.

5.  The Power of Jesus’ Resurrection for Forgiveness Christians believe that the resurrection of Jesus is the source of new life for someone who wants to be healed. Jesus’ resurrection is also the ground of a new identity, that of being an adopted child of God in Jesus who leads us to the Father’s home. We remember that the Risen Lord appeared to his disciples who had failed him, denied him, and abandoned him, not with condemnation or vengeance but with peace, reconciliation, and a new mission ( John 20:19–23). With the Risen Lord, forgiveness triumphs over the destructive forces of evil. Moreover, the Risen Lord shares his life with those who believe in him, giving them new life, new identity, and a mission. During his earthly ministry Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7) and “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). In His Risen life, He showed his disciples the mercy of the Father, in the hope that they would in turn be messengers of the Father’s mercy. Once the “I” of the Risen Jesus encounters and transforms the “I” of a person in mercy and compassion, the relationship of that person with other persons undergoes transformation as well. People are so transformed by Jesus that they can call the almighty God, “Father” (Matthew 6:9) as Jesus did. In the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples during his public teaching, the opening words are “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9–13). It is important to note that after inviting a person to have the courage to call God in a loving intimate way as “Our Father,” Jesus mentions forgiving others in the same prayer. Forgiving other people happens when we are 23

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assured by faith that we have a Father who is close to us and cares for us. Then we are emboldened again to ask God to forgive us our debts as we forgive those who have transgressed against us, the way we have experienced God’s mercy toward us. We know the power and beauty of being forgiven, and now we are challenged to forgive others. The encounter with the Risen Lord confirms all this. I have mentioned already the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23–35). We see a parallel between the teaching in the parable and the words in The Lord’s Prayer. It is only in the context of having experienced the incredible mercy, love, and forgiveness of God that we are asked to now live constantly in this reality, which means preserving a personal relationship with other people, even those who are not always fair to us. The implication is clear. Having experienced the forgiving love of God, we hopefully are taught and enabled to forgive others. We humbly admit that we do not merit or deserve God’s forgiveness, but God undoubtedly loves us to wholeness, restoring us to our humanity in Jesus Christ. If we have received this lavish gift from God, how could we not share it with other people, especially those who do not deserve our love but are nevertheless loved by God? Our forgiveness of others, then, is an act of fidelity to God, to our own humanity, and to the humanity of other people who are equally loved by God.

6.  Grace and Free Will within the Christian Tradition One area that may not be emphasized by authors who employ primarily philosophy, ­psychology, or the human sciences is the importance of God’s grace in the process of forgiving others. Within the virtue-ethics tradition in philosophy, it is the one who desires virtue who rationally understands it, then wills it, and then acts upon it. In the Christian tradition there is an added dimension. We do acknowledge the role of human rationality and free will in choosing good over evil. But we do not see rationality and free will as belonging exclusively to human initiative or activity, leaving no room for God’s initiative of grace or the gratuitous or unmerited help from God. Forgiving others requires the openness to and cooperation of the human person with God. This is seen clearly in St. Augustine’s important work Grace and Free Will in which he countered the Pelagian heresy of the fifth century. Pelagianism surmised that human beings are capable, through their human will alone, of effecting good without God’s grace. Pelagianism stated that God rewards only those who act in goodness out of their own efforts. The inter-relationship between God’s freedom of offering grace and humanity’s freedom of responding to God is seen in the following two passages from St. Paul’s epistles. In the letter to the Romans 7:19, St. Paul expresses a kind of exasperation with himself as a sinner whose will is not strong enough to avoid offenses against God: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” This ends in a cry for help and liberation: “Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24–25). In the second passage from his letter to the Galatians 2:20, he shows relief and hope only when he accepts the grace of Jesus Christ: … it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. We see here the interaction of God’s grace and human free will. It is a Christian faith conviction that to do virtuous acts like forgiving others, one needs the grace of God that does not diminish human freedom. God’s grace does not curtail human freedom. God’s grace liberates human freedom to choose forgiveness. 24

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7.  Christian Rituals or Statements Connected with Forgiveness The Christian faith does not only offer teachings about forgiveness but also has rituals s­ urrounding forgiveness. The primary rituals within the Catholic tradition that bring forgiveness to the recipients are called sacraments. But there are rituals or ceremonies other than the sacraments that also celebrate forgiveness. We start with the sacrament of Baptism that washes away original sin. In the opening part of the sacrament of the Eucharist, we admit our sins and ask for the Lord’s mercy. In the Eucharistic memorial of Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection, we recall how Jesus’ offering of his body and blood for us unto death leads to the forgiveness of sins. In the sacrament of R ­ econciliation, we confess our sins to God and to the community through the priest from whom we receive absolution for sins and acts of penance or reparation. In the anointing of the sick, imploring God’s healing on the sick includes forgiveness of sin. Having been forgiven by God through the sacraments, we then have the grace to forgive others. Aside from sacramental and ritual celebration of forgiveness, statements by Church leaders encouraging the Christian faithful to forgive others are significant. A classic example, mentioned by Rabbi Sacks in his chapter, is the declaration of Vatican II, Nostra Aetate (In Our Times), promulgated on October 28, 1965 by Pope Paul VI. This is a declaration on the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions. It takes the path of mutuality in which the Catholic Church, on the one hand, admits that it has offended some of our brothers and sisters who belong to non-Christian religions and, on the other hand, pardons those who have hurt us. This theme of mutuality in forgiveness was repeated on March 13, 2000 at a Mass inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome by Pope John Paul II and was put into action in many local churches during the Jubilee Year of 2000. Another statement is found in Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering) issued in 1984. The Pope states that we can suffer with Christ in our own sufferings. We can bear suffering out of love for Jesus. The implication he draws is that we can suffer with Jesus for the salvation of others, including those who have hurt us.

8.  Misunderstandings of Forgiving Forgetting and Forgiveness. A challenge is before us: have we given sufficient time, reflection, and practice to this life-giving virtue of forgiveness? I think we need much more dialogue based on the practice of forgiving because many people have misconceptions about what it means to forgive others. I want to consider three main errors. First, I frequently hear this comment, “Oh, you are a Christian. Forget the past so you can forgive.” Forgetting is quite difficult especially when a person has been offended and hurt by others. It is not easy simply to forget the pains incurred in one’s life. I believe that what happens in forgiving is not to forget the past but to remember it in new ways. A new relationship with the past through forgiving makes possible a new relationship with the people who caused the harm. Forgiving does not mean that reconciliation automatically happens because the other person may reject the overture of forgiving. The one who forgives offers the other person a second chance by recalling not just the injury, but also the possibility of a renewed relationship. I think God can forgive us because God does not forget. God can forgive because God always remembers. In Psalm 103, God knows that we are made of dust and God remembers we are dust. Such remembrance moves God’s heart (or womb) to renew His covenantal love. A remembering of the hurtful deed is important for forgiveness, but one that does not make us captive to pain and revenge, but one that makes us see again with understanding of the weakness of others, which may be our own weakness too. From such remembering might come the impulse to renew a relationship. 25

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Justice and Forgiveness. A second misconception in our time is that forgiveness and justice are mutually exclusive of each other. In other words, to practice justice, you should be firmly unforgiving of the offender and if you want to forgive, you should be ready to abandon justice. From the biblical perspective, this contrariety does not exist. In the book of Wisdom it is said of God, Thou who art sovereign in strength dost judge with mildness, and with great forbearance thou dost govern us; for thou hast power to act whenever thou dost choose. Through such works thou has taught thy people that the righteous man must be kind… (Wisdom 12:18–19) In the Christian Bible, Jesus Christ shows on the cross that justice as rendering obedience and homage to God includes the offer of forgiveness because the just God desires the salvation of sinners. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Divine justice is divine mercy. Christian believers are called to live and proclaim God’s justice and the mercy of forgiveness. If we separate one from the other, both get distorted. For example, if a person pursues justice without mercy, his or her real quest might be revenge or the destruction of another person rather than true justice. However, if a person believes in forgiving without justice, he or she might acquiesce to unfair and dehumanizing demands of the other or condone wrongdoing without seeing the dangerous consequences on people and society. The integration of the fairness of justice and the love of forgiveness may help people find their way back to one another after a conflict and work together to fight injustice and evil as a common enemy. The justice and forgiveness that govern the relationship of people are true of one’s relationship with God. If I am willing to receive the gift of forgiveness from God or from other people, I also accept in the spirit of justice, truthfulness, and humility that I have sinned. Without accepting that there is sin in the world and in me, I would not seek forgiveness from God. If there are no wrongdoings, but only mistakes or misunderstandings or unintentional human errors, then what is there to forgive? This is one of the big problems and injustices in our contemporary world. In a 1946 radio address, Pope Pius XII stated that perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that people were losing the sense of sin. If we follow this observation to its logical conclusion, we see the loss of the sense of sin invalidates the very idea of forgiveness, both in seeking it and in giving it to others. Thus, justice and mercy must meet: justice enables people to face the fact that we are capable of intending evil and harm, that we have sinned many times, that other people sin, and then, from that sense of justice and truth, I long for the gift of forgiveness and to offer it to others. Conversely some hardened sinners who have experienced compassion and mercy are led to the path of justice. Zacchaeus who was despised and avoided by everyone rediscovered justice and charity when Jesus showed him respect and acceptance (Luke 19:1–10). The Immediacy of Forgiveness. A third misunderstanding I often hear is that people must forgive immediately and completely. This misconception is based partly on what I consider a misunderstanding of St. Paul’s statement in Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger…” Some people claim that unless a Christian forgives immediately after being offended, or before retiring for the night at the latest, then he or she is not a true Christian. This puts tremendous pressure on a person and induces a false sense of guilt. When we examine St. Paul’s passage in Ephesians, we see that the Greek word for anger is parorgismos. The Greek word orge connotes anger, but when we have a prefix of par and a suffix of mos, the word intensifies to mean a very intense, frothing, hate-filled form of anger. St. Paul is not saying that people must burn the midnight oil or be up all night until anger subsides through forgiveness. He is saying that we all need to work on reducing hateful anger now, presumably at least in part because it is so potentially dangerous for the one harboring such hatred and for 26

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those at whom the anger is directed. Of course, if some people, in cooperation with the grace of God, can forgive immediately, this is wonderful. Yet, for most people, the work of forgiving others is a process that can take time. In other words, we need to respect the human heart and pray that it would be open to God’s grace. When people forgive, they need to acknowledge the truth and the accompanying feeling of having been betrayed and violated. They so often need time to make the choice to forgive: will I remain here feeling victimized or should I choose to be freed from the self-image of a victim? The former choice could delay the forgiveness process because it could fill people with anger and a quest for revenge, which may make the decision to forgive more difficult. The decision to forgive is a human process and is therefore imperfect. I do not think it is against the Christian understanding of the God of forgiveness for us to work at forgiving, to struggle with it, and to take some time in achieving it. But we also do not want to use time as an excuse to keep putting off the decision and effort to forgive. The first step is best done in openness to God’s grace.

9.  Forgiveness as a Path to Healing Divisions among the Monotheistic Faiths First, we need to remember that across the monotheistic religions it is God who first forgives. This occurs in the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. God is the originator of forgiveness. If God can forgive and we have experienced God’s forgiveness, could we not be bearers of that very godly action to other people? Or are we pretending to be above God? Or we pretending to be another god? Second, we admit there is no complete agreement of beliefs and their interpretation among the monotheistic religions. In many incidents in the ministry of Jesus, we see his interpretation of the Law of Moses and the Prophets at odds with that of the Pharisees and scribes. Third, we affirm that followers of the three traditions have some things in common: (a) all three faiths hold out the value of forgiveness to people as seen in the Joseph story in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 37–45), in the story of the Prodigal Son discussed above (Luke 15), and in the book of Joseph in the Qur’an. Forgiveness is a common value. (b) We all struggle in the process of forgiving. Joseph, for example, showed anger toward his brothers; he wept before them and then embraced them. (c) We all believe that we forgive because God first forgave us. When we examine these three commonalities, perhaps people across all three faiths can see all people as fallible, hurting, and in need of mercy from God and others. We share a common humanity. Fourth, as we forgive, we might begin to realize that we are able to do this only because God allows us to participate in God’s act of mercy and compassion. We are not just recipients of forgiveness, but also participants in God’s forgiving activity. All three monotheistic faiths hold this. Fifth, as we forgive, we might begin to realize that we are all sinners. We realize that we all have offended God and others. Again, this is an insight we share across the three monotheistic religions. Such an important insight might move us from being judgmental to being more understanding and forgiving toward other people with whom we share the same human condition. I want to share a personal experience. As a Catholic priest, I hear people’s confession of sins in the sacrament of reconciliation. One thing that has not failed to amaze me is how people who come to confession with their burden of sin and guilt are just like me. I realize I am as sinful as they are and maybe if I were in the exact situation where they had been, I could have done worse things. A priest and a penitent share a common humanity, a common brokenness, and a common need to be forgiven. This realization helps me become less judgmental and become an instrument of God’s covenantal love. In summary, even if there are differences in beliefs and practices among the three monotheistic religions, we also see clearly that all people share the tendency to sin, human imperfections, the need for mercy, and the capacity to forgive. 27

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10.  The Formation of Forgiving Communities To give people a chance to grow in the virtue of forgiveness, they need to be in communities that value forgiveness and provide ample opportunities for the practice of it. This is in line with Aristotle’s ideas of how people grow in the virtues (see Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics). There are, of course, many kinds of communities that could foster forgiveness such as workplaces and places of worship. Hospitals, too, could be a space of forgiving where patients who know they have been forgiven or have forgiven others may experience recovery or healing. I know some studies have already validated this. I would like to focus on two important arenas for forgiving communities: the family and the school. The Family as Forgiving Community. Families that value and practice forgiveness in the home become truly human and spiritual communities. For a group of people living together as family to become a true community, there is a need for commitment on the part of the adults to know what forgiveness is and is not, then to practice it, and then, following Aristotle’s view of the mature person, come to love this virtue. The love of the virtue will enable the parents to discuss the various aspects of forgiveness with their children. A deliberate commitment to forgiving within families would have at least three important ramifications. First, it would allow husbands and wives to look back at their own families of origin, to forgive their respective family members who have treated them unfairly in their youth, recognizing that past hurts continue to pose psychological challenges to them now as adults. If each member of the marriage did this, then displaced anger toward each other likely would lessen. Second, the husband and wife who have forgiven adversaries in their past lives could practice forgiveness toward each other. Forgiving each other’s imperfections and faults within marriage and the family could prevent the escalation of annoyances and resentments that could harm the marriage bond. This also serves for the couple the dual purpose of keeping interpersonal harmony and growing in the virtue of forgiveness. They would hopefully be more understanding, gentle and loving to each other. This could nurture marital life and lower the instances of separation and divorce. Third, the parents schooled in forgiveness have a stable foundation for teaching their children how to forgive. The parents can seize conflicts experienced by their children at home or in school as teaching moments in the family. The parents can invite the children to discuss what happened, how deep the hurt has been, and how to handle the situation. The response should combine acting justly with the possibility of offering forgiveness. Were this kind of discussion to occur in homes on a regular basis, then the adults and children would grow in the virtue of forgiveness and value it. This kind of formation prepares the children for the injustices that they likely would face as adults in their workplaces and in their own families. The challenge is how to aid the adults in the family first to grow in the virtue of forgiveness so that they can pass on their knowledge and virtue to their children. Such aid and encouragement to the parents could come from the local church through conferences on forgiveness and regular statements and testimonies in church bulletins that encourage the practice of forgiving. Let me end this portion by saying that in some instances, it is the children who impart the value and virtue of forgiveness to their elders. We should welcome the witness of the little ones. The School and Forgiveness Education. I come now full circle from my comments at the beginning of this chapter. Pope Benedict XVI made the startling statement that forgiveness destroys evil. It is for this reason that I call for forgiveness education, that is, forming young students in the value and virtue of forgiveness from an early age so that they may know how to address evil when it comes their way. I travel a great deal in my ministry as a Catholic cleric and I see struggles within the human soul, within families, and in societies everywhere. Sadly, I see the wounds that injustice inflicts on individuals, relationships, societies, and nations. Many people are ill-equipped to confront and overcome the effect of injustice in their lives. I see anger, addictions, 28

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acrimony too often without an effective antidote. I believe that forgiveness is one of those a­ ntidotes that need to be at the center of individual lives, families, communities, and nations. If children were given the opportunity to learn about forgiveness in school and to begin practicing it in small ways in the classroom, playground, and canteen, I am convinced that much of the anger and hatred across the world would be lessened. Forgiveness would take away the sting of injustice; it would take away the damaging effects of injustice such as resentments, hatred, and prejudice that can be passed on from generation to generation. Learning well the lessons of forgiveness and putting them into practice will help rebuild shattered lives and communities. It very well may help prevent the multiplication of communities that succumb to the continual negative effects of injustice only to become agents of injustice themselves. At different moments in world history, different life changing themes have emerged. The theme that slavery is not only inappropriate but evil led to a freedom that was denied to many people for millennia. We now look back at the imposition of slavery and shake our heads in disbelief: how could human beings have allowed this evil to go on for so long and so pervasively? We see another life-changing theme in the United States and South Africa when the degradation of racial segregation was seen for what it is: treating human beings created in the image and likeness of God as lacking in human dignity. The dawning insights changed the world. It seems to me that we are on the threshold of a new awakening that can help in changing the world for good and that idea is forgiveness education. We need to give students a chance to learn about what forgiveness is and to practice it as a choice and commitment so that they may have a powerful response to the ravages of evil. Forgiveness destroys evil. It is time to move forgiveness education into mainstream schooling for the good of individuals and societies. The chapters centered on psychology and education in this volume will delve more deeply into the specifics of what forgiveness education is, how one might go about it, and what the studies show when it is examined scientifically.

Note 1 All biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (May & Metzger, 1977) because of its fidelity to the original languages in both the Old and New Testaments.

References Aristotle (340 B.C./2013). Nicomachean Ethics. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, an amazon company, IV.5. Augustine, St. (426/2017). On Grace and Free Will. Translated by Philip Schaff. digireads.com Publication. Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus (2005). Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI, St. Peter’s Basilica, Pentecost S ­ unday, 15 May. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana (https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/ homilies/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050515_priestly-ordination.html) John Paul II, St. Pope. (1984). Salvifici Doloris. Apostolic letter, Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. May, H.G. & Metzger, B.M (Eds.) (1977) New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press. Paul VI, St. Pope (1965). Nostra aetate, Declaration on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions, ­October 28. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. (https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html) Pius XII, Pope (1946). Radio message of his holiness Pius XII to participants in the National Catechetical Congress of the United States in Boston, October 26. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. (https://www.vatican.va/ content/pius-xii/en/speeches/1946/documents/hf_p-xii_spe_19461026_congresso-catechistico-naz. html)

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3 DILEMMAS OF DIVINE FORGIVENESS AND THE REFLECTIVE MUSLIM Zain Ali

The year is 629 C.E., and the city of Mecca in Southern Arabia is encircled by thousands of ­Muslims. Mecca’s residents are on edge. This is where Muhammad was born and this is where, at the age of forty, he began preaching Abrahamic monotheism. The Meccan ruling elite felt threaten by ­Muhammad and sought to eradicate the nascent Muslim community; they had no qualms employing lethal force to achieve their goal. Muhammad and the early Muslim community were forcibly driven out of Mecca; they ended up heading to the northern city of Medina. Despite the strident efforts of the Meccans, Muhammad carried on preaching and in time Medina became a Muslim sanctuary. The tables had now turned, and Muhammad had returned to Mecca with many thousand followers. Mecca was now surrounded, and the Muslims were also armed and ready to engage in battle should the Meccans attack. Mecca’s leaders relent, Muhammad and his followers enter the city, and Mecca was now under Muhammad’s authority. The Meccan elite were painfully aware that revenge may be on the horizon; their lives in the prophet’s hands. They ask him about his plans, and in response, Muhammad is said to have recited the following verse from the Quran: There is no blame on you today. May God forgive you (yaghfirul laahu lakum)! God is the Most Merciful. (Qur’an: 12:92) This verse occurs in Chapter 12 of the Quran, the sacred text of Islam, and represents the words of Joseph – the son of the Biblical patriarch Jacob (Ernst 2011; Mir 1986). Chapter 12 of the Quran is a narrative about the life of Joseph – the narrative involves Joseph’s brothers who scheme against him. Towards the end of this Quranic chapter, Joseph reconciles with his brothers and this moment is captured in verse 92. Like Joseph, Muhammad’s intent was to seek reconciliation through forgiveness (Cole 2020; Lings 2006). Mecca, within Arab and Muslim tradition, is seen to be linked to the Abrahamic tradition. This is where it is believed Hagar and Ishmael, the wife and son of Abraham, settled after their departure from their family home. The message of Islam is a call to return to Abrahamic monotheism, and with Muhammad’s return to Mecca, this had been achieved. With this change the spread of Islam accelerated in the Arabian Peninsula. Not long after the change of guard at Mecca, according to Muslim tradition, Chapter 110 of the Quran was revealed to Muhammad, which reads: In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. When comes the help of God, and victory, and you see people entering God’s religion in crowds, Celebrate the praises of thy Lord, 30

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-6

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and pray for His Forgiveness (astag firuhu): For God is Oft-Returning (tawaaba) in Grace and Mercy. (Qur’an: 110) As with the words from Joseph, the emphasis of this short chapter is on seeking forgiveness, istighfar in Arabic, and recognising God as being tawaab, God is someone who accepts repentance and forgives. This chapter can also be linked to another significant event in the Quran, the fall and restoration of Adam. The relevant verse occurs in the second chapter of the Quran: Then Adam received from his Lord [some] words, and He accepted his repentance. Indeed, it is God who is Accepting of Repentance (tawaab), the Merciful. (Qur’an: 2:37) According to the Quranic narrative, soon after Adam’s fall, God teaches him how to seek forgiveness. Adam seeks forgiveness and God forgives him. Adam is the human archetype; God is tawaab and looks to restore us to spiritual well-being when we fall. Accordingly, Muslim thinkers have pondered on the themes of repentance and forgiveness (Keller 1994: 711–2). There is also an interesting Malaysian study indicating that tawba (repentance) and istighfar (seeking forgiveness) may help improve mental health (Uyun, Jaufalaily and Kurniawan 2019). The theme of forgiveness is important within Muslim tradition; however, as Bahar Davary (2004) observes, more work is needed for a fuller appreciation. A good place to start is the Quran, which contains many verses encouraging believers to seek forgiveness and emphasises God’s willingness to forgive: If anyone does evil or wrongs his own soul but afterwards seeks God’s forgiveness, he will find God Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. (Qur’an: 4:110) Let them pardon and overlook. Would you not love for God to forgive you? God is Forgiving and Merciful. (Qur’an: 24:22) In addition to the Quran, we encounter an emphasis on forgiveness in many hadith, or anecdotes attributed to Muhammad (Brown 2017). For instance: I heard the Messenger of God [Muhammad] saying, ‘I swear by God that I seek God’s pardon and turn to Him in repentance more than seventy times a day.’ (al-Bukhari: 6307) The Messenger of God [Muhammad] said, ‘By the One in Whose Hand my soul is! If you do not commit sins, God would replace you with a people who would commit sins and seek forgiveness from God; and God will certainly forgive them.’ (Muslim: 2749) The first hadith, as with the Quranic verses above, emphasise turning to God for forgiveness; it shows Muhammad as continually turning to God. The second hadith is thought-provoking; God values our vulnerability and values the opportunity to turn to us in forgiveness. God seems to have a deep affection for human beings, and this compassionate view of God can also be seen in the attributes of God affirmed within Muslim tradition. According to Muslim tradition, there are ninety-nine names of God and five relate to the theme of forgiveness: al-Ghafoor the all forgiving; 31

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al-Ghafaar the forgiver; at-Tawaab the restorer and acceptor of repentance; al-Haleem the f­ orbearing and lenient; and al-Affu the pardoner, the effacer, most forgiving (Ali 2016). There are also a variety of ways these terms and concepts are employed within everyday Arab and Islamic contexts (Abu-Nimer and Nasser 2013). An initial question for reflection concerns the nature of divine forgiveness, namely, what is divine forgiveness? What is the quality that is being ascribed to God when God is called the ­Forgiving? What are believers asking God to do when they seek forgiveness from God? One way we may understand forgiveness is that it involves a change in attitude and affect, whereby the person who forgives is letting go of anger, bitterness and resentment towards the wrongdoer (Bhalul 2018). Consider the example of Farid Ahmed, who lost his wife Husna in the 2019 Christchurch Mosque attack in New Zealand. Following this tragedy, Farid spoke about forgiving the perpetrator. He observed, “I don’t want to have a heart that is boiling like a volcano. A volcano has anger, fury, rage…I want a heart that is full of love and care, and full of mercy…” (Radio New Zealand 2019). Forgiveness in this case is about emotions and feelings, the letting go of anger, fury and rage. There are several other examples of Muslim clerics and politicians, especially in the aftermath of the Bosnian War, who foreshadowed Farid Ahmed’s sentiments (Shah-Kazemi 2018). Importantly, would divine forgiveness also involve a change in affect? This raises a question as to whether God has emotions and feelings. If God has no emotions and feelings and is unchanging or immutable, then God does not have the ability and capacity to forgive. Perhaps we could rethink our concept of forgiveness, or we could maintain that the nature of divine forgiveness is known to God alone. Alternatively, we could move away from viewing God as being without emotion. There are Quranic verses that ascribe emotions to God, for example: …eat of the good lawful things We have provided you, and commit no oppression therein, lest My Anger should justly descend on you. (Qur’an: 20:81) For such He has written Faith in their hearts, and strengthened them with a spirit from ­H imself. And He will admit them to gardens beneath which rivers flow, to dwell therein (for ever). God will be well pleased with them, and they with Him. (Qur’an: 58:22) These verses mention divine anger as well as describe God as being pleased, and at face value, God can be seen to have emotions and feelings. Accordingly, divine forgiveness may involve a change in affect, a shift from anger to joy. In one particular hadith, Muhammad advises his followers that God is more pleased with the repentance of His servants than anyone of you is pleased with finding his camel which he had lost in the desert (Muslim: 2747). God, in this hadith, is portrayed as being overjoyed with those who seek forgiveness. There are three further aspects of divine forgiveness we encounter in the Quran. For instance, there are Quranic verses that mention God’s ability to forego punishment which may be incurred by a wrongdoer. On that day [the Day of Judgment], if the penalty is averted from any, it is due to God’s mercy; And that would be (Salvation), the obvious fulfilment of all desire. (Qur’an: 6:16) But God was not going to send them a penalty while you [Muhammad] were among them; nor was He going to send it while they could ask for pardon. (Qur’an: 8:33) 32

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The penalty on the Day of Judgment will be doubled to him [the wrongdoer], and he will dwell therein in ignominy, - unless he repents, believes, and works righteous deeds, for God will change the evil of such persons into good, and God is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. And whoever repents and does good has truly turned to God with an (acceptable) conversion. (Qur’an: 25:69–71) These verses suggest that God can withhold punishment, that a person who repents can receive a divine pardon whereby punishment, for wrongdoing, is completely set-aside. The verses also suggest a transformation within those who repent and seek divine pardon, an internal change from evil to good. This change is emphasised in other Quranic verses as well, “O you who believe! Turn to God with sincere repentance, in the hope that your Lord will remove from you your ills and admit you to gardens beneath which rivers flow” (Qur’an: 66:8). The divinely facilitated moral and spiritual change, and the opportunity to dwell with God, can also be seen as expressions of divine mercy. As recipients of divine mercy, we receive what we do not deserve, or perhaps, we receive more than we deserve. Given these considerations, we may understand divine forgiveness as comprising four broad elements, namely, a change in affect from disapproval to joy, a pardon that waives any punitive consequences arising from the wrongdoing in question, an extension of mercy that helps precipitate moral and spiritual change, and the opportunity to dwell with God. The believer who seeks forgiveness may then be understood as someone who wishes to distance themselves from divine disapproval and punishment, while also seeking moral and spiritual change and the chance to be in right relationship with God. With this in mind, let us turn towards the dilemmas of divine forgiveness (Pettigrove 2008; 2009). My aim in the sections to follow is to address two dilemmas of divine forgiveness. The first relates to whether God or human beings have a standing to forgive; forgiveness is usually seen as the prerogative of the person who has been wronged. Why then, we may ask, is there a need for divine forgiveness if the victims of wrongdoing are human persons? Perhaps, all wrongdoings are offences against God, since wrongdoing contravenes the will of God; therefore, only God would have the standing to forgive. The second dilemma relates to the requirements of justice; if, for example, God forgives a person and foregoes any punitive measures, would that mean God is not being just, since justice requires punishment of wrongdoing. In response to these dilemmas, I maintain that both God and human beings have a standing to forgive, and I also contend that divine justice can be tempered with mercy. As I seek to address these dilemmas, I bring with me the perspective of a reflective Muslim – i.e., a person of the Islamic faith who acknowledges that people of other religious and ­non-religious persuasions are as educated and concerned with seeking truth and avoiding error as they themselves are (Ali 2013). Accordingly, my discussions will draw on the tradition of Islamic theism, while also engaging with other religious and non-religious perspectives.

1.  God’s Standing to Forgive As we reflect on this dilemma, it may be helpful to consider the following question: does God have the standing to forgive, or rather how does God acquire the standing to forgive? There is often an assumption that it is the victim of wrongdoing who has the right or standing to forgive the perpetrator. In the context of everyday life, it is other human beings who are victims; therefore, forgiveness rests in the hands of human beings. Since God is not the victim, it may be claimed that God has no standing to forgive. Alternatively, one may view forgiveness as being in God’s hands alone; consider again the phrase Joseph directs towards his brothers, “May God forgive you.” Joseph is the victim of his brother’s scheming, and while he is intent on reconciliation, it is 33

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God’s forgiveness that seems paramount. The wrongs perpetrated against Joseph require divine ­forgiveness since these wrongs are ultimately offences against God. Joseph’s brothers had contravened the will of God. This gives rise to the following dilemma: Either God cannot forgive the wrongs that usually concern us, viz., those done to human victims, or wrongdoing must always and only be seen as an offence against God. Some, of course, will be happy to embrace one or the other horn of this dilemma. They will maintain either that God cannot forgive wrongs done to human beings or that all wrongs are ultimately (and exclusively) wrongs perpetrated against God. (Pettigrove 2008: 457–8) If we accept the first horn of the dilemma then God has no standing to forgive. However, if we accept the second horn of the dilemma then human beings seem to be, at best, incidental victims of wrongdoing and have no standing to forgive. It is only divine forgiveness that matters. ­Reflecting on this dilemma, with a Muslim perspective in mind, Raja Bhalul notes: …there is no choice but take the second horn of the dilemma. In fact, not only has God been assumed to have a standing to forgive in all cases, but it has also sometimes been claimed that, strictly speaking, only God can forgive. The Qur’an explicitly poses a rhetorical question saying, “Who but God can forgive sins?” (3:135). (Bhalul 2018: 50) Bhalul (2018) observes that there are three ways in which God acquires the standing to forgive. The first relates to an event in the Quran which is referred to as the covenant of alast. This covenant is mentioned in the seventh chapter of the Quran: And [mention] when your Lord took from the children of Adam - from their loins - their descendants and made them testify of themselves, [saying to them], “Am I not your Lord?” They said, “Yes, we have testified.” [This] - lest you should say on the day of Resurrection, “Indeed, we were of this unaware”. (Qur’an 7:172) This covenant is primordial in nature and it involves an acknowledgement, on the part of human beings, that God is indeed Lord. Bhalul notes that in virtue of this covenant, God acquires the standing to forgive given that “moral violations (including ones that make forgiveness possible) could be viewed as violations of God’s right to obedience” (Bhalul 2018: 50–1). A second way in which God may acquire the standing to forgive stems from gratitude. God has created humans in his image and gifted us with reason and dominion over nature. These gifts “may be thought to give God rights,” especially the right to be obeyed; obedience would be an important way of expressing gratitude towards God (Bhalul 2018: 50–1). Disobedience, however, would show a lack of gratitude towards God. If a person were to exhibit disobedience, this may very well merit disapproval and punishment; however, God can also forgive disobedience, and this allows God a standing to forgive. The third proposal from Bhalul draws on the idea of God as “owner” of all creation. Given that God is owner and His will is paramount, we become guilty of wrongdoing when our actions are contrary to the will of God. If we are guilty of wrongdoing then it may merit punishment or perhaps forgiveness, thereby giving God the standing to forgive. The three ways, proposed by Bhalul, in which God may acquire the standing to forgive appear to rest on an obligation to obey God, i.e., the covenant of alast establishes our obligation to obey given that God is lord, obedience as an expression of gratitude, and obedience as a requirement 34

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of divine governance. These proposals while thought-provoking are also slightly discomforting, as they seem to lack acknowledgement of two important elements, namely, acknowledgement of the human victims of wrongdoing and the role of divine love. I’ll further explore these elements shortly; however, my initial point of disagreement with Bhalul’s approach is with his claim that we must embrace the second horn of the dilemma, that it is only God who can forgive. He cites a Quranic verse in support of this view, although if we consider the context of this verse then a broader view emerges. The verse in question poses a rhetorical question, “Who but God can forgive sins?” (Qur’an 3:135); the context is as follows: Be quick in the race for forgiveness from your Lord, and for a garden whose width is that (of the whole) of the heavens and of the earth, prepared for the righteous; Those who spend (freely), whether in prosperity, or in adversity; who restrain anger, and pardon (all) men;- for God loves those who do good; And those who, having done something to be ashamed of, or wronged their own souls, earnestly bring God to mind, and ask for forgiveness for their sins, and who can forgive sins except God?. (Qur’an: 3:133–135) These verses emphasise the importance of making an effort to do good, to be righteous and to seek forgiveness from God. The righteous are those who give charity, restrain anger and give pardon. At face value, these verses encourage forgiveness among people, and this presupposes human beings as having a standing to forgive. The verses also touch on cases where a person carries with them a sense of shame due to something they have done, or cases where a person has “hurt” themselves. These cases may involve others who are the victims of wrongdoing, although it seems that the verses relate to a person who has wronged themselves – i.e., the perpetrator and victim are one and the same person. Following Bhalul’s proposals, one may argue that God acquires a standing to forgive if we view self-directed wrong as being an act of disobedience. In other words, if we view self-directed wrong as violating our obligations to God or as a form of ingratitude, then it may merit punishment or perhaps forgiveness, thereby giving God the standing to forgive. ­Accordingly, the Quranic verses in question need not be seen as a universal affirmation that God alone has the standing to forgive; rather, in cases of self-directed wrong, it is best for the wrongdoer to turn to God for forgiveness. The turn to God may also help open up the wrongdoer to self-forgiveness; it is through seeking divine forgiveness that a person may resolve their sense of shame and find renewed spiritual health. My reading of the verses can accommodate Bhalul’s proposals on how God acquires the standing to forgive, yet we can set aside his claim that it is only God who has the standing to forgive. If we accept this reading, which I am inclined to do, we can rethink our approach to the dilemma at hand. Neither horn of the dilemma seems palatable from the perspective of a reflective Muslim, especially if we keep in mind the following Quranic verses: Hold to forgiveness; command what is right; But turn away from the ignorant. (Qur’an: 7:199) Those who have been graced with bounty and plenty should not swear that they will [no longer] give to kinsmen, the poor, those who emigrated in God’s way: let them pardon and forgive. Do you not wish that God should forgive you? God is most forgiving and merciful. (Qur’an: 24:22) These verses encourage forgiveness of others while also emphasising the importance of divine forgiveness. The Quranic verses acknowledge that human beings and God have the standing to forgive. 35

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As it happens, there are ways to address the dilemma so that God and human beings have the ­standing to forgive. For instance, we may understand the relationship between God and human beings as being analogous to a parent-child relationship. To explore this further, we can follow in the footsteps of Glen Pettigrove and consider the example of a father who has encouraged and helped support his daughter in finding a job (Pettigrove 2008: 459–60). Once she successfully finds a job, her father and perhaps her broader family share in her success. Her father can share in her joy at finding a job; he may also take delight in the fact that his support and encouragement have made a real difference. There may be more tangible benefits as well. The daughter, who is now working, may contribute to the financial welfare of the family. Similarly, if the daughter falls victim to wrongdoing, then this will also affect the family. For example, the daughter may be robbed and assaulted on the street; this is likely to have consequences for her and her family. She may lose her sense of security and confidence, thereby affecting her ability to work. Her siblings may also feel an increased sense of vulnerability and lack of trust. This may also affect her father, who also suffers as he watches his daughter, and children, struggle with losing their sense of confidence, security and trust. The insight here is that it is not only the daughter who is affected by wrongdoing; it also affects those who are close to her. If we view God as being akin to a parent, we can then view the actions of a wrongdoer as hurting someone who is loved by God. It is not the case that God will lose confidence or security due to the actions of the wrongdoer, but rather their actions may incur divine disapproval, perhaps even anger. The parent-child analogy helps us understand that those who are close to the victim are also affected by wrongdoing. God can then be seen to have a standing to forgive, precisely because God is close to the victim. We may also argue that the victim has a standing to forgive since the victim is the primary recipient of the wrongdoing, and perhaps more significantly, God recognises the victim’s standing to forgive. Perhaps we could speak of God, not only recognising but also granting victims the standing to forgive. There are then good reasons to affirm that God and human beings can have the standing to forgive. Building on the discussion above, we may argue that even if we were forced to embrace one of the horns of the dilemma, God and human beings can both retain the standing to forgive. For instance, if we embrace the view that only human victims have the standing to forgive, we may draw on the covenant of alast to argue that, by recognising God as our Lord, we grant God the standing to forgive. When we recognise God as Lord, we may view this as creating an obligation to obey, although it could also be seen as a recognition that God, being all loving, acts from love and has our best interests at heart (Stump 2010: 85–107). This recognition allows us to give God consent to properly act on our behalf, including being able to forgive on our behalf. God’s standing to forgive arises from our consent. If, however, we embrace the view that only God can forgive, we may, at this point, appeal to Quranic verses in which God encourages forgiveness among human beings. Perhaps we can understand these verses as God delegating or granting human beings the standing to forgive. This view also dovetails well with the Quranic view that human beings are God’s representatives (khalifa) on earth (Qur’an: 2:30).

2.  Divine Forgiveness and Justice The second dilemma arises from considerations of divine forgiveness and justice. This dilemma may be stated as follows: If a person deserves to be punished, then it would be unjust for God to forgive, since doing so would involve giving her something other than what she deserves. If a person does not deserve to be punished, then forgiveness seems unnecessary. (Pettigrove 2008: 457)

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Given this dilemma, divine forgiveness is either unjust or unnecessary. Neither option is ­palatable for the reflective Muslim, given the significance of divine forgiveness within Muslim tradition. One way of resolving this dilemma is to embrace an interpersonal view of the relationship between God and human beings (Stump 2018). For example, Zaid lends money to his business associate Erica. As it happens, Erica cannot repay the money despite having signed a contract to do so. Zaid could choose to pursue the matter by initiating civil proceedings against Erica, perhaps even pursue bankruptcy as a punitive measure. If Zaid chose to pursue punitive action, he seems well within his rights to do so. He also has the choice to forgive and not pursue any punitive measures against her. If he chooses to forgive Erica and remits the debt, it will seem counterintuitive to then describe his actions as being unjust. Zaid is under no obligation to only pursue punitive measures; he seems well within his rights to forgive. Both options are rightly open to Zaid; neither option seems unjust. Similarly, it may be argued that God also has the standing to forgive when we fail to give what is owed, by way of obedience and gratitude, to God. If God forgives someone, and punishment is annulled, it does not follow that the act is unjust, since God has the standing to forgive and there is no obligation on God to take only punitive measures. The interpersonal model allows us to view divine forgiveness as being consistent with justice. An interpersonal view of God is also a theme that is affirmed within the Muslim tradition. God is described as ar-Rahman, the merciful; this word is linked to the word rahma or mercy, which in turn is linked to the Arabic term for womb or rahm. The womb can be seen to be symbolic of motherly love (Ali 2016; Cornell 2007: 87). Accordingly, the use of the term Rahman invites us to an intimate and familial approach to God. There is also a hadith, in which God is quoted as saying, “Whoever comes to me walking, I will come to him running” (Muslim: 2687). The interpersonal model seems to provide us with a resolution to the dilemma of forgiveness and justice; however, there is an important challenge to this resolution that we need to consider. Reflecting on the interpersonal model of forgiveness, William Lane Craig observes that it neglects God’s role as judge and ruler. Craig argues that if we accept God as judge and ruler, the dilemma can be recast as follows: God faces “the dilemma of the merciful judge:” when a judge tries to treat an offender mercifully, either the offender is given the penalty he deserves (in which case he is being shown justice, not mercy) or the offender is not given the penalty he deserves (in which case the judge acts unjustly). Thus, a judge in his official capacity cannot exercise real mercy; his choice is between being just or unjust. God in His capacity of Judge acts in conformity with the strict demands of justice, so that we sinners find ourselves condemned before His bar. (Rom 3.19–20) If He pardons, it must be out of mercy. But then He would seem to be acting unjustly. But given that retributive justice belongs to God’s character, it is impossible that He so act. He must give people what they deserve, on pain of acting contrary to His own nature. (Craig 2018a: 13–4) Once we accept God as judge, then it seems God cannot exercise real mercy so as to simply forego punishment. Craig claims that since retributive justice belongs to the character of God, God must exact retribution by way of punishment. Retributive justice, as understood by Craig, holds that “punishment of the guilty is an intrinsic good because the guilty deserve it” (Craig

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2019: 531). This model of justice, contends Craig, belongs to the essential character of God since “the Bible portrays God as a positive retributivist with respect to justice” (Craig 2018a: 13–4). He notes that The ungodly are “storing up wrath” for themselves for God’s final day of judgment (Rom. 2.5). Punishment imposed at that point could seemingly serve no other purpose than retribution. In any case, the biblical view is that the wicked deserve punishment—“those who do such things deserve to die” (Rom 1.32)—, so that retributive justice belongs to God’s character. (Craig 2018a: 13–4) Given that Craig also views mercy as essential to God, he notes that neither justice nor mercy can be sacrificed. He contends that there is, available to us, a resolution to this dilemma and it involves understanding divine forgiveness in relation to a presidential pardon. Craig notes that when we take into account God’s role in the government of the world, divine forgiveness is much more akin to an executive pardon than to the remission of a debt or the forgiveness of an offense (Craig 2018a: 18). A presidential pardon, Craig observes, is also consistent with justice being satisfied. He outlines his resolution as follows: Pardons granted on grounds of innocence and wrongful conviction already show that a pardon is wholly compatible with the demands of justice being satisfied. Pardons to achieve remedial justice do not imply the failure of the person involved to satisfy the demands of justice. Indeed, quite the opposite is the case. Moreover, the vast majority of pardons are granted after the criminal’s sentence has been fully paid. The U.S. Office of Pardon ­Attorney will not even permit applications for a presidential pardon until at least five years have elapsed since the sentence of the criminal has been fully satisfied. A pardon in such a case does not imply that the pardonee has failed to satisfy justice’s demands. As in a case of double causation, both his punishment and his pardon are sufficient to annul his guilt and restore him to innocence. But a pardon also serves to restore to him all his civil rights voided by his conviction. Similarly, a divine pardon serves to bestow upon us the full rights and privileges of a child of God… (Craig 2018a: 13–4) Following the example of a presidential pardon, the wrongdoer or offender receives their punishment followed by a pardon, and this serves to annul their guilt, restoring them to innocence as well as restoring their civil rights. Similarly, God can exact punishment for wrongdoing to satisfy the demands of retributive justice and then provide a pardon to fully restore to the sinner the full rights and privileges of a child of God (Craig 2018a: 16–7). Given Craig’s theological commitments, he notes that the punishment due is borne by Christ; thus, “a divine pardon is rooted in God’s love and grace, for it is by His mercy that God determines to supply a satisfaction of His justice that we might, in turn, be pardoned” (Craig 2018a: 20).

3.  Retributive Justice and Mercy As we reflect on Craig’s proposed solution to the dilemma of justice and mercy, there are several preliminary issues that require consideration. First, there is the question of whether God within Islamic theism is seen to be judge and ruler. The Quran describes God as al-Hasib (Qur’an: 4:86), which can be translated to mean reckoner or judge; God is also described as

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Malik al-Mulk (Qur’an: 3:26), which can be translated to mean “the sovereign Lord.” There are other descriptions of God within the Quran that also allow us to infer God’s status as judge and ruler. The Only Owner (and the Only Ruling Judge) of the Day of Recompense. (Qur’an: 1:4) …the Command rests with none but God: He declares the truth and He is the best of Judges. (Qur’an: 6:57) These Quranic verses allow us to view God as judge and ruler. The next issue to consider is whether God, within the context of Islamic theism, is a positive retributivist with respect to justice, namely, whether God will punish the guilty since punishment of the guilty is an intrinsic good because the guilty deserve it. There are verses in the Quran that mention divine punishment of sin, although there are also verses that mention forgiveness alongside punishment. Below are two examples: Help one another in righteousness and piety but help not one another in sin and rancor: fear God: for God is strict in punishment. (Qur’an: 5:2) The revelation of this Book is from God Exalted in Power Full of Knowledge, the Forgiver of sin and Accepter of repentance, the Strict in punishment, and Infinite in bounty. There is no god worthy of worship except Him. To Him alone is the final return. (Qur’an: 40:2–3) These Quranic verses permit a broad view of divine justice; there is room for forgiveness as well as retributive justice in the form of punishment (Khalil 2016; Hoover 2009). As we have already noted, God in the Quran is described as one who pardons and forgives; God is also understood to be al-Adl or Just (Qur’an: 4:40). Given these descriptions, there appear to be a variety of ways one may understand divine justice within Islamic theism. Craig, however, is clear in his view that God is obliged to punish wrongdoing, since God is a positive retributivist, “who will by no means clear the guilty (Exod 34.7)” (Craig 2018b: 237). At this juncture, one may press the dilemma of the merciful judge – if God acted from mercy to forgive and pardon the guilty without any punishment, then God may be seen to act unjustly; however, given that justice, perhaps retributive justice, is essential to God, He cannot act contrary to his own nature; God cannot be unjust. Given the dilemma of the merciful judge, a reflective Muslim could pursue one of a number of options. For instance, there are Muslim schools of thought, Ash’arism for example, that affirm divine command theory and would view divine justice as being predicated on the will of God. There is then no external standard of justice that God needs to meet, but rather justice is whatever God decides to do. If God chose to forgive, pardon and annul punishment, then this choice is by definition moral and just (Hare 2019). The reflective Muslim could also push back against the idea that God is a positive retributivist. Consider the following Quranic verse which says, “My Mercy [God’s mercy] embraces all things” (Qur’an: 7:156), and the following hadith in which God is quoted as saying, “My Mercy prevailed over My Wrath” (Muslim: 2715). If divine mercy prevails and embraces all things, then there seems ample room for God to forgive and pardon. Divine justice may be redemptive and restorative rather than purely retributive (Muhammad 2020).

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Alternatively, forgiveness may be seen as being consistent with a retributivist framework; in chapter 5 of the Quran, we encounter the following verse: …life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds is legal retribution. But if anyone remits the retaliation by way of charity, it is an act of atonement for himself. (Qur’an: 5:45) This verse can be seen as a restraint on our more vengeful instincts (Finlayson 2011). It serves to mitigate harm, insisting a person could cause no more harm to the perpetrator of the wrong than they had suffered; it also suggests forgiveness as an alternative course of action. While we have the right to seek retribution, it is not an obligation. Moreover, forgiveness is seen as an act of charity, and it is seen as a virtue in this situation (Powell 2011). The insight here is that doing less harm, or no harm, is consistent with a retributivist framework. A reflective Muslim may then be open to a positive retributivist view of divine justice; nevertheless, they may contest Craig’s characterisation of what it entails. Consider Alec Walen, who notes that retributive justice can be understood as a form of justice that is committed to the following three principles: 1 that those who commit certain kinds of wrongful acts, paradigmatically serious crimes, morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment; 2 that it is intrinsically morally good – good without reference to any other goods that might arise – if some legitimate punisher gives them the punishment they deserve; and 3 that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers (Walen 2019). These principles affirm that certain wrongdoers morally deserve to suffer, in such cases punishment is an intrinsic moral good, and that punishment cannot be disproportionately large. It is noteworthy that this characterisation of retributive justice does not preclude mercy and clemency. Perhaps one could contend that it would be wrong to show clemency. For example, there would be genuine grounds for concern if a person was found guilty of wrongdoing, in a court of law, yet the presiding judge declined to punish the wrongdoer; it seems justice, in such a case, has not been served. We may agree that an arbitrary decision to show clemency and leniency would seem unjust; however, what if there were good reasons for clemency. As it happens, there is room for clemency and leniency within retributive theories of justice. For example, a presidential pardon, when examined closely, allows for a broad application of clemency and leniency. The US President’s constitutional power to exercise leniency allows for the commutation or reduction of a sentence; it allows for pardons to be granted prior to a conviction, as well as pardons prior to sentencing. The US Department of Justice notes that It would be highly unusual, but there have been a few cases where people who had not been charged with a crime were pardoned, including President Gerald Ford’s pardon of President Richard Nixon after Watergate, President Jimmy Carter’s pardon of Vietnam draft dodgers and President George H.W. Bush’s pardon of Caspar Weinberger. President Donald J. Trump pardoned Joseph Arpaio after he was charged and convicted, but prior to sentencing. (United States Department of Justice n.d.) The presidential power to exercise leniency is broad and if we use it as a guide to inform our discussions of divine justice and mercy, we can outline several possible scenarios. A person 40

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may be pardoned prior to any formal divine judgment. Perhaps they may be pardoned after judgment but prior to serving their punishment, or a person may face divine judgment, but the quantum of punishment they are due may be commuted. While Craig acknowledges these possibilities, he argues that the reasons adduced for tempering justice do not apply to God. He writes: In a recent, lengthy review of the question Samuel Morison argues that sometimes leniency is morally justified when satisfying the prima facie demands of retributive justice would be immoral or practically impossible. What is striking about Morison’s concerns is that none of them, such as protecting people against self-incrimination, preventing unreasonable searches and seizures, and so on, is remotely relevant to the case of God’s administration of justice. (Craig 2018a: 14) He goes on to note: We can agree with Morison “that the moral basis for the merciful extension of clemency is thus whatever ‘is right and good as judged against all moral considerations, rather than only those of justice. Any pertinent moral consideration may be taken into account’”…One should not, indeed, simply identify morality with justice. But none of the considerations that ­Morison has adduced for tempering justice with mercy in the case of the state applies to God. So how can God legitimately exercise mercy if doing so is inconsistent with the demands of His justice? (Craig 2018a: 15) Craig proceeds to argue that if retributive justice is essential to God, then God justly punishes every sin, and this is because, “in the absence of any apparent justification for pardons of sheer mercy…it is difficult to see what would justify waiving the demands of retributive justice essential to God’s nature” (Craig 2018a: 16). We may agree with Craig that considerations, adduced in the case of a state, for tempering justice with mercy may not apply to God. We may also note that even though such considerations may not apply to God, it does not follow that no considerations at all apply to God. Craig’s argument seems to involve a questionable inference, namely, that there are no grounds for God to temper justice with mercy because the reasons we are familiar with for tempering justice are not relevant to God. Perhaps, there are reasons that are relevant to God, yet these reasons may not be apparent to us. God may have good reasons to show clemency and leniency, although the nature of these reasons is not evident to us at this time. We simply may not be in a position to appreciate the fullness of God’s wisdom. Thus, we have good reason to doubt the claim that if retributive justice is essential to God, then God justly punishes every sin. Perhaps, one could contend that punishment of the guilty is an intrinsic good, and thus cannot be easily set aside without undermining the principles of retributive justice. We may agree that punishment of the guilty is an intrinsic good; however, this need not be seen to conflict with the view that justice can be tempered in order for justice to be satisfied. Given our discussion thus far we can acknowledge that retributive frameworks allow for justice to be tempered, and there are certain circumstances when justice is tempered to achieve a just outcome. As Craig acknowledges, protecting people against self-incrimination and preventing unreasonable searches and seizures are justifiable reasons for tempering justice. There may be other types of reasons as well, such as acquittals for reasons of insanity or acquittals on the basis of self-defence. There is a sense in which it is essential for justice to be tempered in order for justice to be satisfied, since it is not only the 41

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act of wrongdoing that matters, but the context of the act and the state of mind of the accused also matter. This insight lends weight to the following arguments: 1 Retributive justice is essential to the character of God. 2 Retributive justice, under certain circumstances, permits justice to be tempered in order for justice to be satisfied. Therefore, God is permitted, under certain circumstances, to temper justice in order for justice to be satisfied. The circumstances applicable to God may not be known to us at this time; however, it does not follow from this that there cannot be any reasons for God to temper justice. There may be a broad range of reasons that God may have to temper justice, including reasons motivated by mercy. In reply, it could be argued that the complete annulment of punishment, like that permitted by a presidential pardon, may fall short of the requirements of justice. Even if we acknowledge that justice can be tempered with mercy, the complete annulment of punishment, it may be argued, seems to marginalise justice. I believe this concern is misplaced; once we acknowledge the possibility that exercising mercy can lead to justice being satisfied, the question we need to consider is how big a role can mercy play? An answer to this question depends on the reasons for exercising mercy. Given our limits, we cannot fully evaluate the reasons God may have for exercising mercy. There may very well be reasons known to God that would allow for the full annulment of punishment as a just course of action. Accordingly, if God acted out of mercy to forgive and pardon the guilty without any punishment, we need not view such acts as being intrinsically unjust. This insight helps us address the dilemma of the merciful judge – i.e., God can forgive and pardon without contravening the requirements of retributive justice. There is, perhaps, a residual concern that if punishment were pardoned, the pardon may not necessarily be due to an extension of mercy. We may respond by noting that even though the pardon is made possible within the framework of retributive justice, this would not preclude it from being an expression of mercy. Alternatively, we may concede that the pardon is an expression of justice; however, there are other elements to forgiveness that involve divine mercy. Bring to mind our characterisation of divine forgiveness at the beginning of this chapter. It involved four elements, namely, a change in affect, the pardoning of punishment, assistance with moral and spiritual change, and the opportunity to dwell with God. Accordingly, a pardon can be understood as an expression of justice, while divine assistance with moral and spiritual change and the opportunity to dwell with God can be understood as an extension and expression of divine grace and mercy. Understood in this way, there is room for the expression of divine justice as well as the extension of divine mercy.

4.  Concluding Reflections We have covered much ground in this chapter, and it may be helpful to review our findings: First, forgiveness, especially divine forgiveness, is a theme that is central to Muslim tradition. This is evidenced by the Quran, the life of Muhammad, and the attributes or names of God. Second, we may understand divine forgiveness, within Muslim tradition, as involving four elements: a change in affect from disapproval to joy, annulment of punishment, divine assistance with moral and spiritual change, and the opportunity to dwell with God. Third, there are ample resources within Muslim tradition that allow us to view God and human beings as having a standing to forgive. These resources also allow us to explore ways in which God and human victims of wrongdoing acquire the standing to forgive.

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Fourth, a reflective Muslim may address the dilemma of divine justice and mercy by: (1) observing that, under certain circumstances, a retributivist framework allows justice to be tempered in order for justice to be satisfied; and (2) recognising that God may have a range of reasons to temper justice, including reasons motivated by mercy. Consequently, the tempering of justice with mercy need not be seen as being unjust. There are additional resources within Muslim tradition that allow us to address this dilemma. For example, a reflective Muslim could reject a purely positive retributivist view of divine justice. There may be other intrinsic goods at play that God also considers, such as the goods of interpersonal relationship, forgiveness and repentance. A reflective Muslim may also affirm a form of divine command theory with respect to justice such that justice reflects the will of God. If God chose to show mercy and forgiveness and thereby annul punishment, then these acts are by definition just. Our discussion thus far is by no means exhaustive; there remain many important questions to explore. For example, how do we understand wrongdoing and sin; are there forms of wrongdoing and sin that only God can forgive; can there be forgiveness for those who are unrepentant; and are there differences in conceptions of forgiveness across the array of Muslim theological and philosophical schools of thought? Given these questions, there remains ample room for a broader and deeper articulation of forgiveness within the Muslim tradition. For now, though, we may acknowledge that there are plentiful resources within the tradition of Islamic theism that allow us to meaningfully engage with the dilemmas of divine forgiveness.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Glen Pettigrove and Imran Aijaz for their helpful comments on this chapter.

References Abu-Nimer, M. and Nasser, I. (2013) “Forgiveness in the Arab and Islamic Contexts: Between Theology and Practice,” Journal of Religious Ethics 41(3): 474–94. Al-Bukhari. (n.d.) Sahih Al-Bukhari, Online. Available HTTP: https://sunnah.com/bukhari. Ali, A. Y. (2003) The Meaning of the Holy Quran, Maryland: Amana Publications. Ali, Z. (2016) “Concepts of God in Islam,” Philosophy Compass 11(12): 892–904. ­———. (2013) Faith, Philosophy and the Reflective Muslim, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bhalul, R. (2018) “Justice and Mercy: Two Islamic Views on the Nature and Possibility of Divine Forgiveness,” in G. Bock (ed.), The Philosophy of Forgiveness. Vol. III, Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press: 47–65. Brown, J. A. C. (2017) Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, Oxford: Oneworld Publications; Revised edition. Cole, J. (2020) Muhammad Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, Bold Type Books; Reprint edition. Cornell, V. (2007) Voices of Islam: Voices of the Spirit. Vol. 2, Greenwood Publishing Group. Craig, W. L. (2019) “Eleonore Stump’s Critique of Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theories,” Faith and Philosophy 36(4): 531. ­———. (2018a) “Divine Forgiveness and Legal Pardon,” in G. L. Bock (ed.), The Philosophy of Forgiveness. Vol. IV: Christian Perspectives on Forgiveness, Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press: 1–22. ­———. (2018b) “Is Penal Substitution Unjust?,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 83(3): 231–44. Davary, B. (2004) “Forgiveness in Islam: Is It an Ultimate Reality?,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 27(2): 127–41. Ernst, C. (2011) How to Read the Quran: A New Guide, with Select Translations, Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. Finlayson, C. (2011) “Forgiveness in Islam: Religious Revelation versus Cultural Consciousness,” in H. Levy and T. S. Yücel (ed.), Forgiveness: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, Leiden; Boston: Brill: 11–21. Hare, J. (2019) “Religion and Morality, “in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed December 2021).

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Zain Ali Hoover, Jon (2009) “Islamic universalism: Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Salaf ī deliberations on the duration of Hell-Fire”, The Muslim World 99(1): 181–201. Keller, N.H.M. (ed. and trans) (1994) Reliance of the Traveller, The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, ­Beltsville, MD: Amana, revised edn. Khalil, Mohammad Hassan (2016) “Is Hell Truly Everlasting?: An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Universalism” in Christian Lange (ed.), Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions, Leiden, Boston: Brill: 163–174. Lings, M. (2006) Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions; Revised edition. Mir, M. (1986) “The Qur’anic Story of Joseph: Plot, Themes, and. Characters, “The Muslim World 76: 1–15. Muhammad, R. W. (2020) “Forgiveness and Restorative Justice in Islam and the West: A Comparative Analysis,” ICR Journal 11(2): 277–97. Muslim. (n.d.) Sahih Muslim. Online. Available HTTP: . Pettigrove, G. (2009) “The Standing to Forgive,” The Monist 92(4): 583–603. ­———. (2008) “The Dilemma of Divine Forgiveness,” Religious Studies 44(4): 457–64. Powell, R. (2011) “Forgiveness in Islamic Ethics and jurisprudence” Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern & Islamic Law 4: 17–34. Radio New Zealand. (2019) “Christchurch Mosque Attack Survivor Farid Ahmed: ‘I have Chosen Love and I have Forgiven,” Online. Available HTTP: (accessed January 2021). Shah-Kazemi, R. (2018) “Forgiveness in Islam, from Prophetic Practice to Divine Principle,” in H. Cooper, et al. (eds.), Forgiveness in Practice, London; Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers: 37–49. Stump, E. (2010) Wandering in Darkness. Narrative and the Problem of Suffering, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. — ­ ——. (2018) Atonement, Oxford University Press. United States Department of Justice. (n.d.) Frequently Asked Online. Available HTTP: https://www.justice. gov/pardon/frequently-asked-questions (accessed January 2021). Uyun, Q. Jaufalaily, N. and Kurniawan, I. N. (2019) “Repentance and Seeking Forgiveness: The Effects of Spiritual Therapy Based on Islamic Tenets to Improve Mental Health,” Mental Health, Religion and Culture 22(2): 185–94. Walen, A. (2019) “Retributive Justice,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), Online. Available HTTP: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/justice-retributive/ (accessed J­ anuary 2021).

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4 FORGIVENESS IN HINDUISM Roy W. Perrett

1. Introduction There is a substantial Western literature on the philosophy of forgiveness (see, for example, the useful review in Hughes and Warmke 2017). Is there anything comparable to engage with in the Hindu philosophical tradition? There is, but a couple of preliminary caveats need to be noted. The first is that although classical Indian philosophy is incredibly rich in rigorous discussions of topics in epistemology, logic, and metaphysics, comparable discussions in ethics were not as extensive as might have been expected. Certainly, Indian philosophers offered and debated competing proposals on how to live, how to act, or what sort of person to be. But ethics was not a distinct field within Indian philosophy in the manner of pramā ṇavāda, the systematic Indian theory of epistemology and logic. Instead Indian ethical discussions are to be found scattered across many works and genres (see Holdrege 1991). This means we sometimes have to know how to look for the relevant discussions in unfamiliar places and learn to read their foreign styles of discourse. Accordingly, this chapter attempts to convey a little of the philosophical interest of the Indian ethics of forgiveness by concentrating on several case studies that cooperate in such a way as to suggest something of the broad contours of the larger picture. The second caveat is that Hinduism is not monolithic and hence – just as in the West – there are a number of different conceptions of forgiveness. Obviously, we should not presume that conceptions that have emerged in Hindu discussions of what to do with the emotional and relational fallout of moral failings will look exactly like contemporary Western discussions, even when they impinge upon those discussions. But some Western philosophers of forgiveness nevertheless do seem to believe that a central philosophical task is to determine by means of conceptual analysis what the necessary and sufficient conditions for forgiveness are – thus licensing us to rule out putative instances of forgiveness as non-genuine in virtue of failing to satisfy those conditions. It is unclear, however, that this “top-down approach” is the most fruitful way to proceed (see ­Morton 2012). After all, no general consensus about a simple, singular theory of forgiveness has so far emerged among Western philosophers. Perhaps we should even be skeptical that it is possible to capture so diverse and diffuse a practice as forgiveness by a theory of what about it is always the same, no matter the context. Instead we will proceed here on the assumption that forgiveness has many varieties and many contexts. This does not mean that anything at all can count as forgiveness: there are certain commonalities, and perhaps attention to both conceptual and historical inquiry is the most promising

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-7

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way to understand what these are. If that is so, then cross-cultural inquiries of the sort this chapter attempts may have a useful role to play.

2.  Kṣamā and the History of Hindu Philosophy In Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism, the most commonly proffered equivalent term for the English “forgiveness” is k ṣamā. K ṣamā is undoubtedly considered to be an important virtue in Hindu ethics. It is, for instance, the subject of a famous prayer of praise in the great epic the Mahābhārata; it is lauded as one of the qualities of those born to have a divine nature in the Bhagavadgītā; and it is one of the ten universal duties enjoined in the Manusṃṛti. In each of these cases, however, different translators have sometimes offered other translations of k ṣamā: including “patience,” “forbearance,” “endurance,” “pardon,” and even “indulgence (towards).” In other words, they have apparently identified k ṣamā with various connotations of “forgiveness” that many Western philosophers have felt it important to distinguish from the concept of forgiveness itself. So, are the Hindu philosophers talking of k ṣamā really talking of forgiveness, or of something else? Or should they instead be sometimes better approached as drawing attention to questions about forgiveness that have not been explored adequately in the recent Western philosophical literature, or as offering alternative answers to questions that have already been widely discussed? In what follows we shall be addressing these issues by exploring some of what the Hindu philosophers say about k ṣamā and juxtaposing it with various elements of the ­Western debates, particularly those about the nature of forgiveness, its application conditions, and its relation to punishment. But first it may be appropriate to offer some historical context for those unfamiliar with the history of Hindu philosophy. Among historians the periodization of Hindu philosophy is very much a contested matter, but for our present purposes the following may serve as a useful first pass (all the dates are very approximate): 1 2 3 4 5

The Vedic Period (1500–700 BCE) The Epic Period (800 BCE–200 CE) The Classical Period (200–400 CE) The Commentarial Period (400–1700 CE) The Modern Period (1800 CE to the present).

The origins of Hindu thought are to be found in the Vedas. These are the oldest Hindu scriptures, composed in Vedic Sanskrit. They include hymns to the gods and manuals of sacrificial ritual, as well as speculations on the origins of existence and important prefigurements of significant later concepts like karma and moral order (ṛta). Some scholars have felt that the earliest Hindu conceptions of forgiveness are to be found here. Often cited in this connection is a famous hymn in the Ṛ g Veda (7.86), addressed by the poet Vasiṣṭha to Varu ṇ a, chief of the gods of the natural and moral order. The poet’s deeds have angered Varu ṇ a and he now begs the god to accept his offerings and repentance, to forgive his unintentional transgressions, and to restore him to prosperity and health: And I converse thus with myself “When, pray, shall I be in communion with Varu ṇ a? What oblation of mine, would he, free from wrath, enjoy? When shall I, of good cheer, receive his mercy?” I ask about that sin, O Varu ṇ a, with a desire to find out; I approach the wise in order to ask; the sages say one and the same thing to me: “This Varu ṇ a is wroth with thee.” What has been that chief sin, O Varu ṇ a, that thou desirest to slay thy praiser, a friend? ­Proclaim that to me, thou that art hard to deceive, self-dependent one: thee would I, free from sin, 46

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eagerly appease with adoration. Set us free from the misdeeds of our fathers, from those we have committed by ourselves. Release Vasiṣṭha, O King, like a cattle-stealing thief, like a calf from a rope. It was not my own intent, O Varu ṇ a, it was seduction: liquor, anger, dice, thoughtlessness; the elder is in the offence of the younger; not even sleep is the warder off of wrong. I will, like a slave, do service sinless to the bounteous angry god. The noble god made the thoughtless think; he, the wiser, speeds the experienced man to wealth. Let this praise be well impressed on thy heart, O self-dependent Varu ṇ a. Let us have prosperity in possession, prosperity also in acquisition. Do ye protect us ever more with blessings. (Macdonell 1917: 136–41) A closer look at this hymn, however, surely gives us reason to doubt that it is really about forgiveness, especially if we think that notion has to be distinguished from related notions like excuse, pardon, and mercy. After all, the poet’s suggestion that his action was not his own intent seems to imply that he is seeking to be excused rather than forgiven, and the overt emphasis on his plea to be spared punishment (like a thief loosed from his fetters on the way to the punishment ground) seems to imply it is really pardon he is seeking, or perhaps mercy. Moreover, effectively what is going on here seems very much a transactional matter: a trade of the penitent’s slavish flattery for divine abstention from punishment. The primary focus here is just too clearly on prudential self-interest for it to be a good example of the thicker, moralized Western concept of forgiveness (human or divine). But then so too is this particular Vedic hymn inadequate for capturing the later Sanskrit notion of k ṣamā, a term that does not actually appear anywhere in this particular passage from the Ṛ g Veda. To understand these relevant later developments of k ṣamā in Hindu thought, we need to know a little more of the history of later Vedic philosophy. Whereas the earliest period of Vedic philosophy is focused firmly on hymns to the gods and the details of the sacrificial rituals, in the later period the focus shifts more to the mental and moral state of the sacrificer. Since it came to be believed that it was the flawless performance of the sacrifice alone that was necessary for the maintenance of the cosmic order, not the gods to whom sacrifice was made, so too the moral and ritual purity of the sacrificer was deemed necessary to uphold the moral order of the cosmos. But once this was admitted we find in the Upani ṣads of the later Vedic period a subsequent internalization of the ritual, transforming actual physical acts into symbolic representations, and an emphasis on the nature of the pure self of the sacrificer and its identity with the ultimate ground of the universe. In this period we also see the beginnings of both the ethicized notion of karma, according to which “one becomes good by good action, bad by bad action” (B ṛhadāra ṇyaka Upani ṣad 3.2.13), and the ethicized doctrine of rebirth, according to which “those who are of pleasant conduct here... will enter a pleasant womb” to be subsequently reborn (Chāndogya Upani ṣad 5.10.7). Correspondingly, the Vedic legacy in later Hindu philosophy includes a continuing tension between the earlier ideal of the householder embedded in society and committed to the performance of social duties (dharma) and a later ideal of the renunciant who has withdrawn from the world to pursue liberation from rebirth (mok ṣa). Classical Hindu ethics attempts to address this tension with its pluralistic theory of the good (see further Perrett 1998). So Hindu philosophers traditionally recognized four classes of values: dharma, artha, kāma, and mok ṣa. Artha is wealth and political power; kāma is sensual pleasure; dharma is the system of obligations and prohibitions enshrined in the legal and religious texts. These three values are arranged hierarchically, with artha as the lowest and dharma as the highest. The highest value, however, is mok ṣa, a state of complete liberation from the bondage of the cycle of rebirth and the universal suffering of worldly existence. The precise relation of dharma to mok ṣa, though, was a controversial topic among Hindu philosophers. The oldest view is that there is an essential continuity between dharma and mok ṣa: 47

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selfless performance of one’s dharma leads ineluctably to mok ṣa. This view is to be found in the Epics and in the legal and political philosophers. But some Vedāntin philosophers favored instead an opposition between dharma and moksa, though even then the cultivation of dharma was generally considered a prerequisite for the moral development of the qualified aspirant to mok ṣa. In general, then, attainment of the highest good was taken to require the development and cultivation of appropriate moral qualities, including forgiveness. This concern is apparent in the Mahābhārata epic, though the narrativization of moral philosophy there may obscure some of the implications of this development for the unwary reader.

3.  Forgiveness in the Mahābhārata The Mahābhārata is India’s great epic. An enormous work of over 90,000 stanzas, it famously proclaims its total inclusiveness: “what is found here may be found somewhere else, but what is not found here is found nowhere” (1.56.24; van Buitenen 1973: xxiii). It tells the story of the great fratricidal war between the virtuous Pā ṇḍ avas and the wicked Kauravas, and along the way incorporates also entire books of moral and philosophical instruction (including the renowned Bhagavadgītā). Some Indologists have taken the didactic material to be separable from the narrative material of the epic, but the late Bimal Matilal was properly skeptical of this very artificial distinction: The so-called narrative and didactic material are found inextricably fused together in the text, such that often they cannot be differentiated. Sometimes the narrative itself imparts the moral lesson without any deliberate efforts on the part of the narrator. In other words, the medium is the message here. (Matilal 2002: 23) That the Mahābhārata displays a strong concern with dharma and its constitutive properties is incontrovertible. Hence Yudhiṣṭhira, the eldest of the Pā ṇḍ ava brothers, often taken to be the chief hero of the story, is frequently referred to as the dharma-king. And prominent among his virtues is the cardinal virtue of forgiveness (k ṣamā). Here is the famous Mahābhārata prayer of praise of forgiveness, mentioned earlier: Forgiveness [k ṣamā] is dharma, forgiveness is sacrifice, forgiveness is the Vedas. He who knows forgiveness thus can bear anything. Forgiveness is brahman, forgiveness is the truth, forgiveness is the past and the future. Forgiveness is austerity, forgiveness is purity, forgiveness upholds the world. Beyond the worlds of the brahman-wise and ascetic. Beyond those of the knowers of rites, go the forgiving to theirs. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty, forgiveness is the brahman of hermits. Forgiveness is the truth of the truthful, forgiveness is the gift, forgiveness is the glory. (3.31.37–39; van Buitenen 1975: 279, translation modified) These laudatory verses, however, definitely require further narrative contextualization if we are to understand properly k ṣamā in the Mahābhārata (for more on this context see Badrinath 2006, Das 2009, Mukherji 2014). According to the epic’s narrative, Yudhiṣṭhira, together with his four brothers and their joint wife Draupadī, agree to be banished to the forest for thirteen years after Yudhiṣṭhira has lost his whole kingdom to his cousin Duryodhana in a rigged dice game. Following this exile, they are supposed to return to rule their kingdom again. But when the Pā ṇḍ ava brothers attempt to do 48

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so, Duryodhana refuses to honor their original agreement, eventually leading to the terrible war between the Pā ṇḍ avas and the Kauravas, in which the Pā ṇḍ avas end up the unrejoicing victors. Early in their forest exile Draupadī laments to Yudhiṣṭhira about his fallen state and urges him to disregard his promise and take vengeance on the Kauravas. She appeals to the traditional precepts concerning a k ṣatriya warrior’s relation to revenge and forgiveness, citing an ancient history that says, “Revenge is not always better, but neither is forgiveness” (3.29.9). A man who is overly forgiving loses the respect of his fellows, just as surely as does a man who is unforgiving. Thus “one should be gentle at the right time and hard at the right time” (3.31.20). It is appropriate to offer forgiveness to those guilty of only minor wrongs done from ignorance, but not to those who are knowingly and unrepentantly repeat offenders. Forgiveness, in other words, is a virtue of moderation and it has applicability conditions that govern its appropriateness to particular times and places. Therefore, I think, king of men, that it has become time to use your authority… There is no more time to ply the Kurus with forgiveness; and when the time for authority has come, authority must be employed. The meek are despised, but people shrink from the severe: he is a king who knows both, when their time has come. (3.31.10) In his reply to Draupadī’s speech, Yudhiṣṭhira begins with an extended condemnation of anger (krodha), which he takes to be the opposite of forgiveness, before quoting the verses in praise of forgiveness cited above. He insists further that he obeys the commands of dharma, not because of its rewards, but for the sake of dharma itself. Draupadī, however, remains unpersuaded. She never disputed that forgiveness was an important virtue and a component of dharma, but she did argue that forgiveness needs to have applicability conditions that are context-sensitive to time and place, and to the character of the person concerned. Plausibly, neither force nor reconciliation is good always. And since in the end Yudhiṣṭhira does (reluctantly) go to war to reclaim his kingdom, presumably even he would have to concede this. When it comes to spelling out more precisely what these applicability conditions for ­forgiveness are the Mahābhārata is disappointingly unforthcoming: the theoretical tensions dramatized by the dialogue between Draupadī and Yudhi ṣṭ hira are in the end effectively left unresolved. One possible explanation for this is because the Mahābhārata’s ethics is primarily concerned with moral dilemmas: that is, with situations where we have a clash of equally strong but irreconcilable ethical demands, with no universal rational solution available (see further Matilal 2002). But while it is true enough that the epic sometimes does dwell on such dilemmatic situations, it is surely unobvious that there really is a genuine “dilemma of forgiveness” depicted here. The Mahābhārata’s resolute refusal to resolve itself occurs again when we remember that its concern with the virtue of ksamā is generated by its intense concern with dharma and its constitutive properties. So, what is dharma? In a famous and curious incident in the epic, Yudhiṣṭhira is forced by a yak ṣa demi-god to answer a set of questions around this crucial issue in order to save his Pā ṇḍ ava brothers’ lives. Among his “successful” replies is this one: Reasoning has no foundation, The revealed texts contradict one another, There is not one sage whose opinion is authoritative, The truth concerning the Law [dharma] is hidden in a cave. The way the great have gone – that is the path. (3.313.117; Johnson 2005: 319) 49

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Clearly, this sort of claim augurs ill for the prospects of finding systematic moral theory in the Mahābhārata. Worse still, the term “the great” here translates mahājana in the original text, and that Sanskrit compound term is ambiguous between “great people” and “a great many people, the majority.” Nor does mere disambiguation yield a satisfactory resolution. On the former reading, dharma is whatever the moral exemplars do. But there are many such exemplars, some with conflicting moral visions. On the latter reading, dharma is whatever the majority do, even if it is in conflict with what the moral exemplars do. In other words, we seem to face an interpretive choice that commits the epic either to inconsistency or to relativism. The nature of dharma does indeed seem in danger of remaining forever hidden in the darkness of the cave! A different interpretive possibility, however, is that we might better understand the ethics of the Mahābhārata as being analogous to the general approach known as “anti-theory” in Western ethics (see, for example, Williams 1985 and Baier 1985). Anti-theorists come in several types, but they broadly share a rejection of ethical theory as involving the systematic articulation of a set of hierarchically ordered, exceptionless, and universal moral principles. Instead the ethical emphasis is to be focused on the particularity of the context of the irreducibly individual case, and there is no way of systematizing the variety of considerations to which moral judgment needs to be sensitive. The presence of such an approach might then explain why the Mahābhārata so frequently fails to offer any attempted general resolution of the conflicting ethical demands it dramatizes: if there are no exceptionless and universal moral rules, then there is no point in trying to present and order them. Ethics should just stay with the individual, irreducibly particular cases. Whether such an approach is philosophically satisfactory, however, is open to debate. One critical challenge, for instance, is that ethical judgments must be able to fix their semantic content independently of context if they are to count as genuine judgments. Yet anti-theorists risk being unable to show that the meaning and reference of ethical terms can be so constrained, given what they take to be the fluid nature of that content (Pettit 1997: 117). In reply it has to be admitted that the Mahābhārata has nothing much to say about this; but arguably the later Hindu philosophical tradition does have some salient suggestions to offer.

4. The Bhagavadgītā and Its Commentaries It would be a serious error to suppose that narratives like those in the Mahābhārata are the sole, or even the most favored, genre for Hindu philosophy. In fact, far more common is the commentary genre, which itself has many varieties (see further Ganeri 2011, Tubb and Boose 2007). Perhaps the most fundamental of these varieties is the bhā ṣya, a commentary on a root text that performs what the Sanskrit scholastic tradition calls “the five services”: word division, paraphrasing, grammatical analysis, construal of the sentences, and the answering of objections. Bhā ṣya commentaries are to be found in all branches of Sanskritic learning, but a particularly famous set of such commentaries within Hindu philosophy is to be found in the Vedāntic tradition. The term Vedānta means “the end of the Vedas” and refers to all those Hindu philosophical traditions concerned with the interpretation and systematization of three authoritative texts (the prasthānas): the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavadgītā, and the Brahmasūtra. Each of the three most important schools of Vedānta – Advaita, Viśiṣtādvaita, and Dvaita – has a foundational preceptor (ācārya) who composed commentaries on all three prasthānas. The Bhagavadgītā is technically part of the Mahābhārata epic, but over time has acquired something of an independent status and enormous popularity. Set on the battlefield at the beginning of the great war against the Kauravas, it features a famous dialogue between Arjuna (one of the Pā ṇḍ ava brothers) and his charioteer K ṛṣṇ a (soon to be revealed as an avatar of the god Viṣṇu). Arjuna is facing one of the Mahābhārata’s best-known dilemmatic situations: a clash between his duty as a warrior to fight in a just war and his conflicting duty to forebear from killing his 50

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relatives, teachers, and friends in the opposing army, thus initiating a slide into moral anarchy. K ṛṣṇ a offers him a way out: he should perform his required duty as a warrior and fight, but do so with a special psychological attitude of detachment from the “fruits” of his action. (This advice is obviously relevant too to Yudhiṣṭhira’s earlier reservations about the impermissibility of resorting to force motivated by anger: perhaps revenge taken dispassionately need not involve anger.) The Gītā also describes a cosmic theophany granted to Arjuna by Viṣṇu, who imparts further knowledge about a variety of religious and moral issues. This includes a mention of k ṣamā as one in a long list of the virtuous qualities of those born to have a divine nature: Fearlessness, inner purity, fortitude in the yoking of knowledge, liberality, self-control, ­sacrifice, Vedic study, austerity, uprightness, noninjuriousness, truthfulness, peaceableness, relinquishment, serenity, loyalty, compassion for creatures, lack of greed, gentleness, modesty, reliability, vigor, patience [= forgiveness, k ṣamā], fortitude, purity, friendliness, and lack of too much pride comprise the divine complement of virtues of him who is born to it… Deceit, pride, too much self-esteem, irascibility, harshness, and ignorance are of him who is born to the demonic complement… The divine complement leads to release, the demonic to bondage. (16.1–3; van Buitenen 1981: 133. See also Gītā 10.4–5, 34) However, as we can see from this unglossed passage, the Gītā remains first and foremost a religious poem, not a systematic treatise on moral theory. To learn more about k ṣamā and the other qualities mentioned, we need to turn to the Sanskrit commentators and whatever assistance their bhā ṣyas can provide in fixing the semantic content of the root text. Unfortunately, the commentators are often nearly as laconic as the root text they are commenting on. For example, the Viśi ṣtādvaitin preceptor Rāmānuja (Ādidevānanda 1991), commenting on the term k ṣamā in Gītā 16.3, simply glosses it thus: “‘Forgiveness’ is freedom from the feelings of antagonism towards others even when they cause injury to oneself.” And then again at Gītā 10.4 as “a non-disturbed state of mind, even when there is a cause for getting disturbed.” The Dvaitin preceptor Madhva (Sonde 2011) is even terser, glossing k ṣamā at Gītā 10.4 as “refraining from harming through anger even those who have harmed.” The Advaitin preceptor Śa ṃ kara (Gambhīrānanda 2018) is bit more expansive. So k ṣamā at Gītā 10.4 is explained as “imperturbability of the mind of one who is abused or assaulted.” But at Gītā 16.3 it is glossed as “absence of internal perturbation when offended or assaulted – absence of anger has been explained by us as the calming down of a perturbed mind; thus, forgiveness and anger are distinguished.” And the later Advaitin philosopher Madhusūdana Sarasvati (Gambhīrānanda 1998) explains k ṣamā at Gītā 10.4 as “remaining unperturbed in mind when abused or insulted” and at Gītā 16.3 as “non-emergence of anger towards some cause of insult, even when one has the power to retaliate.” Even this small sample of the bhā ṣya offerings on a couple of Gītā verses shows that, for all their laconism, they still do manage to unpack quite a bit about what k ṣamā is supposed to be. In the first place, they all seem to agree that forgiveness is a state of mind that is primarily about how the forgiver feels about another. This puts them in broadly the same camp as emotion accounts of forgiveness in Western philosophy (see Allais, this volume), though there remains plenty of room still for intramural disputes about the specific emotions involved in forgiveness and what must be done with those emotions to achieve forgiveness. Second, all our Vedāntin commentators link forgiveness to the elimination of the emotion of anger. Śa ṃ kara, however, explicitly distinguishes forgiveness (k ṣamā) from mere non-anger (akrodha). When forgiveness is achieved the forgiver’s mind is unaffected by feelings of anger, whereas when non-anger is achieved the mind is still subject to anger but it is quickly suppressed. 51

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Of course, it also has to be admitted that the commentators are often silent on crucial issues. For instance, our different commentators’ glosses all include various mentions of insults, injuries, harms, and abuse that are overcome by the forgiver. This obviously touches upon both a specific context in the Mahābhārata and a general moral question about forgiveness. Recall the dialogue between Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī about anger and forgiveness discussed earlier. One issue implicitly at stake there and elsewhere in the epic is who has standing to forgive a wrongdoer for a particular harm. After Yudhiṣṭhira foolishly lost the kingdom in a rigged dice game it was Draupadī who had to endure (gendered) insult, humiliation, and abuse at the hands of Kar ṇ a and Duryodhana. In the aftermath of this wrong, she fiercely rejects her husbands’ willingness to forgive the insult that she has suffered: She wiped her eyes and, sighing again and again, spoke angrily from a tear-choked throat: “I have got no husbands, no sons… not a brother nor a father nor you, nor friends, if you mercilessly ignored me when I was plagued by the vulgar. For this grudge of mine shall never be appeased: that a Kar ṇ a laughed at me.” (3.31.109–13; van Buitenen 1975: 251) In other words, Draupadī insists that only those who have been wronged can forgive that wrong. Yudhiṣṭhira, in contrast, seems to assume he can forgive both the wrongs done to himself and those done specifically to Draupadī. This disagreement, however, remains unresolved both in the Mahābhārata narrative and in the Vedāntin commentators’ explanations of the meaning of k ṣamā. Similarly, Draupadī and Yudhiṣṭhira both agreed that k ṣamā is indeed a virtue, one Yudhiṣṭhira praised as “a virtue of the weak and an ornament of the strong” (5.33.47). And the commentators’ definitions of forgiveness effectively concur. But neither the Mahābhārata’s narrative nor the Vedāntin commentators on the Gītā offer the explicit application conditions for forgiveness that Draupadī was looking for Yudhiṣṭhira to provide. So, does introducing the contributions of the later commentarial tradition really do enough to fix the semantic content of moral judgments in a way that plausibly responds to the challenge posed earlier to the anti-theoretical ethics of the Mahābhārata? After all, do not even the commentators’ proffered definitions of k ṣamā seem both too broad and too narrow (i.e., they seem to allow both the inclusion of some cases that are plausibly not cases of forgiveness and the exclusion of some cases that are plausibly cases of forgiveness)? The classical Hindu philosophers certainly did have the notion of a definition being too broad or too narrow, but their conception of what a definition (lak ṣa ṇa) amounts to was rather different from that of Western philosophers (see Bhattacharyya 1998, Matilal 1985). The most fully developed Indian account of this was due to the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school of philosophers, who were especially well known for their contributions to logic and epistemology. From early in the school’s history, Nyāya maintained definition to be fundamental to philosophy: “This science will follow a threefold procedure: naming the topic, definition [lak ṣa ṇa], and critical examination of these” (Nyāyabhā ṣya 1.1.3). Lak ṣa ṇa is subsequently characterized as involving the identification of a characteristic which differentiates an enumerated object from all other entities. This is not a Socratic definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions for being some type of entity. According to this Indian theory of definition (developed most elaborately in later Navya-Nyāya), a satisfactory definition (lak ṣa ṇa) does not need to capture the essence of the object to be defined. Instead, it only needs to characterize what is being defined by picking out a unique mark of that object. Indeed, Nyāya even allows for the possibility of parallel defining properties of the same set of objects. Strictly speaking, Nyāya recognizes two different types of lak ṣaṇa. One of these is concerned primarily with things, not words. Beginning with a set of objects collected under a mode, we proceed 52

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by looking for a defining mark, which is any property that excludes the thing defined from other things. Since such a property can be an accidental property of the objects and there may be more than one suitable property, there can be multiple distinct but equally satisfactory definitions. Clearly, this is a highly extensionalist concept of definition, and it fits well with the commitment of most classical Indian philosophers to direct referentialism about linguistic meaning. The second type of lak ṣa ṇa is concerned to explain why a word applies to what it applies to. In this case the defining mark is in the nature of the referents of the word, and is denoted by the abstract noun formed from the word. So, for example, a definition of a cow according to this second type of definition might be: a cow is an entity that instantiates (the natural kind) cowhood. In contrast, a definition of a cow according to the first type of definition might be: a cow is a hoofed animal with a dewlap. Obviously, more could be (and has been) said in explanation and defense of this distinctive Indian conception of definition. But perhaps at least enough has been said here to suggest that it may be an open question as to whether the apparently differing commentators’ definitions of k ṣamā cited earlier can be helpful in fixing the semantic content of moral judgments about forgiveness in a way that responds plausibly to the challenge posed earlier for the anti-theoretical ethics of the Mahābhārata.

5.  Punishment and Forgiveness Be that as it may, one thing the commentators on the Gītā cited earlier did seem to agree on was that forgiveness is a state of mind that is primarily about how the forgiver feels about another. And as we noted then, this puts them in broadly the same camp as emotion accounts of forgiveness in Western philosophy, though there remains plenty of room still for intramural disputes about the specific emotions involved in forgiveness and what must be done with those emotions to achieve forgiveness. It also apparently distinguishes the Hindu view of k ṣamā from punishment-forbearance accounts of forgiveness in Western philosophy, which (at least in their most extreme versions) hold that to forgive is just to forbear from punishing the wrongdoer (see Zaibert 2009, and Russell this volume). However, the view of punishment expressed in the Hindu legal texts (dharmaśāstra) is a bit more nuanced than that. The most famous dharmaśāstra is the Manusmṛti ( Jha 1999, Olivelle 2005), which simply lists the ten universal duties incumbent on all as: Steadiness, forgiveness [k ṣamā], self-control, refraining from theft, performing purifications, control of the senses, discrimination, knowledge, truthfulness, absence of anger; these are the ten-fold duties. Those brahmins who learn the ten forms of duty and, after learning, follow them, attain the highest state. (6.92–93) While this certainly shows the high value Manu attaches to forgiveness, it does not make explicit what forgiveness consists in. The very popular later commentator Medhātithi, however, says k ṣamā here is “the excusing of wrongs committed; not seeking to do injury to a person in return for an injury that might have been done by him” ( Jha 1999). However, the earliest commentator Bhāruci glosses k ṣamā as “the abstention from retaliation by forgiving offences in any circumstance which disturbs one’s mental equilibrium” and contrasts it with absence of anger (akrodha) – though in a way different to that we saw earlier in Śaṃkara’s Gītabhā ṣya: “Absence of anger” is the mind’s remaining unperturbed when in the presence of causes of annoyance. He has already mentioned “forbearance” which is the failure to take positive 53

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action when anger has already arisen; while what is meant here is the non-production of anger – that is the difference. (Derrett 1975: II, 30) These remarks might suggest that k ṣamā is not just about how the forgiver feels about another, but also about what the forgiver does to another. And this idea is at least part of any punishment-­ forbearance view of forgiveness. But is punishment in Hinduism really something that should – or even can – be forborne? Here we need to attend to two distinct contexts of punishment in Hindu jurisprudence: the impersonal retributive punishment associated with the law of karma, and the mundane social context of legal punishment. Arguably, in the former context punishment cannot be forborne, and in the latter context it should not be forborne. So, given that forgiveness is supposed to be both feasible and morally admirable, it cannot simply be punishment-forbearance. What follows is a defense of that claim. The doctrine of karma is one of the best-known features of Hinduism, though its precise nature is a contested matter (O’Flaherty 1980, Perrett 1998). Roughly speaking, however, karma is thought of as a kind of moral causation which operates both within a life and across lives. The overwhelming majority of Indian philosophers (both theistic and atheistic) have regarded karma as an impersonal moral law. It operates as a principle of universal justice quite independent of the will of God (thus a famous passage in the Brahmasūtra (II.1.34) absolves God of responsibility for evil in the world on the grounds that even God is constrained by individuals’ own karma). In this context, then, the impersonal retributive punishment associated with the law of karma cannot, as a matter of causal necessity, be forborne and so forgiveness cannot be a matter of forbearing such punishment. But while the Hindu jurisprudential texts certainly accept this background cosmic retributive theory, they are more often focused on more mundane issues of legal punishment (Davis 2010). Such punishment in Hindu law takes two forms: da ṇḍa and prāyaścitta. Da ṇḍa (“the rod”) is the punishment meted out by legal authorities (usually the ruler) for criminal and civil offences. Prāyaścitta is the self-imposed penance of those who have committed a legal or religious transgression. Both forms of punishment are concerned less with retribution than with prevention and deterrence. Da ṇḍa, however, is a form of punishment that is a mandatory duty for a ruler, since failure to punish crimes will cause harm to the social order of which the ruler is the anointed guardian (Day 1982: 118, Das Gupta 1930: 13–5). Thus the Manusm ṛti says: If the king fails to administer punishment tirelessly on those who ought to be punished, the stronger would grill the weak like fish on a spit… The whole world is subdued through punishment… Wherever punishment, dark-hued and red-eyed, prowls about as the slayer of evil-doers, there the subjects do not go astray – so long as its administrator ascertains correctly. (7.20–25; Olivelle 2005: 155) And the commentator Medhātithi explains that this means the king “should not entertain any such notions as… ‘I shall not punish anyone at all’” ( Jha 1999: 285). Punishment-forbearance is not, then, within the judicial power of a ruler, even though a ruler does have discretion over the instrumentation of punishment. Hence forgiveness cannot be morally praiseworthy if it is indeed forbearance of punishment (in the sense of da ṇḍa). In contrast prāyaścitta, as the voluntary penance of those who have committed a legal or religious transgression, is considered by the dharmaśāstrins to be morally praiseworthy, since it is 54

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deterrent as well as expiatory. But (i) its voluntary nature means that only an offender can impose it and then only on themselves, and (ii) forgoing to do so is not morally praiseworthy. So yet again forgiveness cannot be morally praiseworthy if it is forbearance of punishment (this time in the sense of prāyaścitta). It seems correct to conclude, then, that identifying forgiveness with punishment-forbearance would indeed be incompatible with other fundamental Hindu doctrines about punishment.

6.  Gandhi and Forgiveness: Tradition and Modernity With our final case study we have arrived at the modern period of Hindu philosophy, a period that brought about huge changes in Indian society due to the encounter with British colonialism. While Mahatma Gandhi is surely the outstanding Hindu moralist of modern times, he is better known as a political activist and moral exemplar than as a systematic moral philosopher – in keeping with his famous claim that “My life is my message” (Gandhi 1958–94: 89/156). Throughout his life, however, Gandhi wrote incessantly and his collected works total a hundred volumes, mostly occasional political writings and correspondence. True, at least in his seminal first book Hind Swaraj, he presents a sustained and radical moral critique of modernity, a position he explicitly continued to affirm for the rest of his life (Gandhi 1997, Perrett 2015). But in general Gandhi himself quite accurately described his literary style and its implicit limitations for systematic moral philosophy: “My language is aphoristic, it lacks precision. It is therefore open to several interpretations” (Gandhi 1958–94: 53/485). Gandhi’s moral thinking drew on an eclectic set of influences, both Western and Indian. Nonetheless Gandhi was a traditionalist, one who borrowed elements from modernity and fitted them within the traditional Indian worldview. He starts with tradition and seeks to make the community open through an individual interpretation of that tradition. He was not a traditional Sanskrit scholar like the classical commentators mentioned earlier, but he was certainly familiar with both the Mahābhārata and Rāmayāna epics, and he had a special fondness for the Bhagavadgītā (Gandhi 2009), often interpreting his work in terms of the Gītā’s karma-yoga – active involvement in the world with an attitude of selflessness and dispassion. A particularly prominent instance of Gandhi’s reshaping of traditional Hindu ethics is his widening of the concept of ahi ṃsā. Traditionally, ahi ṃsā meant “non-injury,” the renunciation of the desire to kill or harm (Tähtinen 1976). As we have already seen, it is an important virtue in classical Hindu ethics. Hi ṃsā or harm is traditionally condemned both for what it does to others and for what it does to the agent of the harm. For traditional Hindus, however, not all harm is hi ṃsā: for example, killing in a just war or punishing wrongdoers are not hiṃsā. Finally, most parties agreed that ahiṃsā as a fully feasible ideal is reserved for renunciants. Gandhi thought these traditional accounts far too negative. First, he preferred to translate ahiṃsā as “nonviolence.” Furthermore, he identified ahi ṃsā with compassion and thereby with love and with worldly activism. Ahi ṃsā thus becomes for Gandhi an ideal of active and energetic love meant for all. Moreover, he extended the traditional intentionality condition to include any kind of ill will or malevolence. Thus hi ṃsā means harming others out of ill will or selfishness; harm caused to others in pursuit of legitimate ends is not hi ṃsā if malevolence is not present. Finally, nonviolence is supposed to be feasible for all, not just for ascetics. Although Gandhi saw himself as in holding fast to what he took to be the true significance of ahiṃsā for the Hindu tradition, he also made it very clear that he believed the doctrine of ahiṃsā could be disassociated from any scriptural justification: [T]hough my views on ahimsa are a result of my study of most of the faiths of the world, they are now no longer dependent upon the authority of these works. They are a part of my life 55

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and if I suddenly discovered that the religious books read by me bore a different interpretation from the one I had learnt to give them, I should still hold to the view of ahimsa as I am about to set forth here. (Gandhi 1958–94: 13/294–5) But what did Gandhi have to say specifically about forgiveness: in particular, about its nature, its application conditions, and its justification? Unsurprisingly, Gandhi attempts no precise definition of forgiveness, though scattered through his writings are brief remarks on some of its characteristics. So, for example, forgiveness is glossed (when commenting on Gītā 18.42) as to wish well, from the heart, even to a person who may have hit us with a stone (32/344); but it lies also in not being angry even with a dog which may have bitten us (32/304). One who repents deserves to be forgiven (56/218), and one cannot forgive too much (45/345). But to forgive is not to forget (19/428). Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave and not to be confused with weakness (82/450). Rather the weak can never forgive, forgiveness is the attribute of the strong (45/345). (Note how this famous maxim of Gandhi’s alludes to – and upends – ­Yudhiṣṭhira’s at Mahābhārata 5.33.47 that “forgiveness is a virtue of the weak and an ornament of the strong (k ṣamā gu ṇo hy aśaktānā ṃ śaktānā ṃ bhū ṣa ṇa ṃ k ṣamā).”) That forgiveness has many of these characteristics is largely platitudinous, at least in the Indian context – though Gandhi certainly was unusual in his steadfast determination to exemplify personally these characteristics, and in inviting and replying to public criticism of his success in doing so. More controversial and original was Gandhi’s apparent view of the relation of forgiveness to ahiṃsā: He alone practises the ahimsa dharma who voluntarily and with love refrains from inflicting violence on anyone. Non-violence implies love, compassion, forgiveness. The Shastras ­describe these as the virtues of the brave. (Gandhi 1958–94: 28/49) In other words, it seems that the value of forgiveness (k ṣamā) is grounded in the more fundamental value of nonviolence (ahiṃsā). It is important to note, however, that Gandhi regarded nonviolence primarily as a creed, rather than a tactic. Correspondingly, we need to distinguish his views about nonviolent attitudes and nonviolent resistance (Sorabji 2012). Inspired by Tolstoy, Gandhi thought of nonviolence as an inner psychological state of universal love. Hence while he valued the moral (and political) effects of both nonviolent attitudes and resistance, he valued nonviolent attitudes also for their own sake. In contrast, it is arguable on perfectionist grounds that since the factors overcome in forgiveness were not truly valuable in the first place, forgiveness is valuable only because of its effects, rather than intrinsically valuable (Griswold 2007: 2–14). This is also relevant to another issue about forgiveness, raised earlier in the Mahābhārata. When Draupadī argued that forgiveness needs to have applicability conditions that are context-sensitive to time and place and to the character of the person concerned, the Mahābhārata’s general response seemed to be anti-theoretical: there are no exceptionless and universal moral rules, and hence no point in trying to present and order them. Instead, “in all acts, both good and bad can be seen together” (9.15.50; Badrinath 2006: 127). Gandhi too was often skeptical of universal rules of conduct, preferring a case-by-case approach. But he still retained an important place in his moral thinking for universal rules of attitude, conferring on them a quasi-Euclidean status: The propositions from which I have drawn my arguments are as true as Euclid’s definitions, which are none the less true, because in practice we are unable even to draw Euclid’s line on 56

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a blackboard. But even a geometrician finds it impossible to get on without bearing in mind Euclid’s definitions. Nor may we… dispense with the fundamental propositions on which the doctrine of satyagraha is based. (Gandhi 1958–94: 28/306) So, although there are no universal rules of conduct, there are universal rules of attitude that serve as regulative ideals. Nonviolence is one of these ideals, and one that itself implies forgiveness. Gandhi’s theory of nonviolence has been criticized as inherently flawed in a fashion much like the classical Hindu ethics it is rooted in, oscillating between elaborate rules of conduct regulating the minutest details of life of ordinary folk, and highly abstract ideals with the minimum possible rules to guide their practice that are suitable only for the moral elite (see Parekh 1999). Perhaps the most promising reply to this charge is to try to defend Gandhi’s version of Hindu ethics as a form of principled casuistry: the art of applying abstract principles to concrete cases (after all, recall that Gandhi was a lawyer). Although the development of principles is essential, the weight of principle in a particular case cannot be determined in the abstract. There remains a need for good judgment, hence the Gandhian emphasis on personal self-improvement as well as involvement in social action. And, as we have seen, forgiveness has an important place in this larger moral vision.

7. Conclusion The ocean of Hindu philosophy is wide and deep, and Hinduism itself is more extensive still. Although forgiveness may not be the most widely discussed topic therein, perhaps this chapter has done enough to at least vindicate our opening claim that there is indeed a Hindu philosophical literature on forgiveness to engage with.

References Ādidevānanda, S. (1991) Śrī Rāmānuja Gītā Bhā ṣ ya, Mylapore: Sri Ramakrishna Math. Badrinath, C. (2006) The Mahābhārata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition, Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Baier, A. (1985) Postures of the Mind, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bhattacharyya, S. (1998) “Definition, Indian Concepts of,” in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of ­Philosophy, London: Routledge. Das, G. (2009) The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, New York: Oxford University Press. Das Gupta, R. (1930) Crime and Punishment in Ancient India, Calcutta: Book Company. Davis, D. (2010) The Spirit of Hindu Law, New York: Cambridge University Press. Day, T. (1982) The Conception of Punishment in Early Indian Literature, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press. Derrett, J. (1975) Bhāruci’s Commentary on the Manusm ṛti, 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. Gambhīrānanda, S. (1998) Bhagavad-Gītā With the Annotation Gū ḍhārtha-Dīpikā by Madhusūdana Sarasvati, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. ———. (2018) Bhagavad Gītā with the Commentary of Śa ṅkarācārya, 2nd ed., Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Gandhi, M. (1958–94) The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols., New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. [Accessible online at < https://www. gandhiheritageportal.org/>] ———. (1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2009) The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Ganeri, J. (2011) The Lost Age of Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, New York: Cambridge University Press. Holdrege, B. (1991) “Hindu Ethics,” in J. Carman and M. Juergensmeyer (eds.), A Bibliographic Guide to the Comparative Study of Religious Ethics, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, P. and Warmke, B. (2017) “Forgiveness,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Jha, G. (1999) Manusm ṛti With the “Manubhā ṣya” of Medhātithi, Vol.5, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

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Roy W. Perrett Johnson, W. (2005) Mahābhārata: Book Three, The Forest, Volume Four, New York: New York University Press. Macdonell, A. (1917) A Vedic Reader for Students, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Matilal, B. (1985) Logic, Language and Reality, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. ———. (2002) The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Ethics and Epics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morton, A. (2012) “What is Forgiveness?” in C. Griswold and D. Konstan (eds.), Ancient Forgiveness, New York: Cambridge University Press. Mukherji, G. (2014) “Hi ṃsā-Ahi ṃsā in the Mahābhārata: The Lonely Position of Yudhi ṣṭhira,” in A. Chakrabarti and S. Bandopadhyay (eds.), Mahābhārata Now: Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics, London: Routledge. O’Flaherty, W. (1980) ed. Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, Berkeley: University of California Press. Olivelle, P. (2005) Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parekh, B. (1999) Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse, rev. ed., New Delhi: Sage. Perrett, R. (1998) Hindu Ethics: A Philosophical Study, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. ———. (2015) “Gandhi, Morality, and Modernity,” GITAM Journal of Gandhian Studies 4: 342–61. Pettit, P. (1997) “The Consequentialist Perspective,” in M. Baron, P. Pettit and M. Slote (ed.), Three Methods of Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell. Sonde, N. (2011) Srī Madhavacharya Bhashya and Tatparya Nīrnaya on Bhagavad Gita, Bombay: Vasantik Prakashan, 1995. Sorabji, R. (2012) Gandhi and the Stoics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tähtinen, U. (1976) Ahimsa: Non-Violence in Indian Tradition, London: Rider. Tubb, G. and Boose, E. (2007) Scholastic Sanskrit, New York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies. van Buitenen, J. (1973) The Mahābhārata: Book 1 The Book of the Beginning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1975) The Mahābhārata: Books 2–3 The Book of the Assembly Hall and the Book of the Forest, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1981) The Bhagavadgītā in the Mahābhārata, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Zaibert, L. (2009) “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6: 365–93.

Suggested Further Reading Flood, G. (1996) An Introduction to Hinduism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A useful historical and thematic survey capturing something of the diversity of Hinduism.) Hamilton, S. (2001) Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A succinct historical sketch of the Indian philosophical tradition, aimed at absolute beginners.) Lipner, J. (2010) Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. (Another good introduction to both the diversity and unity of Hinduism, dealing with both beliefs and practices.) Perrett, R. (2016), An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A wide-ranging, thematic introduction to classical Indian philosophy, including some of its more technical dimensions.)

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5 FORGIVENESS, PATIENCE, AND CONFESSION IN BUDDHISM D.E. Osto

Buddhism never elaborated a developed notion of forgiveness. Nevertheless, some contemporary Buddhist thinkers have pointed out that the Buddhist virtue of “patience” (Pāli: khanti; Sanskrit: k ṣānti)1 shares strong similarities or overlapping concerns with what some people consider to be forgiveness.2 In the following pages, I argue that if we accepted Boleyn-Fitzgerald’s (2002) notion of “simple forgiveness” as a “letting go of anger,” then there are indeed a number of significant overlaps in this type of forgiveness within the Buddhist notion of patience.3 Somewhat counterintuitively, though lacking an explicit discourse on forgiveness, Buddhism has been quite concerned with the act of confession. To understand why confession has always been an important part of Buddhism, while an explicit discourse on forgiveness has not, we need to investigate the idea of confession in Buddhism and its role within Buddhist ethics and soteriology. I argue that Buddhism (like Christianity) employs confession, simple forgiveness (in the sense of letting go of anger), and patience as means of maintaining and restoring what I call “right relationship” with members of the Buddhist religious community and, in the case of Mahāyāna Buddhism, with higher spiritual powers. This maintenance and restoration of right relationship, moreover, constitute ethical activities with psychological and soteriological benefits. To understand forgiveness in relation to patience and confession in Buddhist ethics, psychology, and soteriology, I will first look at these ideas in early Buddhism. Next, I investigate these ideas in Mahāyāna Buddhism, giving special attention to the views of Śāntideva, a renowned Indian scholar-monk from the eighth century CE. Mahāyāna Buddhism, which began some five centuries after the life of the Buddha, introduced major innovations to Buddhist cosmology, philosophy, and soteriology. These innovations also impacted on Mahāyāna ideas concerning confession, forgiveness, and patience. Here I focus on Śāntideva for two reasons: as an authoritative Mahāyāna commentator and thinker, his ideas have had a continued influence on significant currents of the Buddhist tradition to this day; moreover, looking in detail at Śāntideva’s texts allows us to examine one particularly developed Buddhist view on these issues, rather than attempting the impossible task of summarizing a 2,500-year-old tradition.

1.  Confession, Patience, and Forgiveness in Early Buddhism Buddhism began in the northeast of India with the life and teachings of the historical Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, an Indian prince who is thought to have lived in the fifth century BCE. It is impossible to appreciate the teachings of the Buddha without some understanding of the religious milieu within which they arose. From about the eighth or ninth century DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-8

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BCE in India, a new religious and philosophical outlook developed among wandering ascetic “renouncers,” who had given up their ordinary lives in the world to pursue a path to ultimate spiritual freedom. A number of core presuppositions form the basis for this new outlook and approach. Two ideas central to the renouncer ethos are karma and rebirth. Karma (from Sanskrit karman) literally means “action,” and is the idea that actions of thought, word, and deed have moral consequences such that harmful actions bring forth harmful results, and meritorious actions bring forth beneficial results or “merit.” Here we see the biblical dictum that “one reaps what one sows.” Indeed, in the Indian context, karma is thought to plant “seeds” (bīja) in the psychophysical stream of the individual that will later bring forth “fruit” (phala). Corollary with the notion of karma is the idea of rebirth, which is the belief that every sentient being goes through an endless cycle of births and deaths since beginningless time, and will continue to do so, unless special measures are taken to stop this process. Karma, whether good or bad, determines what state one is reborn in. Harmful actions lead to negative rebirths as animals, ghosts, or in hell realms. Beneficial actions lead to pleasant rebirths as humans, celestial beings, and gods. However, because the renouncers viewed this entire cosmic process of rebirth as rife with sickness, old age, death, pain, and loss, they deemed the whole of cyclical existence (sa ṃsāra) to be suffering (du ḥkha). Thus, due to the inherently unsatisfactory nature of this process, renouncers sought means to attain permanent release (mok ṣa) from it. The main philosophical and soteriological problem then becomes how does one escape this endless cycle of pain. Within this broad context, we can view the teachings of the Buddha as his unique solution to this problem. Legend has it that on the occasion of Buddha’s first sermon, he taught “Four Noble Truths.” These are that (1) cyclical existence is suffering; (2) the cause of this suffering is craving; (3) the removal of this craving leads to permanent release in nirvana (nirvā ṇa); and (4) the path to this release is eightfold. This Eightfold Path is summarized as follows: (1) Right View, (2) Right Intention, (3) Right Speech, (4) Right Action, (5) Right Livelihood, (6) Right Effort, (7) Right Mindfulness, and (8) Right Concentration. The aim of the Path is “to avoid evil, do good, and purify the mind” (Dhammapada 183). Here we see that Buddhism proposes a psychological solution to a metaphysical problem: craving (literally “thirst”) causes suffering and keeps one bound to the “wheel of becoming” (bhava-cakra). Thus, the end of craving leads to the end of rebirth. In this way, Buddha set in motion his “wheel of teaching” (dharma-cakra) as an antidote for the “wheel of becoming,” otherwise known as the “wheel of sa ṃsāra” (sa ṃsāra-cakra). Important features of early Buddhism to note are that it is both atheistic and dualistic. There is no creator of sa ṃsāra, karma and rebirth. Sa ṃsāra is beginningless, and karma and rebirth are brute facts of our existence. Early Buddhists recognized the existence of gods and goddesses, but these were considered no more than super-human beings (much like the Greek gods and goddesses), and still subject to karma and rebirth. No one could save anyone from sa ṃsāra; only through one’s own efforts could one overcome craving and attain nirvana. The ultimate goal of nirvana was thought to be achieved when one gained special intuitive insight into the true nature of reality. This insight known as “wisdom” (prajñā) dispels the primordial ignorance (avidyā) of the process of becoming and leads to permanent cessation of the three poisons of hatred, greed, and ignorance. When this happens, karma is overcome, and a permanent state of release is attained. A Buddha or enlightened Buddhist saint (Pāli: arahant; Sanskrit arhat) first attains “nirvana with remainder” of a body and mind, then “final nirvana” at physical death never to be reborn. Since final nirvana is the end of rebirth, it is ontologically distinct from sa ṃsāra. Whereas sa ṃsāra is the “conditioned” (sa ṃkhata) realm of karma and rebirth, nirvana is the “unconditioned” (asa ṃkhata) realm of bliss beyond space, time, and causality. Because sa ṃsāra is the conditioned realm of process, change, causality, time, and space, it is characterized by the three “marks” (lak ṣāna) of existence: impermanence (anityā), no-self (anatman), and 60

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suffering (du ḥkha). Here we see Buddhism’s distinctive notion that there is no such thing as an eternal self or soul. Individuals are merely bundles of five psychophysical forces (the five ­a ggregates – form, sensation, conception, latent formations, and consciousness), which are causally connected to one another. The Buddha reasoned that in order for there to be the possibility of escape from this realm, there must be something unconditioned. Thus, nirvana is what allows for the possibility of release from the cycle of sa ṃsāra. This is why the late Steven Collins (2010: 17), leading modern scholar of Theravāda Buddhism, states that nirvana “is essential for the Buddhist project of theodicy.” There is no release from the conditioned realm of suffering without the unconditioned nirvana; but paradoxically, there is no soul that experiences nirvana or even consciousness “in nirvana.” Nevertheless, because nirvana is the permanent end of suffering, Buddhists view it as bliss. Now that we have some of the philosophical and soteriological context of early Buddhism, we are better able to understand the roles of confession, patience, and forgiveness within the Buddhist worldview. According to David Chappell (2019), Indian Buddhism developed three types of repentance and confession: (1) communal repentance and confession within the monastic community, (2) metaphysical repentance of one’s karmic past to a supramundane buddha, (3) meditational repentance of incorrect attachments and understanding. We find Type 1 from the earliest strata of Buddhism. In order to maintain the purity and harmony of the monastic community, monks and nuns were required by the rules of the Buddhist order to confess any misconduct they committed. These confessions were to be performed fortnightly in front of the community of monks. Also, after the three-month long rains retreat, monastics would make public confessions before the laity at the new robe donation ceremony. Depending on the severity of the misconduct, a monk or nun could be expelled from the order (killing, stealing, sexual intercourse, or lying about one’s spiritual attainments were all grounds for expulsion), undergo a probationary period, or face further discipline. These acts of confession functioned to maintain the ethical purity and harmonious functioning of the monastic community. Purity of the order has always been crucial since Buddhist laity considered monastics to be “fields of merit” (particularly good sources of merit when gifted goods) based on the ethical and mental purity of the monks and nuns. Note that this type of Buddhist confession does not require anyone to “forgive” the offender. Penance may be required to restore the individual’s standing in the community and ensure their ethical and mental purity. Also, this type of confession is karmically and soteriologically important for the individual. Confessing wrongdoing and making amends help one to refrain from future misconduct, which would lead to negative karmic consequences and retard one’s progress on the Buddhist path to nirvana. Also note that within this atheistic and dualistic framework, there is no “higher power” to confess one’s sins to, or to forgive one’s wrongdoings. Buddhas and Buddhist saints who have passed into final nirvana have completely gone beyond the sa ṃ sāric realm and are not accessible for petition or aid. In order to understand how forgiveness (in the sense of letting go of anger) plays a role in early Buddhism, we must investigate the concept of “patience” (Pāli: khanti; Sanskrit: k ṣānti). The term k ṣānti has a number of overlapping meanings and, depending on context, carries a similar sense in English to patience, forbearance, acceptance, endurance, and forgiveness. The importance of k ṣānti in early Buddhism is evidenced in the Dhammapada, an ancient collection of verses, and one of the oldest textual sources of Buddhism we possess. For example, Dhammapada verse 184 states, Patience as forbearance is the supreme austerity; Nirvana is the supreme state the Buddhas say. For this reason, one who has gone forth to homelessness does no harm; A renouncer is not one who hurts another.4 61

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Likewise, Dhammapada verse 399 reads: A virtuous person who endures insults, blows and bindings, I say of that one well-armed with the strength of patience, he is a brahmin.5 For heuristic purposes, we can divide k ṣānti into three main types: endurance of hardship, acceptance of the truth (dharmak ṣānti), and patience with others (sattvak ṣānti) (see McDonald 2004; O’Brien 2018).6 Endurance of hardship primarily is about not getting upset or discouraged by physical discomforts such as heat, cold, sickness, and hunger. By practicing patience in this regard, one’s mind remains peaceful and equanimous, and negative mental states are avoided. Acceptance of truth in this sense is about the recognition of basic Buddhist truths concerning the nature of reality such as impermanence. For example, since all conditioned things are impermanent, one should accept this truth and patiently endure difficulties related to impermanence. Again, we see how k ṣānti relates to the maintenance of a peaceful mind, and thereby functions as an important aspect of mind training. In this way, to avoid negative karma and attain ultimate release from the defilements of hatred, greed, and delusion, one must continuously practice k ṣānti as a mental discipline. Patience of others or “patience toward beings” (sattvak ṣānti) is the aspect of k ṣānti that comes the closest to “forgiveness” in the sense of letting go of anger toward others. Thus, if a nun becomes angry at others when they harm, abuse, or mistreat her, she disrupts her mental equilibrium and feeds the defilement of hatred. This inevitably leads to negative karma and further bondage to sa ṃsāra. Thus, when anger does arise toward others, the Buddhist nun should let go of that anger as soon as possible (i.e. “forgive” the offenders). We find some dramatic accounts of “patience toward beings” in early Buddhist sources. In a collection of stories about the Buddha’ previous births known as Jātaka Tales 7 is “The Birth Story on the Teaching of Patience” (Khantīvāda Jātaka),8 about a life where the Bodhisatta (Sanskrit: Bodhisattva, “Buddha-to-be,” see below) is a brahmin ascetic named Ku ṇḍakakumāro residing in a royal park outside the city of Benares (Varanasi). One day the King Kalābu comes to the park with his harem women for drinking and entertainment. When the King falls asleep, the women wander the garden and discover the ascetic sitting peacefully under a tree. They politely ask him for a teaching and Ku ṇḍakakumāro preaches the Dharma to them. When the King awakes, he flies into a rage when he discovers his harem has abandoned him to listen to an ascetic. He finds the brahmin and asks him what he is teaching. When Ku ṇḍakakumāro responds that he is preaching on “patience” (khanti), the King asks what he means by patience. The ascetic replies, “not being angry when men abuse you, strike you, and revile you.” Then to test the ascetic, the King summons his executioner and orders him to whip the ascetic with thorns, flaying his skin. When this fails to anger the ascetic or disturb his peace of mind, the King orders the executioner to cut off his limbs in succession beginning with his feet, hands, ears, and nose. Each time something is removed, the King asks to see if the brahmin is angered or upset, only to find he is undisturbed. Finally, in disgust the King stomps on the bleeding ascetic’s chest and departs the garden only to be immediately swallowed by the earth and fall into the lowest Buddhist hell. The ascetic dies of his wounds later that day and is reborn in heaven as the god Brahmā. In a similar vein to this birth story is a sermon the Buddha preached to his disciples called “Simile of the Saw Discourse” (Kakacūpama Sutta, MN 21). Herein the Buddha says, Monks, even if bandits were to carve you up savagely, limb by limb, with a two-handled saw, he among you who let his heart get angered even at that would not be doing my bidding. Even then you should train yourselves: “Our minds will be unaffected, and we will say no evil words. We will remain sympathetic, with a mind of goodwill, and with no inner hate. We will keep pervading these people with an awareness imbued with goodwill and, 62

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beginning with them, we will keep pervading the all-encompassing world with an awareness imbued with goodwill—abundant, enlarged, immeasurable, free from hostility, free from ill will.” That’s how you should train yourselves. (Thānissaro 2021) Both “The Birth Story on the Teaching of Patience” and the “Simile of the Saw Discourse” exemplify what came to be known in the Buddhist tradition as the “perfection of patience” (S: k ṣānti-pāramitā; P: khanti-pāramī). The perfections are thought to be the qualities a being needs to perfect in order to become a fully enlightened Buddha. Within Buddhism’s expanded cosmology of rebirth, the process of attaining all the perfections is believed to take incalculable eons of practice through countless rebirths. In early Mahāyāna the perfection of patience is the third perfection in a list of six (later expanded to ten, see below), and in the Theravāda tradition (see below) it is the sixth perfection in a list of ten. Thus, within both surviving branches of Buddhism, patience is seen as a core virtue to cultivate and eventually perfect. With regard to others, patience means not getting angry at beings who cause one harm. In the context of the Eightfold Path, patience relates directly to both Right Intention and Right Action. Right Intention means the intention to remove unwholesome mental dispositions that have arisen, to prevent new unwholesome dispositions from arising, and to cultivate a wholesome disposition so that they arise. Right Effort is the force of will to carry out Right Intention. In this way, by practicing patience toward others one makes an effort for anger not to arise; however, if it does arise, one makes an effort to remove the anger, or let it go (i.e. forgive the offenders). Paradoxically, when patience is actually perfected, it is no longer about forgiveness; since no anger arises in the person, there is none to let go of. Likewise, confession and repentance are so that monastics may remove unwholesome dispositions and maintain their mental purity and the purity of the community. In this regard, no one needs “to forgive” a monk’s or nuns’ misdeeds. If they are forgiven by others in a Buddhist context, it is because the forgiver wishes to release their anger and perfect their practice of the Buddhist path. Karmically, this of course is the smart choice. The unwholesome qualities of hatred (of which anger is a part), greed, and delusion lead to bad karma and further bind one to the sa ṃ sāric wheel of suffering.

2.  Confession, Patience, and Forgiveness in Mahāyāna Buddhism About a century after the Buddha’s final nirvana, the Buddhist community began to split into various sects and schools based on disputes around monastic discipline and doctrine. By the beginning of the first millennium CE, numerous Buddhist schools coexisted on the Indian subcontinent. Although differing to some degree in their monastic codes and some finer doctrinal issues, all of these mainstream Buddhist schools adhered to the basic beliefs and practices we have outlined here concerning karma, rebirth, suffering, impermanence, no-self, sa ṃsāra, nirvana, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path. One of these schools, the Sthāviravāda, transplanted in the third century BCE to Sri Lanka, and became the Theravāda school. From there, it subsequently spread to Southeast Asia where it continues to this day in Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. In addition to these ancient Indian schools of mainstream Buddhism, beginning around the first century BCE, a new type of Buddhism emerged, the Mahāyāna, which in some essential ways was a radical departure from early Buddhism and these other mainstream schools. The origins and character of early Mahāyāna are still being debated within the academy,9 but we do know that by the early centuries of the Common Era some of the basic features of this new Buddhism had developed. We may divide these into three broad categories: (1) a new philosophical outlook based on emptiness (śūnyatā); (2) a new religious ideal, the Bodhisattva Ideal; and (3) a new cosmology and Buddhology (Harvey 1990: 89–91). Early Buddhism embraced 63

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an expansive hierarchical cosmology of limitless time and space filled with countless worlds and beings. Although limitless, sa ṃsāra was believed to contain only one Buddha at a time. Once a Buddha passed into final nirvana, and his teaching had entirely disappeared, a new highly advanced bodhisattva would take rebirth on earth and become the next Buddha. In this way, Buddhas would appear in an unending sequence stretching without limit into the past and future. The ultimate goal of early Buddhism and later (non-Mahāyāna) Buddhist schools such as the Theravāda is to follow the Buddha’s teachings and become enlightened saints (Pāli: arahants; Sanskrit: arhats) who attain the final release of nirvana. The Buddha, upon his final nirvana, is believed to be gone forever beyond sa ṃsāra, with only his teaching and bodily relics remaining behind. However, there is the belief that in the far future another Buddha will appear (Maitreya/Metteyya) who would also “turn the wheel of Dharma” (teach the Buddhist truths). Buddhas, before becoming Buddhas in their final birth, are believed to be extremely rare individuals who long ago vowed to postpone their final nirvana as saints in order to become fully enlightened Buddhas who would reintroduce the Buddhist Dharma once it has been lost. While in early Buddhism the spiritual status of the Buddha and the saint was considered more or less equal (both had attained the same state of nirvana). It seems that over the centuries, the status of the Buddha increased with a corresponding decrease in the status of the saint. By the time of the Mahāyāna’s appearance, the new Buddhists viewed the goal of sainthood to be an inferior goal to that of the complete awakening of a Buddha. Thus, a new religious goal was conceived: that one should become a completely enlightened, omniscient Buddha for the sake of all beings. One who set out on this quest was thought to have taken “the bodhisattva’s vow,” to undergo innumerable lifetimes perfecting the various virtues and skills required to become a Buddha. Along with the Bodhisattva Ideal, an extremely important Mahāyāna innovation was the doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā). While mainstream Buddhist schools asserted there was no enduring permanent self (the doctrine of “no-self ” or anātman), they recognized the real existence of various phenomena, elements, or factors (dharmas) that constitute experience. Although impermanent, these factors are real irreducible elements of experience and possess their own nature or essence (svabhāva). Some of the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras, such as the early Perfection of Wisdom Scriptures, attack the notion that these elements have an essence. According to this view, all dharmas are actually “empty” of “own-nature” or independent existence. Because Mahāyānists believe everything arises in interdependence with everything else, nothing possesses svabhāva, including dharmas. In short, this view maintained that no positive statements about the ontological status of any entity could be asserted. This position was first systematized by Nāgārjuna, an Indian Buddhist monk who lived around the second century CE, who is viewed by the tradition as the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna philosophy. One of the most famous verses of Nāgārjuna states: There is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and nirvana. There is not the slightest difference between nirvana and cyclic existence. (XXV: 19; Garfield 1995) Here we see the complete collapse of the ontological distinction between sa ṃsāra (cyclic existence) and nirvana so crucial for early and Theravāda Buddhism, which categorizes nirvana as an unconditioned dharma. For Nāgārjuna and the Mahāyānists who adhered to the notion of emptiness, the distinction between sa ṃsāra and nirvana becomes epistemological rather than ontological: delusive, ignorant cognition perceives sa ṃsāra as constituted by real ontological entities, enlightened cognition does not. The implications of such a position are far reaching. One is the development of a new Buddhology, which claimed Buddhas attain a “non-abiding nirvana,” and therefore, there is no finally passing away of Buddhas in nirvana. 64

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Corollary to this new idea was an expanded cosmology whereby it is believed that infinite ­ uddhas inhabited a limitless universe in rarefied worlds known as “Buddha fields” (buddha-k ṣetra). B Moreover, these Buddhas are thought to possess three different “bodies” (kāya). According to the Mahāyāna view, the historical Buddha that appeared in our world is merely a “manifestation body” (nirmā ṇakāya) of a supramundane Buddha possessing a perfected “celestial” or “enjoyment body” (sa ṃbhogakāya). However, all fully enlightened Buddhas are believed to possess an even more exalted third body, the Dharma body (dharmakāya) that is coextensive with the ultimate body of truth. This ultimate body the Mahāyāna Perfection of Wisdom Scriptures identifies with emptiness itself, the true nature of things (Williams 2009: 177). Within this Mahāyāna context, the ideas of confession, forgiveness, and patience take on new significance. Like their non-Mahāyāna Indian Buddhist counterparts, Mahāyānists could be both monastics and laypeople. Mahāyāna monastics continued to follow the monastic rules, at times it seems, living peacefully in the same monasteries as non-Mahāyāna monks and nuns. Thus, these monks would continue to make community confession for their violations of the monastic rules. However, in addition to this type of confession, a new one emerged whereby those on the bodhisattva path would confess all their misdeeds, from previous lives to “celestial” enjoyment-body Buddhas residing in pure lands throughout all time and space. Since these ­Buddhas were believed to be omniscient and omnibenevolent, they fulfilled two of the three “Os” (omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence) usually assigned to the creator Deity of the ­Abrahamic faiths ( Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). However, since Buddhas are not the creators of sa ṃsāra or omnipotent, karma and rebirth supply justice and retribution for misdeeds. Like the Western God, these Buddhas being omnibenevolent always grant their forgiveness to those that sincerely ask. Confession in this sense is karmically beneficial because it shows remorse for previous misdeeds and helps forge a karmic relationship with enlightened Buddhas. Often these confessions are made to all Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Sometimes confessions are made to a specific celestial Buddha, such as Amitābha, the Buddha of Sukhavāti, the Western Paradise, who is the devotional focus of the Pure Land schools in China and Japan. We see an example of confession to all Buddhas in the Bhadracarī, a very popular and important Mahāyāna liturgical text of 62 verses. Here the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra declares in verses 7 and 8, Whatever are supreme, noble offerings, I devote them to all the Conquerors [Buddhas]. Through the strength of my resolution for the Good Course, I honor and worship all the Conquerors. Whatever evil might be done by me from passion, hatred or through the power of delusion with my body, speech and mind, I confess it all. (Osto 2010: 9) Likewise, Śantideva, the eighth-century Madhyamika philosopher-poet, writes in his classic Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Course of Conduct (Bodhicaryāvatāra): With my hands joined together, I declare to the Buddhas throughout all directions, and the bodhisattvas possessed of great compassion: Whatever evil I, the beast I am, have done or caused to be done within beginningless sā ṃsara, or here in this very life, whatever the transgression leading to my own destruction and committed by my delusion, tormented by regret, I confess. 65

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Whatever wrong I have committed with by body, speech and mind out of disrespect to the Three Jewels,10 my parents, or gurus, whatever horrendous evil carried out by me in my wickedness and my many sins of hate, O Guides,11 all of it I confess.12 A similar confession can be found in the Mahāyāna Scripture on the Supreme Golden Light ­(Suvar ṇaprabhāsottama-sūtra), which Śāntideva quotes in his Compendium of Buddhist Doctrine (Śik ṣasamuccaya): May the Tathāgatas annul the fruit of my evil deeds for me; may the Buddhas wash me clean in the flowing water of mercy. I now declare all the sins I have done before, and all the sins I have now, I now declare. For the future I undertake to cease all my evil deeds; I do not conceal the sin that I may have done. Threefold are the deeds of the body, fourfold of speech, with mind of three kinds: I declare it all. What is done with body or voice and thought with mind, ten kinds in all, I now declare it; and all the sin I have done, that brings undesired fruit, I will now declare standing in the presence of the Buddhas. (Bendall and Rouse 1971: 160) This type of expanded confession and repentance to all Buddhas and bodhisattvas became very popular in China and was performed in large public ceremonies. About these rituals Chappell (2019) writes, …Chinese Buddhist repentance rituals are prominent as regular public ceremonies, so that more than one-fourth of the ritual texts collected among contemporary Chinese Buddhist practitioners by Kamata Shigeo (1986) are repentance texts. These ceremonies pervade the Chinese Buddhist liturgical year and constitute a major bond between the monastic elite and the laity, and between the world of Buddhism and Chinese society. Confession was also included in public healing rituals, which were believed to transfer merit onto the sick person to heal them. About these, Teiser (2017: 323–4) writes, The confession liturgy opens by summoning a hierarchically arranged pantheon of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and deities as authenticators of the confession, and then invites human members of the monkhood to assemble as witnesses. The liturgies thus utilize a variety of technologies, none of them deemed exclusive…. there seems to be “a complex feedback loop” between sponsoring the ritual, transferring the benefits, invoking the divine assistance, confessing past deeds, curing disease, and achieving auspicious rebirth and enlightenment. These Buddhist ideas about public confession and repentance combined in Chinese society with notions about the relationships between living and deceased family members, so that confession becomes an important part of the annual “Ghost Festival.” In this way, “…public repentance during the Ghost Festival to relieve the suffering of deceased family members became a major ritual in Chinese society from medieval times to the present” (Chappell 2019). The notion of patience also takes on new significance in the Mahāyāna tradition. Since the goal of Mahāyāna is to be a bodhisattva striving for complete Buddhahood in order to save all beings, the perfections required to attain this goal gain central importance. Thus, we find in the Perfection of Wisdom Scriptures (Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) a list of six perfections (pāramitā) required for Buddhahood: (1) giving (dāna), (2) morality (sīla), (3) patience (k ṣānti), (4) vigor (vīrya), (5) meditation (dhyāna), and (6) wisdom (prajñā) (Dayal 1932: 168). In the later tradition such as the Scripture on the Ten Stages (daśabhūmikā-sūtra), this list gets expanded to ten by including (7) skillfulness (upāya), 66

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(8) vow (pra ṇidhāna), (9) power (bala), and (10) knowledge ( jñāna) (Dayal 1932: 168). Here we see patience (k ṣānti) is the third perfection to be cultivated in order to become a Buddha. According to Dayal (1932: 209), in Mahāyāna sources, K ṣānti is always described as the opposite of krodha (anger), dve ṣa (hatred), pratigha (repugnance), and vyāpāda (malice). It is defined as freedom from anger and excitement (akopanā, ak ṣobhanatā) and as the habit of enduring and pardoning injuries and insults (par-āpakārasya mar ṣa ṇam). K ṣānti also has two other secondary meanings as (1) the endurance of hardship and pain, and (2) the acceptance of the ideals and doctrines of the religion (Dayal 1932: 209). In its primary Mahāyāna definition as the opposite of anger, we see ksānti’s similarity to forgiveness in the sense of “pardoning injuries and insults.” Thus, Dayal (1932: 209–10) writes that a bodhisattva, …forgives others for all kinds of injury, insults, contumely, abuse and censure. He forgives them at all times, in the forenoon, at noon, in the afternoon, by day and by night. He forgives them for what has been done in the past, for what is being done in the present and for what will be done in the future. He forgives them in sickness and health…. Even if his body is destroyed and cut up into a hundred pieces with swords and spears, he does not conceive an angry thought against his cruel persecutors. He forgives all without exception, his friends, his enemies, and those who are neither…. In a word, his forgiveness is unfailing, universal and absolute, even as Mother Earth suffers in silence all that may be done to her. Since patience is the opposite of anger, one must release anger in the practice of patience. This is the primary sense Śāntideva has in mind in his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Course of Conduct. In his first two verses on his chapter on the perfection of patience, he writes, Virtuous deeds, acts of generosity, and worship of the Sugatas13 Performed throughout thousands of eons, anger destroys it all. There is no evil equal to hatred, and no austerity equal to patience. Therefore, one should cultivate patience with effort through various means.14 In the remainder of this chapter, Śāntideva offers the reader various methods, along with reasons and arguments to cultivate patience and avoid or remove anger. So, for example, he writes, If it is the nature of fools to bring misfortune to others, I should possess no anger toward them since I have none toward fire for burning. Or else hatred is adventitious, and beings are pleasant by nature. Since I possess no anger toward the sky when it contains acrid smoke, I should have no anger toward them. One gets angry at the thrower and not the object when someone has thrown something like a stick at them. Since the thrower was also set in motion by hate, it would be better for me to hate the hatred.15 Here Śāntideva makes a number of interesting arguments. Since fools naturally cause distress, getting angry at them is like getting angry at fire for burning. Then he flips this argument around and says that this fault (causing distress) could be adventitious, since beings are by nature pleasant. Therefore, getting angry at someone who is not bad or foolish by nature is like getting angry at the 67

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sky for being filled with acrid smoke. The sky is naturally clear, and smoke is only a momentarily (adventitious) occurrence, which is no fault of the sky. Then, he points out that the root cause of a person’s hostility is actually hatred; therefore, in the same way we don’t blame the stick that hits us, but the person throwing the stick, so we should hate the hatred in the person that caused the harm and not the person. By claiming that one should hate the hatred, Śāntideva implies that our anger is misdirected, and that hatred (including our own) is the true enemy. Following these points, Śāntideva puts forward additional arguments based on karma: Previously, I also inflicted such pain on sentient beings. Therefore, this is only fitting for me, who has brought misfortune to others.16 Here Śāntideva argues that since he has accumulated negative karma from harming living beings, the harm caused to him is the karmic result of these actions, and therefore, he should not get angry at those inflicting harm on him. This argument sounds dangerously like blaming the victim. However, recall that Śāntideva is applying this reasoning as a way to avoid getting angry. For him anger and hatred are the true enemies because they destroy one’s spiritual progress and generate bad karma. Following on with this logic, he asserts, Beings who injure me are only impelled by my karma. Because of this they descend to the hells. So, is it not I who destroys them? Using them to practice patience, my wickedness is greatly diminished. But through me, they descend to the hells where the torments are long-lasting. In truth, I am a harm to them, and they are a help to me. Why then, mischievous mind, having reversed things, do you become enraged?17 Here we see the intriguing argument that since his enemies will go to the hell realms for harming him, and his wickedness will decrease from practicing patience, Śāntideva is actually harming his enemies and they are helping him! He then addressed his “mischievous mind” and asks it the rhetorical question as to why it has things the wrong way around and becomes angry at his enemies. The logical endpoint to this thinking Śāntideva sums up with this verse, Therefore, because he is a helper on my course to awakening, I should long for an enemy like a treasure acquired without effort appearing in my home.18 For Śāntideva, the ideal attitude one should hold toward even those that harm you is to wish them the greatest possible benefit. Thus, in his Compendium of Training, he cites the Mahāyāna text, Union of Father and Son (Pitāputra-samāgama), wherein the Christlike bodhisattva makes the prayer, “…may they who curse me, who afflict me, who torment me, tear me with knives until they utterly uproot me from my life, all partake of full enlightenment…” (Bendall and Rouse 1971: 178).

3. Conclusion So, what is forgiveness in Buddhism? After covering so much historical and doctrinal ground in our inquiry, I would say in its simplest sense forgiveness in Buddhism is about the restoration of “right relationship” intimately connected to the act of confession and the letting go 68

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of anger required by the practice of patience toward others. Monastic confession and the later ­public c­ onfessions in China serve an important social function in maintaining monastic purity and the right relationship among the members of the Buddhist community (both lay and monastic). Though repentance might be required for infractions of monastic discipline, forgiveness remains entirely the prerogative of other members of the community. However, the virtue of khanti/k ṣānti has always been important in Buddhism as a way of releasing anger and overcoming the defilement of hatred. Through releasing anger, the good Buddhist restores the right kinds of relationships with others (in the sense that these relationships become karmically beneficial and no longer harmful), prevents the acquisition of negative karma that may result from acting on anger and hatred, and advances on the Buddhist path to better rebirth and ultimately nirvana. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, confession to all the Buddhas and bodhisattvas re-establishes the right relationship with these higher powers, forges a beneficial karmic link to them, and helps purify and prevent future negative karma. Forgiveness from the Buddhas and bodhisattva is automatic in sincere confession due to these beings’ infinite compassion (in a similar way to how God is believed to forgive sinners in Christianity). Also, the perfection of patience (k ṣānti-pāramitā) takes on added significance in the Mahāyāna tradition as one of the six (or ten) perfections required by a bodhisattva to attain Buddhahood. Here it is understood as the opposite of anger and hatred, which were deemed catastrophic to the bodhisattva’s path. Paradoxically, the actual perfection of patience requires no act of forgiveness at all since anger never even arises in the mind of the advanced bodhisattva or Buddha. However, another way of understanding this is that forgiveness spontaneously flows out of the heart of such enlightened beings in the same way Christians believe it does out of the omnibenevolent nature of God. However, for those still progressing on the bodhisattva’s path, the importance of overcoming anger and hatred through forgiveness is crucial. This is well exemplified by Śāntideva’s poetry, which reflects profound psychological insights into the harms caused by anger and a passionate commitment to the patience, love, and compassion needed to become a fully enlightened Buddha.

Notes 1 One of the earliest sources of Indian Buddhism we possess is the Pā li Canon of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition. Pā li is a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is historically related to Sanskrit. When introducing a new Buddhist concept, I will generally supply both the Pā li and Sanskrit words, but thereafter use either an English translation of the term or the Sanskrit. 2 However, not all contemporary Buddhists are sanguine about the adoption of forgiveness discourse to Buddhism (see, for example, Mcleod 2017). 3 Boleyn-Fitzgerald’s (2002: 486) view is inspired in part by the contemporary Buddhist meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. 4 khant ī parama ṁ tapo titikkhā, nibbā na ṁ parama ṁ vadanti buddhā, na hi pabbajito par ūpaghāt ī, sama ṇo hoti para ṁ vihe ṭhayanto. (Dhammapada 184). My translation. Text from von Hinüber and ­Norman (1995). 5 akkosa ṁ vadhabandhañ-ca adu ṭṭho yo titikkhati, khant ībala ṁ balā nīka ṁ, tam-aha ṁ brūmi brāhma ṇa ṁ. (Dhammapada 399). My translation. Text from von Hinüber and Norman (1995). 6 The Mahā prajñ ā pāramitā śā stra (second century CE) chapter XIV states there are two kinds of patience (k ṣā nti): (1) the patience toward beings (sattvak ṣā nti) and (2) the patience toward the Dharma (dharmak ṣā nti). See Wisdom Library (2021), “Kshanti, K ṣānti: 18 Definitions.” Access from https://www. wisdomlib.org/definition/kshanti; and Wright (2009: 2). 7 For a translation of the Jātaka, see Cowell (1973). For a synoptic study, see Appleton (2010). 8 For an analysis of this story, see MacQueen (1981). For a recent discussion, see Ubeysekara (2020). For an accessible translation of this story, see Jathaka Katha (2021).

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D.E. Osto 9 The literature in this area is vast. For a recent look at the state of the field of early Mah āyā na, see H ­ arrison (2018). 10 The Three Jewels refer to the Buddha, his Teaching (Dharma), and the Buddhist Community (sa ṅgha). 11 The Guides referred to here are the Buddhas. 12 vijñāpayāmi sa ṃbuddhān sarvadik ṣu vyavasthitān mahākāru ṇikā ṃścāpi bodhisattvānk ṛtāñjaliḥ // Bca_2.27 anādimati sa ṃsāre janmanyatraiva vā puna ḥ yanmayā paśunā pāpa ṃ k ṛta ṃ kāritameva vā // Bca_2.28 yaccānumodita ṃ ki ṃcid ātmaghātāya mohata ḥ tadatyaya ṃ deśayāmi paścāttāpena tāpita ḥ // Bca_2.29 ratnatraye ‘pakāro yo mātāpit ṛṣu vā mayā guru ṣvanye ṣu vā k ṣepāt kāyavāgbuddhibhiḥ k ṛta ḥ // Bca_2.30 anekado ṣadu ṣṭena mayā pāpena nāyakā ḥ yatk ṛta ṃ dāru ṇa ṃ pāpa ṃ tatsarva ṃ deśayāmyaham // Bca_2.31 Sanskrit text from Mahoney (2020). My translation. 13 This is another epithet for Buddhas meaning “Well-Gone Ones.” 14 sarvametatsucarita ṃ dāna ṃ sugatapūjanam k ṛta ṃ kalpasahasrairyat pratigha ḥ pratihanti tat // Bca_6.1 na ca dve ṣasama ṃ pāpa ṃ na ca k ṣāntisama ṃ tapa ḥ tasmāt k ṣānti ṃ prayatnena bhāvayedvividhairnayaiḥ // Bca_6.2 15 yadi svabhāvo bālānā ṃ paropadravakāritā te ṣu kopo na yukto me yathāgnau dahanātmake // Bca_6.39 atha do ṣo ‘yamāgantu ḥ sattvā ḥ prak ṛtipeśalā ḥ yathāpyayuktastatkopa ḥ ka ṭudhūme yathāmbare // Bca_6.40 mukhya ṃ da ṇḍādika ṃ hitvā prerake yadi kupyate dve ṣe ṇa prerita ḥ so ‘pi dve ṣe dve ṣo ‘stu me varam // Bca_6.41 16 mayāpi pūrva ṃ sattvānām īd ṛśyeva vyathā k ṛtā tasmānme yuktamevaitat sattvopadravakāri ṇa ḥ // Bca_6.42. Mahoney (2020). My translation. 17 matkarmacoditā eva jātā mayyapakāri ṇa ḥ yena yāsyanti narakān mayaivāmī hatā nanu // Bca_6.47 etānāśritya me pāpa ṃ k ṣīyate k ṣamato bahu māmāśritya tu yāntyete narakān dīrghavedanān // Bca_6.48 ahamevāpakārye ṣā ṃ mamaite copakāri ṇa ḥ kasmādviparyaya ṃ k ṛtvā khalaceta ḥ prakupyasi //  Bca_6.49. Mahoney (2020). My translation. 18 aśramopārjitastasmād *g ṛhe nidhirivotthita ḥ bodhicaryāsahāyatvāt sp ṛha ṇīyo ripurmama //  Bca_6.107. I have emended n ṛhe (a misprint?) in the text to g ṛhe, “in (my) home.” Mahoney (2020). My translation.

References Appleton, Naomi. 2010. Jātaka Stories in Theravāda Buddhism: Narrating the Bodhisatta Path. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Bendall, Cecil and W. H. D. Rouse, trans. 1971. Śik ṣa Samuccaya: A Compendium of Buddhist Doctrine Complied by Śāntideva Chiefly from Earlier Mahāyāna Sūtras, Second Edition. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Patrick. 2002. “What Should ‘Forgiveness’ Mean?” Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (4): 483–98. Chappell, David W. 2019. “Repentance and Confession.” Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Access from https://www. encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/repentance-and-confession. Collins, Steven. 2010. Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowell, E.B. (ed.). 1973. Jātaka: Or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births. 2 Volumes. Delhi: Cosmo. Dayal, Har. 1932. The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, ­Trubner & Co. Garfield, Jay L. 1995. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (translation and commentary). New York: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Paul. 2018. Setting Out on the Great Way: Essays on Early Mahāyāna Buddhism. Sheffield: Equinox. Harvey, Peter. 1990. An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jathaka Katha. 2021. 305 Khantivada Jataka. Access on 15 May 2021, from http://jathakakatha.lk/­ english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=569:305-khantivadi-jataka&catid=37: kindness&Itemid=102. Kamata, Shigeo. 1986. Chūgoku no Bukkyō girei (Chinese Buddhist Ceremonies). Tokyo: Daizo shuppan. MacQueen, Graeme. 1981. “The Conflict between External and Internal Mastery: An Analysis of the ‘Khantivādi Jātaka’.” History of Religions 20.3 (Feb): 242–52. Mahoney, Richard. 2020. Śāntideva: Bodhicaryāvatāra. Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages (GRETIL), SUB Göttingen. Accessed on 15 May 2021, from http://gretil.sub.uni-­goettingen. de/gretil.html#RLBuddh. McDonald, Michelle. 2004. “Finding Patience: How to survive a traffic jam—on the road, or in the heart.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Accessed from https://tricycle.org/magazine/finding-patience/. Mcleod, Ken. 2017. “Forgiveness is Not Buddhist.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Access on 16 May 2021, from https://tricycle.org/magazine/forgiveness-not-buddhist/. O’Brien, Barbara. 2018. “Ksanti Paramita: Perfection of Patience.” Learning Religions. Accessed from https:// www.learnreligions.com/ksanti-paramita-perfection-of-patience-449609.

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Forgiveness, Patience, and Confession in Buddhism Osto, Douglas. 2010. “A New Translation of the Bhadracarī with Introduction and Notes.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 12.2 (December 2010): 1–21. Teiser, Stephen. 2017. “Curing with Karma and Confession: Two Short Liturgies from Dunhuang.” In Buddhism and Medicine. Edited by C. Pierce Salguero. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 322–35. Thānissaro Bhikkhu (trans.) 2021. “The Simile of the Saw: Kakacūpama Sutta (MN 21).” Accessed on 6 April 2021, from https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN21.html. Ubeysekara, A. 2020. “Patience (khanthi) in Theravada Buddhism.” Accessed on 15 May 2021, from https:// drarisworld.wordpress.com/2020/09/20/patience-khanti-in-theravada-buddhism/. von Hinüber, O. and K.R. Norman. 1995. Dhammapada. London: Pali Text Society. Accessed on 13 May 2021, from http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/2_pali/1_tipit/2_sut/5_khudd/dhampdou.htm. Williams, Paul. 2009. Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Second Edition. New York: Routledge. Wisdom Library. 2021. “Kshanti, K ṣ ānti: 18 Definitions.” Access on 15 May 2021, from https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/kshanti. Wright, Dale. 2009. “The Perfection of Tolerance.” In The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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PART II

Historic Treatments

6 FORGIVENESS IN CLASSICAL GREECE Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Their Background Culture Sophie Grace Chappell 1. “This divine precept to forgive injuries and love our enemies”, writes Bishop Butler (1726: preface, para.34), “tho’ to be met with in Gentile moralists, yet is in a peculiar sense a precept of Christianity; as our Saviour has insisted more upon it than upon any other single virtue”. If anything, Butler here seems to understate the contrast between Christianity and “Gentile moralists”, i.e. the non-Christian, and especially the ancient Greek, classical tradition of ethics. For the Christian ethical tradition is centred upon a thick ethical concept1 of forgiveness that is essentially narrative in structure, and essentially contrastive in its characterisation. Christian forgiveness or redemption is a story of spiritual and psychic transformation, from complete lostness and wickedness to complete salvation and sanctification. It is a story about how, through God’s freely given kindness, some wretch was once lost, but now is found; was blind, but now sees. To allude to Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son, it is a story about the difference between being, by one’s own choice, an outcast and a downcast, eating husks in a pig-sty, and being a rich man’s beloved son and heir, wreathed and feted at a homecoming feast. Or again there is the story of Zacchaeus, the stature-challenged tax collector (Luke 19.1–10); the tales of how Matthew (Matthew 9.9–13) and Peter ( John 1.35–42, John 21.15–19) came to be disciples; and the Damascus road conversion of Saul/Paul (Acts 9). Preceding these Christian narratives, there are the many narratives of the Hebrew Bible where a straying and unfaithful people turn back in repentance to their God, who then restores them: see, for example, Nehemiah, 2 Chronicles 29 (King Hezekiah’s reforms), 2 Chronicles 34 (King Josiah’s reforms), and the religious-­ political polemics of many of the prophets’ books, e.g. Jeremiah 11–12, Ezekiel 36, and much of Isaiah and Zechariah. And what, on this Judaeo-Christian conception, is actually involved in the forgiving of sins?2 It is important to remember that English translations of the New Testament tend to create a misleading impression of lexical and therefore conceptual uniformity about “forgiveness”. In the canonical English version, the King James Bible of 1611, and in every successor translation known to me, the New Testament has the single verb “forgive” (and noun “forgiveness”) standing for at least two different Greek verbs, aphiemi (noun aphesis, “removal” or “cancellation”) and kharizomai (noun kharis, “grace”), with a third verb, apoluw (noun apolysis, “dissolution”), sometimes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-10

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appearing too. Now aphiemi means simply “take away”, like tollere in Latin. And apoluw means, roughly, “dissolve”, and seems to be little more than a verbal alternative to aphiemi. But kharizomai means “do a favour to”, “treat kindly”. In fact, despite all those translators, kharizomai does not necessarily mean forgive at all: it means “be gracious to” (kharis, grace), and forgiving someone is only one way to be gracious to someone. The differences between kharizomai and the other two forgiveness verbs seem crucial. It is one thing for me to “forgive” someone who does me wrong, in the sense of being gracious or kind towards them. It is quite another for me to forgive someone, in the sense of taking away or dissolving their wrongdoing. Grace and kindness towards each other when we get things wrong are, fortunately, commonplace in ordinary human life. But one might say that the power to take sins away, to cancel them or dissolve them, to make it as if they had not been committed in the first place, would have to be a miraculous power. Doing that might seem to involve altering the past, or the moral valence of the past; at the very least it seems to involve altering my own moral beliefs about, or stance towards, what is after all still the same misdeed. It is hard to see how anyone but God could do anything like that, and do it without some kind of injustice, or falsification of the moral record, or contradiction of his own previous verdicts.3 It is not for nothing that when Jesus says to a man whom he heals, “Your sins are forgiven”, the Pharisees’ response is to protest that “Only God can say that” (Luke 5.21).4 Nonetheless, this idea of the cancellation of sin is central to the Christian narrative-contrastive concept of forgiveness. God not only shows us grace and kindness (kharizomai) in respect of our sins; he expresses that grace and kindness by actually cancelling those sins (aphiemi). And so, in the Christian narrative of forgiveness, we go by God’s grace from one contrastive extreme to the other: from the depths of sinful depravity, of “lostness in our sins” (Ephesians 2.1), to the heights of redemption in the “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5.17). Compare here the history of forgiveness narrated by David Konstan (2010), in his enthralling and already-classic historical study Before Forgiveness. He argues that our modern notion of forgiveness has its sources neither in classical Greek and Roman ethical thought, nor in the mainstream Judaeo-Christian tradition, but rather in the time of Kant or not long before—the time, that is, when the autonomous secular individual became culturally central. I have argued in Chappell 1995, and will continue to argue here, that our conception of forgiveness goes together with a conception of clear-eyed wrongdoing that is canonically formulated in the writings of St Augustine (following and developing St Paul in Romans 7.15–20). If I am right, then something like our conception of forgiveness has, pace Konstan (2010), been around a lot longer than just since the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century Enlightenment. However, I suspect that Konstan is correct that until then the forgiver-forgivee relationship, at least as regards the taking away of sin, was paradigmatically the one between believer and God. Before that time, there was little or no thought that such a relationship was possible between two equal citizens in a kingdom (or indeed republic) of ends: as above, only God (or by extension his delegated agents in the church) could forgive sin in the sense of taking it away, and it was an exercise of miraculous power to do so. No doubt, the demythologising and bringing down to earth of this alleged power, not just to be gracious about sins, but to take them away, was, as Konstan argues, an effect of secularisation. In the Christian tradition that we have inherited, then, there is a two-stranded conception of forgiveness: forgiveness is both kindness and grace about wrongdoing, and also cancellation of wrongdoing. Moreover, the focal Augustinian articulation of this tradition works with a very special (and especially problematic) conception of what the wrongdoing is that the forgiver forgives: more about that below. None of these ideas are central to the classical Greek ethical tradition. Most of them are not there at all. In pagan ancient-Greek ethics, there is not much evidence of any concept of 76

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forgiveness.5 The nearest approach is that there is some idea of gracious kindness towards those who do us wrong. But in its pagan Greek version, this does not involve any contrastive narrative of moral or spiritual conversion or transformation; above all, there is in pagan Greek ethics no notion at all of the kind of wrongdoing that at least Augustinian Christianity later came to focus on. I explain these claims further in Section 2.

2. The most obvious place in ancient Greek ethics to look for evidence of forgiveness is, perhaps, the teaching of Socrates, insofar as we can access that (primarily via Plato). It is true—this is perhaps what Bishop Butler has in mind in my opening quotation—that Plato’s Socrates tells us to do good to our enemies as well as to our friends (Crito 47c-49d, Republic 331e-336a), that we should not return evil for evil (Crito 49c), and that it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice (Gorgias 469a-479e). These injunctions certainly sound like Christ’s, and/or Christian, teachings: compare, in particular, Matthew 5:38–48, Luke 6:27–36. However, we should notice what Socrates does not say in these passages of Plato. Socrates does say that we should harm nobody and do injustice to nobody, irrespective of whether they are friends or enemies. But he does not say that we should love our enemies. Socrates does say that we should have a steady disposition of benevolence, or at least non-malevolence, to all people whatever, both friends and enemies. But the disposition that Socrates commends is a steady one: there is no thought of the dramatic narratives of transformation or conversion of disposition that are implied by the Christian concept of forgiveness and its companion-notion, the thick concept of repentance, and which, as above, we find repeatedly in the New Testament. Nor does Plato’s account of Socrates give us any examples of such forgiveness narratives. We see the same sharp contrast with the Judaeo-Christian tradition when we consider the long-established commonplace of treating Socrates as a Hellenic analogue of Jesus: like him a loving, prophetic, and peaceful martyr, a just innocent who accepts death—and only-posthumous vindication—as the price of his ideals and principles. Throughout his teaching ministry, Jesus tells his followers repeatedly to forgive their enemies (Mark 11.25, Matthew 5.44, 6.14–15, 7.2, 18.15–22, 18.34–35; Luke 6.37, 17.3–4). Even on the cross, Jesus asks his heavenly Father to forgive his executioners (Luke 23.34). In the Christian tradition begun, shared, and spread across and beyond the Mediterranean world by Jesus’ followers, the same exhortation to them to forgive each other and their enemies (mainly, I suggest, in the kharizomai sense, the aphiemi sense being seen as God’s prerogative, except insofar as that prerogative is delegated to the church in Matthew 18.18) is heard again and again: Ephesians 4.31–32, Colossians 3.13, 2 Corinthians 2.10. The centrality to the new Christian faith of our receiving forgiveness and transformation as the gift of God’s grace is, if anything, given even stronger emphasis: Matthew 26.28, John 1.29, Acts 2.38, 3.19, Romans 5.10, 8.1, 12.20, Ephesians 1.7, Colossians 1.14–20, 2.13, Hebrews 8.12, 10.17, 1 John 1.9, 2.12, Revelation 1.1–20. This stress on forgiveness is strikingly missing from the narrative that is supposed to be analogous to the Passion, namely the narrative of Socrates’ trial and execution. Consider here the famous passage from the end of the Phaedo where Socrates’ hemlock is brought in (116b-d), the prison guard who brings it expresses his distress at the whole business, and Socrates responds with kindly geniality. It is crucial to see that this passage is not a narrative of forgiveness. By that I do not just mean that the passage is not about the Christian concept of forgiveness; I mean that the passage is not about forgiveness at all. The officer of the Eleven does not accept that he is to blame for Socrates’ death and ask Socrates to forgive him. Rather, he says that someone else is to blame, and that Socrates knows it and is justifiably angry with them, not with the officer. What the officer asks for is not 77

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forgiveness, the lifting of resentment or of condemnation for an act responsibly done, but exculpation, recognition that it was not an act responsibly done. Moreover, Socrates does not forgive him. The officer asks him, rather, to exculpate, and Socrates’ response is indeed to exculpate: he responds like he has nothing to forgive the officer. And despite the officer’s suggestion that Socrates is not angry with him, but with those who are to blame, Socrates shows no sign of blaming or resenting anyone else either. Nor do we get any sign of that in the Crito, where Socrates never even considers the monstrous injustice that has been done to him, let alone the question of whether he should forgive it. Socrates’ only concern there is to ensure that he himself does no injustice to anyone—and he argues that it is an injustice to disobey a legally obtained verdict, and so that it would be unjust for him to run away from execution—despite the fact that such evasion seems to have been commonplace in his time. Of course, Socrates certainly displays what we might call forgivingness. Even in the face of an undeserved and humiliating death Socrates is equable, humorous, impartially benign and indeed graciously kind to his accusers, to their mob of ignorant and prejudiced jurors, and to his jailer; just as he is to his friends and pupils—maybe even to his womenfolk, though they are dismissed from view with startling rapidity (Phaedo 60a, 117d). But just as, in the Christian tradition, it is one thing to be kind and gracious to those who do me wrong (kharizomai), and another thing to take their wrongs against me to be cancelled or taken away (aphiemi), so likewise Socrates’ being forgiving towards those who mistreat him is a different thing from Socrates’ forgiving them. The latter he does not do. For to say that Socrates forgives his enemies would put us back in a narrative-contrastive framework. It would imply, roughly, that Socrates had, at some prior time, an attitude of condemnation or judgment towards those who do him wrong, which attitude he withdraws at some later time, perhaps because the malefactors ask him to or otherwise show repentance or remorse for their earlier misdeeds. But Socrates’ moral stance towards those who mistreat him is entirely unconditional on their moral stance towards him. It is, as above, a steady and unwavering benevolence, quite irrespective of whatever malevolence, confusion, or misdirected would-be “righteousness” they may at any time weaponise against him. “The philosopher”, says Theaetetus 174d, as part of a verbal portrait of someone strikingly like Socrates, “has nothing of his own to contribute to rhetorical denunciations of anyone, because he knows no evil of anyone; for he has never cared about that sort of thing”.

3. We do not have to go very deep to see why Socrates takes forgivingness in this sense to be an important ethical value and thinks that there is in truth no evil to be known of anyone; whereas forgiveness in the Judaeo-Christian narrative-contrastive sense, both gracious kindness about and also the moral cancellation of people’s genuinely evil past acts and dispositions, is never quite what is important to him. In key part, the explanation lies in a doctrine that is central for Socrates, and only marginally less central for Plato and Aristotle: the doctrine that “no one does wrong willingly” (Protagoras 358d, Gorgias 467c-468c, 509e). Forgivingness is the right general attitude, because vice is ignorance (Meno 77c-78b). Each of us wants to be happy, not miserable, and live well, not badly. But desiring harm, and desiring bad things, means desiring to be miserable and to live badly. So no one desires bad things as such: they desire them only because they falsely believe them to be good things. So no one does wrong (or bad) things willingly, in the sense that no one chooses them under that description; the root of all “bad action” is false belief about which descriptions apply to what. Thus, in one sense of an ambiguous word, false belief is ignorance: within the genus not believing what is true, false belief is the species believing what is not true. Furthermore, since on 78

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Socrates’ view wrongdoing always involves false belief, we may infer from one “Socratic paradox” to another: from “No one does wrong willingly” to “Vice is ignorance”. Hence there is nothing to be responsible for, nothing to blame, and nothing to forgive, except ignorance in the sense just defined. But as Socrates propounds the thesis that “No one does wrong willingly” in the Meno, Protagoras, and Gorgias, there is no obvious reason why we should say that anyone is responsible for their ignorance. Indeed, the whole idea of explaining how anyone can ever be responsible for doing bad things begins to seem threatened. Perhaps we could say, with Socrates at Meno 86b-c, that it is a matter of virtue—of courage and industriousness—to do what we can to acquire knowledge and wisdom, and shed ignorance and folly. (One point of the Theaetetus is certainly to equate knowledge with wisdom and ignorance with folly: see e.g. 147d7 and cp. Meno 98d-e.) So it is a matter of courage and industry to seek knowledge and/or wisdom: “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom” (Proverbs 4.7). In which case, the explanation of failures to seek knowledge must lie in the opposite vices— cowardice and laziness. But then, how are we to explain the presence of these vices, if no one goes wrong except through ignorance? The explanation must itself lie in a further instance of ignorance. Here we find no explanation of how anyone can be responsible for wrongdoing—only a regress of non-explanation. It is a fairly standard line in the scholarly literature on Plato on akrasia to say that Plato rejects these Socratic paradoxes. It is commonly claimed that in the Republic in particular, Plato finds a way of “accounting for akrasia”—that is, for explaining how someone can willingly and knowingly choose what they take to be wrong. The idea is that Plato allows for this possibility by admitting divisions within the soul: see e.g. Republic 430e-431a and cp. Phaedrus 246a-b.6 The main question to consider here is whether this move makes any more room for wrongdoing that involves responsibility, culpability. To say it again: unless it does, Plato’s view has no need for the notion of forgiveness strictly speaking. Unless it does, his is a view about exculpation, about the accepting of a reason why someone was not fully responsible for a bad thing that they did, not about forgiveness in the sense of accepting someone’s apology for doing something bad that they were fully responsible for. But there seems little reason to think that the partition of the soul does make room for responsibility in this sense. In the Republic picture, what happens to someone whose soul is disordered is that in them logos, Reason, is overwhelmed by the thumos (Spirit) or the epithumiai (Passions), or both. (Cp. Laws 644d-645b for the rather similar image of the puppet who can be pulled either by the “noble, flexible, and golden” strings of virtue and reason, or by the “violent, rigid, iron” strings of the vices.) The key words here are violent and overwhelmed: when they are not enlightened by the wisdom that comes from contemplating the Form of the Good, the lower parts of the divided soul sometimes—perhaps most of the time—compel the reasoning part of it to act in line with them. This is not a picture in which someone fully responsibly chooses to do what they believe to be wrong, and therefore may seek to be forgiven for it. It is a picture in which choices of what is understood to be wrong are compelled, and therefore no more willingly made than they are for Socrates, for whom such choices are made in ignorance. Certainly the picture of the psyche that we get in the Republic (especially Book 4), Phaedrus (245c-249d), Timaeus (86b-87b), Sophist (228b), and Laws (863e-864b) is as usually presented a more complex one than that found in the “Socratic” dialogues. Yet the point of the complexities never seems to be to deny the “Socratic paradox” that “no one does wrong willingly”; to the contrary, this principle is restated verbatim even as late as the Laws (731c). In the Platonic picture, it is true that an agent can end up doing what the agent him-/herself believes to be wrong. But that is just to say that in Plato compulsion replaces ignorance as the factor that explains the choice of what is known to be wrong. For compulsion too is a condition that undermines voluntariness, just as surely as ignorance does. But if voluntariness is undermined, then so is responsibility; and where 79

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there is no responsibility for wrongdoing, there is room for exculpation and excuse, but not, at least in the central sense of the word, for forgiveness. As a moral about Plato, this conclusion is reinforced by the striking fact that Plato—like many ancient Greeks, especially those influenced, as he apparently was, by Pythagoreanism—believes in reincarnation, and with it in a doctrine much closer to what Buddhists call karma than to anything like the Judaeo-Christian notion of forgiveness and redemption. In the myth of Er that concludes the Republic (614a-621d), there is—just as in Buddhism and Hinduism—an afterlife reckoning for the misdeeds that people commit in their present incarnations; moreover, your deeds in the present life determine your position on “the great chain of being” in the next life. What there is not is any question of forgiveness or redemption in the Judaeo-Christian sense. The parallel with the Indian religions is striking: “There is no grace in the operation of karma, just as there is no grace in the operation of gravity. The only way to stop the evolution of reactive patterns is to change our relationship with those patterns” (MacLeod 2017). There is (at least in this sense) no grace in Plato either. There is, in the myth of Er, no hint or suggestion that sins will, in the language of the Bible, simply be “taken away” or “forgotten” or “washed clean” or “removed”. On the contrary, every misdeed has its price. And that price is both high—it is a tenfold penalty, says Plato—and inevitably paid (Republic 615a-c). In Platonic justice there are no amnesties, only expiation; there is no forgiveness, only forgivingness. There is a benevolent willingness to understand how it is that people cannot help doing bad things, because they are ignorant or irrational, or are overwhelmed by untamed or negative forces within them. But there is no approach to the Christian idea that someone might first be knowingly and intentionally committed to doing evil, then repent of this commitment, replace it with a commitment to the good, and, by being forgiven, be absolved of guilt for the earlier negative commitment. In this sense, forgiveness is not even on Socrates’ or Plato’s ethical map.

4. Nor on Aristotle’s. Aristotle has neither the word nor the concept of forgiveness: not in the Christian tradition’s narrative-contrastive sense, as delineated in section 1; and not really in any looser sense either. The commonest most relevant word in Aristotle’s writings is συγγνώμη. But “forgiveness” is not what συγγνώμη means. What it means is, as LSJ puts it, “fellow-feeling, forbearance, lenient judgment, allowance”, and so also “judg[ing] kindly, excuse, pardon” (Liddell, Scott and Jones 1940). (The Broadie and Rowe translation of 1109b32 uses “feel sympathy with”; Rackham’s Loeb translation has “condone”.) In fact συγγνώμη in the Nicomachean Ethics—the word occurs seven times, with a further six occurrences of cognates—means exactly what we might expect it to mean, given its composition from συν and γνώμη: it means what we mean in English by being understanding. So Aristotle defines συγγνώμη in passing at 1143a23–24, during his discussion of γνώ μη, as “a right-judging understanding of what is appropriate”, apparently meaning “what is an appropriate reaction to someone else’s fault or misdeed”—roughly speaking, how angry one should be about it. There are close and obvious connections here with Aristotle’s interesting discussion in NE 4.5 of the virtue that he calls praotes, mildness, which is a mean for the emotion of anger. (Praos is one of Socrates’ words of praise for the jailer, as quoted above from Phaedo 116b-d. The word occurs in the New Testament too, where, apart from Matthew 5.5, it is usually a Pauline word: 2 Corinthians 10.1, Galatians 5.23, Ephesians 4.2, Colossians 3.12, 1 Timothy 6.11. But in Paul’s thought praotes is not a mean of anything; it is a Christ-like extreme of gentleness and meekness.) At NE 1126a2 Aristotle tells us that the person with the virtue of praotes is syngnwmonikos. Here too we should apply the same distinction that I have already made about Socrates: this is not about forgiveness but 80

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about forgivingness. Indeed it is about a quality that in English—for reasons that go back to the NE via Cicero—we sometimes call magnanimity, or more colloquially being “big enough” to overlook a slight or get past a grudge. The basic point is not that I forgive you your misdeed, your injury done to me, because my heart is full of Christian love towards you. It is that I am untouched by your misdeed, because I am above being affected by such trivial things. At 1125a3 Aristotle has already enunciated this point as a thought about megalopsychia: “it is not a great-spirited person’s part to keep a record of other people’s deeds, especially not their misdeeds; but rather to overlook them (paroran)”. To overlook other people’s misdeeds is, obviously, not to forgive them; rather, it is to think them unworthy of my attention. That is in line with the rest of what we hear about the character and personality of the megalopsychos, who, so far as he can, simply regards bad people as beneath him. This is perhaps Socrates’ attitude to his accusers, too: it would help to explain his tendency to mock them (see e.g. Meno 90b-95a, where Socrates exposes and ridicules Anytus). It is certainly a mindset familiar from Stoicism, and indeed from Buddhism, where the consistent message is that bad people, and bad things, are in truth too insignificant to affect a good person in any real way at all. Aristotle also discusses praotes in Rhetoric 2.3, 1380a1 ff., where his general concern is the functioning of the passions relevant to oratory, and his particular question is how anger is roused or abated. In this discussion—where we should not take it for granted that the word is being used in precisely the same sense as in the Ethics—praotes is what results after a virtuous and reasonable calming-down of anger has been effected by competent oratory. One way praotes arises is because we realise that something has been done involuntarily (akousiws). Another way is when people admit (homologousi) that they have done something wrong, and are sorry for it (metamelomenois): “for then we cease from anger, as if we had a punishment for the wrongdoing in their pain at what they have done” (1380a5; for homolegein as “admit”, and the slightly different word metanoia for “repentance”, cp. Matthew 3.2–6). But here too, the key point is not that I, the victim of some wrong that you have done, choose out of love to forgive you when you repent of your wrongdoing. The point is rather that it is a satisfaction for me to see you humbled (Rhetoric 1380a6–7). Repentance (metameleia) involves a loss of status, and a recognition that I have gone wrong and that because of my going wrong someone else is now, in a new respect, superior to me; it is essentially humiliating. Here we may find some echoes of the Judaeo-Christian narrative-contrastive account of forgiveness, which certainly involves the thought that repentance involves humbling oneself, and that being so humbled is a good thing. (Tapeinophrosyne and cognates regularly mean “humility” in the New Testament (see e.g. Luke 14.11, Matthew 23.12, Ephesians 4.2, Colossians 3.12, 1 Peter 5.5), but on the rare occasions when Plato and Aristotle use words with this root, the sense is something more like “humiliation”, “abasement”, or even “debasement”: Plato, Lysis 210e, Phaedrus 254e; Aristotle, NE 1124b2, 1125a2.7) Certainly it is interesting to see this deployment of Aristotle’s notion of metameleia, a word that means indifferently any kind of ethical disowning of a past deed or attitude—so any of (what we distinguish as) remorse, regret, and repentance (cp. NE 1110b19–23, 1111a21, 1150a21, 1150b29–30, 1166b25). Overall, however, both here and elsewhere in Aristotle, the bottom line is clear that Aristotle is talking about exculpation more than about forgiveness strictly so-called, and about the fair adjustment and regulation of social hierarchies in the light of bad deeds, rather than about loving reconciliation between equals. If a single thought about the topic is basic for him, it is that a good person should be above resentment, anger, and bitterness; to be resentful or unforgiving or grudge-filled is petty. And this is why, to say it again, Aristotle’s key thick concept in this area is not forgiveness but syngnwme: “being understanding” of how easily human affairs can go wrong, and reacting to others’ mistakes not with bitterness or an urge for revenge, but with an urbane, sympathetic, and humane mildness of temper. 81

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On this evidence, then, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle took it to be right and natural that one should lose and concede political, social, and ethical status when one admits that one made a mistake; and they valued amiability (NE 4.4), tolerance and sympathetic understanding, patient benevolence, and (in our sense) magnanimity—dispositions that overlook and minimise slights and injuries, and sometimes perhaps even claim that they are not truly injuries at all, first because, on the offender’s side, “no one does wrong willingly”, and second because, on the side of the person offended against, “nothing can harm the man of virtue”.

5. We may say then that pagan Greek ethical thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had a thick ethical concept of forgivingness. What they did not have was our Judaeo-Christian narrativecontrastive concept of forgiveness, a concept that I illustrated in Section 1 by referring to what I take to be its main historical source, the New Testament, where we find plentiful examples of people whose sins are forgiven, in the sense of being taken away, by a God who comes forgivingly to them in gracious kindness. As before, if there is a point of contact between pagan Greek thought and Judaeo-Christian thought about forgiveness and related concepts, it is in this notion of forgiveness as gracious kindness (kharis) that we may find it; but also as before, for the Christian tradition all notions of forgiveness are narrative and contrastive—they tell stories about journeys from moral benightment into “God’s marvellous light” (1 Peter 2.9); and that is not so in pagan Greek thought. What I want to point out next is that there is something deeply problematic about at least some versions of the Christian concept of forgiveness, as we have inherited it today. It is particularly Augustine’s versions of forgiveness and related concepts that are in play here.8 I shall register that fact by talking freely from here on about the Augustinian concept of forgiveness, repentance, and so on. The central problem that I have in mind about the Augustinian concept of forgiveness is not far from the surface in this familiar liturgical prayer of penitence from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind In Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen. A prayer like this prompts two questions for the penitent who offers them. First, if that is really where you were then, how come you have got here now? And second, if you are really here now, how come you were ever there? On this conception of penitence, what I am asking for forgiveness for is that, at the time I committed my sin, I was acting completely freely and voluntarily. I knew exactly what I was doing, I was not compelled, I was not in any way a victim of occluded rationality. And under those conditions I went ahead and sinned. And now, acting equally freely and voluntarily, I am asking for forgiveness for what I then did. How are we to make sense of this? If I then thought it was just fine to do what I did then, how come I now no longer think that? If I now think that it was a terrible sin for me to do what I did 82

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then, how come I didn’t think that at the time? Or was it that I did think that it was a terrible sin for me to do what I did then, yet that thought didn’t stop me then? But if that thought didn’t stop me then, why and how does it stop me now? The obvious and natural response to this puzzle is to say that in some respect or other I was not in fact acting completely freely and voluntarily at the time I committed my sin: in some way or other, I was ignorant, or acting compulsively, or under conditions in which my rationality was somehow occluded. But the trouble with this response is that it changes the subject of our inquiry from the puzzle cases to other cases that in the key respect are simply not the same. The whole point of the puzzle is that it reflects the evident datum of experience that, at least in some cases, there doesn’t seem to have been anything wrong with me, in respect of my freedom to act with normal voluntariness, at the time when I sinned. I was just as free and rational an agent then as I am now; and then, the sin looked to me like the thing to do; and now it looks like a terrible thing to have done. How is this total switch in my volitional set-up even possible? If this puzzle bites for us, that is presumably because we recognise it from our own experience; we know that we ourselves are like this sometimes. But if it is a datum of our own experience (as it unfortunately is of mine, for instance) that we switch volitionally in the sort of way that I have just described, then it is extremely hard to see how to explain this datum without explaining it away. Certainly any moral psychology like Socrates’ and Plato’s, that takes it as its founding principle that “No one does wrong willingly”, is going to struggle with it. If no one does wrong (or “sins”) willingly, then such total changes in ethical orientation cannot possibly be what they appear to be. There must be some element of compulsiveness, or ignorance, or irrationality somewhere in the picture, because without that, such changes are simply not possible at all. This unclarity in the Augustinian notion of sin spills over to generate further unclarity in the Augustinian notions of penitence and forgiveness. It becomes hard to see exactly what it is to repent; and it becomes hard to see how or what I am supposed to do in forgiving someone who repents. The problem can be made particularly vivid by thinking about apologies. Suppose someone comes to me and says “I’m sorry for snubbing you over lunch yesterday”. In practice, this will often stand as a complete, and completely understood, apology in its own right. But suppose the apologiser then adds “I snubbed you deliberately”. Now, given this addition, the apologiser’s story is not complete, and something more needs to be said to make sense of it: maybe “That was because I thought you had written that libellous review of my book” (implying that the snub would have been appropriate but for this false belief ), or maybe “That was because I was in a particularly foul temper” (implying that the apologiser was carried away by passion at the time, but now sees that it was wrong to be), or again “I was having one of my episodes” (implying that the apologiser’s rationality was temporarily impaired by mental-health problems); or indeed “I was blinded by Atê” (implying that the apologiser was temporarily taken over by supernatural forces: cp. Agamemnon in Iliad 19.85 ff., a perfect example of non-apology). What will not make sense is for the apologiser to continue, for instance, like this: “I snubbed you deliberately because I was thinking how contemptible you are; and I still think that”. Her apology needs to show that things have changed in her since her rudeness yesterday to me, the forgiver. An apology that does not show this, but insists on the contrary that nothing has changed at all since then, is not an apology at all, but a renewed insult. Not only must an apology say something about how things have changed since the offence was committed. Moreover, that something needs to be intelligible. It needs to make sense of the change that has happened since the offence, and it needs to make sense of it in a way that provides the forgiver with some security that the offence won’t be repeated. But if, in committing her offence against me, the apologiser really did act fully deliberately, fully rationally, and with no exonerating ignorance or compulsion, then she cannot appeal to any of those factors to exculpate 83

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herself. So then she needs to explain how what seemed like a good idea to her then—her deliberate snub to me, or whatever it was—now seems like a terrible idea. But if she had no false beliefs then, was not acting irrationally, and was not in some way acting under or on a compulsion when she snubbed me—then what has changed? To speak here of what I have called a “volitional switch” seems unlikely, all on its own, to be much help. If the apologiser had the earlier volitional set-up that made it seem all right to snub me, and now has a different set-up on which snubbing me is not all right, then where is the apologiser’s guarantee to me that she won’t switch back again, at any random time, and snub me again in just the same way as before? Talk of volitional switches baffles explanation of the change in her. But without an explanation of that change, I as forgiver have no reason to trust her about the sincerity or stability of her repentance; indeed she as apologiser, or penitent, has no reason to trust herself about that. As Augustine himself puts something like this puzzle about moral psychology in the Confessions: Now let my heart tell you, O God, what it was looking for there [in the theft of the pears]— that I should be so gratuitously wicked, that there should be no cause of my wickedness unless it was wickedness itself!… Who will untangle that most tortuous and involved knottiness? It is filthy; I do not wish to attend to it; I do not wish to see it. (Confessions 2.4, 2.10; quoted in Chappell 1995: 189) The dilemma for the Augustinian conception of deliberate wrongdoing, and of penitence for such wrongdoing, is as follows. To cite the kind of factors that normally go into an apology is to cite factors that decrease culpability in one way or another, by providing an explanation either of how I failed to know the right thing to do through ignorance or irrationality, or of how I failed to do it even though I knew what it was, through compulsion of some sort. But central to the Augustinian account of forgiveness is the notion of (as I shall call it) absolute culpability: the idea that, in at least some actions, I have no excuse at all of any of these kinds, am completely and unabridgedly responsible for the bad thing that I do, and yet can intelligibly repent of it and be forgiven for it. In such cases nothing explains my wrongdoing—or my repentance of that wrongdoing—except a volitional switch. Yet the notion of a volitional switch is not an explanation of how I have come to see what was wrong with what I did. It is just a bare statement that I have so changed, which not only implies no explanation, but actually frustrates explanation. As I have argued elsewhere (Chappell 1995), it is extremely hard to keep all these ideas in play together. But why, in fact, would anyone even try to? A plausible answer to that is that Augustinian Christianity has needed, or supposed it needed, the idea of absolute culpability, because Augustinian Christianity is committed to a free-will theodicy. Any attempt to explain how someone (call him “Adam”) could be genuinely responsible for a fully freely chosen wrong action must lay the blame for that action squarely and 100% on Adam. For to say that he was ignorant or irrational or compelled, and therefore less than 100% culpable for his misdeed, is to raise the question of how it came about that he was ignorant or irrational or compelled. And it is hard to see how to answer that without inculpating the only other relevant agent in the picture, namely God. But the whole point of a free-will theodicy is, of course, to explain how there can be evil in the world that God created without blaming that evil on the creator. Or as Nietzsche more sardonically puts it, “Men were thought of as ‘free’ so that they could become guilty… Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics” (1968: 53). In its efforts to explain both this phenomenon of clear-eyed, freely chosen wrongdoing and also the accompanying phenomena of repentance, apology, and forgiveness for such wrongdoing, Augustinian Christianity invests a great deal in a deepened notion of culpability; the extreme case of this is the notion of what I have called a “volitional switch”, whereby without any abridgement 84

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of one’s freedom of action, one simply comes to have different views about what is worth doing and what is not to be done; Augustine’s own name for this phenomenon, or the part of it that most preoccupies him, is mala voluntas, “evil will”. But this phenomenon is unknown to the pagan Greeks: from Socrates to Aristotle, they agree that there can be no such thing, because it is unintelligible. Augustine in fact agrees that mala voluntas is unintelligible, but retorts that that is no reason to deny its existence. And his most basic arguments for taking this stance are two. First there is the theological point that Nietzsche is parodying above: the point that since God punishes, and God is just, his punishments must be deserved—which they can only be if humans are absolutely culpable (see de Vera Religione Ch.27; de Libero Arbitrio 1.1). And second, there is the simple evidence of phenomenology: it is our own experience that we freely and clear-eyedly do gratuitously bad things for which we have no exculpation at all. This argument from experience is, I take it, one of the points made by Augustine’s long meditation on the theft of the pears in Book 2 of the Confessions, as quoted above; as I have already admitted, I personally find Augustine’s account of his own experience only too recognisable. In these ways and for these reasons, Augustinian Christianity has needed the notion that I have called absolute culpability. But you do not have to be Nietzsche to have your doubts about that notion, or about the Augustinian concept of forgiveness that I have been questioning here. Bernard Williams, for example, though he puts it rather less epigrammatically than Nietzsche, expresses the same sort of doubt: In some ways… the basic ethical ideas possessed by the [ancient] Greeks were different from ours, and also in better condition. In some other respects, it is rather that we rely on much the same resources as the ancient Greeks, but we do not acknowledge the extent to which we do… How much of a shift there has been, how much we do rely on changed ideas of such things as freedom, responsibility, and the individual agent, is an elusive question that cannot be fully answered; to answer it would involve drawing a firm line between what we think and what we merely think we think. [But just] as there is a “problem of evil” only for those who expect the world to be good, there is a problem of free will only for those who think that the notion of the voluntary can be metaphysically deepened. In truth, though it may be extended or contracted in various ways, it can hardly be deepened at all. What threatens it is the attempt to make it profound, and the effect of trying to deepen it is to put it beyond all recognition. The Greeks were not involved in these attempts; this is one of the places at which we encounter their gift for being [as Nietzsche said9] superficial out of profundity. (Williams 1993: 4, 7, 68)10 11

Notes 1 In Bernard Williams’ sense (1985: 141 ff.). 2 References to the Christian New Testament are based on Nestle et al. (1966). 3 See Kekes (2009) and Zaibert (2009) on “the paradox of forgiveness”, i.e. the paradox that arises if some deed is truly blameworthy, and if forgiveness involves deciding or ceasing to treat it as truly blameworthy. 4 See also Konstan 2010: 100 (italics added): “The term employed for ‘forgive’ [in Lev. 4.13–20] is a form of the root /salakh/; in the Hebrew Bible, only God is the subject of this verb”. 5 Pace Williams 1993: 91 and Dover 1974: 195 ff., whom Williams cites. 6 See Gerson 2014 for a discussion of divisions in the soul in the Republic and Laws. Gerson argues against Bobonich that the Laws does not reject the Republic’s account of these divisions. 7 I do not mean to say, as some have, that humility was not a virtue for the pagan Greeks—on the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere, it most certainly was. But I do mean to say that tapeinosyne was not their word for it, as it was for the authors of the New Testament. Cp. Chappell 2020.

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Sophie Grace Chappell 8 For more detail about the relevant Augustine exegesis—and for the contrast with Aristotle—see Chappell 1995. 9 In the Preface to the Second Edition of The Gay Science; also in the Epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner. 10 Williams and Konstan arrive at rather similar conclusions very independently of each other. David Konstan began his distinguished publication career in about 1994, the year after Shame and Necessity was published, and five years after the Sather Lectures at Berkeley on which Williams’ book was based. It is nonetheless surprising that Konstan’s Before Forgiveness mentions Williams only once (fn.38, p.169, a reference within a reference), and that Williams is not in the index or bibliography. 11 Thanks for helpful discussion to Sarah Broadie, Arran James Crawford, Eve Garrard, Amber Leigh Griffoen, Sofia Jeppson, James Lewis, Andrew March, Alice McLachlan, David McNaughton, Kate Norlock, Glen Pettigrove, Fionn O’Donovan, David Owen, Marianne Talbot, Tim Thornton, Bill Wringe, and, above all, Jamie Dow.

References Aristotle (1890) Ethica Nicomachea, I. Bywater (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1926) Nicomachean Ethics, Harold Rackham (trans.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (2007) Nicomachean Ethics, Sarah Broadie & Christopher Rowe (trans.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Augustine (1844–1849) Confessiones, de Vera Religione, de Libero Arbitrio, in Patrologia Latina, J.P. Migne (ed.) Paris. The Holy Bible (1612) London. The Book of Common Prayer (1662) London. Butler, J. (1726) Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1827. Chappell, T. (1995) Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom of Action, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chappell, S.G. (2020) “Humility among the Ancient Greeks”, in M. Lynch (ed.) The Moral Psychology of Humility, 187–201, London: Routledge. Dover, K.J. (1974) Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gerson, L. (2014) “Plato’s Rational Souls,” Review of Metaphysics 68: 37–59. Kekes, J. (2009) “Blame versus Forgiveness,” The Monist 92: 488–506. Konstan, D. (2010) Before Forgiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liddell, H., Scott, R. and Jones, S. (1940) A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacLeod, K. (2017) “Forgiveness is not Buddhist”, Tricycle Winter 2017, https://tricycle.org/magazine/ forgiveness-not-buddhist/. Nestle, E., Aland, K. et al. (eds) (1966) Novum Testamentum Graece, Berlin: Deutsche Biblische Gesellschaft. Nietzsche, F. (1968) Twilight of the Idols, Gay Science, Nietzsche contra Wagner, R.J. Hollingdale (trans.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plato (1995) Opera Omnia, W. Hicken et al. (eds) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London: Penguin. ———. (1993) Shame and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zaibert, L. (2009) “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6: 365–393.

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7 STOIC FORGIVENESS Jeremy Reid

1.  Introduction: Getting into the Stoic Perspective Consider two pictures of the world: A In general, people behave pretty decently to each other. We all know what is right and wrong, and can be expected to act accordingly. Our social norms are well established, so breaches of those norms are met with surprise and indignation. People who frequently or seriously violate our norms are ostracized. We understand well enough what leads to a happy and fulfilling life, so we are appropriately invested in most of our projects and others should respect them. Nobody is perfect, but we should focus our energies on surrounding ourselves with supportive people who can be trusted, and avoid toxic people who wrong us and those we care about. B In general, people are broken and don’t treat each other nearly as well as they should. Stories of betrayal, injustice, and violence are the daily norm, while truly inspiring figures are few and far between. People care disproportionately about money, status, image, and power, all of which ultimately bring various forms of mental distress. To some extent, it’s not our fault— most people have accepted the story of happiness and success our society tells us. Nonetheless, it is possible to revise our priorities to find a deeper happiness and live in harmony with others (hard as this may be). Importantly, the fact that other people act badly does not lessen our obligation to care for them. What is the role of the emotions in each of these worldviews? In the first view, emotions like anger frequently mark unacceptable deviations from our social norms, especially those behaviors that violate our moral status and undermine the projects that we rightly value (Strawson 2008). These emotions signal transgressions and alert others to moral threats (Hieronymi 2001, 546). In the s­econd view, emotions are often manifestations of a misguided value system. People get angry when their sports team loses, become bitter when they don’t get the promotion they think they deserve, are frustrated when the person they’re dating doesn’t put out, and sink into despair when the stock market crashes. Of course, both worldviews will nuance the picture—but note the connection between the emotions and our values in each case. In the first instance, our emotions reflect commitments that we rightly hold and should defend; in the second, they are another symptom of a sick society (Nussbaum 1994).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-11

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What, then, is the role of forgiveness in each of these systems? In the first view, we need forgiveness when a wrong has been done but the person should no longer be subject to our censure. The paradigm case is when the wrongdoer has apologized, has recognized and sincerely regrets their wrong, and has provided adequate reason for thinking they won’t wrong us again; we thus choose not to hold their wrongdoing against them. This is a common way to think about forgiveness (e.g. Allais 2008; Griswold 2007; Hieronymi 2001; Konstan 2010, 2012). But what is the role of forgiveness in the second system? This latter worldview will likely resonate with those who see forgiveness as a necessary response to a depraved world and who see f­orgiving broken people as an important part of loving them (Pettigrove 2012); we should not wait until people have proven themselves worthy, for no such day will come. More importantly, if we have any hope of being loved by others then we must hope that they will forgive us too. We forgive others, then, in solidarity and recognition that we are all imperfect (Garrard & McNaughton 2016). The Stoics would also say the second worldview is closer to the truth (see Seneca, On Benefits, I.10.1). Although they are theists (technically, pantheists or panentheists; Baltzly 2003) and make a number of normative claims about human nature, the Stoic views on forgiveness fall out of a more general ethical framework that can easily be adopted by non-theists. Moreover, the Stoics provide good reasons for doubting some key assumptions about forgiveness that arise in the contemporary philosophical literature, insofar as that literature frequently assumes the appropriateness of a roughly Strawsonian reactive attitudes framework—i.e. a framework where we register, appreciate, and respond to wrongdoing through emotions like anger, resentment, disappointment, and disgust. Here I motivate a Stoic conception of forgiveness, showing how a philosophical system can make forgiveness central while denying that most instances of anger and resentment are justified. Specifically, I highlight four common assumptions that the Stoics would consider problematic: first, that forgiveness is opposed to justice; second, that anger and resentment are necessary for registering wrongdoing; third, that anger and resentment are generally reliable at tracking the severity of wrongdoing; fourth, that reconciliation with wrongdoers is an option rather than an imperative of virtue. Insofar as the Stoics provide defensible and compelling alternatives to these positions, Stoicism offers a number of philosophical resources to re-conceptualize common ways we think about forgiveness.1

2.  Forgiveness and Justice Intuitively, forgiveness is an alternative to giving a justified punishment. If you wrong me, I can hold you accountable and demand that you suffer the consequences for what you did—or I can forgive you, canceling the moral debt you owe and wiping the slate clean (Allais 2008; Calhoun 1992, 84; Twambley 1976, 89; Warmke 2014). Both courses of action seem like options a virtuous person might rightly choose; thus, the competing demands of justice and forgiveness can be seen as generating indeterminacy within virtue ethical frameworks or as occasions to manifest moral personality. Especially in complex cases, as in the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa, it is not obvious that those who encouraged forgiveness were mistaken to do so, but neither did those who called for justice display a defect in character. Virtuous agents might reasonably disagree. One assumption in this way of presenting the options, though, is that forgiveness cancels the wrongdoer’s moral debt: I cannot both forgive you and punish you; my seeking your punishment is evidence that I haven’t forgiven you. The Stoics reject both that forgiveness is opposed to justice and that to be forgiving entails canceling a moral debt. To some extent, this is motivated on doctrinal grounds: the Stoics believe in the unity of the virtues, so for any character trait to be a virtue it has to be shown that it coheres with the others. For forgiveness, the challenge is to show that it does not contradict justice. 88

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The unity of justice and forgiveness in Stoicism can be seen most clearly in Seneca’s On Clemency. While it has been argued that they are distinct concepts from forgiveness (Allais 2008, 47–8; Konstan 2010, 14; Murphy and Hampton 1998, 21), clemency and mercy are considerations to which a forgiving person attends, and we can learn about how forgiveness is integrated with other virtues in Stoicism by exploring related conceptual terrain (Morton 2012, 4).2 On Clemency was written for the young emperor Nero (before he became notorious) and stresses the importance of mercy for a ruler, likening a forgiving emperor to a good father and even to God (I.14–16; I.19.9). Clemency is not opposed to justice, but to harshness and cruelty on the one hand, and to leniency on the other (I.13; II.4.1–3; II.7). Seneca stresses that those who break the law should not simply be exculpated for their crimes, as justice requires punishing law-breakers (II.7.1–3). But how can Seneca hold both that clemency involves not exacting a justified punishment and that justice must always be done? How is it possible to be at once forgiving and just (Garrard & McNaughton 2016, 32–7, 62; Braund 2012, 92–4)? The key move in Seneca’s approach is to draw on the distinction between retributive conceptions and ameliorative (or restorative) conceptions of punishment. The goal of retributive punishment (timōria) is to take revenge and inflict harm upon the wrongdoer, whereas the goal of ameliorative punishment (kolasis) is to improve the character of wrongdoer (Allen 2000; Dover 1991, 177; McCord-Adams 1991, 297–98). Aristotle marks the difference by defining retributive punishment as for the sake of the person who suffered, whereas ameliorative punishment is for the sake of the person who did the wrong (Rhetoric 1369b12–14). This distinction can be seen in a story approvingly reported by both Musonius Rufus and Epictetus: When a young man who had injured Lycurgus’ eye was sent by the people to be punished [timōrēsaito] in whatever way Lycurgus wanted, he did not punish him. He instead both educated him and made him a good man, after which he led him to the theater…. “This person I received from you as an unruly and violent individual. I give him back to you as a good man and proper citizen.”3 (Sayings, 39=Epictetus, Fragment 5=Stobaeus 3.19.13) Though two people may perform the same crime, the states of their character may be different such that one of the people could be improved by a more gentle approach whereas the other requires harsher measures. Clemency is the relevant virtue for identifying those circumstances in which a more gentle approach would be beneficial and for judging what the best course of action is going forward. The clement king is like a forgiving judge: a forgiving judge will need to give out harsher penalties on particular occasions, but they are rightly said to be forgiving insofar as they are disposed to give lighter penalties and benefit others in doing so (Letters 81.6–8, 15–17; Inwood 2005). Seneca even goes so far as to say that, “it is a fault to punish a crime in full” (On Clemency, fragment 2; Nussbaum 1994, 427; Calhoun 1992, 85–6). So you cannot be virtuously forgiving without also being just, and you cannot be virtuously just without also being merciful. Here we see a conception of forgiveness that doesn’t presuppose that a forgiving person has to cancel debts but that nonetheless shows a more nuanced attitude toward the punishments a person may justifiably impose. Seneca demonstrates this forgiving disposition by reference to good parents: So what is [the emperor’s] duty? Is it that of good parents, who as a rule admonish their children sometimes gently, sometimes with threats, and on some occasions even chastise them with a flogging. Does anyone in his right mind disinherit a son for his first offence? Surely not! Only when his patience has been overcome by many serious wrongs, only when he fears something worse than he reprimanded, does he resort to the decisive pen [i.e. disinheritance]. 89

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Before that, he will try any number of measures to retrieve a character that is still wavering and is already in a worse position. Only when the case is hopeless does he resort to extreme measures. No one arrives at the point of inflicting punishments without exhausting all available remedies first. That is how a parent ought to act—and an emperor too. (On Clemency I.14.1–2; trans Braund; see also On Anger I.6.1–4) Just as parents recognize that children should not be subjected to harsh punishments when they first commit wrongdoing, so too should emperors recognize the different states of character in their subjects. For subjects who are otherwise good but have nonetheless gone astray, more gentle punishments are due; for recalcitrant and difficult subjects, harsh punishments may be justified (I.22.1). According to Seneca, then, we shouldn’t think that justice looks only to the crime and not to the character. Rather, a good judge will consider the person who committed the crime holistically, and determine what is best on the basis of all available psychological evidence (Inwood 2005, 206–10). While a legal statute or social norm may determine that some harm is the penalty for a particular crime, the forgiving judge will decide that a different and more gentle punishment is right because it will be more beneficial for the person being punished. The punishment is forgiving seen relative to the harsher punishments that could have been justified—not to the total cancellation of debts or exaction of punishment altogether. Conceiving of clemency in terms of a kind of gentleness thus preserves the connection between forgiveness and justice, for ameliorative justice is being done even though a less forgiving or objectionably cruel judge would have prescribed retributive penalties. Understanding clemency as a kind of gentleness in the administration of justice explains further aspects of Seneca’s treatise. First, it explains why he urges clemency as an antidote to harshness and cruelty, and second, it explains why clemency also avoids the vice of leniency. Seneca exhorts Nero to aim for clemency because there is a temptation to act cruelly in the name of justice. Those who claim they are enacting retributivist justice may in fact be acting harshly, vengefully, or maliciously. Seneca’s point is that we, not being wise, are subject to errors in how things appear to us. We may think we are acting justly, but if we are disposed to enact retributivist penalties or to impose maximal punishments, we will systematically go wrong. A better strategy, then, is to aim to be more forgiving, looking first to give gentle reformative punishments and only resorting to harsher and more extreme penalties as a last option for people who have no hope of living safely in community with others.4 Thus, forgiveness is a good disposition to cultivate to ensure that non-sages act more justly; cruelty is often done in the name of justice and clemency prevents us going wrong in this way. Nonetheless, by noting that some punishment is properly part of clemency, Seneca is also showing how we avoid the correlate vice of leniency. Forgiving people are sometimes labeled as spineless pushovers in instances where debts are completely canceled or offenders experience no consequences for their wrongdoing. Seneca would think that such people are excessively gentle, calling them weak, feeble, and cowardly.5 Good parents would not jump to punish their children harshly, but neither would they let them get away with wrongdoing. Thus, the inclusion of clemency within the concept of justice saves the Stoic conception of forgiveness from critiques of forgiveness as a pseudo-virtue of the powerless.6

3.  Resentment, Anger, and Registering Wrongdoing I began by explaining the Stoic view on clemency and justice to make clear that the Stoics think that wrongdoing requires a response. This response should manifest a kind of Aristotelian mean, being neither cruel nor excessively lenient, and can be seen as forgiving insofar as sympathetic 90

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judgments about human fallibility partially determine what the most just course of action is going forward.7 The main role of forgiveness in Stoicism, however, is in overcoming anger. The Stoics prescribe an interesting division of ethical labor: insofar as reason takes over the role of registering wrongdoing, deciding how best to respond to it, and providing the motivation to act, anger is at best a superfluous feature of our moral psychology and is regularly a corrupting feature (Pettigrove & Tanaka 2014). Thus, with reason performing the functions we normally expect anger to fulfill, we should work on extirpating anger. For this, forgiveness takes center stage. Overcoming or foreswearing anger is included in many conceptions of forgiveness. Your forgiving me is partly constituted by the fact that you are no longer angry or that you are now making a conscious effort to quell your anger. We tend to think, in accordance with the reactive attitudes framework of ethics, that our anger is how we register that a wrong has been done and how we communicate that the wrongdoing or the wrongdoer still poses a kind of threat, someone who can’t be trusted or of whom we should be wary (Hieronymi 2001, 546–8). Forgiveness is what happens when that anger is no longer justified. The Stoics recognize that forgiveness is a powerful antidote for anger and there is a connection between the Stoic advice to remove anger and their exhortations to forgive each other. But, by contrast, they also think that reason alone should recognize the demands of justice and provides sufficient motivating force to act—anger at best corrupts those judgments and pushes us in dangerous, counterproductive directions. Note, then, how the normative labor is divided up: reason and justice process the wrongs that have been done and determine the best way of rectifying the situation, but forgiveness helps us overcome the feelings of hostility, resentment, and anger we are nonetheless prone to feel in the wake of wrongdoing. The Stoics thus sever the connection between the judgment of wrongdoing and anger. It was as commonplace in the ancient world as it is now to claim that anger is a powerful motivating force to counter injustice. But Seneca’s view is that anything anger can do, reason can do better. He doesn’t deny that anger can motivate—of course it can. His response is that anger does not consistently motivate us well and that reason is a superior psychological force: “But some people control themselves when they’re angry.” Is it the case, then, that they do nothing that anger dictates, or something? If nothing, then clearly anger is not needed for getting things done—the reason that you were summoning its assistance, as though it had some capacity more robust than reason…. Is anger more powerful than reason, or weaker? If stronger, how will reason be able to set a limit on it, since as a rule only weaker entities are obedient? If weaker, then reason is sufficient in itself to get things done, without anger, and doesn’t look for the weaker party’s aid. (On Anger I.8.4–5; trans. Kaster & Nussbaum) Here Seneca responds to the Aristotelian claim that in decent people anger is felt but doesn’t dominate. This is a powerful argumentative strategy insofar as everyone agrees that anger can become harmful when excessive. But Seneca’s dilemma for Aristotle is that either anger cannot be restrained (in which case there is nothing preventing it becoming bad) or it can be restrained, and it is restrained by reason (in which case reason is stronger than anger and shouldn’t need anger’s help). If the interlocutor takes the first option, anger should be extirpated because it is uncontrollable and dangerous; if the second, anger is at best superfluous. Couldn’t it be that anger is a necessary source of motivation, though, even if it is ultimately led by reason? Seneca refutes this line of argument by appealing to central cases where the agent is not angry, but is clearly acting justly. “A good judge,” he writes, “condemns things worthy of reproof, he doesn’t hate them” (I.16.6). Judges dedicate their lives to the justice system, and their job primarily consists in determining appropriate punishments or corrections for people who have 91

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acted unjustly. Surely, then, if anyone appreciates the gravity of injustice, it is a good judge. And yet, we don’t expect judges to get angry at every unjust person they encounter—to do so would be both psychologically exhausting and undermine the importance of what we call judicial temperament. The example of a good judge is thus central to understanding the Stoic view on anger and injustice: the judge acts to rectify injustice but does not get angry. Moreover, there are other analogies we can use to help motivate Seneca’s case: soldiers and law enforcement officers perform their jobs badly when they are filled with hatred; doctors quickly break down if they grieve every death; parents need to recognize when their children have done wrong, but needn’t experience anger to set them right. Thus, while it is often the case that we would normally show our appreciation and recognition of wrongdoing with an emotional response, Seneca’s point is that those emotions are not necessary for that appreciation;8 rather, the Stoic recognizes injustice with reason alone and then shows their commitment to rectifying that injustice with action: So a good man won’t become angry upon seeing an injustice done to those he cares about? No, he will not become angry, but he’ll be their champion and defender. Why are you afraid that a proper sense of devotion won’t goad him sufficiently, even without anger?... A good man will follow up his obligations undisturbed and undeterred…. If my father is being killed, I will defend him; if he has been killed, I will see the matter to a proper conclusion—because I know that’s right, not because I feel a grievance. (On Anger 1.12.1–2; see also On Benefits II.35.2) Because the Stoics deny that we have to get angry in order to fight injustice, we would be making a mistake in letting those emotions permeate our psyche. We should act not because we are so worked up that we have to do something but because we recognize that it is the right thing to do. Seneca thus concludes this line of argument by stating: The fine and worthy thing is to come forward in defense of one’s parents, children, friends, and fellow citizens with one’s sense of obligation actually leading the way, and to do so willingly, deliberately, and prudently, not impulsively and furiously. (On Anger I.12.5) In sum, then, the Stoics argue that anger is at best a superfluous piece of psychological machinery; we don’t need anger to appreciate or respond to injustice, so we should overcome and foreswear our anger while simultaneously working to rectify unjust situations. But as things stand, this verdict understates the Stoic position on the evaluative status of anger, so let us now turn to some of their arguments for why anger is not only unnecessary, but a thorough corruption of the mind and actively harmful as a psychological force.

4.  Anger as Distorted Judgment: Expectation, Surprise, and Emotional Freshness Contemporary writers who discuss anger and forgiveness often build in a “ justified” condition on anger (Allais 2008, 36; Calhoun 1992, 77–9; Hieronymi 2001, 530). There’s an obvious reason for this: even the staunchest pro-anger philosophers aren’t going to say that you should be angry when your new puppy makes a mess on the floor or when your tea is served a touch on the cold side. But the Stoics make an important contribution in pointing out how often this “ justified” condition isn’t satisfied. They note how easily anger is prompted and magnified by considerations that even by our own standards are irrational; in particular, much of our anger comes about because we have incorrect expectations about the world, because we value things 92

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disproportionately, especially when they affect us personally, or because the wrongdoing is recent, leading to a phenomenon the Stoics call “emotional freshness” (Graver 2007, 28, 42–3, 66, 78–9). Recognizing these considerations is important insofar as it shows why forgiveness, understood as involving overcoming one’s anger, will be much more common than might otherwise be supposed. For the Stoics, emotions depend on and are primarily constituted by judgments. But they noticed that the same judgment could produce different affective states depending on the circumstances. Most notably, our emotions are strongest right after the triggering event occurred. This is why they built into their definitions of the particular emotions a “freshness” condition. For example, distress is a fresh belief that some evil is present and that it is appropriate to be pained by it (Stobaeus, Eclogae, 2.7.10b). The same judgment that causes you distress now may not bother you at all once the initial freshness has passed. What is significant is how much of our anger and distress can be caused and exacerbated by freshness and related psychological conditions, like the fact that the event was unexpected or affected you personally. Cicero, reporting Chrysippus’ view, explains some of the various factors that can influence the force of emotions: What is unforeseen strikes us with greater force. But there is more to it than that. It is true that a sudden assault of the enemy creates rather more confusion than an expected one, and that a sudden storm at sea strikes more fear into those on shipboard than if they saw it coming, and there are many similar cases. But if you were to study such events carefully and scientifically, what you would find, quite simply, is that when things happen suddenly, they invariably seem more serious than they otherwise would. There are two reasons for this. First, there is not enough time to gauge the seriousness of what is happening. Second, we sometimes think that if we had foreseen what was to happen, we might have been able to prevent it, and then our distress is keener because compounded with guilt. Thus the cause of distress is not solely that the events are unexpected. Such an event may indeed strike a heavier blow, but what makes it seem more serious is not merely the unexpectedness of it. The reason is rather that the event is fresh in one’s mind. (Tusculan Disputations, III.52) Certain events seem more serious when they are fresh, when we don’t have time to get perspective on their gravity, when they are unexpected, and we think we might have been able to avoid them. What this means is that two people suffering the same misfortune could react very differently on account of a host of other beliefs and character traits that influence their responses. In plain terms, things always seem worse when they first happen, and we more easily accept misfortunes as a part of life with the passing of time. The Stoics exploit this point to great effect, as we don’t often think that this later judgment is mistaken. It may seem at the time as though we’ll never be happy again when an important relationship ends, but we are right to realize later that a good life is still possible. Cicero, reporting the Stoic view in his Tusculan Disputations, argues that what time does slowly, reason can do quickly (III.58; see also III.53–54, 74). When we are struck with misfortune or someone wrongs us, we can either wait for time to change our judgment about its seriousness and effect on our life, or we can use reason now to come to the same judgment we would get to eventually. The Stoics thus challenged Aristotelians, who claimed that anger is a fitting response to injustice, to explain why their anger should ever cease (cf. Callard 2019; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, III.74, IV.39). If the judgment was correct a year ago that you were seriously wronged and that this merited anger, then either it is still correct now and so you should still be angry, or it was never correct and you should never have been angry.9 Their point is that we usually realize after some time (once the surprise and freshness have worn off ) that we were either not 93

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seriously harmed or that our anger was not merited, and so we might as well reason our way to that judgment as soon as we can. Seneca thus recommends pausing before acting on anger, as anger will likely subside with time: No one says to himself, ‘Wait a minute’—yet the greatest remedy for anger is postponement, so that its initial ardor might slacken and the darkness that overwhelms the mind might either pass or be less thick…. Whenever you want to know the character of a thing, entrust the job to time: no careful discriminations are made in flux. (On Anger, III.12.4) Because anger distorts our judgments in the moment, if we want to have a clear perspective on the matter, we often need to wait. Importantly, Seneca also offers this advice because it is difficult to forgive right away: Ask [anger], at the outset, not to forgive but to deliberate: its first assaults do the damage, but if it waits it will back off. Don’t try to uproot it all at once: it will be overcome entirely while you pluck it away bit by bit. (On Anger II.29.1) Thus, overcoming one’s anger is the goal, but Seneca realizes that this is difficult given the powerful distorting effects of freshness on our reactive attitudes. Forgiveness comes easier once we have time to gain perspective. But time isn’t the only distorting force the Stoics recognize. They also note that our more general expectations about what the world is like and what we think we deserve affect our emotional responses. It is easiest to get a grip on this idea using some examples from Epictetus. Notoriously, he writes: With regard to everything that is a source of delight to you, or is useful to you, or of which you are fond, remember to keep telling yourself what kind of thing it is, starting with the most insignificant. If you’re fond of a jug, say, ‘This is a jug that I’m fond of,’ and then, if it gets broken, you won’t be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you’re kissing; and then, if one of them should die, you won’t be upset. (Handbook, 3; trans. Hard) Epictetus is not saying here that we should think of our loved ones like a jug, nor is he saying that their passing should affect us as much as a chipped plate. Rather, he is prompting us to bring to mind a relatively trivial object of which we are fond, and are thus likely to overreact when something happens to it. We know our favorite coffee mug will break eventually, as that is what is the nature of ceramic objects that we use frequently. But by telling ourselves what kind of thing a mug is, we can set realistic expectations about what is likely to happen to it. Epictetus relates a similar thought regarding the circumstances we are likely to find ourselves in: When you’re about to embark on any action, remind yourself what kind of action it is. If you’re going out to take a bath, set before your mind the things that happen at the baths, that people splash you, that people knock up against you, that people steal from you. And you’ll thus undertake the action in a surer manner if you say to yourself at the outset, ‘I want to take a bath and ensure at the same time that my choice remains in harmony with nature.’ (Handbook, 4) 94

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People get splashed at public pools, and you would be a fool to be angered by this, given the nature of public pools and moral seriousness of getting wet (consider also: people getting angry at traffic or flight delays at airports). These cases are uncontroversial. But from the more mundane judgments, we then are supposed to work up to forming realistic expectations about things we care about much more than jugs, like our family and loved ones, applying the same logic. We know that human beings get sick and die eventually, so we should prepare ourselves for when— not if—that happens. This mental preparation for future misfortunes and eventualities, the Stoics claim, will lessen the emotional impact of the event when it occurs (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.52–61). What is important for us to note is how our reactions can be altered by our adjacent expectations. One person may become furious at a transgression, while another may see it as part of the predictable course of the day. We cannot then judge the seriousness of the transgression by looking at the anger in isolation from the other beliefs that influence it. To take another Stoic example, people become much angrier and more distressed when the transgression affects them personally. Epictetus notes the different way in which we treat our own case, and the advice we give to others, pointing out that the advice we give to others is a much better guide to the way things really are: The will of nature may be learned from those events in life in which we don’t differ from one another. For instance, when someone else’s slave-boy breaks a cup, we’re ready at once to say, ‘That’s just one of those things.’ So you should be clear, then, that if your own cup gets broken, you ought to react in exactly the same way as when someone else’s does. (Handbook, 26) We’re not lying when we tell our friends that the wine stain on the couch doesn’t matter, or when we say that job rejections are par for the course and that they shouldn’t be taken to heart. But we are often bad at following our own advice and frequently take our own situation more seriously than that of others. This means that our own anger and distress are further exacerbated because we are the ones affected. Despite how personal the wrongdoing is, the Stoics urge us to think about the matter objectively and impartially. In sum, we often realize later that our earlier reactions were unjustified. Contemporary philosophers, then, have missed an important part of describing the practice of forgiveness by bracketing off concerns about unjustified anger (e.g. Hieronymi 2001, 538). It is precisely because anger feels justified in the moment, often made to appear more serious by extraneous considerations, that we need to remind ourselves to be forgiving; otherwise, we will regret the anger and the actions that flow from it later. From a purely conceptual perspective, forgiveness in response to unjustified anger is not a paradigm case, but in the real world, where the worth of our anger is often distorted, it very much is (McCord-Adams 1991, 293). All that being said, it is one thing to claim that you don’t need to be angry to register wrongdoing and that anger is often a source of distortion, but it is quite another to claim that you should forgive those whom you rightly recognize have wronged you, and have wronged you in a morally serious way. Let us turn, then, to consider someone with impeccable epistemic credentials and then ask whether the Stoics think that they too should forgive wrongdoers.

5.  The Imperative to Reconcile So far we’ve seen that the Stoics think that we should respond to injustice, but that we don’t need to get angry to respond well, and that we are often angered more easily than we should be. Now we’ll consider the strongest claim that Seneca makes about forgiveness, namely that we should forgive everyone all at once. This claim is motivated by two sets of considerations: first, that all 95

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human beings are broken and imperfect, and second, that our social nature means that we should live together in a state of mutual cooperation and harmony. Because our making mistakes and acting unvirtuously is inevitable, but there is nevertheless an imperative to reconcile with others, forgiveness is the only solution. The Stoic approach to forgiveness here is at odds with a number of contemporary assumptions: because virtue requires that we forgive others, forgiveness is not elective nor a “gift” (Allais 2008, 37; Calhoun 1992, 76–7, 79, 81; Fricker, 2019; Twambley 1976, 90); more significantly, forgiveness needn’t be preceded by an apology or a sincere change of heart from the wrongdoer (Griswold 2007, 47–59; Hieronymi 2001, 549; Konstan 2010, 7–13; 2012, 17; Sherman 2005, 83). Because people acting unvirtuously is the rule and not the exception, the Stoics would say that it is naïve to wait until people have changed their ways before forgiving them. The Stoics have a normative conception of the world and human nature, such that we are all citizens of the same cosmic city and we should work together in cooperation for the sake of the whole. This can be seen most clearly in a beloved passage from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: Say to yourself first thing in the morning: I shall meet with people who are meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable. They are subject to these faults because of their ignorance of what is good and bad. But I have recognized the nature of the good and seen that it is the right [i.e. virtue], and the nature of the bad seen that it is the wrong [i.e. vice], and the nature of the wrongdoer himself, and seen that he is related to me, not because he has the same blood or seed, but because he shares in the same mind and portion of divinity. So I cannot be harmed by any of them, as no one will involve me in what is wrong. Nor can I be angry with my relative or hate him. We were born for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. So to work against each other is contrary to nature; and resentment and rejection count as working against someone. (Meditations II.1, trans. Gill) There is an important sequence to Marcus’ logic here. First, he sets realistic expectations about the kind of behavior he can expect to encounter during the day; then he thinks about the psychological causes of this behavior, focusing here on human ignorance about the good (cf. XI.18 for a richer psychology); finally, he reminds himself of our social condition and the goal of cooperation, working together harmoniously as parts in a whole. Anger is contrary to each of these stages, as we shouldn’t be angered by what we expected, by people acting out of ignorance, or at people whom we should be helping (Pettigrove 2012, 66).10 Marcus’ writing closely mirrors an earlier passage from On Anger, in which Seneca explicitly connects wrongdoing with the human condition (II.10.6–8; see also I.5.2–3). Seneca explains that virtue is astonishingly rare and unvirtuous people will wrong us, but this isn’t an excuse to give up on others. Rather, he says our job is to help as best we can, like a doctor treating a sickness or a sailor trying to plug a leak, and this burden falls on everyone equally. Seneca knows fighting vice is a never-ending battle; realistically, the goal is not to make wrongdoing cease—this is impossible—but to try to minimize it and stop it from overpowering the good. How does forgiveness fit into this picture? Once we truly understand human beings in all their ignorance and vice but also understand our ethical responsibilities to each other, we must forgive everyone: To keep from becoming angry with individuals you must forgive all at once: the human race should be granted a pardon. If you become angry with young men and old men because they do wrong, then be angry with infants: they’re going to do wrong. Surely no one becomes angry with children of an age incapable of drawing distinctions, do they? Being human is a greater excuse, and more just, than being a child. These are the terms and stipulations of our 96

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birth: we are creatures subject to no fewer diseases of mind than of body, neither dull nor slow, to be sure, but misusing our acuity, all of us offering each other examples of vices…. What eliminates a wise man’s anger? The great crowd of wrongdoers. He understands how unjust it is—and how dangerous—to be angry with a vice that is pandemic. (On Anger, II.10.2–4; see also On Benefits, V.17.3; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IX.42) Here forgiveness is directly linked with the foreswearing of anger, and it is prompted by the recognition that we owe the same compassion to all human beings that we show to children. As we saw in On Clemency, it is not that we ignore the errors of the young, but rather we gently seek to correct and improve them. This is how the Stoics think that we should approach all instances of wrongdoing, and anger is counterproductive for improving others and motivating ourselves to work for their benefit. That we should have the benefit of others as a goal is not optional. We too easily think of ourselves as atomistic individuals who enter in relationships at will, and with only those people who have shown themselves worthy of love and trust. In such a framework, when someone wrongs us, they signal that they do not value the relationship in the way that we do, and thus that the costs we are incurring for them may not be justified. The Stoics reject this framework outright (Seneca, On Benefits, IV.18.2–4). The teeth do not demand that the hands contribute equally, nor should the feet complain that their burden is heavier than that of the arms. The point, instead, is to consider the nature of the whole and to look to one’s own roles and to how the parts can best work together (Gill 1988). But because the other parts are other people in the world, to whom we are connected by our very nature as humans, forgiveness is not optional. We cannot work harmoniously with others if we are angry with them, so we must forgive each other so that we can live together (cf. Wolf 2011). Stoic forgiveness, then, is not conditioned on a sincere apology or change of heart. It is possible to infer from this absence that the Stoics simply do not have a concept of forgiveness (Konstan 2010, 11). But it is also possible that they reject that people should have to be remorseful or become better before being worthy of our forgiveness. If the baseline we can expect is that people will make mistakes, hurt us, and we will do the same to them, then we simply cannot wait until people are virtuous before entering into relationships with them—we have to work with how they are now, expecting that they will do wrong (Cornell 2017; cf. Hieronymi 2001, 530–1). Consequently, we needn’t think that someone’s wrongdoing doesn’t reflect who they really are before forgiving them (Calhoun 1992, 95–6; cf. Allais 2008, 51, 57; Murphy & Hampton 1988, 24). Even if we don’t fully buy into the Stoic picture of widespread vice, contemporary virtue ethicists should still be skeptical of the framework of character reformation that is implied in much of the forgiveness literature. Character traits go “all the way down” and rapid changes are more likely apparent than real—or at least call for special explanations, like a powerful religious experience on the road to Damascus (Hursthouse 1999, 12). Thus, given that character and habits are formed over long periods of time and are not easily altered, if someone apologizes by saying that they’ve changed and won’t do it again, most of the time we shouldn’t believe them (cf. Konstan 2010, 17). More charitably, the Stoic might interpret such apologies as a recognition of the human condition and a welcome gesture of goodwill, but they will not adjust their expectations of that person’s behavior in any substantial way. From this perspective, then, apologies are much less important for Stoic forgiveness than they might otherwise be. While they might communicate a recognition of the error and a renewed commitment to do better, apologies should not be taken as evidence that the person has turned over a new leaf or that they won’t act badly in the future. Of course others will act badly, but so will we. With any luck, we can somehow help each other improve anyway. 97

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6. Conclusion From within the Stoics’ distinctive ethical worldview, which emphasizes widespread and consistent wrongdoing, various contemporary assumptions about forgiveness and anger aren’t as obvious as they might otherwise appear. We needn’t think of forgiveness as opposed to justice; anger is not necessary for registering wrongdoing, nor is it necessarily a reliable guide to the seriousness of wrongdoings; forgiveness for the sake of reconciliation (even before an apology) is required if unvirtuous people have any hope of living together. If, then, the Stoic worldview has something going for it, we might reasonably rethink some of the central terms of the forgiveness debate. It has been difficult to write this chapter, as I can literally hear coming through my window the shouts from people protesting police brutality and systemic racism. They are very angry, and the wrongs they have suffered are painfully personal. As a historian of philosophy, my job is to present the Stoic views in the most accurate and philosophically compelling ways I can, and it is true that the Stoics would claim that even the anger of the oppressed should be minimized and extirpated. But they would hasten to add that the greater blame falls on those doing the oppressing, as oppressive people and institutions are the sources of injustice and thus the cause of the social disharmony. A Stoic would say that you can be happy and control your anger in situations of oppression, but it is also much harder for a person to respond virtuously in such circumstances, and so it is wrong to put others in that situation when it could be avoided. The main task of Stoic political philosophy, for example, is to determine and bring about the conditions in which people are most likely to progress toward virtue and act rightly. While anger is an impediment to reconciliation, wronging others in such a way that prompts them to feel anger is the more serious error.11 First we must all strive to act virtuously, but when we inevitably fall short, then forgiveness plays a central role. The Stoic view of forgiveness may seem overly permissive, failing to appreciate the moral importance of apology and reform. I hope to have motivated an alternative view, built on taking human fallibility very seriously. Given that all of us will go wrong repeatedly and anger often exacerbates our wrongdoings, we must be less harsh in our punishments, less attached to our anger, and strive toward justice and reconciliation, not only with those people who have shown beyond reasonable doubt that they are no longer a “threat,” but with the very people who will inevitably wrong us again and whom we will inevitably wrong. This is a generous attitude to forgiveness, but perhaps it is the natural consequence of thinking that imperfect people must live with one another.12

Notes 1 I respond indirectly to Konstan (2010), who argues persuasively that the Stoics have no conception of forgiveness. Though an adequate response will take more space than I have, I provide some reasons for thinking that Konstan’s understanding of forgiveness is too narrow and ill fits the Stoics’ revisionary ethical views. 2 Parts of On Clemency make it seem like Seneca endorses clemency but not forgiveness (esp. II.7.1), but this translation choice in part relies on the assumption that to forgive means to abandon what justice requires. Readers should know that there are difficult lexical and historical-conceptual issues here (Dover 1991, 175). My approach is to try to show that Stoic writers are working with conceptions of forgiveness sufficiently similar to our own that we can fruitfully engage with them. 3 See also Thorsteinsson (2010, 52–4, 166–74), and Musonius Rufus 10, for the claim that we should not return wrong for wrong, but offer forgiveness (suggnōmē). 4 The Stoic can thus say that the appropriate response to psychopaths and the kind of people considered by Watson (2008 [1987]) and Wallace (2019) is to take steps to prevent them from harming others, but this can be done without negative reactive attitudes like resentment, anger, or disgust. The fact that humans are by nature social did not, for Seneca, entail that we must never resort to exile, incarceration, or capital punishment; rather, Seneca’s point is that our standards for judging others need to take into account the reality that most––if not all––people are predictably unvirtuous in various ways, and so a

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5 6

7

8

9

10

11 12

great deal hangs on how bad the person being judged is, how serious their crimes are, and whether there is any hope for rehabilitation. The older Stoics appear to have been especially uncompromising on this point; see Diogenes Laertius, Lives VII.123; Cicero, Pro Murena, 61–65; Arius Didymus, Epitome of Stoic Ethics, 11d26–39. This also raises interesting questions about who has the authority to forgive. If there are appropriate people to administer just punishments, so too must there be appropriate people to forgive wrongs. In the Life of Cato the Younger, Plutarch reports an episode where Cato refuses to supplicate Caesar: “For if,” Cato said, “I were willing to be saved by the grace of Caesar [χάριτι Καίσαρος] I ought to go to him in person and see him alone; but I am unwilling to be under obligations to the tyrant for his illegal acts. And he acts illegally in saving, as if their master, those over whom he has no right at all to be lord” (66.2; cf. Braund 2012, 89–94). That others’ injustice occurs at the level of what the Stoics call “indifferents” (things that cannot affect our happiness) is thus tangential to our discussion. Even though the Sage can be happy in situations of injustice and is free from mental distress at others’ wrongdoing, a Stoic would still try to remedy those injustices (note Arius Didymus, Epitome of Stoic Ethics, 11m = SVF 3.578). As Cicero’s archery analogy makes clear, every virtuous action takes as its target some set of indifferents (Cicero, On Moral Ends, III.22; Klein 2014). For the emotions as modes of ethical appreciation, see, e.g., Srinivasan (2018, 132); Hieronymi (2001, 531, 541) claims that not getting upset amounts to “giving up on… the seriousness of the wrong.” When we think harder about emotions versus actions as modes of appreciation, intuitions diverge depending on the case. On the one hand, we may rightly worry about somebody who is consistently enraged at police brutality but who does nothing; on the other hand, somebody who performs the actions of loving spouse but who feels nothing simply does not love their spouse. Interestingly, Seneca seems to recognize the latter point in On Benefits, where the actual gift is not what has moral value, but the goodwill behind the gift-giving (I.5.1–6.1). This notion of non-affective goodwill is worth exploring. Philosophers who think that anger plays primarily a communicative role have a better response than those who defend a fittingness model. I may only need to tell you once that Prokofiev wrote excellent music for me to communicate my valuation to you, but I will need to continue enjoying it throughout my life to continue appreciating its value fittingly. Aristotelians who claim that revenge or the rectification of an injustice is the goal of anger also have a rejoinder here (Nussbaum 2015). The ignorance condition has led some writers to claim that the Stoics think that everyone should be exculpated but not necessarily forgiven (Konstan 2010, 31–3). This is a complicated point, but ignorance may only function as an excuse when it is about particulars and is egregious. The Stoics think that everybody is ignorant, and about the most important things. Moral ignorance should change how we respond to people (compassionately and through teaching, rather than anger) but does not universally undermine moral responsibility. See also McCord-Adams (1991, 293–4) for further discussion of forgiveness in light of ignorant wrongdoing. This is consistent with the Stoic paradox that all wrongdoings are equal; see Cicero, Stoic Paradoxes, III. Something is politically amiss if certain groups are being asked to do much more forgiving than others. Thanks to Jacob Abolafia, Julia Annas, Dylan Barton, Alia Ghafur, Brad Inwood, Hallie Liberto, Theresa Lopez, Ivan Manriquez Jr, Glen Pettigrove, Emory Rhodes, Julius Schönherr, Rachel Singpurwalla, Robert Wallace, and the audience at San Francisco State University for helpful discussion and comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

References Allais, L. (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 36/1, 33–68. Allen, D. (2000) The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Baltzly, D. (2003) “Stoic Pantheism,” Sophia, 42/2, 3–33. Braund, S. (2009) Seneca, De Clementia: Edited with Text, Translation and Commentary, New York: Oxford University Press. Braund, S. (2012) “The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings”, in C. Griswold & D. Konstan (eds.), Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, Christian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 79–96. Calhoun, C. (1992) “Changing One’s Heart,” Ethics, 103/1, 76–96. Callard, A. (2019) “The Reason to Be Angry Forever,” in O. Flanagan & M. Cherry (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Anger, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 123–38. Cornell, N. (2017) “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving,” Philosophical Review, 126/2, 241–72.

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Jeremy Reid Dover, K. (1991) “Fathers, Sons, and Forgiveness,” Illinois Classical Studies, 16/1, 173–82. Fricker, M. (2019) “Forgiveness: An Ordered Pluralism,” Australasian Philosophical Review, 3/3, 241–60. Garrard, E. & D. McNaughton (2016) Forgiveness (The Art of Living), London: Routledge. Gill, C. (1988) “Personhood and Personality: The Four Personae Theory in Cicero De Officiis I,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 6, 169–99. Gill, C. (2013) Marcus Aurelius: Meditations Books 1–6, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gill, C. (ed.) & R. Hard (trans.) (1995) The Discourses of Epictetus: The Handbook, Fragments, London: Everyman. Graver, M. (2002) Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Graver, M. (2007) Stoicism and Emotion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hieronymi, P. (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62/3, 529–55. Hursthouse, R. (1999) On Virtue Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inwood, B. (2005) “Moral Judgement in Seneca”, in Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome, New York: Oxford University Press. Kaster, R. & M. Nussbaum (2010) Seneca: Anger, Mercy, Revenge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klein, J. (2014) “Of Archery and Virtue: Ancient and Modern Conceptions of Value,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 14/19, 1–16. Konstan, D. (2010) Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea, New York: Cambridge University Press. Konstan, D. (2012) “Assuaging Rage: Remorse, Repentance, and Forgiveness in the Classical World,” in C. Griswold & D. Konstan (eds.), Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, Christian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 17–30. McCord, Adams, M. (1991) “Forgiveness: A Christian Model,” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, 8/3, 277–304. Morton, A. (2012) “What is Forgiveness?” in C. Griswold & D. Konstan (eds.), Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, Christian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–16. Murphy, J.G. & J. Hampton (1998) Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1994) The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2015) “Transitional Anger,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1/1, 41–56. Pettigrove, G. (2012) Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, G. & K. Tanaka (2014) “Anger and Moral Judgment,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 92/2, 269–86. Sherman, N. (2005) Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, New York: Oxford University Press. Srinivasan, A. (2018) “The Aptness of Anger,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, 26/2, 123–44. Strawson, P.F. (2008) Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, London and New York: Routledge. Thorsteinsson, R. (2010) Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism: A Comparative Study of Ancient Morality, New York: Oxford University Press. Twambley, P. (1976) “Mercy and Forgiveness,” Analysis, 36/2, 84–90. Wallace, R. (2019) “Responsibility and the Limits of Good and Evil,” Philosophical Studies, 176/10, 2705–27. Warmke, B. (2014) “The Economic Model of Forgiveness,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 97/4, 570–89. Watson, G. (2008 [1987]) “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” in M. McKenna & P. Russell (eds.), Free Will and Reactive Attitudes: Perspectives on P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment”, Burlington: Ashgate. Wolf, S. (2011) “Blame, Italian Style”, in R. Jay Wallace, R. Kumar, & S. Freeman (eds.), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon, New York: Oxford University Press, 332–47.

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8 FORGIVENESS IN AUGUSTINE AND AQUINAS Adam Wood

1. Introduction Perhaps unsurprisingly, no single concept in Augustine’s or Aquinas’s thought corresponds closely to any account of forgiveness current in contemporary philosophical literature. This is partly because while recent discussions focus primarily on forgiveness between human persons, Augustine and Aquinas are equally if not more interested in forgiveness as something God does for us. Indeed, David Konstan claims that the “barrier” between divine and human forgiveness “tended to inhibit the development of a fully formed notion of interpersonal forgiveness” in patristic and scholastic thought, such that we shouldn’t expect much reflection on how we forgive one another from Augustine or Aquinas (Konstan 2010, 144). I’ll stop short here of arguing that Augustine or Aquinas offer a thorough analysis of forgiveness between humans as it is most often understood today, but I will discuss various features of their thought that might provide the resources for such an argument. Before discussing their ideas concerning human forgiveness in the second section of this chapter, however, I’ll address in the first section how each thinks about the equally if not more important case of divine forgiveness. Obviously Augustine and Aquinas were not of one mind. But Thomas’s discussions of forgiveness are deeply indebted to Augustine, and I think Aquinas would have been surprised to discover that his views diverged significantly from Augustine’s. I will assume here that their ideas concerning divine forgiveness run close enough in parallel with one another that I can treat them together. The same is largely true of their thought on human forgiveness, although as we’ll see, Aquinas’s careful study of Aristotle’s ethics provided him some additional resources beyond what we find in Augustine.

2.  Divine Forgiveness Both Augustine and Aquinas reflect often on scriptural passages such as Mt. 6:12, “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors,” that enjoin us to seek divine forgiveness and to extend forgiveness to one another. While in Mt. 6:12 the same Latin verb dimittere (translating the Greek aphiêmi) is used for both cases of forgiveness, however, I will argue that divine forgiveness for both Augustine and Aquinas is an importantly different phenomenon from anything humans do for one another. This section will focus on what Augustine and Aquinas thought we are asking God to do when we pray “forgive us our debts.” Among the questions contemporary philosophers most frequently ask about forgiveness are the following three. First, what is the nature of forgiveness, and how is it distinct from related phenomena such as mercy, love, pardon, and excuse? Second, DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-12

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who has the moral standing to forgive, and in virtue of what do they have it? Third, under what conditions is forgiveness possible or appropriate? In this section, I’ll examine the ways Augustine and Aquinas might answer these questions in turn. As to the first, I’ll take the position here that at the core of Augustine’s and Aquinas’s thought concerning divine forgiveness is the remission of sin. Contemporary accounts of forgiveness typically treat it as a particular sort of response to moral wrong, and Augustine and Aquinas would concur. They would say, however, that the sort of wrong in question is sin, and that for God to respond to sin in a forgiving way is for him to remit sin. To understand what they would mean by saying these things consider first the nature of sin. Aquinas defines sin in the Summa theologiae by way of commenting on Augustine’s claim that “a sin… is a deed, word, or desire contrary to the eternal law” (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.71.6; Augustine 2007, 22.27). The passage where Augustine makes this claim goes on to explain that: The eternal law is the divine reason or the will of God, which commands that the natural order be preserved and forbids that it be disturbed…. Hence, the behavior of a person which is obedient to the faith that is obedient to God reins in all mortal pleasures and keeps them to their natural limit, preferring in an ordered love the better things to the inferior ones. For, if nothing wrong were to cause pleasure, no one would sin. A person sins, therefore, who yields to delight in what is wrong rather than holding back from it. But that is wrong which that law forbids whereby the natural order is preserved. (Augustine 2007, 22.27–28) It would be easy but misleading to read Augustine’s talk about transgression of the eternal law, “the divine reason or will of God,” as straightforwardly affirming a divine command theory of morality. But Augustine characterizes obedience to God’s law here and elsewhere in terms of regulating our desires, such that we love higher things the best and lower things less. To act rightly, then, is a matter of acting out of rightly ordered loves or desires, and sin is a matter of disordered desire (Augustine 1993, 1.15–16; 1996, 1.27.28 and 2012, 15.22). In particular, it is a matter of loving God less than one ought, and desiring that something other than God be capable of bringing one happiness (Augustine 1991, 2.6.14 and 1993, 3.25). Insofar as it involves desiring that the order of goods God has established be upset, it involves a sort of prideful self-assertion, a setting up of oneself in God’s place; hence, pride is the root of all sin (Augustine 1997b, 29.33 and 2012, 12.6). Augustine speaks of this upsetting of the order ordained by God as an abandonment of justice, and losing the state of original justice—in which our wills are subject to God, our bodies to our souls, and our passions to reason—is precisely how Aquinas characterizes original sin—the sort that both thinkers believe is transmitted from Adam to all humans at their conception.1 Neither Aquinas nor Augustine think of original sin as itself a sinful act, but it is a sort of inherited psychic disorder that results in both sinful acts and sinful habits, i.e., vices (Augustine 1997, 1.10.11 and Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.81.1). Much more could be said concerning the nature and varieties of sin in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s thought, but this much should suffice to explain roughly what each has in mind by the remission of sin. Remitting sin for Augustine and Aquinas is chiefly a matter of reorienting our wills toward loving God above all else, and thereby undoing the disorder of original sin along with the further psychic damage wrought by our actual sins and their hardening into vices. Certainly as the Augustinian definition of sin indicates, they think and speak of it in legal terms as well. Among the “effects” of sin, Aquinas argues, are not just psychic disorder—including weakness, ignorance, malice, and concupiscence—but also the “debt of punishment” (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.85.3 and 87). As he explains, “whoever sins, commits an offense against an order: wherefore he is put down, in consequence, by that same order, which repression is punishment” (ibid., 1a2ae.87.1). Hence, 102

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the remission of sin is in part God’s refraining from punishing us as we deserve. All humans born inheriting original sin deserve infinite punishment in hell, according to Augustine and Aquinas, and the remission of sins partly consists in God’s sparing them from this punishment (Augustine 2005, 23.92 and Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.87.5 ad 2). But Augustine equates the “perpetual death of the damned” with their “separation from the life of God” (Augustine 2005, 29.113), and hence sees sparing them from punishment as a matter of reconciling them to himself by healing and restoring peace to their damaged and disordered psyches (Augustine 1997 1.26.39; 1997c, 3.3–6.6 and 2012, 19.13 and 27–28). For Aquinas, the remission of sins is strictly speaking the consummation or end result of the process (motus) of justification, “whereby the soul is moved by God from a state of sin to a state of justice” (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.113.6), that is, a “certain rectitude of order in the interior disposition of a man, insofar as what is highest in man is subject to God, and the inferior powers of the soul are subject to the superior, i.e., to the reason” (ibid., 113.1). Sin, both original and actual, deprived us of this state. For God to remit sin is for him to restore it. There is, of course, a conceptual distinction to be made between sparing us from punishment and healing our souls. In Augustine’s case this is important, since he recognized that Pelagius and his followers acknowledged the need for God’s grace in forgiving our actual sins (Augustine 1997c, 18.20 and 20.22, 1997d, 1.2.2 and 1999, 13.26).2 In Augustine’s estimation, however, this “mere remission of sins” (as he calls it)—that is, merely sparing us from punishment—is insufficient as an account of grace; what’s needed in addition is “the liberation of our nature and the removal of the dominion of sin” (Augustine 1999, 14.27). Or as he puts it elsewhere, the “full and perfect remission of sins” involves the changing “the old carnal nature” by “a process of renewal which increases day by day” (Augustine 1997, 2.37.44; see also ibid., 2.7.9 and 2.38.45). As for how God remits sin, Augustine and Aquinas agree that it requires both a movement of the human will and the infusion of divine grace. As far as the latter is concerned, both maintain God accomplishes it by having become incarnate and suffered death on our behalf. Augustine claims that “every human is separated from God except those who are reconciled to God through Christ the Mediator” and that “there is no reconciliation except by the remission of sins through the one grace of the most merciful Savior” (Augustine 1997, 1.28.56; see also 2005, 14.52). Aquinas likewise holds that “Christ’s passion is the proper cause of the remission of sins,” accomplishing this by making “not only a sufficient but a superabundant atonement for the sins of the human race” (Aquinas 2012, 3a.49.1 and 48.2). Details concerning Augustine’s and Aquinas’s theories how Christ atoned for our sins are disputed, and lie beyond the scope of this chapter. When it comes to the way we avail ourselves of Christ’s atoning work, Augustine and Aquinas staunchly insist against the Pelagians that humans can in no way will rightly without God’s gracious assistance (Augustine 1999, 16.32–17.33 and 1997e, 2.4–3.5 and 33.57; Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.109.2). Yet Augustine also famously asserts that “while God made you without you, he doesn’t justify you without you” (Augustine 1990–97, 169.13). And Aquinas explains that since God “moves humans to justice according to the condition of his human nature” and “it is proper to man’s nature to have free will,” therefore “in him who has the use of reason God’s motion to justice does not take place without a movement of the free-will,” but rather “He so infuses the gift of justifying grace that at the same time He moves the free-will to accept the gift of grace, in such as are capable of being moved thus” (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.113.3). The movement of free choice in question is twofold, including both a desire for God and a hatred for the sins that separate us from him (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.113.5). Yet note how Aquinas is careful to hedge his claims about the involvement of the will in justification with “in him who has the use of reason” and “in such as are capable of being moved thus.” Both Augustine and Aquinas maintain that God is perfectly capable of justifying infants and other humans incapable of using their freedom of choice. Both defend infant baptism on the grounds that baptism is in general necessary for the remission of sins, and infants are marred by original sin (Augustine 1997, 1.16.21–20.28 and 3.4.7–8 and Aquinas 2012, 103

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1a2ae.81.1, 82.4 and 3a.68). Indeed, while Aquinas calls baptism the “beginning of spiritual life, and the door to the sacraments” (Aquinas 2012, 3a.73.3), he regards the eucharist and penance as sacraments no less crucial in their respective ways for the remission of sins (Aquinas 2012, 3a.84.5–6).3 Viewing divine forgiveness chiefly as a matter of God’s remitting sins helps us to see how it differs from related states such as excuse, pardon, or God’s mercy and love. Since forgiveness is a response to sin, it differs from merely excusing errors that aren’t truly sinful. It is controversial just what conditions Augustine and Aquinas consider necessary for moral responsibility, but at the least they view coercion and some forms of ignorance as incompatible with praise or blame.4 I’ll return to the distinction between forgiveness and excuse in discussing human forgiveness below. As for pardon, if we view it primarily as a legal notion of withholding due punishment, then as discussed above it certainly represents part of divine forgiveness, but not the whole; for Augustine and Aquinas the remission of sins consists as much or more in God reorienting our wills toward himself as it does in God’s refraining from punishing us as we deserve. When it comes to God’s love and mercy, Augustine memorably asserts God’s love for all mankind by writing: “you are good and all-powerful, caring for each one of us as though the only one in your care, and yet for all as for each individual” (Augustine 1991, 3.11.19). Aquinas, likewise, thinks that God loves everything he has made, and that there is mercy in all of his works (Aquinas 2012, 1a.20.2–4 and 21.4). Yet both are clear that God’s love and mercy do not mean that he forgives all of us in the sense of remitting all of our sins; instead, in justice God punishes many sinners eternally in hell. Even there, however, God’s love and mercy are present insofar as he maintains the damned in existence and doesn’t punish them as fearfully as they deserve (Augustine 2012, 21.14 and Aquinas 2018, 4.50.2.4 ad 2). As regards God’s standing to forgive, some recent scholars have expressed puzzlement about whether and how God can forgive us for sins we have committed against one another, given that he isn’t in any obvious sense the victim of wrongdoing in these instances (Minas 1975 and Pettigrove 2008). Aquinas and Augustine, however, maintain that in one sense all sin is against God. As mentioned above, all sin involves loving God less than one ought, and pridefully asserting ourselves as authorities in his place. The origins of the City of Man, Augustine tells us, are traceable to “the love of self, even to the point of contempt of God” (Augustine 2012, 14.28). Certainly God isn’t the victim of our contempt in the sense that it effects some negative change in the divine nature, which is altogether immutable (Augustine 1991a, 7.17.23; 1991b, 5.2 and 2012, 8.6 and Aquinas 2012, 1a.9). But any wrong done to our neighbor involves wrong done to God. As Aquinas puts it, “to sin against God is common to all sins, insofar as the order to God includes every human order” (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.72.4 ad 1). What’s more, every one of our sins was born by Christ in the passion. Augustine suggests that we can understand King David’s line in Psalm 51:4—“against you alone have I sinned”—as directed at Christ who, while sinless, suffered death to bring about the remission of sins (Augustine 2000–4, 50.9). Does God forgive sins unconditionally? There are clear reasons for supposing that Augustine and Aquinas would answer “no.” Both frequently condition the forgiveness of sins in various acts in the lives of sinners. God forgives those who ask for forgiveness, repenting of their past sinfulness, and forgives those who forgive others (Augustine 1990–97, 32 and 114; 2005, 17.65–69 and 19.74; 2012, 21.27 and 2014, 2.8.28–29; Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.21.1 and 3a.88.2 and Aquinas 2013, 6.3.596–97).5 Given the role of the sacraments in God’s economy of salvation, he forgives those who are baptized, do penance, receive the eucharist, etc.6 Furthermore, given that for Augustine and Aquinas, coercion by God or anything else removes the voluntariness required for human action, God cannot force sinners to ask for forgiveness, forgive others, partake of the sacraments, or anything else. Aquinas and Augustine both recognize “the sin against the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 12:31, Mk. 3:29; 1 Jn. 5:16) as unforgiveable. Aquinas discusses various ways he finds 104

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Augustine characterizing this sin: “despair, presumption, impenitence, obstinacy, resisting the known truth and envy of our brother’s spiritual good” (Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.14.2 arg. 1; see also Aquinas 1995, 3.14–15 and Augustine 1990–97, 71 and 2005, 22.83). Any of these might present an impediment to God’s forgiving us. However, Augustine and Aquinas think God can and does work in the lives of sinners to bring about their repentance, and indeed, as staunch anti-Pelagians, they insist that God does so apart from any worthiness on the part of sinners to receive his gracious assistance. In Augustine’s eyes, a clear case of God’s doing just this is the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who desired nothing more than to persecute Christians when God turned his mind and will toward faith (Augustine 2008, 1.2.22; see Kantzer Komline 2020, 102–3 for discussion). Hence, we might say, the initial movement on God’s part toward forgiveness is indeed unconditional, although the complete process of forgiveness requires that certain conditions on the part of sinners be met. There is a puzzle here. While, as noted, Augustine and Aquinas think coercion incompatible with freedom, they also think God can cause creaturely acts without coercion, thus leaving creaturely acts free. It is puzzling, then, why God wouldn’t cause in every sinner whatever free acts of repentance are necessary that they might receive forgiveness. Eleonore Stump thinks Augustine recognized this puzzle clearly, and saw no good way of solving it (Stump 2001, esp. 136–38). She proposes a solution on his behalf that she thinks can be found in Aquinas. God cannot bring about acts of repentance unless the sinners previously cease resisting his gracious assistance. Since the cessation of resistance isn’t itself a meritorious act (or an act at all), Stump thinks her proposal compatible with anti-Pelagianism. It would explain why God brings about acts of repentance in some, but not all, sinners, and hence forgives the sins of some but not all. It isn’t clear, however, why Stump thinks God cannot cause sinners to cease resisting grace, and hence isn’t clear whether her proposal succeeds in resolving the puzzle. Furthermore, the case of Saul of Tarsus might appear to provide a ready counterexample in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s eyes to the need for cessation of resistance prior to extension of grace. Aquinas at several points indicates that there’s no reason, ultimately, why God forgives the sins of the particular sinners he does as opposed to other sinners whom he permits to remain obstinate in their refusal to repent. God is like a bricklayer reaching for some bricks for the top of his wall and others for the bottom; there is no reason, ultimately, why he chooses these for the top and those for the bottom (Aquinas 2012, 1a.23.5 ad 3 and 2012d, 9.4.788). As for why God doesn’t simply bring about acts of repentance in all sinners and hence forgive all sinners, supposing he has the ability to do so, I’ll return to this question briefly in my conclusion.

3.  Human Forgiveness Notably absent in the foregoing discussion is any mention of what many contemporary accounts of forgiveness consider its most salient feature, namely the overcoming of negative emotions such as resentment. There is an obvious reason why overcoming resentment isn’t part of the way Augustine and Aquinas think about divine forgiveness—they think God is utterly impassible, and doesn’t literally get angry or sorrowful (Augustine 2005, 29.112 and 2012, 9.5 along with Hallman 1984; in Aquinas see 2012, ST 20.1). Things are otherwise with humans, and I will argue in this section that emotional moderation is central to the way both Augustine and Aquinas think about our forgiving one another. Two notes before I proceed. First, while no human can forgive sins in the sense discussed in the previous section—i.e., we cannot remit sins in the way God alone can—God does deputize priests with the office of forgiving sins. Second, just as I didn’t argue that Augustine’s and Aquinas’s views on the remission of sins offer a complete account of divine forgiveness in the sense of giving us everything we might want from such an account nowadays, neither will I argue that their views give us a theory of interhuman forgiveness that satisfies 105

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contemporary theoretical desiderata. I hope to show, however, that their writings offer enough that to say they lacked a concept of forgiveness altogether would overstate the case. To begin with, Augustine and Aquinas see love and forgiveness as closely intertwined—so closely that the best general characterization of their view on the nature of forgiveness is that to forgive is to respond lovingly to someone who has wronged you.7 This should come as no surprise, given how deeply their understanding of forgiveness is shaped by the parable of the prodigal son, the injunction to love ones enemies, and other scriptures that suggest a strong tie between love and forgiveness. Yet for both, to respond lovingly to wrong done against you is complex—with interrelated cognitive, affective, volitional, and (typically) overtly active aspects—and must be seen in its complexity to be adequately understood. I’ll begin by explaining what I take Augustine and Aquinas to mean by “wrongdoing” as it relates to forgiveness, then disentangle some strands of what each thinks a loving response to wrong done against oneself must involve. I’ll then address two further questions about whether forgiveness is obligatory and whether it requires apology or repentance on the part of the wrongdoer. Above we saw that Augustine and Aquinas alike see divine forgiveness as a response to sin. The same may be true of Augustine’s understanding of human forgiveness, but isn’t so for Aquinas. At least, it isn’t so if we suppose that Thomas would count all of the instances where he speaks of granting someone veniam as instances of forgiveness. Augustine and Aquinas agree that in addition to the sort of conscious, clear-eyed wrongdoing involved in the devil’s fall or (perhaps) Augustine’s theft of the pears, one also can sin from passion—when one’s emotions or desires temporarily cause one to disregard what one knows should be done in a given circumstance—and from ignorance—when one goes astray as a result of not knowing rules or circumstances relevant to one’s action in the first place (Augustine 1997 1.39.70; 2005, 22.81 and 2007, 22.78; Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.76–77). One thing Aquinas makes far clearer than Augustine, however, is that sometimes instead of causing sin, ignorance can remove the voluntariness necessary for human action in the first place. Drawing on Aristotle’s discussion in Nicomachean Ethics book three, Aquinas notes that ignorance causes involuntariness when we are unaware of certain rules or particulars relevant to our action that we aren’t “bound to” know of (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.6.8). There are some things we are all obligated to know, Aquinas thinks, such as the articles of faith, the “universal principles of right,” and, for each individual, “matters regarding their duty or state” (ibid., 1a2ae.76.2). But there are certain items, both general and particular, that we can’t be expected to have known and that in certain cases cause us to go astray. When one does wrong in such cases of “invincible ignorance,” as Aquinas calls them, one doesn’t sin, because one doesn’t act voluntarily, and hence doesn’t perform a “human action” in the first place (ibid., 1a2ae.1.1). Nevertheless, Aristotle thinks the victims of such cases of wrongdoing should extend suggnomê to their perpetrators just as in cases where we have indeed been wronged voluntarily, and Aquinas agrees that such cases call for veniam just as when wrongdoing does indeed involve sin (see Aristotle 1984, 3.1.1110a24 and 1111a1 and Aquinas 1993, 3.1.383 and 413 and 5.13.1049 along with 2012, 1a2ae.47.2 and 2a2ae.68.4 ad 1). Partly for this reason, there is debate about whether Aristotle actually employs the concept of forgiveness as a response to wrongdoing, as opposed to mere excuse.8 To the extent that Aquinas also thinks we can extend veniam to involuntary wrongdoers, we might also debate whether or how closely this notion in his thought parallels a contemporary understanding of forgiveness. As we’ll see further below, however, other features of the way Aquinas uses the concept of veniam do seem to track closely with the way we think about forgiveness today. And even cases of suggnome or veniam for involuntary wrongdoing resemble full-fledged forgiveness in that they involve recognition that the wrongdoer would regret and be pained upon acquiring the missing knowledge that caused their wrongdoing in the first place (Aristotle 1984, 3.1.1110b18–24; Aquinas 1993, 3.3.407–8 and Carter 2018, 55–7). We might say, then, that forgiveness for Aquinas is a spectrum on one side of which is excusing wrongdoing that isn’t sin, and on the other side 106

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of which is forgiving unrepentant sin. In Augustine’s thought it may be that all forgiveness is a response to sin, as opposed to mere involuntary wrongdoing—certainly some is.9 What sort of response to wrongdoing is forgiveness? As mentioned above, it is multi-faceted, involving cognition, volition, affect, and typically overt action.10 I’ll discuss these components in turn. Because forgiveness is a response to wrongdoing, it requires first that the forgiving party recognize accurately that someone has done them wrong. Furthermore, because other aspects of the act of forgiveness may vary considerably depending on the sort of wrong that one is the victim of, forgiveness requires recognizing with a reasonable degree of accuracy what sort of wrong one has suffered. Otherwise, one’s response to the wrongdoing may be out of step with the particulars of the situation, and hence fall short as a loving response. Furthermore, Augustine and Aquinas would agree, to love and forgive someone who has wronged me I must see them not just as a wrongdoer, but also as intrinsically valuable and beloved children of God. This last requirement raises the question whether Augustine and Aquinas think it possible for nonbelievers to forgive. The answer, it seems to me, will depend on what one thinks about their view on the possibility of genuine virtue or virtuous deeds in nonbelievers in general—something that is very much open to debate.11 As mentioned above, Augustine sometimes speaks of all virtues as forms of rightly ordered love, or charity (Augustine 1996, 3.10.16; 2000–4, 9.15; 2006b 15.25 and 2012, 14.7). Aquinas agrees both with the way Augustine characterizes charity toward one’s neighbor— loving them as ordered toward God—and also that charity is required for the presence of any other true virtues (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.65.2–5 and 2a2ae.23 and 25.1). Hence, Aquinas and Augustine might say about forgiveness what Aquinas does in fact say about acts of almsgiving: that “materially” speaking nonbelievers might give alms, but that “formally” almgiving requires giving “for God’s sake, [i.e.], with delight and readiness, and altogether as one ought,” which isn’t possible without charity (Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.32.1 ad 1). Aquinas says charity is a virtue of the will, and it’s safe to say that Augustine would agree. What, then, does the volitional aspect of responding charitably to wrong done against one look like? Stump argues that Aquinas sees love as a dynamic interplay between two different desires: for the good of one’s neighbor—i.e., for their objective flourishing—and for union with one’s neighbor—i.e., in whatever ways befit the particular kind of relationship one has with him or her (Stump 2006). It is a strength of Aquinas’s view of love that it can account both for the way in which we think of love as responsive to features of the beloved, and hence as mutable when these features themselves change, and also as unilaterally bestowed by the lover, and hence as constant even in the face of changes in the beloved. Stump doesn’t make the case that her account of love is Augustinian as well as Thomistic, but it is certainly true that Augustine speaks of both desires in connection with charity (Augustine 1991b, 8.10.14; 1996, 1.29.30; 2006b 26.48–28.58 and 2008b, 8.5). Accordingly, when Stump argues that lacking either of the two desires of love might prevent forgiveness, this might be said about Aquinas’s and Augustine’s views alike. It is clear enough why it is incompatible with forgiveness not to desire what is good, objectively speaking, for the beloved. As Stump notes too, however, a desire to withdraw from the wrongdoer with whom one has a relationship can be equally incompatible with forgiving them. Now in Augustine’s case certainly and often in Aquinas’s as well, it is often difficult to mark precisely the boundary between volition strictly speaking and affect more broadly speaking, including emotions and desires distinct from the will itself.12 So, for example, Aquinas discusses hatred both as a passion and as a vice in the will opposed to charity (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.29 and 2a2ae.32). However we regard it, Augustine and Aquinas agree that hating a wrongdoer is incompatible with forgiving them, as are various related affective states such as vengeful spite (livorem vindictae) and rancor (Augustine 1990–97, 82 and 211.1–2; Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.25.9 and 35.4 ad 2; 2012b, 3.3.161 and 2012c, 4.10.264). On the other hand, both note, one can and indeed must 107

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hate sinfulness, including sins perpetrated against us.13 Furthermore, on Aquinas’s view at least, one may forgive someone while remaining angry with them. Following Aristotle, he sees anger as a natural response to the appearance that one has been wronged, and thus as morally neutral in itself, although in need of careful moderation (Aquinas 1993, 7.6.1390 and 2012, 1a.2ae.46 and 2a2ae.158). The virtuous mean with respect to anger—praotês or manseutedo, usually translated as mildness or meekness—is, like most moral virtues, a matter of feeling anger the right way: “over the right things, with the right persons, in the right way, at the right time, and for the right interval” (Aristotle 1984, 4.5.1125b31–35). Aquinas follows Aristotle in noting that mild persons tend to err toward defect in feeling anger, since it comes to most of us much more naturally to desire vengeance excessively (Aristotle 1984, 4.5.1126a30; Aquinas 1993, 4.13.802 and 2012, 2a2ae.157.2 ad 2). Hence, a forgiving person (suggnômonikos) turns out to be a mild person, although technically forgivingness marks a deficiency with regard to feeling anger, and if taken too far, should be censured, given the important role feeling anger plays in motivating us to censure, punish, and defend against evils as we ought to (Aquinas 1993, 4.13.805). For Aquinas, then, part of forgiving someone is moderating one’s feelings of anger at wrongs done to us such that we aren’t led astray by the excess or deficiency of this passion into errant cognitive or volitional states, or inappropriate behavior. Augustine seems much more ambivalent about whether anger is ever an appropriate part of our response to being wronged. Aquinas is of the opinion that Augustine sided with Aristotle against the Stoics on this issue, and Augustine does sometimes distinguish between anger and hatred, welcoming the former so long as it doesn’t harbor the latter (Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.158.1 ad 1; Augustine 1990–97, 32.2 and 211.1). Elsewhere, however, Augustine characterizes anger as a “lust for revenge” and counsels us to avoid even what might seem to us like righteous anger (Augustine 2012, 14.15; see also 2001–5, 38.2). The Augustine of the latter texts might say that part of forgiving someone is setting aside anger against them altogether, along with other negative affective states like hatred. At any rate, both thinkers agree that moderating or eliminating affective reactions to being wronged is part of what it means to forgive someone, and in this regard they coincide with many mainstream contemporary accounts of forgiveness. It is also worth reiterating that the affective component of human forgiveness for Augustine and Aquinas marks one important dissimilarity between human and divine forgiveness. While God’s forgiving us might resemble our forgiving one another in terms of their cognitive, volitional, and overtly active aspects, emotional moderation can play no part in divine forgiveness since God lacks emotions. It is possible, Augustine and Aquinas would say, that I might forgive someone without any overt behavior accompanying my forgiveness. Augustine speaks as though forgiving someone “from the heart” is what matters most in forgiveness (2005, 19.73–74 and 2012, 21.22). Citing Lk. 6:37–38—“give, and it will be given to you; forgive and you will be forgiven”—he considers forgiveness a sort of spiritual almsgiving, but notes that “in this kind of almsgiving no one is poor”; we need neither wealth nor bodily health to forgive (1990–97, 206.2 and 210.10; see also Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.32.2). Aquinas distinguishes between exterior acts and interior acts of human agents—roughly, between the publicly observable states of affairs our acts bring about and the inner dispositions that accompany or cause them—and I see no reason why he couldn’t allow for the possibility of forgiving someone inwardly without any exterior acts. Perhaps this might happen if I forgive someone long dead. Typically, however, both would agree that forgiveness is marked both by the presence of certain overt actions and by the absence of others. Both the Lord’s Prayer in Mt. 6 and the parable of the unforgiving servant in Mt. 18 speak of forgiveness in terms of debt cancellation, and so too do Augustine and Aquinas (Augustine 1990–97, 6, 33 and 210 and 2007, 19.24–25; Aquinas 2013, 6.3.596). In this respect their view of forgiveness resembles the sort of “economic model” that Brandon Warmke has recently defended (Warmke 2016). One sort of debt cancellation that Augustine and Aquinas clearly believe forgiving someone involves is foreswearing our right to 108

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any further vengeance on our own behalf. Augustine notes that while it isn’t unjust to demand payment of a debt—including the sort of moral debt incurred by wrongdoing—the best safeguard against the possibility of injustice in excessive demands for repayment is to cancel such debts entirely; hence we should forgive by foreswearing vengeance at all on our own behalf, or at least leaving it up to God (Augustine 1990–97, 211.6; 2000–4, 93.7 and 2007, 19.25). Aquinas agrees that “insofar as the wrong inflicted on a man affects his person, he should bear it patiently, if this be expedient” (Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.108.1 ad 4). Nonetheless, neither Augustine nor Aquinas censures violent self-defense as an occasionally necessary response to violent attacks (Augustine 1993, 1.5 and Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.64.7). And both agree that overt actions frequently accompanying forgiveness will include correction, rebuke, and punishment. Employing the notion of forgiveness as spiritual almsgiving, Augustine writes in the Enchiridion: Not only somebody who offers food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, hospitality to the traveler, asylum to the refugee; a visit to the sick or the prisoner, redemption to the captive, support to the weak, guidance to the blind, comfort to the sorrowful, medicine to the unwell, a path to the wanderer, advice to the uncertain, or whatever else is necessary to a person in need, but also one who offers pardon to the sinner is giving alms. And one who uses the whip to correct somebody over whom he has power, or disciplines him in some way, and yet puts away from his heart that person’s sin by which he has been hurt or offended, or prays that it be forgiven him, is giving alms not only through forgiveness and prayer but also in reproof and correction by some punishment, for thus he is showing mercy. (Augustine 2005, 19.72) Several things are worth noting in this important passage. First, that corrective punishment and rebuke are not only consistent with forgiveness but are frequently necessary accompaniments. Aquinas agrees that while forgiveness requires foreswearing vengeance on our own behalf, given that wrongs done to us are also wrongs against God and the community, it would usually be improper not to respond to them by avenging action for the wrongdoer’s own good and that of the community (Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.108.1). As Thomas sees it, “fraternal correction” ranks among the chief alms we can render to our neighbors (ibid., 2a2ae.33). That being said, second, Augustine ends the passage just quoted by noting the need for mercy in punishment. Aquinas concurs in associating clemency in punishment with the Aristotelian virtue of mildness discussed above, and the virtue of equity (Aristotle’s epieikeia) that enables rulers to apply general laws wisely to particular cases (Aquinas 1993, 6.9.1244 and 2012, 2a2ae.120 and 157 ad 2). We can see Augustine striving for such clemency and equity himself especially in some of his letters in his office as Bishop of Hippo, urging mercy to wrongdoers while wrestling with the need not to condone their wrongdoing (Augustine 2001–5, 153, see also 1990–97, 82.7). Third, in the Enchiridion passage, we see clearly that rebuke and correction are far from the only overt actions that Augustine thinks will typically accompany forgiveness; rather, as is also the case in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, these forms of spiritual almsgiving are set alongside a long list of corporeal almsdeeds: giving food, clothing, hospitality, etc. Given that Augustine and Aquinas alike see these kinds of almsgiving as obligatory in general, even toward our enemies, they would presumably insist that one cannot genuinely forgive someone while withholding from them the alms that one would normally be required to render.14 Lastly, Augustine’s passage also indicates that forgiveness will typically (perhaps always) be accompanied by prayer on behalf of the wrongdoer. Aquinas agrees that we must pray for our enemies in the same way that we love them and forgive them (Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.83.8). This raises a pair of questions, however: is it obligatory that we pray for, love, and forgive our enemies or others who have wronged us? And furthermore, must we do so no matter what, even 109

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if they haven’t apologized or sought forgiveness? In response to these questions Augustine draws a distinction that Aquinas picks up and further develops. Quoting Mt. 5:44—“love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute you”—Augustine writes: But this is a characteristic of the perfect children of God, which each one of the faithful must strive for, training his human spirit in such love by prayer to God and discipline and struggle within himself, and, since this great virtue is not possessed by as many people as those whose prayers we believe are heard when the prayer is made, Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors (Mt. 6:12), without a doubt the words of this promise are fulfilled when a person who has not yet progressed so far as to love his enemy nevertheless forgives from his heart one who has sinned against him and asks for forgiveness. (Augustine 2005, 19.73) Aquinas distinguishes between a commandment and a counsel; the former “implies obligation” while the latter “is left to the option of the one to whom it is given” (Aquinas 2012, 1a2ae.108.4). Thomas argues that when it comes to forgiveness, it is a commandment to forgive those who ask forgiveness. Likewise, recalling that for Aquinas wrongdoing can be involuntary, Thomas would say that we must forgive those who wrong us out of ignorance, say, provided that were their ignorance removed they would feel pain and regret. In this he follows Aristotle. Augustine and Aquinas would seemingly depart from Aristotle, however, in extending obligatory forgiveness even to vicious persons who have wronged us, provided they ask forgiveness.15 Many contemporary theorists on forgiveness agree that forgiveness is either impossible or impermissible in many cases, including those of unrepentant wrongdoing. If it is possible to forgive such wrongdoing at all, then, nonetheless, one shouldn’t do so, because this would involve condoning evil. Augustine and Aquinas would point out in response to this argument that forgiving even unrepentant wrongdoers needn’t be seen as condoning their bad behavior provided that forgiveness be accompanied by the spiritual alms of fraternal correction, rebuke, and perhaps punishment. Even if it is possible and permissible to forgive without repentance, however, Aquinas follows Augustine in regarding this as a counsel rather than a commandment—it isn’t obligatory. At least, Aquinas says, it is obligatory only to pray for our enemies and to be prepared to render them further alms if necessary. It isn’t obligatory to seek out our offenders in every case and seek to provide them alms, including forgiveness. Charity, Aquinas says, “does not require that we should have special movement of love to every individual man, since this would be impossible” (Aquinas 2012, 2a2ae.25.8). Nevertheless, lastly, Augustine and Aquinas argue that even if it isn’t obligatory it may, for a variety of reasons, be advantageous for us to seek reconciliation with those who have wronged us, even if they haven’t apologized or asked for forgiveness.16 As Augustine puts it, “in no way at all can your raving enemy do you more harm than you do to yourself if you don’t love your enemy” (Augustine 1990–97, 56.14).

4. Conclusion Insofar as Augustine and Aquinas have a great deal to say that overlaps with contemporary discussions of forgiveness, it would overstate the case to suppose that either lacks the notion in their thought altogether. Yet Konstan and others who have alleged this to be the case are correct insofar as Augustinian and Thomistic forgiveness turns out to be no single simple thing, but rather irreducibly complex in at least two different ways. First, there is an irreducible difference between divine forgiveness, which consists primarily in the remission of sins, and human forgiveness. Divine forgiveness, as we have seen, involves God’s extending to sinners the grace that heals the psychic wounds they have inflicted upon themselves, thereby also reconciling them to himself and 110

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bringing about in them states that merit his lessening of the punishment that would otherwise be due them. All of these aspects of divine forgiveness can rightly be seen as facets of one and the same action on God’s part. Human forgiveness differs from divine forgiveness in several important respects. We cannot, on our own, remit sins. Our forgiving one another involves emotional moderation that is absent in God’s case. And our forgiving one another is in many cases obligatory, whereas it is perfectly consistent with God’s goodness that he refrain from remitting the sins of some. I’ll return to this last point momentarily. Before I do, note a second way in which forgiveness for Augustine and Aquinas is irreducibly complex. Human forgiveness involves distinct cognitive, volitional, emotional, and active components that must typically all be present for us to forgive one another. As a result, depending on which of these components we have in view, the Augustinian and Thomistic account of interpersonal forgiveness will resemble one or another different “models” of forgiveness from the contemporary literature on the subject. It includes characteristics of emotional moderation, debt cancellation, and punishment-forbearance, at least. Binding all of these together for Augustine and Aquinas, I have suggested, is love as a response to wrongdoing against us. But it is true that their account of human forgiveness cannot easily be assimilated to any account of forgiveness standard nowadays. In closing, I raise a final question for Augustine and Aquinas alike: if love is central to forgiveness in both the divine and human cases, and it is in many cases obligatory for humans to forgive one another, then how can it possibly be consistent with God’s love that he should refrain from forgiving the sins of some? Responses to this question vary. Perhaps the Augustinian picture of God is problematically bifurcated into competing drives for mercy on the one hand and justice on the other.17 Or perhaps, contrary to what I have argued, Aquinas’s God (at least) necessarily does forgive the sins of all.18 I would suggest one further possibility. Augustine’s mentor Ambrose is sometimes credited with having written the Exsultet, the hymn sung at the Easter vigil that includes the line “O happy fault, that merited for us such and so great a redeemer!” Augustine and Aquinas alike echo the notion that Adam’s sin was a happy fault. Augustine writes that “[God] judged it better to bring good out of evil than to allow nothing evil to exist” (Augustine 2005, 8.27). And Aquinas cites the hymn while claiming that “God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom” (Aquinas 2012, 3a.1.3 ad 3). It may be that forgiveness through Christ’s redemptive work is one of the great goods that Augustine and Aquinas consider better than his not having permitted sin to occur at all. And it may be that having permitted sin, there are reasons why God does not or cannot forgive the sins of all. On this interpretation of Augustine’s and Aquinas’s thought, however, forgiveness within relationships represents a great good indeed—one worth the cost of permitting strains on the relationship in order that deeper, stronger fellowship through healing and reconciliation might ultimately come about.

Notes 1 See Augustine 2005, 28.106 for the fall as an abandonment of justice, and Augustine 1991, 1.7.11; 1997, 2.22.36–23–37 and 2012, 13.14 for the discussion of original sin, on which Couenhaven 2005 is a very helpful resource. In Aquinas see 2009, 2.186–98 and 2012, 1a.95.1, 1a2ae.82. Aquinas thinks the fomes, or kindling for original sin, were present even in the Virgin Mary (2012, 3a.27.3), and while Augustine appears willing to exempt Mary from ever actually committing sinful acts, I’m not sure he does so from original sin (1997c, 36.42). 2 My thanks to Gregory Lee for help on this point. 3 To be clear, Aquinas explains in these articles that while crucial, the eucharist and penance play quite different roles in the remission of sins than baptism does. For a stimulating perspective on how Aquinas thinks about the role of the eucharist see Stump 2018, ch. 9. 4 See Augustine 1993, 3.17–19 and 2006, 10.12–14 for important passages concerning the conditions for moral responsibility. My thanks to Han-Luen Kantzer Komline for directing my attention to the latter, which she discusses in her 2020, 63–77. In Aquinas see 2012, 1a2ae.6.4–8 and 76.2.

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Adam Wood 5 Ramelli 2011 and 2012 argue that contrary to what is often assumed, early Christian theologians thought of forgiveness as conditional, requiring repentance on the part of the wrongdoer. 6 See Aquinas 2012, 3a.61.1 on the necessity of sacraments, which cites Augustine 2007, 19.11, although here as elsewhere what Augustine says about the necessity of sacraments must be interpreted in its context, which is frequently disputation with the Manichees, Donatists, or Pelagians. 7 See Pettigrove 2012, 73 and Stump 2018, 80–4 for this suggestion regarding Augustine and Aquinas respectively. 8 See Sadler 2009 and Carter 2018 for overviews of this debate and arguments on behalf of genuine forgiveness in Aristotle. 9 Indeed, it may be that at least for Augustine voluntariness isn’t a necessary condition for sinfulness at all; see Augustine 2008, 1.1 and Kantzer Komline 2020, 90–4 for discussion, along with Alflatt 1974. 10 The suggestions that forgiveness and love are interwined and multi-faceted are owing to Pettigrove 2012, ch. 5. 11 See Irwin 1999 on this issue in Augustine and Shanley 1999 on Aquinas. 12 Sometimes Augustine speaks as though all passions just are states of the will, as in 2012, 14.6. 13 See Augustine 2001–5, 211.11 for the famous exhortation toward “love for the persons and hatred for their vices” that is often (mis)quoted: “hate the sinner, love the sin.” Aquinas discusses hatred of sin in 2012, 2a2ae25.6. 14 For discussions of Augustine on almsgiving see Swift 2001 and Brown 2012, ch. 22 and for Aquinas see Stump 2003, ch. 10. Aquinas argues that almsgiving is obligatory (2012, 2a2ae.32.5) and that loving our enemies requires being ready to help them when in need (ibid., 2a2ae.25.9). See Augustine 2014, 1.20.69–23.80 for one discussion of the “great liberality” with which we should treat our enemies in forgiving them. Much of what he says about almsgiving can be found in his sermons and letters—see for example 1990–97, 164a, 206 and 350b. He appears in one sermon to link forgiveness and corporeal almsgiving much as I have suggested: Do as much as you can, do it with what you can, do it cheerfully, and send out your prayer. It will have twin wings, twin acts of kindness. What do I mean by twin acts of kindness? Forgive, and you shall be forgiven; give, and you shall be given (Lk. 6:37–38). One act of kindness is the one that is done with the heart, when you forgive your brother a sin; the other act of kindness is the one that is done with your substance, when you offer bread to the poor man. Do them both, or your prayer may be left without one wing. (1990–97, 58.10) 15 While Aristotle says that while we extend suggnomê in cases of akrasia (1984, 1150b8 and 30–5), Sadler 2009, 235 suggests that Aristotle would think it vicious to forgive vice, though Carter 2018, 61–4 argues that Aristotle might allow for this possibility in cases where formerly vicious persons undergo reformation. 16 Aquinas 1937, 2 lists five reasons why we should forgive even those who don’t ask our forgiveness. 17 See Talbott 1993 for this suggestion. 18 See Stump 2018, 82–3 and 101 for this suggestion.

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Forgiveness in Augustine and Aquinas ———. (2012d). Commentary on the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans, trans. F.R. Larcher OP, ed. J. Mortensen and E. Alarcón. Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute. ———. (2013). Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, trans. J. Holmes and B. Mortensen. Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute. ———. (2018). Commentary on the Sentences, trans. B. Mortensen, ed. P. Kwaskiewski and J. Holmes. Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross, ed. J. Barnes in The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Augustine. (1990–97). Sermons, trans. E. Hill, OP, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, III/1–11. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (1991). Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1991b). The Trinity, trans. E. Hill OP, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/5. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (1993). On Free Choice of the Will, trans. T. Williams. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. ———. (1996). Teaching Christianity (De Doctrina Christiana), trans. E. Hill, OP, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/11. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (1997). The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Little Ones in Answer to the Pelagians I, trans. R. Teske SJ, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/23. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (1997b). The Spirit and the Letter in Answer to the Pelagians I, trans. R. Teske SJ, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/23. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (1997c). Nature and Grace in Answer to the Pelagians I, trans. R. Teske SJ, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/23. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (1997d). The Grace of Christ and Original Sin in Answer to the Pelagians I, trans. R. Teske SJ, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/23. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (1999). On Grace and Free Will in Answer to the Pelagians IV, trans. R. Teske SJ, ed. J. Rotelle in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/26. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2000–4). Expositions of the Psalms, trans. M. Boulding OSB, ed. J. Rotelle, in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, III/15–20. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2001–5). Letters, trans. R. Teske SJ, ed. B. Ramsey in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, II/1–4. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2005). Enchiridion, trans. B. Harbert in On Christian Belief, ed. B. Ramsey in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/8. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2006). The Two Souls in The Manichean Debate, trans. R. Teske, SJ, ed. B. Ramsey, in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/19. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2006b). The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichean Way of Life in The Manichean Debate, trans. R. Teske, SJ, ed. B. Ramsey, in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/19. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2007). Answer to Faustus, a Manichean, trans. R. Teske, SJ, ed. B. Ramsey in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/20. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2008). Miscellany of Questions in Response to Simplician in Responses to Miscellaneous Questions, trans. B. Ramsey, ed. R. Canning in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/12. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2008b). Homilies on the First Epistle of John, trans. B. Ramsey, ed. D. Doyle OSA and T. Martin OSA in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/14. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2012). The City of God, trans. W. Babcock, ed. B. Ramsey in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/6–7. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. ———. (2014). The Sermon on the Mount, trans. M. Campbell OSA in New Testament I and II, ed. B. Ramsey in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, I/15–16. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. Brown, P. (2012). Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carter, J. (2018). “Aristotle and the Problem of Forgiveness,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92.1: 49–71. Couenhaven, J. (2005). “St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin,” Augustinian Studies 36.2: 359–96. Hallman, J. (1984). “The Emotions of God in the Theology of St. Augustine,” Recherches de theólogie ancienne et médiévale 51: 5–19. Irwin, T.H. (1999). “Splendid Vices: Augustine For and Against Pagan Virtues,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 8: 105–27.

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Adam Wood Kantzer Komline, H. (2020). Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Konstan, D. (2010) Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minas, A. (1975). “God and Forgiveness,” The Philosophical Quarterly 25.99: 138–50. Pettigrove, G. (2008). “The Dilemma of Divine Forgiveness,” Religious Studies 44.4: 457–64. ———. (2012). Forgiveness and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramelli, I. (2011). “Unconditional Forgiveness in Christianity? Some Reflections on Ancient Christian Sources and Practices,” in The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays, ed. C. Fricke. London: Routledge, 30–50. ———. (2012). “Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy: The Importance of Repentance and the Centrality of Grace,” in Ancient Forgiveness, ed. C. Griswold and D. Konstan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 195–215. Sadler, G. (2009). “Forgiveness, Anger and Virtue: An Aristotelian Perspective,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 82: 229–47. Shanley, Brian. (1999). “Aquinas on Pagan Virtue,” The Thomist 63.4: 553–77. Stump, E. (2001). “Augustine on Free Will,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Stump and N. Kretzmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124–47. ———. (2003). Aquinas. London: Routledge. ———. (2006). “Love, by All Accounts,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80.2: 25–43. ———. (2018). Atonement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swift, L. (2001). “Giving and Forgiving: Augustine on Eleemosyna and Misericordia,” Augustinian Studies 32.1: 25–36. Talbott, T. (1993). “Punishment, Forgiveness and Divine Justice,” Religious Studies 29.2: 151–68. Warmke, B. (2016). “The Economic Model of Forgiveness,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97: 570–89.

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9 JOSEPH BUTLER ON FORGIVENESS David McNaughton

1. Resentment When someone is wronged they often, and perfectly naturally, have a negative reaction to the person who has wronged them. Such a reaction can range from mild irritation to downright fury and even hatred, depending on the nature of the wrong and how it is perceived. One form that the response can take is resentment, especially if you are wronged by someone close to you, or someone you have trusted. In addition to whatever material harm the wrong has caused – financial loss, bodily injury, damage to your reputation – the wrongdoer has shown a lack of respect for you, a lack of concern for your feelings and well-being, and a lack of regard for your rights. Their contempt calls forth your resentment. Resentment has its pleasures. Some victims may nurture it, perhaps as a way of retaining their self-respect.1 But resentment is in many ways undesirable for the person who resents, and potentially damaging to others. Resentment can be a corrosive emotion that chains you to the past. It can fester, and then burst out in bitterness and recrimination. There seem good reasons, at least in many cases, to be rid of it. But how? There are a number of methods, some more effective or more morally acceptable than others. You might try to find satisfaction in revenge; to pay the other person back, whether in their own coin, or some other way. But revenge is not always possible, and it is also open to strong moral objections. You might seek an apology; a recognition by the wrongdoer that they have treated you badly, accompanied by a commitment not to do it again. But apologies are not always forthcoming, and even where they are they may not fully assuage resentment. In serious cases you may want justice: punishment of the offender and, where possible, reparation. Once again, however, justice cannot always be obtained, and even where the offender gets their just deserts that may not bring closure. Or your resentment might fade with time, especially if the wrong was small and its effects fleeting. Finally, you might try to forgive and hope thereby to release yourself from the burden of harboring a grudge. Difficult though it may be to forgive, forgiveness has a clear advantage over these other strategies. Unlike revenge, accepting an apology, or achieving justice, forgiving the wrongdoer is a goal you can achieve on your own; its success does not depend on good fortune or the cooperation of others. But what exactly is it to forgive? One common and attractive answer is that to forgive is simply to overcome, or at least to foreswear, resentment. That is, the person who has genuinely forgiven either no longer feels resentment, or is committed to losing their resentment and is determined not to give it expression. Proponents of this account of forgiveness sometimes cite Butler’s writings on resentment and forgiveness as the classic source of this view.2 The only difficulty with this attribution is that it DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-13

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does not chime with what Butler himself actually wrote.3 Butler’s position is more nuanced and, in some respects, more interesting than is sometimes realized. Butler’s views are to be found in Sermons 8 and 9 of his Fifteen Sermons, first published in 1726; an expanded and corrected second edition followed in 1729. At the time he delivered these sermons he was Preacher at the Rolls Chapel where his sophisticated congregation would have consisted largely of lawyers and clerks who worked in the Court of Chancery. Despite their intellectual tenor, these are not simply philosophical discourses, but also sermons on the specifically Christian injunctions to forgive and to love our enemies. Many have found Jesus’s words to be hard sayings. As Butler remarks in the Preface to the Sermons (added in the second edition): “Forgiveness of injuries is one of the very few moral obligations which has been disputed” (Butler 1729: P 33).4 Some find the injunction to forgive noble but impractical; others find it downright objectionable. Butler has two main purposes in these two sermons. First, to explain why a benevolent God has endowed us with such a negative and even hostile emotion as resentment, given that it “appears the direct contrary to benevolence” (S 8.1). As he notes in sermon 9, “No other principle, or passion, hath for its end the misery of our fellow-creatures” (S 9.10). Second, he wishes to show that the injunction to forgive is neither impossible nor extravagant, but the merest good sense. In addressing the first issue, Butler assumes not only that humans were created by God but also that our various abilities and dispositions were specifically fashioned by a loving God who had our welfare in mind. “Since no passion God hath endued us with can be in itself evil” (S 8.3), we must seek to find out what good purpose it serves. Since Butler’s assumption is not now widely shared, even among Christians, it might seem that we have little to learn from the first part of his enquiry. But that would be a mistake. Even if we don’t believe our emotional responses were designed for good ends, we can still ask whether a particular reactive attitude does in fact serve various good ends, at least in some circumstances.5 Is the desire that someone be made to suffer for their wrongdoing one that it is ever morally appropriate, or even desirable, to harbor? If it is sometimes a morally legitimate reaction, when is it acceptable to feel this way, and when and how might it be appropriate to give expression to that feeling and actually to inflict harm on the wrongdoer? These are all questions to which Butler offers answers. One possible source of confusion is that Butler uses the words ‘resentment’, ‘indignation’, and ‘anger’ interchangeably. He states that there is a single feeling or reactive attitude for which there happen to be different terms (see S 9.2). I shall later offer reasons to doubt this, but in setting out Butler’s claims I shall follow him in this for the present. He begins by distinguishing two kinds of anger or resentment – hasty or sudden, and settled or deliberate – both of which serve the purpose of protecting us from harm.6 Sudden anger is the immediate response to being hurt, or impeded, and need imply no judgment as to whether you were wronged or treated unjustly. That instinctive response is something we share with small children and animals, and its purpose, Butler proposes, is to prevent or defeat any sudden violence, irrespective of fault. Sudden anger may prevent or rectify injustice, but its primary purpose is self-defense (S 8.6). If, for example, I am shoved or jostled, my likely immediate response is to be irritated, and to push back. Not only is that reaction helpful in defending myself when I am actually pushed or jostled, but the knowledge that people instinctively react this way will often deter others from either intentionally or carelessly bumping into, tripping up, striking, or in other ways impeding me as I go about my business. When it comes to an immediate threat to life, such as a sudden violent attack, then, as Butler remarks, “there is no time for consideration, and yet to be passive is certain destruction; in which, sudden resistance is the only security” (S 8.6). Settled and deliberate anger or resentment, by contrast, results only from the belief that a wrong has been committed. People can harm each other without being to blame for that harm, for a variety of reasons. For example, the person causing the harm might not have been able to foresee 116

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the harm, or if they did, they might not have been able to prevent it. Such harms can be thought of as natural evils – things that happen in the course of life for which no one is to blame. They may be the occasion of many emotions: irritation, distress, regret, a sense of loss, sympathy with those affected, and so on. But we can feel resentment or indignation toward the person who caused those harms only where we believe that person was to blame for the harm, whether they caused it intentionally or by carelessness and inattention. When Butler says that such anger or indignation is deliberate he means that it results from deliberation; the indignant person has reflected on the behavior of the person who caused the harm and concluded that they acted wrongly. We can think of such harms as moral evils – harms for which someone should be held morally accountable. Butler calls such harms injuries, meaning not bodily injuries, but harms that are wrongfully or unjustly inflicted. Sudden anger can die down just as quickly as it flares up, but deliberate anger is settled and lasting because it results from a considered judgment that the person who brought about the harm is to blame. As Butler puts it: It is not natural, but moral evil; it is not suffering, but injury, which raises that anger or resentment, which is of any continuance. The natural object of it is not one, who appears to the suffering person to have been only the innocent occasion of his pain or loss; but one, who has been in a moral sense injurious either to ourselves or others. (S 8.7) Deliberate resentment, like sudden anger, serves to protect us. “It is a weapon, put into our hands by nature, against injury, injustice and cruelty” (S 8.8). First, a potential offender may be deterred by knowing that she will face the indignation not just of her victim but of other people who come to know about the offense. Second, where deterrence has failed, and an offense has been committed, resentment and indignation will help bring an offender to justice.7 Resentment or indignation may serve to further the cause of justice, but it is “a painful remedy” (S 9.6). Passions can run high; victims can be led to wreak a terrible revenge, and mobs can thirst for blood. Even when indignation is channeled through a proper judicial process, the desire to see justice done can bring out ugly elements in human psychology, as the popularity of public executions illustrates. Could there not be a better way of securing justice? Butler thinks that in theory there could be, but in practice it is not possible for beings like us. To see why, we need to understand his analysis of human nature. Human psychology, Butler holds, contains two kinds of elements: authoritative rational principles that are meant to guide our actions, and what he calls particular affections, passions, and appetites. The latter, such as hunger, thirst, fear, hope, compassion, emulation, sexual desire, and parental affection, are emotional or appetitive impulses that furnish us with desires for specific things. When we are hungry, we want to eat; when we pity someone, we want to aid or comfort them; and so on. On their own, however, such natural impulses are not reliable guides as to how best to live. They can lead us to do things that are either immoral, damaging to our own interests, or both. We may feel hungry, and yet it would be bad for our health to eat. Compassion may be misplaced, so that we indulge someone’s harmful weaknesses instead of practicing ‘tough love’. The psychology of animals, according to Butler, consists entirely of these passional elements. Animals are incapable of reflecting on their behavior, and are entirely led by instinctual drives, feelings, and appetites, often to their benefit but sometimes to their own detriment. Since they are incapable of rational control their behavior cannot properly be assessed in terms of praise or blame. It is quite otherwise with humans. We can reflect on what we do, and the motivations from which our actions spring, and judge them reasonable or unreasonable. As a result, we can exercise control directly over what we do and, more indirectly and less surely, over what we feel. In the Sermons Butler suggests that there are two such rational principles: self-love and conscience. We 117

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can reflect on our desires and determine when it would be both safe and morally appropriate to satisfy them. By means of such reflection we can assess the reasons for and against some action, both in terms of our own interests and the interests of others, and come to a balanced judgment as to how we should act. I may give up smoking, enjoyable as it is, because I recognize it will damage my health in the long term. I may resist the clever but wounding witticism that springs to my lips because I realize that it will hurt someone’s feelings. That raises the question: if conscience and self-love are there to guide us to the best course of action, why do we need the affections, passions, and appetites? Butler’s answer is that, though the principles of self-love and conscience have authority, in humans they lack complete power.8 We often act irrationally, knowing that we are doing so. I can be aware that I would be happier, healthier, and wealthier if I stopped smoking, but yet light another cigarette. I can recognize that I may lose a friend by hurting their feelings, and yet I just cannot resist showing off with some cutting quip. Though emotions and appetites can lead us astray, they can also sometimes come to the motivational aid of the rational principles when these latter are too weak to move us. I may know I need to eat, but I might be too lazy or too distracted to do anything about it, were it not for hunger driving me to find food and eat it. Prudence might alert me to the dangers of some course of action, but it may be fear that actually keeps me from taking risks, and so on. When all is going well, reason and desire cooperate in making me act sensibly and considerately. But they can, of course, often conflict. Where that happens, we can, over time, train the non-rational elements to assist conscience and self-love. We do this by forming good habits and learning to find satisfaction in prudent and dutiful acts. We train ourselves to hope or fear, love or detest, the right things. For most of us, there are still internal battles to be fought because our desires do not always fall in line behind the authoritative principles of conscience and self-love. Ideally, we would reach a stage where there were no more battles between reason and desire because they were in total harmony. But that’s an ideal that few, if any, can realize.9 In Butler’s pragmatic view, it would indeed be better if justice could be procured solely by a rational assessment of what is required for public peace and security, but it is unrealistic to suppose that this could happen without the assistance of the emotions of resentment and indignation (S 8.14). A sense of duty, on its own, is not strong enough to do all that is needed. These claims seem plausible. It is often hard to obtain justice, and in many instances it is only achieved after people have waged long, exhausting, and passionate campaigns to right a wrong. It is indignation, and a burning sense of injustice, that keeps such campaigns going, sometimes at considerable personal expense, and often in the face of indifference and obstruction. In the absence of such emotions, it is hard to see how victims, or those who care about them, could find the energy and commitment to keep up the good fight. Moreover, the protection of the public requires, in some cases, the infliction of severe penalties. If we felt no more anger toward criminals than we do toward the innocent, our good will and compassion would revolt against such harsh measures. Indignation thus acts as an emotional counterweight to compassion and reconciles us to the punitive steps that must be taken for the preservation of good order and the protection of the innocent.10 Appropriate indignation may thus be given a cautious welcome because it has good effects. Nevertheless, given that righteous anger often leads people astray, we can recognize that it would be better if rational reflection were sufficient on its own to move society to pass and enforce equitable laws without recourse to the swirling passions of anger and resentment. But that desirable state of affairs is not currently within our reach. We might note in passing that these claims of Butler raise a theological problem for his view. If God cares for our welfare, and if it would be better if we could achieve justice without the need for anger, why did God not arrange things better? Why are we so made that concern for the general welfare is often not sufficient to get us to do the right thing? At the beginning of Sermon 8 Butler announces not only that he is not going to discuss such questions but that they should not even be 118

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raised. Why not? Because, in Butler’s view, we know all we need to know for practical purposes. We cannot now hope to answer these speculative questions since we cannot, from our limited vantage point, understand the great scheme of things and God’s ultimate purposes. It would be at best foolish and at worst impious to try to do so. That said, he does offer the beginnings of an answer in chapter 4 of his Analogy of Religion, where he argues that this world is a proving ground for virtue. We are not born virtuous, but are meant to achieve it through our efforts and in the face of trials and temptations. Success will have the added merit of being a difficult achievement brought about by considerable effort on our part. We saw that there are circumstances in which gratifying a passion or appetite frustrates the good end or purpose that it normally serves. To understand the potential abuses of resentment or indignation, we need to know what its use is: what end it serves. In the case of settled resentment Butler offers, perhaps puzzlingly, two apparently competing answers. As we saw, he claims that “to prevent and to remedy… injury… is the end for which this passion was implanted in man” (S 8.8). Elsewhere, however, he states that “its end [is] the misery of our fellow-creatures” (S 9.10). There is no real inconsistency here once we draw a distinction between the immediate goal or object a desire or appetite seeks to attain, and the good or useful end or purpose that it normally furthers. Thus, the immediate end or goal of hunger is the eating of food, but its proper or appropriate end or purpose is the nourishing of the body. The immediate end or object of settled resentment is the suffering of the wrongdoer. The good end or purpose that gratifying this passion can serve is to prevent and remedy injury to ourselves or others. As we have seen, in the case of sudden anger, its immediate goal is resistance to what is viewed as an attack; its purpose is to deter others from such attacks in virtue of their knowledge that we are likely to respond by flaring up or lashing out. We should not gratify or indulge a passion or appetite when doing so would breach a moral obligation and/or frustrate the purpose of that passion or appetite. Most passions or appetites can, however, be innocently gratified or indulged even when doing so does not promote their proper end. Hunger may be assuaged by eating attractive foods with little nutritional value. Eating in such a case does not promote nourishment, but neither does it impede it. Assuming that such eating does not conflict with a duty, it is innocent and acceptable. Things are quite otherwise, Butler points out, with resentment, whose immediate end is the infliction of suffering on an offender. But the gratification of resentment, if it be not conducive to the end for which it was given us, must necessarily contradict, not only the general obligation to benevolence, but likewise that particular end itself. The end, for which it was given, is to prevent or remedy injury; i.e. the misery occasioned by injury; i.e. misery itself: and the gratification of it consists in producing misery; i.e. in contradicting the end, for which it was implanted in our nature. Having uncovered what he takes to be the proper purpose or end of both sudden and settled anger, Butler asks what abuses they are liable to. Sudden anger can degenerate into a tendency to ‘fly off the handle’, or into peevishness, where each small irritation becomes the occasion for complaint and grumbling. Deliberate resentment is inappropriate when the injury is merely imaginary, or much less than we suppose, or the resentment is disproportionately great given the offense, or finally, as we have just seen above, “when pain or harm is inflicted merely in consequence of, and to gratify, that resentment, though naturally raised” (S 8.11).

2. Forgiveness So what is forgiveness, and when is it required? As we saw, Butler has often been credited as one of the originators of the view that forgiveness requires the overcoming, or at least foreswearing, of resentment, but he never says this. Butler is very clear: the injunction to forgive “must be understood 119

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to forbid only the excess and abuse of this natural feeling, in cases of personal and private injury” (S 9.2, my emphasis).11 Note that Butler restricts the obligation to forgive to instances of “personal and private injury”, meaning thereby offenses against me, or against people I especially care about, or groups with which I identify. He thus excludes third-party cases from the requirement to forgive – cases where my indignation is directed at an offense committed against those to whom I have no special connection. Many writers follow him in this, but not for the reasons that Butler gives. The standard objection to third-party forgiveness is that I lack standing to forgive offenses against others. Only those who are, directly or indirectly, the victims of an offense have the right to forgive those who have offended against them; who am I to forgive (or withhold forgiveness from) those who participated in the Rwandan genocide? Butler’s rationale for the restriction rests on a psychological claim. This natural indignation is generally moderate and low enough in mankind, in each particular man, when the injury which excites it does not affect himself, or one whom he considers as himself. Therefore the precepts to forgive, and to love our enemies, do not relate to that general indignation against injury and the authors of it, but to this feeling, or resentment when raised by private or personal injury. (S 9.2) As a generalization Butler’s claim may be true, but surely there could be exceptions. Accounts and videos of atrocities committed by some dictators against their own people might arouse such repugnance in me that I come to hate the dictator; perhaps I fantasize about what I would do to him if ever I got the chance. Butler should not have ruled out this possibility, but once we admit it, it’s clear what Butler’s response should be. Hatred and cruelty are forbidden, so in the third-party case as well as in the first personal case, we will be obliged to mitigate our anger. Butler is, however, correct in claiming that our anger is usually greater when we, or those we care about or identify with, are the victims than when others are. That is why in such cases we have to be especially careful to avoid excess or abuse in our response.12 Butler’s sensible, if prosaic, advice is to recognize that when we think we have been injured, we are liable to take offense where none has been given or, where we really have been injured, to imagine the offense worse than it is. We should also restrict our indignation to the actual offense lest “the whole man appear monstrous, without anything right or human in him: whereas the resentment should surely at least be confined to that particular part of the behavior which gave offense” (S 9.23). We should be willing, even eager, to have any such misapprehensions corrected. Once that has been done, our best guide as to how much resentment we should feel is to take the stance of a disinterested observer. But suppose the person injured to have a due, natural sense of the injury, and no more; he ought to be affected towards the injurious person in the same way any good men, uninterested in the case, would be; if they had the same just sense, which we have supposed the injured person to have, of the fault. (S 9.19)13 Appropriate resentment is distinct from an urge for revenge. Revenge, malice, hatred, and cruelty are incompatible with forgiveness, because they involve ill will toward the offender – a desire that the offender suffer harm for its own sake, irrespective of whether it will do any good. We have a duty to love our enemies, which Butler takes to be part and parcel of the duty to forgive, and this requires that we retain good will toward them. Butler thinks that our natural default stance toward others is that of benevolence; we wish the great mass of humankind well, in a vague, 120

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perhaps even somewhat detached, manner. When we are indignant at someone who has wronged us our good will toward them may diminish, but it should not vanish. Resentment, Butler says, “is not inconsistent with good-will” (S 9.13). Where the target of our indignation and the degree to which we feel it are appropriate, “there will yet remain good-will towards the offender” (S 9.19). How can this be if, as Butler says, resentment or indignation “implies producing misery” (S 9.8)? Butler’s answer is that in the instance of just punishment we do not wish the offender ill or seek to make her suffer for its own sake. The manner and degree of the punishment should be guided solely by the need to protect society, and punishment should never be inflicted simply because the offender deserves to suffer. It is not man’s being a social creature, much less his being a moral agent, from whence alone our obligations to good-will towards him arise. There is an obligation to it prior to either of these, arising from his being a sensible creature; that is, capable of happiness or misery. Now this obligation cannot be superseded by his moral character. What justifies public executions is, not that the guilt or demerit of the criminal dispenses with the obligation of good-will, neither would this justify any severity; but, that his life is inconsistent with the quiet and happiness of the world: that is, a general and more enlarged obligation necessarily destroys a particular and more confined one of the same kind, inconsistent with it. (S 9.15)14 The criminal facing execution might be pardoned for wondering in what sense we are showing him good will, but Butler’s point stands. We show good will to the offender if we seek to minimize his suffering by exacting the smallest punishment compatible with the protection of the community. The person who bears the offender ill will and therefore seeks revenge would want him to suffer, whether or not it did any further good. The person who has good will toward the offender will be pleased if the punishment happens to benefit the offender in some way, say by reforming him, or teaching him a useful trade that he takes up when returned to the community. The person who bears ill will toward the offender will not, but will rather feel cheated out of part of their revenge. At S 9.23, Butler points out that ill will and hatred tend to be indiscriminate: “the whole man appears monstrous, without anything right or human in him”. Indignation, because it desires the punishment of a particular offense, “should surely at least be confined to that particular part of the behavior which gave offence”. But, one might object, where there is resentment doesn’t the infliction of punishment, even where it is for the good of the whole, gratify the desire for payback? And isn’t that gratification a bad thing in itself ? Butler would agree. Resentment and its gratification are necessary evils, without which we might not put sufficient energy into uncovering and punishing crime. Considered in itself, [the passion of resentment] is very undesirable, and what society must very much wish to be without. It is in every instance absolutely an evil in itself; because it implies producing misery: and consequently must never be indulged or gratified for itself. (S 9.8) Recall that Butler does not think this state of affairs ideal. It would be much better if society punished the wicked solely to protect itself, and no one experienced the least satisfaction at the suffering involved. But given that we have these feelings, and that they serve a useful purpose, just punishment offers a suitable outlet for their gratification. Here’s an analogy that might make Butler’s point clearer. Some people desire to gain prestige by their lavish displays of hospitality and generosity. In itself, this desire is regrettable, and it would be better if no one had it. Still, it can be put to better or worse uses. It could find an outlet in 121

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conspicuous and wasteful consumption, in the throwing of parties in which idle sycophants are given presents they neither need nor appreciate. In that case, the gratification of the desire would have no good effects and should be condemned. Or it could be channeled into giving to worthy causes, perhaps by hosting dinner parties at which the rich guests are expected to give generous donations to charity. While both may serve to satisfy a regrettable desire for display, the latter is surely preferable to the former. It is true that the motives behind the generosity will not be of the highest quality and, because of that, contributing to charity will not be an exercise of virtue, but given that people do have such desires, this seems a legitimate way of satisfying them. It would be even better if people gave because there was a need, and for no other reason, but that is not where we are right now. Butler’s justification of punishment, in which the suffering of the offender is justified only because of the prevention of suffering in the wider community, may seem to have more of a utilitarian than a retributivist cast. Nevertheless, there is a definite retributivist aspect to Butler’s thought. We are indignant only where we believe there is guilt, and that indignation takes the form of both believing the guilty deserve to be punished and desiring that they be punished (S 8.7). “Vice is indeed of ill-desert, and must finally be punished” (S 8.16).15 Given that Butler’s view has retributivist elements, why does he object to punishment for crime, unless it protects society? To answer this question, we need to distinguish stronger and weaker forms of retributivism. Strong retributivism holds that the guilty should be punished, irrespective of good or bad consequences. Weak retributivism, by contrast, holds that guilt is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for imposing punishment. Butler, I suspect, is a weak retributivist about human punishment, but may be a strong retributivist about divine judgment. We should only punish the guilty if the evil of the punishment is outweighed by a greater good. God may be justified in punishing the wicked at the end of things and will do so, unless he has reason to show us mercy. Our guilt alone is sufficient to warrant divine but not human chastisement.16

3.  Resentment and Indignation Butler’s claim that forgiveness requires only the moderation of resentment or indignation, and not its complete elimination, may make his position look either attractively middle of the road or weak and wishy washy, depending on your point of view. People in the Anglican pew might be reassured that Christianity is not going to require too much of them, but Butler’s message can seem out of tune with Jesus’s radical moral stance. The text for both sermons is taken from Matthew v.43, 44 where Jesus enjoins his followers to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you”. “Keep your resentment within reasonable bounds” does not have quite the same ring to it. I am going to suggest, however, that Butler’s view is more demanding than his way of expressing it may make it seem. First, he has an exacting conception of what forgiveness requires. To forgive requires not only that our indignation is kept within appropriate bounds, but also that we completely eschew ill will toward the offender; indeed, we are to retain some measure of good will toward them. Second, forgiveness is not conditional on any change in the offender: we are to forgive whatever wrongs we have suffered whether or not the offender is penitent, or has apologized, or made reparation. Third, he holds that it is not merely good to forgive, but that we have a duty to forgive. If this is not exactly a call to love our enemies, it is still a great deal to ask. I will take each point in turn. I shall first try to show that, surprisingly enough, his claim that forgiveness requires us to eschew ill will, when properly appreciated, does in fact bring his view very close to some accounts that hold forgiveness to require the overcoming, or at least foreswearing, of resentment. What obscures this underlying agreement is, at least in part, a matter of nomenclature, of differences between current usage and Butler’s use of key terms.17 If I am 122

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correct, then the differences between Butler and those who equate forgiveness with having no resentment are more verbal than substantial. Throughout both sermons, Butler takes himself to be analyzing just one negative emotional response to injury and injustice, for which there are several different terms. “Let this be called anger, indignation, resentment, or by whatever name anyone shall choose” (S 9.2). But this identification conceals crucial distinctions that are, perhaps, clearer in modern usage. Take his distinction between sudden and deliberate anger or resentment. In S 8.5 Butler rightly points out that many instances of sudden or momentary anger are not raised by what is seen as “injury or contempt”. “Momentary anger is frequently raised, not only without any real, but without any apparent reason”. It is this kind of spontaneous defensive impulse that he wishes to distinguish from settled resentment or indignation, which requires the victim to judge themselves to have been wronged. As we now use the terms, however, momentary anger of this defensive sort is not properly classified as resentment.18 Someone can only resent, or be indignant about, what they perceive to be an injury or wrong. While anger can be sudden or deliberate, resentment and indignation are always deliberate. Nor, I suggest, is there just one form of deliberate anger, for resentment, as we now think of it, differs from indignation.19 First, resentment is first personal in a way that indignation is not. I can only resent wrongs done to me, or to those with whom I am in some way identified, but I can be indignant about any wrong done to anyone (including, of course, myself ). Second, resentment, at least normally, seems to involve ill will toward the offender, while indignation need not. When we are indignant about some injustice, we typically feel that the injustice should be rectified, which in many cases may require that the wrongdoer be punished or make reparation. This will be costly for the offender, and so damage his interests, but we need harbor no grudge against him. But the resentful typically do hold grudges; they feel vengeful, or vindictive. To have such attitudes is to want the other person to suffer for its own sake, irrespective of whether it would secure any further good – such as protecting the public by deterrence, restraint, and reform. More generally, we can distinguish negative attitudes to the offender from hostile ones.20 The former are compatible with good will to the offender; the latter involve some form of ill will. The wronged person, in particular, may experience such negative reactions as disappointment, feelings of betrayal or loss, grief, hurt, dismay, and so on. None of these need involve a desire that the offender suffer for its own sake. And the presence of such negative attitudes does not entail that the person wronged will feel any gratification should the offender suffer. I suggest that indignation and outrage should be thought of as negative rather than hostile attitudes. Indignation and outrage may of course be accompanied by a desire that the offender suffer whether it will do any good or not, but that desire is not an intrinsic part of those attitudes. A loving parent, for example, whose child treats them badly, may experience any or all of these negative attitudes without for one moment ceasing to love their child and to want its good (as Butler points out in S 9.13). Hostile attitudes, by contrast, such as hatred, bitterness, thirst for revenge, do involve ill will. Resentment, I suggest, is such a hostile attitude. We have seen that if someone wrongs me, I can be indignant without rancor. Resentment, however, is rancorous. If I hope that something bad happens to the person who wronged me, or if I want the satisfaction of a groveling apology, or hope to get my own back, or take pleasure in their discomfiture, then I am not merely indignant about what they did; I resent it.21 If all this is right, then Butler conflates indignation and resentment in the contemporary sense. When he uses the word ‘resentment’ he is, therefore, sometimes referring only to indignation, which need involve no ill will and does not need to be foresworn. Thus, when he writes “resentment is not inconsistent with good-will. … We may love our enemy, and yet have resentment against him for his injurious behaviour towards us” (S 9.13), what he has in mind is what we would now call indignation, and not resentment.22 When, however, he talks about the abuse of that passion in cases where the victim embraces hostile feelings, such as malice or vengefulness, 123

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he is talking, I suggest, about what we would now call resentment. Contemporary philosophers who hold that forgiveness requires the overcoming or foreswearing of resentment may, with perfect propriety, agree with Butler that forgiveness is compatible with appropriate indignation. We may indeed love, or at least have good will toward, our enemy, and yet be indignant at what he has done. We can renounce malice and revenge but accept that the wrongdoing should be punished if that is what is required for the protection of society and/or the good of the offender. We can agree with Butler that any suggestion that we should cease to be indignant at wrongdoing would be implausible. How could one fail to be indignant when a serious wrong has been committed? If we look at Butler’s actual words, then ascribing to him the view that we should overcome, rather than moderate, resentment is a misreading of the text. If, however, we look carefully at what he claims about what he calls resentment, and we are mindful of possible changes of meaning between his time and ours, then he can be interpreted as agreeing that what we would now call resentment is incompatible with forgiveness, because it involves ill will. An appropriate degree of indignation is, however, perfectly fine, and compatible with loving the offender. Thus, by a pleasing irony, it can be argued that those who have misrepresented what Butler actually wrote nevertheless agree with him at a deeper level. They mistook the letter of the text, but (perhaps unconsciously) captured its spirit. Second, Butler imposes no conditions on when forgiveness is required. Some claim that it would be wrong to forgive an offender until they make the first move by, say, apologizing, making reparations, and so on. Our forgiveness should be conditional on the offender being sorry for what they have done. Others hold that while it is not wrong to forgive unconditionally, it is certainly not required. There is not a word in Butler about making forgiveness conditional on such alterations in the offender. Third, Butler holds that we have an obligation to forgive anyone who wrongs us, irrespective of the seriousness of the offense or how often the offender has offended. As he rightly says, this is not a popular view. We may accept that we have an obligation to forgive minor offenses, especially if an apology is offered, but does the parent of a murdered child have the duty to forgive the murderer? Is there an obligation on someone who alone of all her family survived Auschwitz, to eschew hate? Should someone in such a position be required, as Butler suggests, to adopt the viewpoint of a disinterested but sympathetic spectator? Opinions are divided on whether forgiveness in such serious cases is even morally praiseworthy, let alone obligatory. Some may see such forgiveness as betraying those who died: as wronging them a second time. Those who do see forgiveness in these extreme circumstances as noble and morally praiseworthy typically think of it, not as something required, but as a gift offered to the offender, despite his heinous crimes. Such magnanimity is optional or supererogatory – a going above and beyond anything that can reasonably be demanded of the person who has been wronged. If I am right in this, Butler has a very demanding conception of what is required of us by way of forgiving our enemies and those who wrong us. So demanding indeed, that Butler’s avowal that “there is nothing in it unreasonable” (S 9.20) may look a little disingenuous.23 Is there anything in Butler’s position that might mitigate the severity of the injunction to forgive? I think there is. First, there are at least two ways of interpreting the claim that forgiveness is obligatory rather than optional. On one reading, if some action is obligatory then those who fail so to act are rightly open to moral criticism or censure, whereas if an action is optional no such criticism is appropriate, and the agent is morally free to act or not as they see fit. On this interpretation, if a survivor of Auschwitz ought to forgive their torturers, then we would be right to hold them to account for not doing so, to blame them, perhaps, for not trying harder. If that is the right way to understand Butler, then his position is far too strong, and morally objectionable to boot. The other way of thinking of obligations divides them into two kinds. There are obligations that any morally decent person would be expected to fulfill. Failure to do so rightly opens one to 124

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criticism and even social sanctions. But there may be occasions when the stern voice of duty summons us to do something very difficult – something that would require heroism or saintliness on our part. So difficult, in fact, that it would be inappropriate or even obscene for anyone to criticize us if we fail. We might think that we ought not to reveal the names of our comrades fighting in a just cause, even under severe torture. We may believe that a soldier should throw herself on a live grenade if she can thereby save a number of her fellows. On this view, such deeds are not optional in the sense that we are morally free to act as we see fit. It’s noticeable that many of those who rescued Jewish children during the Holocaust, or in other ways risked their lives to save others, typically do not think of what they did as optional in that sense. On the contrary, not only do they think they ought to have done these things, they often express regret that they did not do more. We have no right to criticize those who crack under torture or are unwilling to put their lives on the line, not because they had no such duty, but because doing their duty makes such extreme demands on them that failure is all too human and, indeed, forgivable. The charitable, and in my view the correct, way to interpret Butler’s claim that we ought always to forgive, even when it is very difficult, is in this weaker or less stringent understanding of what being under an obligation entails. On this view, we are answerable to God, but not to our neighbors, for any failures to forgive in extreme circumstances. Second, what is Butler asking of us when he says that justified indignation should never spill over into hatred, malice, or ill will? We can distinguish between bearing ill will to someone and merely feeling it. To bear someone ill will is either to have the intention of harming them if one can or, at the least, to want bad things to happen to them, such that one would be pleased if those bad things happened. We can feel ill will, however, without bearing it, if we disassociate ourselves from our hostile feelings; we precisely do not really want the person to whom we feel them to suffer, however much we may occasionally fantasize about what we would like to do to them. There are two views about what forgiveness requires: the stricter one holds that we have only forgiven if we have no lingering feelings of ill will. That is a very exacting standard. At best, we could set about ridding ourselves of such feelings, but with no guarantee of success. That may be what virtue ultimately requires, but Butler is generally concerned with what we ought to do here and now. His language strongly suggests that what he thinks the duty to forgive requires of us is that we do not bear ill will. We must avoid malice and hatred; we should not indulge a passion, “which, if generally indulged, would propagate itself so as almost to lay waste the world” (S 9.20). This requirement, though still demanding, is not, I would suggest, unreasonably so.24

Notes 1 Hampton and Murphy 1988. 2 “Forgiveness, Bishop Butler teaches, is the forswearing of resentment – the resolute overcoming of the anger and hatred that are naturally directed toward a person who has done one an unjustified and non-excused moral injury” (Hampton and Murphy 1988: 15). For many other examples, see Garcia 2011: 1. 3 Among those who have recognized this are Garcia 2011, Griswold 2007, Gubler unpublished, Hughes and Warmke 2017, Newberry 2001, Norlock 2022, and Pettigrove 2012. However, I shall later argue that his position is not so different in substance from the view that forgiveness is incompatible with resentment. 4 The convention for citing Butler’s Sermons is by sermon number followed by the paragraph number. So S 8.3 would refer to Sermon 8 §3. In the case of the preface to the second edition the convention is to refer to the paragraph number, prefaced by ‘P’. (In future references in the text I shall omit ‘Butler 1729’ as tacitly understood.) 5 The term ‘reactive attitude’ is taken from Strawson 1962. 6 Butler is sometimes credited with discovering this distinction, but something similar can be found in Hobbes (1651: Part I, ch. 6) who distinguishes sudden courage or anger from indignation.

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David McNaughton 7 Although Butler largely focuses on judicial punishment, I take it that his remarks apply to more informal forms of censure. Indignation may rightly lead us to remonstrate with the offender, protest her wrongdoing, warn people who might also be harmed by her, and even, in severe cases, shun her in order to protect ourselves and others. 8 Butler says of conscience that “Had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority; it would absolutely govern the world” (S 2.14). 9 See note to S 3.2. 10 See S 8.13. 11 Some hold that Butler’s account of forgiveness is exclusively concerned with feelings, and not at all with action. Others maintain the opposite. The likely answer is that Butler is concerned with both. For an excellent discussion see Garcia 2011: 6–7. 12 For a very similar objection and response see Pettigrove 2012: 25–6. 13 I do not know how to square this passage with Butler’s claim that it is not only natural, but blameless, to feel more resentment when you or yours are the victim, than when others are. These precepts [to forgive, and to love our enemies] cannot be understood to forbid this feeling [where we are the victims], though raised to a higher degree than in [the case where others are the victims]: because … we cannot but have a greater sensibility to what concerns ourselves. (S 9.2, my emphases) 14 This is a remarkably Benthamite passage. All punishment is bad because it is painful, and its infliction can only be justified if the public good outweighs the private harm. Butler is sometimes seen as a precursor of Kant, but in this respect at least there is a marked difference. 15 See also, for example, the first paragraph of ‘A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue’ in Butler 1729 or Butler 1736. 16 Butler further contrasts divine with human punishment in his later Analogy of Religion. (References to the Analogy of 1736 are standardly cited as A followed by part, chapter, and paragraph number.) God punishes according to desert: e.g. A I.2.3; A I.3.2–3, 6, 9, 25; A II.5.3–4. We, however, should not: “civil government [is] supposed to take cognizance of actions in no other view than as prejudicial to society, without respect to the immorality of them” (A I.3.12). 17 These differences may, of course, reflect usage in the early eighteenth century. I am not claiming that Butler misused any of these terms, by the standards of the day. I am claiming that equating these terms conceals important differences. 18 As it happens, there is evidence that in Butler’s day ‘resent’ could mean ‘resist’. The Oxford English Dictionary entry on resentment does not acknowledge this sense of the word but, curiously, gives an example from Moll Flanders (1722) where it means just that. I hop’d he would make no dishonourable proposal to me … I desir’d he would not propose it, that I might not be oblig’d to offer any Resentment to him that did not become the respect I profess’d for him. This usage makes Butler’s identification of sudden anger as a form of resentment less puzzling. (I am grateful to Sophie Grace Chappell for drawing my attention to this usage.) 19 Again, the claim is not that contemporary usage is correct, and Butler’s is incorrect. Rather, it is that we now use these terms to articulate a distinction that strongly suggests that there is not just one feeling or emotion in play. Pettigrove 2012: 25 suggests that Butler distinguishes resentment as a species of indignation, but Butler seems to me to use the terms interchangeably throughout. 20 Eve Garrard and I have suggested this approach in 2003 and 2017. 21 I think that resentment is typically aroused by an attack on your standing, which makes you feel slighted. The desire to bring the offender down a peg, or to lower their status, can take the form of rancor or even hate, and not just a desire the person be punished. For discussion see, among others, Hampton and Murphy 1988 and Garrard and McNaughton 2003 and 2017. 22 Sometimes, of course, he does use the word ‘indignation’ as we now would. “Indignation raised by cruelty and injustice, and the desire of having it punished, which persons unconcerned would feel, is by no means malice” (S 8.7). 23 For a rather different reading, see Gubler unpublished. 24 I am very grateful to Eve Garrard, not only for many discussions of these topics over the years but also for reading various drafts of this paper and offering extensive and helpful comments.

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References Butler, J. (1729) Fifteen Sermons and Other Writings on Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. (1736) The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, London: Macmillan 1900. Garcia, E. V. (2011) “Bishop Butler on Forgiveness and Resentment,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 11(10): 1–19. Garrard, E. and McNaughton, D. (2003) “In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60. ———. (2017) “Once more with Feeling: Defending the Goodwill Account” in K. Norlock (ed.) The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness London: Rowman and Littlefield, 96–116. Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gubler, S. (unpublished dissertation) “Forgiveness in the Public Realm” (August 2019), University of Texas at Austin, 91–101. Hampton, J. and Murphy, J. (1988) Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan, London: Penguin Books, 1985. Hughes, P. and Warmke, B. (2017) “Forgiveness,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/forgiveness/ Newberry, P. (2001) “Joseph Butler on Forgiveness: A Presupposed Theory of Emotion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62: 233–44. Norlock, J. (2022) “Forgiveness and Moral Repair,” in M. Vargas and J. Doris (eds.) Oxford Handbook on Moral Psychology, 929-946. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford English Dictionary Online (2022) “resentment, n.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, www.oed. com/view/Entry/163487. Pettigrove, G. (2012) Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strawson, P. F. (1962) “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 48: 1–25.

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10 DEVELOPING A NEO-HUMEAN ACCOUNT OF FORGIVENESS A Comparative Philosophical Approach Rico Vitz Hume’s moral philosophy is characterized by two features that make it well suited to provide a pragmatically meaningful account of forgiveness. The first is a practical orientation that recognizes the limits of human abilities to explain things (Hume 1748: 4.12), eschews “lofty pretensions” (see, e.g., Hume 1748: 5.1), and aims, with more intellectual humility, to offer insights that are relevant for “common life” (see, e.g., Hume 1739–40: 1.2.5.26, Hume 1748: 12.25). The second is an “experimental method,” which relies on “cautious observation[s] of human life” taken as “they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures” (Hume 1739–40: 0.10). In light of these features of Hume’s “science of man” and the significance of forgiveness for facilitating peaceful and humane relationships among those within the “narrow circle” in which a person moves – e.g., family, friendship, social allegiances – one might reasonably expect there to be a fair amount of work on Hume’s conception of forgiveness. There is, however, little scholarly work on the topic. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there is only one article on the subject, Glen Pettigrove’s “Hume on Forgiveness and the Unforgivable.” The reason for this is fairly obvious. As Pettigrove notes, Hume does not speak of forgiveness at any length in any of his published works in moral philosophy. The word ‘forgive’ appears only once in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals and not at all in the Treatise or the Essays. (2007: 448) In other words, Hume’s moral philosophy lacks an account of forgiveness anything like that of, for example, his contemporary Joseph Butler. Nonetheless, he does refer to forgiveness a number of times in his History of England. From these references in the History and from “what he says about hatred, contempt, anger, repentance and mercy,” Pettigrove suggests, one “can piece together a Humean account” of the topic (2007: 448). The fact that Hume scholars are left trying to “piece together a Humean account of forgiveness” should strike us as puzzling and immediately invite at least two clarifying questions. The first and most obvious is, “What would such an account look like?” The second, more subtle question is, “In what sense would such an account be ‘Humean’ given how little Hume says on the topic?” My aim in this chapter is to provide a framework for answering these questions, as follows. In Section 1, I will make a necessary methodological clarification to distinguish various responses

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to Hume’s work, each of which might reasonably be described as “Humean.” In Section 2, I will provide a brief overview of the account of forgiveness developed by Pettigrove. In Section 3, I will extend Pettigrove’s account by employing a two-fold methodological approach. On the one hand, this methodology will be traditional insofar as it will draw primarily on sources from within Hume’s own moral philosophy. On the other hand, it will be comparative insofar as it will also draw on Eastern philosophical and religious sources – namely, those from within the Confucian traditions of the Far East and those from within the Eastern Christian tradition that has its roots in the Middle East, Asia Minor, northern and eastern Africa (e.g., Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia), as well as the Greek-speaking lands of the eastern Mediterranean.1 The result will be a framework for developing a neo-Humean account of forgiveness that is both richly in the spirit of Hume’s moral philosophy, on the one hand, and philosophically ecumenical, on the other.

1.  An Opening Clarification Hume scholars have made intriguing contributions to a number of philosophical debates by developing accounts of philosophical concepts that are grounded in Hume’s works in a variety of ways. These include Humean accounts of causation, of virtue, of moral motivation, and so forth. But the relationship that these accounts bear to Hume’s own philosophical views varies so widely that it is often rather unclear in what sense these accounts are “Humean.” This is due, in large part, to the fact that the adjective “Humean” is ambiguous. On the one hand, it could simply indicate an alternative way of referring to Hume’s own view on a given topic. On the other hand, it could indicate a way of referring to an interpreter’s extrapolation of Hume’s view, but such an extrapolation might share only a vague family resemblance to Hume’s own philosophical doctrine. Alternatively, it could indicate some position ranging between the former and the latter. My aim in this section is to clear up this ambiguity in order to set the stage for the analysis of forgiveness that will follow.2 To do so, I will distinguish four different types of philosophical projects: namely, (1) those that articulate Hume’s account of a topic, (2) those that present a Humean account of a topic, (3) those that attempt to develop a neo-Humean account of a topic, and (4) those that offer merely a nominally Humean account of a topic. Let me explain each in turn.3 First, for any given topic, one might attempt to articulate the view that a philosopher had in mind and explicitly developed but which might need clarification. For instance, Hume offers analyses that lead to novel conceptions of causation, sympathy, and justice. In cases such as these, it is reasonable to refer to Hume’s account of causation, to Hume’s account of sympathy, and to Hume’s account of justice. Being able to articulate such accounts is a fundamental interpretive task of those who work in the history of philosophy. Second, for any given topic, one might attempt to articulate a view that a philosopher neither had in mind nor explicitly developed but that is implied by related claims in the philosopher’s work. For instance, Hume does not explicitly develop an account of filial piety per se. Nonetheless, a virtue of this sort is implied by the things Hume says about familial love. In a case like this, it would be more accurate to speak not of Hume’s account of filial piety, since he does not explicitly develop such an account, but of a Humean account of filial piety, since such an account is implicit in his claims about the proper nature of familial love. Being able to articulate accounts of this sort is also among the interpretive tasks of those who work in the history of philosophy, insofar as such accounts attempt to build upon the more fundamental interpretive task in order to develop new insights into a philosopher’s views. Third, for any given topic, one might attempt to articulate a view that a philosopher neither explicitly developed nor implied, but is, nevertheless, in the spirit of the philosopher’s work and derivable from general principles that he or she might plausibly endorse. For instance, Hume

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neither explicitly nor implicitly developed an account of evolutionary altruism. Nonetheless, one might be able to show that something roughly like this is entailed by his views of naturalism and benevolence. Likewise, he neither explicitly nor implicitly developed an account of the Confucian conception of ritual. Nonetheless, one might be able to show that something roughly like this is entailed by his views of the customs and manners of various people groups (see Vitz 2018). In cases such as these, it would not be accurate to speak of Hume’s account of evolutionary altruism or of Hume’s account of ritual. Nor would it be quite right to speak of a Humean account of evolutionary altruism or of a Humean account of ritual. Rather, it would be more accurate to refer to a neoHumean account of evolutionary altruism or a neo-Humean account of ritual. Being able to articulate accounts of this sort requires the kinds of interpretive skills possessed by those who work in the history of philosophy, but the aim of such work is less to contribute to the history of philosophy per se than it is to show how a philosopher’s work might be extended so that it can helpfully inform contemporary discussions in a field that is principally focused not on the history of philosophy but on attempting to solve philosophical problems in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and so forth. Fourth, for any given topic, one might attempt to articulate a view that is only nominally attributable to a philosopher, insofar as it pays homage to the spirit of the philosopher’s work but is, in fact, a development of contemporary principles that bear only a vague family resemblance to the philosopher’s own views. For instance, Michael Smith (1987) develops what he calls a “Humean” theory of moral motivation that is apparently inspired by Hume’s moral philosophy but is neither a view that Hume held, explicitly or implicitly, nor a view that Smith derives from Hume’s principles.4 Rather, it is a view that is in the spirit of Hume’s work but is derived from principles used in contemporary philosophical debates about moral psychology. Since an account of this sort is broadly Humean in name only, it would be more accurate to refer to it as a nominally Humean account of moral motivation. Being able to articulate an account of this sort does not necessarily require the kinds of interpretive skills possessed by those who work in the history of philosophy, and the aim of such work is not to contribute to that subfield of the discipline. Rather, it is to contribute to another subfield – e.g., metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics. In the hope of avoiding misunderstandings about this set of distinctions, let me offer two points of clarification. One is that this set is merely a heuristic for the purpose of trying to distinguishing a bit more clearly how one might handle a philosopher’s view for the purpose of doing, e.g., what we might call “pure history of philosophy” as opposed to “pure philosophical problems.” The other is that the members of this set of distinctions are better understood as lying on a continuum rather than as marking off clearly discrete tasks.5 So, in cases of ambiguity, it might be more accurate to say of a particular account, for example, that it is more of a Humean account of a topic than it is of a Hume’s account of a topic, or that it is more of a neo-Humean account of a topic than it is of a Humean account of a topic.6 This set of clarifications should be particularly helpful for addressing the second question that I mentioned in the introduction, concerning the sense in which an account of forgiveness could be “Humean” given how little Hume says on the topic. To see how this is so, let’s turn next to Pettigrove’s account.

2.  Pettigrove’s Account of Forgiveness In “Hume on Forgiveness and the Unforgivable” (2007), Pettigrove presents an account of forgiveness that has two principal elements. The first concerns the negative affective states to which forgiveness is a response. The second concerns the nature of forgiveness itself. Let’s consider each in turn.

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2.1  Anger, Hatred, and Revenge Pettigrove’s reading begins with an exposition of Hume’s conception of hatred “[s]ince forgiveness is ordinarily preceded by anger, hatred, or some other form of ill will” (2007: 448). To be clear, Hume’s point is not merely that anger, hatred, and similar passions occur prior to forgiveness. Rather it is that forgiveness is a response to these negative affective states. So, understanding Hume’s conception of these types of passions is key for understanding Pettigrove’s account. This is an aspect of moral psychology on which Hume provides helpful resources. Of particular interest for present purposes is his three-part distinction between a passion’s object, its cause, and its motivational structure. In the case of hatred, he applies these distinctions as follows. First, the object of hatred is “some thinking person” (Hume 1739–40: 2.2.1.6). Thus, although people might be angry or frustrated at, say, their circumstances, circumstances per se are not something that a person would hate, on Hume’s account. Second, the cause of hatred must be a quality “related to,” or more specifically “plac’d” on, “a person or thinking being” (cp. Hume 1739–40: 2.2.1.5–7). The quality may be either significant or trivial, and it may be related to the person either directly or indirectly. An example of a significant quality that is directly related to the person would be the person’s vicious character trait. An example of a trivial quality that is directly related to the person would be something like the person’s poorly kept property. An example of a significant quality that is indirectly related to the person would be the person’s particular ties to a family member, friend, or associate with a vicious character trait, such as being the son of a murderous dictator, or being friends with an unrepentant sexual abuser, or being an employee of a business that profits by exploiting the poor. An example of a trivial quality that is indirectly related to the person would be something like being the daughter of the neighbor who has poorly kept property, or being the friend of one’s love interest, or being an employee of a rival business. Third, hatred has a particular kind of motivational structure. Given the “original constitution of the mind” (Hume 1739–40: 2.2.6.6), hatred produces anger, or “a desire of the misery of the person hated, and an aversion to his happiness” (Hume 1739–40: 2.2.9.3; cp. Hume 1739–40: 2.2.6.3; Hume 1757: 3.6). Nonetheless, anger is a distinct passion that is not an “absolutely essential” part of hatred. As Hume notes, [T]ho’ ’tis certain we never love any person without desiring his happiness, nor hate any without wishing his misery, yet these desires arise only upon the ideas of the happiness or misery of our friend or enemy being presented by the imagination, and are not absolutely essential to love and hatred. They are the most obvious and natural sentiments of these affections, but not the only ones. The passions may express themselves in a hundred ways, and may subsist a considerable time, without our reflecting on the happiness or misery of their objects … (Hume 1739–40: 2.2.6.5) Thus, although hatred is naturally linked with anger and ill will, it is possible to hate another person, dispositionally, without feeling anger, occurrently. In this way, hatred is related to malice, which is “a joy in the misery of others, without any … enmity to occasion this … joy.” Unlike malice, however, the ill will associated with hatred proceeds from a harm or an injury. Thus, Hume claims, it is more “properly speaking” related to revenge (Hume 1739–40: 2.2.7.1). In short, hatred is a paradigmatic case of a passion that forgiveness overcomes. It is not, however, the only such passion. Rather, forgiveness could be a response to a variety of negative affective states that share the same kind of object, cause, and motivational structure as hatred including, e.g., “anger, resentment, indignation [and] contempt” (Pettigrove 2007: 449).

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Understanding the kinds of affective states to which forgiveness is a response is the first aspect of Pettigrove’s account. Let us turn now to the second: i.e., his presentation of the nature of forgiveness itself.

2.2 Forgiveness Pettigrove begins his exposition of “Hume’s account of forgiveness” (2007: 450) by making two important clarifications about the ways in which Hume uses the term “forgiveness” in the History of England. First, at two points in the History (Hume 1754–62: 2.14.155, 2.18.342), Hume uses the term “forgiveness” in a narrow sense in a way that distinguishes it from his use of the term “pardon.” In these cases, he uses the term “pardon” to refer to an agent’s standing with respect to an offense and, consequently, to the penalties to which the agent is subject under law. He uses the term “forgiveness” to refer to the agent’s standing with respect to the one who has been offended and, consequently, to whether the agent will remain the object of ill will vis-à-vis the one who has been offended (2007: 451). Second, throughout the History, Hume regularly uses the term “forgiveness” roughly interchangeably with terms like “mercy,” “pardon,” and “clemency.” In political contexts, pardons are associated with “overcoming ‘resentment’, and involving ‘compassion’ and ‘affection’” (Pettigrove 2007: 451; cp. Hume 1754–62: 1.4.220; 2.12.64; 3.31.224). According to Pettigrove, the fact that Hume uses the term “forgiveness” in this way is not surprising given that they are consistent with the way the terms were used in contemporary English translations of the Bible, which, he notes, had “strongly influenced both the concepts and the language of forgiveness and mercy in Britain for quite some time prior to Hume’s birth.” In particular, he notes the significance of the Psalter on Anglican and Presbyterian forms of worship that would most likely have influenced Hume and his contemporaries, either directly or indirectly. As examples illustrating his point, Pettigrove cites the work of two churchmen who were contemporaries of Hume. One is John Wesley’s Sermon 26 (1771), on the Lord’s Prayer, in which he explains the prayer’s call to forgive others. The other is Joseph Butler’s Sermon IX (1827), on forgiveness, in which he discusses the forgiveness of injuries (Pettigrove 2007: 452).7 Given that Hume uses the term “forgiveness” as akin to the term “mercy,” conceives of mercy as a species of benevolence, and understands benevolence as “a desire of the happiness of the person belov’d, and an aversion to his misery” (Hume 1739–40: 2.2.6.3), Pettigrove infers that Hume conceives of forgiveness as an act oriented in a way opposed to anger (2007: 452). Thus, he concludes, Forgiveness involves a desire for the happiness and aversion to the misery of someone who has caused us displeasure. Ordinarily, that displeasure will have been due to a moral failing on the part of the other, but it needn’t always be so caused.8 It is often, but not always, preceded by the wrongdoer’s repentance and/or apology.9 Forgiveness is naturally, but not necessarily, followed by forgetting the offence.10 And it characteristically leads to reconciliation.11 (Pettigrove 2007: 453; cp. 454–5) In essence, Pettigrove suggests that Hume presents forgiveness as “a special kind of … love” (2007: 450) that requires not only the forbearance of ill will but also (and in fact, even more) the replacement of ill will with benevolence.

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2.3  What Kind of Account Is This? Pettigrove describes the account he presents in different ways. Sometimes he refers to it as “Hume’s account of forgiveness” (see, e.g., 2007: 450), and other times he refers to it as “a Humean account of forgiveness” that one can “piece together” (see, e.g., 2007: 448). So, we might reasonably wonder, “What kind of account is this?” In light of the analysis that I presented in Section 1, I am inclined to regard it as neo-Humean account for three reasons. First, it is an attempt to “piece together” an account of forgiveness from various texts. So, it seems inaccurate to regard it as Hume’s account of forgiveness. Second, the textual evidence on which Pettigrove’s reading relies is principally from the History, in which Hume is describing people’s actions using terms in ways that his readers would find familiar. This seems to be rather compelling prima facie evidence that it is less plausible to think of it as a Humean account of forgiveness. Third, it is also essentially dependent on external sources, and it uses these sources not merely to provide context for interpreting Hume’s work but to provide complementary resources for extending the evidence from Hume’s texts. In particular, Pettigrove’s reading relies on ideas from modern Anglican philosophy and theology, as presented in the works of two of Hume’s contemporaries: namely, John Wesley and Joseph Butler. The account of forgiveness that emerges from this methodological approach is similar in fundamental ways to the one that Joseph Butler presents in two sermons about the following passage from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy’: But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. (Matt 5:43–44) For these reasons, it seems more plausible to interpret Pettigrove’s project as a neo-Humean account of forgiveness, in the sense described in above, in Section 1. That said, I recognize that there might be a case to be made for thinking that Pettigrove is offering a Humean account of forgiveness. This strikes me as a point on which reasonable people can differ. In any event, determining how best to categorize Pettigrove’s project is not of primary interest for present purposes. What is important is to recognize that developing an account of forgiveness from Hume’s moral philosophy is a constructive project that requires scholars to find creative ways of extending Hume’s work beyond what his texts offer. Pettigrove provides an illustrative model for how scholars might extend Hume’s moral philosophy in just this way. In what follows, I aim to continue in this vein, describing a framework for developing a neo-Humean account of forgiveness that extends the foundational work done by Pettigrove.

3.  Suggestions for Revising and Extending Pettigrove’s Account In this final section, I will highlight two constructive ways of revising and extending Pettigrove’s project in order to develop a neo-Humean account of forgiveness that is richly consistent with the ethos of Hume’s moral philosophy. The first concerns the primary social focus of the account. The second concerns its primary psychological focus. In brief, I will be arguing for a conception of forgiveness that begins at the heart of the “narrow circle” in which people move – namely, family and friendships – and develops in light of the principal role of sympathy as a source of moral motivation. In order to do so, I will employ both a traditional and a comparative methodology, drawing on Hume’s own moral philosophy as well as on sources from within the classical

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Confucian traditions of the Far East12 and the Eastern Christian tradition of the Middle East, Asia Minor, Africa, and the Greek-speaking lands of the eastern Mediterranean.

3.1  The Primary Social Focus Hume’s moral philosophy features both a cosmopolitan aspect that emphasizes the facets of human nature shared by all human beings and a communitarian aspect that focuses on human beings as people with particular moral obligations to those within the “narrow circle, in which any person moves” (Hume 1739–40: 3.3.3.2). My analysis will focus on the latter since it is within this narrow circle – and more specifically within the innermost parts of the circle, such as relationships within one’s family and among one’s friends – that opportunities for forgiveness are likely to arise most frequently. Hume describes family relationships as ones characterized by mutual benevolence. Among family relationships, he discusses the obligations of children to care for their parents. In this way, Hume’s moral philosophy shares similarities with Confucian moral philosophy. Unlike Confucianism, however, Hume tends to focus more on the obligations of parents to care for their children. Among these responsibilities, he emphasizes the obligation of parents to educate their children. This includes a duty not only to provide an academic education (see, e.g., Hume 1777: 185; cp. Hume 1739–40: 3.2.2.5; 3.2.12.4; Hume 1777: 279) but also to “inculcate” prudential guidance for living (see, e.g., Hume 1777: 161) and, most importantly for present purposes, a moral  education by which children are trained up “to some rule of conduct and behaviour” (Hume 1751: 3.16). One might be tempted to read this as a quaint platitude or as a rather inconsequential aspect of Hume’s moral philosophy, but this is a temptation that one ought to resist. On Hume’s account, human families are foundational elements of society. He highlights this in a particularly noteworthy paragraph in Book 3 of the Treatise. The paragraph is a bit long but worth reading in full. Hume says, [I]n order to form society, ’tis requisite not only that it be advantageous, but also that men be sensible of its advantages; and ’tis impossible, in their wild uncultivated state, that by study and reflection alone, they should ever be able to attain this knowledge. Most fortunately, therefore, there is conjoin’d to those necessities, whose remedies are remote and obscure, another necessity, which having a present and more obvious remedy, may justly be regarded as the first and original principle of human society. This necessity is no other than that natural appetite betwixt the sexes, which unites them together, and preserves their union, till a new tye takes place in their concern for their common offspring. This new concern becomes also a principle of union betwixt the parents and offspring, and forms a more numerous society; where the parents govern by the advantage of their superior strength and wisdom, and at the same time are restrain’d in the exercise of their authority by that natural affection, which they bear their children. In a little time, custom and habit operating on the tender minds of the children, makes them sensible of the advantages, which they may reap from society, as well as fashions them by degrees for it, by rubbing off those rough corners and untoward affections, which prevent their coalition. (Hume 1739–40: 3.2.2.4; emphasis mine) On Hume’s account, family life itself is critically important for helping people to rub off “rough corners and untoward affections.” What’s more, the moral education that virtuous parents give to their children provides them with an understanding of foundational moral principles, like the principles of justice. These are necessary “in order to preserve peace among [one’s] children” (Hume 1739–40: 3.2.2.14), but they are also essential features of the kind of virtues that 134

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are necessary for a stable and flourishing society (cp. Hume 1739–40: 3.2.2.26; see also Hume 1739–40: 3.2.6.11; Hume 1751: 9.2). The implications of Hume’s point in this passage are similar to those of Mencius, who claims that “the root of the state lies in the family” (Mencius 2008: 4A5.1). On Hume’s account, family life is foundational in the following way. The family is the first society in which human beings naturally participate. In this society, they learn the kinds of moral principles that make possible peaceful co-existence; they cultivate the kinds of moral dispositions that foster the ties of sympathy and humane concern. These will include not only things like the observance of “the rule for stability of possession” (Hume 1739–40: 3.2.2.14) but also finding appropriate ways to reconcile when such principles have been violated. A key element of this process typically involves learning both to forgive the offenses of others and to be forgiven for one’s own offenses. In other words, the family is a small society in which people can develop the kinds of cognitive, affective, and volitional dispositions that are necessary to cultivate social virtues for establishing and sustaining the kinds of communities in which human beings can flourish. In this way and to this extent, Hume, like Mencius, regards the family as “the root” of the state. A root, however, is merely a foundation of a larger organism. Thus, just as farmers must nurture the roots of plants so that they can extend through shoots from which the full-grown organisms will emerge, so too human beings must nurture the social dispositions they develop in their family life and “extend” them through various kinds of social relations within their narrow circle from which wider civil societies will emerge (see, e.g., Mencius 2008: 7A15, 7B15; cp. Confucius 2003: 1.2). In more prosaic terms, people must extend the kind of social virtues they begin to develop within their families to their personal friendships, their partnerships, their contractually oriented civil alliances, and so forth to the broad category of civic friendships that constitute their extended, political communities. In short, learning how to forgive and to be forgiven is a fundamental aspect of social wellbeing that human beings first learn in the context of the family. Thus, a neo-Humean account of forgiveness that begins by focusing on family life, which is at the heart of the “narrow circle” in which people move, rather than on political life more generally, would be more richly consistent with Hume’s own moral philosophy in three ways. First, it would focus primarily on the kinds of contexts and relationships that are more fundamentally constitutive of “common life” (cp. Hume 1748: 12.24). Second, and consequently, it would be more likely to yield practical guidance for how one ought to conduct oneself on a daily basis. Third, and perhaps most theoretically interesting, it would result in an account of forgiveness that is more clearly focused on the psychological mechanism that is at the heart of Hume’s moral psychology, as I will argue presently.

3.2  The Primary Psychological Focus As I discussed briefly at the end of Section 2, Pettigrove develops his account of forgiveness in light of ideas from eighteenth-century Anglican and Presbyterian conceptions of Christianity, as expressed in the works of John Wesley and Joseph Butler. In what follows, I intend to extend this approach in two ways. I will begin by highlighting an aspect of the traditional Eastern Christian conception of forgiveness that seems to differ in an important way from the early modern Protestant conceptions of forgiveness on which Pettigrove’s account relies. The difference concerns the role of sympathy as a primary psychological source of forgiveness. I will then highlight an aspect of the classical Confucian conception of sympathetic understanding (shù, 恕), and I will explain how this Confucian concept complements the Eastern Christian insight regarding the role of sympathy in a way that elucidates important and often unrecognized aspects of Hume’s own moral philosophy. 135

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3.2.1 Sympathy Given that forgiveness is a way of dealing with a type of anger that arises from offense,13 it might seem rather surprising – shocking perhaps – to hear various Eastern Christian figures suggesting that forgiveness ought to be motivated by sympathy or pity or compassion. And yet this is just what one seems to find in a number of their works. For instance, St. Basil the Great says that in response to anger, one ought to “sympathize … with [one’s] brother, because if he continues in sin, [then] with the devil he will be delivered up to eternal fire” (2005: 90). Likewise, St. John Chrysostom says to one who has been injured by another, Pity him then, do not hate him; weep and mourn, do not turn away from him. … Consider that Christ, when about to be crucified, rejoiced for Himself, but wept for them that were crucifying Him. This ought to be our disposition also; and the more we are injured, so much the more should we lament for them that are injuring us. For to us many are the benefits hence arising, but to them the opposites. (1888: 658) In a similar vein, St. Isaac of Syria suggests, “A sign of compassion is forgiveness of every debt; a sign of an evil mind is offensive speech to one who has fallen” (2011: 364). To be clear, these are not, strictly speaking, imperatives concerning moral behavior: namely, that we ought to show compassion to those who have wronged us, in the sense of acting mercifully toward them. Rather, these are imperatives concerning moral psychology: namely, that we ought to be motivated by some kind of empathetic affection – like sympathy,14 pity, or compassion – to act mercifully toward those who have wronged us. St. Gregory Palamas illustrates this point even more clearly in his thirty-sixth homily. Palamas distinguishes between volitional acts related to forgiveness, such as “forbearance” or “forgiving a wrong,” on the one hand, and compassion, on the other (2016: 283, 284; cp. 2016: 287). And he uses “compassion” in two senses (2016: 285). In some cases, he uses it to refer to acts of mercy that follow from, e.g., “forbearance.” For instance, he says, [L]et us put on, as the apostle says, ‘bowels of mercy’ (Col 3:12). By showing compassion in our words and deeds, let us … ‘be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another … even as God for Christ’s sake forgave you’ (Eph 4:32). (2016: 288) In other cases, and more importantly for present purposes, he uses it to refer to the affectivemotivational conditions that give rise to volitional acts, like “forbearance,” and acts of mercy. For instance, he says, When the man owing ten thousand talents was brought before the king without being able to pay, ‘His Lord,’ it says, ‘commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made’ (Matt 18:25). But when he fell down, asked him to have patience and promised to pay, the Lord was moved with compassion, released him and forgave the debt. In the age to come there will be no such thing as postponement, promises from the debtor, settlement of debts, or any sort of forgiveness from the giver of all, who will demand an account of all. (2016: 285) Thus, St. Gregory distinguishes three things: (1) the affective aspects that motivate forgiveness, (2) the internal, volitional aspects of forgiveness, and (3) the external, actions of mercy that characterize forgiveness. 136

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In short, a number of exemplary Eastern Christian figures suggest that people ought to be motivated to forgive others by some type of empathic affections with those who have wronged them, such as sympathy, pity, or compassion. In this way, the Eastern Christian view presents an intriguing difference15 from the early modern, Western Christian tradition on which Pettigrove’s account relies. More importantly, for present purposes, it presents an important similarity with Hume’s own moral philosophy and, in so doing, offers a promising suggestion for how to develop a richer neo-Humean conception of forgiveness that focuses on the kinds of cases of forgiveness that typically arise in “common life.”16 One might worry, however, that the benefit of being more richly Humean in this way is outweighed by a more serious cost: namely, being less plausible because it fails to value the role of reason. To address this worry, let me turn further east and draw on an insight from classical Confucian philosophy.

3.2.2  Sympathetic Understanding Western philosophical discourse frequently conceives of the affections as operations of “the heart” that are fundamentally separated from, if not opposed to, reasons, or “the mind.” This is not the case in classical Confucian philosophy, which conceives of the two as operations of a single cognitive-affective faculty, xìn (心), which is translated into English as “heart-mind.” One operation of the heart-mind (xìn, 心) that is of particular interest for developing a neo-Humean conception of forgiveness is (shù, 恕), or “sympathetic understanding.”17 Confucius characterizes sympathetic understanding as one of the two aspects of the “single thread” on which his moral philosophy stands (Confucius 2003: 4.15) and as “one word that can serve as a guide for one’s entire life” (Confucius 2003: 15.24). Presented as a moral principle, it is essentially a negative version of the Golden Rule: “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire” (Confucius 2003:15.24; cp. 5.12). But sympathetic understanding consists not merely of a rule that ought to guide people’s moral reasoning but also, and more fundamentally, of an affective element. This is evident in the word itself. The character for sympathetic understanding (shù, 恕) is a compound that consists of the character for heart-mind (xìn, 心) and the character for “like” or “as if ” (rú, 如). Thus, it is essentially a kind of cognitive-affective perception of the heart of another human being. Moreover, as Mencius notes, it is a kind of cognitive-affective perception that is inherently related to humanity, or benevolence (rén, 仁) (see, e.g., Mencius 2008: 7A4.3). There are two particularly illustrative examples from Mencius’s moral philosophy that will be useful to elucidate the relationship between sympathetic understanding (shù, 恕) and humanity, or benevolence (rén, 仁).18 The first is the case of a child who is about to fall into a well. According to Mencius, anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well, would have a feeling of alarm and compassion – not because one sought to get in good with the child’s parents, not because one wanted fame among one’s neighbors and friends, and not because one would dislike the sound of the child’s cries. From this we can see that if one is without the feeling of compassion, one is not human. (Mencius 2008: 2A6:3–4) Mencius uses this story as evidence for a fundamental aspect of human psychology: i.e., every person has an innate capacity to feel with and for others. The second is the case of King Xuan (Mencius 2008: 1A7). In brief, the story is as follows. King Xuan suggests that he is incapable of being a benevolent ruler. Mencius shows the king that he is mistaken. The king has a heart that is capable of feeling with and for his people (see, e.g., Mencius 2008: 1B5). He merely needs to 137

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“extend” this ability from those beings for which he feels compassion, like animals, to the subjects whom he rules. Insofar as he has failed to manifest compassion for his people, it is because he fails to make the effort to do so. Most importantly, this would require the king to reflect (sī, 思) on the needs of his subject. In essence, Mencius suggests reflection, or focused attentiveness (sī, 思) is a means of cultivating the kind of sympathetic understanding (shù, 恕) that leads to actions that manifest humanity, or benevolence (rén, 仁). The general similarities between the classical Confucian conception of sympathetic understanding and Hume’s conception of sympathy – especially in light of the relationship of each to benevolence – will be clear to those who are familiar with Hume’s moral philosophy. Thus, the possibility that this conception of sympathetic understanding could be helpful for developing a neo-Humean conception of forgiveness should be fairly clear. What might not be clear, however, is how well the classical Confucian conception of sympathetic understanding (shù, 恕), related by reflection (sī, 思), is to Hume’s own moral philosophy. Although Hume does famously claim that “reason is and always ought to be the slave of the passions” (Hume 1739–40: 2.3.3.4), he also claims that human nature is “compos’d of two principal parts, which are requisite in all its actions, the affections and understanding” and that “’tis certain, that the blind motions of the former, without the direction of the latter, incapacitate men for society” (Hume 1739–40: 3.2.2.14). In a similar vein, he says that “reason, if not an essential part of taste, is at least requisite to the operations of this latter faculty” (Hume 1777: 240). In essence, as Marissa Espinoza and I have argued elsewhere (2021), Hume recognizes the need for proper exercises of the understanding – what he calls the “concomitants” of the principles of sympathy and humanity – to guide moral deliberation.19 Moreover, he notes that these “concomitants” include the ability of people to focus – or as he says, to “fix” – their attention 20 on the kinds of relevant circumstances of people’s experiences with which a properly cultivated sense of humanity would sympathize. In short, Hume has a conception of the relationships among the understanding, sympathy, and humanity that is rather similar to the classical Confucian conception of the relationships among reflection (sī, 思), sympathetic understanding (shù, 恕), and humanity, or benevolence (rén, 仁). These conceptions are not identical, to be sure, but that is not essential for my argument. What is important is that they are sufficiently similar to make the classical Confucian conception of the nature of sympathetic understanding and its function in motivating and “extending” sympathy, or what Mencius calls “compassion,” interesting for the development of a neo-Humean conception of forgiveness. Throughout this final section, I have employed a comparative philosophical methodology, putting Hume in conversation with an alternative set of interlocutors. More specifically, I have argued that classical Confucianism and Eastern Christianity provide promising sets of resources for Hume scholars to develop a neo-Humean account of forgiveness. Let me conclude by summarizing my analysis briefly.

4. Conclusion In the preceding sections, I have attempted to provide a framework for developing a neoHumean account of forgiveness, in three steps. I began by distinguishing different types of scholarly approaches to engaging with Hume’s work. My motive for this is that, as far as I can tell, Hume lacks an account of forgiveness, so any attempt to develop such an account would have to develop and extend the resources that he provides. I then provided an overview of the most significant work that has been done in this vein: i.e., Pettigrove (2007). In the final section, I offered a few suggestions for further developing Pettigrove’s work in two ways. The first is by

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adopting a more philosophically cosmopolitan and ecumenical methodology that puts Hume’s work in dialogue with philosophy and religion from the Far East and the Near East: specifically, classical Confucianism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, respectively. The second is by drawing on these sources to suggest ways of focusing a neo-Humean account of forgiveness on two themes that are more richly consistent with the ethos of Hume’s own moral philosophy. One is that such an account should adopt as it primary focus those social relationships at the heart of the “narrow circle” in which one moves – e.g., family relationships and friendships – in order to develop an account of forgiveness that is practically relevant for “common life.” The other is that such an account should have as its primary psychological explanans Hume’s conception of sympathy and a related Humean conception of what classical Confucians call “sympathetic understanding.” Given the absence of an account of forgiveness in Hume’s work and the scarcity of developments of the topic in the secondary literature, a lot of work will be required in order to develop a fully articulated neo-Humean account of forgiveness. My hope is that the framework I have provided will be of use to Hume scholars in the pursuit of that goal.

Notes 1 Employing this type of comparative philosophical methodology has already yielded compelling insights in other areas. If scholars can develop compelling neo-Humean insights at the intersection of, e.g., Hume’s moral philosophy and the feminist ethics of care, there is no prima facie reason to think that they could not or ought not to do so at the intersection of Hume’s moral philosophy and the philosophical and religious traditions of non-Western cultures. In fact, as I hope to show, there is reason to think that broadening our methodological approach to Hume scholarship will be particularly profitable. 2 For accounts that attempt to make similar kinds of distinctions, see, e.g., Millgram 1995 as well as Cohen and Keyt 1992. 3 Thanks to Max Hayward, Gary Hartenberg, Kaleb Adney, Eric Hagedorn, Beau Branson, David Bradshaw, David Woodruff, and Chike Jeffers for helping me try to articulate this distinction more clearly. 4 Thanks to Max Hayward for a discussion that lead me to this example. 5 Thanks to Chike Jeffers for suggesting that such distinctions be conceived of as lying on a continuum. 6 My aim in this section is to distinguish different types of philosophical projects. Some might prefer to distinguish these with titles other than the ones I have chosen. That is fine. What concerns me is the nature of the distinctions and, for present purposes, that the reader simply recognizes the way I am using the titles to refer to these distinctive types of project. 7 I will say more about the significance of these figures for Pettigrove’s conception of forgiveness in Section 4. 8 This is an example of the kind of indirect cause I noted above, as evinced by the case that Pettigrove cites (2007: 453n26): In a letter to Adam Smith [Hume 1766–1776: 2.406], Hume thanks Smith for his ‘friendly Resentment against the Right Reverend’ John Oswald and informs Smith that he has now forgiven Rev. Oswald’s brother, James, for having failed to apologize for his brother John’s behaviour. 9 As examples of forgiveness preceded by repentance, Pettigrove cites Hume 1754–62: 1.9.363 and 3.31.221–2. As an example of forgiveness without repentance, Pettigrove cites Hume 1754–62: 5.59.540–2. 10 See, e.g., Hume 1754–62: 4.41.220; see also Hume 1754–62: 2.22.473, 5.51.187. As another example of forgetting the offense, Pettigrove cites Hume 1754–62: 1.10.400, but strictly speaking this is an example not of forgetting an offense but of the hoping to forget an offense. 11 As an example of such a reconciliation, Pettigrove cites Hume 1754–62: 1.4.220 and Letter 259 (Hume 2011: 277–9). He also cites Hume 1754–62: 1.8.327 and 3.36.425, but these offer much less compelling evidence of reconciliation following forgiveness. 12 In what follows, I will focus, in particular, on themes found in two seminal texts within the classical Confucian traditions: The Analects, or the Lunyu (Confucius 2003), and the Mengzi (Mencius 2008).

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Rico Vitz 13 Regarding forgiveness being a response to offense, see, e.g., Chrysostom 1888: 246, 657; Basil the Great 2005: 81–3, 89–91; Palamas 2016: 264. Regarding forgiveness being a way of dealing with anger, see, e.g., Chrysostom 1888: 246, 657, 659; Maximos the Confessor 1981: 301–2. 14 In this sense, “sympathy” refers not to the psychological mechanism of sympathy but what Hume calls “sentiment of sympathy.” For a description of the difference between sympathy as a mechanism, as a process, and as a product, see Vitz 2016. 15 The difference is at least one of emphasis if not one of content. 16 For theological reasons, the scope of the traditional Eastern Christian account is broader than this, but for the purposes of developing a neo-Humean account of forgiveness, this narrower conception of the scope of forgiveness will suffice. 17 See, e.g., Van Norden’s translation of the Mengzi (2008). 18 For a more detailed discussion of the relationship of Mencius’s moral philosophy to that of Hume, see Carey and Vitz 2019. 19 See, e.g., Hume 1739–40: 2.2.9, 2.2.12.8; cp. 2.2.9.14; see also Taylor 2015: 45–49; 87. 20 Cp. Hume 1739–40: 1.3.8.2; 2.3.10.6; see also Hume 1739–40: 3.3.3.5.

References Basil the Great. (2005) “Homily against Anger,” in On the Human Condition. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Butler, J. (1827) Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel. Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins. Carey, J. and R. Vitz. (2019) “Mencius, Hume, and the Virtue of Humanity: Sources of Benevolent Moral Development,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (4): 693–713. Chrysostom, J. (1888) Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew. (W. Wilson, trans.), in P. Schaff (ed.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 10. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001. Originally published in Edinburgh by T & T Clark. https://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/npnf110/cache/npnf110.pdf. Cohen, S. M. and D. Keyt. (1992) “Analyzing Plato’s Arguments: Plato and Platonism,” in J. C. Klagge and N. D. Smith (eds.) Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, supplementary volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 173–200. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Confucius. (2003) The Analects, Edward Slingerland (trans.) Indianapolis: Hackett. Espinoza, M. and R. Vitz. (2021) “Cultural Embeddedness and the Mestiza Ethics of Care: A Neo-Humean Response to the Problem of Moral Inclusion,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (5): 1091–107. Hume, D. (1754–62) The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. vols. 1–6. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983. Hume, D. (1739–40) A Treatise of Human Nature, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Hume, D. (1748) An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Hume, D. (1751) An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Hume, D. (1757) A Dissertation on the Passions, in A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of Religion: A Critical Edition, T. Beauchamp (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. Hume, D. (1727–65, 1766–76) The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols, J. Y. T. Greig (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011. Hume, D. (1777) Essays Moral Political and Literary. Revised Edition. Eugene Miller (ed.) Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985. Isaac the Syrian. (2011) The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Revised Second Edition. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (trans.) Boston, Massachusetts: Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Maximos the Confessor. (1981) “On the Lord’s Prayer,” in G. Palmer, P. Sherrard, and K. Ware (eds.), St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth (comp.) The Philokalia, vol. 2, 285– 305. London: Faber and Faber. Mencius. (2008) Mengzi, Bryan W. Van Norden (trans.) Indianapolis: Hackett. Millgram, E. (1995) “Was Hume a Humean?” Hume Studies 21 (1): 75–93. Palamas, G. (2016) The Homilies. Edited and translated by Christopher Veniamin. Dalton, Pennsylvania: Mount Tabor Publishing. Pettigrove, G. (2007) “Hume on Forgiveness and the Unforgivable.” Utilitas 19 (4): 447–65. Smith, M. (1987). “The Humean Theory of Motivation,” Mind 96 (381): 36–61.

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Developing a Neo-Humean Account of Forgiveness Taylor, J. (2015) Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy, and Society in Hume’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP. Vitz, R. (2016) “The Nature and Functions of Sympathy in Hume’s Philosophy,” in Paul Russell (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Hume, 312–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vitz, R. (2018) “Character, Culture, and Humean Virtue Ethics: Insights from Situationism and Confucianism,” in P. A. Reed and R. Vitz (eds.) Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology, 91–114. London: Routledge. Wesley, J. (1771) Sermons on Several Occasions. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Available at: https://ccel.org/ccel/w/wesley/sermons/cache/sermons.pdf (Accessed 23 Nov 2021).

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11 HEGEL ON FORGIVENESS Christopher Yeomans

1. Introduction One of the primary functions of the history of philosophy is to provide another perspective on our own debates, and to offer or remind us of frequently neglected alternatives to the choices of philosophical positions we consider. I will argue here that a consideration of Hegel’s theory of forgiveness can serve such a function with respect to our own debate. In part, Hegel’s suitability for this role is owed to the prominent and consequential role that forgiveness plays in Hegel’s ethics and indeed in his systematic philosophy as a whole—a role recently brought to the foreground by Robert Brandom. With respect to the contemporary debate, two aspects of Hegel’s position on the circumstances of forgiveness—the offending action or character—are important. First, Hegel holds such offense to be necessary and inevitable in the course of human interactions. And second, the offense to which forgiveness responds is not exclusively (or even primarily) moral. As a result, two aspects of Hegel’s position on the ethics of forgiveness are brought into relief. First, we cannot understand the ethics of forgiveness until we understand the logic of the necessity of the underlying offenses. And second, we cannot understand the ethics of forgiveness until we understand the social structure of offense and forgiveness. Each of the following sections takes up one of these points in turn.

2.  The Logic of Offense and Forgiveness It would be quite wrong, of course, to insist that Hegel was the first theorist to argue that the offenses to which forgiveness responds are necessary and inevitable, or even to claim that such a recognition is lacking in the current debate. In fact, the very first line of the very first section of Hughes and Warmke’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article presents this fact as an introductory truism: “An inevitable and unfortunate fact of life is that we are often mistreated by others. Forgiveness concerns one kind of response to those who wrong us” (Hughes and Warmke 2017). But what is unique about Hegel is his diagnosis of that inevitability. On Hegel’s account, that inevitability doesn’t just trace back to free will or the crooked timber of the human character, but rather all the way down to the very structure of conceptuality itself. The root of that inevitability is logical. Furthermore, that inevitability has a distinctive way of playing itself out in the temporal form of human actions. Explaining these two features of Hegel’s view is the task of this section. To start to get a handle on the logical root of the inevitability of offense (and thus the inevitability of the need for forgiveness), we take up Robert Brandom’s understanding of forgiveness. 142

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On Brandom’s account, what we have in Hegel is a contrast between universal moral rules of the form made most explicit in Kant’s Categorical Imperative and the particular motivations and interests that in Kant go under the term ‘inclination [Neigung].’ On a Kantian account, any time I am motivated by my inclinations rather than the Categorical Imperative, I commit a moral wrong and thus generate a potential occasion for forgiveness. Logically speaking, any time the explanation for my action is a particular cause rather than a general rule, I have done wrong. But Hegel sees that both the generality of rules and the specificity of interests are necessary to explain and justify actions in actual circumstances. Logically speaking, we are the individuals that we are because of both our general characters and our particular interests. Thus, forgiveness, which absolves us of the (purported) mistake of not being exclusively general, is a recognition of a conceptual truth: Forgiveness [Verzeihung] is a recognitive attitude that practically acknowledges the complementary contributions of particularity and universality to individuality—both the way the application of the universal raises the particular to the individual and the way that application to particulars actualizes the universal in an individual. It is a practical, community-instituting form of self-consciousness… (Brandom 2019: 598) It is community-instituting in the sense that it either generates or repairs a social fabric in which the reality of agents’ complex lives is accepted. If I forgive a friend for not coming to help me move as he had promised, because he had a fight with his boyfriend and needed to patch things up, I acknowledge that in this case his subsumption under the general rule that one ought to keep one’s promises has to be modulated by the particular attachments and needs that make him the individual he is. Even if I think his boyfriend is bad for him—that is, even if I think that, on balance, he should nonetheless have come help me move—my forgiveness acknowledges the validity and even necessity of his perspective, because of the visceral and particular attachment that it involves. This example points to another feature of Hegel’s view that deserves comment. These general rules and particular interests are not just input sources for the process of deciding what to do (or explaining what was done); rather, they are just for that reason also perspectives from which the action itself can be viewed. And they are perspectives that cannot easily be integrated with each other. We are accustomed to this difficulty from our experience of forgiveness, which is a complicated movement of the heart that is always in danger of slipping back into resentment or unspoken reservations. But it is worth noting briefly that for Hegel, the perspectival nature of knowing and the ineradicable differences between perspectives are built into his conception of what it means to conceive of anything at all (Yeomans 2019a). Fear not: I have no intention of trying to walk through the extensive argument in which Hegel tries to show both of these things. But a summary of the conclusion and its immediate historical background are necessary to explain the depth of our need for forgiveness and the extent to which forgiving each other makes not only social life but understanding itself possible. And the conclusion is that any conceptualization of anything at all requires that three different aspects of it be in play: the universal aspect, the particular aspect, and the individual aspect. That is, we must understand the general rules and types on display in the thing, the specific features that distinguish this instance or appearance from others, and the way in which the thing forms a totality or whole. This is as true of numbers and pineapples as it is of the basic structure of a political system or the character of a person. In Kant, these aspects of the thing are apportioned to different input sources of cognition— general concepts of the understanding, particular intuitions, and individual ideas of reason— whereas Hegel de-psychologizes and generalizes them to be three aspects of concepts themselves. But what is retained from Kant is an awareness of the extraordinary difficulty in getting these 143

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aspects together. In Kant this shows up in a profusion of forms of mediation, as ever more resources are brought in to bring actual particular intuitions together with universal concept (first forms of intuition, then schemata for those concepts, then synthetic principles, then ideas of reason which regulate judgment according to methodological principles, and finally (in the third Critique) principles of teleological judgment). In Hegel this shows up as a profusion of forms of inference, each of which takes one of the aspects involved as a way to connect the other two. Thus, instead of offering additional notions that play the mediating role, Hegel offers structures in which each of the three play that mediating role for the other two. But since they can play this mediating role, another way to describe them is as perspectives. Each provides a point of view from which the relation between the other two can be made visible. But each provides a point of view from which the relation between two other points of view can be made visible—the latter do not cease to be points of view of their own in virtue of that mediation, and thus the heterogenous nature and potential conflict between the points of view are never eliminated. In one sense, this is a logical picture that is tailor-made for the understanding of forgiveness, since it is a logical picture that embeds the kind of difference in perspective that it presupposes in every act of understanding. But, on the other hand, the very generalization of the difference in perspective can make it harder to see what is distinctive about forgiveness, and particularly about the circumstances of forgiveness. Most of our usual examples of forgivable offenses do seem to involve the particular not being in conformity with the universal, e.g., my stealing another’s property seems like an offense against a general rule regarding property that is motivated by my particular advantage. And examples such as this can make it seem as if they are relatively rare divergences from a baseline of respect for the general rule. But as Kant followed this thought rigorously, and connected it to issues of moral character (which has to do with our motivations) rather than legal acceptability (which has only to do with the external form of the action), he began to doubt whether anyone was ever truly motivated by the moral law rather than particular inclinations, and denied that we could ever know that we had done so. And this isn’t just Kant: particularly from many undergraduate students in ethics classes one hears a skepticism that anyone ever really acts from universal principles rather than selfishness. What Hegel saw is that this perspective of the pure universal, to which all agents appear as selfish, is both always available and in fact necessarily a part of any understanding of action. This logical feature makes it the case that taking offense at the action of another is always an option, and thus that the circumstances of potential forgiveness are (at least potentially) omnipresent. And, in fact, the problem is even worse than this makes it sound, and we can get at what makes it worse by looking a bit more at Brandom’s view. Though Brandom is often criticized for overstating the significance of trust and forgiveness for Hegel, on my view Brandom actually understates its extent and manifold nature. Brandom clearly sees this problem in the relation between particularity and universality (as in the examples given here so far), but he does not as clearly see the fact that individuality is also in play here as a perspective that can offend against the others and be offended by it. Brandom certainly deserves credit for having traced through the Phenomenology of Spirit an argument that this sort of forgiveness is necessary in order to get any particulars together with any universal norms, and not just concepts concerning actions. But it is important to bring out that the offenses can move in any of three directions, from any of the three sources. The driving force here is partial incompatibility, which runs in all directions. Just as the particular motivation can offend against the universal standard, the universal standard can offend against the particular instance— most readers will be familiar with academic administrators with a fetish for rule compliance, even in particular situations where the purpose animating the rule has no application. Sometimes these situations are just funny or annoying, but sometimes people don’t get paid who ought to be. In addition, the particular can offend against the wholeness of a person’s character (their individuality, in Hegel’s sense). Sometimes we can file such a case under the category of weakness of 144

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will—we act on a particular motivation that, all things considered or from our second-order perspective on our character, we do not endorse. But equally we can understand an offense of the universal rule against individuals. This is how I am inclined to read Bernard Williams’ ‘one thought too many’ example, in which a husband who must choose between two different drowning persons (one of whom is his wife) really should not have the thought that it is permissible to save his wife first, as certain conceptions of ethical judgment would seem to require. The problem is less that the universal rule to save those in danger threatens his particular attachment to his wife but rather that it threatens the integrity of the individual lives of both spouses, of which that particular attachment is an essential element (Williams 1982: 18). The previous paragraph offered a selection of largely random examples designed merely to make the point that different sorts of offense can be in play as circumstances of forgiveness, and thus that there might be different forms of forgiveness. They will all count as forms of forgiveness (i.e., as species of the same genus) because they will all be respond to fundamental clashes of perspective that give offense. But they will all be different forms of forgiveness (i.e., different species of the same genus) because they will each respond to a specific type of clash between specific types of perspectives. The taxonomy of those circumstances has thus far remained in the (perhaps uninspiring) logical register; Hegel himself has a kind of typology of these circumstances in a more interpersonal register, to which we can now turn. We find Hegel’s typology in the section on “Conscience. The beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness” in his Phenomenology of Spirit. The first is conscience itself, the second is the beautiful soul, and the third is the heard-hearted judge who plays the moral valet. These are largely strange and unfamiliar terms; we should read these as morality plays or allegories for the sorts of conflicts to which forgiveness responds. In each case I will try to flesh out the characters in the allegory first, and then connect it to the logical structure we have just described. One thing to flag now is that each of these allegories will have two characters, and the specific nature of the two characters is very important. One of the two characters will give a characteristic kind of offense, and another will take a characteristic kind of offense. Only when we see the contributions of both characters can we make out the specific nature of the forgiveness involved, which has the implication (to be explored in the conclusion) that all forgiveness is mutual. In his introductory remarks to conscience, he distinguishes it from the moral frameworks discussed earlier in the book, which were more characteristically Kantian—the moral worldview— precisely by the centrality of the standpoint of individuality (Hegel 1807: ¶637).1 The question at issue is no longer the Kantian one of trying to find a perspective from which the universal law and the particular interest are compatible, but rather the universal law itself is taken to exist for the individual: “Now the law exists for the sake of the self and not the other way around, that is, not the self existing for the sake of the law” (¶639). So the question is not directly the compatibility of the universal and the particular; rather, the question is the relation between the universal and the individual, and specifically, whether the way in which the individual has appropriated the universal—the way that the individual has made their duty their own—can be recognized by others: However, the existing actuality of conscience is such [an actuality] that is a self, i.e., an existence conscious of itself, the spiritual element of coming-to-be-recognized. Hence, the activity is merely the translation of its individual content into the objective element within which it is universal and is recognized, and it is precisely in the content being recognized that the deed is made into an actuality. (¶640) This is one essential character in our drama—the conscientious self who has thought about what morality requires, and not just as an action in response to a situation but as the shape of a whole 145

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life. These are the parents, for example, who want their own biological children but also feel the moral weight of the needs of foster children for a loving home, and so decide to have a biological child and also to adopt a foster child. Or this is the person who is concerned about both the impact of climate change on future generations and lives for international travel, and so decides to buy carbon offsets for the flights and eat less meat to lower her carbon footprint. This is conscience—which is sometimes associated with the inviolability of an inner tribunal—because there isn’t a clear line for the moral demand, and no exhaustive justification of the course of action can be provided with respect to the moral demands at play. Nonetheless, the conscientious subject insists on the moral integrity of their decision, and expects recognition of that integrity from others. And again, not merely for specific decisions but for the course of a life, consider, for example, the conditions for Conscientious Objectors (COs) to military conscription in the United States: Beliefs which qualify a registrant for CO status may be religious in nature, but don’t have to be. Beliefs may be moral or ethical; however, a man’s reasons for not wanting to participate in a war must not be based on politics, expediency, or self-interest. In general, the man’s lifestyle prior to making his claim must reflect his current claims.2 But not everyone who applies is granted CO status, and not every conscientious agent is recognized as so by others. The form of justification offered by the conscientious agent is fundamentally in terms of general rules (here, moral or religious), but the judgment as to what counts as a form of life that respects those rules as the kind of person one is remains irreducibly individual. This leads to the introduction of our second character in the drama, the judgmental observer. In an important passage that goes to the heart of this new character, Hegel argues that we judge others as a form of self-justification: The others thus do not know whether this conscience is morally good or evil; or to an even greater degree, not only can they not know this, they must also take it to be evil. This is so because in the way that it is free from the determinateness of duty and from duty as existing in itself, so too are they. They themselves know how to dissemble about what it proposes to them. It is something expressing merely the self of an other, not their own self. Not only do they know themselves to be free from it, they must bring it to dissolution within their own consciousness, and, for the sake of preserving their own selves, they must nullify it by judging and explaining it. (¶649, emphasis added) Here, I think, is the moral-psychological heart of conscience as a relation between individuals. The integrity of each individual—which, qua wholeness or totality, is distinctive of individuality on Hegel’s conception of that term—is secured for it by its confidence that its way of life counts as a way of meeting the relevant moral demands. It isn’t in the Kantian position of meeting moral demands and then having its own particular welfare as an additional aspect of its life, on the side as it were; rather the whole shape of its life is a moral shape. The judgmental observer is, themself, a conscientious self—one whose own perspective is defined by a similar commitment—and the doubts that they have about the self that they judge are grounded in their self-awareness of the possibility of rationalization, overconfidence, and dissemblance. Precisely because the conscientious self cannot provide a fully principled defense of their choices—can a vegan eschew honey but ride on a bus with tires made from stearic acid?—the room to doubt the sincerity of conscience is omnipresent. Simply put, the life that is lived doesn’t wear its moral shape on its face. 146

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Hegel thinks that under these circumstances, the differences in perspectives between individuals become purely particular or bare differences. Conscience can see that the other is different from it, but that difference registers as a kind of pure difference (particularity) rather than as another individual manifestation of a shared (general or universal) perspective. Nonetheless, it judges the other precisely on the basis of a feature that the other shares with it and is thus general (the possibility of and temptation to various forms of insincerity). This is quite close to the Christian gospel admonition that one should take the log out of one’s own eye before judging the splinter in another (Matthew 7:3–5 and Luke 6:42). Conscience is self-aware, but though it can see the log in its own eye, it just can’t take it out. So instead it endorses the authority of conscience of the other, and accepts the assurances of the other’s conviction: The articulation of this assurance sublates the form of its particularity, and it therein recognizes the necessary universality of the self. In that it calls itself “conscience,” it calls itself pure self-knowledge and pure abstract will, i.e., it calls itself the universal knowledge and willing which recognizes others and which is the same as them, for they too are precisely this pure self-knowing and willing and for that reason, it is also recognized by them… Whoever therefore says that he is acting from conscience is speaking the truth, for his conscience is the knowing and willing self. However, it is essential that he should say this, for this self must at the same time be a universal self. It is not universal in the content of the activity, for this content is on account of its determinateness in itself indifferent. Rather, the universality lies in the form of the action, and it is this form which is to be posited as actual. It is the self which as such is actual in language, which declares itself to be the truth, and which precisely in doing so recognizes all other selves and is recognized by them. (¶654) Through this offering and acceptance of assurance, the conscientious self and the judgmental observer (who is also a conscientious self ) forgive each other. In conscience, forgiveness comes down to acknowledging the limitations of one’s own perspective, and granting to others who testify to their own conscientious character the same blamelessness that one appropriates for oneself. Importantly, this acknowledgment absolves both agents of their blinkered perspective—it is a form of forgiveness that despairs of the possibility of removing the limitations, and simply acknowledges as fair that everyone should be entitled to theirs, so long as it is sincerely and reflectively held. By a side path, this does get to a kind of universality, in the sense that both agents are treated the same by the forgiving conscience, which acknowledges that, structurally at least, it is in the same situation as the forgiven. But it cannot bring that universality to visibility as such (“It is not universal in the content of the activity, for this content is on account of its determinateness in itself indifferent”). The second example is one in which that universality is the primarily visible feature. If conscience is the individual that cannot see the universal but is stuck at the level of the particular (which is as far as it can get in its conception of the other), the beautiful soul is the universal that cannot see the individual but is stuck at the level of the particular (which is as far as it can get). It cannot see how the particular features of the world could become resources for the lofty projects demanded by universal norms, so it cannot see how one could actually give moral shape to a complete life—and thus it sees that world as a dirty and base competition from which it abstracts itself. Whereas the conscientious person came to a grudging respect for other perspectives as a condition for respecting their own, the beautiful soul essentially disowns its own unique perspective so as not to have to respect others’ perspective. Everything about its perspective is rendered in abstract terms, unrelated to specific facts or features of action or character. “Refined into this purity, consciousness exists in its poorest shape, and this poverty, which constitutes its sole possession, exists itself in the act of disappearing” (¶657). In Hegel, ‘purity’ is almost always pejorative; the beautiful 147

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soul identifies itself with the abstract universal, and for that very reason rejects in principle the sorts of integrated particularity that makes individuals whole. So where is the offense here to which forgiveness responds? We are given a clue by Hegel’s claim that the beautiful soul’s reaction to the world in relation to itself is the same as the reaction of the “unhappy consciousness,” only this time played out internally (¶658). The “unhappy consciousness” is an earlier episode in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and is generally taken to be an allegory for medieval Catholicism. The unhappy consciousness experiences the chasm between their own bodily functions and tenuous existence, on the one hand, and the eternal purity and divinity of God, on the other. Here, the beautiful soul experiences these mundane humiliations as offenses to its own purity, rather than registering its distance from a divine being. The beautiful soul lacks the force to empty itself, that is, lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to suffer the burden of being. It lives with the anxiety that it will stain the glory of its inwardness by means of action and existence. Thus, to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and it steadfastly perseveres in its obstinate powerlessness to renounce its own self, a self which has been intensified to the final point of abstraction. (¶658) As this passage makes clear, the action of the beautiful soul is both a response to the offense taken to the world and yet also an action within the world—a fleeing. This is the key to understanding how the beautiful soul can give offense (particularly to Hegel himself, who cannot hide his distaste). As other people see the beautiful soul, it is not an abstract universal but rather a selfish individual who absolves themselves from the burden of contributing to the general good: That is, the significance of this universality and duty themselves is that of the determinate individuality who exempts himself from the universal and for whom pure duty is merely the universality which has made its appearance on the surface and which has turned outwards. Duty is only a matter of words and counts as a being for an other (¶659) Whereas the conscientious standpoint was able to fill the concept of duty with its own determinate nature and thus to at least find its way to act in concert with others in specific ways, the beautiful soul refuses that determinacy and projects it onto others, who are then left to do the social work required to realize the good. We have, I think, all been involved in groups with personalities of this sort, for whom the problematic features of the system or institution within which the group operates are so distasteful to them that they limit their group contributions to complaints about the constraints under which it operates (“It stays within the universality of thought, conducts itself as a consciousness that apprehends, and its first act is merely that of judgment” (¶664)). Others in the group actually deal with the constraints and try to do what good they can under them. But Hegel’s distaste for such personalities aside, they are often accurate in pointing out the problematic nature of the constraints and the way in which continued operation under them serves a legitimizing function. Now we have a picture of the personalities involved and the situation in which offense is given and so we must ask, what does forgiveness look like in the case of the beautiful soul? Here, it must be noted that Hegel sees only the most minimal form of forgiveness as possible: Inasmuch as the self-certain spirit as a beautiful soul does not now possess the strength to empty itself of the self-knowledge which it keeps to itself in itself, it cannot achieve a parity

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with the consciousness it has repulsed, and thus it cannot achieve the intuited unity of itself in an other, and it cannot attain existence. Hence, the parity comes about merely negatively, as a spirit-less being. The beautiful soul, which lacks all actuality, which is caught in the contradiction between its pure self and its necessity to empty itself into existence and to convert itself into actuality, exists in the immediacy of this opposition to which it so tenaciously clings – in an immediacy which is alone the mediating term and the reconciliation of an opposition which has been intensified up to the point of its pure abstraction, and which is itself pure being or empty nothingness – and thus, as the consciousness of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, it becomes unhinged to the point of madness, and it melts into a yearning tubercular consumption. It thereby in fact gives up its grim adherence to its being-for-itself, but it only manages to engender merely the spiritless unity of being. (¶668) Forgiveness (“parity”) is hard to come by here because the beautiful soul cannot see others as individuals, but only as tools of the system. From its abstractly universal perspective, others show up merely as particulars. In the social work situation that is the background here, the beautiful soul sees others as cogs in a machine rather than as contributors to a social enterprise. Other agents are rendered more as things—as precisely characterized by the thinghood from which the beautiful soul wants to distance itself (¶661). Thus, the possibility of substantial forgiveness by the beautiful soul of the others by whom it is offended seems foreclosed: “it cannot achieve a parity with the consciousness it has repulsed, and thus cannot achieve the intuited unity of itself in another.” Instead, we get two different forms of reaction to the situation, neither of which immediately appears to be forgiveness in its paradigmatic form. The first is a sort of exhausted resignation (it “gives up its grim adherence to its being-for-itself, but it only manages to engender merely the spiritless unity of being” (¶668)), and the second is through realizing that its own judgment of the world is an act, and therefore something also subject to judgment and evaluation, which therefore makes it part of the social fabric (¶664). Psychologically, the first is a sort of preparatory phase for the second. In the first, the beautiful soul takes the step of abandoning its sense of its own superiority and distinctiveness, even though that amounts to a resignation to the evils of the world and the base parity that it is no better than the hypocritical agents in the system that it despises. In the second, it really does start to recognize the validity of the other character in the drama—namely the other members of the group—and their perception of the beautiful soul’s withdrawal as a refusal to put their shoulder to the wheel. This is, of course, still a limit case of forgiveness—it doesn’t achieve the parity which the conscientious self achieves—but it is a limit case because it is a developmental case. What I mean by that is that this form of forgiveness essentially involves a change in the nature of the self which forgives. The beautiful soul is an internally untenable position to occupy; it is destined to be abandoned (and thus is often associated with adolescence). This brings us to the third form of forgiveness, where the term (Verzeihung) is most explicitly thematized. We already saw this dynamic at the beginning of this section in the discussion of Brandom’s view—and though it is important not to overgeneralize this dynamic, it is also important to recognize its richness.3 It begins as a kind of confrontation of the two different personalities that we have already seen, the conscientious person and the beautiful soul. (A brief remark: the drama is construed in this way—with independent characters—to maximize the visibility of the types of forgiveness rather than to insist that these are different types of persons. We can all inhabit each of these perspectives, both on others and on ourselves, even if we might predominantly gravitate towards one.) These two characters in our drama of forgiveness confront each other by presenting two different ways in which their deeds potentially don’t match their words:

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In both of them, the aspect of actuality is distinct from that of speech; in one of them, the distinction is made through the self-interested ends of action, and in the other, it is made through the lack of action per se (¶664) But then out of these by-now familiar characters we get a completely new dynamic: The acting consciousness [formerly conscience] articulates its determinate activity as duty, and the judgmental consciousness [formerly the beautiful soul] cannot deny it this, for duty itself is the form capable of all content, that is, the form without content – which is to say, it is concrete action which is in itself diverse in its many-sidedness. It possesses both the universal aspect, which is the aspect taken as duty and which equally exists in it, as well as the particular aspect, which constitutes the individual’s contribution and interest. Now, the judgmental consciousness stops short neither at the former aspect of duty nor the agent’s knowledge that this is to be his duty, that is, that this is to be the condition and the status of his actuality. Rather, it latches onto the other aspect, spins the action off into the inward realm, and explains the action in terms of an intention and a self-serving motive which is different from the action itself. As every action is capable of being taken in respect to its dutifulness, so too can every action be taken from the point of view of particularity [Betrachtung der Besonderheit], for as an action it is the actuality of an individual. (¶665) In this process, the judgmental consciousness of the beautiful soul reveals that it is not (or is no longer) the perspective of universality, judging the world according to standards that are simply too high for anything in the world to live up to, but rather the particular perspective, which finds in every action only that which is specific and idiosyncratic, i.e., which has a different nature than duty itself. Hegel then argues that this reveals as much about the judgmental consciousness as about the acting consciousness: No action can escape being judged in such a way, since duty for duty’s sake, this pure purpose, is the non-actual. It has its actuality in what individuality does, and as a result, the action has the aspect of particularity in itself. – No man is a hero to his valet, but not because that man is not a hero, but rather because the latter is – a valet, a person with whom the hero deals not as a hero but as someone who eats, drinks, gets dressed, that is, the valet generally deals with him in the individuality of his needs and views. (¶665) It is very important here to see that the two perspectives involved in the situation are the individual and the particular, and not the universal and the particular. What we have here is a dispute between the individual and particular perspectives about whether the universal can be brought into view in the individual’s action. The individual says that it can—that in the specific deed done, an action with a morally satisfactory shape can be made out. The particular says that it can’t—that all deeds reduce to the selfish drives of the individual, whether for fame or something else. But the point Hegel is making here is the base hypocrisy of the particular perspective, which is still clothed in the mantle of universality and presents itself as upholding these high standards for human action, when in fact all it could ever bring into view are particular drives and desires, and thus the prophecy of failure to meet those universal standards is self-fulfilling. 150

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The individual’s acting consciousness comes to perceive this hypocrisy and has a ‘we’re not so different, you and I’ moment with the judgmental consciousness: In thereby bringing itself to parity with the agent about whom it is so judgmental, the judgmental consciousness is thus recognized by that agent to be the same as himself. The latter agent not only finds that he has been taken by the judgmental consciousness to be somebody alien and not the same as himself; he finds to an even greater degree that the judgmental consciousness, in terms of the way that consciousness is constituted, is the same as himself. As he intuits this parity and gives articulation to it, he confesses this to the other, and he equally expects that the other, who has in fact put himself into parity with him, will reciprocate his speech and in his own words will articulate their parity so that recognitive existence will make its appearance. (¶666) Of course, in Hegel’s allegory, the hard-hearted and stiff-necked judgmental consciousness at first refuses to acknowledge this similarity, but eventually they come around. And when they do so there is a fullness of forgiveness that, as Brandom rightly points out, is community-instituting: The breaking of the hard heart and its elevation to universality is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness that confessed. The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable. The deed is taken back by spirit into itself… (¶669) I think it is important to point out precisely why forgiveness has this powerful function of instituting (and repairing) communities: because it reveals the blind spots of both perspectives involved, it reveals the dependence of each on the other (see Yeomans 2019b). In that very move it mitigates the superiority of the judging character with respect to the acting character, and shows each of the characters to need each other to achieve a full understanding of the situation. On Hegel’s view, the paradigmatic form of forgiveness is one in which both an action and a judgment about that action are recognized by both the agent and the judger as having the same basic kind of deficiency. Forgiveness is essentially mutual rather than unilateral. This is just what we should expect from a view on which the inevitability of offense is logical, of course. On a standard (cultural) view, the perpetrator of moral wrong stands out from the community as someone susceptible to judgment and then perhaps also deserving of or at least benefitting from forgiveness. Sometimes also that act of forgiveness is seen as returning the perpetrator to the community and re-establishing relationships—a view suggested also by Hegel’s language that the “wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind.” But it is crucial to recognize that, on Hegel’s view, both the perpetrator and accuser stand out from the community and are in similarly precarious positions with respect to it. Forgiveness makes both agents’ situation less tenuous. Before moving on to social structure I want briefly to take up another important interpretation of Hegel’s theory of forgiveness, that of Allen Speight (Speight 2001). This returns us to a monistic interpretation of forgiveness (as in Brandom), according to which the one form of forgiveness is that concerning the universal and the particular. For Speight, the problem is initially presented as a problem of the different aspects of expression involved in the performance of action. Action requires both a theatrical seeming that makes the action out to be more than it is, and a retrospective interpretation that reduces the action to its particular nature. The two necessary elements pull in opposite directions, and on Speight’s account, the only hope is the transition to an impersonal and impartial perspective which can judge the balance fairly. That theatrical seeming always 151

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requests that the action be acknowledged to have a wider or more general significance than can initially be substantiated, so it has an essentially universal aspect. And retrospectivity allows for the pinpointing of the specific nature of the action, and thus its particularity. Thus, both Brandom and Speight see forgiveness in the Phenomenology primarily as a matter of the conflict between the universal (Speight: theatricality) and the particular (Speight: retrospectivity). Forgiveness then comes in as the individual dimension. Again, as with monist views in general, this strikes me as right as far as it goes; and Speight’s addition of a temporal dimension as well between a forward-looking universal theatricality and a backward-looking particular retrospectivity is an important insight. In many cases of the circumstances of forgiveness, the accuser will interpret their intentions by reference to what actually did occur in the circumstances. In contrast, the accused will claim that hindsight is 20/20, circumstances conspired against them, and in fact they had intended something much grander and rather different. But I want to push back against a further feature of Speight’s view, which is the idea that Hegel’s conception of forgiveness involves a move to an impersonal perspective. On Hegel’s view there are only these three perspectives that I have mapped out, and the impersonal (universal) perspective was one of the gravest offenders. This notion of an impersonal perspective is parallel to the notion that absolute knowledge requires a view from nowhere or that the absolute idea requires a transcendence of all difference. As with respect to the Logic, it is important to retain perspective, and in the case of forgiveness, personal perspective.

3.  The Social Structure of Offense and Forgiveness As we have already seen, part of Hegel’s understanding of the circumstances of forgiveness concerns the personae who can give and receive offense, and thus give and receive forgiveness (the characters in our three dramas so far). This presents a rather different picture than our usual understanding, in which the persons involved are different only as particulars and the wrong involved is primarily moral. In Hegel’s understanding, the persons are involved primarily as playing certain rather consistent roles, which give and receive offense in ways that resist easy collection under the term ‘moral.’ In the discussion so far, we have focused on paradigmatic interpersonal examples of such personae and the way that they are connected to the three basic logical perspectives (universality, particularity, and individuality). His Phenomenology, which we have been discussing so far, presents a very general argument for the necessarily social and historical nature of all self-consciousness, a conception that Hegel calls ‘spirit [Geist]’ and which includes these three personae. But Hegel also took these personae to be embodied in what we might call ideal types of actors in the social structure of early nineteenth century Europe. These ideal types we get in Hegel’s philosophy of ‘objective spirit,’ particularly in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (G. W. F. Hegel 1821). (‘Objective spirit’ is ‘objective’ in being historically local and specific—in this case, spirit as it manifests itself in the specific conditions of continental Europe after the Napoleonic wars.) In this section, I want briefly to discuss the way that Hegel saw that social structure unfolding in his own historical context, and the sense in which it encapsulates a kind of political forgiveness. With any such theory, there is a question as to the nature and number of such personae. When we come to objective spirit, Hegel derives the personae from the three logical elements we have just been considering—universality, particularity, and individuality—by a somewhat indirect route. First, he argues that the free will itself is something that has such a conceptual structure, and thus that there must be universal, particular, and individual aspects to it. Second, he argues that these aspects are really projects in their own right. Just as the will itself is the project of translating something subjective (e.g., an intention) into something objective (e.g., a movement), each of its aspects is a sub-project of the same sort. Though Hegel himself never comes to a consistent terminology here, I have come to call these projects self-appropriation, self-determination, and 152

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self-governance.4 Self-appropriation is the universal sub-project of the will—I take possession of myself as understanding my actions as appropriate or inappropriate to a person of a certain type (parent, nurse, Muslim, etc.). Self-determination is the particular sub-project of the will—I act by specifying my wants and needs and picking out particular objects or activities which satisfy them. And self-governance is the individual sub-project of the will—we aim to be effective in the world not only by organizing our own motivations and tending to its structure, but even more by finding our place in the causal nexus of the world where we can produce the greatest consequences. But this doesn’t yet get us to the personae, because we are all involved in all three of these projects continually. What gets us to the personae is a dose of something for which Hegel is not generally known—humility about human capabilities. Specifically, Hegel thinks that doing three things at once is hard, and so we almost always end up doing one primarily or best, and then the others come along for the ride. This is the third step: we have three basically different ways of being an agent, corresponding to which of the three we prioritize. Now, Hegel has extensive descriptions of these three ways in the Morality section of his Philosophy of Right, and extensive discussions of the moral psychology involved in each in his corresponding lectures, but we will leave most of that aside. The important thing for us is that the paradigmatic offenses to which forgiveness responds arise out of the conflicts between people who are agents in different ways—these are our personae. We will get back to the indirect route shortly, but I want first to emphasize a feature of these circumstances that is crucial for the possibility and significance of forgiveness. Notice that what distinguishes these personae, on Hegel’s account, is not an exclusive difference in values or a radically different set of goals. Rather, what distinguishes them is a different emphasis on one of the three sub-projects in which they are all nonetheless involved, and thus a different balance of priorities. Thus, the offense we give depends as much on what we share as on where we differ—or, put another way, it is what we share that makes a mere difference of opinion as to the status of an action into an offense that requires forgiveness. And what we do when we forgive is recognize that what someone else thought was most important is also something that we take to be important, even if less so. This is another, perhaps less metaphorical, way of putting the point made above with respect to the Phenomenology as the point that the accused and the accuser come to understand that the other had in view an aspect of the action to which they were blind. We might have been blind to the significance of that aspect entirely, or we might just have been blind to the fact that we did, in fact, recognize that significance but hadn’t brought it fully into the context of our judgment of the action. In any event, this is something that can, in principle, be done unilaterally, even if it depends on an essentially mutual structure (the interdependence of perspectives) and thus its paradigmatic form is mutual. Back to the route to politics: the fourth step is sociological: Hegel tried to identify different groups in the society in which he lived which, by and large, embodied one of these forms of agency. This he expressed using the standard legal and sociological device of the time, namely a system of estates (Stände) (Yeomans 2017). The agricultural estate he interpreted as prioritizing the particular project of self-determination, the estate of trade and industry as prioritizing the universal project of self-appropriation, and the public estate (civil servants, doctors, priests, etc.) as prioritizing the individual project of self-governance. Here is where the temporal dimension brought into relief by Speight (and, to a lesser degree, Brandom) becomes a fundamentally historical dimension. The agricultural estate’s particular project is retrospective—it is conservative in the sense of wanting to hold on to the specific meanings produced by the past. The estate of trade and industry is prospective—it builds towards a future civil society of free markets and open political participation. And the public estate is concurrent—it attempts in the present to maintain and reform the structures that allow for the transition from the past to the future. Of course, Hegel’s society is not our own. Though the urban/rural divide has recently made a political comeback, there is no question of taking up Hegel’s estates structure. But it is far from 153

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clear that our sociological groupings—race, class, gender, generation, immigration status, etc.— do not point in the direction of the kinds of fundamental differences in orientation that Hegel saw as generating the inevitability of offense and the need for forgiveness. The notion that forgiveness responds not primarily to contingent and individual offenses but to deep differences in perspective and the corresponding notion that forgiveness is mutual at heart retain their value as suggestions for social life.5

Notes 1 Standard reference to Hegel’s Phenomenology is to paragraph number, which is reproduced in all of the English translations. All references to Hegel in this section are to the Phenomenology. 2 US Selective Service Website, https://www.sss.gov/conscientious-objectors/. Accessed September 8, 2020. 3 Logically speaking, if conscience is the individual that cannot see the universal but is stuck at the level of the particular (which is as far as it can get in its conception of the other), and the beautiful soul is the universal that cannot see the individual but is stuck at the level of the particular (which is as far as it can get), then the moral valet is the particular that cannot see the universal but is stuck at the level of the individual (which is as far as it can get). So it sees the universal only as one particular kind of motivation among others, and one that is always trumped by the good of the individual—as a result the agent so judged always looks selfish. 4 In earlier work I referred to these as self-appropriation, specification of content, and effectiveness (Yeomans 2015). 5 I am heavily indebted to Glen Pettigrove for many improvements and suggestions.

References Brandom, Robert. 2019. A Spirit of Trust, Harvard UP. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1807. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Translation edition. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1821. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood and Hugh Barr Nisbet. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Paul M., and Brandon Warmke. 2017. “Forgiveness.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2017. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/forgiveness/. Speight, Allen. 2001. Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1982. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeomans, Christopher. 2015. The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel’s Pluralistic Philosophy of Action. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. “Perspectives without Privileges: The Estates in Hegel’s Political Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3): 469–90. ———. 2019a. “Perspective and Logical Pluralism in Hegel.” Hegel Bulletin 40 (1): 29–50. ———. 2019b. “Hegel’s Pluralism as a Comedy of Action.” Hegel Bulletin 40 (3): 357–73.

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12 KIERKEGAARD ON FORGIVENESS John Lippitt

1.  Kierkegaard’s Approach to Forgiveness Despite not being the central topic of any of his major works, forgiveness is a recurring theme in the writings of the nineteenth century Danish philosopher and Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55). Kierkegaard’s approach to forgiveness has perhaps three most distinctive features. First, the primary lens through which Kierkegaard views forgiveness is the divine forgiveness of sins, and his view of interpersonal forgiveness is intimately related to his view of God’s forgiveness of us. The centrality of divine forgiveness to his worldview has led some to claim that his is a purely theological discussion, with no relevance to discussions of interpersonal forgiveness. But this view is, I believe, profoundly mistaken. Relevant here is that there are two distinct Danish terms for forgiveness used in Kierkegaard’s work. Of the two, Forladelse has a far more liturgical resonance than Tilgivelse. But Kierkegaard uses Tilgivelse – which has a much broader usage in terms of relations between humans – approximately twice as often as Forladelse. This is significant in that it suggests that despite the centrality to his discussion of God’s forgiveness of sins, Kierkegaard is also concerned about interpersonal forgiveness. Kierkegaard, in this sense a good Lutheran, takes it that divine forgiveness is something that cannot be earned (Kierkegaard 1849–51: 155),1 and this has an important implication for his stance on the question of whether interpersonal forgiveness should be conditional or unconditional. He favours, I shall claim, a particular kind of unconditional forgiveness. A second distinctive feature of Kierkegaard’s approach is that whereas philosophical discussion of forgiveness has focused more on the challenges and difficulties of forgiving, Kierkegaard stresses at least as much the difficulties of accepting forgiveness (McDonald, undated). In its interpersonal mode, one reason for this difficulty is that the standing to forgive is something that can be wielded in pride or conceit (Kierkegaard 1845: 14–15) – and who would want to be on the receiving end of that? To be fully effective, forgiveness requires in the recipient a consciousness of being in the wrong (what Kierkegaard labels “sin-consciousness”), and further challenges them to respond to the offer of forgiveness in gratitude; to commit to moral transformation; and to act upon that commitment. This is a tough ask for prideful creatures like us. Yet properly handled, Kierkegaard claims, forgiveness is a wonderful gift, more valuable to the one who needs it than all the riches of Croesus (Kierkegaard 1845: 13). But – and here is the third distinctive point – forgiveness must be offered in love, for only love has “sufficient dexterity” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 295) to negotiate these difficulties. As we shall also see, Kierkegaard’s view of forgiveness is rooted in his discussion of love, such that we shall not understand his contribution unless we grasp that for Kierkegaard, DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-16

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forgiveness is a work of love.2 As will emerge from the discussion below, we could say that Kierkegaard is interested in what it means to be a forgiving person as one significant aspect of what it means to be a loving person. As noted, unlike such notions as anxiety or despair, there is no single major Kierkegaardian text in which forgiveness is the central topic. However, the topic recurs in a variety of texts, the most substantial discussions being found in The Sickness Unto Death and the so-called “discourse literature”: religious, often explicitly Christian, writings published under Kierkegaard’s own name (as opposed to those works, including many of his most famous, that were published under a series of pseudonyms). Perhaps the most important of all the discussions in the discourse literature are to be found in Works of Love and in several discourses on the “sinful woman” featured in the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel, who “loved much” because she had been “forgiven much”. Kierkegaard’s discussions of forgiveness make several interrelated claims. First, to the tortured soul, it is apparently impossible that our sins can be forgiven. And yet – Christianity insists – it is true. Faith in the forgiveness of sins – “the decisive crisis whereby a human being becomes spirit”; becomes “another person” (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 67)3 – is that which provides the tortured soul with rest. Second, only God can forgive sin, and so sin – and its forgiveness – is the “chasmal qualitative abyss” (Kierkegaard 1849: 122) between God and humanity. However, there is an important distinction to be made here between the ontological condition of sin and individual “sins” or moral wrongs. The claim that only God can forgive sin does not imply that we cannot forgive moral wrongs (individual “sins”) done to us by another. Human love is unable to forgive wrongdoers’ ontological condition of sinfulness, but that does not mean that it cannot forgive individual people for their wrongful acts.4 Kierkegaard’s recognition of this distinction is suggested by the following journal entry: To forgive sins is divine not only in the sense that no one is able to do it except God, but it is also divine in another sense so that we must say that no one can do it without God. (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 1224, my emphases) Third, despair of the forgiveness of sins – the refusal to accept that one’s sins can be forgiven – is itself a sin (Kierkegaard 1849: 113–24), which Kierkegaard labels “offense”. (Compare here Works of Love’s Conclusion, in which forgiveness is a major topic, and where Kierkegaard claims that the hard-hearted person experiences God’s “leniency” as “rigorousness”, because such a person finds being judged a more palatable prospect than salvation or being forgiven (Kierkegaard 1847b: 377– 8).5) However, this can be transcended in faith, “faith” and “offense” being key contrast terms in Kierkegaard’s terminology. William McDonald (undated) has pointed out that Kierkegaard’s Discourses at the Communion on Fridays provides a series of New Testament case studies on how the faithful accept forgiveness. Fourth, the consciousness of the forgiveness of sins lightens a burden that would otherwise be unbearably heavy. Hence, the following journal remark: A man rests in the forgiveness of sins when the thought of God does not remind him of the sin but that it is forgiven, when the past is not a memory of how much he trespassed but of how much he has been forgiven. (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 1209) These discussions of the forgiveness of sins have important implications for, fifth, interpersonal forgiveness (where a central notion in Works of Love, the “like for like”, becomes significant) and, sixth, self-forgiveness.6 The key question here is: what does God’s forgiveness of my sin imply for my forgiveness of others; for interpersonal forgiveness? At one point, Kierkegaard claims that a failure to see that 156

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because I have been forgiven, I must forgive, is “double-mindedness” (Kierkegaard 1847a: 70–1). But there is some unclarity here, in claims such as that, in the Conclusion to Works of Love, “the forgiveness that you give is the forgiveness that you receive … God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 380). What does the “as” mean? One reading is a stark “or else”: forgive others, or else God will not forgive you. This makes God’s forgiveness of me dependent upon my forgiveness of others. There are some Biblical passages that seem to support this (e.g. Matthew 6: 14–15). But such a reading is at odds with what Kierkegaard claims elsewhere. For instance, in one of the Friday communion discourses, he says: You cannot meet [Christ, the Savior] before the Communion table as a co-worker as you indeed can meet God in your work as a co-worker. You cannot be Christ’s co-worker in connection with the reconciliation [i.e. the Atonement of Christ], not in the remotest way. You are totally in debt; he is totally the satisfaction. (Kierkegaard 1848: 299, my emphasis) I propose that a better option than the “or else” reading is revealed by considering a key figure in Kierkegaard’s reflections on forgiveness: the “sinful woman” of Luke 7: 36–50. A careful analysis of the several discourses in which Kierkegaard discusses this woman7 yields the conclusion that we are to forgive others not in order to be forgiven by God, but out of gratitude for having been forgiven by God.8 On this view, the woman’s sins are not forgiven because she loved much, but her great love proceeds from; demonstrates that she has been forgiven much. However, perhaps this is not an either/or. The self-righteousness exhibited by the Pharisee Simon in this passage, with whom the woman is contrasted, can close one off from being forgiving – but also from one’s own need for forgiveness and the grace that forgiveness brings.9 When I forgive others, the process of doing so puts me in a position whereby I can better see my own need to be forgiven – and to accept the grace which offers this forgiveness. So perhaps we have two aspects of the same process. Realising that I have been forgiven by God, part of the way in which my gratitude is expressed is in forgiving others. Yet the process of doing so also opens me up to accepting at a deeper level my own need for forgiveness. Certainly, Kierkegaard’s main concern in the Works of Love passage quoted earlier in the present paragraph is to suggest that forgiveness is not a gift to be hoarded for oneself, as if I could accept God’s forgiveness of me while refusing to forgive those who have wronged me (Kierkegaard 1847b: 380). Shortly afterwards, he glosses such an attitude in terms of wanting to make God hard-hearted, so that he too would not forgive the perpetrator – but then, he points out, how could such a God forgive you (Kierkegaard 1847b: 384)? This is one way in which we can see Kierkegaard as thinking about forgiveness in terms of being a forgiving person, and the value of considering the character trait or virtue of “forgivingness”10 in the context of other qualities of character. Some of these are explored in his “discourse literature” and chief amongst them, I’ll go on to suggest below, are generosity of spirit, humility, and hope. In terms of the contemporary distinction between conditional and unconditional forgiveness, I see Kierkegaard as advancing a particular kind of unconditional forgiveness. However, to understand what I take to be his view, it is necessary to distinguish between two varieties of such forgiveness. Some commentators would make of Kierkegaard a kind of proto-Derrida on forgiveness, reading unconditional forgiveness in its Derridean variety.11 That is, the term “forgiveness” should only be used to forgive the “unforgivable”, such that it is only “true” forgiveness if one forgives “both the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repentance or promise” (Derrida 2001: 39). This is not the place for a critique of Derrida on forgiveness,12 but suffice it to say that his approach sets a needlessly 157

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high bar for forgiveness to count as “unconditional”. I see no reason to saddle Kierkegaard with such a view. Rather, although the Dane’s view is clearly unconditional in the sense that forgiveness can be offered pre-emptively, without prior demands on the wrongdoer, hope plays a key role in Kierkegaardian forgiveness, very much including hope for the repentance of the wrongdoer and – in most cases – hope for reconciliation. But such repentance is not held out as a condition that must be met before forgiveness can be offered. Love’s hopefulness is a key theme of “Love abides”, one of several key deliberations in Works of Love that pertain to forgiveness and reconciliation.13 But let us set this in a broader context. We noted above that a distinctive, albeit not unique, aspect of Kierkegaard’s approach to forgiveness is that he treats it in the context of a discussion of love: specifically, what he calls “Christian” or agapic love. One cannot really understand his discussion of forgiveness other than through the lens of such love, and its connection with certain other virtues or spiritual qualities. Perhaps the key question that Kierkegaard poses to discussions of forgiveness is the following: what difference might it make to our view of interpersonal forgiveness if we were to seek to understand it as a “work of love”? One of the most famous claims of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is the idea that love presupposes love in the person loved (Kierkegaard 1847b: 216). In this way, love seeks to draw out the good in the person loved, or to “love forth” [opelsker] love, simultaneously “building up” love in the person loved (Kierkegaard 1847b: 216–7). This requires both a generosity of spirit and a willingness to take a risk in hope. Love is said to be a “lenient interpreter” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 294) of situations and people. But Kierkegaard’s discussion here includes some confusing terminology, with images of eyes “shut” to sin, sin being “taken away”, and of “blotting out”, “hiding”, and “forgetting” sins (see, e.g., Kierkegaard 1847b: 295). The question of primary interest to us here is: what does forgiveness do to our sins or wrongs? It is here that the terminology is confusing. But the key and most fruitful image, I suggest, is “hiding”. Kierkegaard wrote four different discourses on the biblical passage that “Love hides a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4: 8).14 In these discussions, he refers to the biblical images of both God hiding sin behind his back (Isaiah 38: 17) and Christ’s love hiding our sins in much the same way that a mother hen hides her chicks from harm under her wing (Kierkegaard 1849–51: 185–6). “Hiding” seems preferable to “blotting out” because the latter – like “wiping the slate clean” – may be taken to mean that forgiveness is an action whereby the wrong just disappears (compare Vladimir Jankélévich, for whom “[t]he obstacle called the misdeed vanishes as if by magic”, so that “forgiveness makes a tabula rasa of the past” ( Jankélévich 2005: 153)). In fact, Kierkegaard describes a related idea – having one’s transgressions forgotten – as the attitude of a “light-minded” person, whom he contrasts with a person of faith (Kierkegaard 1847a: 247). The crucial notion that “hiding” retains is the idea that the wrong is in some sense still there, at least in the sense that its consequences remain, such that the slate is not literally “wiped clean”. As Kierkegaard puts it, “not to discover what still must be there, insofar as it still must be discovered – that is hiding” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 282; cf. Kierkegaard 1847a: 181) and “one is not ignorant of what is forgotten … what one has forgotten, one has known” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 295–6).15 Kierkegaard clarifies his view on this in an important journal entry: Forgiveness of sins cannot be such that God by a single stroke, as it were, erases all guilt [Skyld], abrogates all its consequences. Such a craving is only a worldly desire which does not really know what guilt is. It is only the guilt which is forgiven; more than this the forgiveness of sins is not. It does not mean to become another person in more fortunate circumstances, but it does mean to become another person in the reassuring consciousness that the guilt is forgiven even if the consequences of guilt remain. (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 1205, my emphasis) 158

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The central idea, then, is not that forgiveness literally wipes the slate clean, but that in love, forgiveness hides our “sins” (moral wrongs) in a manner analogous to the way Christ’s love is said to hide them: as a mother hen hides her chicks under her wing. The complication here is of course that for the Christian, Christ’s atoning death does in a sense “wipe out” sins. (Kierkegaard describes it as the ultimate secure hiding place (Kierkegaard 1849–51: 186–7).) Ultimately it is divine love, not ours, that “blots out” sin. But even if our dependence on God is total, there is still something for us to do, given our own deep psychological need to be forgiven by each other (cf. Kierkegaard 1847b: 295–6). And while this is not the place for a discussion of Kierkegaard’s soteriology, the fact that as a Christian Kierkegaard still insists that “the consequences of guilt remain” – such that even divine love and Christ’s Atonement don’t entirely wipe the slate clean – is all the more interesting. One way in which the wrong is still there is highlighted by the following journal entry quoted earlier: A man rests in the forgiveness of sins when the thought of God does not remind him of the sin but that it is forgiven, when the past is not a memory of how much he trespassed but of how much he has been forgiven. (Kierkegaard 1967–78: 1209) This is one reason why “forgetting in forgiveness” is not the same as forgetting simpliciter. In general, the picture is that the eyes and ears of the person with a loving heart lack the propensity to seek out and discover faults in others.16 However, on the interpersonal level, one might still think that there is some intrinsic problem here. If love is “hiding” sins, is love not being wilfully and culpably blind to the facts? To what extent can this worry be addressed?

2.  The Look of Love There are several different strands to an answer here. To begin with, Kierkegaard makes clear that the hiding is of what love “cannot avoid hearing or seeing” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 289). It does this in three ways: by silence (such as avoiding the spreading of rumour and gossip, which have a corrupting effect on both the gossip-monger and his audience (Kierkegaard 1847b: 289–90)), by looking for a “mitigating explanation” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 289, 291–4), and by forgiveness (Kierkegaard 1847b: 294–5). The distinction between the second and third of these suggests Kierkegaard’s endorsement of the common distinction between forgiving on the one hand and condoning, excusing, or justifying on the other. So the very fact that forgiveness is in play shows that there is something that has already been “seen” or “heard”, and that no “mitigating explanation” is available – in other words, that we are in the territory of what “cannot be denied to be sin” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 294) or culpable wrongdoing. So this is not wilful blindness per se. What then are we to make of the talk of hiding, seeing with “closed eyes”, and the like? In the context of forgiveness, the gist, I suggest, is that the eyes are “closed” to defects and flaws in the sense that we do not reduce the person in question to those defects, and see them only through that lens (which talk of “wrongdoers” and “offenders” risks doing). The wrong is recognised (cf. “the consequences of guilt remain”), but is not dwelt upon in the sense that one’s attention is not focussed on it. The risk that this avoids is that like the jaundiced eye, which sees only yellow, the unloving eye sees only evil (give it a finger, Kierkegaard claims, and evil will take the whole hand (Kierkegaard 1847b: 286)). One aspect of addressing this involves extending to the neighbour – a group that, for the follower of Jesus, of course, should be taken to include our enemies – the kind of generosity of spirit we might normally extend only to our nearest and dearest, such as our romantic beloveds and friends (what Kierkegaard calls our “preferential” loves). Kierkegaard illustrates such generosity when he says that love “does not hear at all words said in haste”, and “does not understand 159

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the long angry insulting verbal assault” because it is waiting for “one more word that will give it meaning” (Kierkegaard 1843–44: 60–1). But another aspect is the idea that love can sometimes see what detachment cannot. On occasion, an attitude of love – seeing as the loving person sees – is the only way of revealing value. Sometimes, to be sure, this will be self-deceptive (such as in the case of the parent who discerns a talent in their child that simply isn’t there). But sometimes it can be the only way to recognise a value to be nourished and encouraged (the caring teacher who sees some latent talent in the child whose unfortunate background means that it has never been noticed before). In other words, love has epistemic standards of its own – and (as the second example above suggests) it would be wrong to assume that these standards are necessarily less reliable than those of detached neutrality.17 A possible criticism of Kierkegaard is that he sometimes seems to overlook how negative judgment of wrongdoing may serve an important expressive function, such as showing social disapproval of wrongs. But this can be done in a manner consistent with love. For instance, in the case of forgiving egregious wrongs, the sort of neighbour-love demonstrated by someone such as Sister Helen Prejean in her memoir Dead Man Walking towards the Death Row inmates – murderers and rapists – to whom she acted as a spiritual counsellor seems to demonstrate a particular version of this. Prejean manifests an openness to seeing the good in them that precedes the recognition of any specific good qualities.18 This, I suggest, is an illustration of Kierkegaard’s claim that a person’s “inner being determines what he discovers and what he hides” (Kierkegaard 1843–44: 60), and perhaps of his idea that agapic love, far from being understood as some sort of generic benevolence or good-will towards the other, requires paying attention to the particular in the other person, as a way of paying due respect to the idea that God “gives in such a way that the receiver acquires distinctiveness” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 271). In the case of her relation to at least one inmate, Elmo Patrick Sonnier, Prejean’s loving attention does indeed “love forth love”, the formerly angry and embittered prisoner coming before his execution to show apparently genuine repentance and gratitude to those who have tried to help him (Prejean; his lawyer; and the chef who prepares him his final meal), and to ask forgiveness from the father of one of his victims. In expressing his gratitude to Prejean, he is reported as saying “It’s a shame a man has to come to prison to find love” (Prejean 1996: 105). He would have been unlikely to have said this if Prejean’s attitude had been merely a manifestation of a generic good-will. What we see here is love being the catalyst that encourages a person to become a better version of himself (love “loving forth” love).19 This is an important aspect of “love’s vision”. Rather than condoning or excusing, it expresses a – sometimes successful – hope in the power of love to transform.20 This is expressed in general terms in the idea that the loving eye “has the power to love forth the good in the impure” (Kierkegaard 1843–44: 61), which it does by focusing on the pure. But a key illustration of this is found in Kierkegaard’s discussion of the resurrected Christ’s attitude to Peter’s betrayal of him: Christ’s love for Peter was boundless in this way: in loving Peter he accomplished loving the person one sees. He did not say, “Peter must first change and become another person before I can love him again”. No, he said exactly the opposite, “Peter is Peter, and I love him. My love, if anything, will help him to become another person”. Therefore he did not break off the friendship in order perhaps to renew it if Peter would have become another person; no, he preserved the friendship unchanged and in that way helped Peter to become another person. (Kierkegaard 1847b: 172) 21 On the human level, this hope for the wrongdoer’s repentance and reform will often need to be accompanied by hope for one’s own ability to continue to forgive (consistent with the thought 160

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that forgiveness is first and foremost a process). This is part of why Kierkegaard stresses that love “abides”; it never gives up. This generosity of vision, rooted in a humility able to resist self-righteousness and allied to hope – “lovingly” hoping in “the possibility of the good for the other person” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 253) – is at the heart of the kind of forgiveness as a work of love that Kierkegaard praises.22 We may contrast this with the sort of forgiveness that is dispensed either grudgingly or from the moral high ground: wielded by the self-righteous as a weapon of power (cf. Kierkegaard 1847b: 295). Part of Kierkegaard’s concern here is that he does not want forgiveness (which by its nature involves a difference of moral standing between forgiver and forgiven, at least with regard to a particular wrong) to involve humiliating the person forgiven. It is significant here that he refers to the woman discovered in open adultery ( John 8: 3–11), to whose accusers Jesus responds by simply writing on the ground. As Kierkegaard puts it, “love stooped down and did not hear the accusation” (Kierkegaard 1843–44: 67) – or better, did not appear to hear the accusation, since once the two of them are alone, Jesus tells her to “go; do not sin again”. Although Kierkegaard sometimes appears to underrate the importance of a proper role for justice in acts of love, what is modelled here is not mere wilful blindness to wrongs, but a vision that has a sense of judgment about justice and the good built into it, but which expresses that vision with the “dexterity” of love.23 More generally, the kind of unconditional forgiveness that hopes for the repentance and reform of the wrongdoer also has built into it a sense of care for the wrongdoer’s good to which a sense of justice and the good (and the wrongdoer’s own recognition of their importance) is integral.

3.  Recent Secondary Literature There is a relatively small but growing secondary literature in English on Kierkegaard and forgiveness. Works of Love is probably the most commonly explored text, but some of its implications are, in my view, misconstrued owing to a tendency of Kierkegaard scholars either to fail to engage with a sufficiently broad range of recent writing on forgiveness, or to fail to recognise some of the nuances in key debates (such as on conditional versus unconditional forgiveness). Where the work of a single other recent writer on forgiveness is paired with Kierkegaard, that figure tends to be Derrida (e.g. Pyper 2002/2011; Podmore 2011; Marcar 2019). There is a tendency to conflate Kierkegaard’s views on forgiveness with those of Derrida, and sometimes to receive insufficiently critically Derrida’s remarks about forgiveness being able only to forgive the “unforgivable” (monstrous crimes such as the Holocaust). Pyper (2002/2011) roots his discussion of Kierkegaard in the discussion of Hannah Arendt, Jankélévitch, and Derrida, claiming that there is a “Kierkegaardian ring” to Derrida’s paradoxical formulation that forgiveness can forgive only the unforgivable. However, unlike some others, Pyper is careful to qualify this by talking of “elements of ” Kierkegaard’s understanding of the matter (2011: 147). Pyper also explores the New Testament background to Kierkegaard’s discussion of forgiveness, noting the tensions in passages on forgiveness in the gospels as to whether forgiveness is supposed to be conditional or unconditional (2011: 147–9). He then focuses on Kierkegaardian passages explored above (especially from Works of Love) about “hiding” and related notions, putting particular emphasis on the distinction between a wrong being forgotten and being “forgotten in forgiveness” (2011: 151–4), before turning to the question of whether we can forgive God for having forgiven “the unforgivable” (2011: 155–8). Podmore (2011) is a Kierkegaardian account of what it means for a human self to stand “before God”, in which an initial focus on sin as the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and humanity is gradually replaced by the “impossible” gift of the divine forgiveness of sin taking on that role. Although a rich theological discussion, bringing Kierkegaard into dialogue with Martin Luther, Rudolf Otto, and others, Podmore seems less interested in broader philosophical debates about forgiveness, such that the only other recent writer on forgiveness discussed (briefly) is again 161

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Derrida, approached via Pyper’s discussion (Podmore 2011: 190–2). Interpersonal forgiveness is once again viewed through the lens of the “impossible” (2011: 187, 188–92). Marcar (2019) also sets up his discussion of Kierkegaard in reference to Derrida, but claims that Kierkegaard’s ethic of Christian love renders forgiveness a “redundant concept” such that for Kierkegaard it is “unforgiveness” which is “impossible”. It may be that the language of “impossibility” is really just a hook on which to hang the comparison with Derrida: a better summary of the view outlined in Marcar’s article might be to say that “unforgiveness” is not allowed by, or is inconsistent with, exemplary forms of such love (2019: 732). However, it is somewhat unclear precisely what Marcar takes forgiveness to be, his central idea of a break in the relationship remaining underdeveloped (2019: 729, 732). He offers mostly an exegetical account of several key discourses in the second series of Works of Love, with some interesting elements (for instance reading the discourse on mercifulness [Barmhjertighed] in terms of not having an unforgiving attitude such as holding a grudge (2019: 723–7)24). Rightly in my view, Marcar takes resentment and its overcoming – a standard feature of so many philosophical accounts of forgiveness, but much more rarely mentioned by Kierkegaard commentators – to be importantly relevant to, even if not explicitly named in, Kierkegaard’s analysis of forgiveness (2019: 722, 725, 727). However, he makes little of the tensions between some of the terms Kierkegaard uses to describe forgiveness, conflating erasing, forgetting, and hiding behind one’s back (2019: 719). Some commentators draw on Kierkegaard to challenge views of forgiveness which they take to be excessively prominent in the wider literature. For instance, in line with my discussion above, Howell (2010) gives centrestage to the link Kierkegaard draws between forgiveness and ­neighbour-love in Works of Love (especially through a detailed exegesis of the “Love hides a multitude of sins” deliberation in that text), contrasting him with writers on forgiveness who seek to cash forgiveness out in terms of relinquishing negative emotions rather than requiring a particular kind of attitude towards the forgiven party. While also interested in the role of forgiveness in Kierkegaard’s agapic ethic, Gauvin (2017) addresses a more unusual question, namely whether in Genesis 22’s famous story of the Akedah at the heart of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Isaac is in a position to forgive his father Abraham, an exploration which is taken to make the often blank canvas of Isaac less “characterless and philosophically uninteresting” (2017: 83).25 Lippitt (2013), in drawing on Kierkegaard (especially Works of Love) to explore proper and debased forms of self-love, discusses the way in which a certain kind of self-forgiveness can be a form of proper self-love. Lippitt connects Kierkegaard with some recent philosophical work on forgiveness and respect, and self-forgiveness and self-respect, in order to argue for a picture of self-forgiveness that retains a role for a continuing kind of self-reproach of a certain kind (2013: 156–80; cf. also Lippitt 2020: 205–19). Lippitt (2014) offers a brief overview of the references to forgiveness in Kierkegaard’s writings, as part of a series of articles on key concepts in his authorship. The central question motivating the present chapter – about what difference it might make to our view of interpersonal forgiveness if we were to understand it as a “work of love” – is explored in greater detail in Lippitt (2020), the only book-length philosophical treatment of Kierkegaard and forgiveness in English. This book seeks to root the discussion of Kierkegaard in broader philosophical discussions of interpersonal forgiveness in recent years (such as the relation between forgiveness and resentment, conditional and unconditional accounts of forgiveness, and the question of third-party forgiveness), as well as in discussion of key New Testament passages on forgiveness. In dialogue with Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lippitt also seeks to offer an understanding of forgiveness that incorporates both agapic love and a proper concern for justice. Exploring religious and secular uses of key metaphors for forgiveness, and the idea of “forgivingness” as a character trait, Lippitt suggests that seeking to correct for various cognitive biases is key to the development of such a virtue, which he connects to other putative virtues, such as humility and hope (and to a lesser extent gratitude and patience), which are explored in more detail than in the present chapter. 162

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Like Lippitt (2020), Slowikowski (2020) also refers to a wider body of recent literature on forgiveness, focusing on the victim-offender relation, contemporary debates about conditional and unconditional forgiveness, forgiveness and condonation, and the question of the “unforgivable”. Slowikowski criticises the approaches of Howell, Lippitt, and Pyper, amongst others, and sees Kierkegaard’s discussion as standing quite apart from other discussions in “contemporary secular and Christian ethics” (2020: 55). Claiming that for Kierkegaard forgiveness is only ever performed by God (a view incompatible with several New Testament passages on forgiveness, and at odds with several of Kierkegaard’s own remarks on forgiveness), Slowikowski contrasts what he calls an “immanent” approach to forgiveness found in “contemporary ethical and Christian thought”, appealing to “the world of human values” (2020: 55) and rooted in the good of “the human community” (2020: 78), with Kierkegaard’s allegedly purely “transcendent” approach. He is critical of anyone who seeks to apply Kierkegaard’s remarks on forgiveness “directly” to interpersonal forgiveness (2020: 63, 75n39), though precisely what he means by this term remains obscure.26 The claim is doubly puzzling, since as noted above, many of Kierkegaard’s remarks are actually about interpersonal forgiveness. The problem here seems to be twofold. First, the determination to see Kierkegaard’s approach as utterly distinct from all others, including several explicitly acknowledged to belong within the Christian tradition, and therefore also committed to a notion of human sin. Second, and more importantly, a failure to recognise that notions like transcendence and immanence, divine and human values, and the good of the individual and the community are far more porous than Slowikowski’s schema allows for. There is some irony in the title of his paper here: whereas Slowikowski is concerned with the divergent (“transcendent” and “immanent”) paths from the crossroads, it is surely in the very nature of a crossroads that there is a point of intersection, and it is precisely this point of intersection that has interested many of the commentators at whom Slowikowski takes aim. Aware on some level of the fact that, if what he claims about Kierkegaard is true, we might wonder what the Dane could contribute to discussion of forgiveness at all, Slowikowski retreats to the following rather baffling assertion: “The mere fact that there is no possibility to make use of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on transcendent forgiveness does not mean that they are useless for the contemporary, immanent understanding of this problem” (2020: 78). Something that “cannot be used” but is nevertheless not “useless” may take us further into the realms of paradox than even readers of Kierkegaard are willing to go. What Slowikowski is trying to get at here seems to be that the “transcendent” view provides an “independent reference point” that puts the “immanent” approach “in its place in the world” (2020: 78). But this leaves unclear precisely how this is supposed to be inconsistent with the views of those criticised, who could easily agree that the “transcendent” reference gives “immanent” approaches “a higher order reference point in which they find their ultimate definition” (2020: 78). Overall, I think that Slowikowski’s approach risks obscuring the contribution that understanding forgiveness as a work of love can make to everyday human problems of interpersonal forgiveness.

4. Conclusion I have argued that, as approaches to forgiveness go, Kierkegaard’s is distinctive in several ways. He roots his discussion of interpersonal forgiveness in the context of the divine forgiveness of sins. He is at least as interested in the difficulties of accepting forgiveness as in the difficulties of forgiving. And forgiveness is for him best grasped as a “work” of agapic or neighbourly love. I have also claimed that a Kierkegaardian approach to forgiveness suggests that there are important connections to be drawn between the quality of being a forgiving person – what we might describe as possessing the virtue of “forgivingness” – and such other virtues as generosity of spirit, humility, and hope. A promising avenue for future research (which I have tried to commence in Lippitt 163

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2020) would be to explore in more detail the nature of these connections – especially the somewhat under-theorised notion of generosity of spirit.27

Notes 1 Unless otherwise stated, in citing Kierkegaard’s works, I have given page numbers from the “Kierkegaard’s Writings” series published by Princeton University Press. The standard edition in Danish is now Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (Kierkegaard 1997–2013), available online at: http://sks.dk/forside/ indhold.asp. 2 Love has been a major theme in Kierkegaard scholarship during recent years. Monographs on the topic in English include Ferreira 2001, Hall 2002, Evans 2004, Furtak 2005, Krishek 2009, Lippitt 2013, and Strawser 2015. 3 Although I have cited Kierkegaard’s published works by the original date of publication, this sevenvolume edition of Kierkegaard’s journals and loose papers covers nearly the full spread of Kierkegaard’s life as a writer, so I have here made an exception and cited by the dates of its publication in English. Unlike with the published works, numbers here refer to entry, not page, number. 4 The failure to recognise the importance of this distinction can lead commentators to draw excessively stringent conclusions about the implications of the claim that only God can forgive sin. For an example, see Slowikowski 2020 (to be discussed briefly in Section 3). 5 On this point, compare Kierkegaard 1967–78: 1224. 6 Space forbids a treatment of self-forgiveness in the present chapter, but for such thoughts as I do have on the matter, see Lippitt 2013: 156–80 and 2020: 83–5, 205–19. 7 Such as I seek to offer in Lippitt 2020: 74–83. 8 For a parallel argument – that because our love, the source of our forgiveness, has its roots in God’s love (a case Kierkegaard makes earlier in Works of Love), so God’s forgiveness is prior to, and the source of, our forgiveness – see Howell 2010: 41–2. 9 On this point, cf. Bash 2015: 100–1. 10 I take this ugly but useful term (distinguishing as it does a virtue from an act or process) from Roberts 1995. 11 For more on this, see Section 3. 12 I offer such a critique in Lippitt 2020: 55–62. 13 “Love abides” is the sixth deliberation in the second series of Works of Love, following immediately after “Love hides a multitude of sins”. Reconciliation is the central topic of the eighth deliberation in the second series, “The victory of the conciliatory spirit in love, which wins the one overcome”. 14 See Kierkegaard 1843–4, 1847, 1849–51. 15 For a good discussion of the tensions in Kierkegaard’s imagery here, and their connection to Luther’s idea of simul justus et peccator [being at once justified and a sinner], see Burgess 1999. I have explored the resonances of contemporary uses of “wiping the slate clean” – particularly in Allais 2008 and Bennett 2003 – in the context of Kierkegaard’s discussion, and the differences between forgetting and “forgetting in forgiveness”, in Lippitt 2020: 126–55. 16 On this point cf. Marcar 2019: 726. 17 Elsewhere, I have drawn parallels between the work of Kierkegaard and Troy Jollimore (2011) on these points (Lippitt 2020: 85–104). Others will be reminded of some of the work of Iris Murdoch. 18 See Prejean 1996. Note that Prejean – whom I consider to manifest a kind of legitimate third-party forgiveness (Lippitt 2020: 49, 119–20) – never denies that the prisoners in question deserve punishment, just not the death penalty. 19 “When the sin in a person is surrounded by love, it is outside its element. It is like a besieged city cut off from every connection with its compatriots” (Kierkegaard 1847b: 298). 20 If not condonation nor excuse, on occasion Kierkegaard’s remarks do sound like a culpable blindness: for instance, the claim that love’s closed eye “does not discover” sin (Kierkegaard 1843–4: 60). Typically, however, if we read on, we discover a subtler position: in this case, “turning a sinner from the error of his ways” being praised over one who merely “refrains from disputes”, since the efforts of the latter may be only momentarily successful (Kierkegaard 1843–4: 63). I take it that one cannot “turn a sinner from the error of his ways” without in some sense being aware of his sinfulness. 21 Kierkegaard is discussing the incident described in John 21. 22 The link with hope is also noted by Howell 2010: 42–5. 23 For a more detailed exploration of this, building on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s (2011) distinction between benevolence-agapism and care-agapism, see Lippitt 2020: 105–25.

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Kierkegaard on Forgiveness 24 In this way, Marcar provides an alternative reading to M. Jamie Ferreira’s influential account of this discourse (Ferreira 2001: 188–200). 25 Podmore also touches on, but ultimately ducks, the question of whether Isaac can forgive Abraham (2011: 191). 26 Slowikowski’s claims about the way in which “essentially all” (2020: 58n6) “ethical theories of forgiveness” (2020: 58) treat the victim-offender relation are insufficiently nuanced. He treats the default kind of case of victim and offender as the only kind of case (2020: 58n6), dismissing out of hand, for example, the possibility of third-party forgiveness within a secular account (2020: 58n7) and talking of one party causing the other “suffering”, ignoring other forms of moral harm (such as disrespect) that cannot be reduced to that (2020: 58n6). It is this picture that other Kierkegaard commentators (such as Howell 2010 and Lippitt 2017) are said (I would claim inaccurately) to apply “directly” to Kierkegaard. Lippitt 2020 provides a more fully fleshed out account of what is actually my view. The variety of views available under the conditional/unconditional headings are also more varied and nuanced than Slowikowski claims (2020: 64–5). 27 The research underpinning this chapter was undertaken with the support of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2018–20). I am extremely grateful to the Trust for its generous support for my work.

References Allais, L. (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean: the Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36–1, 33–68. Bash, A. (2015) Forgiveness: a Theology, Eugene OR: Cascade. Bennett, C. (2003) “Personal and Redemptive Forgiveness,” European Journal of Philosophy 11–2, 127–44. Burgess, A. (1999) “Kierkegaard’s Concept of Redoubling and Luther’s Simul Justus,” in R. L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Derrida, J. (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, M. Dooley and M. Hughes (trans.), London and New York: Routledge. Evans, C. S. (2004) Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Ferreira, M. J. (2001) Love’s Grateful Striving: a Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, New York: Oxford University Press. Furtak, R. A. (2005) Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Gauvin, M. J. (2017) “Can Isaac Forgive Abraham?,” Journal of Religious Ethics 45–1, 83–103. Hall, A. L. (2002) Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howell, J. B. (2010) “Forgiveness and Kierkegaard’s Agapeistic Ethic,” Philosophia Christi 12–1, 29–45. Jankélévich, V. (2005) Forgiveness, A. Kelley (trans.), Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Jollimore, T. (2011) Love’s Vision, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1843–4) To opbyggelige Taler, 1843; Tre opbyggelige Taler, 1843; Fire opbyggelige Taler, 1843; To opbyggelige Taler, 1844; Tre opbyggelige Taler, 1844; Fire opbyggelige Taler, 1844 [Two Upbuilding Discourses, 1843; Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1843; Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843; Two Upbuilding Discourses, 1844; Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1844; Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1844; collected under the title Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses], H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Kierkegaard, S. (1845) Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder [Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions], H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Kierkegaard, S. (1847a) Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand [Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits], H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Kierkegaard, S. (1847b) Kjerlighedens Gjerninger [Works of Love], H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Kierkegaard, S. (1848) Christelige Taler [Christian Discourses], H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Kierkegaard, S. (1849) Sygdommen til Døden [The Sickness Unto Death], H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Kierkegaard, S. (1849–51) Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen: Tre gudelige Taler; Tvende ethisk-religieuse Smaa-Afhandlinger; »Ypperstepræsten« – »Tolderen« – »Synderinden«: tre Taler ved Altergangen om Fredagen; En opbyggelig Tale; To Taler ved Altergangen om Fredagen [The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses; Two Ethical-Religious Essays; Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays:

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John Lippitt The High Priest, The Tax Collector, The Woman Who Was a Sinner; An Upbuilding Discourse; Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, collected under the title: Without Authority], H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Kierkegaard, S. (1967–78) Journaler og Papirer [Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers], 7 volumes, H. V. and E. H. Hong (eds and trans.), Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–78. Kierkegaard, S. (1997–2013) Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter, N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, K. Kynde, T. A. Olesen and S. Tullberg (eds), electronic edition: http://sks.dk/forside/indhold.asp. Krishek, S. (2009) Kierkegaard on Faith and Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippitt, J. (2013) Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippitt, J. (2014) “Forgiveness,” in S. Emmanuel, W. McDonald and J. Stewart (eds), Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, 15: Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome III: Envy to Incognito, London: Ashgate. Lippitt, J. (2017) “Forgiveness: a Work of Love?,” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 28, 19–39. Lippitt, J. (2020) Love’s Forgiveness: Kierkegaard, Resentment, Humility, and Hope, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcar, G. P. (2019) “Søren Kierkegaard and the Impossibility of (Un)forgiveness: Another Look at Love, Mercy, and Reconciliation in Kierkegaard’s Theological Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 47, 716–34. McDonald, W. (undated) “Accepting Forgiveness,” unpublished paper. Podmore, S. D. (2011) Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Prejean, H. (1996) Dead Man Walking, London: Fount. Pyper, H. S. (2002) “Forgiving the Unforgivable: Kierkegaard, Derrida and the Scandal of Forgiveness,” Kierkegaardiana 22, 7–23. Reprinted in H. S. Pyper (2011) The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader, Sheffield and Oakville: Equinox; page numbers refer to this version. Roberts, R. C. (1995) “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32–4, 289–306. Slowikowski, A. (2020) “Crossroads of Forgiveness: a Transcendent Understanding of Forgiveness in Kierkegaard’s Religious Writings and Immanent Account of Forgiveness in Contemporary Secular and Christian Ethics,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 87, 55–8. Strawser, M. (2015) Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Love, Lanham MD: Lexington. Wolterstorff, N. (2011) Justice in Love, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

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13 JUNG AND FORGIVENESS Robin S. Brown

C.G. Jung is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of modern psychology. Like Freud, with whom he collaborated for several years, Jung is centrally informed by the idea that we are not masters of our own house—that is, his approach foregrounds the centrality of the unconscious mind. Jung considers that what we think we know about ourselves and the world rests upon factors of which we are, at best, only dimly aware. Although his work has exerted a broad cultural influence, he is rarely studied in contemporary psychology departments. This can partly be understood as reflecting the extent to which Jung’s thinking moves beyond the confines of both the clinic and the laboratory to embrace the wider sphere of culture—ranging into the fields of anthropology, theology, philosophy, and even quantum physics. Reflecting both his own character and the times in which he lived, Jung’s approach to the mind tends to lean on the metaphor of interiority to imagine what is happening “inside” of individuals. This emphasis on the individual results in the particular flavor his work has if we are to consider its relevance for our understanding of the more relational notion of forgiveness. The act of forgiveness can be conceived both outwardly (forgiving another) and inwardly (forgiving oneself ). In Jung’s analytical psychology,1 self and world are in dynamic relationship—our value judgments about the outer world reflect how we relate to ourselves, just as how we relate to ourselves will be shaped by our experiences of being valued in the world. Despite this reciprocity, one of the distinctive features of Jung’s work is his particular emphasis on what he considers to be the innate determinants of human nature and character. While considering the role of environmental influence significant, Jung often portrays the environment to be of secondary concern relative to the more fundamental determination of the person’s inborn nature. This is reflected in a broad emphasis on self-responsibility and the notion that individuals can transform their relationship to the world by raising self-awareness. We might think of this sensibility in contrast to one that emphasizes the need of changing social conditions in order to effect a change in the individual. The world’s responsibility to the individual is a notion that rings strangely hollow in the context of Jung’s work. In fact, Jung would likely consider such a notion regressive: “This kind of reaction is called infantile. It is characteristic of children, and of naïve minds generally, not to find the mistake in themselves but in things outside them, and forcibly to impose on things their own subjective judgement” ( Jung 1955, para. 382). Psychologically speaking, notions of forgiveness have much to do with how we think about trauma. The notion of trauma suggests the idea of a harm imposed on the individual as a consequence of their relatedness to the world. In Jung’s view, however, the impact of a traumatic event is significantly dependent upon the constitutional endowment of the individual. Jung states: “An DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-17

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attentive observer of small children can detect, even in early infancy, any unusual sensitiveness. […] These far reaching differences, which go back into earliest childhood, cannot be due to accidental events but must be regarded as innate” ( Jung 1955, para. 397). As such, forgiveness of others is not directly emphasized in Jung’s work, so much as the task of coming to terms with oneself. The notion of forgiveness per se is in fact rather alien to Jungian psychology. In the index to the English translation of Jung’s Collected Works, there are only five passing references to forgiveness. In the limited extent to which Jung does make direct reference to this notion it is in relationship to the Christian confessional and the forgiveness of sins. Thus, in so far as Jung directly engages the theme of forgiveness, it is in terms of self-forgiveness and the experience of guilt.

1.  Self-forgiveness and Confession Commenting on Jung’s work, Todd (1985) conceptualizes the confessional role of the therapist as follows: Therapy begins with the act of confession including the patient’s conscious recollections and the recovery of unconscious material that has been repressed, even concealed. It is through confession that the patient is able to end his moral isolation and feel restored to the community represented by the therapist. (Todd 1985, 46) Self-forgiveness is thus by no means an exclusively private matter. The role played by the therapist/ confessor is to bear witness to those aspects of the individual’s personality considered by the individual to be incompatible with the view that they have of themselves (and that they imagine others have of them). In confessing to the therapist the patient is better able to grasp those aspects of their personality that they find inadmissible and, in having these qualities received without censure, to feel that these traits are less fundamentally incompatible than was previously assumed. How does the individual come to dis-identify with key aspects of their own nature? In Freudian thinking this question is understood in terms of the repression of socially unacceptable traits— most centrally sexuality. Jung further nuances this idea by drawing our attention to the ways in which occupying a specific societal position promotes identification with those character traits associated with the needs of the role. This is a natural consequence of successfully establishing oneself in society. The process of adaptation requires a directed conscious function characterized by inner consistency and logical coherence. Because it is directed, everything unsuitable must be excluded in order to maintain the integrity of direction. The unsuitable elements are subjected to inhibition and thereby escape attention. ( Jung 1928a, para. 64) Jung considers it essential that we each be able to develop a social mask, or “persona,” by means of which to assume a place in collective life. In thus establishing ourselves, however, there is a natural tendency to confuse oneself with the persona. This tendency is reflected in the perennial “getting to know you” question—what do you do? The emphasis we still place on equating the individual with the societal role that they play speaks to the challenge an outwardly directed person is liable to experience in separating a sense of their core identity from their position in the world. For example, a brain surgeon will be well served by being able to go about her work in an orderly and dispassionate manner. Qualities of intelligence, manual dexterity, poise, efficiency, and reliability will all be highly prized in such a person. This individual is likely to be held in high 168

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regard by others for exhibiting these qualities, and their reputation is liable to be associated with hard work and upstanding personal accomplishment. For the individual to be a success in her chosen profession would likely suggest that many of these qualities come relatively naturally. This fact coupled with the ways in which the perceptions of other people reinforce these qualities is likely to cause the individual to feel strongly affiliated with them. The more one-sidedly the individual embraces these specific qualities, the more will any tendency that runs contrary to them remain not only unacknowledged but perhaps even actively repressed. In consequence, the individual’s conscious control of those aspects of her essential humanity that she denies will be correspondingly limited—precisely in the extent to which these qualities remain unconscious. In due course, however, circumstances will often transpire which force an individual to confront aspects of themselves that are not being seen or readily expressed. Thus, the brain surgeon known for exhibiting a calm professional demeanor at work may begin to struggle with uncontrollable outbursts of rage behind closed doors at home. If the individual is sufficiently selfreflective then they will no longer be able to deny their failure to live up to the collective ideal—a matter which may come to be guarded as a guilty secret. Whether the act of confessing leads to a broadening of self-awareness would depend both upon the disposition of the individual and upon the manner in which the confession is received. The psychology of confession foregrounds self-forgiveness in so far as the confessor’s act of forgiving can be considered relatively passive—the confessor acts as a dispassionate representative of the collective. It can be assumed that the confessor was not personally wounded by the violation reflected in the confession. The apparent act of forgiveness might therefore be considered incidental to the self-forgiveness that it enables. However, further reflection on why confession comes to be necessary in the first place will enable us to grasp some broader implications for the meaning and nature of forgiveness in Jung’s work.

2.  Forgiveness of Others and Shadow Projection It was just mentioned that, in Jung’s view, the need for confession arises from the individual’s violation of that which they consider proper to them. While the personal ideal is partly reflective of the collective moral code, it is also informed by the needs of the specific mode of adaptation expressed by a given social role. The pressure generated by this state of affairs can lead to a crisis which forces the individual to confront in themselves that which they had not previously been able to recognize. Yet this course of events is by no means an inevitability. The individual may be able to function at length without suffering a meaningful disturbance to their limited self-image. Equally, the individual may suffer such disturbances repeatedly without learning from them. In so far as we continue to reject core aspects of our own humanity we will experience a strong aversion to these same qualities when they are exhibited by others. Jung speaks of “shadow projection” in referring to the tendency of finding fault in other people as a consequence of the limited sense that we have of ourselves. Tolerance is thus founded in being able to meaningfully recognize the qualities of our neighbor in ourselves. The more constrained we feel in our sense of who we are, the more intolerant will we be in our attitude toward other people. Recognition of one’s shadow thus suggests the possibility of a certain kind of forgiveness in relationship to the world. Prior to finding fault in ourselves (such as might drive us to confession), we will often settle instead for lashing out at those who inadvertently bring the problem to our attention. In recognizing their own shadow, the individual forgives others in the same degree that they forgive themselves. The person who comes to terms with their shadow effectively forgives the other with the realization that the offense apparently caused wasn’t substantive— that the perception of an offense was merely reflective of the perceiver’s too restrictive sense of themselves. 169

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3.  Forgiveness and Trauma In the forgoing conception of forgiveness offered in terms of the withdrawal of shadow projections, it may rightly be objected that something is still missing. Forgiveness where shadow projection is concerned still does not reflect forgiveness for a harm caused by another party. So what of forgiveness in cases where an actual harm has occurred? Here we return to the question of trauma. One way of understanding the relative lack of importance Jung often seems to place on the material reality of trauma is by contextualizing his work in relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud is well known for moving away from a trauma-based approach and for emphasizing the role of unconscious fantasy as determinative. In his early work Freud introduced the notion of infantile seduction: “at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience” (Freud 1896, 203). Freud had initially worked on the assumption that the memories of childhood sexual abuse produced by his patients referred to actual events that were causative of the patient’s struggles in the present. Notoriously, however, within a few short years Freud (1900) came to reject the theory of infantile seduction in favor of the Oedipus Complex. Responding to what he considered the improbable frequency with which patients appeared to have suffered sexual abuse in childhood, Freud adopted a more skeptical attitude toward the question of how such beliefs might have come to be formed. Oedipal psychology suggested that the determinative factor lay not with an actual trauma but with a system of fantasy founded in the prohibition of incest. While Freud himself never denied the importance (or occurrence) of sexual abuse as a traumatic event, the emphasis in psychoanalysis came to lie with unpacking the complications associated with unresolved Oedipal fantasy. In this intellectual context, Jung’s approach to trauma becomes more understandable. Jung considers trauma to be of significance, but he suggests that the determining factor is the particular disposition of the individual. Jung writes: we are too much inclined […] to attribute the emotional development of a person wholly, or at least very largely, to accidents. The old trauma theory went too far in this respect. We must never forget that the world is, in the first place, a subjective phenomenon. The impressions we receive from these accidental happenings are also our own doing, It is not true that the impressions are forced on us unconditionally; our own predisposition conditions the impression. ( Jung 1955, para. 400, italics in original) Elsewhere Jung states: Clearly, in dealing with this question, one should never be influenced too much by the surface appearance of the symptoms, even when both the patient and his family synchronize the first manifestation of these with the onset of the neurosis. A more thorough investigation will almost invariably show that some morbid tendency existed long before the appearance of clinical symptoms. ( Jung 1928b, para. 259) Jung acknowledges the existence of the traumatic event while also stressing the need of a particular mode of sensitivity in order for the event to actually be registered traumatic: “The fantasy-images outweigh the influence of sensory stimuli and mould them into conformity with a pre-existing psychic image” ( Jung 1954b, para 135, italics in the original). While Jung does grant that there are some cases where the trauma itself appears to be causative, he generally comes down on the side of subjective determinants by emphasizing the individual’s predisposition and/or sensitivity— that is, the individual’s tendency to shape experience along predetermined lines and their innate 170

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susceptibility to being impacted by external events. There are passages where Jung goes so far as to endorse the idea that many traumatic memories never actually occurred: I soon discovered that, though traumata of clearly aetiological significance were occasionally present, the majority of them appeared very improbable. Many traumata were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most as a pretext for the neurosis. But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all. ( Jung 1914, para. 582) In addition to underscoring the significance of fantasy and sensitivity of temperament, Jung’s approach to psychopathology also places considerable emphasis on the present moment. This has the effect of further reinforcing a sense that Jung often minimizes the importance of the trauma itself. Jung writes: In constructing a theory which derives the neurosis from causes in the distant past, we are first and foremost allowing the tendency of our patients to lure us as far away as possible from the critical present. For the cause of the pathogenic conflict lies mainly in the present moment. It is just as if a nation were to blame its miserable political condition on the past; as if the Germany of the nineteenth century had attributed her political dismemberment and incapacity to her oppression by the Romans, instead of seeking the causes of her difficulties in the actual present. ( Jung 1955, para. 373, italics in the original) Jung’s emphasis on fantasy, the constitutional sensitivity of the individual, and the role of the present moment—all combine to result in an outlook which de-emphasizes the relative importance of the trauma itself. As has already been touched upon, this outlook clearly has significant implications with regard to the question of forgiveness. If traumatic experience ultimately hinges upon the psychological predisposition of the traumatized individual, then the task of forgiveness has more to do with understanding the nature of the person than it does with working directly on specific relationships in the world. To better appreciate this perspective requires that we touch upon the nature of archetypes. The notion of the archetype can be considered one of the single most distinctive features of Jung’s psychology. The archetypes are posited to constitute the innate structure of the psyche. They can be understood as universal predispositions associated with certain forms of behavior and experience (sensations, feelings, thoughts, and images). Archetypes are posited to express themselves along a continuum—at one end of this continuum they manifest in the body as instincts, at the other end they present themselves to consciousness as thoughts and images. All of the essential and meaningful experiences of being human rest upon an archetypal foundation: “There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life” ( Jung 1954a, para. 99). They are the basis upon which psychological development occurs, and they are by turns both threatening and alluring to the conscious mind; this duality reflects the archetype’s fundamentally ambivalent nature. Consciousness is dependent upon being able to relate to these nodal points of meaning, yet there is always a danger that the fascination of the archetype will overwhelm consciousness. Archetypal imagery is given expression across all spheres of creative endeavor, though Jung considers mythology, religion, and folklore to be particularly pure expressions of this. To understand the place of forgiveness in Jung’s work means examining the manner in which the archetypal foundations of the psyche are posited to underlie the experience of trauma. In order to unpack this further, I would like to reference a helpful terminological distinction offered by the 171

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transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof. Grof (2000) suggests that we might usefully differentiate between traumas of omission (entailing the absence of important experiences) and traumas of commission (entailing events that actively disrupt psychological development).

3.1  Traumas of Omission Jung’s model of the psyche is grounded in the experience of affect. In turn, all affect is grounded in archetypal meaning. The threat posed to the infant by primitive affective experience is understood to reflect the overwhelming nature of the archetype manifesting in both its positive and negative aspects. For a person to be able to relate more consciously to archetypal influence requires a capacity to negotiate between these two poles. Developing this capacity initially depends upon the availability of caregivers to mediate the affective experience of the archetype on the child’s behalf. In this way the child gradually develops a distinct sense of independent ego so as to ultimately enable mediation of these experiences for themselves. In early life, two of the most important archetypes requiring mediation are directly reflected in the images of the mother and the father. The mother may be experienced as a goddess (the fountainhead of life, love, and material support) or as a dangerous witch (deceitful, jealous, and engulfing). The father may appear godlike (embodying strength, wisdom, and protection) or he may be experienced as a tyrant (distant, judgmental, and fearsomely punitive).2 The ego’s development depends upon a growing capacity to relate to the parental archetypes both in their positive and negative aspects. Becoming fully adult doesn’t mean internalizing experiences of good parents so much as developing a more nuanced relationship to the parental archetypes. While the actual parents do influence the image we have of them, these images are also informed by the innate temperament or sensitivity of the individual. Furthermore, without considerable conscious effort of discrimination (enabled by the successful mediation of caregivers), these images will be more fundamentally reflective of one’s relationship to the archetype than the actual parent. Jung states: The patient’s love, admiration, resistance, hatred, and rebelliousness still cling to [the parents’] effigies, transfigured by affection or distorted by envy, and often bearing little resemblance to the erstwhile reality. It was this fact that compelled me to speak no longer of “father” and “mother” but to employ instead the term “imago,” because these fantasies are not concerned anymore with the real father and mother but with subjective and often very much distorted images of them which lead a shadowy but nonetheless potent existence in the mind of the patient. ( Jung 1955, para 305) In another context, Jung writes: The simple soul is of course quite unaware of the fact that his nearest relations, who exercise immediate influence over him, create in him an image which is only partly a replica of themselves, while its other part is compounded of elements derived from himself. The imago is built up of parental influences plus the specific reactions of the child; it is therefore an image that reflects the object with very considerable qualifications. Naturally, the simple soul believes that his parents are as he sees them. The image is unconsciously projected, and when the parents die, the projected image goes on working as though it were a spirit existing on its own. The primitive then speaks of parental spirits who return by night (revenants), while the modern man calls it a father or mother complex. ( Jung 1953, para. 294) 172

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From a Jungian perspective, traumas of omission will be reflected in difficulties mediating the parental archetypes. To appreciate the breadth of these challenges, it should be noted that the parental archetypes inform not only our experience of the actual parents; they can be considered a constant factor in our engagement with the world. Wherever mothering or fathering qualities are evoked in our relations with others, the specific valence of the relevant complex will also be constellated. This will naturally occur in relationship not only with other people but also with systems and organizations. For example, a person’s opinions about public healthcare will be informed both by the mother imago (in so far as we are concerned with themes of material ­support and nurture) and by the father imago (in so far as we are concerned with rules and justice). Difficulties in mediating the parental archetypes will often be expressed in feelings of personal inadequacy and/or resentment toward the world. We thus return to the theme of forgiveness as it manifests in terms of both self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others. A sense of personal inadequacy results from the ego feeling beholden to the parental imagoes in their positive aspects (e.g. not worthy of/hopelessly less than) and terrified of them in their negative aspects (e.g. fearful of engulfment/castration). In an effort to resist these tendencies, the ego will project this conflict onto the environment. For example, a person with a negative relationship to their father may take up a subservient role in the workplace and feel undeserving of promotion. Alternatively, the individual may feel threatened by the working world and anticipate being rejected by it. In an effort to combat this sense of things, the individual may repress the perceived threat and instead reason that the working world is beneath them. In responding to traumas of omission, a relationship will be therapeutic in the extent to which it enables a more successful mediation of the parental archetypes. In being able to hold both positive and negative experiences of the parental archetypes, the analyst enables the patient to experience a broader range of possibilities in relationship to both themselves and the world. This would correlate with a process of both self-forgiveness (diminishment in feelings of personal inadequacy) and forgiveness toward the world (diminishment of resentments). The individual is more able to mediate the ambivalence of the parental archetypes for themselves, and the world can be related to in a fashion considered more realistic.

3.2  Traumas of Commission For a psychotherapist, the theme of forgiveness is perhaps registered most starkly in those cases where a person has been emotionally harmed by an experience that was too distressing to be managed by means of the usual defense mechanisms. Grof (2000) describes trauma by commission in the following way: “It is the result of external intrusions that had damaging impact on the future development on the individual. Here belong such insults as physical or sexual abuse, frightening situations, destructive criticism, or ridicule” (196). While Jung generally emphasizes the individual’s constitution as the central factor deciding whether an event will be registered as traumatic, he does acknowledge the occurrence of events that are, in effect, inherently traumatic. Commenting on instances of shell-shock following World War I, Jung writes: Now if we set aside the numerous cases of war neurosis where a trauma—a violent shock— impinged upon an established neurotic history, there still remain not a few cases where no neurotic disposition can be established, or where it is so insignificant that the neurosis could hardly have arisen without a trauma. Here the trauma is more than an agent of the release: it is causative in the sense of a causa efficiens, especially when we include, as an essential factor, the unique psychic atmosphere of the battlefield. ( Jung 1928b, para. 261) 173

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Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched has sought to explicate Jung’s thinking on trauma in light of subsequent research. Kalsched argues for the enduring importance of an archetypal understanding of trauma in helping to explain how the traumatized person remains traumatized. He seeks to demonstrate that Jung’s particular emphasis on the role of fantasy is essential if we are to understand the manner in which trauma manifests as a daimonic presence haunting the traumatized psyche: Most contemporary analytic writers are inclined to see this attacking figure as an internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma, who has “possessed” the inner world of the trauma victim. But this popularized view is only half correct. The diabolical inner figure is often far more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator, indicating that we are dealing here with a psychological factor set loose in the inner world by trauma—an archetypal traumatogenic agency within the psyche itself. (Kalsched 1996, 4) Kalsched describes the fashion in which numerous authors have identified the typical (i.e. archetypal) fashion in which the traumatized individual undergoes a split within themselves—one side of the ego regresses and becomes infantile while the other side progresses and becomes inauthentically mature. The latter side of the personality then attempts to caretake the former. It is this caretaker side of the ego which attempts to ensure that the traumatic experience is not repeated. Ironically, however, it is precisely the caretaker side which comes to be responsible for re-traumatization. This occurs first on an inward level: the caretaker side of the ego seeks to terrorize the regressed side of the ego in an effort to prevent the individual from trusting others (for doing so would risk being re-traumatized). Drawing from clinical experience, Kalsched cites the occurrence of terrifying dreams dramatizing this struggle—dreams which occurred seemingly in response to moments of therapeutic breakthrough wherein the traumatized patient had just started to show signs of being able to trust again. Because this drama reflects the structure of the person’s inner world, it is naturally played out interpersonally. Externalizing the internal conflict enables the possibility that the traumatic split might be healed. Significantly, Jung (1928b) emphasizes that this process is of essence a relational one: “the mere rehearsal of the experience does not itself possess a curative effect: the experience must be rehearsed in the presence of the doctor” (para. 269). As Kalsched explains: In Jung’s language, we might say that the original traumatic situation posed such danger to personality survival that that it was not retained in memorable personal form but only in daimonic archetypal form. This is the collective or “magical” layer of the unconscious and cannot be assimilated by the ego until it has been “incarnated” in a human interaction. As archetypal dynamism it “exists” in a form that cannot be recovered by the ego except as an experience of re-traumatization. Or, to put it another way, the unconscious repetition of traumatization in the inner world which goes on incessantly must become a real traumatization with an object in the world if the inner system is to be “unlocked.” (Kalsched 1996, 26) The traumatic split in consciousness makes being able to fully acknowledge the existence of the original trauma impossible; hence, the question of forgiveness in relationship to the original trauma is moot. In so far as a debt comes to be levied against the world by the traumatized person, then it will most likely arise in context of the re-traumatization that inevitably occurs as a consequence of the playing out in the present of the past traumatic experience. The emphasis Jung places on the curative nature of the therapeutic relationship with the analyst is thus noteworthy. 174

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In a fashion quite strikingly distinct from the emphasis he often places on the responsibility of the individual, Jung writes: One can easily see what it means to the patient when he can confide his experience to an understanding and sympathetic doctor. His conscious mind finds in the doctor a moral support against the unmanageable affect of his traumatic complex. No longer does he stand alone in his battle with these elemental powers, but someone whom he trusts reaches out a hand, lending him moral strength to combat the tyranny of uncontrolled emotion. In this way the integrative powers of his conscious mind are reinforced until he is able once more to bring the rebellious affect under control. This influence on the part of the doctor, which is absolutely essential, may, if you like, be called suggestion. [/] For myself, I would rather call it his human interest and personal devotion. These are the property of no method, nor can they ever become one; they are moral qualities which are of the greatest importance in all methods of psychotherapy, and not in the case of abreaction alone. The rehearsal of the traumatic moment is able to reintegrate the neurotic dissociation only when the conscious personality of the patient is so far reinforced by his relationship to the doctor that he can consciously bring the autonomous complex under the control of his will. (para. 270–1) Jung’s position here implies significant nuances to his broader outlook. We have seen that Jung consistently foregrounds a number of factors that tend to emphasize personal responsibility and an implied logic of self-forgiveness over and against the responsibility of the world. Here, however, Jung speaks movingly of the role played by the clinician in supporting the patient. This raises the complicated question of in what extent Jung might be considered a “relationally” oriented theorist.3 How much does Jung consider psychology as something that happens between people and not simply inside of people? The foregoing statement is typical of his position in this regard: he speaks directly to the great importance of the curative nature of human connection, and yet these comments are all too brief and leave much to the imagination. What is the nature of the doctor’s devotion? What does Jung mean by moral strength in this context? How does Jung work with the rehearsal of the traumatic moment? How does he conceptualize the doctor’s role?4 It is in relationship to the clinician’s devotion and moral commitment that much could be said about questions of forgiveness arising in the treatment, but Jung stops short of exploring this.

4.  Revising Jung’s Introverted Attitude toward Forgiveness I suggested previously that one way of understanding Jung’s frequent minimizing of the etiological significance of trauma is to read his work in relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis—that Jung’s emphasis on the role played by the psychic constitution of the individual undergoing a potentially traumatic event can be linked with the Freudian emphasis on the psychically constitutive nature of Oedipal fantasy. In addition, however, Jung’s approach can also be interpreted typologically (see Jung 1921). One of Jung’s most widely known contributions to psychology is the distinction he draws between introverted and extroverted personality types. While it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to adequately review this theory, in brief it can be stated that Jung believes individuals tend to negotiate their relationship with the world in one of two ways: the extrovert places primary value on the outside world, while the introvert places primary value on inner experiences. Neither attitude is posited to be superior to the other, for in practice each person must find a way of coming to terms both with the world and with themselves. The difference between the two types, however, results in two quite different ways of approaching life. 175

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Emphasis on the etiological significance of trauma can be considered reflective of an extroverted psychology. This is because events external to the individual are here being valued as determinative. As an introverted person, Jung’s emphasis on fantasy and temperament in determining whether an event registers as traumatic can be understood in terms of his typology. Jung (1921) states: “The introverted attitude is normally oriented by the psychic structure, which is in principle hereditary and is inborn in the subject” (para. 623). This sensibility is evidenced in Jung’s attitude toward trauma which often seems to translate into a psychology that subtly emphasizes self-forgiveness rather than the role of forgiving, or being forgiven by, others. What is to be made of this distinctive Jungian emphasis in the present day? Partly in reaction to the early psychoanalytic tendency of locating psychological difficulties inside of people rather than social systems, North American psychoanalysis over the past 50 years has shifted to see much greater curative value in the nature of the therapeutic relationship itself (as opposed to the analyst’s function, defined more narrowly, as an interpreter of the patient’s experience). Where the analytic ideal was once expressed in terms of clinical neutrality, psychoanalysts are now more likely to prize active participation, spontaneity, and a willingness to be vulnerable. In response to the early analytic emphasis on unconscious fantasy, the influence of the environment has come to assume a much more central role in psychoanalytic theorizing. Many analysts have come to assert that the recapitulation of past trauma is an inevitable feature of all analytic work—this entailing the unconscious participation of both patient and clinician. Forgiveness has thus assumed a central role in appreciating the relational mechanics of clinical work. Where the recapitulation of past experiences is thought to occur inevitably within the treatment, the analyst’s capacity to recognize their own “mistakes” and the patient’s capacity to make use of this recognition broadly reflect questions of forgiveness. While these developments in the mainstream psychoanalytic world accord with certain fundamental tenets of Jung’s clinical approach (i.e. the active emotional participation of the analyst and a focus on the present moment 5), they also throw doubt upon the relatively limited role Jung places on trauma as causally determinative. Kalsched (1996) argues that Jung “is exaggerating his point” (71) when he goes so far as to state that whether or not a trauma actually occurred is irrelevant. Kalsched is perhaps a little quick to dismiss this issue given the explicit manner in which Jung makes such assertions. Rather, this tendency in Jung’s work might be seen as a significant defense of the introverted standpoint, and that his efforts to accommodate a more extroverted theory of trauma (environmental influence as causally determinative) should be understood to exist in tension with his ideas about innate sensitivity and the historically indeterminate origins of trauma. Perhaps the worldview implied by Jung’s ideas about synchronicity points the way toward a reconciliation.6 Jung (1952) coined the term “synchronicity” to refer to what he describes as an “acausal connecting principle” linking psyche with matter—a tendency which manifests in subjectively meaningful coincidences that arise between a person’s experience and events in the outer world. Despite Jung’s profound interest in synchronistic phenomena, he only formally outlined this concept in later life and the main body of his work doesn’t always reflect the implications (i.e. often appears more simply Cartesian). Because Jung generally focuses on specific examples of synchronicity, this can give the sense that synchronicities should be understood as infrequent and isolated events. However, Jung’s thinking also suggests the possibility of a broader worldview reflecting the notion of an underlying harmony between psyche and matter.7 From such a perspective, it becomes less necessary to defend a categorical distinction between trauma as expressive of innate character and trauma as expressive of environmental influence. From a synchronistic perspective, events in the world can be understood to unfold in meaningful relationship to the unfolding nature of the person. Hence the distinction between trauma as a product of temperament and trauma as something externally imposed can now be understood as two ways of perceiving the same underlying phenomenon. 176

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Consider the following passage: it is perfectly clear that the individual must meet the trauma with a quite definite inner predisposition in order to make it really effective. This inner predisposition is not to be understood as that obscure, hereditary disposition of which we know so little, but as a psychological development which reaches its climax, and becomes manifest, at the traumatic moment. ( Jung 1955, para. 217) Reading this passage in context of Jung’s ideas about synchronicity, we might detect the basis for a more complete integration of the typological possibilities of forgiveness. The occurrence of the trauma as an external event is here conceptualized as the culmination of a psychological process. From a synchronistic perspective, it becomes unnecessary to protect the introverted perspective from the sheer externality of the traumatic event. At the same time, the experienced externality or the traumatic moment is in no way diminished. This suggests the basis for a psychological perspective wherein self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others can be understood as equally weighted and more truly inseparable. In my own work (Brown 2018a, 2020), I have sought to elucidate the implications of Jung’s synchronicity principle in connection with the psychoanalytic notion of enactment. Contemporary analysts have further underscored the ubiquity of unconscious processes in our relatedness to the world. An awareness has developed of the impossibility of taking a self-reflective stance beyond this such as had classically been implied by the ideal of analytic neutrality. Our interactions are always both intrapsychic and interpersonal—reflective of our relatedness to ourselves and to external others. The notion of enactment speaks to the fashion in which we are each simultaneously performing in our relations with others the working out of our inner lives. For example, our relatedness with mothering in the world is at the same time an undertaking to work with our internal representations of mothering. But as useful as this distinction continues to be, this line of thinking tends to lean on a Cartesian distinction between self and world which appears unstable in explaining how these two domains are finally related. We struggle to preserve the foundational importance of both sides of the equation. To relate this back to our topic of forgiveness: either the self is primary, in which case the notion of forgiveness is ultimately reducible to internal states that have little to do with the reality of the other person, or the world is primary, in which case forgiveness is merely a behavioral transaction and the notion of the self an illusion. The synchronicity principle posits a correspondence between self and world, implying the possibility of a meaningful parallelism wherein both sides of this dispute are subtended by a more fundamental reality that unifies the two while preserving their difference. Jung thus comes to adopt a form of dual-aspect monism, positing psyche and matter as two sides of the same fundamental reality. In this light, it becomes possible to imagine how a relational act such as forgiveness functions in parallel with a change in the person and also, in some fundamental, sense is that change.

5. Conclusion Although the theme of forgiveness is not foregrounded in Jung’s thinking, his work is nevertheless valuable in exploring this topic from a psychological perspective. We have seen that, in so far as Jung explicitly addresses forgiveness, his emphasis lies with self-forgiveness and the confessional. However, I have argued that Jung’s thinking on this subject can be further discerned in examining the theme of trauma. The introverted sensibility of Jung’s thinking registers his approach to trauma quite distinctive. In contrast to the contemporary psychological emphasis on trauma as something externally imposed, Jung places considerable emphasis on the inner world and the subjective determinants that register an experience traumatic. While this approach tends to further 177

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reinforce a sense that Jung’s work is skewed toward self-forgiveness and personal responsibility, Jung’s efforts to also incorporate a serious recognition of the exteriority of trauma suggest a creative tension in his thinking that can be framed as a dialectic between self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others. I have suggested that the synchronistic perspective emerging with Jung’s late work offers an intriguing basis upon which this tension might be better understood.

Notes 1 This being the name he gave to his particular school of thinking. 2 It should be noted that these qualities are posited as being typically associated with the images of woman and man. However, this aspect of Jung’s thinking needn’t imply an essentialist attitude toward gender or a fixed idea about gender roles—the father archetype can be evoked by a woman and the mother by a man. 3 For the origins of the relational movement in psychoanalysis see Greenberg and Mitchell (1983). 4 Jung’s most comprehensive statement on the nature of the therapeutic relationship is offered in The Psychology of the Transference (1946), a text which leans heavily on archetypal material and is short on clinical example. 5 For further connections between Jungian psychology and contemporary psychoanalytic theory see Brown (2018b, 2017, 2020). 6 For broader reflections on this theme see Brown (2020, 2018a, 2014). 7 Several of Jung’s closest colleagues directly endorse this idea (see Progoff 1973; von Franz 1980), though it should also be noted that, in print, Jung was hesitant to fully commit to such a notion ostensibly owing to the lack of direct empirical support for it (see Jung 1952, para. 938).

References Brown, Robin S. 2014. “Evolving Attitudes.” International Journal of Jungian Studies 6 (3):243–53. Brown, Robin S. 2017. Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking Towards the Post-Relational. London & New York: Routledge. Brown, Robin S. 2018a. “Imaginal action: Towards a Jungian Conception of Enactment, and an Extraverted Counterpart to Active Imagination.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 63 (2):186–206. Brown, Robin S. 2018b. Re-Encountering Jung: Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Routledge Brown, Robin S. 2020. Groundwork for a Transperonal Psychoanalysis: Spirituality, Relationship, and Participation. London & New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1896. “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 187–221. London: The Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1900. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, ix–627. London: The Hogarth Press. Greenberg, Jay R., and Stephen A. Mitchell. 1983. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grof, Stanislav. 2000. Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. Albany, NT: State University of New York Press. Jung, C.G. 1914. “Some Crucial Points in Psychoanalysis.” In Collected Works, 252–89. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1921. “Psychological Types.” In Collected Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1928a. “On Psychic Energy.” In Collected Works, 3–66. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1928b. “The Therapeutic Value of Abreaction.” In Collected Works, 129–38. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1946. “The Psychology of the Transference.” In Collected Works, 353–537. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1952. “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” In Collected Works, 417–531. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1953. “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.” In Collected Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Jung and Forgiveness Jung, C.G. 1954a. “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.” In Collected Works, 3–41. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1954b. “Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept.” In Collected Works, 54–74. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C.G. 1955. “The Theory of Psychoanalysis.” In Collected Works, 83–228. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kalsched, Donald. 1996. The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. London & New York: Brunner-Routledge. Progoff, Ira. 1973. Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny. New York: Julian Press. Todd, Elizabeth. 1985. “The Value of Confession and Forgiveness According to Jung.” Journal of Religion and Health 24 (1):39–48. von Franz, Marie-Louise. 1980. Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul. Translated by William H. Kennedy. La Salle & London: Open Court Publishing Company.

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14 SIMONE WEIL The Impossibility of Forgiveness and the Limits of the Human Christopher Hamilton To say ‘I’ is to lie

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1 I intend in what follows to explore the understanding of forgiveness that we find in the work of Simone Weil from about 1938 onwards. This is the point from which her thinking – which in her case can in no helpful way be distinguished from her life – turned towards religion. Although she never finally converted to Catholicism, she was deeply attracted to this form of Christianity. More significantly even than that, however, was the fact that, with her whole being, she became haunted by Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere concerning the need for complete purity: no thought touched by even the slightest evil was to be tolerated; love, including for one’s enemies, was to be unconditional; all judging of others was to be rejected; wealth was an evil, ensuring that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; and so on. Everything in Weil strained towards an acceptance of this teaching in its most literal form, where her accepting it meant living exceptionlessly in accord with it: she had nothing but contempt for those who might think of themselves as Christians but who manage to convince themselves that they can somehow combine bourgeois comfort, social success, etc. with a Christian life. For her, that is bad faith (perhaps one should say: no faith). In this she shares the view of some of the fiercest critics of Christianity – Nietzsche is an obvious example, but George Orwell is another, the ferocity of whose critique is often masked by the immense, but understated, elegance of his writing – who, we might say, in one sense take Christianity more seriously than do those who espouse it. For Weil, for example, any attempt to interpret Jesus’ comments about the rich man’s entry into Heaven in such a way as to allow one legitimately to retain one’s wealth and remain a Christian was merely a lie designed to subserve human self-deception and the needs of the self – both of which Christ’s teaching was aimed to expose and destroy. To this extent, Weil, again like Nietzsche and Orwell, distinguishes the life of a Christian and a genuinely Christ-like life. She hated Nietzsche, probably because a fair bit of what she says is, in the end, not so far from what he said – for example, she accepted completely that Christianity was (ought to be; is when properly understood) the religion of the slaves – but would certainly have agreed with him that there has only ever been one Christian, and he died on the Cross. That, however, for her, only made the demand to live a Christ-like life all the more imperious. 180

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It is in the light of such an approach that Weil’s understanding of forgiveness is to be understood. In particular, in her thinking about forgiveness, she clearly has somewhere in the back of her mind Jesus’ comment to Peter (Matt 18: 22) that we are to forgive others their sins against us, not seven times, but seventy-seven times, taking this to be part of the unconditional love that Jesus requires of us.

2 It must be granted, however, that Weil wrote little directly on the notion of forgiveness – certainly at nowhere near the length that characterises her reflections on, say, necessity, gravity, force, affliction, attention, etc. Nonetheless, what she does say on forgiveness is of high philosophical, religious and spiritual interest and value. It must be remembered, however, that Weil was not in any sense a systematic thinker and most of what she wrote were notes collected in her cahiers, so much of what she was doing in the material we have from her was seeking to work things out for herself, with all the consequences – or risks – this has for ellipsis, fragmentation, exaggeration (a general feature, indeed, of her life and work: everything in Weil seeks the extreme), false starts, dead ends, truncated suggestions, etc. But this, to my mind, is not, in the end, the greatest difficulty in thinking about Weil. One must press intellectually on her because to do otherwise would be to do a disservice to the seriousness of her thought, but this is made extremely difficult by the fact that in her writing she adopts at every point a tone that suggests she took herself to have much deeper ethical and spiritual insight than others, a gesture she simultaneously sought to efface by declaring that she was of no value in herself, but had been vouchsafed insights into truth that it was her business to pass on. And because she adopts such a tone it is hard to criticise her, for there is operative on the commentator the fear, by disagreeing with her, of showing him- or herself to be rather shallow or frivolous, certainly too mundane, since there is no doubt that there is, in some ways, real depth in what Weil says, together with a vision that is beguiling, giving a constant sense that those who disagree with her are locked out of, cannot fully grasp, something that one feels somehow, at the same time, might be so revelatory of the truth that it would put an end, from one perspective, to one’s anguished sense of the confusion of life. To that extent, there is something messianic in Weil’s writing, as if she were able to show us that there, just over there, on the horizon of our quotidian concerns, life reveals its meaning and truth to us…and she has glimpsed them…. and the rest of us have to be content to plod along behind. That, at any rate, is one way to put the point, and it is one reason, in my view, why too many commentators read her in her own terms, as if they were bewitched by the tone of her work. Another, less generous way to put the point is to say that there is in Weil’s work a relentless desire to transcend the human, even a hostility to, or attack on, the human – an attack that few are willing to name as such. The justification for that claim will, I hope, have emerged by the end of my reflections here.

3 Let us begin with a startling – and obscure – comment Weil makes on forgiveness: it is – at any rate understood from a certain perspective – impossible. Here is what she says: To forgive. One cannot [On ne peut pas]. When someone has hurt us, reactions arise within us [il se crée en nous des réactions]. The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. To look for the equilibrium on another level. One must go alone to the limit. There one touches the void. (Weil 1991 [1947]: 48)

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Weil’s thought is far from clear. What does she mean? We might suppose that the issue is one of vengeance, since this is the key emotion to which she refers. Then one might imagine that she means that we can never let go of vengeful desires; or that true forgiveness involves not feeling vengeful desires in the first place; or that somehow the desire for vengeance involves a longing to undo the past.1 But we do sometimes let go of vengeful desires; and surely there are cases of those in whom such desires do not arise in the first place; and it is far from clear that such desires involve the (irrational) wish to undo the past – though this last is, as we shall see, closer to Weil’s meaning, I think, insofar as she suggests, as I shall seek to show, that we want (really want) something in forgiveness that is just as impossible to have as it would be to undo the past (and for similar reasons: we are confronted here by a desire to undo the human condition). In fact, as I shall try to make clear, the real issue here is not one of vengeance or vengeful desires. These are only, for Weil, an example of something more fundamental. That more fundamental thing is the desire for “equilibrium.” And her thought seems to be that we cannot forgive because what we seek in forgiveness is (an) equilibrium, but that we mistake the equilibrium we can achieve, at least in principle – release from being bound to the past through feelings of vengeance – for the “essential equilibrium” that we really want but cannot achieve. The latter we could only achieve by, per impossibile, transcending our condition. But, since we cannot do this, we are condemned to an impossibility which is an expression of the impossibility that we are: a permanent longing to be other than we are. What does this mean? Weil’s thought here concerning the impossibility of forgiveness concerns the impossibility of such on the level of human beings – its impossibility for us as human beings. That is the level [plan] on which forgiveness is impossible. It is only where we reach the limit of what we are as human beings that one touches the space, the emptiness, where forgiveness becomes possible. We can only forgive by transcending what we are. But we cannot do that. That is, no exercise of the will can bring us to transcend ourselves in the sense Weil has in mind. Forgiveness is impossible. Nonetheless, it is required of us. We exist here as a contradiction. We are a contradiction. This thought makes sense in the context of Weil’s thinking about gravity. Weil writes: “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Only grace is an exception” (Weil 1991 [1947]: 41). I shall come back to the question of grace. For the moment, let us pursue things from the point of view of human beings as natural beings, part of nature – as subject to what Weil calls gravity. Human beings, from that point of view, are, for Weil, like machines that are relentlessly self-concerned. Everything they do aims at self-preservation, self-aggrandisement, the acquisition of power and security, and it expresses a desire to shore up the flagging ego and protect themselves. In an exposition of La Rochefoucauld’s thinking, particularly the notion of amour-propre, W.G. Moore talks of the former’s sense “of the human person as an idle machine which is galvanised by the passions, or by anything that affects its survival” (Moore 1969: 97), and that captures much of the spirit of what Weil intends; and in this we see her as extending a line of reflection deep at the heart of the thinking of the French moralistes. This does not mean, for Weil, that human beings are always selfish: we need to distinguish between selfishness and egoism. All human beings are all the time egoistic in the sense just explained, but they are not always and everywhere selfish: my egoism might well be expressed in my concern for those I care about, but this does not mean that I do not really care about them. It means, rather, that, even as I care for them, I am protecting myself, shoring myself up, etc. This is shown, for Weil, by the fact that human beings need a constant supply of energy to offset the energy they expend. I may care about you and help you, but what I cannot do, in Weil’s terms, is do that and accept no return of energy whatsoever: a feeling of satisfaction, your thanks, someone’s praise or whatever. This is what Weil means by “equilibrium.” It is a law – it is an aspect of the gravity that controls human life – that human beings cannot bear disequilibrium. What they fear is what Weil calls “the void” (le vide) and they flee it seeking compensation. Of course, all people 182

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some of the time and some people most of the time are also selfish: they do not care a fig for others’ concerns. But there is, for Weil, no difference in kind between egoism and selfishness: both are equally governed by gravity. Hence: That which is directly contrary to evil is never of a higher order of good. Often hardly above evil! Examples: theft and bourgeois respect for property; adultery and the ‘respectable [hônnete] woman’; the savings banks and waste; lies and ‘sincerity’. (Weil 1991 [1947]: 132) The void is not something that lies, as it were, at the outer rim of human experience. Despite the fact that Weil talks about going to the limit and touching the void, the void is not something that is a bound of human experience. It is what we in fact are. But we do not know this (better, perhaps: do not acknowledge this), because the whole of human life is a flight from this knowledge. A glimpse of the void, of what we really are, is vouchsafed us in certain experiences: Man only escapes from the laws of this world for the length of time of a flash of lightning. Moments when everything stops, of pure intuition, of mental emptiness [vide mental], of acceptance of the moral void [vide moral]. It is through such moments that he is capable of the supernatural. (Weil 1991 [1947]: 55) But the most significant glimpse we have of the void is in what Weil calls “affliction,” the central image of which, for her, is Christ on the cross, a form of suffering that involves spiritual, physical and social agony. But we cannot live in the light of this knowledge, not even in the experience of affliction, because we do all we can to flee our own affliction and the sight of it in others: there is a kind of natural revulsion of the flesh, of the embodied spirit, in the face of affliction. Hence it is that Weil writes: “Impossible to forgive him who has hurt us if the evil lowers us. One must think that he has not lowered us, but revealed our true level [niveau]” (Weil 1991 [1947]: 47). Our true level is our being as the void, as nothing. According to Weil, it is only in accepting that that I can accept another’s hurting of me. But I cannot accept that, at least insofar as I am subject to natural laws that govern my behaviour. So the “equilibrium” that I really want in forgiving is one in which I see my own nothingness, see that, as it were, there could not be anything to forgive because my own substantiality was the illusion – the necessary illusion – to which I am subject and which generates the sense that anything I get by way of treatment from others might reduce me. What I really want is the “essential equilibrium” that is my recognition of my nothingness – as it were, my total moral poverty, total moral insignificance and unimportance (“moral,” here, understood in the broadest sense) – but were I properly conscious of that, I would have never felt the insult or injury that led to the need to forgive in the first place. My felt injury or insult and the desire to reassert an “equilibrium” in its light is an illusion about my condition but one to which I am necessarily subject as a human being. The “essential equilibrium” is one that would erase all that from the first because it would reveal to me my nothingness which, in another way, I know myself to be but from which I am in flight. Hence, I am a contradiction, an impossibility, and forgiveness – the whole complex of injury or insult that generates the need for it, or the refusal of it, etc. – is one expression or manifestation of that, of the impossibility of human life. So when Weil says that forgiveness is impossible, she means that, even when I forgive another and am, in this sense, released from feelings of vengeance, this forgiveness remains “impossible” because it is based on an illusion about what I am, namely, that I am the kind of thing (creature) who could be owed something – that I am something, rather than nothing.

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4 What this means is that there is a sense, for Weil, in which the very need to forgive is illusory. That is, we can only think that someone requires our forgiveness because he hurt us or withheld some good from us, but his doing so, that is, our supposing that he hurt us or withheld some good from us, depends upon our supposing that we deserved or merited or were entitled to – at any rate: should have had – something other than that which we did have (the hurt inflicted or the privation of the good withheld). Yet we think this is possible only by supposing that we are something rather than nothing, that we are not the void, for the void is just that, a void, and it makes no sense to speak of a void as deserving, meriting, etc. something or other. We imagine that others owe us something because we imagine ourselves to be other than the void, but we are not. If we were (per impossibile) able to grasp this, we would see that nothing is owed us and, hence, that no one can give us what we merit, or less than that: to suppose otherwise is a kind of category mistake, taking ourselves to be something other than that which we are. Hence: “Every form of recompense constitutes a degradation of energy” (Weil 1991 [1947]: 51). And: A being whom I love disappoints [me]. I have written to him. Impossible that he not reply by saying the same to me as I have said to myself in his name. Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. Forgive them [Leur remettre] this debt. To accept that they are other than creatures of our imagination is to imitate God’s renunciation. (Weil 1991 [1947]: 52) What we have to forgive in others is, for Weil, therefore, not so much that they have hurt us or deprived us of something as that they are as they are. We have to forgive them for being human beings. God, in creation, has, on Weil’s highly unorthodox view, withdrawn, contracted into himself, allowed something to exist that is not himself, and all created things are thus governed by necessity, which is diametrically opposed to God’s freedom, goodness and love, and is the limiting condition for gravity (Weil often speaks also of “force,” but “gravity” appears to be her term for the master force that governs creatures, perhaps the only force that there is after all). Necessity governs all that exists (and what exists is what is created by God’s withdrawal: for Weil, it is misleading at best, and probably simply mistaken, to say that God exists) and our reality, the reality for human beings “here below,” is contact with necessity. Weil’s image of the waves of the sea that blindly obey necessity – the forces to which they exposed, which impact on them in specific ways, given their nature (chemical composition, etc.) – gives a sense of what she has in mind. Human behaviour in all its aspects, including as thoughts, emotions, etc., is as governed by necessity as are the waves. From that point of view, human beings have absolutely no choice about whether to obey necessity or not. The only things they can do here is obey willingly rather than unknowingly. The spirit in which one obeys is key here, not whether one obeys at all, about which, as I have said, one has no choice. So: When…a man turns away from God, he simply gives himself up to the law of gravity. Then he thinks he can decide and choose, but he is only a thing, a stone that falls. If we examine human society and souls closely and with real attention, we see that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and as exact as the laws of gravitation. To know this is profitable and necessary. Those whom we call criminals are only tiles blown off a roof by the wind and falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice which made them into such tiles. (Weil 1977 [1951]: 69–70) 184

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Hence: “Human crime…is part of blind necessity, because criminals do not know what they are doing” (Weil 1977 [1951]: 68). Weil has, of course, Christ’s words on the cross in mind here: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

5 Weil thinks, then, that when we have the idea that forgiveness of another is required of us on account of something specific he has done, this is an illusion, for there is nothing real here by which we could be aggrieved if we were only to see things as they really are, that is, our own being as the void. However, that for which we do need to forgive the wrongdoer is his doing whatever he did qua creature subject to the force of necessity. Forgiveness in this sense bypasses both the specific harm caused and the character of the wrongdoer to focus instead on his basic ontological condition. Yet, at the same time, this forgiveness is impossible because, although, obviously enough, we can think the truth of our condition – otherwise, Weil would not be able to provide the account she gives – we cannot embody it in our lives, at least insofar as we act and feel qua human beings, subject to the laws to which all natural phenomena are subject. We do not yet have before us all the details of Weil’s account of forgiveness, but we should, I think, try and make sense at this stage of what we have so far. It is clear in all this, I think, as I have already suggested, that one thing Weil wishes to articulate is a fundamental contradiction in the human condition. Her thinking about forgiveness is, indeed, only one expression of the contradictory nature of our lives, for Weil’s philosophy stages over and over a return to this feature of our condition. In this, she expresses those features deep within Christianity that seek to overturn, hollow out, extirpate anything that we could think of as expressing ordinary, natural features of human psychology. Of course, what these are is no doubt not always clear, and the concept of the natural is notoriously fraught; but whatever else is the case, the last thing we would expect of human beings, I take it, is that they not judge, love their enemies, reject wealth, etc. If someone hurts you and you feel anger, resentment and a desire to take revenge, no one will be surprised. If you overcome these feelings – something that is often thought to be central to the act of forgiveness2 – then you may well be admired, seen to be a person of deep humanity. If, however, you genuinely express love for the person in question, well, that will need explanation; that would appear to go beyond the limits of the human in at least one important and tolerably clear sense. And Christianity has certainly had the monopoly on trying to give the explanation and tell us what are the limits of the human that are in question. It is, indeed, partly the need for such explanation that Weil has in mind in speaking of human beings’ exposure to gravity. Forgiveness shows one aspect of our existence as something contradictory, for Weil, because it is at once impossible for us as human beings to forgive and yet possible insofar as it is a possibility for us as humans through the operation of grace (as I have said, I shall return to the question of grace) – something that takes us beyond our condition as human beings (subject to natural laws) and yet is inherent in our condition precisely as a possibility (as, for example, is shown by the fact that this is not so for animals). Forgiveness takes us beyond what we are; it can only be revealed insofar as we are, so to speak, outside or beyond ourselves, and yet it brings us back to what we are insofar as this possibility – the possibility of forgiving – is at the centre of our being as the kind of creatures we are. Weil is articulating here an old idea that it is the very nature of human beings to be beyond themselves: naturally, so to speak, they are beyond nature. Some may wish to object to this aspect of Weil’s thinking, that is, her claim that our fundamental condition is contradictory. I am not myself disposed to raise such an objection. Although I would not articulate the idea of the contradictory nature of our existence in just the kind of terms that Weil makes available, I do nonetheless think that human existence is fundamentally contradictory, that we are, as I have put it elsewhere, ontological misfits in the universe.3 More pressing, 185

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I think, is what we are to make of the fact that Weil seems to be riding roughshod over plenty of distinctions that we might want to make when thinking about forgiveness. One, for example, is that between different kinds of evil to which the victim is subject. For what Weil’s reflections seem to do is to erase all the differences between different kinds of harm or hurt and therefore different ways of forgiving. My forgiving you for letting me down when we were supposed to be meeting for lunch is nothing like the forgiveness I might seek to offer you for your betrayal of me concerning something important in my life or your refusal or incapacity to help when I really needed you. As I have said, Weil’s interest in thinking about forgiveness is in the fundamental ontological condition of those whom we seek to forgive. Why is this? I take it that the answer is that the kind of forgiveness that Weil has in mind is unconditional forgiveness.4 What seems uppermost in Weil’s mind is a sense of what one might call a common fellowship among human beings, our common humanity. This, for her, has a distinctly tragic dimension. The thought is clearly that we all wander through life like outcasts, stumbling largely blindly from one mistake to another, not understanding what we are doing, living in a dream. Indeed, the image of a dream is one that Weil often uses: we try to fill up the void through the exercise of the imagination, seeking what Samuel Johnson called “supplemental satisfactions” in the face of, in flight from, the poverty of what we really are (for Weil, as we have seen: the void). It is this vision that grounds her sense of the nature of forgiveness. Such forgiveness does not await the repentance of the evil-doer; nor does it deal in a currency of respect for self or other, or matters of human dignity or questions of rights; and it is not interested in issues of punishment or reform. Certainly, Weil has things to say on all of those topics, most of it deeply sceptical,5 but this is not directly her concern here. Here, the central idea is captured, I think, by a sense of pity for human beings in the confusion of their life, for their being subject to forces that they can neither know nor control, for their foolishness and wretchedness. The forgiveness in question is underwritten by a very powerful sense of: “There but for the grace of God go I.” The evil-doer is my brother or sister, no different in kind from me; it is a matter of luck that I have not done what he or she has done – and perhaps, tomorrow, I may do it. No one knows his own limits or what he might be capable of doing in any given situation; we are all fragile, vulnerable, weak.

6 There is a corollary of Weil’s claim that, in forgiveness, what we forgive is the other out of a sense of common humanity with him or her. For it is God who is responsible for the fact that there are such creatures as we are. It turns out, therefore, that the ultimate object of our forgiveness of the other is God. It is God whom we have to forgive. We lay the blame for our failures and shortcomings upon things and creatures other than us. In the end, we are accusing God. If we forgive God for our sins, he forgives us for them. All our debts are to God, and God is also our only debtor. (Weil 2015 [1970]: 210) Once more, Weil’s view is highly unorthodox: God consents to Adam’s fall, in a non-temporal sense, because in this way, in sin, the absolute value of the good (the Good) is revealed. Weil is addressing an old and tormenting problem faced by Christianity, and perhaps best seen in the figure of Judas and his betrayal of Christ. If Judas had not betrayed Christ, Christ would not have been crucified. But had he not been crucified, his work of redemption could not have been effected. Judas, in his betrayal, is a necessary part of Christ’s redemption of us. From that point of view, the sinner is not a contingent part of the human condition, and sin is not something that 186

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could, in principle, be eliminated. Rather, these are necessary conditions of our existence, where that means not simply that, as a matter of fact, we have to know evil to know good, but that evil is part of the total economy of life such that, were it to be eliminated, there would be no human life. Weil, longing for the purity of untarnished goodness, saw that there was no such thing in the world as goodness that was not necessarily intertwined with evil, and thus sought to construe this evil as something that had to be loved, as if that might be redemptive of it, rendering it no longer evil. God is perfect goodness, but he creates us as creatures governed by necessity, creatures who must sin, without our even grasping why in any given case. God is thus an object of our resentment. Hence: The most difficult remission of debts consists in forgiving God for our sins. The sense of guilt is accompanied by a sort of rancour and hatred against the Good, against God, and it is the effect of this mechanism that makes crime harmful to the soul. (Weil 2015 [1970]: 140) And: One can only excuse men for evil by accusing God of it. If one accuses God one forgives, because God is the Good. Amid the multitude of those who seem to owe us something, God is our only real debtor…Sin is an offence offered to God from the resentment at the debts he owes us and does not pay us. By forgiving God we cut the root of sin in ourselves. At the bottom of every sin there is anger against God. If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures. (Weil 2015 [1970]: 94–5, italics mine) Further: “Just as God, through the mouth of Christ, accused himself of the Passion, so we should accuse God for every human affliction. And just as God replies with silence, so we should reply with silence” (Weil 2015 [1970]: 95). Weil’s thought here is, in part, that evil – resentment, anger – directed at another simply circulates: it is just passed on. “Here below,” evil is simply exchanged for evil. Once it is directed to that which is pure or absolute Good, namely, God, it disappears: only God can rid us of evil. But Weil, pushing this thought even further, suggests that, looked at aright, good and evil are not so much two categories or types of moral experience as simply two perspectives on the same thing, two ways of talking of the same thing that, ultimately, lose all meaning. If only we could see things as they truly are, these categories would, as it were, be rendered null and void, and be replaced by a total acceptance of existence – Weil here speaks, as Nietzsche had done, of amor fati – which existence would be grasped as beautiful. Or perhaps we should say that, when viewed correctly, evil loses it meaning, since all is beautiful: The beings gifted with reason who do not love God are…wholly obedient but only in the manner of a falling stone. Their soul is also matter, psychic matter, humbled to a mechanism as rigorous as that of gravity. Even their belief in their own free arbitration, the illusions of their pride, their defiance, their revolts, are all simply phenomena as rigorously determined as the refraction of light. Considered thus, as inert matter, the worst criminals make up a part of the order of the world and therefore of the beauty of the world. Everything obeys God, therefore everything is perfect beauty. To know that, to know it really, is to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect. (Weil 1987 [1957]: 193–4)

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Again: “The universe is beautiful, even including evil, which, as part of the order of the world, has a sort of terrible beauty. We feel it” (Weil 2015 [1970]): 329). As Lissa McCullough puts it in expounding this aspect of Weil’s thought: “in an ultimate sense, evil as such is entirely good” (McCullough 2014: 91). It is clear, I think, that something has gone badly wrong. What started off in Weil as an acute sense of the fragility and vulnerability of human beings has turned into monstrous – well, what? Indifference or insensitivity would not capture it, but it is something like that. One should not even think that the camps, the genocides, the massacres, the wars, etc. are beautiful, part of the beauty of the world. No one who is looking clear-sightedly at such things could entertain such a thought – though, of course, Weil is not alone in saying such things about evil.6 Only from the protective enclosure of academic discourse does it even seem possible to suppose such a thing. But Weil cannot, after all, be accused of that since, as I noted earlier, she sought in every way to close the gap between thinking and feeling, between reflection and life, and must have suffered agonies at being required, as she saw it, to embrace such a thought. She set herself to “love evil in all its forms… [including] the sufferings of other men insofar as we are not called upon to relieve them” (1977 [1951]: 3), but this is an intense act of self-inflicted violence. Put it this way: most people, most of the time, simply ignore the fact that, as Johnson put it, we live in a world “bursting with sin and sorrow.” Some, a very few highly sensitive spirits, are tormented by this, finding it impossible simply to turn away, as the rest of us do. Weil was one of them, as was Nietzsche. Nietzsche sought to bear this by fantasising a kind of adamantine strength that could cope with it all. Weil made the same move by trying to get herself to think that what she was witnessing in the world was, in the end, in its ultimate meaning, good. Both of them were destroyed by the attempt, and both of them said some pretty dreadful things in the process. But they cast a light, nonetheless, on the terrible indifference of the rest of us.

7 Montaigne in his final great, perhaps greatest, essay De l’expérience, into which he sought to compress the staggering wealth of his thought, wrote (Montaigne 1580): They [people] want to transcend themselves and escape their condition as human beings. This is madness: instead of becoming angels they become beasts; instead of rising high, they crash down. These transcendental moods fill me with fear, like lofty, inaccessible heights. Weil is guilty of this madness; she loses touch here – and elsewhere – with her humanity. In aiming to be so much more than human, in seeking to transcend her condition, she falls lower than she would have had she not sought this escape, to use Montaigne’s term. Any God whose perfection involves his knowing the evil of the world to be beautiful – and any God who might demand of us that we seek for the same perfection – refutes himself, not so much by showing that he does not exist as by showing that to accept him would be indecent. Of course, Weil is certainly not alone in wishing to transcend her condition. On the contrary, it seems built into human beings to wish to be other than they are, or, to put the point in the kind of way Stanley Cavell was wont to do, to attack the ordinary conditions of their existence as being inadequate to the demands they make on them. This is an expression of terror or horror in the face of their own vulnerability. And it is why we need again and again the thinking of someone like Montaigne to remind us that we are dealing here, indeed, with a kind of madness: he helps us learn that to face this madness is the central task that we each face in trying to be a human being and that it is a task we can neither complete nor escape but to which we should not just capitulate. And, just as importantly, he helps us learn how we might seek to do that with a modicum of decorum. 188

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But the point goes further than one about the view of evil that Weil offers. There is a total absence in her thinking not only of Montaigne’s urbanity but also of anything light, delicate, tender, anything that could minister to the play of life, to a sense of the body as offering deep and real pleasure, of the rapture and intoxication we sense in being part of the world of animals and plants. There is no love in her of what George Orwell called the surface of life, of its movement and flow. For sure, her talk of the beauty of the world is intended to head off such a sense of her work, but it is unconvincing, not simply on account of its connection with evil, as we have just seen, but because it always, in fact, appears as an afterthought in her work, an afterthought to her thinking on affliction, necessity and the rest. And, it is, in any case, completely obvious that her work lacks all of the innocent delight in existence that we find in a thinker like Montaigne.

8 Two examples might help to get closer to a proper understanding of what I am suggesting, casting, as they do, Weil’s thinking in a revealing light. The first concerns how someone else coped with his affliction. Brian Keenan, a northern Irish writer, spent four and a half years, from April 1986 onwards, as a hostage of Islamic Jihad in Beirut. He wrote an extraordinary book about his experience, An Evil Cradling. Among the many things that stand out in this book, one is particularly important for my reflections here. At one point he discusses how he and a fellow hostage, John McCarthy, held with him in the same cell, would play and fool around, tell jokes, invent companions and the like, in order not to give in to the utter wretchedness of their condition. Keenan writes: In [our] laughter we discovered something of what life really is. We were convinced by the conditions we were kept in and the lives that we managed to lead that if there was a God that God was a comedian. In humour, sometimes hysterical, sometimes calculated, often childish, life was returned to us. (Keenan 1992: 172) It is the idea that God is a comedian that is so striking here. There is nothing to parallel it in Weil, and nothing to parallel the importance of humour. This whole dimension of life – clownish, playful, childlike, silly, mischievous, joking – is wholly lacking in what she says (T.S. Eliot remarked that she had no sense of humour). Still less is there the sense that, in touching such things, one touches life itself, that here one truly comes alive. I do not mean this as a criticism of Weil. It is meant, rather, as an expression of a kind of fascinated horror on my part for Weil that the human spirit can do such violence to itself, can treat this fugitive existence of ours as one in which we should take as little delight as possible. For all her sense of human beings’ vulnerability, she wishes to close down sources of joy in this world. Isaiah Berlin said of Tolstoy that he was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog: he had an immense sense of the variety, confusion, ramshackle delight of human affairs, but wanted to relate it all to a central, defining vision in which this variety would be neatly ordered and the shambles removed. Weil, however, it seems always was a hedgehog: she seemed never really to have much sense of delight in the chaotic confusion of life and her vision, though utterly brilliant, was, in the way I have been exploring, life-denying. That may seem unfair, but perhaps the point can be made also in another way, and this is my second example. At one point, Boswell records Johnson as saying that, “It is as unreasonable for a man to go into a Carthusian convent for fear of being immoral, as for a man to cut off his hands for fear he should steal.” He went on:

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All severity that does not tend to produce good, or prevent evil, is idle. I said to the Lady Abbess of a convent, “Madam, you are here, not for the love of virtue, but the fear of vice.” She said, “She should remember this as long as she lived.” (Boswell 2019 [1791]: 266) Spiritually speaking, Tolstoy cut off his hands. And I am inclined to think that Weil did so as well. Again and again we find her constraining or constricting the scope of what is worth our attention. Witness this comment (Weil 1968: 148): The future is made of the same stuff as the present. We are well aware that the good which we possess at present…is not sufficient; yet we believe that on the day when we get a little more we shall be satisfied. We believe this because we lie to ourselves. If we really reflect for a moment we know it is false. Or again, if we are suffering from illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; as soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else….One always wants something more; one wants something to live for. But it is only necessary to be honest with oneself to realize that there is nothing in this world to live for. We have only to imagine all our desires satisfied; after a time we should become discontented. We should want something else and we should be miserable through not knowing what to want. A thing everyone can do is to keep his attention fixed upon this truth. Now, I do not disagree about human beings’ insufficiency to themselves. On the contrary, I think Weil is quite right. But I am objecting to the proposed solution. In Weil, that solution is the spiritual equivalent of cutting off one’s hands. For the response that she entirely rejects is to seek to live in a way that accepts that insufficiency and learns to find delight in it. That is what she means by telling us that we should keep our mind fixed upon the truth she articulates. Of finding delight in the way indicated she was temperamentally incapable and she sought in every possible way to remove herself from such a compromise. If we are leaky vessels, to use Plato’s image, then we are not going to change that. So perhaps we should try to learn to enjoy being such vessels. This is why Montaigne’s essays are full of comments about the things he likes to do: eat melons, scratch his ear and so on. These seem banal, but they are of the first importance. He is saying: find in your life the things that can give you satisfaction, happiness, joy, contentment as the kind of being you are. Weil resolutely rejects such an invitation and speaks as if only those benightedly limited spiritually could disagree. Her severity does not, I think, reduce evil or promote good because it does nothing to help us be a little more satisfied with our lot or more at home in the world. All this is relevant to the topic of forgiveness in Weil. For her insight into human beings’ vulnerability and the sense this delivers of human fellowship – the immense charity of this view – is something that is sadly lacking in life and philosophy. But she is, I am suggesting, inadequate to her own response. A sense of human fellowship cannot depend just on such an idea, that is, that of human beings’ vulnerability, without being conceptually and spiritually impoverished. It needs also an understanding of the pleasures and joys, the delights and charms of life, of the things that keep us going and – this is the key point – attached to the earth. Weil, however, has no adequate sense of that, and, in the end, does not want us to be attached to the earth. If my sense of the need of unconditional forgiveness for human beings is underwritten by my fellowship with them, then that fellowship needs more than Weil allows it. The fact that Weil does not allow this is of a piece with her ending up saying that evil has to be loved. Both are expressions of a lack of humanity in Weil, who sacrifices this in her attempted fulfilment of her vocation for sainthood. It is significant that she calls this “detachment.” As I have said, she does not want us to

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be attached to the world. But virtually everyone else does want this, and is, in the end, prepared to pay the price for it.

9 The closest Weil came to the type of charity to herself of which Keenan speaks is in the kind of thought she articulates when, having said, as we saw earlier, that we must forgive others the debt we imagine them to owe us and accept the fact that they are other than creatures of our imagination, she says: “I too am other than I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness” (Weil 1991 [1947]: 52). The thought is clearly that I am not what I think I am. I take myself to be important and what I do to matter. But if I fully grasp my utter unimportance then I can forgive myself my failings, which disappear as I see myself as nothing more than subject to necessity to which I consent. We should not, of course, think that Weil is now claiming that it matters not what I do. The spiritual balancing act here is much more subtle than that. It involves a sense that one sees oneself simultaneously as charged with the heaviest responsibility for one’s deeds and also from a great distance in the vision of the world God has in his perfection, where all, including sin, is beautiful. Such a spiritual condition – and it is never in a person’s possession, but must be continually renewed – is vanishingly rare, and probably makes no sense as a possibility unless and until seen embodied in someone’s life. Maybe the only place we can see that is in Christ’s life. At any rate, Weil clearly thinks that there is a forgiveness of self of the kind towards which she gestures.

10 Forgiveness, I have said, is for Weil impossible. There is nothing one can do in order to forgive. However, forgiveness becomes possible as a gift of grace. But one cannot seek grace, and wanting it ensures that one will not receive it. All one can do is to be open to receiving it. To be open in this way is simply to accept the void. We normally fill the void with imagination. When we stop doing this, the void is filled with grace. But it is grace itself that makes it possible to stop filling the void with the imagination. In that sense, the void is itself made by grace because, when it is filled with the products of the imagination, it is not even there – it is full. Hence: Necessity for a reward, to receive the equivalent of that which one gives. But if, doing violence to this necessity, one leaves a void, a kind of suction of air is produced and a supernatural reward results. It does not come if one receives other wages: it is the void that makes it come. The same with the remission of debts (which concerns not simply the evil that others have inflicted on us, but also the good we have done them). There again, one accepts a void in oneself. To accept the void in oneself is supernatural. Where does one find the energy for an act without compensation? The energy must come from elsewhere. (Weil 1991 [1947]: 54) And: Whoever endures the void for even a moment either receives supernatural bread or falls. Terrible risk, but one must take it, even when there is no hope [et même un moment sans espérance]. But one must not throw oneself into it. (Weil 1991 [1947]: 55) Enduring the void is “contrary to all the laws of nature” (Weil 1991 [1947]: 53). 191

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To receive grace is, for Weil, to renounce utterly the self. I must cease to think in terms of “I,” of myself as the centre of the world, which just is my egoism, my existence, as I said earlier. I must also cease to think of anyone else, anyone I love, as the centre of the world. The centre of the world is outside the world; it is God. All I can do is consent to the necessity that governs all. Such consent is the receiving of grace; it is the destruction of the self; it is my becoming nothing – the void that I am – and the way in which God can love me, which is to love himself through me as a complete emptiness. Our existence is God’s will that we should consent not to exist. My capacity to say “I” is of a piece with my being in a state of sin, since that capacity means that I take myself to be the centre of the world and am thus indifferent to others, in varying degrees. As I have already said, Weil is right to be drawing our attention to our terrible indifference to the suffering of others. We could and should be more sensitive to this than we are. But once again, Weil shows that, in the end, she wishes to deny the conditions of human existence. She wishes me to love others with a complete giving of myself that is utterly free of a sense of “I.” And yet my love for, care of, attention to others depends upon the fact that others say “I” of themselves: you want someone’s care because you take yourself to be the centre of the world (in Weil’s sense). So Weil is asking us to love others while thinking that, if only they were thinking and feeling correctly, they would not want this at all, for they would no longer say “I” and simply consent to whatever came their way. There is a kind of double-mindedness here: I am to love you all the while thinking that the only way this love makes sense is because you have failed to be what you really are, because you are in flight from the void that you are. This is not the point that we could all love better than we do, or, indeed, receive love better than we do. Nor is it the point that human love is always compromised, incomplete, in various ways shabby. It is, rather, all that and a total incapacity, a refusal, to live with it, a complete refusal to accept human love for what it is. Hence, for Weil, love – that is, the kind of love she favours – conceals within itself a rejection of the beloved person as a human being, and harbours a kind of contempt for him or her as its guilty secret. For sure, human love is shabby; but it is wonderful in its shabbiness. It is, perhaps, in the end, all we have, and it is enough. If I love you as a human being I take you for the centre of the world, your centre, part of my centre and rightly so, and I do so knowing that others take themselves to be their centre, a different centre; but about them, I do not care in this way. Human love is partial and affirms its partiality, finds it partiality adequate to itself because inevitable. Human love involves need. Weil can only see this as sinful, as an assertion of the “I.” In the context of erotic love she thus writes: “[T]he instinct called sexual…is alien to love, except insofar as there is thought of children. That is why chastity is indispensable to love. It is outraged as soon as need and desire, even reciprocal, enter in” (Weil 2015 [1970]: 10). The kind of love she favours will not accept need and desire and, indeed, rejects them. I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Weil loved her parents and a few others with a full-blooded human love. But somewhere in her, she saw this as a failure, and her writings express this. Hence, her claim that I should always think of the one I love as dead: then, in my need of him or her, I can, after all, ask nothing, demand nothing; need is, after all, neutralised. If grace, then, is what allows us to forgive, but comes only through the destruction of the “I”, then, once again, Weil is inadequate to her own thinking. She gets to where she wants to be only by asking us to relinquish our humanity. Weil’s thinking on forgiveness helps us see something of what is at stake in these matters. But no one can really claim to believe what she says here without either doing immense violence – as Weil did – to his humanity, or falling into a sentimentality that may seem edifying but is refuted by his life. 11 Where does all this leave us? For Weil, forgiveness is not, as we usually suppose, an act that releases another from the burden of the wrong he has done us, freeing us at the same time from feelings of resentment and rancour. Rather, in the sense we have of the need or requirement to forgive another we are to see, she suggests a revelation about our own mistaken sense 192

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of our own importance: given our (true; real) unimportance, there is nothing anyone can (really; truly) do to us that would require our forgiveness. We are owed nothing. We are all in need of redemption for our condition, regardless of what we do. But God is the author of us in that condition, so when we experience the demand to forgive another, we must direct our resentment towards God. And God, being wholly good, will extinguish the resentment. Weil thinks that, somehow, we all know all this to be true, but that we are in flight from it. When we direct our resentment and forgiveness to another, we know that we are mistaken; we know that these must be directed towards God. Yet we know we cannot do this. The will here can only impede what is necessary. And what is necessary is nothing more and nothing less that opening ourselves to grace. This would be a kind absolute passivity, an amor fati, an acceptance and love for all, including those who have hurt us. But this we cannot do – not because we are human, all too human, but because we are simply human.

Notes 1 I owe these suggestions to Glen Pettigrove. 2 See, for example, Glen Pettigrove’s comment and further discussion: “‘I forgive you’…involves the forswearing of hostile reactive attitudes” (Pettigrove 2016 [2012]: 13). 3 See Hamilton (2016). 4 For a discussion – and defence – of such forgiveness from a different perspective, see Garrard and McNaughton (2003). 5 I have sought to say something about these aspects of Weil’s thought in Hamilton (2005) and (2008). 6 Cf. my comments on Richard Swinburne in Hamilton (2019) and Kenneth Surin’s critique of John Hick’s reading of Augustine’s theodicy in Surin (2004).

References Boswell, J. (2019 [1791]), The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. II, Frankfurt am Main: Outlook Verlag Garrard, E. and McNaughton, D. (2003) “In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103, 39–60 Hamilton, C. (2005) “Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’: Between the Personal and the Impersonal”, Harvard Theological Review 98:2, 187–207 Hamilton, C. (2008) “Power, Punishment and Reconciliation in the Political and Social Thought of Simone Weil”, European Journal of Social Theory, 11:3, 315–30 Hamilton, C. (2016) A Philosophy of Tragedy, London: Reaktion Hamilton. C. (2019) “Philosophy and Religion, Hope and Rapture”, European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 11:3, 115–34 Keenan, B. (1992) An Evil Cradling, London: BCA McCullough, L. (2014) The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil, London: I.B. Tauris Montaigne, M (1580) Les Essais, ed. P. Villey and V.-L. Saulnier. Online edition by P. Desan, University of Chicago. Available at: https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/montessaisvilley/ Moore, W.G. (1969) La Rochefoucauld: His Mind and His Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press Pettigrove, G. (2016 [2012]) Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press Surin, K. (2004) Theology and the Problem of Evil, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Weil, S. (1968) On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, London: Oxford University Press, tr. Richard Rees Weil, S. (1977 [1951]) Waiting on God, London: Fount, tr. Emma Crauford Weil, S. (1987 [1957]) Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, London: Ark, tr. Emma Crauford Weil, S. (1991 [1947]) La pesanteur et la grâce, Paris: Plon Weil, S. (2015 [1970]) First and Last Notebooks, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, tr. Richard Rees

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15 THE GIFT OF FORGIVENESS Perspectives from the French Philosophical Tradition Christina M. Gschwandtner 1. Introduction Philosophy in continental Europe in the early and mid-twentieth century was for obvious historical reasons first of all preoccupied with evil and guilt, rather than forgiveness. In light of the atrocities of the Shoah, the very mention of forgiveness somehow seemed already a kind of betrayal. Instead, the focus was on plumbing the depths of the human capacity for evil and finding ways of ensuring that nothing like this would ever happen again. Notions like the “immemorial” or the “imprescriptible” highlighted the absolute uniqueness of this singular evil, its incomparable nature defying human comprehension.1 Especially in France, many thinkers had a Jewish background and those who survived had lost countless relatives and friends in the camps or had themselves been subject to various sorts of injustice.2 It would be no exaggeration to say that twentieth-century “Continental” philosophy cannot be understood or appreciated without taking seriously the weight of memory of the Shoah. No easy move to forgiveness was possible here. Maybe the most striking demonstration of this is the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, motivated most profoundly by the need to articulate the ethical injunction of care for the other, “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger,” the vulnerable “other” who calls me to supreme and irrevocable responsibility. Although Lévinas’ later work goes so far as to call for “substitution” for the other, being responsible even for the other’s responsibility, to the point of becoming “hostage” to the other, he does not engage in any sustained reflection on forgiveness.3 The moral philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch is probably the first to confront the question of forgiveness directly and to do so deliberately in view of what it would mean to forgive Germans. He engages the question in his 1967 book Le pardon, but provides a quite different perspective in his 1971 less academic text Pardonner, later reprinted as L’Imprescriptible. Jacques Derrida gave two years of seminars and several lectures on the topic of perjury and pardon in the late nineties, drawing on and responding to Jankélévitch, reflecting on several contemporary public acts of requests for pardon, and commenting on a variety of literary and philosophical sources on the topic. Others have picked up on these treatments and criticized them or carried them further. Paul Ricœur ends his monumental Memory, History, Forgetting with an epilogue entitled “Difficult Forgiveness” that responds to both Jankélévitch and Derrida explicitly. Jean-Luc Marion considers the question of forgiveness—indirectly responding to Derrida—in the context of a reflection on gift and sacrifice, juxtaposing an analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear with an interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son. Interestingly, in all of these treatments, forgiveness is linked closely to the notion of the gift. While the etymology—even more obvious in the French terms don (gift) and pardon 194

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(forgiveness)—offers itself to establishing such a link, it is not at all clear that understanding either the phenomenon of forgiveness or that of the gift is best served by such close association. After providing a perspective on the main treatments of the topic in twentieth-century French philosophy, the final section of this contribution will argue for distinguishing more carefully between the two phenomena.

2.  Vladimir Jankélévitch: Forgiveness as the Excessive Gift of Limitless Love In his 1971 essay developing an opinion piece originally written for Le Monde (in 1965) and arguing against the lifting of the statutory limitations for Nazi war crimes, Jankélévitch contends that the crimes of the Shoah are imprescriptible and that no forgiveness is possible, especially as Germans acknowledge no guilt and have never requested forgiveness, but instead sit leisurely at home enjoying their economic miracle.4 Antisemitism is not a “common law crime” but an absolutely exceptional crime in its enormity and unbelievable sadism; it constitutes “an assault against the human being as human being,” thus “a grave offense against human beings in general” (1996:555). Recounting some of the horrors of the camps, he contends that “the extermination of the Jews is the product of pure wickedness, of ontological wickedness, of the most diabolical and gratuitous wickedness that history has ever known” (1996:556). The perpetrators are “monsters” and the deed is a “metaphysical crime.”5 In the face of this “grandiose massacre,” one “can do nothing”: One cannot give life back to that immense mountain of miserable ashes. One cannot punish the criminal with a punishment proportional to his crime for in relation to the infinite all finite magnitudes tend to equal one another; hence the penalty hardly seems to matter, strictly speaking, what happened is inexpiable (1996:558) Moreover, Germans are well off and without a guilty conscience; they “are an unrepentant people” (1996:556). The crime is minimized, quantified, and polemicized. No guilt is ever admitted. Jankélévitch pushes back against this obsolescence, arguing that we must talk about it and cannot afford to forget (1996:563). Indeed, we have “not spoken enough” of the death camps. We must speak for the massacred, work against the “tide of forgetfulness,” not let go of the “insurmountable horror” (1996:571–2). Forgiveness is impossible when no one ever even requests pardon or acknowledges guilt. He admonishes: I do not see why it should be up to us, the survivors, to pardon. Let us rather beware of that complacency about our beautiful soul and our noble conscience, that the opportunity to assume a pathetic attitude and the temptation of playing a role do not one day make us forget the martyrs. (1996:569) Jankélévitch calls Jews “to accept neither indemnities from the Germans nor their reparations” (1996:570), because “there are no damages that can compensate us for the execution of six million; there are no reparations for the irreparable” (1996:571). Focusing on the immensity of the crime, this text concludes that it could never be expiated, properly prosecuted, or forgiven, heightened by the fact that forgiveness has not even been sought and guilt has not been properly acknowledged. Jankélévitch begins his fuller treatment of the topic of forgiveness by pointing out that like remorse, sacrifice, and charity, forgiveness is a limit case. It seems inhuman or superhuman, an impossible event that requires an apophatic philosophical approach, i.e., one that proceeds by 195

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delimiting what it is not (2005:5). He will ultimately define it as a gift of pure love, but only after showing how various phenomena associated with forgiveness fall short of giving an adequate account of the phenomenon. Granting clemency, for example, does not amount to forgiving (2005:6–7). He first considers the role that time may play in enabling us to forgive, especially in light of legal rules regarding statutes of limitation and the notion of the imprescriptible. Although time can lessen resentment and the person may change over time and thus be apparently more easily forgiven, he thinks that this is not true forgiveness (2005:15–19). Time cannot justify the original offence; forgiveness must instead be granted instantaneously or immediately. Time does not erase or neutralize the deed (2005:35–8).6 He argues strongly against what he calls “intellectualism”: various ways of justifying the offender or explaining the offence away. If there was no real offence or if the person is no longer evil, because so thoroughly repentant or transformed in character, then forgiveness is also no longer needed. This is not forgiveness, but a way of erasing the need for forgiveness. Forgiveness must be given from the heart not from the mind in the form of rationalization or excusing (2005:39). Seeking to “understand” the deed or even sympathizing with the offender is not forgiveness, but a way of minimizing the evil (2005:68–72). To understand the deed is not to forgive but to exonerate someone now rendered innocent through the process of rationalization (2005:82). This process of excusing the other makes forgiveness into something reasonable with rational conditions, but forgiveness cannot be justified or circumscribed or based on conditions (2005:94).7 Precisely because forgiveness cannot be conditional, it is always a free gift from the offended person to the offender. Forgiveness is “the concavity of which gift is the convexity” (2005:10). For Jankélévitch, there are always three elements at stake in forgiveness: the event, the personal relation, and the gratuitous gift. Forgiveness involves limitless generosity, overflowing love like a gushing fountain (2005:96). Like love it is without reservations or boundaries. It does not deny the misdeed or ignore it but acts in the mode of the “as if ”—ultimately an absurd position (2005:98). Thus, forgiveness, properly speaking, forgives the inexcusable and does so without demand for regeneration, good will, reasons, or rights; it is purely gratuitous (2005:106–7). Pardoning the guilty may have redemptive force in “saving the sinner” and generating gratitude for the abundant gift (2005:108–13). It opens up the infinite under the horizon of grace. For the guilty person, forgiveness granted has even higher intensity than the gift does (2005:127). Both love and forgiveness say “even though” rather than “because,” loving despite the obstacles involved (2005:130–1). Forgiveness refuses to imitate evil, to pass on blame or hurt, and loves despite the misdeed (2005:144).8 In short, it is a gift of spontaneous love that forgives “in one fell swoop”—and in that respect it is superior to the gift, a better gift than the gift (2005:147, 153). It sacrifices my position of superiority and acknowledges that “I am like you, weak, fallible, and miserable” (2005:161–2). Here, then, forgiveness and even a kind of empathy with the perpetrator are possible.9 Forgiveness grants the gift of love freely and establishes a new relation through this gift. It does not require that the sinner change ahead of time but enables a transformation via the gift of forgiveness. It also does not minimize the guilt or explain it away, but faces it squarely and yet forgives anyway. For Jankélévitch, it is only the absolutely inexpiable that cannot ultimately be forgiven.

3.  Jacques Derrida: Forgiveness as the Impossible Gift of Pure Gratuity Derrida gave two years’ worth of seminars on the topic of forgiveness, following his lectures on hospitality in the previous two years (and preceding his lectures on the death penalty, which he occasionally previews in the forgiveness seminars).10 These seminars cover a variety of topics and texts related to forgiveness, including discussions of Portia’s speech contrasting Jewish and Christian notions of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Rousseau’s self-defense for a youthful theft in his Confessions, various biblical texts, and selections from poetry (especially 196

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Baudelaire), often conducting close readings of selected passages. He also considers linguistic expressions, such as the link between pardon and perjury, the French colloquial expression “y a pas d’mal” (“no harm done”), often given in response to an apology, and the Greek term syggnōmē in two Platonic texts (Critias and Hippias minor), against the claim that the Greeks had no notion of forgiveness. The second set of seminars in the following academic year focus more explicitly on political topics, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the use of rape in war and oppression. Whether discussing the political processes of reconciliation in South Africa or Chile, analyzing the texts of Shakespeare, or explicitly citing biblical texts, Derrida is attentive to the Judeo-­Christian heritage that has shaped our understanding of the notion of forgiveness, whether personal or political. At the same time, he censures the compromises and shady pacts made with corrupt leaders in political situations by leaders of various churches. Yet, despite these failures in practice, the Judeo-Christian (even koranic) tradition has deeply influenced our contemporary understanding and practices of forgiveness. He points to its use by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela11 and comments on the Christian framing of public acts of repentance or pardon that even in non-Western nations draw on the Christian link between forgiveness and remorse, repentance, and salvation. Derrida neither rejects this history nor embraces it, but shows how it has shaped our thinking of forgiveness, especially the tension between conditions for forgiveness— like proper remorse, repentance, or even radical change of life—and the unconditional forgiveness granted as gratuitous gift through divine grace or mercy (2019:49, 150; 2001a:39). This is evident, for instance, in the “theo-politics” of forgiveness of The Merchant of Venice, which juxtaposes the Jewish conditional and Christian (supposedly) unconditional notions of forgiveness, as well as the tension between forgiveness, justice, and mercy. He will return to this tension frequently. Derrida often points to the Abrahamic heritage that defines our public discourse about forgiveness, including the Christian trifold “convulsion-conversion-confession” and the link between forgiveness and the secret (2001a:31; 2019:127–36). Using Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham, which contends that Abraham cannot divulge God’s order to anyone, Derrida suggests that faceto-face relation with the absolute always requires secrecy, speaking of it would be betrayal or perjury (2019:158–9). Literature in a sense becomes an act of confession, a transgression of this secrecy, an act of perjury for which it demands pardon.12 The “secret” or enigma of forgiveness must be respected, especially in instances of radical evil, where both the experience of the atrocity and the decision to forgive it are so singular and extreme that they cannot be understood by others. No measure can be applied in such cases and the logic of singularity or excess—often having recourse to religious language—is in conflict with the legal logic of equivalence or retribution (2001a:55–6). Forgiveness is colored by such religious notions as redemption, atonement, and reconciliation (2001a:36; 2001b:26). Christ’s death on the cross often counts as the paradigmatic instance of forgiveness (2019:84). In Augustine, forgiveness is linked to healing and Derrida points to the close etymological connections between healing and holiness (heilen—heilig), salving, sacrality, and salvation (salut) (2019:173). Even the tradition of “universal humanism” is “profoundly Christian” (2019:50). If one must ask forgiveness always of another, this other is wholly, “infinitely and irreducibly,” other (2019:149). He repeatedly speaks of this biblical-koranic logic of forgiveness as abyss, pointing to the disproportionality between sin and mercy, where a “regression to infinity” is inscribed into the very notion of forgiveness (2019:179; 2001b:29). Forgiveness, thus, always implies a kind of disproportion, an exceeding of equivalence. Derrida asks whether forgiveness in its excessive and unconditional dimensions must always point to something beyond the merely human, possibly a divine dimension: can only God forgive (2019:66, 70; 2001b:44)? In much of the tradition (e.g. Augustine’s Confessions or Shakespeare’s Hamlet), the request for forgiveness is directed to both God and neighbor (2019:161–3, 197

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176; 2001b:46). Furthermore, if forgiveness is by its very nature unlimited and the divine (or animal) constitutes the limit of the human, what does this mean for the notion and practice of forgiveness? Not only do we often refer to God in the context of forgiveness, but “God” is the name for an “absolute singularity,” a final witness even when a definitive victim or criminal is absent (2019:68). It is not that God speaks, but that forgiveness is spoken “in the name of God” (2019:145). This name thus has become inextricably linked with the history of forgiveness; “the name of God has always already been uttered” in this history (2019:152). The heritage of forgiveness is thus theologically colored in a variety of ways. Yet, as the same time, Derrida challenges the notion that the Greek heritage has no term for forgiveness and analyzes the notion of syggnōmē in Plato and Aristotle to show how this is untrue. He highlights two types of identification with the other that in some way make excuse and pardon indissociable from each other. Gnome implies a kind of understanding or sympathy that enables forgiveness. It requires both a comprehension of the fault and a refusal to comprehend—the two are irreducible to each other (2019:235). In Plato, syggnōmē refers to an unlimited indulgence or benevolence (2019:251). Syggnōmē is both clemency and an infinite gift of forgiveness (2019:283). Socrates forgives his executioners in a way that parallels, but is not identical to, Christ’s forgiveness on the cross with the strange reason that they do not “know” what they are doing (2019:285). Derrida argues that Socrates challenges the logic that one could forgive more easily if the other is acting in ignorance (2019:287). Knowledge cannot help us escape the dilemma of fault and responsibility. Derrida draws extensively on Jankélévitch in the lectures, especially in the earlier seminars.13 He agrees with him that forgiveness can only be granted by the victims, not by a third, and that it is without measure. He contends that there is no forgiveness if nothing is unforgiveable, although he will also go on to criticize Jankélévitch’s account of the unforgiveable and especially his strong statements in the shorter lecture that seem to make forgiveness not only entirely impossible, but— ironically—also dependent on the condition of requesting it. Requiring repentance is to reinscribe forgiveness into the logic of conditions (2019:225). Derrida dissociates the unforgiveable from the imprescriptible and forgiving from forgetting (2019:34, 37, 111; 2001b:31; 2001c:185). One does not forgive the innocent and if the movement of forgiveness renders innocent, one is “culpable” for forgiving (2019:142). Forgiveness is neither absolution nor amnesty. Excuses are selfjustifications not true apologies (2019:376). Forgiveness requires facing the fault (2019:167), not effacing culpability (2019:323). He also, like Jankélévitch, examines the role that comprehending the other person plays in forgiveness: neither judging nor forgiving equates to comprehending (2019:238, 315). Derrida wonders repeatedly whether it is possible to forgive collectively or whether forgiveness must always be granted by the singular person. Can it be demanded or granted by someone other than the one who has been harmed (2019:147; 2001c:185, 188)? That question is especially relevant in political contexts, where heads of state grant pardons or request forgiveness on behalf of victims long dead. Derrida repeatedly reflects on political events and processes: Brandt’s avowal of German guilt in Warsaw (and obviously the topic of the Shoah more broadly), Bush’s refusal to grant clemency to Texas prisoners on death row, Clinton’s alleged apology for his adultery and lying under oath, the processes of political reconciliation in Chile and South Africa, and many others. For example, in the piece included in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness,14 Derrida is especially interested in the question in a political sense of public demonstrations of demands for or proclamations of forgiveness, whether German, Japanese, or South African. In a lecture delivered in South America, he extensively discusses the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and also devotes a section to rape as a tool of war employed to denigrate the work of female revolutionaries (2004:111–56; 2016:61–120; see also Michaud 2018). He troubles the notion of granting clemency or pardon from a position of sovereignty or superiority (2019:91; 2001b:25, 32–3).15 He also rejects the practices of amnesty or

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of public “therapy of reconciliation” governed by the nation-state for its own good (2001:40–1). Forgiveness cannot amount to forgetting (2019:111; 2001b:23). He criticizes the political claim that we are “in an epoch of forgiveness” (2019:207).16 Reconciliation requires keeping memory alive (2019:211). Political moves to reconciliation, although they often employ the language of forgiveness, must be distinguished from forgiveness. They are therapeutic and often necessary, but they do not replace the need for forgiveness on interpersonal levels (2019:213–14). Forgiveness is always a kind of final word (2019:299–311), it interrupts and accomplishes history (2019:312). Forgiveness is thus in some way outside the law or transcends the law (2019:210). Forgiveness is both just and greater than justice; it does not judge and yet the “final word” of judgment lies at its heart; it comprehends and yet goes beyond any comprehension, because if we could comprehend fully we would explain or excuse rather than forgive (2019:314–15). If full justice were rendered in a particular case, forgiveness would no longer be necessary, because recompense has been accomplished. In a different context he says: “Nothing is given in advance for an act of forgiveness, no rule, no criterion, no norm. It is the chaos at the origin of the world” (2001c:188). Forgiveness is always an event; something occurs irreversibly (2019:329–30). In this respect, Derrida also investigates the way in which to say “pardon” is performative language; indeed, he starts several of his seminar sessions with a demonstrative statement (like “Pardon”/“Excuse me”) and then goes on to question whether he has just performed an activity or merely stated a word to be examined as a topic but not intended to effect anything. Forgiveness is always performative speech in some form (2019:67; 2001b:46).17 Furthermore, it can be expressed in a variety of forms: address, invocation, prayer, hymn, praise (2019:195). Forgiveness is a call, vocation, appeal, or demand (2019:115). This “address of forgiveness,” he suggests, “must forever remain undecidably equivocal, by which I do not mean ambiguous, shady, twilit, but heterogeneous to any determination in the order of knowledge of determinate theoretical judgment, of the self-presentation of an appropriable sense” (2001b:36). The living speech of forgiveness points to mercy, while its writing points to credit and agency (2019:205). Indeed, the semantic dimensions of the term are of great interest to Derrida. He repeatedly distinguishes pardon, reconciliation, redemption, expiation, and excuse (e.g. 2019:109). In several lectures, he compares how the notion of forgiveness operates in various languages by comparing their etymologies and the ways in which related terms are distinguished (2019:30; 2004). Although English links forgiving and forgetting, these two should not be equated. Forgiveness is also not excusing. For example, the idiomatic phrase “y a pas d’mal” implies that the evil has not truly occurred, that no actual harm has been done. It is thus not forgiveness, but a way of rendering innocent or excusing, as if nothing had occurred. It tries to efface even the memory of the harm (2019:221). Excusing or rationalizing the transgression becomes a way of justifying it and inscribing it into a logic of exchange, in which the act can be fully comprehended and thus rendered innocuous or innocent. Forgiveness, instead, breaks with the logic of retribution or exchange; it constitutes something radically new and different. Derrida does wonder whether the break with economy that forgiveness constitutes reintroduces a new type of economy (2019:89). There is always a tension between the hyperbolical ethics that tends to push the exigency to the limit and beyond the limit of the possible and this everyday economy of forgiveness that dominates the religious, juridical, even political and psychological semantics of forgiveness, a forgiveness held within the human or anthropo-theological limits of repentance, confession, expiation, reconciliation, or redemption. (2001b:29)

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Thus, there is disproportion between the one who forgives—from a height—and the one who receives forgiveness (2019:91). It is this asymmetry or disproportion that is at the very heart of the logic of forgiveness. Derrida’s explication of this logic parallels and is grounded in his discussions of the gift, of hospitality, of cosmopolitanism, and of what he calls “the democracy to come” (or a kind of messianism). For all these, he shows a paradoxical structure of impossibility, in which purity and gratuity are crucial, even essential, for the notions of gift, forgiveness, and hospitality, while in reality concrete practices of gift-giving, forgiveness, and hospitality always remain in the realm of political or economic exchange, always impure, and certainly not fully gratuitous. We cannot be completely open to all strangers, whether on personal or political levels; our hospitality always remains marked by hostility, as indicated even by the fact that in several languages the words for friend and enemy, neighbor and stranger, are the same (thus the notion of “hostipitality”). We cannot give a purely gratuitous gift that expects nothing back (not even gratitude) and imposes absolutely no obligations of return on the recipient.18 In the same way, we cannot render absolute forgiveness such that any acknowledgment of debt or guilt is excluded; both a requirement of repentance and a dismissal of guilt erase genuine forgiveness. Gift (don) and forgiveness (pardon) have an obvious etymological link, but they also share logical parallels. Derrida links forgiveness to the gift at the very opening of the first lecture: in both giving is never enough, always insufficient (2019:29, 2001b:37). Both the gift and forgiveness imply a temporal dimension; both feature the aporia of insufficiency: no gift or act of forgiveness ever goes far enough or gives sufficiently, because both notions essentially include the dimension of infinite abundance. Indeed, Derrida often reiterates that forgiveness has no limit, measure, or moderation, that it cannot be calculated; it is in principle “heterogeneous and irreducible” (2001a:27). Both gift and forgiveness in some way imply their opposite: giving implies receiving, forgiving implies the prior deed to which it responds (2019:29).Yet, at the same time, they both imply that they ought to function without or beyond such “return”: true gift-giving expects no return, true forgiveness forgives absolutely, without requiring conditions. In practice, however, albeit in even more complicated ways than the gift, forgiveness always expects some sort of acknowledgment of guilt, some expectation of repentance, sometimes even a partial payment of the debt. But if repayment or excuse is possible, if the act can be fully explained (and thus excused) or fully exonerated (via payment or appropriate punishment), forgiveness is no longer necessary, because the action has been excused or recompensed. That is to say, “to forgive the forgivable, the venial, the excusable, what one can always forgive, is not to forgive” (2019:42). One does not pardon the innocent, nor does forgiveness ever render anyone innocent (2019:142). Forgiveness is thus always exceptional and extraordinary, possible only by doing the impossible and therefore forgiveness deals most fundamentally with the unforgiveable (2019:115, 2001c:184). This tension between the “conditional logic of exchange” and the unconditional, infinite, and uneconomic must always be preserved (2001a:34). This absolute unconditionality brings “forgiveness right to the abyss of the impossible”; it “appears impossible, even when it takes place” (2001c:184, 186). Yet, these two dimensions of what seems impossible and yet has to occur always have to be held together: If our idea of forgiveness falls into ruin as soon as it is deprived of its pole of absolute reference, namely its unconditional purity, it remains nonetheless inseparable from what is heterogeneous to it, namely the order of conditions, repentance, transformation... These two poles, the conditional and the unconditional, are absolutely heterogeneous, and must remain irreducible to one another. (2001a:44)

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Thus, forgiveness, in some sense, has neither “meaning” nor intelligibility; it is the “madness of the impossible,” while acts of public clemency or pardon are conditioned by law, even as they transcend the law (2001a:45). Derrida contends that this tension between “a hyperbolic ethical vision of forgiveness” and concrete social acts of reconciliation always remains and must not be collapsed (2001a:51).19 Forgiveness must maintain the victim’s right to speak and ultimately remain “without power: unconditional but without sovereignty” (2001:59). Yet Derrida does not claim that no gifts, no hospitality, or no forgiveness are ever possible and that we should not strive to become generous, hospitable, forgiving, or cosmopolitan, although he is often misrepresented as arguing this (e.g. Papastephanou 2003; Verdeja 2004; Evink 2005; Kaposy 2005; Bernstein 2006; Lotz 2006; Zaibert 2009; Ahn 2010a; Gormley 2014). Related to this, some argue that he only traffics in abstractions and has no concern with how forgiveness does or does not work in real life, “on the ground,” so to speak (cf. Verdeja 2004:36). Yet neither claim is true, as his concern with many political events clearly demonstrates. Rather, what Derrida tries to show is that there is a structural impossibility and purity inscribed in these very notions and that even the “compromised” phenomena that do actually appear and the concrete acts that we undertake presuppose this structural gratuity. The very concept of hospitality requires a notion of unlimited welcome; the very idea of the gift requires a sense of pure gratuity; the very notion of forgiveness requires that the other not change to accommodate my hurt but that the forgiveness apply to the crime in its most manifest evil (2001b:48). If it is already mitigated, already repented, already changed in the direction of the good, what remains to forgive? The impossible or gratuitous or pure, then, is inscribed at the very heart of the possible, conditional, and impure—it both makes it possible, makes it what it “is,” and simultaneously always challenges it and shows its shortcomings in practice. Derrida is quite clear that “the distinction between unconditionality and conditionality is shifty enough not to let itself be determined as a simple opposition.” Thus, the unconditional and the conditional are, certainly, absolutely heterogeneous, and this forever, on either side of a limit, but they are also indissociable. There is a movement, in the motion of unconditional forgiveness, an inner exigency of becoming-effective, manifest, determined, and, in determining itself, bending to conditionality. (2001b:45) The conditional and the unconditional are hence always mutually implicated, one cannot occur without the other. The logic of the unconditional always functions within the concrete and conditional, both enabling it and undoing it at the same time, continually challenging it to be true to itself.

4.  Paul Ricœur: Forgiveness as the Difficult Gift of Agential Unbinding The title of Ricœur’s epilogue, “Difficult Forgiveness,” in Memory, History, Forgetting explicitly responds to Derrida’s notion of impossible forgiveness, qualifying it as “difficult,” that is to say “not easy but not impossible” (2004:457).20 Forgiveness is difficult to give, to receive, and to conceive. He points out that forgiveness requires two speech acts: “the avowal of guilt and the hymn of forgiveness” that are an “unequal exchange,” disproportionate in “the depth of fault and the height of forgiveness,” yet establish a “bilateral relation between request for and offer of forgiveness” (2004:457, 459, 468, 478). Like Jankélévitch and Derrida, he is careful to distinguish between notions of the inexpiable, the irreparable, the imprescriptible, and the unforgiveable (2004:465). Employing Jaspers’ distinctions between criminal, political, and moral guilt, he

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considers the issue of crimes against humanity and whether peoples (or rather only individuals) can be forgiven. Like Derrida, he wonders: On what authority can a political leader in office or the current head of a religious community presume to request forgiveness from the victims, with respect to whom he or she was not personally the aggressor and who themselves did not personally suffer the harm in question? (2004:470) He similarly notes Derrida’s disjunction between the conditional and the unconditional in regard to forgiveness, which he suggests is crossed by the “vertical” relation between requesting and granting forgiveness (2004:469).21 He considers forgiveness especially in regard to its impact on the guilty agent. Acts can only be indicted (or forgiven) if they are imputed to a concrete guilty agent (2004:460). This includes the self-recognition that one is impacted by one’s actions (2004:462). This association between guilt and fault enables drawing on the resources of mythic and religious traditions, which he had already explored in his early work and which suggest that a distinction can be made between agent and act (2004:465). While the voice of fault speaks from below, that of forgiveness—like those of love and joy—resounds from on high. While the fault “paralyzes the power to act” of the “capable being,” forgiveness unbinds the agent from the act and enables new actions to become possible. Forgiveness “actualizes” the capacity of the agent (2004:490). Here he draws on Arendt who had described the power to forgive and the power to promise as two interpersonal powers, the first enabling new action by unleashing the agent from a previous act, the second as binding action through commitment to another (1958:213). Forgiveness grants mutual release that sets free and enables newness (1958:216).22 Ricœur suggests that this confirms his earlier philosophy of action by making the guilty capable of acting again (2004:490, 493). While he agrees with Arendt that there is a structural similarity between the acts of forgiving and promising, he suggests that there is also a “significant asymmetry” between them (2004:459), inasmuch as forgiveness escapes the logic of conditioned versus unconditioned and cannot be inscribed into a purely legal or political process, but ultimately requires something like the abundance of religious grace (2004:492–3). The unbinding of the agent that occurs in the gracious gift of forgiveness then restores the agent’s capacity for promising and opens a new future. Like Derrida and Jankélévitch, Ricœur also speaks of forgiveness in terms of the gift. Yet, unlike them, Ricœur qualifies the “absence of reciprocity” in the case of the gift, noting that Mauss’ famous analysis of the gift shows the problematics of a continued economic competition set into motion by the gift, but does not condemn all forms of exchange. The real problem is calculation and self-interest (in the market economy), rather than responding to a gift in gratitude or giving back only as much as has been received (2004:480–1). Forgiveness, like the gift, is marked by such reciprocal relation, but this need not necessarily be an economic one of calculated exchange. Rather, gratitude can be an appropriate response to a gift that is not equivalent to recompense, but rather a mutual response that does not create inferiority or dependence. Not all circular exchanges are malicious. Similarly, instead of incurring further debt, love or forgiveness can convert the enemy into a friend (2004:482). Forgiveness is not a transaction or a stratagem, but preserves “the incommensurability between the unconditionality of forgiveness and the conditionality of the request for forgiveness” (2004:485). Thus, like the gift, forgiveness is something freely exchanged by two partners that cannot be reduced to an economic calculation or based on predetermined conditions. It is offered freely to someone to whom one is bound by a previous evil or crime and lets the other person reassume his or her prior capacities without thereby forgetting or annulling the act. Thus, for Ricœur, forgiveness is essentially the gift of renewed freedom granted to another with whom one can thereby enter into a new relation. 202

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5.  Jean-Luc Marion: Forgiveness as the Redounding Gift of Unconditioned Return Marion engages the topic of forgiveness in the context of a discussion of the gift, which is undertaken at least partly in response to Derrida. Although he refers to Derrida only very briefly in the discussion of forgiveness, his repeated rejection of the language of “purity” or the “impossible” clearly alludes to Derrida’s treatment.23 Marion contrasts “sacrifice” and “forgiveness” as two phenomena that allow the phenomenon of the gift to make an appearance. Developing his earlier treatment of the gift, he insists in this discussion that the phenomenon of the gift cannot itself appear except obliquely in these reverse phenomena of sacrifice and forgiveness.24 While sacrifice allows the recipient to appear, forgiveness, for the first time, makes visible the giver: The forgiveness that the recipient puts into operation by regiving (by redounding) the gift and saturating it with givenness constrains, or at the last leads (for it does not force), the recipient to recognize, most often for the first time, this gift as such, as given. And, in finally seeing the gift as given, the recipient for the first time sees in the gift, as if backlit, its giver, because he sees him in the glory of the event of giving in operation. (2015:145) Marion employs the story of King Lear to show how Lear initially rejects the gift of love offered by his daughter Cordelia (2015:140–3). He does not understand it, discounts it, does not recognize or acknowledge it as a gift. It is only when he asks for her forgiveness that he recognizes (too late) what this initial gift had been. He can ask for her forgiveness only because the gift had been offered, and this gift and she, as its giver, become visible or manifest for the first time as phenomena via the request for forgiveness. Similarly, in the story of the prodigal son, the father’s love is discounted and spurned by the son (2015:147–54). It is only when the son returns to ask the father’s forgiveness that he acknowledges the free and abundant gift of love initially given and so prodigally squandered. Gift and forgiveness are thus intimately related, even “flip-sides” of each other. There is no forgiveness, Marion contends, without an initial gift, and forgiveness consists in a return or reversal of this gift, paralleling the reversal instituted by the phenomenon of sacrifice, in which the gift appears via its very annihilation. (That is, it is only when Abraham becomes willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, that he recognizes him—again, or maybe for the first time—as the gift of God rather than his own possession [2015:128–32].) Marion argues that this has two implications. First, forgiveness always implies the repetition of a gift. If there has been no initial gift or if no such gift has been acknowledged, forgiveness cannot occur. Forgiveness essentially consists in the release of a prior gift that has been spurned or attempted to be grasped as possession. Only by returning the gift in similar gratuity, by acknowledging that one had not received it as it ought to have been received, does forgiveness become possible. This is not reciprocal exchange—Marion is just as suspicious of economy as Derrida— but a sort of mutual asymmetry. Injustice or confusion results if this “unconditional” condition is ignored. Forgiveness follows on the gift “through a flaw in justice” (2015:133). It assumes that a gift has been given and lost, regaining this gift and recognizing it for the first time via the act of forgiveness. Forgiveness “regives the gift from the recipient’s side” (2015:145). Second, he thinks that this resolves the issue of the “unforgivable”: “hypothetically, the only one who could forgive anything would be the one for whom everything already has the status of a gift, and thus the one for whom a redounding proves itself always possible” (2015:146). Thus, ultimately only God can truly forgive.25 Because God regards everything as gift, gives everything as gift via creation, only God can fully return the gift by endlessly re-giving it.26 The supreme giving is that of the endless re-giving at work within the Trinity, but it operates in the same way on the most mundane levels 203

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(2015:153). Forgiveness requires not an “ethical conversion” but “the thinking of the gift, of the given, and of givenness” (2015:154).

6.  Conclusion: Forgiveness and the Gift Forgiveness, then, is thought in terms of the gift in all of these accounts.27 This is especially evident in Marion’s treatment where it is explicitly claimed that if there had been no prior gift there could not be any forgiveness, because forgiveness always constitutes the re-giving or return of an original gift. By granting forgiveness, the father gives again the gift to the son that was not recognized in its initial giving but treated as possession or even rejected (as also in Lear’s case). But it is not at all clear why this should be the case: one forgives an evil that has been done or a wrong one has suffered, rather than returning an earlier gift. Harming or offending someone does not necessarily come in the wake of a previous gift, although it does often imply a previous relationship of some sort. It is less clear, however, that such a relationship is required; surely one can cause pain or perpetrate evil on a stranger. For Jankélévitch, not unlike Marion, it is the parallel to love that turns forgiveness into a gift: it is given abundantly, immediately, without preparation, as a gift of unlimited love. But must forgiveness necessarily involve love? Can one not grant forgiveness to an offender, not pursue prosecution of the other’s fault, or not continue to bear a grudge, without loving the other? These seem qualitatively different affects or acts. Forgiveness can be granted without establishing a permanent or intimate relationship with the offender. Indeed, it might not be healthy to do so—in some cases even dangerous. Although forgiveness can often bear an emotional valence, can relieve the one who forgives as much as the one who is forgiven (albeit in different ways), this lightening of the burden is neither the same affect as love nor does it necessarily establish a permanent relationship. It is clearest in Derrida’s analysis why the granting of forgiveness (rather than receiving it, as in Marion) bears a likeness to the gift: both require pure gratuity and they share a structural logic that presumes excess and unconditionality. But—as evidenced by the confusion of many commentators—this focus on the logic of forgiveness gives the impression that the phenomenon itself never actually appears or only under the most extreme of circumstances. Derrida’s comments on concrete political instantiations of reconciliation tend to highlight their shortcomings or divergence from true forgiveness. The deconstructive move of showing how the logic of the term serves to undermine its concrete manifestations makes it hard to see how the phenomenon might appear in a more positive sense. While both Derrida and Marion give us examples—many literary, some political—there is no full phenomenological analysis of the experience of forgiveness, whether granted or received. Yet, such a phenomenological analysis would not only give us a better sense of forgiveness as a lived experience, but also allow us to reveal it more carefully as a phenomenon. Distinguishing it from other phenomena like amnesty, absolution, excuse, reconciliation, and so forth, as both Derrida and Jankélévitch do, certainly helps in providing a better sense of it as a phenomenon. Yet more work could (and maybe should) be done here. How is the phenomenon of forgiveness instantiated? What are its essential structures? What makes it this sort of phenomenon rather than another one? What is “essential” to it that distinguishes or picks it out among other phenomena (like the gift) as a phenomenon of forgiveness? In order to provide such an analysis, we need a more substantive phenomenological exploration of the experiences and acts of forgiveness: not just the speech acts (as Ricœur emphasizes), but the way in which it is embodied, the gestures that demonstrate it, the affect that accompanies it, the places and times of forgiveness. This may well include analyses of practices of confession, absolution, and forgiveness in religious or other social and political settings, including the ways in which they can enact forgiveness and the ways in which they may fail. Careful attention to the bodily and 204

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affective experience of forgiveness in all its dimensions will help us understand it more fully as a phenomenon of experience. Is it that we have “made up our mind” about an action we will undertake, thus involving elements of understanding, not just of affectivity? Is it that our postures and gestures change, that we are able to reach out our hands or even offer an embrace? Is it our mood that shifts toward the offender or perpetrator, such that the affects or emotions of hostility, rancor, or bitterness have been transformed into other affects? What are the differences between the affects that accompany holding a grudge and those coming after an act of forgiveness? Is there release or relief? Must those affects necessarily accompany the act and can it be judged as authentic only when certain gestures or bodily postures accompany it? All these—and many other considerations and careful descriptions—will help us see as what sort of phenomenon forgiveness shows itself, how it is manifested, and how to distinguish it from other phenomena, like those of love or the gift.

Notes 1 See Richard Kearney’s trenchant critique of this (2003:106–8, 179–90, 208–11). 2 Such thinkers include Jean Wahl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Eric Weil, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Sarah Kofman, and others. Jewish intellectuals were prominent in Germany as well, although most of them left the country before or during the war, such as Martin Buber, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Hannah Arendt. Others, like Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Walter Benjamin, did not survive the war. (Weil died in England from the repercussions of her intense identification with occupied France; Stein was killed in Auschwitz; Benjamin committed suicide when it became clear that he would be unable to cross the border into Spain.) 3 Lévinas commented in an interview that it was easy to forgive Germans, but hard to forgive Heidegger. Nevertheless, he never set foot on German soil again after the war, despite continuing to read Heidegger and praising Being and Time as one of the central books in the history of philosophy (2009:37–44; 2001:130–9; 1998:116–18). Lévinas’ most extended treatment of forgiveness is one of his Talmudic lectures, delivered in 1963 at a Jewish colloquium devoted to the topic (1990:12–29). For a treatment of Lévinas on forgiveness, see Drichel (2018:43–63). Derrida also discusses Lévinas within his lectures on forgiveness, especially in the eighth session (2019:302–11). Serban (2014) sets Lévinas, Jankélévitch, and Derrida in relation to each other. 4 For discussions of Jankélévitch, see Kooper (1970), Gouhier (1987), Fiasse (2012), Kelley (2013), DeWarren (2014), Nieves (2015), Villa (2016), Ford (2017), Perrin (2017), Bachmetjevas (2018), and Banki (2018). The fullest treatment of Jankélévitch’s work as a whole in English is Looney (2015). 5 This terminology draws implicitly from Karl Jaspers’ reflection The Question of German Guilt (1947), which establishes four categories of guilt (criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical). 6 On time see also Wyschogrod (2006) and Looney (2015). 7 Fiasse challenges this dichotomy between excusing and forgiving (2012:3–15). 8 This is a topic Marion will also explore, albeit in a considerably more theological vein (2002a:1–30). 9 Banki tries to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the two pieces (2018:65–81). 10 The account here will draw primarily from these seminars, because they are the most extensive and most comprehensive, although they will be supplemented by references to other lectures published separately, including the few existing English translations. (Unfortunately, the second set of seminars was not yet published at the time of writing and so could not be consulted, aside from the couple of sessions published separately.) Given that Derrida’s account is by far the most extensive, much of it not yet translated into English, and in some ways has also been the most influential—and confusing—more space will be devoted to his treatment than to the other thinkers discussed. 11 See especially the section “Christianization of Forgiveness” (2004:147–52), where he repeatedly censures Tutu for imposing a Christian interpretation on the process of reconciliation in South Africa. 12 Much of this discussion is an interpretation of the French phrase “pardon de ne pas vouloir dire,” which requests pardon for a refusal to speak or betray a secret (2019:127–60); it serves as a transition between Derrida’s consideration of the religious heritage and his turn to Augustine’s and especially Rousseau’s Confessions in the following seminar sessions. 13 Especially the opening seminar lays out the question of forgiveness primarily in terms of what Jankélévitch has already shown. It also reviews the exchange of letters with Wiard Raveling in detail, criticizing Jankélévitch’s response at several points. (See also 2001b:26–45, which is a slightly edited version of a couple of the earlier seminar sessions.)

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Christina M. Gschwandtner 14 This text was actually originally an interview, although the questions are, oddly, not included in the English translation (2001a:vii). 15 There are repeated comments in text and footnotes about the US political situation in regard to granting clemency to people on death row, especially the case of Karla Faye Tucker in Texas (2019:199–214). 16 He also points out that public acts of or requests for forgiveness, such as the German apology for the bombing of Guernica, are contemporary phenomena that have no clear precedent in history. Forgiveness is becoming “globalized” (2019:409–11). Such gestures on behalf of the State are usually linked to concrete reparations or payments for particular debts incurred and constitute an acknowledgment of such debt. 17 He points out that both deMan and Austin focus on the act of apology, on what is done in the speech act (2019:331). On apology see also Thompson (2010). 18 At the same time: “One must a priori, thus, ask forgiveness for the gift itself, one has to be forgiven the gift, the sovereignty or the desire for the sovereignty of the gift” (2001b:22). 19 Zarka thinks this is ultimately incoherent: “Derrida cannot at the same time break with the condition, even if minimal, of a hyperbolic ethics, without calling forgiveness itself into question” (2014:447). 20 For discussions of Ricœur’s treatment of forgiveness, see Anidjar (2005), Belvedresi (2006), Fiasse (2007; 2010:77–89; 2018:85–101), Deckard/Makant (2017:185–201), Kearney (2009:85–97), Heaps (2017), and Jani (2019). 21 He also rejects amnesty as an abuse of forgetting and memory; the events of history demand to be recounted (2004:498). Forgiveness involves forgetting but is not the same thing as forgetting. 22 She also argues that acts of radical evil (in Kant’s sense) can be neither punished nor forgiven and that one cannot forgive oneself, because it is an act that requires plurality (1958:217–18). While Ricœur refers to her approvingly, Derrida criticizes her account of forgiving as a power or faculty (2019:46, 85, 123). For a discussion of this, see Haddad (2007) who suggests that Derrida is actually closer to Arendt than he acknowledges and would profit from more positive use of her. 23 The most extensive discussion of Derrida occurs in note 23 (2015:252; see also Ahn 2010b). At one point, Marion very briefly juxtaposes Derrida and Jankélévitch against each other, suggesting that for Derrida “forgiveness becomes immobilized in (im)possible possibility,” while for Jankélévitch it shows “its impotence in repairing the injustice of the unequal exchange that confiscates the giver’s gift, or deprives him of his due” (2015:140). Marion does not mention Ricœur. 24 In earlier discussions (2008:80–100; 2002b:71–118) he had argued (against Derrida) that the gift can, in fact, appear. This position is revised and shown to be too facile in Negative Certainties. 25 This parallels his argument about holiness or sanctity (2017:144–51); interestingly, the only other piece that involves a discussion of Jankélévitch and explicit reference to the Shoah. 26 As in other texts, Marion insists on the ineffable nature of the phenomena he discusses: the gift and forgiveness are radically unconditioned, must be given with infinite abandon, wholly delivered with such abundance and abandonment that no exchange can be possible or conceivable. Abandon refers here to complete dispossession (in the sense of kenosis), undivided and unlimited devotion, and the abundance of saturation. Marion speaks in the exact same way of Christ on the cross, the Eucharist, and the erotic phenomenon (which also only God can give because only God loves truly with complete kenotic abandon) (e.g. 2017:102–15). Ultimately, everything becomes gift in a way that is also methodologically speaking an abundant abandonment of distinctions. 27 This is not the case for all Francophone treatments of the topic. Julia Kristeva’s account, for example, is heavily psychoanalytic and makes little reference to the gift or gift-giving. She argues that psychoanalytic interpretation can function as a form of forgiveness, accomplishing the sort of work religion used to do culturally and personally in terms of enabling psychic rebirth via pardon (2010:191–4).

References Ahn, Ilsup. (2010a) “Economy of ‘Invisible Debt’ and Ethics of ‘Radical Hospitality’: Toward a Paradigm Change of Hospitality from ‘Gift’ to ‘Forgiveness’,” Journal of Religious Ethics 38(2): 243–67. Ahn, Ilsup. (2010b) “The Genealogy of Debt and the Phenomenology of Forgiveness: Nietzsche, Marion, and Derrida on the Meaning of the ‘Peculiar Phenomenon’,” Heythrop Journal 51(3): 454–70. Anidjar, Gil. (2005) “Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi,” Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 8(1): 8–25. Arendt, Hannah. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bachmetjevas, Viktoras. (2018) “Deconstructing Forgiveness: Jankélévitch’s Influence on Derrida,” Athena: Filosofijos Studijos 13: 184–98.

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The Gift of Forgiveness Banki, Peter. (2018) “Hyper-Ethical Forgiveness and the Inexpiable,” in Marguerite la Caze (ed.) Phenomenology and Forgiveness, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 65–81. Begué, Marie-France. (2002) “La Memoria Apaciguada,” Escritos de Filosofia 21(41–42): 225–34. Belvedresi, Rosa. (2006) “Consideraciones Acerca de La Memoria, El Olvido y El Perdón a Partir de Los Aportes de P. Ricoeur,” Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía 32(2): 199–211. Bernstein, Richard J. (2006) “Derrida: The Aporia of Forgiveness?” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 13(3): 394–406. Colonnello, Pio. (2011) “La Riscrittura Del Passato. Ancora Sul Nesso Memoria Oblio Perdono,” Bolletino Fiosofico 27: 77–93. Deckard, Michael Funk and Mindy Makant. (2017) “The Fault of Forgiveness: Fragility and Memory of Evil in Volf and Ricoeur,” in Bruce Ellis Benson and B. Keith Putt (eds) Evil, Fallenness, and Finitude, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 185–201. Derrida, Jacques. (2001a) “On Forgiveness,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London: Routledge, 25–60. Derrida, Jacques. (2001b) “To Forgive: The Unforgiveable and the Imprescriptible,” in John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon (eds) Questioning God, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 21–51. Derrida, Jacques. (2001c) “........,” in Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (eds) The Work of Mourning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 168–88. Derrida, Jacques. (2004) “Versöhnung, ubuntu, pardon: quel genre?” Le Genre humain 43: 111–56. Derrida, Jacques. (2016) “La Conférence de Rio de Janeiro (2004). ‘Le pardon, la vérité, la réconciliation: quel genre?’” in Evando Nascimento (ed.) La Solidarité des vivants et le pardon. Conférence et entretiens, Paris: Éditions Hermann, 61–120. Derrida, Jacques. (2019) Le parjure et le pardon, vol. 1: Séminaire (1997–1998), Paris: Seuil. Derrida, Jacques. (2020) Le parjure et le pardon, vol. 2: Séminaire (1998–1999), Paris: Seuil. DeWarren, Nicolas. (2014) “L’impardonnable chez Jankélévitch,” Archives de philosophie 77(3): 421–33. Drichel, Simone. (2018) “A Forgiveness that Remakes the World’: Trauma, Vulnerability, and Forgiveness in the Work of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Marguerite la Caze (ed.) Phenomenology and Forgiveness, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 43–63. Evink, Eddo. (2009) “(In)Finite Responsibility: How to Avoid the Contrary Effects of Derrida’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 35(4): 467–81. Fiasse, Gaëlle. (2007) “Paul Ricœur et le pardon comme au-delà de l’action,” Laval théologique et philosophiques 63(2): 363–76. Fiasse, Gaëlle. (2008) “Forgiveness and the Refusal of Injustice,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 82: 125–34. Fiasse, Gaëlle. (2010) “The Golden Rule and Forgiveness,” in Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema (eds) A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, New York: Fordham University Press, 77–89. Fiasse, Gaëlle. (2012) “Revisiting Jankélévitch’s Dichotomy: Between Excusing the Ignorant and Forgiving the Wicked,” Philosophy Today 56(1): 3–15. Fiasse, Gaëlle. (2018) “Forgiveness in Ricoeur,” in Marguerite la Caze (ed.) Phenomenology and Forgiveness, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 85–101. Ford, Russell. (2017) “The Problem of Forgiveness: Jankélévitch, Deleuze, and Spinoza,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy: A Quarterly Journal of History, Criticism, and Imagination 31(3): 409–21. Gormley, Steven. (2014) “The Impossible Demand of Forgiveness,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22(1): 27–48. Gouhier, Alain. (1987) “Le temps de l’impardonnable et le temps du pardon selon Jankélévitch,” in Michel Perrin (ed.) Le point théologique, Paris: Beauchesne. Haddad, Samir. (2007) “Arendt, Derrida, and the Inheritance of Forgiveness,” Philosophy Today 51(4): 416–26. Hart, Kevin (2014) “Guilty Forgiveness,” in Kingdoms of God, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 247–64. Heaps, Jonathan R. (2017) “Traversing Forgiveness: Elucidating ‘Height’ and ‘Depth’ in the Epilogue to Memory, History, Forgetting,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91(1): 53–72. Holland, Nancy J. (2006) “The Revenant of Abu Ghraib: Derrida and the Discourses of Globalization, Gender, and Forgiveness,” Philosophy Today 50 (Suppl.): 182–6. Jani, Anna. (2019) “Guilt, Confession, and Forgiveness: From Methodology to Religious Experiencing in Paul Ricoeur’s Phenomenology,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy: A Quarterly Journal of History, Criticism, and Imagination 33(1): 8–21. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. (1996) “Should we Pardon Them?” Critical Inquiry 22: 552–72.

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Christina M. Gschwandtner Jankélévitch, Vladimir. (2005) Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jaspers, Karl. (1947) The Question of German Guilt, trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Dial Press. Kaposy, Chris. (2005) “‘Analytic’ Reading, ‘Continental’ Text: The Case of Derrida’s ‘On Forgiveness’,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13(2): 203–26. Kearney, Richard. (2003) Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, London: Routledge. Kearney, Richard. (2009) “Forgiveness at the Limit: Impossible or Possible?” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 82: 85–97. Kelley, Andrew. (2013) “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself,” Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics 52(1): 159–84. Kopper, Joachim. (1970) “Kants synthetisch-praktischer Satz a priori und Jankélévitchs Verständnis der Vergebung: Zu V. Jankélévitch, Le pardon,” Kant-Studien: Philosophische Zeitschrift der Kant-Gesellschaft 61(1): 238–47. Kristeva, Julia. (2010) Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. La Caze, Marguerite. (2006) “The Asymmetry between Apology and Forgiveness,” Contemporary Political Theory 5(4): 447–68. Levinas, Emmanuel. (1990) Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. (1998) Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. (2001) Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. (2009) Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Looney, Aaron T. (2015) Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness. New York: Fordham University Press. Lotz, Christian. (2006) “The Events of Morality and Forgiveness: From Kant to Derrida,” Research in Phenomenology 36(1): 255–73. Marion, Jean-Luc. (2002a) “Evil in Person,” in Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 1–30. Marion, Jean-Luc. (2002b) Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. (2015) Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. (2017) Believing in Order to See, New York: Fordham University Press. Michaud, Ginette. (2018) “Putting Truth to the Test of Forgiveness: Reading Jacques Derrida’s Seminar ‘Le parjure et le pardon’ (Perjury and Forgiveness),” Derrida Today 11(2): 144–77. Nieves Loja, Gerardo Miguel. (2015) “El Perdón Contemporáneo y El Retorno a la Dimensión Espiritual. De Los Mayores Crímenes a la Infintud del Perdón,” Fragmentos de Filosofía 13(1): 145–62. O’Regan, Cyril. (2008) “Forgiveness and the Forms of the Impossible,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 82(1): 67–84. Oliver, Kelly. (2007) “Tropho-Ethics: Derrida’s Homeopathic Purity,” Harvard Review of Philosophy 15: 37–57. Papastephanou, Marianna. (2003) “Forgiving and Requesting Forgiveness,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 37(3): 503–24. Perrin, Christophe. (2017) “Une réalité sans nom: L’impardon,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 207(2): 159–74. Picardi, Roberta. (2017) “Tra eticità, moralità e religione. Il ‘male et il suo perdono’ nell’opera di Ricoeur,” Annuario Filosofico 33(1): 462–84. Reynolds, Jack. (2004) “Possible and Impossible, Self and Other, and the Reversibility of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” Philosophy Today 48(1): 35–48. Ricoeur, Paul. (2000) “Sanction, Rehabilitation, Pardon,” in The Just, trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 133–45. Ricoeur, Paul. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Serban, Oana. (2014) “A ‘Person’ Imagines Forgiving a ‘Subject’—Three Perspectives on the Rest of Forgiving, Following Jankélévitch, Derrida and Levinas: The Unpardonable of the Ipseity ‘Outside the Subject’,” Analele Universitatii Bucuresti: Filosofie 63(2): 57–75. Stiver, Dan. (2006) “Derrida on Forgiveness: Notes from a Wittgensteinian Therapist,” Southwest Philosophical Studies 28: 41–7.

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The Gift of Forgiveness Thompson, Janna. (2010) “Is Apology a Sorry Affair? Derrida and the Moral Force of the Impossible,” Philosophical Forum 41(3): 259–74. Van Tongeren, Paul. (2008) “Impossible Forgiveness,” Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 15(3): 369–79. Verdeja, Ernesto. (2004) “Derrida and the Impossibility of Forgiveness,” Contemporary Political Theory 3(1): 23–47. Villa Castaño, Lida Esperanza. (2015) “El perdón en el plano humano: Entre el amor y el diálogo,” Praxis Filosofica 41: 125–42. Villa Castaño, Lida Esperanza. (2016) “Ante el daño absoluto, la resistencia: Una lectura desde Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad del Norte 25: 129–56. Wyschogrod, Edith. (2006) “Repentance and Forgiveness: The Undoing of Time,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60(1–3): 157–68. Zaibert, Leo. (2009) “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6(3): 365–93. Zarka, Yves Charles. (2014) “Le pardon de l’impardonnable. Derrida en question,” Archives de philosophie 77(3): 435–47.

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SECTION B

Current Research

PART III

The Nature of Forgiveness

16 FEELING BLAME AND FEELING FORGIVENESS Lucy Allais

These simplifications are of use to me only if they help to emphasize how much we actually mind, how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other people—and particularly of some other people—reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand, or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other. (Strawson 1962, 5)

1. Introduction This chapter is about the idea of forgiveness as a change in feelings. I present what I take to be a broad and inclusive account of emotion-centric views, while noting points at which there are disagreements within this family of positions, as well as places where I present specific features of my own version of this position. There is disagreement about what forgiveness is, and emotion-centric accounts are rejected by those who see forgiveness as primarily a speech act, a waiving of obligations, a performance, a commitment, or some combination of these, as well as by those who resist the idea of a unified account. While my aim is to discuss the idea of the change in feeling involved in forgiveness, my arguments are compatible with seeing this as only one part of forgiveness. However, I will suggest that understanding forgiveness as an emotional change gives an explanatorily powerful, unified account of the different things we care about with respect to forgiveness. Further, understanding forgiveness as ceasing to have blame-feelings towards someone who has wronged you with respect to that wrong (or has wronged someone you are closely identified with) is a highly capacious account, able to accommodate a wide range of circumstances, particularity, and context. It is an account that is both unified and inclusive. Like many people writing on forgiveness I assume that it is, at least, a response to wrongdoing which involves somehow releasing the wrongdoer from blame. This does not pre-empt argument about the role of feeling as opposed to speech and other actions (and the effect of these on moral requirements), as blame could be understood as encompassing any or all of these. But since this chapter is about emotion-centric accounts, I will focus on blame-feeling.1 A further common starting assumption is to assume that forgiveness is a response that is different from justifying, excusing, accepting, and condoning, because all of the latter are ways of ceasing to see the act in question as wrong. Forgiveness, in contrast, involves some kind of release from blame but without giving up the verdict of the wrongness and culpability of what is being forgiven; this is what

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-22

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makes it so puzzling and so special. I will also assume that forgiveness is distinct from mercy, and reconciliation,2 and that clarifying the differences and relations between these concepts can enrich our conceptual resources.

2.  A Sketch of Blame-Feeling Despite the disagreements mentioned, many philosophers note that the emotion-centric view of forgiveness is the dominant account.3 This is as it should be, in my view. Those who see forgiveness as a change in feelings need to give an account of which feelings are at issue (whether it is moral anger, resentment, hurt feelings, or something else), as well as an account of what kind of change in these emotions is required for forgiveness (whether it is overcoming, eliminating, diminishing, forswearing, or something else) and whether there is some particular process through which such emotions must be changed for this change to count as forgiveness. Murphy, for example, argues that forgiveness is the resolute overcoming, on moral grounds, of the retributive emotions that are naturally directed towards a person who has done an unjustified and non-excused moral injury (“Forgiveness and Mercy” 1988).4 Much literature about forgiveness focuses on resentment as the key emotion forgiveness overcomes. The emphasis on resentment in the seminal pieces in the literature, such as those by Joseph Butler,5 P. F. Strawson,6 and Jean Hampton and Jeffrie Murphy,7 no doubt plays a role in this. However, others also include hurt feelings and some forms of disappointment, or even just speak of negative feelings.8 There seems to be agreement that we should not include simply any negative emotion: it seems, for example, that there are forms of sadness one might have about a wrong that do not need to be overcome in order for one to have forgiven. Part of the reason for philosophers picking resentment as the relevant emotion, it seems to me, is that it is often, or even typically, a way of blaming. If forgiveness is a response to wrongdoing which releases a wrongdoer from blame, a broad emotion-centric account will see it as a release from the wronged person’s blame-feelings, of which resentment is central examplar.9 Blame-­ feelings are feelings which include in their content a presentation of someone as having culpably done something wrong. Such feelings include resentment, but there is no need to limit the blame-feelings at issue with forgiveness to resentment (and not all forms of resentment may be best understood as blame-feelings, so relevant to forgiveness10). Focus on blame-feeling gives us a way of discriminating which negative feelings are relevant for forgiveness while still allowing a lot of latitude. Hurt feelings and forms of disappointment can be blame-feelings but are not always. Those forms of sadness and disappointment which do not hold an action against – blame – the wrongdoer are not at issue with respect to forgiveness.11 Most writing on forgiveness starts by assuming that blame-feelings can be warranted and appropriate in some circumstances – specifically, in response to wrongdoing.12 In addition to characterizing the emotions at issue, emotion-centred accounts of forgiveness need to say something about the change in feelings that forgiveness involves, and whether there is a more positive feeling which needs to replace the negative one. Strawson famously describes forgiveness as ‘forswearing’ resentment, while other accounts talk about overcoming, eliminating, letting go of, abandoning, diminishing, rationally revising, or otherwise ceasing to have the relevant negative feelings. In addition, there are a variety of accounts of the attitude the forgiver should have to the forgiven once forgiveness has taken place. As Pettigrove says, [t]he candidates for the positive regard necessary for forgiveness are numerous. Martin Hughes refers to ‘the substitution of friendlier attitudes’. Margaret Holmgren, Eve Garrard, and ­David McNaughton suggest ‘an attitude of good will’ as the relevant positive regard. Robert

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Enright, David Eastin, and David Novitz propose compassion. Augustine offers love as the attitude forgiveness puts in the place of real or deserved anger. Aurel Kolnai recommends trust. Jean Hampton’s favoured description of the ‘pro-attitude’ the forgiver takes toward the wrongdoer is that she ‘reapproves’ of him. And Joanna North lists compassion, benevolence, love, trust, affection, and esteem among the pro-attitudes that could be adopted in forgiving. (Pettigrove 2012, 8)13 As we will see, understanding forgiveness as overcoming blame-feeling allows a lot of latitude with respect to how one gets rid of blame-feeling and with respect to how positive the feelings that replace it need to be. This is a strength of emotion-centric accounts. Much of the literature on moral emotions, moral responsibility, blame, and forgiveness looks to P. F. Strawson’s notion of a reactive attitude (Strawson 1962). Strawson’s notion is specifically a feeling-involving response (an affective attitude) to what a person has done, and what their action expressed about their willing. This makes it perfectly suited for the feelings that are at issue with respect to forgiveness. While we may have a variety of negative feelings (for example disappointment, annoyance, frustration, despair, anger) in relation to natural events (such as the weather, an illness, an obstacle), so long as we do not attribute these to a person’s willing, these negative feelings are not blame-feelings. And when we are able to change such negative attitudes we do not think of this as forgiving. Blame-feelings, in contrast, are specifically responses to what someone has done and what this action expressed about their willing; this makes them reactive attitudes. Part of what is so rich about Strawson’s notion of reactive attitudes is the complex content that he brings out as part of these attitudes. They are affective ways of seeing persons – they specifically belong to what Strawson calls the ‘participant view’. This is a view or way of understanding people from which we see them as acting – as authors of actions which flow from their agency and express their will. The participant view is understood in opposition to what he calls the ‘objective view’ from which we might have, for example, a physical explanation of a person’s bodily movements. Strawson’s aim is to argue that these two fundamentally different ways of thinking about and explaining actions do not exclude each other, in order to argue that this enables us to dissolve the free will problem; this aspect of his appeal to reactive attitudes does not concern us here. What is relevant here is simply the idea of affective attitudes which contain, as part of their content, seeing a person’s action as expressing their will. In Strawson’s account, in seeing something as an action, as something a person does, we are seeing it as willed by them (rather than understanding it as caused in some physical way) and when we understand it as willed by them, we understand it not just in terms of what happened (they moved their foot onto your hand) but in terms of how they understood what they were doing and what they thought and felt about it (whether they stepped on your hand with malice or accidentally, while trying to save you); this complex is what he refers to as ‘the quality of their will’. Strawson starts his discussion of resentment saying that [t]he central commonplace that I want to insist on is the very great importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings, and the great extent to which our personal feelings and reactions depend upon, or involve, our beliefs about these attitudes and intentions. (Strawson 1962, 5) Reactive attitudes express this concern. A further part of the complex content of these attitudes in Strawson’s account is that he thinks that they are responses which evaluate a person’s actions (and therefore evaluate their willing) in

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relation to a legitimate demand for some minimum amount of good will. For example, when we resent someone we see them as having culpably done something we were entitled to require them not to do. Not all reactive attitudes are negative or blame-involving: when we feel, for example, gratitude towards someone, we see them as having done something (as the author of an action that flowed from their will) that expressed more good-will towards us than we were entitled to expect. Gratitude is an affective view of a person’s willing that evaluates them in response to their action in the light of a valid demand for a minimum amount of good-will; it is therefore a reactive attitude. Blaming reactive attitudes see a person as having willed something which expressed insufficient regard for some requirement that we were entitled to expect them to have regarded. Their willing was not what we were entitled to have expected it to be. Note that the relevant demands can be highly relationship-specific: what counts as a hurtful lack of regard can be highly specific to particular people, contexts, and relationships. The targets or objects of reactive attitudes are agents in relation to their actions as willed, in the light of what we were entitled to expect of them. Seeing a person as a person (what Darwall calls recognition respect14) is a condition of seeing them as having willed their action (as opposed to its being an event or movement having happened); reactive attitudes go beyond this, and evaluate the agent. These attitudes see the action as reflecting on the agent as a person and thus involve esteem or appraisal.15 While recognition respect is unearned and is what every person is due, simply in virtue of being a person, esteem or appraisal evaluations reflect on a person’s worthiness to be admired or criticized as a result of their action.16 Our only access to other people’s willing is what their actions reflect about it. If we do not ever see someone’s actions as reflecting their willing and therefore as reflecting on them, then we are not seeing them as a person. Of course, there are grounds for caution about how much we know about what motivates others and what their reasons for acting really were, but to the extent that we understand a person’s actions as expressing her willing, we take it to reflect on her and we can evaluate her in the light of it. Blaming-feeling sees the wrongdoer in negative way, as someone who had bad willing (in the specific respect in question). In this sense, blame-feeling holds the wrongdoing against the wrongdoer; it is held to the wrongdoer’s account, as something that reflects on them. One could explain this by saying that reactive attitudes involve an affective evaluation of the agent’s character, but while this seems to me right in capturing the idea of the action as reflecting on the agent as a person, it is in danger of sounding too general. The affective appraisal e­ valuations that reactive attitudes involve can be highly specific. One can fail to forgive someone for ­something (hold it against them) while thinking well of their character overall and while loving them. Blame-feeling need not involve seeing them as overall bad or rotten, and is compatible with seeing them as overall good. Further, one can hold an unkind remark against someone who one thinks of as generally kind (this might even make their remark even more hurtful). In my view, so long as we see a person’s wrong as reflecting on them, we hold it against them. One final feature of reactive attitudes that is important for understanding blame-feeling (and the overcoming of it) is the idea that reactive attitudes are communicative. For example, they have been described as a form of moral address (McGeer 2013), as calling out to others (Walker 2006, 136), and as seeking recognition (A. Smith 2013, 44). As Coleen Macnamara says, there are a variety of accounts of this, which include saying that reactive attitudes seek, call on, urge, demand, require, deserve, or aim at some kind of response (Macnamara 2013b, 6). She explains this by saying that they have a ‘call-and-response’ structure (Macnamara 2013b, 896) and that even when they are not expressed, reactive attitudes are for evoking a response, and have an addressee (Macnamara 2013b, 18). Earlier I noted that reactive attitudes see their targets as responsible persons in seeing them as actors, the culpable authors of their actions; now we see that, in addition, the 218

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targets of these attitudes are seen as responsible agents in the sense of being addressed and held answerable. Smith expresses this, saying that [b]lame is incipiently communicative both in the sense that it registers (i.e., communicates, even if only to the victim herself ) the existence of unjustified wrongdoing and in the sense that it seeks some sort of moral recognition of wrongdoing on the part of the blameworthy agent. (A. Smith 2013, 44)17 Those who see reactive attitudes as at least implicitly communicative do not argue that this requires that they are always actually expressed; rather, the point is that their role is to communicate something and it is part of their content that they call for response, reply, acknowledgement, or recognition.18 As Stephen Darwall says, they come with an implicit RSVP (Darwall 2006, 145). Thus, reactive attitudes have specific relationality built into their content. McGeer explains this by saying that blame has ‘a cognitively sophisticated dialogical dimension. Blame responds to something a wrongdoer has done and it calls for something from the wrongdoer in return: namely, that the wrongdoer appropriately address the blamer’s sense of being wronged’ (McGeer 2013, 184). Having sketched blame-feeling, in the next section I present some concerns that have been raised with emotion-centric accounts, and which are taken to motivate alternatives. Then, in the final sections, I use a discussion of responses to these objections to present view of forgiveness as overcoming blame-feeling.

3.  Challenges to Emotion-Centric Accounts While many philosophers see forgiveness as a change in blame-feelings, there are also a number of philosophers who emphasize instead forgiveness as something that brings about changes in the normative situation, usually the wrongdoer’s obligations. Twambly sees forgiveness as the waiving of a debt (Twambly 1976); Jeremy Watkins sees forgiveness as allowing the wrongdoer to exclude from her practical deliberations reasons for remorse and apology that were previously in place (Watkins 2005); Dana Nelkin sees forgiveness as constituted (at least in part) by a kind of release from a special kind of obligation the offender has to the victim (Nelkin 2013).19 Some of these accounts emphasize the saying of ‘I forgive you’ as an act whereby the norms of interaction are altered, so they understand forgiveness as a kind of performative speech act.20 In this section, I outline some concerns these alternative accounts have raised with emotion-centric accounts. I will not treat them in their own right, but rather will simply focus on the objections to e­ motion-centric accounts that are at least part of what motivates them. One line of objection is to the sufficiency of emotion-change as an account of forgiveness. The thought is that appealing to a change in emotion is not enough to characterize forgiveness, because not all overcomings of blame-feeling constitute forgiveness – something more is needed to distinguish the eliminations of blame-feeling that count. This could be because something in addition to overcoming blame-feelings is thought to be needed, or because some particular way of overcoming blame-feelings is thought to be needed. Describing both concerns, Warmke and Hughes say that emotion accounts wouldn’t count someone as having forgiven who happened to eliminate their resentment by falling and hitting their head, or if the resentment simply withered away. They say that in response to this concern emotion-centric accounts typically only count overcoming resentment for the right reasons (with these still to be specified). A related kind of concern with right reasons motivates those who think we can only distinguish forgiveness from the related but distinct phenomena of justifying, excusing, accepting, and condoning if it is done for the right kinds of reasons. This is because forgiveness, unlike these alternative ways of getting rid of blame, continues to see the wrong as justifying resentment. 219

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It is thought that only appealing to reasons which show resentment to no longer be warranted will enable us to explain how we can cease to have it while continuing to see the act as having warranted it. This is defended by Per Milam (Milam 2018a, 2018b).21 In addition to the kinds of reasons for which we abandon blame-feelings, Warmke and Hughes point out that some emotion-centric accounts hold that forgiving requires a specified process by which the relevant emotions are changed. They say: [s]uppose, for example, that one sought to forgive and that the miracle of modern medicine produced a pill that, if ingested, could immediately eliminate one’s resentment. It has seemed to many that taking the resentment-eliminating pill does not qualify as forgiving (even if one were to take the pill for the right kinds of reasons). (Warmke and Hughes 2017) To deal with this supposed problem, some argue that forgiveness requires some particular way of achieving the change in question, such as the right kind of agent effort (Adams 1991).22 Another group of concerns with emotion-centric accounts is based on seeing emotions as too transitory, changeable, fickle, passive, and insufficiently subject to the will for a change in emotions to play the role in reaccepting and moving forward that forgiveness seems (at least often) to play. For example, Pettigrove worries that forgiveness is something we do, which may make a change of heart seem too passive (Pettigrove 2012, 9). In contrast, it might be thought that expressing/speaking forgiveness and acting in a way that shows your expectations to be changed are things that we undertake and things we do, and therefore that they have a better chance of playing the role that forgiveness should be able to play in releasing the wrongdoer from blame and restoring relationships.23 I started by saying that forgiveness releases wrongdoers from blame; proponents of ­obligation-changing accounts of forgiveness argue that it is not clear how an alteration in the wronged person’s feelings releases the wrongdoer from anything, and argue that the release is achieved, instead, through a change in obligations.24 Bennett, for example, holds that forgiveness involves either cancelling some of the wrongdoer’s secondary obligations or acknowledging that secondary obligations have been discharged and undertaking an obligation to treat the wrongdoer as one who no longer stands under those cancelled or discharged obligations (Bennett 2018, 1–2). ­Secondary obligations include things like apologizing and making amends (where possible). Similarly Warmke argues that forgiving alters the norms of interaction between victim and wrongdoer, such that the wronged one gives up rights to blame, to resent, and to demand action when they forgive, and they release the wrongdoer from obligations such as apology or restitution (Warmke 2016, 689–91). Bennett argues that understanding forgiveness as cancelling obligations gives us a way of explaining how it can be a process by which wrongdoers can be re-integrated, and which involves the specific relations we have to specific persons we have wronged (Bennett 2018, 3). He argues that seeing forgiveness as a change of feeling towards the wrongdoer does not enable us to explain how it can do this. Philosophers such as Alice MacLachlan and Kathryn Norlock question the project of trying to present a unified account of forgiveness (MacLachlan 2009, 191; Norlock 2009, 95).25 Among their concerns are that philosophers trying to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as forgiveness will fail to pay attention to the complexity and particularity of actual lives and socio-historical contexts, and will inappropriately exclude and impose, resulting in accounts of forgiveness which ‘do not match up at all with the meanings and intentions of actual people who express forgiveness in daily life’ (Norlock 2009, 18–21). I have some sympathy with this concern. Speaking forgiveness, waiving obligations, and changing feelings are all components that play roles in our lives and relationships, and this might lead us to think that there is 220

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not much point in dispute about which component takes the podium position as what forgiveness is. H ­ owever, I will argue that the disagreements between the above accounts are not just dispute about exactly which piece of a process should be seen as constituting the primary essence of forgiveness. Rather, they give radically different accounts of the role of the different components of forgiveness and their relation to each other. I will argue that an emotion-centric account is able to accommodate many of the worries mentioned, as well as to give a powerful and capacious account of how the different components of the process relate to each other.

4.  The Sufficiency of Overcoming Blame-Feeling In Section 2, I outlined an account of blame-feeling as a reactive attitude. In this and the next sections, I sketch an understanding of forgiveness as the overcoming of blame-feeling, and elaborate on it by considering how it can deal with the objections to emotion-centric accounts just presented. If we understand forgiveness as overcoming blame-feeling understood as a reactive attitude, then it will be a matter of ceasing to have (or reducing) towards the wrongdoer the incipiently communicative, blaming-appraisal that their wrongdoing licences. We have already seen that blame-feeling has complex intentional content; this will also be true of the ceasing to have blame-feeling. Since forgiveness does not involve a change in judgment about the culpability or wrongness of the act in question, it must involve a change in other aspects of the content of blame-feeling: the way the action is held against the wrongdoer, taken to reflect on them, and the way blame calls for them to respond to this. As we will see, paying attention to the detailed content of this change avoids concerns about the sufficiency of a change in feeling. Further, blame-feeling is something that (at least some of the time) we care very deeply about, enabling the overcoming of it to constitute an important release. Blame-feeling has normative significance and is communicative, which accommodates a number of concerns about the normative effects of overcoming it. Finally, this account is highly open-ended and variable. It allows that the overcoming of blame-feeling can be done for a variety of reasons, through a variety of processes, and can result in a variety of kinds and degrees of more positive attitudes.26 This shows that an ­emotion-centric account of forgiving can be highly non-prescriptive, and can allow for the complexity, specificity, and variety in human life that concern those who object to attempts to provide a unified account of forgiveness. As we have seen, some authors respond to concerns about the sufficiency of a change in emotions by requiring that the relevant change of feeling is achieved for the right kinds of reason and with the right kind of process.27 There is no agreed account of the right kinds of reasons for a change in attitude to count as forgiveness (extant accounts have challenges both to the necessity and to the sufficiency of the proposed required reasons).28 In my view, this move introduces problems.29 One problem is that if we say that a change of heart is only forgiveness if it is brought about for certain kinds of reasons, we may leave too little (or even no) space for the possibility of sometimes regarding forgiveness as criticizable. The account is in danger of making what we might sometimes want to regard as inappropriate, imprudent, hasty, or otherwise problematic forgiveness simply not instances of forgiveness. And requiring specific kinds of reasons is likely to fall into the inappropriate excluding and imposing that Norlock and MacLachlan warn us against, regimenting whether people who take themselves to be forgiving are really doing so, to a greater extent than we should. In my view emotion-centric accounts have no need to invoke specific kinds of reasons for the overcoming of blame-feeling as an extra condition, because the supposed problem the requirement is meant to address in fact dissolves when we pay attention to the details of the blaming reactive attitudes that forgiveness overcomes. Reactive attitudes, in Strawson’s account, are affective (they essentially involve feeling), but they are not simple occurrent emotions. For example, 221

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to have contempt for someone is not to have one simple feeling and may involve being disposed to have a variety of feelings towards someone in a variety of contexts; it may involve feeling anger in some circumstances and satisfaction in others (perhaps in relation to their setbacks). And it involves complex content: an affective appraisal of them as a person. This appraisal content can persist while relatively simple emotions like anger change. Suppose anger fades through forgetting, or because I simply put you out of my mind, or because I regard you as beneath contempt. If I still have the appraisal evaluations involved in a blaming reactive attitude, I could still hold the act against you and not have forgiven you. But if, in contrast, I no longer see the wrongdoing as reflecting on you (I no longer have blame-feeling towards you), then I no longer hold it against you. In this case it seems to me that I have forgiven you, whatever the reason for which I got myself to that position. The concern with ceasing to be angry as a result of a bang to the head is that the change in feeling doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the wrongdoer. But a change in affective appraisal of the wrongdoer is centrally about the wrongdoer, meaning that no further conditions are needed to ensure this focus. The concern that a change in emotions is too fickle and transitory to play the role we need forgiveness to play (at least potentially) in relationships is, it seems to me, also based on not taking sufficiently seriously the complex intentional content of blaming-reactive attitudes. Having a blaming reactive attitude is not just a matter of having occurrent anger, because it involves an affective appraisal evaluation of a person. Anger may come and go, and may reflect mood, circumstance, context, distractions, etc., while one continues to have the lowered appraisal evaluation associated with blame. This complexity means that reactive attitudes are considerably less fickle and transitory than simple feelings. This is not to deny that reactive attitudes could change; forgiveness may not always be stable. And you could think you have forgiven someone and find that you have not.30 But this seems to me an appropriate amount of changeability for an account of forgiveness to recognize, while at the same time giving it enough of the stability needed to make sense of the role it plays in relationships. Making forgiveness subject to transitory simple emotions would make it hard to see how it could play a role in explaining our moving forward in relationships, but this is not a problem for the overcoming blame-feeling account. Another basis for invoking the ‘right reasons’ as part of what makes a change in feeling constitutive of forgiving was the concern that in the absence of this the overcoming of blame-feeling is not warranted (because the wrongdoing justified blame), meaning that forgiveness cannot be distinguished from justifying, excusing, condoning, and accepting. However, it is important that ceasing to have the incipiently communicative, blaming appraisal that the wrongdoing licences requires no change in view of the wrongness of the action. The former is a view of the person, and this means that grounds for the change in feeling will depend on how we think about the justification for evaluations of persons’ willing or character. Apologies and remorse can be ways in which the wrongdoer gives the wronged person grounds for thinking that they have appropriately understood and responded to the blame and have reoriented their moral person; they are therefore a central kind of warrant for a change in this kind of evaluation. However, there may be other grounds for thinking it is rationally permissible to see the wrongdoer as a better person than their wrongdoing licences see them. In my view, the openness of persons – the fact that persons can change and improve – may be enough to licence this permissibility. Focus on the nature of the change in blame-feeling allows us to see why forgiveness often (perhaps usually) takes place in response to reasons (and certain specific kinds of reasons, such as those provided by apologies), as well as to see why the putative forgiver is entitled to make some demands for apologies, but without forcing us to limit the kinds of reasons that must be in place for something to count as forgiveness. This allows emotion-centric view to accommodate both conditional and unconditional forgiveness.31 Seeing a person’s will in the optimistic, hopeful, more positive way that is involved in no longer seeing their wrongdoing as reflecting on them has no implications at all for changing 222

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your view of the action as wrong, so is in no danger of being indistinguishable from condoning and accepting. Thus, while an emotion-centric account of forgiveness that sees it as overcoming blaming reactive attitudes could add as an extra condition that this must be done for a specific kind of reason, it has no need to. Once we pay attention to the details of the content of reactive attitudes, we can see that the requisite focus on the wrongdoer is already there when these attitudes change. This means that the account could include the conflict-avoidance kinds of forgiveness which accounts requiring moral reasons exclude,32 as well as self-interested reasons for achieving forgiveness: someone working with a therapist to overcoming their blame-reactive attitudes out of entirely prudential, self-involving considerations. These, as I see it, would count as forgiveness if the change has the right kind of content. It is not just a matter of the wronged person having, for example, less occurrent anger or dwelling less, but rather their actual affective-evaluative-communicative view of the wrongdoer. If the latter has changed, we can allow that forgiveness has occurred, whatever the reason that motivated starting the forgiving process. This account does not deny that people forgive for reasons (or that there could be better or worse reasons), but it does not need to require some particular kind of reason to be present for the change to count as forgiveness, and it allows that you could simply wake up one day and realize that you have forgiven someone, without having consciously intended to do so (and without doing so for some particular reason). In addition to not needing that the change in feeling to occur for a specified kind of reason, an account of forgiveness as overcoming blaming reactive attitudes can allow many different kinds of processes to constitute forgiveness.33 Forgiveness may come effortlessly to some and be a struggle for others. Some may undertake long and intense therapeutic processes in an attempt to overcome blame-feeling, while others may simply find that blame-feeling has gone. Some may not be able to bring themselves to forgive without apologies and recompense, and some may not be able to bring themselves to forgive even when there have been apologies and recompense, while others may forgive in the absence of any such steps by the wrongdoer. A concern with emotion-centric accounts is that forgiving is something we do, whereas a change in feeling is something passive, that happens to us. But both these claims are too general. As affective construals of persons, reactive attitudes are things we can cultivate and can undertake to cultivate. This means that it is not right to say that a change in blame-feeling is always merely something that happens to us and not something we do and undertake to do (though it can sometimes be something that happens to us). Forgiveness can be something that happens to us (I find that I have forgiven someone) but also can be something we work very hard at achieving.

5.  Obligations and the Overcoming of Blame-Feeling I have argued that concerns about the sufficiency of an emotional change can be answered by ­getting in view the complex content of reactive attitudes. But an altogether different set of concerns is raised by those who think that what we really need to explain is the change the forgiver makes to the wrongdoer’s obligations. There are a number of different positions here, which I will group together as ‘obligation-waiving’ views.34 A change in feelings, the speaking of forgiveness, and a change in rights and obligations are all things we care about that can play an important role in moving forward in relationships after wrongdoing. So emotion-change views, including the overcoming blame-feeling version I have presented, do not have to argue that speaking forgiveness and the normative changes that this effects are not part of forgiveness; we could have an inclusive account that allows all these as different aspects of forgiveness. Having noted this as a possible position, I am now going to argue for the stronger view that (1) a blame-feeling account can accommodate much of what obligation-waiving views want to accommodate and (2) the change of feeling is more fundamental than the speaking of forgiveness, because it (and not the 223

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waiving of obligations) explains what it is that is being spoken. Further, there is a point to the dispute, because the difference between emotion-change and obligation-waiving views is not just in which of the parts each puts emphasis on; they also have an entirely different understanding of the role and relations these parts have to each other. We started with the claim that forgiveness involves a release from blame, and one concern that motivates obligation-waiving accounts is that a mere inner change in feeling is insufficient to characterize this release, whereas, in contrast, waiving such obligations as apologizing and making amends might be thought to be more obviously a release from something. This concern, it seems to me, underestimates, in Strawson’s words, ‘how much we actually mind, how much it matters to us’ (Strawson 1962, 5) when those we care about have blame-feeling towards us. Strawson, at this point, is talking about our caring about the attitudes and intentions expressed in the actions to which our reactive attitudes respond, but we also care deeply about how others affectively evaluate us in their reactive responses: our wanting forgiveness for our actions reflects our caring about their caring. In my view, we want forgiveness when we care about the appraisal evaluations of those we have wronged; we want them to believe in our being the better persons we are undertaking to be when we apologize properly. Once we pay attention to how much we care about others’ caring about our affective evaluations of them, we can also see why forgiveness plays a role in restoring relationships.35 Our feelings are not mere epiphenomena; they are part of our constituting ourselves in relations to others; we actively form our characters in relationships, informed by the views, caring, expectations and checks on us that others’ attitudes to us represent.36 As we have seen, both Bennett and Warmke argue that the act of forgiving changes the normative situation between wrongdoer and wronged (and perhaps also other persons), and that a change of heart cannot explain this. Warmke says that if someone has forgiven it would be strange to subsequently find them expressing blame (Warmke 2016, 691). However, emotion-centric accounts have resources to explain a change in the norms of interaction. An emotion-centric account of course allows that we speak forgiveness, and independently of what forgiveness is, saying that you have forgiven someone alters legitimate normative expectations.37 It is indeed strange to express blame when you have said you no longer blame (or have undertaken no longer to blame). 38 We commit ourselves to acting in certain ways by things that we say, even if they don’t reflect how we feel. I might commit myself to acting in a certain way by saying ‘I trust you’ without in fact trusting the person concerned, but this could still affect norms of interaction. We would find it surprising to find someone checking up on a person who had said that they trust, because their report of their affective attitude generates reasonable expectations that they do in fact trust, but this does not make trusting someone a matter of declaring that you do. That speaking forgiveness affects the normative situation does not mean that speaking forgiveness is what forgiveness is. However, the emotion-centric view can explain why speaking forgiveness is important: because we often deeply care about the other’s evaluative appraisals of us and want to know that they forgive us. The emotion-centric account we have been considering has a further, more fundamental account of how forgiving changes the normative situation, which turns on the idea that independently of the speaking of forgiveness, it is part of the content of reactive attitudes that they are communicative, and that what they communicate has normative force. It follows from this that a change in reactive attitudes changes the normative situation. Although the natural role in our lives of blame-feeling involves its being communicated, emotion-centric accounts typically allow that one can forgive someone entirely ‘in your heart’ (in other words without saying or doing anything). However, while proponents of communicative understandings of reactive attitudes do not think these attitudes always are in fact communicated, part of the content of these attitudes is the call for a response, and this has normative implications. Overcoming a blaming reactive attitude is ceasing to have an accusatory attitude that calls for a response; this is a change in the normative situation that is a matter of the wronged person’s attitudes. Further, the accusatory appraisal makes 224

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a call that is from a specific person to another specific person, which is why the change typically cannot be accomplished by someone else. Obligation-waiving views see forgiveness as releasing a debt of some kind. An emotion-centric view can also have a kind of metaphorical balance sheet in mind, but here the debt column does not contain obligations incurred by wrongdoing that are dischargeable by actions the wrongdoer can undertake, but rather marks against the wrongdoer’s moral person (we can call this their character, having noted above ways this is too simple). This means that apologies and recompense have a role in both models, but these roles differ, resulting in very different understanding of the wronged one’s discretions and entitlements. In the obligations model, apologies and recompense are a way of discharging obligations. Once someone has apologized and discharged their obligations, there is nothing left for the wronged person to do but acknowledge this. Obligation-waiving views therefore allow the wronged person much less discretion and also seem to me to see what is owed after wrongdoing as much tidier and more clear-cut: there is something the wrongdoer owes and once they have discharged it, it is discharged. At this point, forgiveness simply consists in acknowledging that the wrongdoer has discharged their obligations. On the emotion-centric view we have been considering, rather than evaluating and altering her rights and the wrongdoer’s obligations, the forgiver is evaluating the wrongdoer. Here, the role of apologies and remorse is to show the wronged person your acknowledgement of their concerns and your commitment to being better, in the hope that this will lead to them evaluating you in an open, optimistic, hopeful way that sees you as being better than the wrongdoing reflects. But while one can take apologies and recompense as some evidence of a reorientation in the wrongdoer’s moral character, the action still stands as something they were willing to do, so the grounds are often inconclusive. And the things the wronged one needs to enable them to affectively see the wrongdoer differently (to no longer see them in the way their wrongdoing supports) need not be specified in terms of clear moral obligations and rights. Some people, in relation to some wrongs, might require willingness to make repeated apologies, and repeatedly talk it through, some might require evidence of sustained change in action, while others might not.39 Both blame-feeling and obligation-waiving accounts can allow that a change in feelings, the speaking of forgiveness, and the accepting or waiving of apologies have roles to play, but the difference between the accounts is not just in which component is being chosen to be called forgiveness. Rather, the components feature in very different ways. Consider what the wrongdoer who wants forgiveness wants. On the blame-feeling account they want you to stop seeing them in a certain way, and they are apologizing to acknowledge the wrong and show that they have reoriented their willing. On the obligation-waiving view, they want you to accept that their obligations are discharged or to waive their obligations. These are very different accounts. Further, the overcoming blame-feeling view of forgiveness can explain why having said ‘I forgive you’ commits the forgiver to not blaming, and to not requiring further apologies. In contrast, it is harder to see how waiving the requirement for apologies and recompense commits you to not affectively evaluating the wrongdoer in a way that sees the action as reflecting on them – to not blaming them. Warmke says the forgiver gives up their right to resent and blame, but while declaring an obligation to be waived gives up your right to insist on the performance of the obligation, it need have no implications for your affective appraisals. In my view, forgiveness is situated outside of the space of careful debt-keeping, rights, and obligation discharging. It is not straightforwardly an assessment of what is owed or has been paid, but an evaluation of persons, and the open, potentially growing nature of persons allows much flexibility in such evaluations, and explains why generous, hopeful evaluations from others can be important to us. This does not mean appraising each other inaccurately (and there is also an important role in relationships for acceptance). In my view, forgiveness most centrally comes into play in relation to the possibility of moral growth and change. In central cases in which 225

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the wrongdoer who has apologized wants forgiveness, they want to be better than their action ­indicated, and they want to be seen in this way. In forgiving, we view them in this way which is both open (it does not see them as forever fixed by their action) and hopeful or optimistic.40 An account of forgiveness as overcoming blame-feeling is both explanatory and capacious. The overcoming of blame-feeling is something we, at least sometimes, deeply want from those we wrong. We want the way we are seen not to be fixed by our wrongdoing, rather than for our obligations to have changed (though the process of bringing about the former change can change our obligations). No longer being blamed can be experienced as a release, it has normative force, and it can heal relationships. Telling someone you have overcome blame-feeling, or committing to doing so, creates expectations (to not act in a blaming way), and this is something we want to be told. Apologies and recompense can ground the overcoming of blame-feelings, both rationally and psychologically, but at the same time this overcoming can be done for a wide variety of reasons, through a wide variety of processes, and it can be a matter of degree. It is a response to wrongdoing which sees persons as constantly forming ourselves through our choices (our willing), which sees our willing as reflecting on us, but also sees us as open-ended, potentially growing works in progress who have the capacity to reorient and remake ourselves. And sometimes it is a response that can help us to grow and be the better selves we want to be, through the hopeful and generous view the one we have wronged takes of us.

Notes Iam extremely grateful to Kathryn Norlock, Glen Pettigrove, Abe Stoll, Monique Wonderly, and ­participants of the Zürich moral responsibility workshop for fantastically helpful and generous comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am grateful for a fellowship from the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, during which I completed this chapter. 1 Some argue blame fundamentally is what I am calling blame-feeling (A. Smith 2013), while others ­a rgue that blame does not essentially involve feeling. I do not enter this dispute here, so I will talk about blame-feeling to highlight this aspect of blame. 2 See Barrett Emerick for discussion of the differences and relations between forgiveness and reconciliation (Emerick 2017, 121–2). 3 For example, in the Stanford Encyclopedia article on forgiveness, Warmke and Hughes present it as the dominant view (Warmke and Hughes 2017). See “Forgiveness and Mercy” (1988) and Hampton (1988) for a classic presentation of the view. 4 See also Allais (2008b); Emerick (2017); McNaughton and Garrard (2017); Hughes (1993); Calhoun (n.d.); Richards (1988). 5 Butler (1913). 6 Strawson (1962). 7 “Forgiveness and Mercy” (1988). 8 Norvin Richards speaks about abandoning all ‘hard feelings’ (Richards 1988). There is also debate about what resentment is. For example, Hieronymi sees it as a protest (Hieronymi 2001), Garrard and ­McNaughton (Garrard and McNaughton 2002) see it as ill-will, and Hughes sees it as moral anger (Hughes 1993). I present it as a retributive reactive attitude (Allais 2008b) and as a blaming reactive attitude (Allais 2021). 9 See Fricker (2021). 10 I am sympathetic to MacLachlan’s concerns about philosophers over-moralizing resentment, and focusing on it too much in discussions of forgiveness. (MacLachlan, n.d.; Per Milam 2018). See Allais (2013, 2021). 11 They may not accept the suggestion, but it seems to me that it would be helpful to Garrard and ­McNaughton’s account of the ill-will that forgiveness overcomes and the good-will that replaces it to include a reactive attitudes analysis of both. If what is at issue is the ill-will involved in blaming reactive attitudes, they can exclude ill-will which is not part of blaming the wrongdoer (perhaps is just based on hostility or dislike) as well as good will that one ought to have to everyone anyway. 12 As Strawson says, ‘[t]o ask for forgiveness is in part to acknowledge that the attitude displayed in our actions was such as might properly be resented’ (Strawson 1962).

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Feeling Blame and Feeling Forgiveness 13 A possible concern with some of these emotions is that they involve feelings of good will that we ought to have to others, specifically those with whom we are in relationships, independently of forgiving them. 14 Darwall (2004). 15 See Allais (2008a). 16 See Angela Smith, who says that ‘to blame a person for something is essentially to take that thing to reveal something negative about that person’s character’ (A. Smith 2013, 30), and Gabriele Taylor who says that feeling guilt about something involves seeing it as a ‘stain’ and says ‘when feeling guilty I think of myself as having brought about a forbidden state of affairs and thereby in this respect disfigured a self which otherwise remains the same’ (Taylor 1985, 92). 17 See also McGeer (2013, 184); Macnamara (2013b, 898). 18 Macnamara (2013a, 2013b); McGeer (2012, 2013); A. Smith (2013); Darwall (2006); Walker (2006) 19 See also Bennett (2018); Warmke (2016). 20 Warmke (2016, 696). See Pettigrove (2012) and Norlock (2009) for discussion of the act of speaking forgiveness. 21 See also Hieronymi (2001). 22 See Per Milam in this volume on process accounts of forgiveness. 23 See MacLachlan (2009, 189). 24 See Bennett (2018, 1–2); Warmke (2016, 689–90). 25 Similarly see N. Smith (2000, 134) and Neblett (1974, 273). 26 For example, in previous work, I cite an example from South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process, in which Doreen Faku expresses forgiveness towards Eugene De Kock, the man who orchestrated the ­abduction, torture, and murder of her husband by saying ‘I would like to hold him by the hand, and show him that there is a future, and that he can still change’. Quoted in Gobodo-Madikezela (2004, 14–15). See Allais (2008b). Taking her words seriously, Faku’s forgiveness does not consist in thinking that De Kock has changed; however, in my view she does see him more positively than his actions ­licence, simply in seeing him as capable of change, as not fixed and set in the nature that his evil actions entitle her to attribute to him. He has acted in a way that warrants her writing him off as a person; in forgiving she sees him as not unredeemable, and as still having enough potential goodness in him to be capable of moral improvement. 27 “Forgiveness and Mercy” (1988). 28 See Brunning and Milam (2018). 29 I argue this in detail in Allais (2008b). 30 The account also allows, as Monique Wonderly argues, the possibility of unforgiving someone. Wonderly (MS). 31 For further discussion of conditional and unconditional forgiveness, see Allais (2013); Garrard and ­McNaughton (2002); Milam (2018a); Fricker (2021); Govier (1999). 32 This is a criticism Hampton makes of Murphy’s account (Hampton 1988). For discussion, see Norlock (2009, 18–21). 33 Once we pay attention to the complex content that reactive attitudes involve, the kinds of head-­ banging and pill-taking to overcome resentment Hughes and Warmke mention as possible problems for ­emotion-only accounts become much less plausible, even as possibilities. The complex content of reactive attitudes and the complex relations these have to other beliefs, dispositions, and emotions mean that a changed view of someone that is involved in letting go of a blaming reactive attitude is a complex change, and not the mere change in a simple feeling. A complex question arises here as to whether we can have the cognitive content that reactive attitudes involve without the feeling. The position I am outlining is assuming that this is not typically possible: that these attitudes have content that is essentially intentional and essentially affective, rather than that they consist of cognitive content with an add-on of non-intentional affect. Many authors have written about emotions as having a specific kind of personally significant, evaluative, charged presentation of their objects. (De Sousa, Goldie, Roberts, Macnamara, and Helm for discussion in relation to reactive attitudes.) As McGeer argues, emotions are attention grabbers which ‘make salient for us the communicative content of what they convey’ (McGeer 2013, 182). Smith stresses that blame is not a mere assessment of wrongdoing (after all, this assessment is still present after forgiveness has taken place), but an emotion that contains protest and call for recognition (A. Smith 2013, 29–30). 34 Twambly (1976); Watkins (2005); Nelkin (2013); Bennett (2018); Warmke (2016). 35 Bennett argues that emotion-centric views cannot explain this, arguing that it is the obligations that the wrongdoer has that are the obstacle to restored relations, and not the wronged one’s blame-feelings (Bennett 2018, 19).

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Lucy Allais 36 As Bennett Helm puts it, ‘there is an important interpersonal dimension of the identities of persons’ (Bennett 2017, 3). My claim here is that this includes the kinds of evaluative assessments expressed by reactive attitudes. 37 This does not mean that an emotion-centric account has to understand the speaking of forgiveness only as a report of feelings – this speaking can be understood as an undertaking and a commitment. See Pettigrove (2012, 19) for discussion. The undertaking could be to continue to affectively regard the wrongdoer in a certain way (or to cultivate this affective regard) and to act on this. 38 If you tell someone that they no longer owe you an apology then you are no longer entitled to ask them for an apology; this is relevantly similar to how obligations are changed by saying things like ‘you don’t owe me anything, it was a gift’, or ‘this one’s on me’. Assuming that the other person accepts this, you have undertaken to waive something they might have owed, and once you have done this you are no longer entitled to think of them as owing you something. See McNaughton and Garrard (2017, 101) for a similar claim. 39 Of course, those who have been wronged could be unreasonable in what they require; how this relates to forgiveness seems to me a complicated question, which may depend on the specific details of particular cases. 40 I allow that we can forgive the dead; obviously in this case the open-endedness does not involve future possibilities for improvement, so it must involve an optimistic view of the possibility of interpreting their willing as overall better than it seemed to be.

References Adams, Marilyn McCord. 1991. “‘Forgiveness: A Christian Model.’” Faith and Philosophy 83 (3): 277–304. Allais, Lucy. 2008a. “Dissolving Reactive Attitudes: Forgiving and Understanding.” The South African ­Journal of Philosophy 27: 1–23. ———. 2008b. “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 36 (1): 33–68. ———. 2013. “Elective Forgiveness.” The International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (5): 637–53. ———. 2021. “The Priority of Gifted Forgiveness: A Response to Fricker’.” The Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (3): 261–73. Bennett, Christopher. 2018. “The Alteration Thesis: Forgiveness as a Normative Power.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 46 (2): 207–33. Brunning, Luke, and Per-Erik Milam. 2018. “Oppression, Forgiveness, and Ceasing to Blame.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 14 (2): 143–75. Butler, Joseph. 1913. Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Cathedral. London: Macmillan and Co. Calhoun, Cheshire. n.d. “Changing One’s Heart.” Ethics 103 (1): 76–96. Darwall, Stephen. 2004. “Presidential Address to the Central Division of the American Philosophical ­A ssociation.” http://www-personal.umich.edu/sdarwall/. ———. 2006. The Second Person Standpoint. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Emerick, Barrett. 2017. “Forgiveness and Reconciliation.” In The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Kathryn Norlock. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 117–34. “Forgiveness and Mercy.” 1988. In Forgiveness and Mercy, edited by Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2021. “Forgiveness - An Ordered Pluralism.” Australasian Philosophical Review, 3 (3): 241–60. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2002. “In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (1): 39–60. Gobodo-Madikezela, Pumla. 2004. A Human Being Died That Night. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Govier, Trudy. 1999. “Forgiveness and the Unforgiveable.” American Philosophical Quarterly 36: 59–75. Hampton, Jean. 1988. “Forgiveness and Mercy.” In Forgiveness and Mercy, edited by Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helm, Bennett W. 2017. Communities of Respect. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hieronymi, Pamela. 2001. “Articulating and Uncompromising Forgiveness.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 529–55. Hughes, Paul. 1993. “What Is Involved in Forgiving?” Journal of Value Inquiry 27 (3): 331–40. MacLachlan, Alice. 2009. “Practicing Imperfect Forgiveness.” In Feminist Ethics and Social and Political ­Philosophy: Theorising the Non-Ideal, edited by Lisa Tessman. New York: Springer. ———. n.d. “Unreasonable Resentments.” Journal of Social Philosophy 41 (4): 422–41.

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Feeling Blame and Feeling Forgiveness Macnamara, Coleen. 2013a. “Reactive Attitudes as Communicative Entities.” Philosophy and ­Phenomenological Research 90 (3): 546–569. ———. 2013b. “‘Screw You!’ & ‘thank You”.” Philosophical Studies 165: 893–914. McGeer, Victoria. 2012. “Co-Reactive Attitudes and the Making of Moral Community.” In Emotions, Imaginatin and Moral Reasoning, edited by C MacKenzie and R. Langdon, 299–326. New York: Psychology Press. ———. 2013. “Civilizing Blame.” In Blame: Its Nature and Norms, edited by D. Justin Coates and Neal A. Tognazzini, 162–88. New York: Oxford University Press. McNaughton, David, and Eve Garrard. 2017. “Once More with Feeling: Defending the Goodwill Account of Forgiveness.” In The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Kathryn Norlock. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Milam, Per. 2018a. “Against Elective Forgiveness.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21: 569–84. ———. 2018b. “Reasons to Forgive.” Analysis 01 (01): 1–11. Neblett, William. 1974. “Forgiveness and Ideals.” Mind 83 (330): 269–75. Nelkin, Dana. 2013. “Freedom and Forgiveness.” In Free Will and Moral Responsibility, edited by Ishtiyaque Haji and Justin Caouette. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Norlock, Kathryn. 2009. Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Pettigrove, Glen. 2012. Forgiveness and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, Norvin. 1988. “Forgiveness.” Ethics 99 (1): 77–97. Smith, Angela. 2013. “Moral Blame and Moral Protest.” In Blame: Its Nature and Norms, edited by D. Justin Coates and Neal A. Tognazzini, 27–48. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Nick. 2000. I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strawson, P. F. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25. Taylor, Gabriele. 1985. Pride, Shame, and Guilt. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Twambly, P. 1976. “Mercy and Forgiveness.” Analysis 36: 84–90. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2006. Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warmke, Brandon. 2016. “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 687–703. Warmke, Brandon, and Paul Hughes. 2017. “Forgiveness.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/forgiveness/. Watkins, Jeremy. 2005. “Forgiveness and Its Place in Ethics.” Theoria 71 (1): 59–77.

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17 FORGIVENESS AS A VOLITIONAL COMMITMENT Kathryn J. Norlock

In this chapter, I develop a view of forgiveness as primarily a commitment. The position that forgiveness is a commitment presumes, or takes as an important focus, a view of forgiveness as volitional and distal. To see forgiveness as volitional is to see it as neither involuntary nor merely a grim duty one has little choice to observe (Enright et al. 1998: 47; Warmke 2015). Therefore, accounts of forgiveness as a commitment tend not to focus on extents to which it is identified with emotions or edicts. Instead, forgiveness is usually characterized as an expression, practice, or cultivated attitude in commitment-centered accounts, and delivered or maintained by forgiving agents with intention and purpose. Forgiveness in this sense is also distal; that is, a commitment to be forgiving takes the nature of forgiveness to involve not just reaction in response to an occasion but moral agency over time, a hopeful view of one’s control over one’s future forgiving behaviors and attitudes to be in part up to the agent (Alfano 2016). The form and content of that commitment depends on several aspects, which I outline in ­Section 1. The commitment of forgiveness can take the form of an expression to others or an inward pledge. It can be a commitment to repair or restore relationships with wrongdoers for their sake or the sake of the relationship, usually by forswearing one’s hostile attitudes toward a particular wrongdoing (Lauritzen 1987; Balázs 2000; Norlock 2009). For my purposes, the conception of forgiveness as release, repair, or relief advanced by Alice MacLachlan works best; she holds a multidimensional view of forgiveness, and summarizes them with the observation that the different phenomena described as forgiveness have in common their intended function(s). They all intend a certain transformation in relation to the wrong and wrongdoer: to release the wrongdoer from his or her wrong in some way, to repair some of the damage done to all parties by the wrong…or simply to offer some relief from the subjective experience of guilt. (MacLachlan 2017: 139) The commitment may also be to oneself for one’s own sake, to be a more forgiving person for self-regarding as well as relational reasons. Forgiveness as a commitment can be incident-specific, that is, a response to a particular occasion of harm, or it can be a forward-looking disposition, an aim to cultivate the habit of being a forgiving person in advance. As a commitment that must be revisited and renewed over time, forgiveness can also be seen as a process. As a disposition in advance, forgiveness in the sense of a commitment resembles accounts of forgiveness as a virtue, that is, forgivingness. The enabling conditions of forgivingness as a virtue (or at least a skill 230

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of virtuous people) may be more basic master virtues including integrity and humility, which I discuss in more detail in Section 2. Those same motivations underpin commitments to be unforgiving, so I conclude this chapter with some careful consideration of the ethics of unforgivingness.

1.  What, When, and to Whom Are These Commitments to Forgive? The literature on forgiveness today offers various accounts of forgiveness, but most do not take the view that forgiveness is primarily a commitment. Many argue instead that forgiveness is primarily a transformation in one’s feelings with respect to a wrongdoer (Murphy and Hampton 1988; Calhoun 1992); in stricter versions of these accounts, forgiveness does not occur absent a change in one’s affective disposition to a wrongdoer (Allais 2008; Garrard and McNaughton 2010, Milam 2018). As an emotional transformation, forgiveness may be seen as incompatible with continuing to have hostile feelings toward the perpetrator with respect to the wrongdoing (although Lucy Allais notes that such feelings may admit of degrees; see Allais 2008, 37). From these perspectives, a commitment to forgive would then be part of a process of one’s self-transformation, perhaps the reason motivating a decision to try to feel differently, or an expression to another of what has occurred in one’s heart, but not its chief characteristic. The appropriate change of heart, based on reasons that it is morally justified, serves for some of these theorists as the central function of forgiveness (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 23). Like many theorists of forgiveness, I am a descriptive pluralist with respect to what forgiveness is, and I am a moral pluralist with respect to what makes forgiveness right or good, because actual moral practices of forgiving serve diverse moral functions, and agents’ conceptions of forgiveness are so dependent upon differences including embodiment, culture, religion, and location ­(Norlock 2017a; see also Card 2002; Neblett 1974). In what follows, therefore, I do not believe that I offer an account that covers all forms of forgiveness. However, while forgiveness may have a multiplicity of functions and manifestations, the commitments that forgiveness yields are arguably common to varieties of moral experiences. For example, accounts of forgiveness that focus on emotion may describe forgiveness as the achievement of overcoming or eliminating hostile feelings (Horsbrugh 1974; McGary 1989; Govier and Verwoerd 2002; McNaughton and Garrard 2017), and accounts of forgiveness as a speech act may focus on a declaration, such as “I forgive you” (Haber 1991; Scarre 2016). These are very different forms of forgiveness, and yet authors of both sorts of accounts have raised, as a matter of concern, what it might mean that the forgiver feels a renewed spike of anger or pain at a later date; some of these philosophers speculate that perhaps the forgiver experienced a backslide in emotional progress, or perhaps later anger reveals she spoke hastily or insincerely. Understood primarily as a commitment, however, forgiveness just is the practice of committing oneself to a different future, including renewing or redoubling one’s efforts to uphold a previous decision to commit to forgiving. According to theorists of commitment-based accounts, later negative feelings are not necessarily either forms of backsliding or evidence of previous insincerity, so much as simply foreseeable aspects of the challenges of living up to a commitment. For example, Glen Pettigrove (2012) agrees that forgiveness can be a commitment in some of its forms, and expression of a commitment to forgive that is followed by later resentment or anger “does not display confusion” (15). He adds that when forgiveness is expressed to an offender, “the articulation of the forgiving commitment creates a reasonable set of expectations on the part of the one to whom it has been voiced” (17). I would add that whether it is voiced or not, the activities and practices of one who forgives have this effect on others; most enactments of forgiveness can create expectations that the future will resemble the new present on the part of perceptive wrongdoers in interpersonal contexts. ­Relationships are defined in part by their existence over time, and forgiving in relationships would seem highly likely to yield expectations that forgivers will continue to forgive over time. 231

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This is important to understanding forgiveness as a commitment, because moral agents are not static things. Persons are subject to change over time and subject to the recurrence of memories that can be both uncontrolled and as vivid as they were when one was first wronged. Even accounts of forgiveness as an act or decision that “fixes” a wrong in the past only provide a snapshot of what forgiveness may be at a particular time (Walker 2006: 169–70). It is a reasonable expectation on the part of someone who is aware that they are forgiven that one does not just forgive at the time of a harm but will remain forgiving, because forgiveness in many forms can alter the norms of interaction for the forgiven and the forgiver (Scarre 2016; Warmke 2016). It is also realistic and understandable that a forgiver will not remain settled in their attitudes over time, and so the understandable expectations of forgiven wrongdoers may conflict with the foreseeable changes in the dispositions of a forgiver. As Marilyn McCord Adams says, “forgiveness involves a series of re-evaluations of the situation.… Things may be better than they seem and/or worse than they seem, but they will always be more complicated than at first they seem” (Adams 1991: 293). The distinctive challenge of forgiveness as a commitment is that one is faced with indefinite future moral decisions as to whether and how to uphold the commitment, even if a wrongdoing may be forgiven “at first” for good reasons. How that first commitment is made or conveyed is a separate matter. Forgiveness can be a commitment in the sense of being expressed to a wrongdoer in one form of a speech act, specifically, a commissive. By a commissive, I mean J.L. Austin’s (1962) category of illocutions by dint of which speakers commit themselves to future conduct in the course of saying so; Austin’s most well-known example of commissives is betting. In saying that I bet you five dollars (say, that my team will beat your team), I just do commit myself to paying you in the course of saying that I bet you. Austin never cites “I forgive” as an example of a performative utterance, although he suggests such close relatives as “I accept your apology” (1962: 7). I extend Austin’s insights to forgiveness because, in some contexts, saying “I forgive you” or “all is forgiven” commits me to a course of future forgiving conduct. Against objections that a forgiver may be in error about the nature of a wrong, or unable to maintain a commitment, or insincere, defenders of commissive accounts grant that, as with betting, commissive forgiving can misfire, be abused, or be given in bad faith, and this no more undermines commissive forgiveness than it does such commissives as betting and promising (Haber 1991; ­Norlock 2009; Pettigrove 2012). If I made a monetary bet that I knew I could not pay, that I won did not mean I would not have been reasonably held to normative expectations to live up to my commitment if I’d lost. So too with forgiveness. One could communicate it hastily with a clear sense that one is not ready to live up to the expectations it engenders, yet to do so commits one “to some future course of action” in the minds of listeners (Searle 1976: 11). For this reason, expressions of forgiveness take important moral risks; indeed, all such normatively forceful expressions are morally risky, since we are pledging ourselves to pursue future forms of relationship without knowing what unexpected future developments will change our priorities and practices (Kading 1960: 61). Accounts of forgiveness as a commissive tend to focus on expressions of forgiveness after particular incidents (Londey 1986; Pettigrove 2004, 2012; Warmke 2016; Jorgensen 2017). Not all accounts of forgiveness as a spoken commitment require that the wrongdoing precede forgiveness, however; Nicolas Cornell, for example, develops an account of expressions of “preemptive forgiving” that commit speakers to taking a forgiving stance toward specific injuries in the event that they arise in the future (Cornell 2017: 242). This is complex, in part because Cornell is neutral regarding how to understand what has happened if the event does not ultimately take place. For example, I have had the experience of telling a student of mine, with a bit of reluctance, “Well, it’ll mean grading on my holiday, but I forgive you if you send the paper late,” and finding to my delight that the student did not send the paper late, but rather got it in a bit early. According to Cornell, did I preemptively forgive my student? He suggests two possibilities: either no forgiving 232

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occurred or I “forgave something nonactual, interpreting it as ‘I forgive [you if you f ],’” and ­Cornell clarifies forgiving the nonactual with the example, “consider forgiving a transgression that one mistakenly believes to have been committed” (2017: 253). One could argue that no forgiving occurred, since my student did nothing to be forgiven for. Yet on a commissive account, I did establish expectations within our relationship that I would orient myself toward a possible future harm in a way my student could trust to be reparative. In other words, communicating preemptive forgiveness established normative expectations in my student with respect to the course of our future relationship; this is clearer if one considers whether my student’s expectations would be the same had I said, “If you send this paper to me on a holiday, I will never forgive you.” Seeing forgiveness as at times a commissive is compatible with allowing for the possibility that at other times the same expression does not function that way. One may say it as a report of how one currently feels, one may intend it as a declarative expression intended to set another free in an urgent moment, and one may lie, intending it as a manipulation of the recipient. As Austin observes, the same propositional sentence can serve in more than one functional context; for example, “I shall be there” may be a prediction or it may be a promise (33). As with some other speech acts, a commissive is subject to felicity conditions, including the circumstances, the appropriate speaker and listener, the speaker’s intention to carry out the commitment, and their appropriate states of mind, including believing that one can live up to a commitment. In conveying the commissive in interpersonal relationships, one who says “I forgive you” or a relevantly similar commissive implies that they will forswear their negative feelings about the wrongdoing or the wrongdoer (Warmke 2020), and that they intend to restore the relationship that obtains or to repair the damage that the memory of the relationship would otherwise bear. Repair of a relationship is consistent with ceasing to interact, so the commissive to forgive is not necessarily a promise of reconciliation. Forgiveness can also be a commitment in the sense of being a chosen set of attitudes and practices that reflect the forgiver’s ongoing adherence to the view that he or she forgives a wrongful incident. That is, forgiveness as a commitment may not be expressed aloud in so many words, but may motivate a forgiver to come to important moral decisions to conduct “inner work” (Emerick 2017: 120, 121; see also Enright 2001). One may decide to cultivate improved attitudes toward a wrongdoer, and to revisit whether to maintain those forgiving attitudes over time. Such an inner commitment to forgive is fundamentally unilateral (Emerick 2017: 117). This form of commitment to forgiveness can occur without the wrongdoer’s knowing that they are forgiven and can include forgiving absent wrongdoers and even the dead. One could object that forgiveness of the absent and the dead is not a commitment that is obviously motivated by relational repair, because where there is no interactive reciprocity, there is no relationship. However, I resist the latter clause; as I argue elsewhere, relationships are meaningful even when they are no longer reciprocal, because most real relationships exist primarily in the imaginative and interpretive contents of the mind, and in behaviors and conduct influenced by one’s attitude toward one’s own mental contents (Norlock 2017c: 351). As Diana Meyers says, “relationships are sources of moral identity” (2004: 292). If one’s relationships include past harms and one’s own internally valued commitments to forgive that harm, then forgiveness is likewise a source of one’s moral identity. Not all agents will find they need to revisit the commitment if a forgiving attitude toward a past harm is easily maintained and therefore even forgotten, but the possibilities of some easy forgiveness or subsequent forgetting are compatible with forgiveness being a commitment. Indeed, the ease with which some commitments to forgive are upheld seems to me to be confirmation that one made a highly appropriate commitment, one suited to the relationship and perhaps accommodated by understanding how a wrong but forgiven act fits into a wider narrative about the forgiven person (Calhoun 1992). Easily upheld commitments can co-exist with other offers of forgiveness that require reconsideration, especially on more difficult occasions. When a forgiver’s 233

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perspective on a wrongdoer or a past wrongdoing is one that was committed to forgiving, but becomes dominated by negative feelings upon remembering or reflecting on the harm, then forgiveness may require recommitting to a change in one’s feelings, a renewal of one’s aims to repair this aspect of a relationship. In saying this, I do not intend to indicate that all relationships require a recommitment; many of us find it possible to continue in relationships in which incidents are unforgiven, or relationships in which forgiving commitments were made and not maintained. The reconsideration of one’s previous commitment to forgive may also be resolved by concluding that it is proper to cease recommitting, that forgiveness is no longer appropriate not only because of what a wrongdoer did but because of the person that wrongdoer is. As Pettigrove (2012) argues, we forgive or decline to forgive persons for their characters as well as for their acts. Whether forgiveness is a commitment to be recommended depends upon one’s moral aims with respect to a relationship or to one’s own character. When one’s moral aims with respect to one’s own character include cultivating the virtues and skills of sociality, then a commitment to forgiveness can be a disposition, cultivated in advance of any wrong acts. Robin Dillon refers to such a disposition as “preservative,” and describes preservative forgiveness as a forward-looking attitude that persons are “basically decent and aiming to be good, capable of moral ­self-improvement… and, on the other hand, as inherently fallible and liable to get even far off track” (Dillon 2001: 58), therefore likely worthy of forgiveness and demanding of us to be prepared to forgive. Dillon uses the analogy of a forgiving surface that allows one to drop a glass without its shattering; the idea is that a person will make errors, which can be accommodated rather than felt to be irreversibly damaging (2001: 59). Dispositions to forgive in advance can be commitments to oneself or commitments to others. Dillon (2001) focuses on self-forgiveness as a form of preservative forgiveness; this is a form of a commitment to oneself that makes sense if we grant that we can have relationships with our past, present, and future selves (Norlock 2009: 153). Forward-looking dispositions to be forgiving resemble the accounts of philosophers who describe forgiveness as permitting an openness to reconciliation (Emerick 2017; Strabbing 2020). One may see a commitment to be self-forgiving as a commitment to living with oneself without (or with fewer) regrets. Those of us who have written about self-forgiveness regularly observe that self-forgiveness entails reconciliation in a way that a disposition to forgive others does not. Arguably, a commitment to forgiveness of oneself or others, when cultivated as a disposition in advance of harm, is simply a virtue of forgivingness (Roberts 1995; Neu 2011; Griswold 2007). Virtues are deliberately cultivated moral practices that agents take to be central to a good life, and committing to being a forgiving person implies that over time, one aims to avoid the extremes of vice, “servility on the one side, and an unyielding hard-heartedness and vengefulness on the other” (Neu 2011: 135–6). Commitment to being a forgiving person is not like a propositional commitment to a specific future act or set of acts; instead, it is “a commitment to some value, as a general guide to action” (Nguyen 2019: 976). In Kantian terms, one may see forgivingness as an imperfect duty, a practice to be committed to exercising over time, even if not required on every possible occasion (Kant 1775–80; Blöser 2019; Satne 2018; Moran 2013; Sussman 2005).

2.  What Motivates Committing to Forgive, and Committing to Unforgivingness? In the remainder of this chapter, I take up discussion of some of the motivating attitudes that inform commitments to forgive another or to be a forgiving person in advance of harms. I then proceed to consider the possible motivations of those who commit to being unforgiving, such as survivors of atrocities who say that what happened should never be forgiven, and those who commit in advance of harm to being the sorts of persons who are prepared to be unforgiving if harms they already hold to be unforgivable come about. Let us start with some possible grounding conditions for the commitment to forgive. 234

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2.1  Motivating Attitudes of Commitments to Forgive One may take seriously a commitment to be forgiving for moral reasons that include humility and integrity.1 I see integrity as fundamental to being a person who lives up to commitments generally; in interpersonal relationships, I see integrity as the basic disposition of one who can be trusted to carry out one’s expressions, especially expressions of forgiveness when these carry the implicit message that forgiveness will enable the repair of the relationship after a harm. As Cheshire Calhoun argues, integrity is a “master virtue” that presses into service “a host of other virtues” (Calhoun 2016: 153), and I suggest that those virtues could including a preparation to be forgiving. Integrity, as Calhoun develops it, is “the social virtue of acting on one’s own judgment” – on her view, “one’s best judgment” – and “calls us simultaneously to stand behind our convictions and to take seriously others’ doubts about them” (2016: 151, 150). When those convictions include a commitment to forgivingness, then one’s judgment is that one ought to remain open to repairing relationships with future offenders, or be consistent and trustworthy in following through on commitments to past offenders to renew forgiveness upon future occasions to forgive. I add to Calhoun’s account that integrity can be, and at its best ought to be, compatible with great epistemological humility regarding whether one thinks one either knows “best” or has arrived at one’s best judgment. To commit to forgive in incident-specific senses includes the judgment that one is right to forgive a wrongdoer; to commit to being a forgiving person in advance of harms includes the judgment that forgivingness is the appropriate disposition to cultivate. I agree with Calhoun that integrity involves reflecting on one’s commitment to forgive and authentically owning it as “one’s own judgment,” but I disagree that one must hold the view that it is one’s optimal or “best” judgment. As decisions to commit to a course of ethics, neither of these judgments need be optimal. Forgiveness demands a form of accounting, to oneself and others, in shared moral terms, for what it is that flawed and erring agents do, and so one’s accounting must be connected to considering real possibilities that one chooses to forgive wrongly, else one is not taking the accounting project sufficiently seriously. Because an agent with integrity aims to be trustworthy and to stand for convictions that one is receptive to discuss and defend, then ­self-scrutiny and the criticisms of others are part of the project of integrity; that is, integrity demands the humble recognition that commitments to forgive or to cultivate forgivingness must be renewed, revisited, and revised if reflection reveals a better alternative. If one can have integrity and simultaneously embrace humble uncertainty as to whether one has the most appropriate commitments with respect to (past or future) wrongdoers, then forgiveness in actual practice will often turn out to be continually open-ended, as the moral agent with integrity commits to be prepared to revise their own stance as to the appropriate response to a wrong. Because commitments to forgive will be open-ended and subject to failures and revisions, for the person with humility and integrity, I do not believe dispositional commitments to forgive are virtues. Virtue in strong senses of the term may refer to a character trait or a success term, suggesting that one not only aims for but achieves virtue over time, whereas a view of forgiveness as a commitment is more open-ended and admits of failure or revision. In the case of self-forgiveness, humility may again be an integral part of such a disposition to forgive. Humility would seem to be an eminently necessary skill for moral agents if one is to move beyond penitence for what one has done to readiness to accept facts about ourselves and to take responsibility for the person we rightly apprehend ourselves to be. I do not intend to suggest that this is the sole purpose of humility, but among its many moral functions, humility may be a precondition for self-forgiveness of past harms. In advance of particular future errors, a self-forgiving disposition would entail the humble person’s awareness of their own vulnerability to future error; self-acceptance of one’s moral imperfection is a start, but a self-forgiving person is prepared to do 235

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the further work of reaccepting oneself, or recommitting to living with one’s bad self, when one’s own errors seem so profound that self-acceptance is off the table. Judith Andre (2015) describes the humble person as one who characteristically accepts and integrates bad news, and I add that the humble person continues to expect bad news about oneself. Akin to a sense of “self-lowering” (M. Austin 2014), humble forgivingness could be characterized as the understanding that one is actually likely to err, that one will continue to disappoint oneself, that one is not on a steadily upward path in every possible way, and therefore one requires from oneself a commitment, in advance, to continue to live with oneself, not just a shrug of acceptance but a forward-looking dedication to repair one’s most negative attitudes toward one’s own wrongdoings. Not only is such news, as Andre says, frequent, I would go so far as to say it is in our future; I advocate for an openness to pessimism with respect to personal progress and change. In saying this, I grant that my view is at odds with accounts that claim forgiveness involves a belief that the wrongdoer will not act a similar way in the future. At the least, I am arguing for an acceptance of one’s vulnerability to that which one knows one cannot control. On this view, self-forgiveness can be a disposition to not give up on oneself or lower one’s moral principles in advance of one’s actual wrongdoing, a humble forgivingness that is in part a commitment to a continual relation with oneself, in which one cultivates a disposition to expect one’s future, unfolding relationship with oneself not to be linear and progressive, but instead to involve predictably falling short of one’s own standards. Dillon’s earlier metaphor of “getting off track” is helpful, reminding us that linear time is no guarantee of improvement in our flaws or frequency of falling short. That a disposition to self-forgive requires humility seems obvious. It may be less obvious that humility would inform a commitment to forgive others. Mark Button’s (2005) account of humility emphasizes a generous and relational view which extends one’s view of one’s flawed self to a sympathetic view of others; to refer back to my language about our own liability to do wrong, the certainty that we will actually err, ourselves, is naturally informative of our fellows’ fallibilities. 2 Button draws on the influence of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, noting, ­“Bernard sees humility as a quality whose cultivation and practice is essential for relationships,” not just intimate relationships, but one’s place in a wider “relational network between self and other that humility helps both to open up and to shape, slowing drives toward condemnation and rejection…, and fostering conditions for critical attentiveness, mutual understanding, and generosity” (2005: 850–1). This last stands as a good candidate for one view of the commitment to be forgiving in advance of particular harms. Forgivingness can be a commitment to slow down when one feels oneself driven to condemn or reject an offender, and do the work of attending to what is understandable and what capacities one may have for a generous, if undeserved, response. Of course, St. Bernard was an adherent to a religion that holds forgiveness is morally required. Theorists today differ as to whether a commitment to forgive can be supererogatory or morally required. During the initial proliferation of contemporary research in forgiveness in the 1980s and 1990s, the predominant view was that forgiveness is always elective, a gift and not an obligation (Enright et al. 1998; Calhoun 1992; McGary 1989). However, as Per Milam argues, that forgiveness is typically elective does not mean it is essentially elective. Forgiveness may be optional at some times and a duty at other times, depending on the reasons one forgives: In order to forgive one must have the right kind of reasons. One can have reasons for or against forgiving, or both. And these reasons can add up, giving one more or less reason to forgive, all things considered. But, if reasons for and against forgiving can add up, then sometimes the weight of one’s reasons can generate a requirement either to forgive or not. (2018: 575) 236

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Therefore, “whether and when forgiveness is elective depends on contingent facts about the offence, the offender, and potential forgiver” (2018: 583). I add that those contingent facts include facts about the nature of the relationship at hand, especially when one is in a position to care for vulnerable others. Some relationships are those in which it is not sheerly optional to maintain or repair the relationship, and instead, come with requirements to make commitments to each other. And this is a preferable world; it would be bizarre if all relationships were as optional as relationships of adults and nearly strangers in a large workplace, who could casually decide whether to interact or not (Wilson 1988). The weight of one’s reasons to forgive may at times amount to a duty to commit to forgiving particular incidents, or to commit in advance to being forgiving of each other for future wrongs. I realize that some philosophers may hold that one cannot be required to make a promise or a commitment. But the position that commitments cannot be required seems, like necessarily elective forgiveness, an acontextual and non-relational treatment of the nature of forgiveness. As Linda Ross Meyer suggests with her example of saying to her child, “I am still angry, but I forgive you anyway” (2000:1523). As children, we need to believe our parents won’t eternally resent us for our minor offenses and even for culpably wronging them, in order to develop basic senses of trust. Especially in response to more trivial harms, then, parents may bear special obligations to their children to express a declarative act of forgiveness, which will, as one carries forward the relationship, further entail commissive acts to remain repaired and uphold a forgiving attitude.

2.2  Motivating Attitudes of Commitments to be Unforgiving Grudge-holders may be described as members of the set of those with a commitment to ­unforgivingness, which I turn to for the remainder of this chapter. If forgiveness can be a commitment in response to particular harms or as a disposition in advance, then certainly unforgivingness can be a commitment as well; for example, one can declare a commitment to a view that a particular instance of wrongdoing is unforgivable in perpetuity, or take the view that it would be wrong to be a person that is prepared to forgive some types of possible, future wrong. This enjoys some controversy in the literature. For example, Trudy Govier argues, against commitments to unforgivingness, that it is objectionable to adopt an attitude that any individual wrongdoer is “completely and finally irredeemable” or “evil through and through and could never change,” because such an attitude “anticipates and communicates the worst” (2002: 137; see also Wolfendale 2005; Holmgren 2012). Govier prescribes an attitude toward even unrepentant wrongdoers that cultivates hope for their moral transformation, implying that giving up hope amounts to a failure to respect them as human moral agents. As I argue elsewhere, this may be too high of a normative standard for victims of atrocity to meet when their perpetrators are expressly unrepentant (Norlock 2017b: 176). In such cases, Govier’s description of conditional unforgivability may be more apt; she says that when there “are indeed enormous psychological and moral obstacles to the forgiveness of very serious wrongs,” then we may rightly regard a perpetrator as conditionally unforgivable if that perpetrator has not acknowledged, and does not morally regret, the wrongdoing…Failure to forgive perpetrators in these circumstances expresses our conviction that those acts, and any person still identified with them, are profoundly evil. (2002: 117–18) Govier’s conditional unforgivability seems to function as an interim commitment, a decision to uphold a particular view of a wrongdoer as an unforgivable person that is subject to revision in the face of new information. 237

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The most profound evils are often the object of commitments to be unforgiving. Crimes against humanity, atrocities, and the evils that make a life indecent are the subject of both ­incident-specific expressions and attitudes in advance of particular harm. The commitment to a view that evils are just those things which are unforgivable may be an ontological position regarding the impossibility of forgiveness as constitutive of the nature of evil, an ethical position that forgiveness is wrong even if possible, a descriptive claim that forgiveness of evils is (and will continue to be) psychologically difficult even if possible and right, or a combination of the three. It is not always possible or necessary to disentangle the motives in all writings which further this view. For example, consider the responses to a narrative by Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal (1969), who asks participants in a symposium at the end of his book what he should have done when a dying Nazi soldier asked him for forgiveness. Several participants held that commitments to upholding evils as unforgivable ought to be maintained whether it is for psychological or ethical reasons. Some argue conceptual objections; Matthew Fox (9), a priest, and Wole Soyinka (172), a playwright and poet, both argue that evils violate conditions of forgiveness because they are disposed to the commitment, in advance, that intolerable harms cannot be atoned for adequately. Since the conditions enabling a coherent account of forgiveness do not obtain, forgiveness is conceptually impossible, and on this view, it is only rational to commit to holding that some types of wrongs are unforgivable by definition. In the same symposium, Henry James Cargas, a Catholic, responded that God may forgive, but “Simon Wiesenthal could not, I cannot” (125), implying both that it was psychologically too much to ask at the time and a further commitment to continuing to exempt a forgiver on the basis of the difficulty involved. Commitments to unforgivingness for ethical, principled reasons are expressed by human rights scholar Joshua Rubenstein (240), who objected that the request for forgiveness was morally callous; Nechama Tec, a Holocaust survivor, indicates similarly ethical objections that the soldier didn’t deserve it, saying, “Even on his deathbed he seems to be denying to the Jews their humanity” (258). Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, a Jew who lived in France through the occupation, argues relatedly that forgiveness “died in the death camps,” and that crimes against humanity are “inexpiable,” impossible to punish (1996: 567). “Get ahead of one’s victim, that was the thing; ask for a pardon,” Jankélévitch adds, emphasizing the callousness of the expectation that victims forgive as a reason to commit to withholding undeserved forgiveness (567). As Marguerite La Caze (2005) explains, some philosophers who hold that evils are the set of unforgivable things tend to proceed on the assumption that forgiveness is only apt for that which can be sufficiently punished. With others, she cites Hannah Arendt’s ([1958] 1998) formulation of the seeming impossibility to forgive, given the inadequacy of any punishment or revenge for the worst of evils: It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true hallmark of those offences which, since Kant, we call “radical evil” and about whose nature so little is known, even to those of us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 241) The above passage is widely quoted in support of positions that the worst of evils cannot or should not be forgiven, because there is no moral response adequate to the task of appropriately responding to the wrong. Evil “transcends all moral categories,” as Arendt writes elsewhere, and forgiveness is a merely moral response to something so heinous it defies morals (2003: 23). But why would the impossible require asserting or cultivating of commitments? Arendt’s comment as to what men are unable to do moves me to shift attention away from definitions of evils 238

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and unforgivable things, to focus on the ethical motivations in particular, and what it is that commitments to being unforgiving aim to accomplish. As Margaret Walker says, it may be more productive to go beyond justifications of definitions; instead, we should “ask what it means for individuals, or for a group or society collectively, to declare an act unforgivable. What is the moral power of that declaration? To what moral positions do we want to recruit each other?” (2006: 187; see also MacLachlan 2009). Expressions in social space can recruit others to a view, or try to so; reactive attitudes “issue an RSVP, an implicit bid for the other’s acknowledgement” of one’s authority to hold others or themselves accountable, as Stephen Darwall says (2016: 267; see also Fricker 2020). One answer Walker offers is that a commitment to be unforgiving functions similarly to atrocity victims’ saying “never again,” that is, as a warning and an invitation…Join us in insisting that there is real evil in the world, and that not all human beings are willing to be, or capable of being, a part of anything recognizable as a human moral community based on reciprocal trust. (2006: 188–9) The preparation to be unforgiving of evils cannot prevent evildoers from acting, but the perpetrators must be kept resolutely outside the community of morally decent, if­ fallible, …folk. Holding wrongs ‘unforgivable’ is a way to mark the enormity of injury and the ­m alignancy of wrongdoing as exceeding anything that could be made to fit back into a reliable framework of moral relations. (189–90) As I said at the outset, holding wrongs unforgivable is distal in character. Whether one is holding a particular past wrong to be unforgivable, or cultivating a preparation to be unforgiving of future types of wrongs, one is making a volitional decision to carry the attitude of unforgivingness forward in time. But like the commitment to be forgiving, the commitment to be unforgiving may also admit of open-endedness and an end, depending on its motivation and the form it takes. For example, philosophers who defend third-party refusals to forgive often point to respect for a wrongdoer’s victims or concern for their recovery from harm as a reason for third parties to communicate unforgivingness (MacLachlan 2017; Radzik 2010; Garrard 2002). This seems a more hopeful warning invitation than Walker describes above; the expression of concern that victims are not yet sufficiently respected by wrongdoers is one that enjoins a wrongdoer to improve, manifest respect, and rectify harms or compensate victims for their losses. In other words, rather than being a statement that no one could absorb the magnitude of some types of harm, an expression of unforgivingness may function proleptically to convey that wrongdoers have not done as much as they could. This is a moral invitation to wrongdoers that may express both anger and hope, indicating that unforgiving agents expect better and believe wrongdoers to be capable of better. Even the thought that one cannot forgive oneself may admit of hope that one can change, a conditional commitment to a view that one can and should do more than one has done to rectify past wrongs. The attitude that one did something unforgivable may be a principled commitment to be a certain sort of person, one who neither ceases to make reparations to the past nor does similar types of harms again in the future. As with commitments to forgive, a commitment to be unforgiving of one’s past wrongs may be motivated by virtues of humility and integrity, as one commits to keeping one’s errors in full view so as not to make the mistake of assuming one’s unlikelihood of future error (Norlock 2009; Govier 1999). Continued self-reproach does not require self-forgiveness (Lippitt 2019) but the attitude that one should not or should “never” 239

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forgive oneself is worth appreciating as possibly motivating of critical self-reflection, a hallmark of decency (Hagberg 2011; Griswold 2007). A commitment to unforgivingness may sound lamentable if forgiveness is always preferable to its converse, but I hope I have outlined reasons for readers to agree that in the actual, nonideal world, unforgivingness can be a principled position motivated by justice and at times encouraging of good efforts. As Eduardo Rivera-López (2013) says, “the best or most appropriate actions, rules, and institutions in this nonideal world are different from what they would be in an ideal one” (3626). The rules governing principled commitments to be forgiving or unforgiving are different partly because of the feasibility conditions that constrain agents, regarding what is possible or desirable in context. I find nonideal theoretical approaches appealing because they are empirically informed; taking seriously the actualities of agents in a position to commit to forgive or to refuse forgiveness after evils has helped my own understanding of the limits of what H.L.A. Hart (1959) called definitional stops, such as ending inquiries about forgiving evils with the statement that evils are unforgivable. Some victims report deciding to forgive and some report a dedication to refusing to forgive; the latter only makes sense if forgiveness is an option, and its refusal is a moral power that they can sensibly claim. And victims and bystanders have extended forgivingness as well as unforgivingness even after the worst of harms. As Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2011) argues, regarding her work in South African communities, “To say… that horrific deeds committed in the context of systematic human rights abuses by states are simply unforgivable does not capture the complexity and richness of all the social contexts within which gross human rights abuses are committed” (544). The reasons to be forgiving or unforgiving can be remarkably similar, and I conclude as I began with some healthy moral pluralism with respect to which we ought to convey and when. In a perpetually unjust world, the best we can hope for is a commitment to do what we can to make the future better than the past, to make decent lives possible, to return our attention to moral efforts repeatedly, to reconsider the commitments we’ve made when we fail, and to appreciate achievements of forgivingness and unforgivingness as markers on a path of moral experience that will include change.

Notes 1 In personal correspondence regarding an early draft of this chapter, Lucy Allais adds, “I think ­generosity in our interpretation of others is also key.” I completely concur, although I hold that generosity is a consequence of (at least some) humility, which I take to be a preparation to be abidingly accepting of one’s own errors and, perforce, a preparation to see others as flawed like oneself, thereby meriting some compassionate exercise of the principle of charity, as I make clearer in what follows; some humility ­begets generosity, in other words. 2 In light of my previous endnote, I add here that it is Mark Button’s views which inform my own view that humility is the master virtue of generosity, because humility gives rise to sympathy for flawed others; sympathy is the generous response to everyone’s fallibility.

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Forgiveness as a Volitional Commitment Blöser, C. (2019) “Human Fallibility and the Need for Forgiveness,” Philosophia, 47(1), 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11406-018-9950-4. Button, M. (2005) “‘A Monkish Kind of Virtue’?: For and Against Humility,” Political Theory, 33(6), 840–68. Calhoun, C. (1992) “Changing One’s Heart,” Ethics, 103(1), 76–96. Calhoun, C. (2016) Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting It Right and Practicing Morality with Others, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Card, C. (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cornell, N. (2017) “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving,” Philosophical Review Recent Issues, 126(2), 241–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-3772018 Darwall, S. (2016) “Making the ‘Hard’ Problem of Moral Normativity Easier,” in E. Lord and B. Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dillon, R. (2001) “Self-Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Ethics, 112, 53–83. Emerick, B. (2017) “Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” in Kathryn J. Norlock (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, London: Rowman & Littlefield, International. Enright, R. (2001) Forgiveness Is a Choice, Washington, DC: APA LifeTools. Enright, R., S. Freedman, and J. Rique. (1998) “The Psychology of Interpersonal Forgiveness,” in R. Enright and J. North (eds.), Exploring Forgiveness, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fricker, M. (2019) “Forgiveness—An Ordered Pluralism,” Australasian Philosophical Review, 3(3), 241–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/24740500.2020.1859230 Garrard, E. (2002) “Forgiveness and the Holocaust,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 5(2), 147–65. Garrard, E., and D. McNaughton. (2010) Forgiveness, Durham: Acumen Publishing. Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2011) “Intersubjectivity and Embodiment: Exploring the Role of the Maternal in the Language of Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” Signs, 36(3), 541–51. Govier, T. (1999) “Forgiveness and the Unforgivable,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 36(1), 59–75. Govier, T. (2002) Forgiveness and Revenge, London: Routledge. Govier, T., and W. Verwoerd. (2002) “Forgiveness: The Victim’s Prerogative,” South African Journal of ­Philosophy, 21(2), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.4314/sajpem.v21i2.31338 Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haber, J. (1991) Forgiveness, Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Hagberg, G. (2011) “The Self Rewritten: The Case of Self-Forgiveness,” in C. Fricke (ed.), The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays, London: Routledge. Hart, H. (1959) Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2008. Holmgren, M. (2012) Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Horsbrugh, H. J. N. (1974) “Forgiveness,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4(2), 269–82. https://doi.org/10.1 080/00455091.1974.10716937 Jankélévitch, V. (1996) “Should we pardon them?” In A. Hobart (trans.), Critical Inquiry, 22(3), 552–72. Jorgensen, L. M. (2017) “Forgiveness After Charleston: The Ethics of an Unlikely Act,” The Good Society, 26(2–3), 338–53. Kading, D. (1960) “On Promising Without Moral Risk,” Philosophical Studies, 11(4), 58–63. https://doi. org/10.1007/BF00420678 Kant, I. (1775–80) Lectures on Ethics, L. Infield (trans.), London: Hackett Publishing, 1981. La Caze, M. (2005) “Should Radical Evil be Forgiven?” in T. Mason (ed.), Forensic Psychiatry: Influences of Evil, Totowa, NJ: Humana Press. Lauritzen, P. (1987) “Forgiveness: Moral Prerogative or Religious Duty?” The Journal of Religious Ethics, 15(2), 141–54. Lippitt, J. (2019) “Self-forgiveness and the Moral Perspective of Humility: Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” in Garry L. Hagberg (ed.), Narrative and Self-Understanding, London: Palgrave. Londey, D. (1986) “Can God Forgive Us Our Trespasses?” Sophia, 25(2), 4–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF02912217 MacLachlan, A. (2009) “Practicing Imperfect Forgiveness,” in L. Tessman (ed.), Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal, New York: Springer. MacLachlan, A. (2017) “In Defense of Third-Party Forgiveness,” in K. Norlock (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, London: Rowman & Littlefield, International. McGary, H. (1989) “Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 26(4), 343–51. McNaughton, D., and E. Garrard. (2017) “Once More with Feeling,” in K. J. Norlock (ed.), The Moral ­Psychology of Forgiveness, London: Rowman & Littlefield, International.

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Kathryn J. Norlock Meyer, L. (2000) “Forgiveness and Public Trust,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, 27(5), 1515–40. Meyers, D. (2004) “Narrative and Moral Life,” in C. Calhoun (ed.), Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers, New York: Oxford University Press. Milam, P. (2018) “Against Elective Forgiveness,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21(3), 569–84. Moran, K. (2013) “For Community’s Sake – A Self-Respecting Kantian Account of Forgiveness,” in M. Ruffing, C. L. Rocca, A. Ferrarin, and S. Bacin (eds.), Kant Und Die Philosophie in Weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des Xi. Kant-Kongresses 2010, Berlin: De Gruyter. Murphy, J., and J. Hampton (1988) Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neblett, W. (1974) “Forgiveness and Ideals,” Mind, 83(330), 269–75. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/ LXXXIII.330.269 Neu, J. (2011) “On Loving our Enemies,” in C. Fricke (ed.), The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays, London: Routledge. Nguyen, C. (2019) “Monuments as Commitments: How Art Speaks to Groups and How Groups Think in Art,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 100(4), 971–94. Norlock, K. (2009) Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Norlock, K. (2017a) “The Challenges of Forgiveness in Context: Introduction to the Moral Psychology of Forgiveness,” in K. J. Norlock (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, London: Rowman & Littlefield, International. Norlock, K. (2017b) “Giving Up, Expecting Hope, and Moral Transformation,” in C. E. Hundleby (ed.), Reasonable Responses: The Thought of Trudy Govier, Windsor, ON: University of Windsor. windsor.­ scholarsportal.info/omp/index.php/wsia/catalog/book/14 Norlock, K. (2017c) “Real (and) Imaginal Relationships with the Dead,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 51(2), 341–56. Pettigrove, G. (2004) “Unapologetic Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 41(3), 187–204. Pettigrove, G. (2012) Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radzik, L. (2010) “Moral Bystanders and the Virtue of Forgiveness,” Forgiveness in Perspective, 66, 69–88. Rivera-López, E. (2013) “Nonideal Ethics,” in H. LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Roberts, R. (1995) “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 32(4), 289–306. Satne, P. (2018) “Forgiveness and Punishment in Kant’s Moral System,” in L. Krasnoff, N. S. Madrid, and P. Satne (eds.), Kant’s Doctrine of Right in the 21st Century, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Scarre, G. (2016) “On Taking Back Forgiveness,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19(4), 931–44. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10677-015-9651-z Searle, J. (1976) “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts,” Language in Society, 5(1), 1–23. Strabbing, J. (2020) “Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 98(3), 531–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2019.1687532. Sussman, D. (2005) “Kantian Forgiveness,” Kant-Studien, 96(1), 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1515/ kant.2005.96.1.85 Walker, M. (2006) Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warmke, B. (2015) “Articulate Forgiveness and Normative Constraints,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 45(4), 490–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2015.1101305 Warmke, B. (2016) “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 94(4), 687–703. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2015.1126850 Warmke, B. (2020) “Does Forgiveness Require Resentment,” working paper, to be published in P. Satne and K. Scheiter (eds.), Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge, and Punishment, New York: Springer, forthcoming. Wiesenthal, S. (1969) The Sunflower. New York: Schocken Books. Wilson, J. (1988) “Why Forgiveness Requires Repentance,” Philosophy, 63(246), 534–5. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0031819100043850 Wolfendale, J. (2005) “The Hardened Heart: The Moral Dangers of Not Forgiving,” Journal of Social ­Philosophy, 36(3), 344–63.

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18 PUNISHMENT FORBEARANCE ACCOUNTS OF FORGIVENESS Luke Russell

We read in the Bible that as Jesus was dying on the cross he cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Although this is one of the best-known uses of the word “forgive,” it creates some problems for philosophers. First, ignorance on the part of the wrongdoer is typically taken to be grounds for excusing, not for forgiving. Perhaps Jesus was actually requesting that God excuse, rather than forgive, those who had crucified him (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 20). If we maintain that Jesus was calling for God to forgive rather than to excuse, then a second problem arises. Most of the contemporary philosophers who have written about forgiveness say that forgiving has nothing to do with punishment; it is a completely separate matter. Forgiveness requires the removal of resentment, angry blame, and any desire for revenge, but it does not require the cessation of punishment. Forgiveness does not entail mercy. According to this kind of “compatibility account,” forgiveness is not an alternative to punishment and retributive justice. Yet imagine how odd it would be to interpret Jesus as saying, “Father, forgive them, and by that I mean do not be angry with them, but make sure that they burn in Hell for eternity.” It is more plausible to read Jesus as calling for God not to punish the wrongdoers for their transgression. This reflects a competing conception of forgiveness according to which forgiveness necessarily includes the forbearance of punishment. Only a handful of contemporary philosophers endorse this view, but perhaps it is more popular among the broader community. Consider the case of Beatrice Mukarwambari, whose house was destroyed by Laurent Nsabimana during the Rwandan genocide. Twenty years later, Beatrice and Laurent were photographed standing side by side for a New York Times article that documented forgiveness in the wake of the atrocity. In this article, Beatrice expresses her thoughts about forgiveness: If I am not stubborn, life moves forward. When someone comes close to you without hatred, although horrible things happened, you welcome him and grant what he is looking for from you. Forgiveness equals mercy. (Dominus 2014) In a video introducing The Forgiveness Project, Archbishop Desmond Tutu appears to agree with the idea that forgiveness is an alternative to punishment, claiming that “victims can find healing in choosing to forgive rather than demanding retribution.”1 This conception of forgiveness is deeply at odds with the dominant view among contemporary philosophers. Which side, if either, is getting things right?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-24

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1.  Clarifying the Questions There are many different issues concerning the nature of forgiveness that merit detailed ­philosophical exploration. I will have to gloss over most of these here, but it is worth being explicit about some common assumptions that I will take for granted in this chapter. The first assumption is that forgiveness is one possible response that a victim can make toward the person whom she judges to have wronged her. I will set aside the questions as to whether third parties can also forgive, whether self-forgiveness is possible, and whether we can forgive things that are not actually wrong (see Russell 2020). The second assumption is that forgiving is incompatible with excusing and incompatible with justifying. After you have been hurt by someone else’s action, one possibility is that you respond by justifying the action in question; that is, by judging that it was a right or permissible action, that you have been hurt but not wronged, and hence that the agent has nothing to answer for. Alternatively, you might excuse the perpetrator; that is, you might judge that the action was an unjustified wrong but that the agent was not morally responsible for what he did, and hence was never a fitting candidate for blame or retribution. When you forgive you do neither of these things. When you forgive you still believe that the action was an unjustified wrong, and that the agent is morally responsible for what he did, but you no longer hold that wrong against him (e.g., Murphy and Hampton 1988: 20; Hieronymi 2001: 530; Allais 2008: 36; Zaibert 2009: 368). There is significant disagreement among philosophers as to what it means not to hold the wrong against the perpetrator in the sense that is relevant to forgiveness. A common but disputed view is that after forgiveness the victim no longer feels resentment or contempt toward the perpetrator (Hieronymi 2001: 530; Griswold 2007: 26; Allais 2008: 42), or at least has significantly reduced such feelings (Pettigrove 2012: 18). Some philosophers have claimed that the victim who has forgiven the perpetrator no longer holds the wrong against him in various other ways as well: she does not seek revenge, she does not continue to blame him for what he did, she does not bear ill will toward him, and so on (Calhoun 1992: 84; Lang 1994: 108; Griswold 2007: 53; Warmke 2011: 619). The question that will be our focus here is whether punishment is one of these things that is incompatible with forgiveness. In order to frame this question with greater precision, we first need to make several distinctions and clear up some potential confusion. The initial point of clarification concerns the issue of who forbears punishment. In his influential paper “Forgiveness,” Kolnai suggested that punishment has nothing to do with forgiveness simply because punishment is not something that is ever available to victims of wrongdoing. “Punishment,” Kolnai claims, “is quite outside our context: it can only be inflicted by the proper legal or administrative authority (maiming or killing an aggressor in self-defence is not punishment, however justified)” (1973/4: 93–4). If Kolnai were right about this, then we should say that punishment, mercy, and pardon belong in the realm of institutional responses to wrongdoing, while forgiveness belongs in the interpersonal realm. Kolnai does put his finger on something important here. The victim’s forgiveness is separate from institutionally administered punishment. Victims often have no control over whether the person who wronged them will be punished under the law. Sometimes a victim will have forgiven the perpetrator before that perpetrator begins serving his legally imposed sentence. Sometimes a perpetrator who has been imprisoned and served a full sentence might still hope in vain to be forgiven by the victim. However, Kolnai’s definition of punishment is implausibly restrictive. Not all punishment is administered by institutions. Individual victims, whether they have institutional authority or not, are often able to punish those who wrong them. As Allais points out, “in an ordinary interpersonal context … we punish those who hurt us with anger, withdrawal of affection, sulking, and the like” (Allais 2008: 48; cf. Roberts 1995: 291). We can also punish those who wrong us by publicly shaming them, by refusing to cooperate with them, or by socially excluding them (O’Shaughnessy 1967: 339; 244

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Zaibert 2012: 110–11; Russell 2016: 706; Tosi and Warmke 2016: 206). The interesting question is whether the victim’s forgiveness of the perpetrator is in some way incompatible with the victim’s punishment of the perpetrator. Another point of clarification concerns the temporal direction of the question. No philosopher thinks that a victim who has already imposed some punishment on the perpetrator is thereby unable to forgive that perpetrator. We want to determine whether the victim’s forgiveness of the wrongdoer is compatible with the victim’s continued punishment of that wrongdoer; that is, punishment that has already begun and will continue after the forgiveness is in place, or punishment that has not yet begun but will be imposed after the forgiveness is in place. We also need to think more carefully about what it means to say that someone forbears further punishment. To forbear, in everyday English, is to refrain or hold back from doing something.2 But punishment forbearance cannot mean simply failure to punish in cases when you judge that you have been wronged. For example, what if you fail to punish the person who wronged you purely because, by chance, you never run into him again? Or what if you do not punish the person who wronged you only because he happens to be dead and hence beyond your reach? In cases like these, it would be misleading to say that you are forbearing punishment. Perhaps what it is to forbear punishment is to withhold punishment that you could administer but choose not to administer. Tosi and Warmke take this approach, defining punishment forbearance as the combination of a “commitment … to deliberately refuse to do so” and the actual refraining from punishment (2016: 204). As we shall see, some philosophers believe that forgiving includes the forbearance of punishment, in this sense of forbearance. But it is also worth flagging a subtly distinct view. Some might think that forgiving does not necessarily include commitment-based forbearance of punishment, but that forgiveness is incompatible with further punishing nonetheless. This latter view makes room for the possibility that forgiving is not always an active commitment on the part of the forgiver, but sometimes is a passive and non-rational process that produces new and stable emotional and behavioral dispositions in the forgiver. We want to figure out whether forgiving includes either the stable and non-accidental withholding of further punishment or the ­commitment-based forbearance of further punishment. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to both of these options as punishment forbearance accounts of forgiveness. The next thing requiring clarification is the nature of punishment. There is significant dispute over the boundaries of this concept, too. It is generally agreed that punishment is some kind of negative treatment in which a burden is placed on the person who is punished. Common punishments include the infliction of pain or suffering on the perpetrator, confiscating property owned by the perpetrator, denying the perpetrator the right to access certain goods or to move about freely, and so on. Yet not every kind of negative treatment counts as punishment. Think, for example, of the enforced quarantine of someone who is carrying a dangerous infectious disease. To punish someone for having done ø is not merely to impose a burden on her, but to do so as a reprobative response to her having done ø (Boonin 2008: 22). Punishment includes a condemnation of the wrong action, and it carries a message to the wrongdoer or to the broader community that actions of this kind will not be tolerated (Pettigrove 2012: 117). Income tax, which is the imposition of an unwanted burden on people as a response to their actions, does not count as punishment because it is not condemnatory of those actions. Fines for tax avoidance are punishments because they are burdens imposed in order to condemn the actions in question. Punishment is plausibly defined as necessarily being retributive, but this could be read in weaker or stronger ways. In the weak sense, punishment is essentially retributive in that it contains a backward-looking element; it is intended as a response to something that has already been done by the person who is being punished, and the punisher thinks that it is permissible to impose this burden on the perpetrator because that perpetrator did something wrong (Boonin 2008: 17). Punishment is intended to be a just response to past wrongdoing. Purely pre-emptive deterrents 245

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against wrongs that have not yet occurred do not count as punishments, because they are not retributive in this sense. The view that punishment is essentially retributive in this weak sense is compatible with the claim that punishment is often partly motivated and partly justified by ­forward-looking considerations, such as deterrence and reform. In what follows, I will assume that punishment is essentially retributive in this sense. There is also more contentious sense in which it might be claimed that punishment is essentially retributive. As Feinberg says, punishment is “a conventional device for the expression of attitudes of resentment and indignation” (1970: 98), and it is true that often punishment is inflicted out of anger. On this basis some people might assume that punishment is the resentful imposition of a burden on the perpetrator in an attempt to get even. If punishment really were always angry and vengeful, then it might seem from the outset that forgiving could not be compatible with continuing to punish. Many philosophers are antecedently committed to the view that a victim who has forgiven the wrongdoer no longer feels significant levels of anger or resentment toward him. According to this story, forgiving is a way of getting over a wrong, of moving on, and a victim who is still plagued by anger has not yet moved on. If we were to define punishment as essentially angry and vengeful, then these philosophers would be committed to saying that forgiving is incompatible with the victim’s continued (necessarily resentful) punishment of the perpetrator. However, it is implausible that all punishment is imposed out of anger or a desire for vengeance. Punishment is sometimes motivated by an impartial desire for justice, a calm desire to reform the wrongdoer, and a benevolent desire to protect other members of the community from harm. Once we make it clear that punishment is not always resentful, we undermine this potential objection to the compatibility of forgiveness and punishment. The interesting question that survives is whether the victim’s forgiving of the perpetrator for ø is compatible with the victim’s continued non-resentful punishment of that perpetrator for ø. One final point of clarification must be made before we can move on to evaluate punishment forbearance accounts of forgiveness. It concerns the sense in which forgiving might be incompatible with continued punishment. There are two different kinds of incompatibility that are discussed in this context, giving rise to two distinct and equally interesting questions. For the majority of the participants in this debate, the relevant kind of incompatibility could be called conceptual or metaphysical incompatibility.3 These philosophers want to know whether the fact that the victim continues to punish the perpetrator implies that the victim has not in fact forgiven the perpetrator (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 33; Pettigrove 2012: 122; Russell 2016: 704). Most advocates of punishment forbearance accounts of forgiveness are claiming that part of what it is for the victim to have forgiven the wrongdoer is for that victim to inflict no further punishment on that wrongdoer. On this view, continued punishment would show that even if the victim had sincerely said “I forgive you” to the perpetrator, the victim has not in fact forgiven the perpetrator. Let us call this a conceptual/metaphysical punishment forbearance account of forgiveness. Some philosophers have focused on a second kind of incompatibility in this context, which we might call normative incompatibility. To say that forgiveness is normatively incompatible with continued punishment is to say that it would be morally wrong, ceteris paribus, for a victim who has forgiven the perpetrator to then continue to inflict punishment on that perpetrator. For example, it might be thought that the victim who forgives thereby waives her right to punish the perpetrator, henceforth making it wrong for her to inflict any further punishment (Tosi and Warmke 2016: 205). This way of thinking about forgiveness is particularly salient to those who conceive of forgiving as a performative, analogous to promising, in which the forgiver makes a commitment to the perpetrator and thereby changes the norms relating to the way that victim and perpetrator treat each other (Warmke 2016: 288; Bennett 2018: 207). The view that forgiving makes it morally wrong to inflict further punishment could also be described as a punishment forbearance account of forgiveness, but in a very different sense. Advocates of a normative 246

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punishment forbearance account of forgiveness typically would think that it is possible to forgive and then continue to punish, but that a victim who does impose punishment after forgiving has thereby wronged the forgiven perpetrator. In contrast, advocates of a conceptual/metaphysical punishment forbearance account think that it is impossible to forgive and continue to punish. Tosi and Warmke have suggested that these two different kinds of account are connected, claiming that “if it is false that forgiveness makes punishment morally impermissible, then that would be very good evidence that it is also false that, as a necessary condition on forgiveness, one must forbear punishment” (2016: 211). It is not clear that Tosi and Warmke have got this right. It would be odd to argue from the claim that forgiveness makes further punishment impermissible to the claim that it makes further punishment impossible. If it did make it impossible, why would there be any need to proclaim its wrongness? It is more plausible to treat these two kinds of punishment forbearance accounts of forgiveness as competitors, rather than as complimentary positions. We need to answer two distinct questions, which we can now phrase with more precision: The conceptual/metaphysical question: Does the fact that the victim continues n ­ on-resentfully to punish the perpetrator for ø imply that the victim has not forgiven the perpetrator for ø? The normative question: Does the fact that the victim has forgiven the perpetrator for ø make it morally wrong, ceteris paribus, for the victim to continue non-resentfully to punish the perpetrator for ø?

2.  Punishment Forbearance Accounts It would be possible to claim that forgiveness consists in nothing more than the forbearance of further punishment, but, as far as I am aware, no philosophers have defended this view. Several contemporary philosophers have claimed that forgiveness includes the forbearance of further punishment, and hence that any further punishment by the victim implies that the victim has not forgiven the perpetrator. These philosophers give a positive answer to the conceptual/­ metaphysical question. Perhaps the most pure of the conceptual/metaphysical punishment forbearance accounts of forgiveness is that offered by Zaibert, who asserts that “to punish and to forgive are indeed mutually synchronically exclusive” (2009: 387). According to Zaibert, forgiveness does not require the reduction or the absence of resentment. When we forgive we change what we do, not change what we feel (2012: 104). Zaibert thinks that the victim who has forgiven the perpetrator still judges that ø was wrong and that the perpetrator is culpable, and she also judges that it would be a good thing if something would happen to the perpetrator that would offset his having done ø, but she believes that things would be worse overall if she tried to offset that wrong action herself, so she “deliberately refuses to try to offset [this] wrongdoing” (2009: 387). The victim who has forgiven the wrongdoer, on Zaibert’s account, chooses not to punish the wrongdoer, but might be quite pleased if the wrongdoer happens to get his comeuppance (2009: 390). Zaibert’s account of forgiveness is ingenious but highly unorthodox, and it remains unattractive to those of us who think that a victim who is still seething with resentment cannot have forgiven the wrongdoer. However, some philosophers who hold the more traditional view that forgiveness requires a loss of resentment also suggest that forgiving is conceptually or metaphysically incompatible with continuing to punish. For example, Londey claims that “in forgiving you I remit any penalty or sanction that your wrongdoing would otherwise bring on your head,” and that this includes “moral censure as well as more tangible punishments” (1986: 4–5). According to Londey, I have not forgiven you if I then go on to punish you, “no matter what words I utter” (1986: 5). Calhoun says that forgiveness “seems to rule out retribution, moral reproach, nonreconciliation, a demand for restitution, and in short, any act of holding the wrongdoer to account” 247

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(1992: 84). Gustafson Affinito claims that forgiveness is the deliberate withholding of personal punishment and the feeling of relief that flows from this (2002: 93). Hieronymi also declares that forgiving is incompatible with continued punishment: With forgiveness, the offended agrees to bear in her own person the cost of the wrongdoing and to incorporate the injury into her own life without further protest and without demand for retribution. (2001: 551) It might be tempting to think that Hieronymi is only claiming that the forgiver is agreeing or committing to imposing no further retribution, not that forgiveness is conceptually or metaphysically incompatible with the victim’s continuing to impose it. Yet Hieronymi goes on to endorse the stronger view, claiming that “[i]n forgiveness, the one wronged absorbs the cost, without retribution” (2001: 551 ft.39). If this were true, then someone who continues to enforce retribution has not forgiven. Sussman endorses Hieronymi’s account, saying that the forgiver “must yield her just claims for retribution, apology, etc.” (2005: 97). The philosophers who have claimed that forgiveness is conceptually or metaphysically incompatible with continued punishment typically do not provide arguments in support of this view, but simply report it as fact. Nonetheless, it is not difficult to locate some attractive features of this position. It accords with at least some folk claims about forgiveness, such as those made by Beatrice Mukarwambari and Desmond Tutu. It also fits well with many of the common metaphors that are used to express the idea of forgiveness (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 37; Allais 2008: 33). Arguably, victims who continue to punish the wrongdoer have not wiped the slate clean, have not washed away or covered over the wrongdoing, and have not put the wrong behind them. If these metaphors give an accurate picture of forgiveness, then it seems that forgiveness would have to include the forbearance of further punishment. Accepting that forgiveness is incompatible with continued punishment also helps to make sense of the widely held view that forgiveness is a means of resolving conflict, of healing the rifts that persist after wrongdoing. After forgiveness, victim and perpetrator can begin afresh, so we are told, and it is much easier to start afresh once the barrier of punishment has been lifted. This punishment forbearance view also would vindicate the common but contentious idea that forgiveness is a generous gift given by the victim, in so far as a victim who chooses to withhold further punishment is voluntarily providing a benefit to the wrongdoer (Calhoun 1992: 81; Allais 2013: 648). These benefits that come with a conceptual/metaphysical punishment forbearance account of forgiveness are counterbalanced by some costs. Advocates of this position seem to face a dilemma. On their view either many apparent acts of forgiveness were in fact no such thing, or forgiveness is often very short-lived. Imagine the case of a victim who accepts the apology made by the wrongdoer, feels her resentment dissipate, and then commits to no longer treating the perpetrator in any negative ways in relation to the wrong in question, and expresses all of this by sincerely saying to the wrongdoer “I forgive you.” But imagine that two weeks later this victim does impose further punishment on the perpetrator by publicly excluding him from a fun group activity on the grounds that he wronged her. If a conceptual/metaphysical punishment forbearance account were correct, this later act of punishment might be taken to imply that the initial declaration of forgiveness did not make it the case that the victim has forgiven the perpetrator. Advocates of an incompatibility account are likely to simply bite this bullet and accept that forgiveness is often an elusive and hard-won achievement. Sometimes we discover to our surprise that we have not succeeded in forgiving or in being forgiven. To some philosophers this is an unacceptable outcome. Some think that forgiving is a communicative act in which we make commitments to each other, similar to promising or apologizing. If this were true, then it would be natural to believe that 248

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sincere declarations of forgiveness do make it the case that the victim has forgiven the perpetrator, and that this fact cannot be retrospectively dissolved by a change of mind. The only way to accept this claim while still endorsing a conceptual/metaphysical punishment forbearance account is to claim that the perpetrator was briefly in the state of having been forgiven by the victim but two weeks later was tipped out of that state and back into a state of non-forgiveness. This conflicts with the widely held view that forgiveness is a stable state which allows victim and perpetrator to move on from the wrong. Either way, there is some cost to be borne by those who endorse a conceptual/ metaphysical punishment forbearance account of forgiveness. Some of these problems can be avoided if we instead claim that forgiving is conceptually and metaphysically compatible with continued punishment, but that the victim’s forgiving of the perpetrator makes it wrong, ceteris paribus, for the victim to continue to impose punishment on the wrongdoer. This normative punishment forbearance account of forgiveness is the result of giving a negative answer to the conceptual question but a positive answer to the normative question. Swinburne has endorsed this view, claiming that “[i]f I forgive you for some act, I ought not subsequently to punish you for that act” (1989: 87, ft.8). While he does not flesh out a position in detail, Morton says that the victim who has forgiven “has agreed to act as if the [wrong] act had never occurred” (2004: 125), which might, given some extra assumptions, lead him to adopt a normative punishment forbearance account of forgiveness. As Tosi and Warmke have pointed out, this view of forgiveness fits neatly with the idea that forgiving is a performative or communicated commitment in which the forgiver changes the normative facts, either by waiving some of the duties that the wrongdoer owes to the victim, or by creating new obligations that the forgiver owes to the perpetrator, or both (cf. Cornell 2017: 263; Bennett 2018: 207). Perhaps what the victim does in forgiving is waive her right to demand further punishment of the perpetrator, and create a new obligation for herself not to call for or to impose this punishment. Advocates of a normative punishment forbearance view of forgiveness are free to claim that a sincere declaration of forgiveness does make it the case that the victim has forgiven the wrongdoer, regardless of what happens in relation to future punishment. If the forgiver changes her mind and imposes punishment two weeks later, then it is still true that she has forgiven the perpetrator, but she has now violated her own commitment and has wronged the perpetrator in turn. In shifting to a normative punishment forbearance view of forgiveness we would lose some of the benefits that came with the conceptual/metaphysical punishment forbearance view. If forgiving merely involves a commitment not to punish, and does not necessarily include the actual withholding of punishment, then we can no longer assume that after forgiveness the victim and perpetrator can move on from the wrong and start afresh. Forgiving is just the making of a commitment, according to this view, and in real life many commitments end up being broken. Broken commitments usually exacerbate conflict rather than end it. This kind of forgiving will only sometimes result in healing, and will only sometimes allow victim and perpetrator to move on or to start afresh. Additionally, if forgiveness is merely a commitment to withhold further punishment, it will no longer be true that after forgiveness the victim always feels a sense of peace or emotional resolution in relation to the wrong. People frequently make commitments to treat others in certain ways and then struggle to act in accordance with those commitments. When the victim commits to withhold further punishment her act of commitment might make her emotional life harder rather than easier. This clashes with the common belief that forgiveness provides emotional relief for the victim. These objections might be avoided by philosophers who take normative punishment forbearance to be merely one of the necessary components of forgiveness, but who also claim that forgiving necessarily includes the stable loss of resentment and the absence of continued conflict. However, these additions would run against the spirit of the normative punishment forbearance view, undermining the idea that forgiving is essentially a commitment that might subsequently be broken by the forgiver. 249

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Tosi and Warmke have offered a different set of arguments against the normative punishment forbearance view of forgiveness. They claim that if forgiveness involved a commitment to waive further punishment, “[f ]ew would have the temerity to ask for it” (2016: 210), yet many people do ask for it, which suggests that forgiveness does not actually involve such a commitment. Rejoinders to this argument are ready at hand. Many of the people who ask for forgiveness have already apologized and undergone reform, which provides some justification for forgiving them, and would render their request less bold. Many who ask for forgiveness have undergone significant punishment already, including that imposed by institutions. Many are guilty of only minor wrongs, which warrant little punishment. And, of course, there are plenty of unapologetic and unreformed perpetrators who are not lacking in temerity. Tosi and Warmke make a more powerful case against the normative punishment forbearance view when they point out that parents often forgive their children while still enforcing punishment on them, and that this does not seem to be an unjustified course of action, much less a rights violation (2016: 207; cf. Murphy and Hampton 1998: 158).

3.  Compatibility Accounts Many philosophers have rejected the two different kinds of punishment forbearance accounts of forgiveness and have claimed instead that forgiving is conceptually and normatively compatible with the victim’s continued punishment of the wrongdoer. Let us call this view a “compatibility account” of forgiveness. Murphy and Hampton both claim that the victim can forgive while continuing to punish and to demand legal punishment (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 33, 158). Holmgren states that we can punish wrongdoers without hating or resenting them, and hence we can forgive while still punishing (1993: 347). According to Griswold, forgiveness “is not mercy, in the sense of the suspension of warranted punishment” (2007: 47). Pettigrove maintains that “it is possible to forgive and at the same time seek reparation from the one forgiven” (2012: 122). Allais agrees, claiming that “forgiveness is not an alternative to punishment: they do not compete in logical space” (2013: 650). Garrard and McNaughton say that the victim who has forgiven now feels goodwill toward the perpetrator, but that this places no limit on continued punishment (2011: 99). The claim that victims can and sometimes morally should continue to punish those whom they have forgiven is also endorsed by Hughes (1993: 337), Roberts (1995: 303), Govier (1999: 59), Nelkin (2013: 184), and Warmke (2013: 918). A compatibility account of forgiveness will seem counterintuitive to many people. Popular wisdom and religious texts suggest that forgiving includes wiping the slate clean, washing away or covering over the wrong, moving on, and starting afresh (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 37; Allais 2008: 33). A victim who continues to impose punishment on the wrongdoer has not wiped the slate clean, according to the most straightforward reading of that phrase. She is still holding the wrong against the perpetrator by punishing him. Imagine that an apologetic perpetrator of wrongdoing in the workplace asks the victim for forgiveness and is told, Yes, I forgive you, but unfortunately what you did was seriously wrong. You deserve to be punished for it, and other employees need to be protected from you. I am going to report your wrongdoing to the boss, and you will lose your job. In these circumstances, the perpetrator might feel that the words “I forgive you” have been uttered insincerely, or that their meaning has been hollowed out. In response to these objections, advocates of a compatibility account will have to argue that these common metaphors are misleading to some degree. They are committed to saying that some of the wrongdoer’s slate is wiped clean when he is forgiven, but not all of it. Advocates of a compatibility account typically say that 250

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the victim who forgives no longer feels resentment, contempt, and personal animosity toward the wrongdoer and perhaps no longer focuses on the wrong and no longer thinks of the perpetrator primarily as a perpetrator (Garrard and McNaughton 2011: 99). But forgiving does not erase the wrong, does not imply that the wrongdoer will be treated as if the wrong never happened, and does not imply that the wrongdoer can put the wrong behind her and return to her prior standing in the community. No doubt some will join Beatrice Mukarwambari in thinking that forgiveness, so conceived, is impoverished or incomplete, and is less than what apologetic perpetrators are hoping for. Advocates of a compatibility account must also explain how this view can be made to fit with some of their other claims about forgiveness. For example, philosophers who say that forgiving is compatible with continuing to punish are required to show how this claim fits with the widespread view that forgiving is incompatible with continuing to blame the perpetrator, and with continuing to seek revenge. It might be that blame and revenge are essentially angry or essentially malicious, but that punishment is not, so the incompatibility between forgiving and blaming or seeking revenge is grounded in the more fundamental incompatibilities between forgiving and continuing to feel resentment, or between forgiving and bearing ill will toward the wrongdoer (Garrard and McNaughton 2011: 98). Alternatively, it might be thought that blame and revenge are essentially motivated by personal concerns – by the thought that you wronged me, so now I want to get back at you – whereas punishment is often motivated by impersonal and impartial concern with justice, with protecting others from harm, and with the general upholding of moral rules. Perhaps forgiving is incompatible with personally motivated retribution, but not with impartially motivated retribution (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 22; Tosi and Warmke 2016: 208). Although this may seem to be an attractive thought, it is not clear that we should welcome and admire impartially motivated punishment while denigrating personally motivated punishment. The motive of self-respect is essentially personal, and we often encourage trampled and timid victims to stand up for themselves as well as for impartial justice (Calhoun 1992: 85; Griswold 2007: 47). Many philosophers who say that forgiving is compatible with continuing to punish also claim that forgiveness results in the healing of damaged relationships, and allows both victim and perpetrator to move on. According to Murphy, forgiveness “heals and restores” (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 17). Pettigrove believes that forgiving helps to turn enemies into friends, and that generous acts of forgiveness allow us to mend deep social divisions (2012: 139). Forgiveness allows us to “move forward in a relationship that is not bound by past wrongdoing,” says Allais (2008: 68). Holmgren claims that “forgiveness restores the love, compassion, acceptance and harmony that would ideally underlie all human relationships” (1993: 345). Yet in a great number of cases the imposition of continued punishment is not accepted by the perpetrator, and is a source of ongoing conflict. Perpetrators who have apologized and who think that they have already been punished enough are likely to argue back against a victim who continues to impose significant punishment on them, even if they are told that the victim is no longer angry and bears no ill will toward them. If we claim that forgiveness does not stand in the way of continued punishment, then in many cases the victim will have forgiven the wrongdoer even though the two of them continue to argue over the appropriateness of the punishment that the victim continues to impose (Russell 2016: 715). It seems that advocates of a compatibility account will have to moderate their claims about the positive social effects of forgiveness. They should concede that on their view forgiveness sometimes results in healing, and sometimes allows victim and perpetrator to move on and start afresh, but forgiveness sometimes leaves victim and perpetrator mired in conflict over the proper response to the wrong. (In this respect advocates of a compatibility account are in the same boat as those who defend the view that forgiving is a commitment, one that forgivers often break.) People who are wedded to the idea that forgiveness allows the victim and perpetrator to put the 251

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wrong behind them might prefer to revert to a metaphysical/conceptual punishment forbearance account, according to which the victim who has forgiven no longer places a punitive burden on the wrongdoer. There is a middle ground position that would allow us to respect some of the intuitions on both sides of this dispute. This is the view that forgiving is compatible with the victim’s continuing to punish the perpetrator, but only if the punishment is not a source of continued conflict between the two of them (Russell 2016: 712). Often wrongdoers recognize their own misdeeds and accept the punishment that is placed on them, in the sense that they take it to be justified, and they do not argue back or resist. Some perpetrators even want to be punished. They might think that justice demands it, or that by accepting significant punishment they will be able to demonstrate that they recognize the gravity of their wrongdoing. In cases like these, the victim’s continued imposition of punishment is not an emotional or a practical sticking point between victim and perpetrator. Arguably, we ought to say that forgiveness has occurred in a case in which a victim has overcome any feelings of resentment and contempt toward the wrongdoer and continues to impose punishment that the wrongdoer accepts. Often people can and do move on, start afresh, and renew their relationship while accepted punishment continues to be paid out. In contrast, when a non-resentful victim continues to impose unaccepted punishment on the perpetrator they remain in conflict over the wrong. The matter is not settled, and there is a palpable sense in which the victim continues to hold the wrong against the wrongdoer, even though the victim is no longer angry. Perhaps we should conclude that in a case like this forgiveness has not yet occurred. By adding this kind of non-conflict condition to our account of forgiveness we could allow that forgiving is sometimes compatible with continuing to punish, but also preserve the common belief that forgiveness relieves tension between victim and perpetrator and allows both to move on from the wrong (Russell 2016: 714). We have seen that those who endorse a compatibility account of forgiveness face significant challenges, but we have not yet addressed the question as to why so many contemporary philosophers have adopted this view. We might hope to argue for it simply by pointing to folk intuitions regarding the extension of the concept of forgiveness. If the vast majority of people agree that often a mother has forgiven her child even though she non-resentfully continues to impose punishment on him, then we have some grounds for rejecting a punishment forbearance view and accepting a compatibility account. Unfortunately, the preliminary evidence suggests that folk intuitions about the extension of the concept of forgiveness are unstable within individuals and vary wildly between individuals (Latham et al. forthcoming). It may turn out that this type of evidence does not firmly favor one account over another. However, if we pay attention to the precise point at which philosophers typically claim that forgiving is compatible with continuing to punish, we discover another consideration that often motivates this view. Many philosophers are not merely aiming to explain the nature of forgiveness, but are defending forgiveness against the charge of irrationality (Kolnai 1973/4: 98; Hieronymi 2001: 531), or are defending the moral virtuousness of forgiveness (Roberts 1995: 289; Griswold 2007; 47; Pettigrove 2012: 125), or are at least claiming that it is always morally permissible for a victim to forgive (Allais 2013: 647; Garrard 2002: 155). This philosophical advocacy of forgiveness echoes the endorsement offered by prominent voices within various religious traditions and within therapeutic psychology. Yet the idea that unconditional forgiveness is morally good induces worries regarding the forgiveness of unrepentant, unapologetic, and unreformed perpetrators who are likely to keep on performing exactly the kind of harmful actions for which they have already been forgiven. It seems that forgiveness might be dangerous in these cases; it will let the wrongdoers off the hook, undermine moral standards, and facilitate reoffense. In the case of unrepentant perpetrators of atrocities, unconditional forgiveness may also seem to be so disrespectful to the victims as to be morally improper (Russell 2018: 215–22; cf. Pettigrove 2012: 112). 252

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Some philosophers simply accept that forgiving would be too dangerous or too disrespectful in these circumstances, and hence conclude that it is sometimes morally wrong to forgive (­ Richards 1988: 82; Lang 1994: 111; Zaibert 2009: 382; Nelkin 2013: 183; Russell 2016: 717; Milam 2018: 574). It seems plausible that sometimes a victim is morally obliged to continue to punish the perpetrator, and to do so even if the perpetrator does not accept that punishment. For example, imagine a case of extreme wrongdoing in which only the victim knows about the wrong action, and in which the only feasible way to protect other members of the community from this perpetrator is for the victim publicly to denounce his wrongdoing and to call for his incarceration. If either of the punishment forbearance accounts of forgiveness were correct, then forgiving would either block or impede the victim’s ability to punish dangerous unreformed wrongdoers, and hence forgiving would sometimes conflict with the victim’s moral duty. Plenty of philosophers either shy away from this conclusion or reject it outright. They respond to the problem of dangerous unreformed perpetrators by claiming that forgiving them is not prohibitively dangerous, because we can forgive them while continuing to punish them and while remaining in conflict with them over the wrong. It would be unfair to accuse forgivers of letting wrongdoers off the hook, or of facilitating reoffense, or of disrespecting victims, if those victims forgive but then go on to ensure that the perpetrators are locked away against their will (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 158; Holmgren 1993: 347; Garrard 2002: 153; Pettigrove 2012: 122). A compatibility account of forgiveness renders unconditional forgiveness less likely to be dangerous and disrespectful, and for this reason it is very attractive to advocates of unconditional forgiveness. If forgiveness is primarily an internal emotional change in the forgiver and does not include the removal of the forgiver’s behavioral resistance toward the perpetrator, then forgiving the unrepentant will turn out to be virtually risk-free. The moral injunction to forgive would mean “Don’t engage in any angry blaming or angry revenge, but forcefully impose as much non-angry impartial retribution as is morally appropriate.” But if this is what forgiveness amounts to, then forgiveness frequently will fall a long way short of healing the rifts created by wrongdoing, and will not allow victim and perpetrator to move on and begin afresh. It is easy to see why some philosophers claim instead that a victim who forgives imposes no further punishment (or perhaps no further unaccepted punishment) on the perpetrator.

Notes 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bwykwi5MGU 2 The word ‘forbear’ may have connotations of holding back from doing something that deep down you want to do, of restraining yourself. We should not include this kind of internal conflict as a necessary condition in our definition of forbearance for current purposes. Instead we should allow that someone might forbear punishment while having no urge to punish and while judging that punishment is not justified, all things considered. 3 A proper exploration of the difference between conceptual incompatibility and metaphysical incompatibility would require a lengthy discussion of complex methodological issues. For the purposes of this chapter not much is riding on this distinction, so I will treat these as roughly synonymous here.

References Allais, Lucy (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36:1, 33–68. Allais, Lucy (2013) “Elective Forgiveness,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21:5, 637–53. Bennett, Christopher (2018) “The Alteration Thesis: Forgiveness as a Normative Power,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 46:2, 207–33. Boonin, David (2008) The Problem of Punishment, New York: Cambridge University Press. Calhoun, Cheshire (1992) “Changing One’s Heart,” Ethics 103:1, 76–96.

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Luke Russell Cornell, Nicolas (2017) “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving,” Philosophical Review 126:2, 241–72. Dominus, Susan (2014) “Portraits of Reconciliation,” The New York Times, Feinberg, Joel (1970) Doing and Deserving, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Garrard, Eve (2002) “Forgiveness and the Holocaust,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5:2, 147–65. Garrard, Eve and David McNaughton (2011) “Conditional and Unconditional Forgiveness,” in Cristel Frick (ed.) The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays, New York: Routledge, 97–106. Govier, Trudy (1999) “Forgiveness and the Unforgiveable,” American Philosophical Quarterly 36:1, 59–75. Griswold, Charles (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, New York: Cambridge University Press. Gustafson Affinito, Mona (2002) “Forgiveness in Counseling: Caution, Definition, and Application,” in Sharon Lamb and Jeffrie G. Murphy (eds) Before Forgiving: Cautionary Views of Forgiveness in Psychotherapy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 88–111. Hieronymi, Pamela (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62:3, 529–55. Holmgren, Margaret (1993) “Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons,” American Philosophical Quarterly 30:4, 341–52. Hughes, Paul M. (1993) “What Is Involved In Forgiving?,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 27:3, 331–40. Kolnai, Aurel (1973/4) “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74, 91–106. Lang, Berel (1994) “Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 31:2, 105–17. Latham, Andrew and Kristie Miller, James Norton and Luke Russell (forthcoming) “Forgiveness: From Conceptual Pluralism to Conceptual Ethics,” in Court Lewis (ed.) The Philosophy of Forgiveness, Volume V, Vernon Press. Londey, David (1986) “Can God Forgive Us Our Trespasses?” Sophia 25:2, 4–10. Milam, Per-Erik (2018) “Against Elective Forgiveness,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21:3, 569–84. Morton, Adam (2004) On Evil, New York: Routledge. Murphy, Jeffrie G. and Jean Hampton (1988) Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelkin, Dana (2013) “Freedom and Forgiveness,” in Ishtiyaque Haji and Justin Caouette (eds) Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. O’Shaughnessy, R. J. (1967) “Forgiveness,” Philosophy 42:162, 336–52. Pettigrove, Glen (2012) Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, Norvin (1988) “Forgiveness,” Ethics 99:1, 77–97. Roberts, Robert (1995) “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32:4, 289–306. Russell, Luke (2016) “Forgiving While Punishing,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94:4, 704–18. Russell, Luke (2018) “Evil and the Unforgiveable,” in Shlomit Harrosh and Roger Crisp (eds) Moral Evil in Practical Ethics, New York: Routledge. Russell, Luke (2020) “The Who, the What, and the How of Forgiveness,” Philosophy Compass 15:3, 1–9. Sussman, David (2005) “Kantian Forgiveness,” Kant Studien 96:1, 85–107. Swinburne, Richard (1989) Responsibility and Atonement, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tosi, Justin and Brandon Warmke (2016) “Punishment and Forgiveness,” in Jonathan Jacobs and Jonathan Jackson (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics, Abingdon: Routledge. Warmke, Brandon (2011) “Is Forgiveness the Deliberate Refusal to Punish?,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 8:4, 613–20. Warmke, Brandon (2013) “Two Arguments Against the Punishment-Forbearance Account of Forgiveness,” Philosophical Studies 165:3, 915–20. Warmke, Brandon (2016) “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94:4, 687–703. Zaibert, Leo (2009) “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6:3, 365–93. Zaibert, Leo (2012) “On Forgiveness and the Deliberate Refusal to Punish: Reiterating the Differences,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 9:1, 103–13.

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19 PERFORMATIVE ACCOUNTS OF FORGIVENESS Brandon Warmke

And is it complicated? Well, it is complicated a bit; but life and truth and things do tend to be complicated. J.L. Austin, “Performative Utterances”

1. Introduction Many philosophers think that forgiveness is a private affair. Forgiveness occurs “in the heart.” Some say forgiveness is the forswearing or overcoming or moderating of the resentment (or other negative emotions) one feels toward one’s wrongdoer. Others say that to forgive is to refuse to punish. Some say forgiveness is openness to reconciliation with one’s wrongdoer. According to these approaches, forgiveness involves certain changes in one’s beliefs, desires, feelings, emotions, decisions, intentions, commitments, and memories. But what these accounts all have in common is that they locate forgiveness in the realm of the mental. I have not done a proper survey, but my suspicion is that most philosophers who have written on forgiveness adopt the view that forgiveness is exclusively private. But this view of forgiveness is not universally held. There is a strand of thinking that says that forgiveness is something that can be performed. Performative accounts of forgiveness say that you can, by engaging in some overt action, forgive. What kind of action? Typically, an utterance of “I forgive you.” Performative accounts of forgiveness therefore claim that “I forgive you” is a performative utterance—one that brings about forgiveness. As one performative theorist, Glen Pettigrove, puts it, “under ordinary circumstances, when A sincerely says, ‘I forgive you’, to B, she is forgiving him” (2012: 1). Performative utterances accomplish what they state (Austin 1979). Here are some examples: “I promise you.” “I congratulate you.” “I applaud you.” “I pronounce you husband and wife.” “I christen this ship.” “I apologize.” In uttering these things, you accomplish what you say you are doing. Under normal circumstances, when you say, “I promise you,” you make a promise. Each example I’ve listed is what DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-25

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J.L. Austin called an “explicit performative utterance,” one in which you make explicit what precise act you are performing.1 “I order you to shut the door” is an explicit performative utterance. But not all performative utterances are explicit. “Shut the door” is a performative utterance (it gives an order), but does not make explicit that an order is being given. (Austin calls these kinds “primary performative utterances.”) The performative theorist points out, quite obviously, that sometimes people say, “I forgive you.” She will then ask: what happens under normal conditions when someone says this? Some might say that “I forgive you” is simply to report an inner state of the speaker, functioning much like “I hate you” or “I loathe you.” Others may say that “I forgive you” reports some change in one’s inner state. It communicates to one’s wrongdoer, for example, that while one formerly resented her, one no longer feels resentment and has instead taking up an attitude of good will.2 If “I forgive you” merely reveals one’s mental state or a change in one’s mental state, then “I forgive you” is not a performative. It would be what Austin called a constative—a declaration that could be true or false. On these views, uttering “I forgive you” is not itself an act of forgiveness. It might simply report one’s inner state of having forgiven. But some philosophers have claimed that “I forgive you” can in fact function as a performative. In this chapter, I explain performative accounts of forgiveness, as I understand them. I’ll say something about what a performative account of forgiveness claims, and why someone might think that this is the right way to think about the nature of forgiveness. I’ll then see what can be said in defense of performative accounts of forgiveness against some criticisms they’ve received. But first: some preliminaries. Broadly speaking, there are three central questions about ­forgiveness. The first is: what is forgiveness—what is its nature? Second: who can forgive— when does someone have metaphysical standing to forgive a wrongdoer? Third: what are the moral norms of forgiveness—when, if ever, is forgiveness morally good, permissible, obligatory, supererogatory, or virtuous? We are concerned here with the first question, so we will set aside the other two. In discussing performative accounts of forgiveness, we will focus on the (alleged) explicit ­performative utterances like “I forgive you.” But a performative account of forgiveness need not say that this is the only way forgiveness can be performed. It may allow that one can forgive with an inexplicit performative utterance (“It’s okay now, we are good”) or even a gesture that conventionally functions as a performative (perhaps a “forgiving look,” a hug, or a pat on the back and a round of beers).3 Finally, those who hold that forgiveness can be performed need not deny that there are other modes or forms of forgiving. Many are in fact pluralists about forgiveness, allowing both a ­“private” and “overt” dimension.4 To help clarify the matter at hand, let’s distinguish three claims: Weak Thesis: Forgiveness can be performed by an utterance of “I forgive you.” Moderate Thesis: The performative utterance of “I forgive you” is the paradigmatic form of forgiveness. Strong Thesis: The only way to forgive is with a performative utterance such as “I forgive you.” To my knowledge, no philosopher has argued for the Strong Thesis in print. It will strike many as ­ oderate a radical thesis, for it denies that one can ever forgive exclusively “in one’s heart.”5 The M Thesis claims not merely that one can forgive with a performative utterance, but that these cases are the central or paradigmatic cases of forgiveness. Some philosophers have endorsed the M ­ oderate Thesis, which we will only briefly discuss. The main issue as I see it is whether some instances of forgiveness are performative acts. We will therefore focus on the Weak Thesis. In this chapter, I explain it, defend it, and discuss some objections against it. 256

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2.  What Does a Performative Account Claim? What does it mean to say that one can forgive via a performative utterance? When we say, “I forgive you,” what are we supposed to be doing, according to performative accounts? We can frame the question by analogy. In typical circumstances, “I promise you” is a performative utterance. When you utter these words, you make a promise. But what does it mean to make a promise? Similarly, with forgiveness we can distinguish two questions. 1 Can one forgive by uttering “I forgive you”? 2 What is the nature of forgiveness that is issued by an utterance of “I forgive you”? My strategy will be first to look at question 2, and survey how performative theorists have understood the nature of performative forgiveness. Then, in the following section, we will turn our attention to question 1 and ask what reasons there are for thinking that forgiveness can be issued by a performative utterance in the first place.

2.1  William Neblett To my knowledge, the first clear and sustained endorsement of a performative account of ­forgiveness is found in William Neblett’s 1974 paper, “Forgiveness and Ideals.”6 The view of forgiveness I will defend, on the other hand, takes it for granted that in some instances merely saying, ‘I forgive you’, does constitute forgiveness. (269) What does one do when one says “I forgive you?” What is the nature of this kind of forgiveness? Neblett is not as forthcoming as we might hope. This is partly due to his approach to forgiveness in general, which is pluralist twice over. In the first place, he argues that there is no single thing that is forgiveness in every instance.7 Forgiveness can sometimes occur “in the heart,” “without ever communicating that forgiveness to the person” (273). But one can also forgive by saying “I forgive you” even if one still feels resentment and hasn’t wiped away ill-will (269). But there is a second layer to his pluralism: overt, performative instances of forgiveness are themselves a diffuse phenomenon, admitting of a diverse internal structure, depending on what the forgiver is intending to do with her utterance of “I forgive you.” “The language of forgiveness is quite often put to a performatory use,” he says, “and it is not always put to the same performatory use” (269). There is no single thing that one always accomplishes when one says “I forgive you.” Neblett does give us two hints about his thinking, though. First, he says that “the meaning of performatory utterances is linked to the purpose for which those utterances are employed, which means that the meaning of performatory utterances is linked to the intentions of the speaker-actor who ‘employs’ those utterances” (272). What are those purposes? Neblett says that the language of ‘forgiveness’ is put to a variety of purposes, e.g. to convey that one wants to continue the relationship as before, that one does not wish the guilty party to continue to feel guilty, that one no longer harbours resentment (or at least is committed to trying to wipe away his resentment), that one will not exact punishment for the injury suffered, etc. (272) 8 257

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2.2  Richard Swinburne In 1989, Richard Swinburne published Responsibility and Atonement, in which he offers a ­performative account of forgiveness. To get his view on the table, I draw both from that early work and a more recent paper. Here’s the basic idea according to Swinburne. In the typical situation, when you wrong someone you incur guilt, which is like a moral debt, and you owe the victim a kind of payment or “atonement.” This might involve reparation, repentance, apology, and penance. At the next stage, the victim of the wrongdoing can forgive the wrongdoer, which involves a kind of acceptance of these gifts and a wiping away of the debt, the guilt.9 Here, the performative account enters the stage: When a person says ‘I forgive’ him/her that may sometimes constitute a report of a mental state; the person reports that he no longer resents someone’s wrong actions. But more often, I believe, it is a performative utterance in the sense that necessarily it makes something (other than itself ) the case, and does not merely report something. (2021: 127) Swinburne says that “I forgive you” does not always function as a performative. It can merely report or describe the world. However, the performative utterance of forgiveness is “the primary and morally more important kind of forgiveness” (2021:127). So, according to Swinburne, the performative utterance “I forgive you” makes something other than itself the case. But what? First, forgiving involves the “acceptance” of the wrongdoer’s “reparation, penance, and, above all, apology” (1989: 85). Second, this acceptance means that the forgiver cancels the wrongdoer’s debt by removing her guilt (1989: 95). And third, performative forgiveness involves making a promise: Forgiving in the performative sense consists in deeming the wrongdoer’s atonement sufficient, and thereby it involves a promise. One who promises creates an obligation to do or not do some future act; she does not merely report something which would be so whether or not the report was made. The promise which B makes by forgiving A is, I suggest, a promise to treat A insofar as is possible as someone who has not wronged B by his past action. (2021: 133) On Swinburne’s performative account, utterances of “I forgive you” typically accomplish (at least) three things: (1) the acceptance of the wrongdoer’s reparation, penance, and apology; (2) the erasing of the wrongdoer’s guilt, which is like canceling a debt; and (3) the promise to treat the wrongdoer like someone who had not committed the wrong, which creates certain obligations.

2.3  Joram Graf Haber In 1991 Joram Graf Haber published Forgiveness: A Philosophical Study. While Neblett and ­Swinburne had previously offered performative accounts, Haber is sometimes regarded as the first to do so. I think this is probably due to a couple of factors. First, Neblett’s comments on performative forgiveness take up a small part of his paper (which is, I think, rarely studied), and Swinburne’s account was initially presented in a few pages in a book on issues regarding Christian theories of atonement. However, Haber puts his performative account front and center in what was at the time the second major philosophical monograph focused on forgiveness in the second half of the twentieth century (after Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton’s Forgiveness and Mercy, published three years earlier in 1988). The second reason for the focus on Haber is that he situates his performative 258

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account within J.L. Austin’s discussion of performative utterances. For that reason, Haber could provide a more detailed theoretical model showing how one can forgive by saying “I forgive you.” Before we explain his model, though, we must spend some time discussing the Austinian machinery he uses. Austin’s discussions of performative utterances are complicated. At the outset, he drew the performative/constantive distinction in a paper entitled “Performative Utterances” in 1961[1979], and in How to Do Things with Words, published in 1962[1975]. Constantives are used to declare some state of affairs or state some fact: “The cheese is in the fridge.” When one utters a performative, however, one is doing what one is saying: one is performing the act named by the verb in the sentence. In saying “I promise you” you make a promise. In the latter part of How to Do Things with Words, however, Austin introduces some machinery that some have thought effectively supersedes the performative/constantive distinction.10 We will not discuss his motivations or the details except for what’s needed to understand Haber’s account. Austin here again distinguishes different things we can do when we speak. In the first instance, we can think of an utterance simply as a locutionary act, which is simply the act of uttering a sentence. But we do not typically utter sentences simply for the sake of uttering sentences. We also ask questions, make demands, warn of threats, persuade detractors, express our preferences, declare someone husband and wife, and make promises. The key here is to see that these actions do not merely report or describe some state of the world. Thus, Austin suggested that in addition to the performance of the act of uttering a sentence, we may also perform an act in uttering a sentence, what he called illocutionary acts. Consider the sentence “I would like a ham sandwich.” The locutionary act is the utterance of the sentence itself. As an illocutionary act, saying this might be, in a certain context, ordering a sandwich at the deli counter. So utterances like “I promise you” or “I pronounce you husband and wife” would be both locutionary and illocutionary acts. Although he stressed that it’s not an exact science, Austin thought that you could divide up illocutionary acts in general classes. Some speech acts, for example, are “commissives,” or have “commissive force.” When uttering something like “I promise to buy you lunch tomorrow,” you thereby make a commitment. Now to Haber. Haber claims that “I forgive you” can function as a performative utterance.11 He writes that “one way for S to forgive X is to say felicitously that he forgives him,” typically by uttering “I forgive you” (54, italics original). When, under certain conditions, you say “I forgive you,” you thereby forgive. But he also argues that “I forgive you” can be understood as belonging to a class of illocutionary acts that Austin called behabitives, speech acts which express our attitudes (Austin 1975: 160). “I applaud you” and “I welcome” are examples of behabitives. As is “I love you.” Sometimes we say this merely to report to someone how we feel or think about them: do you love me, she asks? Yes of course I love you, he says. We might even say it to manipulate someone. But “I love you” can also be used to express how one feels. And just as these other behabitive utterances express their respective attitudes, so can “I forgive you.” What attitude is thereby expressed? Here, Haber says that in expressing forgiveness of an agent X for his act A, a speaker S represents as true all of the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6

X did A; A was wrong; X was responsible for doing A; S was personally injured by X’s doing A; S resented being injured by X’s doing A; and S has overcome his resentment for X’s doing A, or is at least willing to try to overcome it.12

When someone issues the performative utterance “I forgive you,” she therefore expresses her forgiving attitude, which is understood as expressing (1)–(6). Again: what is important to understand 259

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is that Haber is not claiming that “I forgive you” simply reports one’s internal state. It is rather an expression of an attitude, much like “I thank you” can express gratitude. For now, I won’t say more about the details of this account. We will return to it later in this chapter. One final observation: like many other performative theorists, Haber does not claim that the only way to forgive is through a performative utterance.13 However, he does think that it is the most precise way to forgive. Here, he cites Austin, who claims that to issue a performative utterance “is to perform an action—an action, perhaps which one could scarcely perform, at least with so much precision, in any other way.”14 The idea, I believe, is that saying “I forgive you” is the clearest and most surefire way to effect forgiveness just like saying “I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife” is the clearest and most surefire way to get married, even if one can get married by other means, such as through common law. For this reason, I understand Haber as not merely defending the Weak Thesis, but rather a Moderate one, according to which performative forgiveness, while not the only way to forgive, enjoys pride of place among its diverse forms.

2.4  P.E. Digeser In 2001, political scientist P.E. Digeser published Political Forgiveness, the first major work exploring the uniquely political conception of forgiveness. Roughly, political forgiveness concerns forgiveness that occurs between individuals or groups that essentially involves one’s role in government, public administration, or international relations. Digeser distinguishes political forgiveness from “ordinary, interpersonal conceptions of forgiveness,” which rely heavily on the notion that forgiveness requires some emotional change (2001: 4). In fact, Digeser claims, political forgiveness cannot be private: “Given its inherent public character” (25)… “political forgiveness cannot be done sotto voce, as is the case for ordinary forgiveness” (28). The point of forgiveness, Digeser says, is to publicly release the wrongdoer(s) from their moral, legal, and financial debts (20). “Because politics is more a matter of civil behavior than appropriate sentiment,” political forgiveness is akin to our practices of pardon and financial debt forgiveness (17–19). Forgiveness therefore must be public and must involve “uptake” from the forgiven: the wrongdoer must hear and understand that their debt has been forgiven (29). In fact, the private, emotional aspects of ordinary, interpersonal forgiveness can be totally absent. Following Haber, Digeser puts the performative account in Austinian terms. “Political forgiveness as an illocutionary act whose point is to relieve one party’s indebtedness to another” (208). What kind of illocutionary act? Here, Digeser could be clearer. Digeser says that Haber’s behabitive account captures many non-political instances of “I forgive you,” but is insufficient to capture two key features of political forgiveness. Instead, Digeser claims that political forgiveness involves a “decision in favor of a course of action” (in this case, a decision to release the wrongdoer from their debts), and a “commitment to a certain course of action” (“a commitment to release one’s debts”) (31).15 Because political forgiveness involves an exercise of one’s authority to release another from his debts, Digeser uses the Austinian notion of “exercitive” illocutionary force, whereby one exercises one’s rights or powers to make a decision (e.g., “I pardon you”). And because it also involves a commitment, Digeser says political forgiveness also functions as a commissive. Political forgiveness, then, is a performative utterance, involving two closely related illocutionary acts: an exercitive and a commissive.

2.5  Glen Pettigrove In a 2004 paper and his 2012 book Forgiveness and Love, Glen Pettigrove endorsed a performative account. In doing so, he revised and then built upon Haber’s behabitive account of “I forgive you” using Austinian machinery. 260

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To begin, let’s look at the revision to Haber’s account. Pettigrove agrees with Haber that “I forgive you” typically has behabitive force; that is, it expresses certain of the forgiver’s attitudes. Like Haber, Pettigrove holds that “I forgive you” expresses: 1 that the speaker believes that she’s been wronged by the one to whom she speaks. Pettigrove’s revisions to Haber’s account are subtle but important. First, Pettigrove points out that Haber’s view requires that the forgiver has experienced resentment, and has either overcome it or is committed to overcoming it. But for reasons we need not discuss here, Pettigrove thinks that one can forgive even if one hasn’t experienced those hostile attitudes. What’s important when one says “I forgive you” is that one has an absence of such attitudes, whether one has overcome them or never had them in the first place. Thus, “I forgive you” also expresses: 2 that the speaker has an absence of or reduction in hostile reactive attitudes that might have arisen in response to the wrongdoing. The second change to Haber’s behabitive account arises from the observation that merely a lack of hostile attitudes is not sufficient to qualify one as having a forgiving attitude. On Haber’s account, one can forgive yet merely be indifferent to one’s wrongdoer. But this would not qualify as the “highest manifestation” of forgiveness that Pettigrove is after. For this reason, Pettigrove adds that “I forgive you” also expresses: 3 that the speaker has some degree of positive regard for the one she addresses.16 For Pettigrove, much like Haber, “I forgive you” is a way to forgive, and in doing so, one reveals or expresses certain facts about oneself. However, according to Pettigrove, there is a distinct cluster of activities one performs when one says “I forgive you.” Speech acts may also function as commissives, which have the illocutionary force of committing the speaker to an action or a course of conduct. Pettigrove urges that we think of “I forgive you” as functioning as a commissive. When saying “I forgive you,” the speaker commits herself: 1 to not retaliating against her wrongdoer; 2 to forswear future hostile reactive attitudes; 3 to the well-being of the wrongdoer, in ways that are appropriate.17 Pettigrove then asks: should we think of “I forgive you” as a behabitive or a commissive? Here we again find a pluralism common to performative accounts: sometimes “I forgive you” can function as a behabitive, other times it can function as a commissive.18 However, in the paradigmatic, “highest manifestation” cases with which Pettigrove is most concerned, “I forgive you” does both. The “forgiveness for which we hope,” as Pettigrove puts it, is a performative act whereby the forgiver sincerely says, “I forgive you,” thereby expressing her forgiving attitude to the forgiven and committing to treat and regard the forgiven in certain ways going forward.19

2.6  Kathryn Norlock In her 2009 book, Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective, Kathryn Norlock endorsed a performative account of forgiveness, arguing that “‘I forgive you’ can be, itself, an instance of forgiveness” (96). Like virtually all defenders of performative accounts, Norlock endorses a pluralism about the 261

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phenomenon of forgiveness. As Norlock sees things, forgiveness is a moral act (or set of acts) that has two “dimensions.” The first dimension is private, insofar as one makes: 1 the choice to take seriously a new attitude toward one’s wrongdoer, which functions as a remedy in responding to blame or condemnation, releasing offenders from the fullness of their blameworthiness (97). This private dimension of forgiveness can be accomplished separately or in concert with the second overt, performative dimension: 2 the performative utterance to the wrongdoer of one’s accomplishment of, or commitment to, the choices and actions that releasing them requires (97). Crucially for Norlock, (2) can be accomplished absent (1).20 That is, one can successfully forgive by saying “I forgive you” without choosing to release offenders from their blameworthiness. Like Haber and Pettigrove, Norlock frames her performative account in the Austinian language of illocutionary force. While Norlock agrees, in general, with Pettigrove’s insight that the illocutionary force of “I forgive you” can be composite in the way Pettigrove argues, Norlock herself stresses the commissive aspect of performative forgiveness. The rationale has to do with the forward-looking functions of forgiveness, namely the way forgiveness can promote trust between wrongdoer and victim. In saying “I forgive you” to our wrongdoer, we minimally create a mutual understanding about how the victim intends to treat the wrongdoer going forward in the relationship.

2.7  Brandon Warmke In a few papers that would probably convince you entirely, I’ve defended performative accounts of forgiveness, arguing that paradigmatic cases of forgiveness are utterances of “I forgive you” (2016a, 2016b). Insofar as “I forgive you” generally expresses certain forgiving attitudes and commits the speaker to treat and regard the wrongdoer in certain ways going forward, I agree with Pettigrove and others. However, in my estimation, this account doesn’t go far enough. Paradigmatic cases of forgiveness also possess declarative illocutionary force. Declaratives, to put it crudely, “change reality.” “I christen this ship” or “I hereby find you guilty” are examples of statements possessing declarative force when uttered by persons with the appropriate authority. In what way can “I forgive you” function as a declarative? Here, we can rely on an analogy between the cancellation of a financial debt and moral forgiveness (Swinburne 1989, Nelkin 2013, Warmke 2016a). Just like one can forgive a financial debt with a performative utterance, one can forgive a moral debt with an utterance of “I forgive you.” The declarative force of “I forgive you” involves canceling or forgiving the wrongdoer’s moral debt. When you cancel someone’s financial debt through some performative action, you give up a right to demand payment and you relieve them from a duty to repay. Debt cancellation thereby alters the operative norms of interaction. Similarly, forgiveness “alters the norms of interaction for both the victim and the wrongdoer in certain characteristic ways” and so can be thought of as the exercise of a normative power (Warmke 2016b, see also Bennett 2018). Forgiveness can release the wrongdoer from certain personal obligations (e.g., to apologize, show remorse, offer restitution) (Nelkin 2013). And in forgiving the victim can relinquish her right or license to regard or treat the wrongdoer in certain ways (e.g., ways constitutive of private or overt blame) (Warmke 2016a, 2016b). The rationale for thinking that “I forgive” can function as a declarative therefore rests on two claims. The first is that paradigmatic cases of forgiveness alter the norms of interaction 262

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between victim and wrongdoer. Forgiving itself changes how victims and wrongdoers are m ­ orally ­permitted to treat and regard one another. The second claim is that this unique, norm-altering effect cannot be explained by a performative account that only draws from the resources provided by behabitive and commissive force. I have not tried to catalog every endorsement of a performative account of forgiveness.21 Nor have I addressed all the details of these accounts or all the philosophical issues that arise. I have attempted, however, to explain in broad outline the major approaches to theorizing forgiveness as a performative utterance. My goal has been to show what philosophers mean they claim that one can forgive by saying “I forgive you.” I now want to ask what reasons there are to accept the Weak Thesis, the view that forgiveness can be performed by an utterance of “I forgive you.”

3.  Arguments for Performative Accounts There are, it seems to me, three different families of arguments for the Weak Thesis. I won’t develop these arguments in detail. Some of these arguments have been presented, or at least suggested in the literature. Others I sketch here because I think they are promising routes for defending performative forgiveness and have yet to be developed.

3.1.  Linguistic Arguments Perhaps the most obvious way to argue for performative accounts of forgiveness is to ask: what is the best explanation for what one does when one says “I forgive you”? As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, “I forgive you” looks very much like statements widely accepted to be performative utterances: “I applaud you,” “I promise you,” “I congratulate you,” “I welcome you,” and so on. Like these utterances, in “I forgive you” we find a sentence with familiar form: a first-person singular subject with the main verb in the simple present tense, using active voice.22 To my knowledge, though, Austin never offered “I forgive you” as an example of a performative. Whether this is because he didn’t think it was a performative, we cannot know.23 What I’ll suggest here, however, is that given what Austin says about performatives in general, there’s good reason to let “I forgive you” into the club. First, Austin claims that a useful criterion for identifying performatives is whether one may insert “hereby” before the performative verb. For example, one may say, “I hereby cancel your debts” but not “I hereby shine your shoes.” The reason this “hereby test” works, Austin thinks, is that “hereby” indicates that the utterance itself is “the instrument effecting the act” named by the verb in the sentence (1975: 57). “I hereby…” tells the audience what the speaker is about to do with the rest of the utterance. While it may be officious to tell someone “I hereby forgive you,” there is nothing so far as I can see that’s confusing or infelicitous about doing so. A second test concerns how some verbs are used in the first-person singular present indicative active, and how the same verb is used in other persons and tenses. To see what Austin has in mind, consider the difference between: “I promise.” And: “He promises” or “I promised.” In the first case, the speaker is not reporting anyone’s promising conduct. Rather, she is making the promise. Yet in the latter examples, the speaker is not using the verb to make the promise, but rather to report on someone else’s present promise-making, or his own past promise-making. So here’s a test: is there an asymmetry in how the verbs are put to use when we change their person and tense? If yes, that’s evidence that the use of the verb in the first-person singular present indicative active can function as a performative. “I forgive you” passes this test. Compare: 263

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“I forgive you.” With: “He forgives you” or “I forgave you.” The latter cases are clearly reports of forgiveness. But in the former case, it is not so obvious that the speaker is merely reporting someone’s forgiveness. To see this, we can draw from Austin’s own illustration (modified for the case of forgiveness): [Consider] a typical incident of little Willie whose uncle says he’s disappointed that little ­ illie hasn’t forgiven his sibling for stealing his toy. Little Willie’s parent says, “Of course you W forgive, don’t you, Willie?” giving him a nudge, but little Willie says nothing. (242) The point, Austin says, is that Willie must do the forgiving himself by saying “I forgive you,” and his parent “is going too fast” in saying Willie forgives. The parent could report that Willie had forgiven, but that is not what we are waiting to see Willie do. We are waiting to see if he forgives, something he alone can do with an utterance of “I forgive you.” “I forgive you” therefore passes the Hereby Test and the Asymmetry Test. Its performative credentials are looking good. Here is another piece of linguistic evidence. Sometimes people will ask others to forgive them: “Please forgive me?” And people sometimes reply, “I forgive you.” It seems to me that what is happening here is that the wrongdoer has asked for something to occur, and the victim, in saying “I forgive you,” brings about the thing that the wrongdoer has asked for. That thing is forgiveness. For those who find these arguments unconvincing, I think there is a two-fold explanatory burden. First, critics need to provide some reason for thinking that “I forgive you” cannot be a performative against the above considerations (perhaps that Austin’s tests aren’t good ones, or that forgiveness doesn’t pass them after all). Second, they need to explain what one is doing in normal circumstances when one says “I forgive you.” We will return to this matter in the next section.

3.2  Arguments from Function and Ideality Two more argumentative strategies can be treated in tandem. One strategy says that there are certain functions of forgiveness that can only be accounted for by way of a performative act. For example, P.E. Digeser claims that given the essentially public nature of political forgiveness, at least some forms of forgiveness must be overt, communicative acts with illocutionary force.24 That is, insofar as there is a distinctive political forgiveness, the manifestly public functions of political forgiveness mandate an essentially public and performative form of forgiveness. Or one could draw upon social functions of forgiveness such as: (1) forgiveness is a felicitous response to apologies (performatives like “I’m sorry”) or requests for forgiveness; (2) forgiveness as a public act promotes reconciliation in a way private forgiveness cannot; (3) public acts of forgiveness inform third parties about the status of the relationship between victim and wrongdoer. The argument could then run as follows: if at least some forms of forgiveness have these functions, then we need an account of forgiveness that accounts for them. Performative forgiveness does exactly this. Here’s a second argumentative strategy in the same neighborhood. Some have argued that cases of performative forgiveness are paradigmatic, or morally ideal. For example, Glen Pettigrove’s (2004, 2012) strategy for identifying the cases of paradigmatic forgiveness begins by asking “what is the forgiveness we seek?” Whatever the “highest manifestation” of forgiveness turns out to be, it is of course forgiveness. So, if Pettigrove is right that the highest manifestation of forgiveness is performative, then at least some forms of forgiveness are performative utterances. How might one argue for the premise that performative forgiveness is morally ideal? The details may be filled out in various ways. Perhaps ideal forgiveness is a communicative act because 264

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such acts of forgiving are more generous. They let the wrongdoer know where they stand and put “on record” one’s forgiveness so that one can be held accountable by others to treat the wrongdoer appropriately going forward. Or perhaps ideal forgiveness is that which accomplishes certain paradigmatic functions: it expresses our emotional state, or commits ourselves to treat and regard the wrongdoer in a certain way, or cancels a moral debt thereby altering certain norms.

3.3  Normative Arguments A final set of arguments for performative forgiveness rely on certain commonly accepted normative facts or features of forgiveness. I’ll outline two of them. First, as we discussed in the previous section, forgiveness arguably alters the operative moral norms between victim and wrongdoer. The most obvious example of this is that after I forgive you, it is no longer appropriate to continue overtly blaming you. Upon forgiving a wrongdoer we relinquish something like a right or license to regard or treat the wrongdoer in ways that had been previously appropriate prior to our forgiving. These are changes on the victim side of the equation. But there are also normative changes concerning the wrongdoer. Upon being forgiven, one is released from certain personal obligations, such as the obligation to apologize or offer restitution. Forgiveness, at least in some cases, frees the wrongdoer from these personal obligations going forward. Supposing this is correct, here then are the bare bones of an argument for performative forgiveness.25 Performative accounts of forgiveness explain why some cases of forgiveness alter these norms, but non-performative accounts cannot. Critics of performative forgiveness lack the resources to explain the full range of norm changes: a mere change in attitude or the making of a decision, for instance, is not sufficient to account for the normative alteration. What is needed is a performative act. A second normative feature of forgiveness is that it is sometimes subject to ought norms. We think “she shouldn’t have forgiven him so soon.” Or: “He really should forgive her, she feels terrible and it was so long ago.” Sometimes one ought or ought not forgive, where the relevant ought involves a demand of specific action.26 An account of forgiveness should have the resources to explain why forgiveness is governed by some ought judgments. What kinds of resources? The ought norms bearing on forgiveness sometimes imply that compliance with those norms is under the victim’s voluntary control. Therefore, an account of forgiveness should have the resources to explain why forgiveness is at least sometimes under the victim’s voluntary control.27 Performative accounts of forgiveness have such resources, in virtue of their being speech acts that one can accomplish with an exercise of voluntary agency. Many account of forgiveness, such as emotion accounts, lack these resources. While such an argument may provide some evidence for performative accounts, it doesn’t speak only in favor of such accounts. Accounts in which forgiveness is crucially a decision or the making of a commitment presumably preserve the right kind of voluntary control. We would still need a further argument, like those given above, to push in the direction of performative accounts.

4.  Objections to Performative Accounts In 1965, R.S. Downie announced that “‘I forgive you’ is never a performative utterance” (1965: 131). Downie is not alone; performative accounts of forgiveness have come under heavy scrutiny. In conclusion, we’ll discuss a few of these objections. Before we do, though, we must talk about a worry that might have been bothering the reader since the outset. It is not so much an objection to performative accounts, but a way of thinking about the utterance “I forgive you” that does not require it to be an act of forgiveness. The basic idea is this. An utterance of “I forgive you” can indeed function as a speech act. It can have any or all the kinds of illocutionary force discussed earlier in the chapter. It can express one’s 265

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forgiving attitude, commit one to treat and regard the wrongdoing in certain ways, and it can cancel a moral debt, or function as an exercise of a normative power that alters the normative situation between victim and wrongdoer. All this can be true, and yet, one could deny that “I forgive you” is an explicit performative utterance. That is, one could consistently deny that by saying “I forgive you” one thereby forgives, even though “I forgive you” could function as an illocutionary act. There are hints of this sort of response in Novitz’s 1998 paper,28 but it is most clearly articulated in a 2017 paper by David McNaughton and Eve Garrard. They write: We accept that ‘I forgive you’ has declarative force: to say it is often to change the norms of interaction … What we reject is the claim that saying ‘I forgive you’ is itself an explicit performative act, in the way that, for example, saying ‘I promise’ is, under suitable circumstances, to promise. To say ‘I forgive’ is not to forgive, on our view. (2017: 101, italics original)29 How are we to adjudicate this dispute? I am not sure. One strategy is to advert to ordinary language. Do competent speakers of English (or whatever language) call utterances of “I forgive you” an act of forgiveness? William Neblett, anticipating the Novitz/McNaughton/Garrard move, suggests the following: Of course, some philosophers might protest here saying, ‘I do not wish to disallow that sort of behaviour, I merely refuse to allow it to be labelled ‘forgiveness’. But everyone else calls it by that name, and that is how (labelling) words get their meaning. (1974: 272) Perhaps Neblett is correct. But it must be noted that his conclusion relies on two crucial assumptions: that people generally call such utterance forgiveness and that this fact would be evidence that “I forgive you” is in fact an instance of forgiveness. Another strategy puts these critics on the defensive. The critics in question are prepared to grant that “I forgive you” can function as a speech act in all the ways detailed in Section 2. They just deny that the utterance is an act of forgiveness. Why? What is the rationale for denying that “I forgive you” is sometimes an explicit performative? Let’s now turn to some objections that might shed light on this denial. Naturally, not every performative theorist will answer these objections in the same way. Where possible, I’ll try to stay neutral and explain what I think a performative theorist in general might say in response.

4.1  Objection #1 Perhaps the most common objection to performative accounts is that one cannot forgive by saying “I forgive you” if one’s heart is not in the right place. This objection has been articulated in different ways. Here’s how H.J.N. Horsbrugh put it: I am not even prepared to concede that ‘I forgive you’ is sometimes used performatively since the uttering of these words never itself constitutes forgiveness. If they are accompanied by a decision to forgive and by a spontaneous reversal of feeling such as often disposes of a quarrel between old friends I should agree that someone has been forgiven. But this would be true even if the words remained unuttered. (1974: 270, fn. 3) 266

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Here are David McNaughton and Eve Garrard: Suppose that, although V [the victim] has accepted W’s [the wrongdoer] apology and has told W that he or she forgives him or her, he or she still resents his or her behavior and gets in some low digs or makes snide remarks. W could reasonably say to V: ‘You haven’t really forgiven me, have you?’ To which V might reply: ‘No, I’m afraid that I haven’t. I thought I had. I have tried.’ (2017: 102) At the heart of these objections is the thought that “I forgive you” doesn’t accomplish forgiveness because one can utter this sentence and yet still feel resentment (or some other relevant negative attitudes) toward the wrongdoer. And since one still feels resentment, one hasn’t forgiven. ­Obviously, the assumption behind this objection is that overcoming resentment (or something similar) is a necessary condition on forgiving. This is supposed to explain why one can say “I forgive you” but fail to forgive. But why must the performative theorist accept that assumption? Just like there can be private blame and public blame, why can’t there be private forgiveness and public forgiveness?30 A slightly different way to frame the objection, following Downie, is to say that if one has forgiven, and then at a later time experiences resentment or overtly blames the wrongdoer, then this shows that one had not actually forgiven in the first place.31 But the performative theorist can argue that these attitudes and actions do not necessarily show that one has not forgiven. Rather they show that one is not living up to the norms of one’s forgiveness.32 Consider this scenario from Neblett: Consider… two friends, Mary and John: At some time in the past John had offended Mary (unjustifiably), and afterward Mary had said to John, ‘Never mind, I forgive you’. Later John finds himself in a difficult situation and turns to Mary for help, but Mary still harbouring illwill over the earlier offense responds, ‘Why should I help you after what you did to me?’ John then reminds her, ‘But you already forgave me for that’, and Mary admits, ‘Yes, of course, you’re right’, and proceeds to help him out. Both Mary and John would be agreeing, so it seems, that Mary had forgiven John (no matter that she still felt ill-will towards him), and that her forgiveness forbade her use of the earlier incident ‘against him’. (1974: 269) John has a point, one that we can perfectly well imagine Mary granting. If that’s correct, then overcoming resentment is not a necessary condition on forgiveness in the way these philosophers imagine. Nor does post-forgiveness blame or resentment show that one hadn’t forgiven after all.33 The right response to both these cases, I think, is to allow a reasonable pluralism about what it is to forgive: one can forgive privately of course, but there is also a distinctive way of forgiving that is public and performative. All this said, the performative theorist does owe us a story about the relationship between one’s mental states and one’s performative act of forgiving. When does an utterance of “I f­ orgive you” count as a performance of forgiveness? If, in your sleep, you say, “Robbie, I forgive you,’ have you thereby forgiven him? It would seem not. A defender of performative accounts will not claim then that the mere locutionary act of saying the words accomplishes forgiveness. What more is needed? Perhaps the most natural response is to say, with Pettigrove, that “under ordinary circumstances, when A sincerely says, ‘I forgive you’, to B, she is forgiving him” (2012: 1, emphasis added). Naturally, we will want to know what it takes to say those words sincerely. Does 267

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sincerity require, say, having overcome resentment? One might argue that saying “I forgive you” implies that one has a forgiving, non-retributive attitude, and so if one implies that one has such an attitude but doesn’t, then this would perhaps not be a sincere utterance. Or instead one might argue that sincerity requires no such thing. Dzur and Wertheimer provide one such way of seeing things: It may be thought that to say, “I forgive you” without experiencing the relevant emotions is empty. But that is false. The request for and granting of forgiveness has behavioral consequences. If V says “I forgive you,” V cannot continue to express a desire to see O suffer, or demand additional apologies. If O says, “Please forgive me,” O cannot later say, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” As a psychological matter, V may express forgiveness even when he has not (yet) forgiven in his heart precisely because V wishes to bar himself from treating O in certain ways even though (or maybe precisely because) he does not (yet) have the requisite feelings. On this view, the expression of forgiveness may be a form of “Ulysses” contract. 34 V thinks that he “should” forgive O, and so V says that he does. The action itself helps V to let go by committing himself to certain future actions. The relevant feelings do not precede the performative actions. Rather, the performative actions serve to generate the relevant feelings. (Dzur and Wertheimer 2002: 12) On this view, “I forgive you” need not be accompanied by “forgiving feelings,” whatever those might be, to effect forgiveness. One could sincerely engage in this kind of “Ulysses”-style performative forgiveness that changes the normative relations and motivates one to work on one’s emotions without any hint of insincerity. Perhaps, though, we can approach the issue of sincerity differently. To do so, we can return to a feature of Haber’s Austinian account that I passed over previously. In Austin’s discussion of performatives, he is clear that merely saying “I pronounce you husband and wife” or “I promise you” is not sufficient to perform the specified action. Performative utterances must meet several “felicity conditions.”35 For example, Austin says for a locution to count as a performative, there must be a conventional procedure having a certain procedural effect, and the persons and situation must be appropriate given that convention. When one of these conditions is not met, we say that the utterance “misfired.” In these cases of misfire, even though I say the “right words” I do not actually do the thing I say I’m doing. For example, if I say to you and your kitchen table, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” I have not done so because there is no convention whereby one can marry a table. Similarly, in the case of forgiveness, were I to tell you I forgive you for what you did to your spouse, I have arguably not done so because the persons and circumstances are not appropriate (I lack standing to forgive strangers who do things to others). But other felicity conditions are such that their violation does not mean that one does not perform the relevant action. It rather means that one’s performance of that action is hollow or empty. Austin calls these “abuses.” For instance, Austin writes that “If you use one of the formulae when you do not have the requisite thoughts or feelings or intentions then there is an abuse of the procedure, there is insincerity” (Austin 1979: 239). Perhaps, then, saying “I forgive you” without certain relevant feelings or intentions is an abuse of the practice of forgiveness, but it doesn’t mean that one has thereby not forgiven. However, this sidesteps the issue of what feelings and intentions are relevant to avoid abuse.36 But that is a discussion for another time. The present point is simply to show that saying “I forgive you” without the relevant feelings and intentions need not entail that one has not forgiven.

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4.2  Objection #2 In Section 3, we discussed some linguistic arguments in favor of performative accounts. But some have also raised linguistic arguments against performative accounts. H.J.N. Horsbrugh objects: The phrase ‘I’ll try to forgive you’ is enough in itself to show that ‘to forgive’ is not a performative, for one cannot use the verb ‘to try’ in connection with any performative expression. (1974: 270) As Haber points out, the objection here seems to be that one cannot use “try” before a performative because if you can utter “I’ll try to forgive you,” then you can surely utter “I forgive you.” And since, according to performative theories, to do the latter is to forgive, then there is no sense in saying you are trying to forgive! Is this alone enough to show that “I forgive you” is not a performative? The performative theorist has a few things to say here. First, Haber responds to this objection by saying that while an utterance of “I forgive you” is within the direct control of the agent, a sincere utterance of “I forgive you” may not be within one’s direct control. Haber draws a comparison with “I applaud you” or “I congratulate you,” both examples of performatives according to Austin.37 You have a huge argument with your spouse before you go to an event where she will receive an award and you are to give a congratulatory speech. You say on the ride over, “Look I’m pissed right now, but I’ll try to congratulate you.” Similarly, “I apologize” is a performative. But there is no problem in telling someone “I’ll try to apologize” because, while you want to apologize, you aren’t ready or able to say, “I apologize” sincerely. A second response to this objection says that when one says “I’ll try to forgive you,” what one sometimes means is not that I will try to sincerely utter “I forgive you,” but rather that I will try to privately forgive you. The night before you leave town for a long trip, your spouse says some mean things. At the airport, she asks, “Please forgive me?” You say, “I’ll try to forgive you. Love you and talk soon.” Whatever you are communicating here, I can’t see how that would be decisive evidence that “I forgive you” cannot function as a performative.

4.3  Objection #3 Finally, some have sought to use Austin’s own discussion of performatives as ammunition against the claim that “I forgive you” can so function. Here again are McNaughton and Garrard: Though some explicit performative acts can be sincere or insincere, they are not truth-apt.38 But it looks as if the statement ‘I forgive you’ can be true or false. I can straightforwardly lie about having forgiven. The person I am addressing, or a bystander, observing my ill-disguised resentment, can say ‘I don’t think you do.’ The same response to an act of promising misfires. If I promise to get the groceries today, it would be absurd for someone to say, on the basis of my past behavior, or shifty look: ‘I don’t think you do.’ If I promise, I promise, however insincerely. (2017: 102) We must be clear about the nature of the objection. Are McNaughton and Garrard simply claiming that one could say “I forgive you” and yet fail to forgive? If so, then this is no problem for the performative theorist: as we have seen, utterances can misfire. If I say “I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife,” but I am already married to someone else, then it is false that I have now taken this person to be my wife. If I say “I forgive you” to a tree, it is false that I have forgiven anyone or

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anything. If this is the extent of the complaint, the performative theorist is unmoved. McNaughton and Garrard are correct that Austin held that, strictly speaking, performatives cannot be true or false.39 But it is no part of the theory of performatives that whenever one utters “I hereby cancel your debt” that it is therefore true that a debt has been canceled. So there is no problem with someone uttering a performative formula and then expressing doubt that one has actually done as one said. Now perhaps they have something else in mind: namely, that one can say “I forgive you” and misrepresent oneself if one is still, say, harboring resentment. Even if performatives themselves are not truth-apt, they can imply things that are truth-apt. Haber is clear here: “to say that performative utterances are neither true nor false is not to deny that they imply statements that are true or false” (1991: 42, italics original). So perhaps McNaughton and Garrard are thinking that one can say “I forgive you” and mislead someone about one’s mental states. Well of course this can happen. Performatives can be abused. If I say “I congratulate you on your promotion,” I imply that this person has done something meriting praise, etc. (Haber 1991: 43). I might say “I applaud you” or “I welcome you” but you might not buy it. You might say “Okay sure you said the words, but you’re just going through the motions. I don’t think you really mean it.” But this would not mean that “I applaud you” and “I welcome you” are not performatives. “I forgive you” can imply something false, but this is true of performatives in general. Perhaps, though, what they are really suggesting is that if I say “I forgive you” and I am still harboring resentment, then because of that my performative utterance has misfired. But why should the performative theorist accept this? If there is a form of forgiveness that is performative, that, say, alters the norms of interaction between victim and wrongdoer and commits one to treat and regard the wrongdoer in certain ways, then it is no objection to say that one still felt resentment when saying “I forgive you.” At any rate, it’s not true that because one can doubt that “I forgive you” sometimes effects forgiveness, or because “I forgive you” can sometimes imply something false, this means that forgiveness cannot be a performative.

5. Conclusion Philosophers who defend performative accounts of forgiveness are likely to think that forgiveness is complicated—that it does not admit of simple analysis. Not only is forgiveness a diverse private phenomenon, but it can also be publicly performed. And further, there is no single thing that is performative forgiveness. Some philosophers will balk as this pluralism. But in my view, theorists about forgiveness should embrace these complexities. Sure, forgiveness is complicated, but “life and truth and things do tend to be complicated.”

Notes 1 Austin (1979: 245). 2 See Pettigrove (2012: 1). There is another “non-performative” way of understanding what one does when one says “I forgive you,” which we will discuss later. 3 Neblett (1974: 273); Swinburne (1989: 85). 4 See, e.g., Adams (1991), among others discussed in the next section. 5 P.E. Digeser (2001: 28) claims that performative forgiveness is the only way that one can enact political forgiveness (more on this in a bit). Digeser says that interpersonal forgiveness, however, can be private. 6 Neblett is responding in part to an earlier paper by R.S. Downie (1965), who gives an argument against performative accounts that I’ll briefly mention in Section 4. 7 “It is a mistake to imagine that there is some specific and definable activity, which activity and no other constitutes forgiveness” (1974: 269). 8 Shortly thereafter, Neblett adds, “When someone says, ‘I forgive you’, he may intend to convey, among other things, that he does not intend to exact punishment, that he wishes to ‘show mercy’” (1974: 272). 9 1989: 85.

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Performative Accounts of Forgiveness 10 “Performative Utterances.” Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Encyclopedia.com. 10 Jul. 2020. 11 He allows that “I forgive you” can sometimes merely report one’s attitudes instead of expressing them (1991: 30). 12 (1991: 40). 13 In claiming that ‘I forgive you’ is a performative utterance, I am not implying that the only way to forgive an individual is to utter the verbal formula…one could forgive another by having the requisite attitude, independent of any verbal expression. (1991: 41) 14 Austin (1977: 13) cited in Haber (1991: 40). 15 I confess I am unclear exactly how these two features of political forgiveness are related. There are a few different ways to read this claim, but I will pass over this issue. 16 (2012: 9). 17 (2012: 15). 18 (2012: 17). 19 (2012: 18). 20 See also Adams (1991) and Warmke and McKenna (2013) on this point. 21 See also, for example, Adams (1991) and Balazs (2000). 22 Austin is clear, however, that performatives need not be so constructed. 23 My suspicion is that it’s related to P.F. Strawson’s observation in 1962 that forgiveness was “a rather ­u nfashionable subject in moral philosophy” (1962[2003]: 76). 24 Digeser (2001: 20ff.). 25 For the full argument see Warmke (2016b). 26 As opposed to oughts of “axiological ideality”—oughts having to do with how we think something about the world “should” be. See Pereboom (2014). 27 For the full argument see Warmke (2015). 28 See Novitz (1998: 301–2). Novitz agrees that “I forgive you” can alter the operative norms between ­v ictim and wrongdoer. What Novitz denies is that it can function as a performative utterance that “constitutes and exhaust[s]” the act of forgiving. If by “exhausts,” Novitz means that all instances of forgiveness are performative utterances, then this is correct, and in my estimation most defenders of performative accounts will agree. As we have noted, there do not seem to be any theorists who claim that forgiveness can only be accomplished by a performative utterance. But Novitz also denies that the performative utterance can constitute forgiveness. His reason appears to be: forgiveness requires relinquishing hard feelings, and the performative utterance itself cannot do that. More on this in a bit. 29 Compare Holmgren: “If we have forgiven the offender, and it would be beneficial to tell him so, then the speech act will be appropriate” (2012: 44). She continues: Given that we must know whether an attitude of forgiveness or an attitude of resentment is morally appropriate in order to determine whether a speech act of forgiveness is appropriate, there is good reason to define forgiveness as an attitude here. (2012: 45) 30 Warmke and McKenna (2013). 31 See Downie (1965: 131). McNaughton and Garrard frame an objection in this way, too (2017: 102). 32 See also Balazs (2000: 107) for a response to Downie of this sort. For another response to Downie, see Haber (1991: 56). 33 In fact, the same objection can be turned back around on emotion theorists: suppose you “forgive” someone by overcoming resentment and then the resentment returns a week, a month, a year later. Does this show one never forgave? If this objection is problem for performance theorist, it is no less a problem for the emotion theorists who raise the objection. 34 My own note: In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses (Odysseus in the Greek), wanting to hear the Sirens’ song, but knowing that if he does he will jump into the sea and die, has himself tied to the mast of his ship. 35 (1975: 16). 36 For Haber’s own explanation see (1991: 41ff ). 37 (1991: 56). 38 Here is their endnote at this juncture, which, it seems to me, provides the resources for a rebuttal: This has, we believe, been denied. But we take it to be fairly uncontentious nonetheless. Of course, once Christopher Robin has named his inverted umbrella The Floating Bear, it is true that this is its name. And when people make performative utterances they often imply that certain things are

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Brandon Warmke the case, but they do not, in making the utterance, assert that they are so. So performatives can be ­m isleading, and deceitful, but so can many forms of communication that are not truth-apt. Iago misleads and deceives Othello by dropping Desdemona’s handkerchief, but he says nothing that could be true or false. People frequently say that Kant held that ‘lying’ promises are absolutely forbidden, but that is not the most apposite way of describing the position. It is insincere promises that he forbids. 39 Searle (1989) rejected this Austinian claim about performatives, arguing they too can be true or false. In fact, this Austinian claim is according to Hornsby, “denied by almost everyone nowadays” (2006: 904). For more on this issue, see Tsohatzidis (2017).

References Adams, Marilyn McCord. 1991. “Forgiveness: A Christian Model,” Faith and Philosophy, 8(3): 277–304. Austin, J.L.1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press ———. 1977. “Performative-Constantive,” in J.R. Searle (ed.) The Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. ———. 1979. “Performative Utterances,” in J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (eds.) Philosophical Papers, 3rd ­edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Balazs, Zoltan. 2000. “Forgiveness and Repentance,” Public Affairs Quarterly 14(2): 105–27. Bennett, Christopher. 2018. “The Alteration Thesis: Forgiveness as a Normative Power,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 46(2): 207–33. Digeser, P.E. 2001. Political Forgiveness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Downie, R.S. 1965. “Forgiveness,” The Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–34. Dzur, Albert W. and Alan Wertheimer. 2002. “Forgiveness and Public Deliberation: The Practice of ­Restorative Justice,” Criminal Justice Ethics 21(1): 3–20. Haber, Joram Graf. 1991. Forgiveness. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Holmgren, Margaret. 2012. Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hornsby, Jennifer. 2006. “Speech Acts and Performatives,” in Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 893–909. Horsbrugh, H.J.N. 1974. “Forgiveness,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4(2): 269–82. McNaughton, David and Eve Garrard. 2017. “Once More with Feeling: Defending the Goodwill Account of Forgiveness,” in Kathryn J. Norlock (ed.) The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neblett, William. 1974. “Forgiveness and Ideals,” Mind 83(330): 269–75. Nelkin, Dana. 2013. “Freedom and Forgiveness,” in Ishtiyaque Haji and Justin Caouette (eds.) Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Norlock, Kathryn. 2008. Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective. Lanham: Lexington Books. Novitz, David. 1998. “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 299–315. Pettigrove, Glen. 2004. “The Forgiveness We Speak: The Illocutionary Force of Forgiving,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 42(3): 371–92. ———. 2012. Forgiveness and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pereboom, Derk. 2014. Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, John. 1989. “How Performatives Work,” Linguistics and Philosophy 12(5): 535–58. Strawson, P.F. 1962 (2003). “Freedom and Resentment,” in Gary Watson (ed.) Free Will, 2nd edition. ­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 72–93. Swinburne, Richard. 1989. Responsibility and Atonement. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. “Forgiving as a Performative Utterance,” in Brandon Warmke, Dana Nelkin, and Michael ­McKenna (eds.) Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Tsohatzidis, Savas L. 2017. “Performativity and the ‘True/False Fetish’,” in Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.) ­Interpreting J.L. Austin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 96–118. Warmke, Brandon. 2015. “Articulate Forgiveness and Normative Constraints,” Canadian Journal of ­Philosophy 45(4): 490–514. ———. 2016a. “The Economic Model of Forgiveness,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97(4): 570–89. ———. 2016b. “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94(4): 687–703. Warmke, Brandon and Michael McKenna. 2013. “Moral Responsibility, Forgiveness, and Conversation,” in Ishtiyaque Haji and Justin Caouette (eds) Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.

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20 NORMATIVE POWER ACCOUNTS OF FORGIVENESS Christopher Bennett

1.  Philosophy and Forgiveness Let us start with real life, before we get to philosophical theory. Examples of forgiveness are ­varied. A person might forgive their friend for forgetting their birthday; or someone might forgive their partner for infidelity; or a survivor might forgive a terrorist for attempting to kill them, or for murdering their father; or one might forgive one’s dead parents for one’s abusive childhood; or, in the Abrahamic tradition, God might forgive human beings for their sins. Instances of forgiveness vary in their significance and in the gravity of what is being forgiven. Broadly speaking, forgiveness concerns wrongs, grievances, and offences: acts to which the person affected might have a non-trivial objection. And the orientation of forgiveness is not simply to decline to press or aggravate that objection or to withhold or mitigate it, but to bracket it from the point of view of future relations and, at least provisionally, consign it to the past. Once forgiveness has been given, the parties to a relationship can expect the tenor of the relationship to change and to no longer be conditioned by the wrongdoing (Garrard and MacNaughton 2003). For this reason, as Lucy Allais has noted, the metaphor of wiping the slate clean seems to capture the heart of what goes on in forgiveness (Allais 2008). A philosophical theory of forgiveness can be thought of as attempting to increase our self-­ understanding by providing an interpretation of the place of forgiveness in our actual lives, an interpretation that illuminates the nature of forgiveness, explains what is common in varied instances of forgiveness, explains how it differs from related phenomena, and gives us a better understanding of its value (or lack of it). This last point is important. As with literary interpretation, philosophical or conceptual interpretation aims both to fit the “text” and to explain it in a way that reveals whatever of value there might be in it (Dworkin 2011). In other words, a philosophical account of forgiveness has to be true to the phenomenon being interpreted – that is, the way we talk and act in regard to forgiveness and the place it seems to have in our lives – while at the same time explaining why (or to what extent) it might be reasonable to give it the importance we do. It is compatible with this kind of philosophical project that the phenomenon being interpreted is revealed to be so flawed or incoherent, or to rest on such problematic assumptions, that we are wrong in giving it the importance we do. However, because forgiveness is central to our dealings with one another, it has earned a prima facie plausibility; we would only be required to adopt such a subversive interpretation if the possibilities of finding a vindicating interpretation had been exhausted. Let us say that talk of forgiveness comes up, very broadly speaking, in cases in which one person, A, has done something to another person, P, or another group of people, PQR, that might be DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-26

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objected to in some way; on the basis of which negative reactions and demands might be expected from P, or PQR, or some other concerned parties, XYZ, towards A; and where P, or PQR, does not press the objection by expressing those reactions and demands but rather brackets them. The questions a philosophical theory of forgiveness would need to address in interpreting this phenomenon include: 1 Which among our responses to objectionable acts are those that we can properly call forgiveness? What goes on when one person forgives another? What are the characteristic features of forgiveness? What does a response to wrongdoing have to be like in order for it to be a case of forgiveness? 2 Who can forgive? Can XYZ forgive A for something done to P? Or is it only P who can forgive? 3 What good is forgiveness? Is forgiveness an important or praiseworthy reaction to objectionable acts, and if so why? Is it important in general terms, as a conceptual option that we would want to have available to us for use in various situations? And is it usually, or always, a good thing for P to forgive A in some particular situation – and if not always, when is it? In answering these questions, a philosophical theory will need to fit the “text,” where this refers to various familiar facts about forgiveness. These familiar facts may sound like platitudes, but we need a rough outline of the phenomenon we are trying to capture: the features without which we would not really be talking about forgiveness, but about something else. The reader should be warned, however, that any such list of these “familiar” facts is likely to be controversial, since selection of the facts that an account has to fit can have a significant bearing on the theory that results. Recognizing that it might be hard to give a non-partisan account of these initial facts, we can nevertheless give a tentative set of platitudes about forgiveness as follows: Forgiveness is distinct from the recognition that what appeared to be wrongdoing is in fact an action for which the agent has a valid justification (to the effect that the action was not in fact wrongful) or a valid excuse (to the effect that the agent was not responsible for it). If there were a valid justification or excuse then there would be nothing to be forgiven. Thus, forgiveness is only necessary where there is (perceived to be, by the forgiver) some responsible wrongdoing. b Forgiveness is also distinct from saying that the wrongdoing “doesn’t matter” (what Downie and Kolnai call condonation [Downie 1965; Kolnai 1973–74]). Forgiveness is compatible with taking the wrongdoing fully seriously, whatever such seriousness involves. It doesn’t, or doesn’t have to, involve downgrading the seriousness of the wrongdoing (Hieronymi 2001). c It sometimes matters to us very much to get the forgiveness of someone we have wronged. Apologizing is closely related to asking for forgiveness. It can also matter to us very much how to respond to a request for forgiveness. d The fact that we have to ask for forgiveness shows that at least sometimes we have no right to be forgiven, and that the forgiver has no duty to forgive. Asking for forgiveness is, or at least can be, like asking for a favour. Forgiveness in such cases calls for gratitude; it is not claimed as a right. Nevertheless, a wrongdoer can sometimes rightly complain that, given what they have done to make up for the wrong, the victim is unreasonable in withholding forgiveness. e The victim of the wrongdoing has a special place in relation to forgiveness. This need not be to say that only the victim can forgive, since whether this is true will depend on what forgiveness involves. But at any rate, it is at least sometimes appropriate for the victim to a

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say, “You have no right to forgive them for what they did to me,” meaning that it does not belong to those other parties to forgive such things, whereas the same charge could not be addressed by another party to the victim. Therefore, there is at least some sense in which the victim has a special role. At the same time, however, there is such a thing as forgiving oneself, where this does not imply that one was the victim of one’s own wrongdoing. It is possible to forgive someone inappropriately. That is, an act of forgiveness can be assessed in terms of the prudential, moral, or other reasons that speak in its favour or against it. However, even if inappropriate by such an assessment, forgiveness can still be valid: forgiveness may have still taken place. Furthermore, even if forgiveness can sometimes be inappropriate, being a forgiving person is a virtue. Even if we forgive inappropriately, there is some sense in which, having forgiven, the forgiver is “stuck” with what they have done. Forgiveness thus involves making some kind of commitment (Warmke 2016a). Furthermore, this seems to be a commitment regarding their treatment of the wrongdoer. When a wrongdoer has been told that they have been forgiven, but continues to be subjected to angry references to their wrongdoing, the wrongdoer may be entitled to protest that they are being treated unfairly, or (perhaps more likely) someone might make such a protest on their behalf. If forgiveness does involve making a commitment, however, it need not be taken to be absolute – for instance, if the wrongdoer continues to behave abusively the commitment might be voided. To forgive it is not sufficient simply to say the words, “I forgive you.” Forgiving seems in this way different from promising, since to make a promise it is sufficient to have communicated to someone that one intends to make a promise. Forgiveness, by contrast, seems to have something to do with changing one’s heart towards someone, and it is possible to say, “I thought I had forgiven him, but now I realize that I really hadn’t.” It is possible to forgive the dead, and others with whom one will never have interpersonal contact. Forgiveness is not only a theological concept, but it is a theological concept. Thus, it is possible, and indeed fairly common, to believe that forgiveness can be given by God as well as by individual humans. Indeed, it is possible to think that only God can truly forgive.

A philosophical theory tries to answer the questions we raised above, in a way that respects as far as possible platitudes such as a-j. In doing so, philosophical theory can appear to get intricate and technical. It can appeal to concepts that would be unfamiliar to non-philosophers who do, however, seem perfectly able to operate with the concept of forgiveness. Indeed, it might be that people lacking philosophical training find it very hard to fully grasp a philosophical theory of forgiveness, while still being perfectly proficient at forgiving. But this should not worry us: forgiving and theorizing philosophically about forgiveness are two quite different skills. If philosophy is successful, it illuminates the nature and value of forgiving, and gives us a better, more self-conscious, and more articulate grasp of its place in our lives. But one can forgive perfectly appropriately without having any knowledge of, or even interest in gaining, such an articulation.

2.  What Is the Normative Power Account? Enough about philosophical method. A normative power account is one that claims that the best interpretation of forgiveness – the one that best meets the dual aims of fitting the phenomenon and explaining whatever might be of value in it – explains forgiveness as a normative power. We will 275

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have more to say below about what a normative power is, but the basic idea is that “powers” in this sense are normative rights to change people’s rights and responsibilities, or their entitlements and obligations, through some specific, pre-determined, canonical procedure. Thus, these “powers” do not pertain to bringing about physical changes in the world, but rather involve an authority to make changes in the normative realm, where this realm is comprised of what we owe to one another as a matter of obligation and what, conversely, we can demand of others (or, perhaps, of what others can demand on our behalf ). The authority is exercised, and the changes brought about, by the performance of a somewhat ritualistic set of actions whose fittingness for that role is in some way pre-determined, and which are performed by the agent at least in part with the intention of bringing about those normative changes. Claudia Card gives a good initial summary of the view (see also Twambley 1976; Warmke 2016b): Evils change moral relationships among those who become perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, or victims. They create moral powers in survivors, obligations in perpetrators, beneficiaries, and bystanders, and new options for many. Like benefactors, who can call upon the gratitude or indebtedness of beneficiaries, victims have moral powers: to blame or resent, to forgive, and, if politically empowered, to punish or retaliate, exact reparations and apologies, and to pardon or show mercy. Like creditors and benefactors who can forgive or exact debts, voluntarily releasing others or holding them to obligation, victims have moral powers to r­ elease or hold perpetrators to obligation. Beneficiaries can do little to change their own ethical status in relation to benefactors. Regardless of whether they meet their obligations, they remain indebted unless benefactors release them. Similarly, perpetrators can do little to change their own ethical status in relation to victims but remain morally dependent on them (or their representatives) for release. Yet benefactors and victims can forfeit moral powers through misconduct. Just as unscrupulous or abusive benefactors can cease to deserve gratitude, thereby involuntarily releasing beneficiaries from obligation, unscrupulous or abusive victims can cease to deserve apologies or reparations, involuntarily releasing perpetrators from obligation. (Card 2002: 167–8)1 To summarize the ideas here, we can say that, on Card’s view, forgiveness requires wrongdoing, and specifically wrongdoing that has an identifiable victim; that wrongdoing changes relationships, and in particular moral relationships – that is, it changes the moral bond between one party and another, or what the parties owe to one another; that wrongdoing is a bit like incurring a debt, in that it creates obligations owed by the wrongdoer to that victim; that unlike financial or material debt, what the wrongdoer owes the victim is not money or goods but rather apology and reparation; that similarly to the way a creditor has the right or power to enforce the debt or to release the debtor from their obligations, wrongdoing gives the victim the right or power to forgive; and that forgiveness is therefore a power, held specifically by the victim of wrongdoing P, to release the wrongdoer A from the obligations that A owes to P. If this is the basic idea, we can now ask how the normative power account sketched by Card provides distinctive answers to the questions we outlined above. In answer to the first question, Card’s account says that forgiveness is distinctive among responses to wrongdoing because it involves voluntarily releasing a wrongdoer from obligations incurred by their wrongdoing. Wrongdoing “changes moral relationships” in the sense that it gives rise to new obligations on the part of the wrongdoer, owed to the victim (for instance, the obligation to apologize and make reparations), and new rights or powers on the part of the victim to demand that those obligations be honoured. Forgiveness comes about when the victim releases the wrongdoer from the obligation to apologize and make reparations that the wrongdoer owes the victim as a result of their wrongdoing. In response to the second question, Card’s account says that forgiveness is a power 276

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held distinctively by the victim of wrongdoing; it is a power that they have in relation to the wrongdoer; and they have the power because of their having been wronged. Forgiveness therefore is a power that has to be understood through the idea of a relationship. This relationship need not be a face-to-face relationship involving ongoing acquaintance and interaction, but is rather a normative relationship involving moral ties or bonds. Specifically, it is the relationship created by the wrongdoing whereby the wrongdoer incurs obligations owed specifically to the victim and the victim is invested with a corresponding power over the wrongdoer to demand the fulfilment of these obligations or to waive them. What Card’s account says in answer to the third question, about the value of forgiveness, is less clear at this stage. A standard answer, compatible with Card’s account but not made explicit in the passage above, is that forgiveness is good insofar as it tends towards the maintenance and robustness of valuable human relationships (Walker 2006). Forgiveness, as the normative power account sees it, which involves something like a gift from victim to wrongdoer, removing a normative obstacle to good relations and thus trying to reset relations between the parties, can be an important contribution to the restoration of valuable relationships, and may even be constitutive of such value. However, it is worth stressing that this does not make any particular act of forgiveness necessarily good. We can imagine situations in which forgiveness would merely reinforce a relation of servility (Murphy 1988). Connected to this would be the issue of whether a tendency to forgive should be seen as a virtue, and if it is, whether it would be virtuous to forgive indiscriminately or whether with forgiveness there is some kind of Aristotelian ‘golden mean,’ and if the latter what that would involve. Implicit in Card’s account is a further point: that part of the value of forgiveness is that it is tied up with a view according to which the obligations to victims that wrongdoers violate when they do wrong do not simply disappear but rather survive their own violation (Gardner 2011). These violated obligations provide the basis for a wrongdoer’s obligations to apologize and make reparations. It is also part of the moral vision underpinning the normative power account, on Card’s suggestive reading, that the victim is not simply downtrodden and subjugated but is rather the one who ends up with authority over the wrongdoer: not only is the victim the one to whom reparative obligations are owed, but they get to decide whether or not to hold the wrongdoer to these obligations.

3.  Assessing the Normative Power Account Now let us consider how well the normative power account fits with our proposed platitudes a-j. Recall that fitting with these platitudes, and explaining how the features mentioned in the platitudes hang together coherently, is a key aim of interpretive philosophical theory. We can now see that the normative power account fits well across many of the platitudes we enumerated. First of all, the normative power account gives a clear explanation of how forgiveness is distinct from justification and excuse. According to the normative power account, forgiving involves altering in some way the obligations that have been incurred by the wrongdoer in virtue of their wrongdoing; whereas if we say that something is justified or excused then we are saying, in one way or another, that no wrong was done, and hence that none of those obligations were incurred. (Whether the normative power account explains forgiveness as being necessarily distinct from condonation is a question to which we will return.) Furthermore, the normative power account explains why it can matter to us very much to get the forgiveness of someone we have wronged. According to the normative power account, forgiveness matters because wrongdoing incurs obligations that condition one’s relations to another person, and someone who cares about having right relations will feel the discomfort of unmet obligations until such time as these are fulfilled – by their making sufficient apology and reparation – or waived through forgiveness. 277

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The normative power account also explains why the victim of the wrongdoing has a special place in relation to forgiveness. As the person to whom the obligations of apology and reparation are owed, it belongs to the victim to decide whether to stand on those obligations and demand their fulfilment, or whether to release the wrongdoer from those obligations. Because the normative power account explains this, it can also explain why it does not normally belong to any party other than the victim to release the wrongdoer from these obligations, and hence why it can be appropriate to say “You have no right to forgive them for what they did to me.” The normative power account also thus explains why forgiveness can be like a gift, or a favour, something to which the prospective forgivee has no right, but which can be bestowed on him through a voluntary act of the victim. Furthermore, the normative power account can explain how it is possible to forgive someone inappropriately. This is possible, on this account, in just the same way that it can be inappropriate, or inadvisable, to release someone from a debt: it can be a sign of weakness, or imprudence, or blindness. However, it can also explain why forgiveness can be appropriate: when forgiveness is a sign of generosity, of solidarity, of hopefulness. In one who knows how to forgive well – to forgive the right people, at the right time, in the right manner, etc. – a tendency to forgive will indeed be a virtue. Furthermore, the normative power account is quite compatible with the view that there is a God and that God forgives us: what this would involve is the idea that God holds a normative power of forgiveness. To extend the story, we might say that he holds this power because there is a sense in which he is our victim when we sin, since the wrongs we do are, in part at least, wrongs against him, and against the order that he has created, and that we therefore incur obligations owed to him each time we sin. God has the power, however, to release us from these obligations, though only if, perhaps because of his loving nature, he so chooses. If he does choose to release us from these obligations then, the normative power account says, he has thereby forgiven us, and this can be a ground of gratitude on our part. These platitudes are accounted for well by the normative power account, and this already puts it in a strong position as a philosophical theory. However, there are a number of platitudes that we have not yet discussed. These are: that forgiveness is different from condonation (or simply saying that wrongdoing “doesn’t matter”); that forgiveness involves making some kind of commitment (perhaps a commitment to the wrongdoer); that we can forgive the dead or those who we have no contact with; and that forgiveness is not simply given by saying that it is given. Can the normative power account explain these platitudes? It might seem not. For it might seem as though waiving a debt is precisely to make it the case that the debt does not matter, since it involves treating it as something that no longer needs to be paid, and thus that by analogy the normative power account would say that forgiveness involves saying that it no longer matters that the obligations are fulfilled; that on the normative power account forgiving involves releasing the wrongdoer from obligations but not making any commitments oneself; that to forgive debts one has to communicate that to the person concerned, and thus has to have some contact with them, as one cannot with the dead; and that if forgiveness is like waiving a debt then it should be done just by saying that it is done. However, at least two of these problems are not so serious, and can be dealt with by introducing some complexities to the basic account given by Card. In order to deal with the problem of condonation, we can point out, first of all, that forgiveness differs from condoning because it insists that there is something to be forgiven (Garrard and MacNaughton 2003). But furthermore, a normative power account of forgiveness can also respond to the intuition that one person’s will should not be able to make it all right that the wrongdoer did what they did. It can do this by specifying, for instance, that wrongdoing does not only incur obligations that are owed to the victim and which the victim can waive. It also incurs obligations that are not owed to anyone in particular, but which the wrongdoer must discharge if they are to redeem themselves for what they have done (Bennett 2018). This matter of redemption is not just a matter of what the 278

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wrongdoer owes to themselves, or to God or the moral community. It isn’t owed to anyone; it is just what the wrongdoer must do. If the waiving of these non-directed obligations is not in the gift of the victim then the normative power of forgiveness cannot make it “all right”: regardless of the victim’s forgiveness, wrongdoing has normative consequences since it incurs some obligations that the victim cannot cancel. Now, we might say that if the wrongdoer does discharge these redemptive obligations then they have earned a kind of forgiveness: for instance, they would then be in a position in which they could rightly forgive themselves. But this type of forgiveness – call it redemptive forgiveness (Bennett 2018) – would be quite different from that envisaged by Card. Rather than actively releasing the wrongdoer from obligations incurred by wrongdoing, it would rather acknowledge or recognize that those obligations had been fulfilled. As such, redemptive forgiveness would not be the sole preserve of the victim; such acknowledgement could rather be given by any competent member of the moral community (acting, as it were, not in their own person but as a representative of the moral community). The normative power account might also extend Card’s remarks to include the idea that forgiveness involves making a commitment of some sort. The content of this commitment might be, for instance, that the forgiver not continue to treat the offender as though those obligations were still outstanding. Forgiveness might also be taken to involve an undertaking to work towards a state of no longer having feelings towards the wrongdoer that would be appropriate only towards one who still stood under those obligations (Bennett 2018). In other words, forgiving would involve not only waiving the wrongdoer’s obligations to apologize and make reparations but also undertaking an obligation to the wrongdoer to leave those obligations to apologize and repair (and associated emotional attitudes) in the past. If such a commitment is usually part of forgiving then it might be said that it will just as much be part of redemptive forgiveness as it is of Card’s victim’s rights-waiving forgiveness. In other words, if P forgives A in virtue of the fact that A has earned forgiveness by discharging their redemptive obligations then P does not simply acknowledge the wrongdoer’s redeemed state but also undertakes an obligation, owed to A, no longer to treat them as one who stands under the said obligations (Bennett 2018).

4.  How Does the Normative Power Account Compare to Alternatives? What of the final platitudes, that it is possible to forgive the dead, etc.; and that saying one has forgiven is not sufficient for actually forgiving? These platitudes might seem problematic for the normative power account since the model we have used thus far, the waiving of a debt, is precisely an action in which saying that one is making the relevant normative change is necessary and (broadly) sufficient for making it. In other words, it might be said that one cannot exercise the power without communicating to the debtor one’s intention thereby to waive the debt; and that, other things being equal, the communication of such an intention is enough for the power to be exercised. The same goes for other acts that have been claimed to be normative powers, such as promising, giving, and ordering (Raz 1975; Owens 2012). If Card and others claim that forgiveness is like a normative power then it is natural to assume that they mean that the communication of a decision to forgive is necessary, and at least often sufficient, to bring about the relevant normative change. This seems to rule out exercising the power in relation to someone who is beyond communication, such as a dead person; and it seems to rule out that one might say one had forgiven but fail to have done so. Furthermore, this, it might be argued, reveals the Achilles heel of the normative power account. For what this problem shows, it might be claimed, is that the normative power account neglects the emotional side of forgiveness. What makes it possible to forgive the dead is that forgiveness operates at a deeper psychological level than that of communicated decision: it requires 279

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more profound psychological changes. The same fact explains why it is possible to say that one has forgiven and then realize that one had not. Forgiveness, it might be said, is thus a matter of altering deep emotion, whereas the normative power account goes wrong by making it a matter of altering obligations. If one is swayed by this line of criticism, one might think that the key metaphor of wiping the slate clean should be understood not as a matter of clearing away obligations owed by the wrongdoer to the victim but rather as a matter of removing a psychological barrier to the relationship by adopting a new attitude towards the wrongdoer (Hampton 1988) or of changing one’s heart (Calhoun 1992). Since one’s heart may be less than transparent, even (or perhaps especially) to oneself, this change of heart view explains straightforwardly how it can be that one might be mistaken about whether one has forgiven, and why saying that one has forgiven does not mean that one has forgiven. This would be similar to the fact that saying that one loves someone – even sincerely – does not make it the case that one does love them and is not an infallible sign of love. It would also explain straightforwardly how it is possible to forgive the dead, given that one can express one’s attitudes towards the dead. Furthermore, the idea that forgiveness involves changing one’s heart can explain that forgiveness is different from justification and excuse because it is a response to responsible wrongdoing. It can explain that such changes of heart are sometimes brought about inappropriately, in ways that involve insufficient self-respect, but it can also explain how a tendency to change one’s heart may refuse to compromise with wrongdoing (Hieronymi 2001). It can explain why forgiveness can be a virtue. Nevertheless, the idea that forgiveness involves changing one’s heart fails to capture a number of platitudes that we listed earlier in the chapter. For instance, it is not clear that it gives a good explanation of why we find it important to be forgiven. For although it can be natural to want to know that those whom one has hurt do not continue to have a grievance against one, this is far more likely to apply to those with whom one will continue to have dealings or whose good opinion we particularly desire. Yet it seems perfectly possible that I might still wish I could be forgiven by a person I wronged many years ago and whom I never expect to see again. I continue to be troubled by the lack of forgiveness, not because I want them to have a good opinion of me but because, as the normative power account predicts, I am aware that there is an unmet obligation, a normative bond that links me to that person, and that troubles me with the claim that has gone unsatisfied. Or consider the case of someone who asks for forgiveness before they die. It need not be that this person continues to crave the good opinion of the one they wronged, but rather they want their relationship with the one they wronged to be set right. The change of heart account also has trouble explaining the sense in which forgiving involves undertaking a commitment, since simply changing one’s heart is not normally sufficient for the creation of such a commitment. And the change of heart view also fails to explain why it should be that the victim has a special place in forgiveness: given that anyone who has been made angry by what the wrongdoer did can change their heart towards him, why should the victim’s change of heart be special? We can no doubt imagine cases in which a particular wrongdoer cares much more for the opinion of a third party than they do for a victim, in which case it would seem that, for that particular wrongdoer, this third party’s forgiveness would have a special place. Thus, the change of heart view struggles to give a straightforward explanation of some of the key platitudes of our common practice of forgiving. For that reason, it might be better to look more closely at the normative power account to see whether, on reflection, it can in fact accommodate the platitudes that above appeared to be problematic (Bennett 2018). First of all, we might point out that it is in fact often the case that to say that one has forgiven is sufficient for forgiveness. For instance, in cases of minor wrongdoing, the victim can waive the wrongdoer’s obligation simply by saying so, and thus has incurred a commitment to keep it waived regardless of the feelings they may have been expressing at the 280

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time. Perhaps no forgiveness would come about in a case where the would-be forgiver says that they are forgiving but in a way that expresses hatred. But an expression of positive emotion is often not required. Thus, the platitude that announcing forgiveness is not sufficient for genuine forgiveness may in fact only be valid in certain, particularly serious cases. These might be cases of wrongdoing involving particularly deep emotional wounding, for instance. We might acknowledge that forgiveness has not been given in such cases if one forgives while in shock, unthinkingly, etc. To accommodate such cases, the normative power account can claim that what it takes to exercise the normative power can vary with the gravity of the wrong, and that for particularly serious wrongs it requires the appropriate degree of mental clarity and a sufficiently settled emotional state. ­Furthermore, this would not be peculiar to forgiveness: other normative powers can vary similarly with the gravity of the situation. In order to exercise them one needs to show an awareness of the gravity of the normative changes being made (Bennett 2022). Take, for instance, a vow, which is valid only if undertaken solemnly. One of the ways in which vows and oaths differ from promises is that they are appropriate only for weighty matters such as the assumption of a significant responsibility. The solemnity is not simply a sign of assurance that the vow will be taken seriously by the person making it; the person simply has not succeeded in undertaking the vow unless they do it solemnly. Second, we can question whether, in order to exercise a normative power, it is always necessary to communicate the intention to exercise it to the person whose obligations are being affected. Whether this is so may depend on the nature of the particular power in question; it would be wise not to generalize from a few cases such as ordering or promising. In particular, we need not model our understanding of normative powers too closely on legal powers. For rule of law reasons, legal powers may well need to be exercised publicly and transparently. However, there is no reason why the exercise of normative powers could not be more complex and subtle. Depending on the power in question, their exercise may not need to prioritize always making the normative situation transparent in the way that we might need in the legal case. The scope, limits, and exercise of normative powers depend, we might speculate, on the particular function of the power in q­ uestion – what we need it to do – and the history of our conceptualization of the power. At any rate, it is unnecessary, at least without further investigation, to assume that normative powers always involve the communication of the relevant intention to those affected by its exercise, and therefore that forgiving the dead would be impossible if forgiveness is a normative power. This suggestion about how to accommodate this final platitude indicates that a broader investigation of normative powers is required. We turn to that now, in the final section of this chapter.

5.  Are Normative Powers Bunk? Now is an appropriate time to raise a further objection that might be made to the normative power account. This objection is that the normative power account involves the stipulation of an unnecessarily elaborate theoretical apparatus in order to explain the role of forgiveness in our lives. Or, to put it more pithily, talk of normative powers is just more “nonsense on stilts” (as Bentham said of natural rights). Now I said at the outset that philosophical theory sometimes requires us to posit a framework that goes beyond the concepts that non-philosophers explicitly refer to when they are talking about forgiveness. This should not be worrying in itself, since philosophers have specific theoretical goals that ordinary participants in the practice of forgiveness do not necessarily share. However, does the normative power interpretation of forgiveness lead us to an implausible or over-complicated interpretation of what stands behind everyday practice? We can start to examine this criticism by summarizing the major theoretical commitments of the normative power account. First of all, there must be (“primary”) obligations about how we treat one another, such that acts can be wrongful. Second, the content of some of these obligations 281

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must be such that an action is not simply what some agent A is required to do, but rather that the action is owed by A to another party P (or “directed” from A specifically to P). Hence, the violation of these primary obligations is not simply wrongful but rather constitutes a wrong done by A against P. Third, the violation of these obligations must give rise to further remedial (“secondary”) obligations, owed by A to P, to apologize and make reparation. Fourth, these remedial obligations must be something over which P, the person to whom they are owed, has some degree of control (to demand their fulfilment, to cancel them, perhaps to lessen them, etc.). Fifth, therefore, there must be normative powers, whereby through a performance of specified, canonical actions, a person may change the rights and obligations of themselves and others, and a particular form of which the victim possesses by virtue of having been wronged. We can now put the ball back into the court of the critic, and ask which of these features, specifically, are unnecessary to posit. A full investigation of this question being impossible given the limitations of space, we will restrict ourselves to some brief remarks. The idea of directed or bipolar or “second-personal” obligations has been the subject of intensive philosophical investigation in recent years (Thompson 2004; Darwall 2013; Wallace 2019). According to the authors proposing the existence of such obligations, the fact that some obligations are owed specifically by one party to another explains some key facts about accountability. For instance, it explains what the wrongdoer is accountable for, namely a wrong or normative injury done to the victim. It explains why it is appropriate that, in apologizing, a wrongdoer does not simply express contrition for having violated a binding moral standard but rather directs their reparative activity to the victim specifically. Furthermore, it explains why the victim has a special standing to reproach the wrongdoer. This need not be to say that parties other than the victim have no standing to blame, but it gives the victim a special role. And finally, it explains why the victim should have a special normative position, or a special right, in regard to forgiveness. As Stephen Darwall puts it: Just as it is uniquely up to the right holder to decide whether or not to consent or waive her right (assuming the right is one that can be waived), so is it distinctively up to a victim whose right has been violated, whether to forgive someone who has violated it. No one else has the same authority or standing. (Darwall 2013: 30–1) And R. Jay Wallace makes essentially the same point: Forgiveness may be understood to involve the exercise of a kind of normative authority … To forgive is not necessarily to overcome all resentment in one’s feelings about the wrongdoer, but to adopt a distinctive stance toward such attitudes, forswearing them as attitudes that should be accorded importance in one’s ongoing relations to the agent of the wrongful action. The individual who bestows forgiveness is someone who is authorized to adopt this kind of reflective stance, and who has a measure of discretion about when and in what ways to make use of this authority … Note, however, that the authority that is thus presupposed by forgiveness is the proprietary possession of only some individuals, who stand in a distinctive relation to the wrongdoing that might be forgiven … Just as apologies are owed specifically to those who have been wronged by what the agent did, so too are those individuals alone authorized to bestow forgiveness on the wrongdoer. (Wallace 2019: 90–1) If positing the existence of bipolar obligations is necessary to account for these features then this theoretical posit is not redundant. Neither is it over-complicated: it is simply as complex as it needs 282

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to be to explain the phenomena. Furthermore, talk of bipolar obligations is not simply an attempt to capture common modern ideas about morality. Rather, it gives expression to a moral vision in which each person matters as the particular individual they are. It is this vision that lies behind the idea that each person has obligations owed to them individually: bipolar obligations thus do not simply set standards for our agency as we act in the world but rather tie us to the particular individuals who are affected by our actions, expressing the normative relationship that obtains between us and which we rupture when we violate those obligations and wrong those to whom we are normatively bound. If this is plausible, it is likewise natural to accept the third posit, that those primary obligations must, as we said in explaining Card’s account, survive their own violation, and that they therefore issue in secondary obligations when they are violated. Our sense that remedial secondary obligations arise from wrongdoing again gives expression to our sense that victims matter and that the normative tie is not simply cancelled when it is broken, such that the wrongdoer can walk free, but that it continues to hold, and indeed that it holds in an even stronger, elaborated form that recognizes the nature and gravity of the initial violation. Is it also plausible to accept, finally, that we are in possession of normative powers? This is the question of whether there is some domain of morality in which particular agents are invested with, in H.L.A. Hart’s famous phrase, “control over another’s duty” (Hart 1955). In Hart’s view, control over duty was the distinctive mark of rights, and his view of rights is widely treated as the outstanding statement of the will theory of rights, as opposed to the interest theory. However, we do not need to involve ourselves in that controversy over the nature of rights to see that some important considerations speak in favour of recognizing normative powers. For instance, it is common to think that our interest in autonomy – that is, in being the authors of our own lives and having control over some central aspects of the way our lives unfold – is extremely important: either an important interest as such, or important given that we live in the kind of society that we do (Raz 1986). And just as this interest in autonomy is often taken to ground a range of discretionary rights to control over our person, our possessions, and our agency, it does not stretch credulity to think that the same interest might also ground rights to control our normative situation, such that we can alter the normative relationships we have to others through ritualistic procedures. Control over rights and obligations is important because the presence or absence of such obligations is an important part of our possession of freedom and community (given that obligations are constitutive of relationships). Normative control is thus an important part of our being able to negotiate a balance between these values, and being the authors of our lives.

6. Conclusion In this chapter, we have looked at normative power accounts of forgiveness. We started by outlining some aims for a philosophical theory of forgiveness, some of the questions that it will need to answer, and some of the features of forgiveness that it will need to accommodate and explain. We then introduced the normative power account, explaining that its distinctive feature is that it sees forgiveness as the exercise of a power to alter one’s own and others’ obligations. We showed that the normative power account fits well with many of the features of forgiveness. But an apparent lack of fit with some of those features became a source of potential objections to the normative power account. However, we saw that the normative power account was nevertheless a better explanation of the features of forgiveness than an influential rival account, according to which to forgive is to undergo a change of heart, and we outlined ways in which the normative power account could be developed to accommodate those apparently recalcitrant features. Finally, we considered the objection that the normative power account rests on the existence of an implausible and over-complicated set of theoretical posits. Having explained in some detail what those 283

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posits are, we showed that there are in fact good reasons to accept them, rooted as they are in an attractive picture of morality. We can conclude that normative power accounts are in good shape as a philosophical theory of forgiveness.

Note 1 Thanks to Kayleigh Doherty for drawing my attention to this passage.

References Allais, L. (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean: the Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36: 33–68 Bennett, C. (2018) “The Alteration Thesis: Forgiveness as a Normative Power,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 46: 207–33 Bennett, C. (2022) “What Goes On When We Apologize?” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 23: 115–135. Calhoun, C. (1992) “Changing One’s Heart,” Ethics 103: 76–96 Card, C. (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press Darwall, S. (2013) “Bipolar Obligation” in Morality, Authority and Law: Essays in Second Personal Ethics I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20–39 Downie, R. (1965) “Forgiveness,” Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–34 Dworkin, R. (2011) Justice for Hedgehogs, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press Gardner, J. (2011) “What Is Tort Law For? Part 1. The Place of Corrective Justice,” Law and Philosophy 30: 1–50 Garrard, E. and D. MacNaughton (2003) “In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the ­Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60 Hampton, J. (1988) “Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred,” in J. G. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds), Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hart, H. L. A. (1955) “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64: 175–91 Hieronymi, P. (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological ­Research 62: 529–55 Kolnai, A. (1973–4) “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74: 91–106 Murphy, J. G. (1988) “Forgiveness and Resentment,” in J. G. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds), Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Owens, D. (2012) Shaping the Normative Landscape, Oxford: Oxford University Press Raz, J. (1975) Practical Reason and Norms, Oxford: Oxford University Press ——— (1986) The Morality of Freedom, Oxford: Clarendon Press Thompson, M. (2004) “What Is It to Wrong Someone: A Puzzle About Justice,” in R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler and Michael Smith (eds), Reasons and Values: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford: Clarendon Press Twambley, P. (1976) “Mercy and Forgiveness,” Analysis 36: 84–90 Walker, M. U. (2006) Moral Repair: Reconstructing Relations After Wrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Wallace, R. J. (2019) The Moral Nexus, Oxford: Princeton University Press Warmke, B. (2016a) “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94: 687–703 ——— (2016b) “The Economic Model of Forgiveness,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97: 570–89

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21 PROCESS ACCOUNTS OF FORGIVENESS Per-Erik Milam

Her breakthrough comes as breakthroughs often do: by long and prepared accident. Richard Powers, The Overstory

It’s tempting to think of scientific discoveries as “eureka moments,” flashes of insight into the way the world works. We imagine Archimedes settling into his bathtub or Newton watching an apple fall from a tree. However, many historians and philosophers of science have abandoned this view of discovery (Schickore 2018). They claim that scientific discovery is better understood as a process that takes place over time and in a series of stages (Lugg 1985). For example, William Whewell argued that we should understand the process of discovery as being comprised of three stages: the insight (or “happy thought”), development of the insight, and the verification of it. The insight is, at best, the beginning of a discovery; and there are prerequisites for even having this eureka moment (Whewell 1840: 189). It is neither accurate nor illuminating to understand the discovery of gravity as Newton watching an apple fall and thinking to himself, “Hmm, perhaps every particle attracts every other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers.” To understand how a scientific discovery occurs, for it to be intelligible, we must understand the processes that make an insight possible and that lead from an insight to a theory. A similar point can be made about forgiveness. It’s common—or at least easy—to conceive of forgiveness as taking place at a moment, whether the moment one decides to forgive or the moment one utters the words “I forgive you.” However, at best, this view leaves many aspects of the phenomenon unexplained and, at worst, renders it unexplainable. Instead, it seems fruitful to understand forgiveness, like discovery, as a process unfolding over time in a series of stages. To understand how forgiveness happens, for it to be intelligible, we must understand the processes that make the decision to forgive possible and that lead from decision to accomplishment. The aim of this chapter is to articulate and evaluate the view of forgiveness as a process. ­Section 1 provides a brief history of process accounts. The next two sections introduce self-identified process accounts. Section 2 describes a psychological process model developed by psychologists. Section 3 describes two philosophical process accounts: the weak agency model and the emergent forgiveness model. Section 4 considers the lessons and limitations of these three models and of process accounts generally. Section 5 evaluates process accounts according to common criteria of adequacy and identifies the core commitments of a process account as a basis for developing ­a lternatives to models discussed in this chapter. Section 6 concludes. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-27

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1. History The psychologist Robert Enright and his collaborators began developing process accounts of forgiveness in the late 1980s. They were inspired by earlier accounts (Loewen 1970; Augsberger 1981; Brandsma 1982), but also by Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential account of moral development in children (1984). Enright wanted to investigate a dimension of human moral development that he felt had been neglected. While Kohlberg focused on justice, Enright turned his attention to restorative practices, the ways in which we resolve conflicts and repair relationships. Since then forgiveness has become an increasingly popular subject of psychological research. The next fifteen years saw refinement of the process account and its associated therapies by Enright and his collaborators (Enright et al. 1991; Enright, Gassin, and Wu 1992; Enright, Freedman, and Rique 1998), as well as experimental demonstrations of its success and benefits. Competing theories were also developed, including other process models (McCullough, Worthington, and Rachal 1997; Strelan and Covic 2006) and decision models of forgiveness (McCullough and Worthington 1995). According to a representative statement of the view, “In the psychological context, the forgiveness process refers to an individual’s progression through a series of interdependent (though not necessarily linear) phases, each consisting of cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses or intentions” (Strelan and Covic 2006: 1063).1 This phase of development culminated in the publication of Enright’s (2001) book, Forgiveness is a Choice, as well as a handful of meta-analyses and reviews (Baskin and Enright 2004; Freedman, Enright, and Knutson 2005; Strelan and Covic 2006). 2 In the last fifteen years, psychologists’ attention—and apparently their allegiance—seems to have shifted from process accounts toward attempts to identify the mechanisms and measure the effects of forgiveness independently of clinical interventions. A few meta-analyses of the effects of process-based forgiveness therapy have been conducted in the last few years, but the number of relevant studies has not kept pace with the rest of the forgiveness literature. One such analysis identified twenty-seven relevant studies of which only fifteen met the criteria for inclusion (Akhtar and Barlow 2018). By contrast a meta-analysis of the link between forgiveness and physical health evaluated 128 studies (Lee and Enright 2019). The development of process accounts in philosophy is more obscure. Most philosophical accounts of forgiveness attempt to analyze the concept of forgiveness. Many of these accounts refer to it as a process, but few have devoted much attention to understanding this feature of the phenomenon. Jean Hampton is representative of philosophers in acknowledging that “forgiveness should be analyzed as a process involving, not only certain psychological preparations (mainly the overcoming of various forms of anger), but, more positively, a change of heart towards the wrongdoer” (1988: 42 emphasis in the original). Few philosophers writing on forgiveness have identified their views as process accounts and, as we’ll see, one salient commitment shared by those who have is that forgiveness requires a change of heart.

2.  Psychological Process Accounts The process accounts of forgiveness developed by psychologists must be understood in light of the aims of the social and clinical researchers who developed them. Their goal was to improve individuals’ psychological and physical well-being by helping them to forgive. Their central insight—call it a “process insight”—was that forgiving takes time because it’s difficult and that trained clinicians could guide patients through the process and thereby facilitate this beneficial transformation. In order to understand this insight and the research it motivated, it’s useful to contrast psychological and philosophical theorizing about forgiveness. We can begin by examining the 286

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questions that philosophers and psychologists take themselves to be answering. Philosophers tend to ­investigate conceptual and ethical questions: i What is forgiveness? ii When should one forgive or not forgive? There are different ways to answer the first question, all of which can contribute to a complete account. One approach is to give a definition—i.e. to identify necessary and sufficient conditions on forgiveness and thereby explain what counts as forgiveness.3 For example, one might argue that forgiving consists in overcoming blame toward an offender for the right kind of reasons (Milam 2019). Another approach is to describe paradigmatic forms and instances of forgiveness and explain what forgiveness does and how it works. For example, an account might explain the role of forgiveness in the broader practice of holding one another responsible (Warmke and McKenna 2013) or the “moral reconstruction” that must often take place in order to resolve a moral conflict (Walker 2006). These approaches can be complementary, as when an account of what forgiveness is begins by explaining what makes the act of saying “I forgive you.” successful (Pettigrove 2012: chapter 1). The second question concerns the appropriateness of forgiveness. Two common topics in the ethics of forgiveness are electivity4 —whether forgiving is optional or whether it can be required or prohibited—and standing to forgive—whether it is appropriate for non-victims to forgive (Pettigrove 2012: chapter 2). In addition to these topics, others have addressed concerns about forgiveness and self-respect (Murphy 2003, cf. Holmgren 2012), when continuing to blame is reasonable (MacLachlan 2010), and the appropriateness of collective forgiveness (Blustein 2014). Psychologists, by contrast, tend to focus on questions that are amenable to empirical investigation: i ii What is happening psychologically when one forgives? iv What are the effects of forgiving? v How can therapeutic interventions facilitate forgiveness?5 Question (iii) is similar to (i), but it is empirical rather than conceptual. The aim is to identify psychological and neurological phenomena associated with and determinant of forgiveness (Pronk et al. 2010; Billingsley and Losin 2017). For example, a study may ask participants to reflect on a recent offense and respond to survey items measuring anger, vengefulness, compassion, or rumination (McCullough et al. 2001; Fehr, Gelfand, and Nag 2010). For many psychologists, answering question (iv) is the primary aim of forgiveness research. Doing so requires measuring forgiveness and showing at least presumptive evidence that it causes other benefits. There is a large and growing literature documenting various psychological and physical effects of forgiveness (Karremans et al. 2003; Lawler-Row et al. 2008; Lee and Enright 2019). For example, a study by Larsen et al. (2012) suggests that forgiving has cardiovascular benefits and that they exceed the benefits of merely distracting oneself from one’s anger.6 Finally, question (v) is related to (iv), but is more specific. Its aim is to understand the forgiveness process in order to design forgiveness therapies that are at least as beneficial as other clinical interventions (Freedman, Enright, and Knutson 2005). Answering this question requires showing that a particular therapy makes forgiving more likely and more likely to have positive effects.7 We can begin to understand the disconnect between process accounts in psychology and philosophy. The empirical focus of psychological accounts—especially the focus on clinical ­practice—helps explain why philosophers haven’t seen them as a promising foundation for conceptual theorizing. Empirical models usually presuppose an answer to the conceptual question rather than arguing for it. Nevertheless, there is a process insight behind these accounts that can 287

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illuminate the practice of forgiveness. In the remainder of this section, I describe the process model operative in much of the psychological literature and try to articulate this insight.8 What I will call the psychological process model (PPM) rejects the view that forgiveness amounts to a decision to forgive and instead argues that it involves “a series of strategies” designed to resolve the conflict and facilitate the cognitive, affective, and motivational changes that constitute successful forgiveness (Enright et al. 1991: 138; see also Baskin and Enright 2004: 81–2).9 In short, it requires a change of heart in addition to a decision. The forgiveness process is divided into phases—understanding one’s blame and its grounds, deciding to forgive, working on forgiveness, and reflecting on one’s mistreatment, blame, and forgiveness after having forgiven (Enright 2001: 78)—each of which contains more specific stages—e.g. deciding to forgive might require assessing alternatives to forgiveness, taking it seriously as an option, and actually deciding to forgive. The motivation for PPM is the perception that many people are burdened by excessive anger, resulting from being seriously mistreated, and that forgiving, because it requires a change of heart, takes time and may be difficult (Enright et al. 1991: 148). However, it also assumes that forgiveness is a choice (Denton and Martin 1998: 282)—indeed that’s the title of Enright’s book. As the basis for a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, PPM is structured as a guide to forgiveness, where the patient is led to consider their present circumstances and the reasons they have to forgive. Moreover, because its aim is to improve the well-being of the forgiver, the process emphasizes self-­ directed reasons. Patients are encouraged to see that their anger is contributing to their suffering and that forgiveness is a way of neutralizing that threat. The different phases can be understood as opportunities to reflect on one’s reasons for pursuing different aspects of forgiveness: understanding one’s victimization, deciding to forgive, overcoming anger, offering forgiveness as an undeserved gift, and reflecting on the effects of having forgiven. This model is well-intentioned, but it has limitations as an account of forgiveness. First, its purpose limits its scope. It is designed for individuals who are experiencing overwhelming and debilitating anger in response to severe mistreatment. It has little to say, therefore, about everyday moral conflicts and the ways in which we address and resolve them through blame, apology, and forgiveness. Second, it focuses on the intrapersonal components of forgiveness (e.g. deciding to forgive, overcoming anger) and neglects interpersonal components (e.g. communicating blame, responding to remorse) (Strelan and Covic 2006: 1066). Third, it privileges a particular conception of forgiveness as an unconditional gift and views other forms of forgiveness as “distortions” (Enright et al. 1991: 147; Enright, Gassin, and Wu: 106). Finally, while it aims to distinguish forgiveness from cognate phenomena like excuse, it often misunderstands these phenomena (Enright et al. 1991: 129–30; Baskin and Enright 2004: 80; Strelan and Covic 2006: 1062 and 1076). However, these are criticisms of PPM as an account of forgiveness, not as an account of a process. The development and deployment of PPM makes plausible the claim that forgiveness is a process through which a person can be guided—though the success of process-based forgiveness therapies is disputed.10 In the next section, I consider philosophical accounts of this process.

3.  Philosophical Process Accounts I mentioned above (Section 1) that there is a notable absence of philosophical process accounts of forgiveness. I considered some possible reasons for this (Section 2), including the fact that the proponents of psychological process accounts have generally been content to adopt existing definitions of forgiveness rather than explain the nature of forgiveness themselves. The aim of this section is to sketch the accounts of the few philosophers who have identified their views as process accounts. Before turning to these models, though, it is worth examining the process insights of philosophers who have not developed their insights into full theories. 288

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3.1  Proto-Process Accounts While few philosophers have developed process accounts, some have understood forgiveness as a process in ways that anticipate existing views. In addition to describing forgiveness as a process that takes time and happens in stages, these brief discussions introduce three ideas that will prove central to the philosophical process accounts we consider in Sections 3.2 and 3.3. First, some see the recognition that forgiveness takes time and happens in stages as illuminating in itself. Trudy Govier suggests that only by recognizing these temporal aspects can we reconcile the value of warranted resentment and the value of overcoming it (2002: 54). Second, some suggest that the process of “addressing the wrong” is a prerequisite for genuine forgiveness, insofar as this process must be completed in order for the decision to forgive to be on the table (Holmgren 2012: 63). Third, some suggest that forgiving is not always or entirely voluntary, that some parts of the process may be beyond one’s control. Thus, whether one succeeds in forgiving may depend on one’s habits, one’s hopes, or even one’s prayers (Morris 1988: 17; Adams 1991: 295). Finally, many have suggested that forgiving requires that one undergo some internal transformation and come to view the offender differently (Hampton 1988: 42).11 As we will see, this last suggestion—call it the change of heart thesis—plays a central role in the self-identified process accounts examined below.

3.2  Weak Agency Model Laurent Jaffro (2018) explicitly understands forgiveness as process. On his view, forgiveness is a transformation that takes place over time in multiple stages and he argues that “Forgiveness becomes intelligible when it is envisaged as involving a process, and not an isolated act or decision” (2018: 108). Notice the parallel with views about scientific discovery. If we want to understand forgiveness (or discovery), we cannot reduce it to a single moment of decision (or insight). Why does forgiveness become intelligible only when understood as a process? Because, for Jaffro, the difficulty of forgiving suggests that it requires more than just a decision. It requires both a decision to forgive and a change in one’s willingness to take revenge, and it is often difficult to follow through on the decision. One may decide to forgive, but remain overwhelmed by anger; and even if one tries to overcome it, one may fail to do so. Call this the fact of “weak agency” and Jaffro’s model the weak agency model (WAM). Weak agency explains why motivational change can be difficult. According to this model, the decision to forgive precedes and facilitates the transformation from willing-to-pursue-revenge to no-longer-willing. The motivational change is the consequence of the decision to forgive and luck (2018: 119). The decision makes room for changes in affect and motivation; one is open to feeling differently toward the offender even if one remains, for the moment, in the grip of one’s anger. However, one may still encounter obstacles and this will depend on luck with regard to one’s circumstances. Having decided to forgive, the offender might provoke the victim and stoke her anger. Or the victim’s community might discourage the victim’s intention to forgive. Jaffro compares deciding to forgive to deciding to leave a party (2018: 121). Deciding may prompt you to end your conversation and get off the couch, but it may not get you out the door. You may find yourself saying goodbye to different people, perhaps for quite a while, as you prepare to leave. However, the decision to leave nonetheless creates favorable conditions for leaving, given some luck. If, having gotten up and begun saying goodbyes, another guest offers you a ride, then you might leave immediately, thereby accomplishing what you decided half an hour earlier. The basic story seems to be this: forgiving takes time because a decision to forgive is insufficient and a transformation is necessary; but the transformation is difficult because it is not entirely voluntary. The account develops the idea—apparently unknown to Jaffro—articulated by Herbert Morris 289

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that forgiving has both voluntary and involuntary components, that “certain courses of action may till the soil and sow the seed, as it were, so that forgiveness may more probably burst into bloom” (1988: 17). Forgiveness is a process like other processes, taking place over time and in stages. The two stages Jaffro identifies—deciding to forgive and working to accomplish forgiveness (i.e. a change of heart)—overlap with PPM. Moreover, his account of weak agency helps to explain why forgiveness therapy might help those who are overwhelmed by anger or who face other obstacles to forgiving. By identifying those obstacles, counselors can help patients overcome them.

3.3  Emergent Forgiveness Model Alisa Carse and Lynne Tirrell (2010) offer a process account of forgiveness focused on “grave wrongs.” By this they mean the kinds of atrocities that take place during genocides like the one in Rwanda, where otherwise ordinary people massacred their neighbors. Their emergent forgiveness model (EFM) articulates the now familiar insight that forgiving can be difficult, but it also extends PPM and WAM.12 Carse and Tirrell also recognize that, in some circumstances, deciding is not enough to bring about forgiveness. However, they argue that forgiving doesn’t even require a decision. They appear to reason as follows. In the aftermath of grave wrongs, the personal and social bases of trust may be so severely undermined—they say “shattered”—that deciding to forgive is impossible. Even if it occurred to a person to do so, the norms and values presupposed by such a decision no longer exist to make it meaningful (2010: 50). A Rwandan woman, quoted in the article, puts it this way: A man, if he has had one Primus beer too many and then beats his wife, he can ask to be forgiven. But if he has worked at killing for a whole month, even on Sundays, whatever can he hope for pardon? (44) However, this does not imply that forgiveness is impossible. Indeed, individuals appear to forgive their victimizers even in these circumstances. When it happens, though, forgiveness will be, according to Carse and Tirrell, “of necessity, a multifaceted, complex, and often jagged process, through which both trust and hope gain a foothold under conditions of perilous normative disorientation and moral insecurity, slowly contributing to conditions through which robust, and potentially enduring, forgiveness evolves” (46). In these circumstances, viewing forgiveness as a decision obscures the significance of the social and moral reconstruction that must occur between radically estranged parties. Carse and Tirrell call the kind of forgiveness that occurs in such circumstances emergent forgiveness. It is the result of small choices, none of which aim at forgiveness, rather than a decision to forgive (2010: 56). It emerges from a long process whereby individuals reestablish trust day by day, one interaction at a time. The same hallmarks of process are present here as in the other models we have considered. Emergent forgiveness is a transformation that takes time and happens in increments, though not necessarily in the stages identified by PPM and WAM. Carse and Tirrell’s process insight also concerns time and difficulty. When the moral order of a society has been so badly damaged, forgiveness may come about through a slow and incremental process of rebuilding trust and reestablishing social norms via countless interactions—and this process may only be recognizable in retrospect.

4.  Lessons and Limitations The last two sections introduced three self-identified process accounts: PPM, WAM, and EFM. This section considers the lessons and limitations of these accounts as well as whether they apply to process accounts generally. 290

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The three models share a central process insight, namely, that forgiving takes time and can be difficult. From this they infer that forgiveness cannot consist solely in the decision to forgive; it requires a change of heart and must therefore be a process. The models develop this insight into a full account by describing how this change can occur so as to bring about forgiveness. In addition, the philosophical accounts attempt to explain why changing one’s heart can be difficult. Jaffro identifies weak agency as an obstacle, and Carse and Tirrell expand this explanation by showing how grave wrongs can prevent the direct pursuit of forgiveness. In short, they suggest ways in which forgiveness is not always or entirely voluntary. The models share an understanding of forgiveness’s basic processual features, namely, that the process takes time and happens in stages. But they disagree about how to delineate the process and about the mechanisms operative at each stage. The widest conception, from PPM, includes both the preparations preliminary to deciding to forgive (e.g. recognizing one’s blame) and reflection on its effects (e.g. on one’s experience of overcoming debilitating anger) (Enright 2001: 78). By contrast, Jaffro takes the process to be comprised entirely of the decision to forgive and the motivational change facilitated by that decision. Earlier stages are understood as prerequisites for the forgiveness process, and the process concludes with the motivational change ( Jaffro 2018: 111). According to Carse and Tirrell, a decision to forgive is not even necessary. The forgiveness process consists in whatever interactions help to restore trust and reestablish the norms that make the requisite emotional change possible. We can draw a few lessons from these different models, from which emerges a general process account. First, they share an insight into what forgiveness is like, namely, that forgiveness takes time and can be difficult—this is the process insight. Process accounts therefore aim to capture and explain the difficulty of forgiving. Second, the duration and difficulty of forgiving is explained by the fact that forgiving requires a transformation (the change of heart thesis) and that this transformation is not always entirely voluntary (the voluntariness thesis).13 It is this change, however it is specified, that takes time and admits impediments. These are important lessons, but forgiveness theorists should also attend to the limitations of these accounts. First, while process accounts show that forgiveness takes time and happens in stages, neither the fact that it is a process nor these process features explain how forgiveness works. Call this the Explanation Problem. Second, what distinguishes process accounts from other popular accounts is not the fact of being a process or having process features. Call this the Categorization Problem. Let’s start with the Explanation Problem. One would expect a process account of X to explain X or some feature of X by reference to the fact that it is a process or has process features. Other accounts of forgiveness do this. For example, according to normative power accounts, it is the exercise of a normative power that explains how forgiving can wipe the slate clean—by waiving the obligation to make further amends the offender ceases to have that obligation. Even if we reject such accounts, we reject them as explanations. Process accounts of other phenomena also avoid this problem. For example, process accounts of biological phenomena argue that a process ontology—one according to which processes, not things, are the fundamental elements of ­reality—is required to adequately explain phenomena like metabolism, development, and evolution (Seibt 2021: Section 4).14 Whether or not they are correct, such accounts clearly attribute explanatory power to the process features of these phenomena (Dupré and Nicholson 2018: 3–4). Process accounts of forgiveness do not do this. This is not to say that they have no explanatory power. They clearly aim to explain why forgiving is sometimes difficult—why we may require guidance (PPM), why we sometimes fail to do what we decide (WAM), and why we sometimes cannot even pursue forgiveness intentionally (EFM). And all three accounts try to explain the fact that victims must often work through the emotional fallout of a transgression before they can forgive. However, it is not the fact that forgiveness is a process or that it has the properties of a 291

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process that explain the difficulty of forgiving. Rather, difficulty is explained by the mechanisms that constitute the process and the impediments to those mechanisms. Consider an analogy. Watching an opera (or a play, or a film) can elicit various experiences, including rising tension as the plot thickens and emotional release after the climax. An opera is a process and has the features of a process, but these facts do not explain our emotional transformation. Our transformation is explained by the types of events that occur in the opera and the order in which they occur—e.g. the development of a conflict, the possibility of either a tragic or a happy ending. Pointing out that an opera is a temporally extended process that occurs in stages doesn’t tell us much; it is what those stages are and what happens during that time that explains its emotional power. If we want to understand the nature of (the process of ) forgiveness and how it does what it does, we need an account of what the mechanisms are and the order in which they occur. This may include both descriptive mechanisms (e.g. overcoming anger) and normative mechanisms (e.g. waiving an obligation). Or, to put the point in forward-looking terms, if we want to predict how forgiveness might be impeded, what matters is not that forgiveness happens in stages but which stages it is composed of. At this point, defenders of process accounts might point out that they do identify particular mechanisms and explain what they do. Jaffro explains how making a decision influences motivation. Carse and Tirrell explain how forgiveness can emerge from a series of hardly noticeable and often unintentional changes. Enright et al. explain how one progresses toward forgiveness through various phases and stages. This is true, but it renders the notion of a “process account” somewhat hollow.15 And it reinforces the other worry mentioned above, namely, the Categorization Problem. Arguing for a “process account” of forgiveness suggests that such accounts are distinct from other kinds. But which other kinds and how are they distinct? On the one hand, process accounts are distinct from and incompatible with declarative accounts according to which saying “I forgive you.” is sufficient to bring it about that the offender is forgiven. Such accounts take forgiveness to be instantaneous and have only a single stage. On the other hand, this is not particularly distinctive.16 Most theories would reject this characterization. The Categorization Problem becomes especially pressing if, to solve the Explanation Problem, process theories fall back on the claim that they explain how forgiveness works by reference to its constituent mechanisms. Understood in this way, most accounts of the nature of forgiveness are process accounts (e.g. Hieronymi 2001; Griswold 2007; Allais 2008; Pettigrove 2012; Fricker 2019). Indeed, even accounts according to which a significant change can occur instantaneously via the exercise of a normative power can also allow that forgiveness takes time and occurs in stages prior to the norm-altering event (Warmke 2016: 690). This point does not make process accounts less plausible, but it does encourage us to view them as of a type with these other theories and as sharing a central aim with them, namely, to capture the diversity of forgiveness by explaining how forgiving is a (sometimes) long, (sometimes) difficult, and (sometimes) not-­ entirely-voluntary process. The Explanation and Categorization Problems are real challenges. Forgiveness theories are in the business of offering explanations and those explanations are part of what distinguishes them from competing theories—even if they attempt to capture the same phenomena and fit the same intuitions about what forgiveness is. That said, these problems can be answered. Process accounts do explain some features of forgiveness and they are distinct from some competing theories. However, it seems that the best defense of process accounts against the Explanation Problem must characterize them as very similar to most, albeit not all, of their supposed competitors, and therefore open to a version of the Categorization Problem. I’ve used the three models described above to illustrate these limitations, but any process account is liable to these problems insofar as it understands the nature of (the process of ) forgiveness by 292

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reference to its component mechanisms/stages. Understanding what forgiveness is and how it works just is a matter of identifying these mechanisms/stages and describing how they work. If we recall the comparison with scientific discovery, though, we should not be surprised by the susceptibility of process accounts to these two problems. Historians and philosophers who study scientific discovery also have to address explanation and categorization. Early accounts of the process of discovery (e.g. William Whewell’s) were rejected in favor of accounts that distinguished between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification” (e.g. Hans Reichenbach’s). Many proponents of the distinction held that justification was a process amenable to analysis but that discovery—understood as “the act of conceiving or inventing a theory” (Popper 1934: 7)— did not admit of explanation. Many later scholars, however, maintained that discovery is itself a process with an identifiable logic or structure (Schickore 2018: Sections 6–8; Lugg 1985).17 This taxonomical disagreement reflects an explanatory disagreement. If discovery is a process, and not just a “eureka moment,” then an explanation of how science works must include an account of discovery. When we see how accounts of the discovery process address the Explanation and Categorization Problems, we can see a parallel route for accounts of the forgiveness process. Historians and philosophers of science came to view discovery as a process with particular parts that together constitute the phenomenon, but in doing so they saw that how the process works—how it does what it is meant to do—is explained not by the fact that it’s a process but by the mechanisms that comprise it. Similarly, philosophers and psychologists studying forgiveness have recognized that the forgiveness process is explained by its (descriptive and normative) mechanisms. However, if this is right, it seems unhelpful to refer to process accounts and non-process accounts and more helpful to refer to these views by the mechanisms to which they attribute explanatory power—as most competing accounts seem to do (Hughes and Warmke 2017).

5.  Criteria of Adequacy The previous section identified crucial limitations of particular process models and of process accounts in general. However, the significance of these limitations for our overall evaluation depends on our expectations for a process account of forgiveness. Inadequate explanatory power is not a trivial fault, but the limitations of an account as a process account are not necessarily limitations of an account as an account of forgiveness. A particular view may succeed in the latter respect, even if it is inadequate (or uninteresting) in the former. In this section, I consider whether process accounts can meet other criteria of adequacy beyond the two discussed above. I also try to evaluate process accounts in general, as characterized above (Section 4). So, what can we expect of an account of forgiveness and can a process account meet these expectations? First, an account can identify or defend one or more necessary conditions. The point of such conditions is to delineate the boundaries of forgiveness and distinguish it from other similar phenomena. For example, one might argue that, in order to forgive, one must forswear blame (Griswold 2007: 54), for the right kind of reason (Milam 2019: 243), while continuing to view the offender as blameworthy (Hieronymi 2001: 530). Second, an account can identify or defend jointly sufficient conditions on forgiveness. The point of sufficient conditions is to describe what it takes to forgive given the constraints of the necessary conditions. For example, one might argue that one forgives so long as one refuses to punish an offender (Zaibert 2009). Identifying sufficient conditions is also a way to ensure a properly inclusive conception that recognizes the variety of forms forgiveness can take. One way to do this is to dispute purportedly necessary conditions—e.g. by denying that one must overcome one’s blame toward the offender (Neblett 1974: 269–70). Another way is to defend pluralism about forgiveness and accept that different forms have different requirements (Bennett 2003; Fricker 2019).18 293

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Third, an account can explain features of forgiveness that are neither necessary nor ­sufficient, but which nonetheless illuminate the practice because they are either common (e.g. saying “I forgive you.”) or uncommon but especially significant when present (e.g. atrocities or gendered pressure to forgive). For example, Brandon Warmke (2016) assesses whether particular conditions can explain the normative significance of paradigmatic forgiveness rather than whether they are necessary or sufficient. Fourth, an account can explain the normative mechanisms of forgiveness. A descriptive account of the changes involved in forgiving—how one’s beliefs, feelings, motivations, as well as one’s relationships change—is important. But some claim that forgiving also alters relations between victim and offender in morally significant ways. For example, some argue that, when you forgive, you release an offender from the obligation they acquired by mistreating you (Nelkin 2013; Warmke 2016; Bennett 2018). Likewise, one might try to explain how speech acts—e.g. “I forgive you.”—do what we intend (Allais 2008: 41)—or how they give us what we hope for in being forgiven (Pettigrove 2012: chapter 1). Finally, an account can capture the phenomenology of forgiving. For example, one might describe and explain the pain and effort of forgiving (Hieronymi 2001; Walker 2006), the sense that forgiving is up to us (Calhoun 1992), or the difference between forgiving and merely letting go (Milam 2019). This task may also have a critical dimension. One might try to explain how we can be mistaken about whether we have forgiven or how one could forgive without realizing it. Given that process accounts are susceptible as process accounts to the Explanation and Categorization Problems, how well do they meet these other criteria of adequacy? Each of the three models identifies conditions as necessary and/or sufficient. However, as noted above, their distinctive commitments seem to be that deciding to forgive is insufficient and that a change of heart is necessary, neither of which is unique. In general, process accounts can adopt any further commitments compatible with these two, including what kind of change of heart is involved and how much forgiveness is under our voluntary control. Jaffro requires a motivational change, while Carse and Tirrell explicitly assume Griswold’s account of forgiveness as an emotional change (2010: 45). Moreover, all three views weigh in on the claim that forgiving must be voluntary. The therapeutic project of PPM is premised on the assumption that forgiveness is completely voluntary, albeit difficult. Jaffro denies that a decision to forgive is sufficient to bring it about (cf. Neblett 1974), and follows Morris (1988) in allowing that forgiveness has both voluntary and non-voluntary aspects. Carse and Tirrell deny that forgiveness requires a decision at all and argue that it can be entirely non-voluntary insofar as it emerges from a series of other undirected acts.19 Most importantly, perhaps, Jaffro and Carse and Tirrell acknowledge that they are each describing one of many forms of forgiveness ( Jaffro 2018: 107; Carse and Tirrell 2010: 45), thereby allowing that other forms may have different conditions. None of the three accounts attempts to explain the normative significance of forgiveness. But neither do their core commitments preclude popular accounts according to which forgiving— especially expressing forgiveness—changes the normative relations between victim and offender (e.g. whether the offender is obligated to apologize). At the same time, we might expect a process account to locate the normative alteration later in the forgiveness process than some have done. For example, if forgiving requires a change of heart, then an exercise of normative power that brings about forgiveness can only occur once this change has happened. It cannot be brought about merely by the decision to forgive (unless the decision itself requires a change of heart). The main aim of all three models seems to be to capture a neglected aspect of the phenomenology of forgiveness, namely, the difficulty of forgiving and especially of changing one’s heart— what we might call the limits of forgiveness. The PPM recognizes that forgiving can be difficult, and Jaffro explains the difficulty as a problem of weak agency, an obstacle to voluntary action. It requires a transformation that is only partially under one’s direct control. Carse and Tirrell 294

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identify another level of difficulty, namely, the challenge of forgiving when the very grounds for forgiveness—the responsibility practice of which forgiveness is one element—have been destroyed. By denying that one must decide to forgive, they also capture a form of forgiveness that isn’t experienced like forgiveness at all because it may not be recognized until it has happened. In fact, acknowledging the difficulty of forgiving is arguably an upshot of any process account insofar as they claim that forgiveness requires a change of heart. This point about difficulty suggests a corollary insight about expectations. Neither those who forgive nor those who receive forgiveness should expect it to happen overnight or to wipe the slate entirely clean. Indeed, the process of forgiveness may itself remain with the forgiver for a long time. To summarize, process accounts of forgiveness—both the three models considered above and any account with the core commitments—do illuminate the phenomenon. Their main contribution is to emphasize a particular aspect of the experience of forgiveness, namely, the difficulty of accomplishing it. In doing so, they also add nuance to our understanding of forgiving as a voluntary practice. However, process accounts face a serious challenge, namely, that their explanatory power—including explaining how they differ from competing views—derives from the change of heart thesis and voluntariness thesis, but not from the fact that forgiveness is a process or has the properties of a process. This means that the category “process account” is much wider than one might have expected and includes a diverse variety of views, from Hampton (1988), Calhoun (1992), and Hieronymi (2001), to Griswold (2007) and Allais (2008). This makes it very likely that some process account is correct (or among the most plausible), but it also makes this conclusion fairly trivial because the class of non-process accounts is very small indeed.

6. Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to describe and evaluate process accounts of forgiveness. Doing so has proven less straightforward a task than anticipated because the category of process views has not been explicitly defined by its advocates, either positively (in its own terms) or negatively (by contrast with alternative accounts of forgiveness). Nonetheless, I have tried to describe the core of the view. Process accounts are motivated by a common process insight, namely, that forgiveness takes time and is difficult. This is because forgiveness requires a change of heart (change of heart thesis) and changing one’s heart is not always or entirely under one’s control (voluntariness thesis). The process of forgiving is the process of working through whatever stages are necessary to achieve this change of heart. We can and do forgive—and can be helped to do so—by understanding and approaching forgiveness as a process that takes time and happens in stages. Different process accounts will identify different changes as necessary and will differ about the strength and scope of our control over whether we forgive. That is, they will differ in how they understand the nature of (the process of ) forgiving. The view they all seem to share, though, is that forgiveness comes as breakthroughs often due: by long and prepared accident.20

Notes 1 Baskin and Enright (2004: 82) and Akhtar and Barlow (2018: 108) give similar descriptions. 2 For a more critical history of psychology’s interest in forgiveness see Lamb (2005). 3 While psychologists often adopt philosophers’ definitions, they have also tried to distill definitions from individuals’ overlapping conceptions, whether by analyzing written forgiveness narratives (Zechmeister and Romero 2002), via prototype analysis (Kearns and Fincham 2004), or by directly asking participants to define forgiveness (Younger et al. 2004; Freedman and Chang 2010). 4 For elective accounts, see Calhoun (1992); Garrard and McNaughton (2003); Allais (2013). For critiques of electivity, see Richards (1988); Murphy (2003); Milam (2018).

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Per-Erik Milam 5 These five questions are not the only ones we can ask about forgiveness, but together they capture most of philosophical and psychological research over the past fifty years. 6 Studies of the negative effects of forgiveness are much less common. See, for example, McNulty (2008) and McNulty and Fincham (2012). 7 A meta-analysis by Baskin and Enright (2004) suggests that process-based forgiveness interventions produce better results than decision-based interventions, but see Strelan and Covic (2006) for a more critical review of the same literature and Akhtar and Barlow (2018) for a recent reassessment. For a critique of forgiveness therapy as a whole see Lamb (2005). 8 This model is based on publications by Enright and colleagues, including Enright et al. (1991); Enright, Gassin, and Wu (1992); Enright, Freedman, and Rique (1998); and Enright (2001). It also captures some alternative process accounts, including McCullough, Worthington, and Rachal (1997), though not all (Strelan and Covic 2006). 9 By contrast, decision-based forgiveness interventions serve as a forum for considering whether to forgive (Baskin and Enright 2004: 81–2). 10 See endnote 7, but also chapters in this volume by Worthington and Lamb and Baskin. 11 Marilyn McCord Adams gives perhaps the most detailed proto-process account when she describes “forgiveness from the heart” as a process whereby one lets go of one’s blaming point of view and adopts God’s forgiving point of view. This process may consist of many stages and will not be entirely within one’s voluntary control (1991: 294–5). 12 I say “extends,” but this should not be taken literally. The three models do not reference one another and Carse and Tirrell’s view predates Jaffro’s. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which their insights develop a single line of thought. 13 Arguably, a change of heart—or any internal transformation, no matter how difficult—could, in principle, be instantaneous, as it was for Saul on the road to Damascus. Those who find this point compelling may think of process accounts as describing the experience of some (or most) forgivers. 14 One could perhaps argue that a process ontology would provide a more illuminating account of forgiveness, but to my knowledge no one has suggested this. 15 Indeed, the fact that forgiveness is a process and takes place over time begins to seem like a generalization about—and thus a fact explained by—the series of particular mechanisms that bring about key events. 16 One could argue that punishment-forbearance accounts differ from process accounts in the same way. However, according to the most prominent such account, X forgives Y when (a) X believes that the world would be a worse place if she punished Y for her offense, and therefore (b) she refuses to punish Y (Zaibert 2009: 387). While there is a sense in which X could accomplish (a) and (b) instantaneously, a process theorist—especially someone like Jaffro—would point out that the gap between believing and refusing to act is precisely where weak agency becomes an obstacle to forgiveness. Whatever the distinction between Jaffro’s account and Zaibert’s, it does little to blunt the force of the Categorization Problem. 17 A further wrinkle in the discovery and forgiveness analogy is that we must distinguish accounts of how they could happen and how they actually happen. While both discovery and forgiveness must be sufficiently rational to count as what they are, both can also happen in ways that are not entirely rational. Edgar Allen Poe once described the process of composing his poem “The Raven,” but it’s unlikely that it happened as he described it. Our practices often look more rational when reverse engineered than they do in process. 18 Few accounts offer necessary and sufficient conditions on forgiveness and those who do often acknowledge other possible forms of forgiveness with different conditions (Milam 2017: fn. 5). 19 For its part, PPM suggests that, with the help of a counselor, forgiveness can be achieved through a series of voluntary actions. What the would-be forgiver lacks, on this view, is mostly the understanding of forgiveness necessary to pursue it effectively. 20 Thanks to Craig Agule, Daphne Brandenburg, Sofia Jeppsson, Benjamin Matheson, Glen Pettigrove, and Theron Pummer all of whom commented on drafts of this chapter, and to Barrett Emerick and Kate Norlock for literature recommendations and other advice. This chapter was written during a research fellowship funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant #2018-01156).

References Adams, M.M. 1991. “Forgiveness: A Christian Model.” Faith and Philosophy 8.3, 277–304. Akhtar, S. and J. Barlow. 2018. “Forgiveness Therapy for the Promotion of Mental Well-Being: A ­Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Trauma, Violence, and Abuse 19.1, 107–22.

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Process Accounts of Forgiveness Allais, L. 2008. “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36.1, 33–68. Allais, L. 2013. “Elective Forgiveness.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21.5, 637–53. Augsberger, D. 1981. Caring Enough Not to Forgive. Scottsdale, PA: Herald. Baskin, T.W. and R.D. Enright. 2004. “Intervention Studies on Forgiveness: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Counseling and Development 82, 79–90. Bennett, C. 2003. “Personal and Redemptive Forgiveness.” European Journal of Philosophy 11.2, 127–44. Bennett, C. 2018. “The Alteration Thesis: Forgiveness as a Normative Power.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 46.2, 207–33. Billingsley, J. and E.A.R. Losin. 2017. “The Neural Systems of Forgiveness: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective.” Frontiers in Psychology 8, 1–13. Blustein, J. 2014. Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Brandsma, J.M. 1982. “Forgiveness: A Dynamic Theological and Therapeutic Analysis.” Pastoral Psychology 31, 40–50. Calhoun, C. 1992. “Changing One’s Heart.” Ethics 103.1, 76–96. Carse, A.L. and L. Tirrell. 2010. “Forgiving Grave Wrongs” in Forgiveness in Perspective. Eds. Christopher R. Allers and Marieke Smit. New York: Rodopi, 43–65. Denton, R.T. and M.W. Martin. 1998. “Defining Forgiveness: An Empirical Exploration of Process and Role.” American Journal of Family Therapy 26.4, 281–92. Dupré, J. and D.J. Nicholson. 2018. “A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology” in Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Eds. J, Dupré and D.J. Nicholson. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 3–45. Enright, R.D. 2001. Forgiveness Is a Choice. Washington, DC: APA. Enright et al. 1991. “The Moral Development of Forgiveness” in Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development (Vol. 1: Theory). Eds. William W. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz. New York: Psychology Press, 123–52. Enright, R.D., E.A. Gassin, C. Wu. 1992. “Forgiveness: A Developmental View.” Journal of Moral Education 21.2, 99–114. Enright, R.D., S. Freedman, and J. Rique. 1998. “The Psychology of Interpersonal Forgiveness” in Exploring Forgiveness. Eds. R.D. Enright and J. North. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 46–62. Fehr, R., M.J. Gelfand, and M. Nag. 2010. “The Road to Forgiveness: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of Its Situational and Dispositional Correlates.” Psychological Bulletin 136.5, 894–914. Freedman, S. and W.R. Chang. 2010. “An Analysis of a Sample of the General Population’s Understanding of Forgiveness: Implications for Mental Health Counselors.” Journal of Mental Health Counseling 32.1, 5–34. Freedman, S., R.D. Enright, and J. Knutson. 2005. “A Progress Report on the Process Model of Forgiveness” in The Handbook of Forgiveness. Ed. E.L. Worthington. New York: Routledge, 393–406. Fricker, M. 2019. “Forgiveness—An Ordered Pluralism.” Australasian Philosophical Review 3.3, 241–60. Garrard, E. and D. McNaughton. 2003. “In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness.” Proceedings of the ­Aristotelian Society 103, 39–60. Govier, T. 2002. Forgiveness and Revenge. New York: Routledge. Griswold, C. 2007. Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hieronymi, P. 2001. “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness.” Philosophy and Phenomenological ­Research 62.3, 529–55. Holmgren, M.R. 2012. Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing. New York: Cambridge ­University Press. Hughes, P.M. and B. Warmke. 2017. “Forgiveness.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = Jaffro, L. 2018. “Forgiveness and Weak Agency.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118, 107–25. Karremans et al. 2003. “When Forgiving Enhances Psychological Well-Being: The Role of Interpersonal Commitment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.5, 1011–26. Kearns, J.N. and F.D. Fincham. 2004. “A Prototype Analysis of Forgiveness.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30.7, 838–55. Kohlberg, L. 1984. The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages. New York: Harper and Row. Lamb, S. 2005. “Forgiveness Therapy: The Context and Conflict.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 25.1, 62–80.

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Per-Erik Milam Larsen et al. 2012. “The Immediate and Delayed Cardiovascular Benefits of Forgiving.” Psychosomatic ­Medicine 74, 745–50. Lawler-Row et al. 2008. “Forgiveness, Physiological Reactivity and Health: The Role of Anger.” ­International Journal of Psychophysiology 68, 51–8. Lee, Y. and R.D. Enright. 2019. “A Meta-Analysis of the Association between Forgiveness of Others and Physical Health.” Psychology and Health 34.5, 626–43. Loewen, J.A. 1970. “Four Kinds of Forgiveness.” Practical Anthropology 11.4, 153–68. Lugg, A. 1985. “The Process of Discovery.” Philosophy of Science 52, 207–20. MacLachlan, A. 2010. “Unreasonable Resentments.” Journal of Social Philosophy 41.4, 422–41. McCullough, M.E. and E.L. Worthington. 1995. “Promoting Forgiveness: The Comparison of Two Brief Psychoeducational Interventions with a Wait-List Control.” Counseling and Values 40, 55–68. McCullough, M.E., E.L. Worthington, and K.C. Rachal. 1997. “Interpersonal Forgiving in Close ­Relationships.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73.2, 321–36. McCullough et al. 2001. “Vengefulness: Relationships with Forgiveness, Rumination, Well-Being, and the Big Five.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27.5, 601–10. McNulty, J.K. 2008. “Forgiveness in Marriage: Putting the Benefits into Context.” Journal of Family ­Psychology 22.1, 171–5. McNulty J.K. and F.D. Fincham. 2012. “Beyond Positive Psychology? Toward a Contextual View of ­Psychological Processes and Well-Being.” American Psychologist 67.2, 101–10. Milam, P. 2017. “How Is Self-Forgiveness Possible? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98, 49–69. Milam, P. 2018. “Against Elective Forgiveness.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21, 569–84. Milam, P. 2019. “Reasons to Forgive.” Analysis 79.2, 242–51. Morris, H. 1988. “Murphy on Forgiveness.” Criminal Justice Ethics 7.2, 15–19. Murphy, J.G. 2003. Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits. New York: Oxford University Press. Murphy, J.G. and J. Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Neblett, W.R. 1974. “Forgiveness and Ideals.” Mind 83.330, 269–75. Nelkin, D. 2013. “Freedom and Forgiveness” in Free Will and Responsibility. Eds. I. Haji and J. Caouette. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 165–88. Pettigrove, G. 2012. Forgiveness and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popper, K. 1934. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pronk et al. 2010. “What It Takes to Forgive: When and Why Executive Functioning Facilitates ­Forgiveness.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98.1, 119–31. Richards, N. 1988. “Forgiveness.” Ethics 99.1, 77–97. Schickore, J. 2018. “Scientific Discovery.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Seibt, J. 2021. “Process Philosophy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = Strelan, P. and T. Covic. 2006. “A Review of Forgiveness Process Models and a Coping Framework to Guide Future Research.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 25.10, 1059–85. Walker, M.U. 2006. Moral Repair. New York: Cambridge University Press. Warmke, B. 2016. “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94.4, 687–703. Warmke, B. and M. McKenna. 2013. “Moral Responsibility, Forgiveness, and Conversation” in Free Will and Responsibility. Eds. I. Haji and J. Caouette. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. 189–212. Whewell, W. 1840. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. London: Harrison and Co. Younger, J.W. et al. 2004. “Dimensions of Forgiveness: The Views of Laypersons.” Journal of Social and ­Personal Relationships 21.6, 837–55. Zaibert, L. 2009. “The Paradox of Forgiveness.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6, 365–93. Zechmeister, J.S. and C. Romero. 2002. “Victim and Offender Accounts of Interpersonal Conflict: ­Autobiographical Narratives of Forgiveness and Unforgiveness.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, 675–86.

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22 FORGIVENESS AND AGENCY Jada Twedt Strabbing

Agents forgive and receive forgiveness. In this chapter, I explore connections between ­forgiveness and agency. In Section 1, I ask what kind of agents can aptly give and receive forgiveness. I focus primarily on what it takes to be a candidate for forgiveness—i.e., a person who can be an apt target of forgiveness—arguing that such a candidate must be a morally accountable agent. I then use this argument to claim that a forgiver must also be a morally accountable agent. Thus, apt forgiveness takes place only in accountability relationships. In Section 2, I focus on the agency that we manifest when we forgive. In short, to forgive is to have a set of attitudes, not to perform an action. Even so, forgiveness is deeply agential: it is constituted by attitudes that are sensitive to the normative reasons that we take ourselves to have. Hence forgiveness is a state formed and maintained by rational agency. In developing the argument in Section 2, I canvas a variety of views of forgiveness and, by way of illustration, contend that my own view overcomes some difficulties that other views face. But I neither aim to provide a comprehensive treatment of the various accounts of forgiveness nor argue that my view is correct.

1.  The Kind of Agents that Give and Receive Forgiveness Standardly, we forgive people for actions. Perhaps we also forgive people for other things, such as their attitudes or even who they are (Bell 2008), but when we do, we still forgive agents whose actions flow from those attitudes and characters. Further, if something is not an agent, it is not a legitimate target of forgiveness. If my computer crashes, causing me to lose important data, I cannot forgive my computer unless I mistakenly think of it as somehow having acted. Thus, only agents are apt targets of forgiveness. But what kind of agency makes one an apt target of forgiveness? To answer this question, distinguish two related senses of what it is to be an apt target of ­forgiveness. In the first sense, an apt target of forgiveness is what I call a ‘candidate’ for ­forgiveness—i.e., a being with the capacities required to be aptly forgiven. In this sense, the average adult is a candidate for forgiveness, whereas cats and computers are not. In the second sense, a legitimate target is a person who may reasonably be forgiven in some particular case because, say, they acted wrongly without an excuse. Someone’s being a legitimate target in the first sense is necessary but not sufficient for their being a legitimate target in the second sense. After all, only candidates for forgiveness can reasonably be forgiven in some instance, but one can be a candidate for forgiveness without, say, having done anything wrong. I am interested here in determining DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-28

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the kind of agency required to be a candidate for forgiveness. Because being a candidate for ­forgiveness is necessary for being reasonably forgiven in a specific case, we can appeal to specific cases to illuminate the kind of agency I am after. What kind of agency makes one a candidate for forgiveness? To start, it requires more than the ability to act intentionally. If a hawk swoops down and snatches your favorite hat, it acts intentionally, but it is not a candidate for forgiveness. Why not? Notice that the hawk does not act wrongly in snatching your favorite hat, since hawks are not beings that can act morally rightly or wrongly. To be a candidate for forgiveness, a being must be capable of acting wrongly. This is unsurprising, since we standardly forgive someone for wronging us. A being capable of acting wrongly is a moral agent—i.e., a being whose actions and attitudes can be appropriately evaluated morally. Therefore, only moral agents are candidates for forgiveness. Animals and infants are not because they are not moral agents. Being a moral agent is necessary for being a candidate for forgiveness. Is it also sufficient? The answer turns on whether moral agency is not merely necessary but also sufficient for another kind of agency, the one at the heart of being a candidate for forgiveness. To get at that kind of agency, it is helpful to think of specific cases. If someone harms you but has a good excuse—say, someone threatened to harm her children if she did not betray your confidence—then forgiveness is inappropriate. Cases like this show that forgiveness is only appropriate toward blameworthy agents. This makes sense, given that we typically assume that when you blame someone, you have not forgiven her, and if you have forgiven someone, then you no longer blame her. In fact, we typically associate forgiveness with foreswearing or eliminating resentment, which is widely considered to be a form of blame. Thus, a candidate for forgiveness is an agent with the capacities to be ­blameworthy—i.e., a morally responsible agent. On some views, being a moral agent is sufficient for being a morally responsible agent. For example, according to Stephen Darwall, morality is grounded in moral accountability relationships, and an agent acts wrongly in virtue of being blameworthy for his action absent an excuse (Darwall 2010: 143, 2006: 93). Thus, on Darwall’s view, an agent must be a morally responsible agent to even act wrongly and, so, to be a moral agent. For T. M. Scanlon (1998) and Angela Smith (2005), being morally responsible for an action or attitude is a matter of being answerable for it, which means that others can reasonably ask one to justify or defend the action or attitude. Smith focuses on attitudes, and on her version, agents are responsible for attitudes that have a rational connection to their evaluative judgments. An upshot is that being a morally responsible agent is a matter of having the capacity to make and respond to morally evaluative judgments. And since it is reasonable to think that this capacity is necessary for being an agent whose actions and attitudes can be evaluated morally, it is reasonable to think that being morally responsible is necessary for being a moral agent. However, on other views, being morally responsible requires capacities beyond those of moral agency. For example, Susan Wolf (1987/2003) and R. Jay Wallace (1994) argue that being morally responsible requires the ability to recognize and respond to actual moral reasons. That capacity is more than is required for moral agency, since psychopaths act wrongly when they, say, empty a lover’s bank account, even though they plausibly lack the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons (Watson 2011). For the purposes of this chapter, I need not take a stand on this controversial issue. What matters is that morally responsible agents and only morally responsible agents are the appropriate targets of forgiveness. There is a further complication. Some philosophers claim that there is more than one kind of moral responsibility. For example, Gary Watson (1996/2004) distinguishes two kinds of moral responsibility: attributability and accountability. Attributability is the kind of moral responsibility that agents have for actions that express who they are morally, making it appropriate to evaluate them morally for those actions. In my view, attributable actions are those that are “up to” the 300

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agent, in the sense that she has control over the fact that she performs them. This explains both why attributability is a type of responsibility and why it is appropriate to evaluate agents morally for attributable actions (Strabbing 2016). Accountability is the kind of moral responsibility that agents have for actions that makes it appropriate for others to hold them accountable for those actions. Reactive attitudes—e.g., resentment, indignation, and gratitude—are central to our practice of holding others accountable, and so we can identify whether agents are accountable based upon whether reactive attitudes are appropriate toward them. For those who make the distinction, very young children and psychopaths are common examples of agents who are attributionally responsible but not accountable for their actions. The idea is that it is appropriate to evaluate them morally for their actions—e.g., as selfish—because their wrong actions express who they are morally, but it is inappropriate to, say, resent them for those actions, since they lack at least some capacities required to be accountable. Here it does not matter whether we can identify what these accountability-making capacities are, but I mentioned a candidate above: the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. There may be other types of responsibility. For example, David Shoemaker (2011, 2015) holds that there is a third kind of responsibility called answerability. For my purposes, the important question is this: if there is more than one kind of moral responsibility, what kind makes one a candidate for forgiveness? The answer is accountability. I see three reasons for this. First, consider the standard case in which the wrongdoer sincerely apologizes to the victim and the victim forgives the wrongdoer. In sincerely apologizing, the wrongdoer holds herself accountable to the victim and so must be an accountable agent. Even though not all cases of forgiveness involve the wrongdoer apologizing, it seems that the wrongdoer must be at least capable of holding herself accountable to the victim through sincere apology or some other act of contrition in order to be a candidate for forgiveness. After all, even in cases in which the victim forgives an unrepentant wrongdoer, we assume that the wrongdoer is capable of repentance and that it would be better if the wrongdoer were repentant. This point is supported by the second reason for thinking that a candidate for forgiveness must be an accountable agent: forgiveness plausibly aims at reconciliation, and so it is reasonable to think that a candidate for forgiveness can achieve that aim. Since reconciliation occurs only in accountability relationships, a candidate for forgiveness must be an accountable agent. Finally, if, as many think, forgiving involves forswearing or overcoming negative reactive attitudes, such as resentment and indignation, then a candidate for forgiveness must be an accountable agent. This is because only accountable agents are candidates for reactive attitudes, and hence, if forgiveness requires overcoming negative reactive attitudes, then only accountable agents are candidates for forgiveness. In claiming that candidates for forgiveness must be accountable agents, I do not rule out forgiving someone who is no longer an accountable agent, such as a dead person or a person who develops severe dementia. In such cases, we forgive the person they were when they committed the wrong, a person who was then an accountable agent. What about forgiving young children? You might think that we can forgive young children even though they are not accountable agents. I do not think that young children serve as a counterexample to my claim that candidates for forgiveness must be accountable agents. Very young children, such as babies and toddlers, are neither accountable agents nor candidates for forgiveness. (Of course, we may sometimes treat toddlers as both accountable agents and candidates for forgiveness in order to help develop the requisite capacities in them.) With respect to young children older than toddlers, it is important to remember that accountability comes in degrees. As children develop, they become more and more accountable until they are fully so. Before children are fully accountable agents, it is reasonable to say that they are partially accountable agents. They are partially accountable agents in the sense that a) they are accountable for some actions but not others, and b) with respect to what they are accountable for, their accountability 301

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comes in degrees. A seven-year-old may be fully accountable for hitting his younger brother, partially accountable for telling a lie to get out of trouble, and not at all accountable for failing to notice another’s distress. It all depends on the child’s capacities. In my view, children are also partial candidates for forgiveness, and they are partial candidates for forgiveness to the extent that they are partially accountable agents. This means that children are candidates for forgiveness with respect to the wrong actions for which they are accountable but otherwise are not candidates for forgiveness. Thus, the seven-year-old who is accountable for hitting his younger brother but not for failing to notice another’s distress is a candidate for forgiveness with respect to the former action but not the latter. (Here I set aside the complication of degrees of accountability.) In my view, then, children are candidates for forgiveness to the extent to which they are accountable agents, which is only partial. I have just argued that candidates for forgiveness must be accountable agents. For those who think that there is merely one kind of moral responsibility, then an accountable agent just is a morally responsible agent. For those who think that there is more than one kind of moral responsibility, accountability is the kind of moral responsibility relevant to forgiveness. Thus, for those who distinguish attributability and accountability, a psychopath would be attributionally responsible for emptying his lover’s bank account, since the action expresses the psychopath’s cruelty; but the psychopath is not a candidate for forgiveness, since he lacks the capacities required to be an accountable agent. Just as candidates for forgiveness must be accountable agents, those who can forgive must also be accountable agents. Since forgiveness aims at reconciliation, forgivers must be capable of reconciliation and so must stand in accountability relationships with others. Thus, the kind of agency that makes someone a person who can forgive is accountable agency. Forgiveness, then, must take place in accountability relationships.

2.  What Agents Do When They Forgive In this section, I focus on an important further question about a forgiver’s agency: what is it that accountable agents do when they forgive? When we think about forgiveness, we naturally think of private attitudes toward the wrongdoer and acts characteristic of forgiveness. Attitudes are central to forgiveness, since someone who feels intense resentment and bitterness toward the wrongdoer has clearly not forgiven the wrongdoer, no matter what they claim. Acts characteristic of forgiveness are also important, as they play a crucial role in human relationships. In the standard case of forgiveness, the wrongdoer repents, and the victim responds, “I forgive you,” which brings about reconciliation between them. An account of forgiveness must make sense of both the attitudes and acts central to forgiveness. Standardly, the acts characteristic of forgiveness are speech acts: sincerely saying to the wrongdoer “I forgive you” or another phrase intended to convey the same thing, like “I accept your apology” or “Don’t give it another thought. We’re good.” But they need not be speech acts so understood. Holding out one’s arms for a hug or simply smiling may serve the same function in the right context. Acts characteristic of forgiveness are intentional actions and so are clear instances of agency. In contrast to actions, you might think that attitudes are not manifestations of agency. But that is not so. As I argue later, the attitudes central to forgiveness are formed and maintained by rational agency. In fact, I make the case that forgiveness is not even partially constituted by an action but is rather a state constituted by certain attitudes. The fact that this state is formed and maintained by rational agency gives forgiveness a deep connection to agency. As for the acts characteristic of forgiveness, I claim that they communicate forgiveness and commit the forgiver to treating the wrongdoer accordingly, but they do not even partly constitute forgiveness. 302

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Begin by thinking about acts characteristic of forgiveness. I will focus on the speech act p­ erformed in uttering “I forgive you,” but what I say will apply to other such acts, verbal or nonverbal. What do we do when we sincerely say “I forgive you” to a wrongdoer? As J. L. Austin (1962/1975) claims, we typically perform different acts when we utter a sentence. First, we perform a locutionary act, which is standardly the act of uttering a sentence with a certain meaning. We also thereby perform illocutionary acts, which are acts that we perform in uttering a sentence, such as demanding, warning, suggesting, inquiring, expressing preferences, and expressing attitudes. For example, in saying “I would like you to turn down your music,” you might be making a demand or expressing a preference, depending on your intentions and the context. Which illocutionary acts do we standardly perform in sincerely uttering “I forgive you”? Joram Haber (1991) and Glen Pettigrove (2004) claim that in sincerely uttering “I forgive you,” an agent performs a behabitive, where a ‘behabitive’ is Austin’s term for an illocutionary act that expresses the speaker’s attitudes toward someone. Examples of behabitives are actions in which one utters sentences such as “I congratulate you” and “I welcome you,” which (when sincerely uttered) express the speaker’s attitudes toward their target. Sincerely uttering “I forgive you” counts as a behabitive because it expresses our attitudes toward the wrongdoer. For example, we may express that we no longer resent them or that we desire to continue our relationship with them. Glen Pettigrove (2004) says that we typically perform a further illocutionary act—a ­commissive—in saying, “I forgive you.” A commissive is the kind of illocutionary act that commits the speaker to a certain course of conduct. “I promise to pick you up at the airport” or “I swear that I will never let you down” are examples of commissives because, in uttering those sentences, the speaker commits to behaving in certain ways. Pettigrove plausibly argues that, in sincerely saying “I forgive you,” we commit ourselves to future courses of action, such as foreswearing hostile attitudes toward the wrongdoer and having some appropriate level of commitment to their well-being (2004: 385). Brandon Warmke (2016) argues that, in sincerely saying “I forgive you,” an agent performs a declarative act. A declarative is an illocutionary act that changes reality in line with what is expressed by a sentence. For example, when uttered under the right conditions, “I christen this ship” makes it the case that the ship is christened. And, when said in the right circumstances, “I pronounce you duly married” makes it the case that the couple standing before the officiant is married. If sincerely uttering “I forgive you” is a declarative, as Warmke argues, then saying it to a wrongdoer under the right conditions—e.g., those in which the forgiver has the appropriate standing to forgive— makes it the case that the wrongdoer is forgiven. Warmke claims that paradigmatic expressions of forgiveness must have declarative force in order to account for what he calls the Post-Forgiveness Fact: that “paradigmatic cases of forgiving alter the norms of interaction for both the victim and the wrongdoer in certain characteristic ways” (2016: 690). In other words, in paradigmatic cases of forgiveness, the forgiver changes which norms govern the interactions between herself and the wrongdoer. For example, prior to forgiveness, the forgiver has the right to continue blaming the wrongdoer, and the wrongdoer has the obligation to make restitution or amends. In forgiving, the forgiver gives up this right and releases the wrongdoer from the obligations incurred by the wrongdoing. If Warmke is correct that the only way to explain this alteration in norms is to posit that paradigmatic acts of forgiveness have declarative force, then paradigmatic forgiveness is at least partially constituted by a declarative illocutionary act. We have, I believe, good reason to deny this. When we sincerely utter “I forgive you,” we thereby express attitudes that we have toward the wrongdoer, but we do not bring forth forgiveness in the way that a wedding officiant creates a married couple. After all, by their very nature, declaratives are public actions; there is no such thing as private marrying. But there can be private, non-communicated forgiveness. It follows that forgiveness is not even partially constituted by a 303

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declarative. Note that I am not saying that forgiveness must take place before the communication of it. We might change our attitudes toward the wrongdoer as we say “I forgive you” or even after we say it. The point is that, whatever constitutes forgiveness, it must be something that can go uncommunicated. Warmke rightly accepts that private forgiveness occurs, but he takes it to be non-paradigmatic. That allows him consistently to claim both that paradigmatic forgiveness is partially constituted by a declarative illocutionary act and that private forgiveness occurs. However, I think that private forgiveness is far too pervasive to be non-paradigmatic. We often forgive those to whom it is impossible or ill-advised to communicate forgiveness: the dead, the long-lost friend, the unrepentant, the abuser. Note that this argument against Warmke’s view implies a stronger conclusion: forgiveness is not even partially constituted by the performance of an illocutionary act, declarative or otherwise. For if forgiveness were so constituted, this would wrongly imply that private forgiveness is either impossible or non-paradigmatic. But what about Warmke’s claim that the only way to explain the alteration in norms is by accepting that paradigmatic forgiveness partially consists in the performance of a declarative illocutionary act? If what I have said above is correct, then there must be some other way to explain the alteration in norms. Warmke is skeptical that this is possible. He argues against the widespread view of forgiveness as foreswearing resentment by noting that it explains neither how a victim gives up the right to engage in blaming behaviors toward the wrongdoer nor how the wrongdoer is released from, say, the obligation to make restitution. I am unsure whether this is correct. But even if it is, forgiveness could be just a matter of having certain attitudes, if having those attitudes explains the alteration in norms. I will use my view of forgiveness to illustrate the point, but there may be other views that do the same. According to the view I defend, forgiveness is openness to reconciliation with the wrongdoer with respect to the wrongdoing (Strabbing 2020). What does it mean to be “open to reconciliation” with a wrongdoer? Imagine that your friend has betrayed your confidence and later repents and apologizes, wanting to repair the friendship. You could respond, “I am open to reconciling with you, but first I need some time to cool off.” Or you could say, “I am open to reconciling with you, but first I’d like you to make it up to me by helping me assemble my Ikea furniture.” Neither reply expresses openness to reconciliation in the sense that I have in mind. As I understand openness to reconciliation, the first statement amounts to: “I will be open to reconciling with you after I have time to cool off.” The second amounts to: “I will be open to reconciling with you if you help me assemble my Ikea furniture.” After all, such statements do not express forgiveness but rather that forgiveness will be forthcoming if or after a certain condition is met. Instead, as I understand openness to reconciliation, a victim is open to reconciliation in virtue of having attitudes and intentions toward the wrongdoer such that, if the wrongdoer were repentant, they would be reconciled. Intuitively, we could think of this as the victim playing her part in the reconciliation. This view makes forgiveness a matter of having certain attitudes toward the wrongdoer, and yet it accounts for the alteration in norms that Warmke points out. In being open to reconciliation, the forgiver commits to not blaming the wrongdoer. In so committing herself, the forgiver thereby renders herself liable to correction, reproach, or the like, if she were to continue to blame. Further, in being open to reconciliation, the forgiver commits herself to releasing the wrongdoer from the obligation to make restitution or amends. After all, unless the victim has such commitments, she has not played her part in the reconciliation. Thus, at least one attitudinal-based view can account for the alteration in norms that Warmke discusses. I have just argued that, although some illocutionary acts play a role in our practices of forgiveness, forgiveness does not partially consist in the performance of illocutionary acts, declarative or otherwise. But could forgiveness be partially constituted by other types of actions, such as mental 304

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acts? I propose to answer this question by evaluating some prominent views of forgiveness to see whether they are best understood as incorporating such actions. Start by considering the widespread view that forgiveness is foreswearing resentment. At first glance, foreswearing resentment may look like a mental action, something one does in order to eliminate resentment. If foreswearing resentment is a mental action, then this view is one on which forgiveness is simply a mental act. But I do not think that this is the correct way to understand the view. Mental acts, even if they take significant time to complete, are episodes; they occur, and then they are done. When you perform a mental calculation or think a thought, you do it, and it is over. That is not the case with foreswearing resentment. Foreswearing resentment must be maintained. After all, your resentment toward the wrongdoer could and sometimes does return. You may forgive someone and then dwell on the offense again, only to find your resentment returning. A satisfactory view of forgiveness should allow for this, as we can move from forgiveness back to unforgiveness. It may be wrong to do so, especially if we have communicated forgiveness and thereby overtly committed ourselves to forgiving. But it is possible. The upshot is that the best way to understand the view that forgiveness is foreswearing resentment is to think of foreswearing resentment as a state, one that we can move in and out of and must be maintained. I want to draw attention to problems that this view faces, since overcoming them will provide additional support for the idea that forgiveness is a state. Here is one problem: the view that forgiveness is foreswearing resentment has difficulty distinguishing forgiveness from moving on. To see this, notice that foreswearing resentment eliminates resentment, but not just any elimination of resentment counts as foreswearing it. Forgetting about the wrongdoing eliminates resentment but is not foreswearing it. Foreswearing resentment is done for reasons. But moving on from an offense also eliminates resentment and is responsive to reasons. For example, you may relinquish resentment toward someone because you simply do not want that person to affect you anymore. You may say to yourself, “She isn’t worth my being angry at.” That is clearly moving on, not forgiveness. Jeffrie Murphy (2003) attempts to distinguish forgiveness from moving on by claiming that forgiveness is foreswearing resentment on moral grounds. Of course, to count as forgiveness, foreswearing resentment cannot be done on just any moral grounds. If I foreswear resentment toward a fellow emergency room doctor on the grounds that our working together well will save many lives, I have not forgiven her. Murphy claims that foreswearing resentment must be done for the right moral reasons. He lists five: the offender repented; he meant well; he has already suffered enough; he has been subjected to humiliation; for old times’ sake. He argues that these reasons fit under the unifying category of separating act from agent. I doubt that Murphy’s response works. It seems to me that someone could move on from an offense, rather than forgive, for the reasons he lists. For example, someone may move on because the wrongdoer has already suffered enough. Further, someone may forgive for reasons other than the ones that he lists, such as a desire to be at peace with others. Yet the underlying problem is not with Murphy’s particular list of reasons. The problem is that his view builds the reasons for foreswearing resentment into an account of forgiveness. These reasons then determine whether forgiveness occurs. This is counterintuitive because we can forgive for many different reasons, including bad ones. The upshot is that, in forgiving, agents need not be motivated by any particular reason. Since both foreswearing resentment and moving on involve eliminating resentment for reasons, and can be done for the very same reasons, the view that forgiveness is foreswearing resentment cannot adequately distinguish forgiving from moving on. There is another problem with the view. As I have argued elsewhere (Strabbing 2020), forgiveness has the power to effect reconciliation with a repentant offender; the view that forgiveness is foreswearing resentment cannot account for that power. This is because reconciliation requires both parties to have emotional movement toward the other. However, simply eliminating 305

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a negative emotion cannot explain the emotional movement toward the offender required for forgiveness to effect reconciliation. If this is correct, the view that forgiveness is foreswearing resentment can neither adequately distinguish forgiveness from moving on nor explain the emotional movement toward the offender required for forgiveness to effect reconciliation. To overcome these problems, it is reasonable to think that a view of forgiveness must incorporate positive attitudes toward the wrongdoer, a maneuver that bolsters the idea that forgiveness is a state. For example, on another prominent view, to forgive is to foreswear hostile attitudes toward the wrongdoer and have some positive regard toward him.1 Different versions of this view cash out “positive regard” differently. For example, Eve Garrard and David McNaughton (2010) understand it as good will, Aurel Kolnai (1973) as trust, David Novitz (1998) as compassion, and Jean Hampton (1988) as reapproval. By bringing in the notion of positive regard, this view avoids the two problems noted above: it distinguishes forgiveness from moving on and rightly acknowledges that forgiveness requires emotional movement toward the offender. Importantly, having positive regard toward someone is a state of having certain positive attitudes toward them. Additionally, as I argued above, foreswearing hostile attitudes toward someone is also best understood as a state, one that must be maintained, since we can move from forgiveness back to unforgiveness. Therefore, on this more plausible view, forgiveness is a state. It is a state of having certain attitudes toward the wrongdoer. You might object that a view on which forgiveness is simply a matter of having certain attitudes incorrectly makes forgiveness something that merely happens to agents, rather than a genuine manifestation of agency. After all, it may seem that genuine manifestations of agency are ones in which agents try or intend to do things. But, typically, we cannot directly intend or try to have attitudes. If we want to have some attitude but do not, we must instead intend or try to do actions that put ourselves in position to have that attitude. For example, emotions and beliefs are not the result of directly intending or trying to have them. When we fail to muster indignation toward the brutal dictator we hear about in the news, the solution is not to try to feel indignant. Instead, we must perform other intentional actions to put ourselves in position to feel indignant, such as dwelling on the atrocities he has committed. Similarly, when we fail to believe something for which we think there is good evidence, the solution is not to directly try to believe it, but to dwell on the evidence. The same seems true of forgiveness. If we want to forgive but have not, we must intend or try to act in ways that put ourselves in position to forgive, such as reflecting on the fact that we sometimes need forgiveness ourselves, directing our attention to the fact that the wrongdoer is repentant, reminding ourselves that we would like to be on good terms with the wrongdoer again, and so on. Thus, the worry is that, if forgiveness is constituted by attitudes toward the wrongdoer, forgiveness is not a manifestation of agency; agency only comes in with respect to putting ourselves in the best position to forgive. This objection is misplaced. Consider beliefs. Although we cannot will ourselves to believe something, beliefs are formed and maintained by rational agency. This is because beliefs are sensitive to the normative reasons that we take ourselves to have. (As T. M. Scanlon (1998) puts it, beliefs are judgment-sensitive attitudes.) In other words, beliefs are formed and maintained by our responsiveness to what we take to be the normative reasons for and against them. Roughly, a normative reason for something is a consideration that counts in favor of it. The fact that others can reasonably ask us to justify our beliefs shows that beliefs are sensitive to the normative reasons that we take ourselves to have. Of course, what we take to be a normative reason for a belief may not actually be one. And sometimes we may even lack conscious access to what we take those reasons to be. But the fact that we expect ourselves to be able to offer considerations in favor of our beliefs shows that our beliefs are responsive to the reasons we take ourselves to have. The upshot is that, even though beliefs are plausibly not under our direct control, they are not passive. They are formed and maintained by rational agency. 306

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Object-directed emotions are also sensitive to the normative reasons that we take ourselves to have. This is because object-directed emotions present their targets as having certain evaluative features. Fear presents its target as dangerous. Indignation presents its target as having acted wrongly and as having features that make the target blameworthy for it. Envy presents it target as having features that make it enviable, such as having something good that one lacks. What exactly are these evaluative presentations? That is controversial. Cognitivist theories claim that emotions are at least partially constituted by propositional attitudes like beliefs, judgments, or thoughts that represent their targets as having certain features.2 Perceptual theories claim that emotions are evaluative perceptions of their objects, analogous to visual perceptions.3 Motivational theories claim that these presentations are interpretations into language of the emotional syndrome, including the motivational aspects.4 For my purposes, it does not matter which theory is correct. Whatever the nature of emotions’ evaluative presentations, these presentations typically are and should be responsive to the normative reasons we take ourselves to have. Typically, when we take something to be safe, we do not fear it; if we do fear it, we think that the fear is unjustified. Typically, if we realize that someone is not actually blameworthy, then our indignation towards them disappears; if we continue to feel indignation, we think that the indignation is unjustified. Thus, object-­ directed emotions are also formed and maintained by rational agency. Turn back now to forgiveness. It is reasonable to think that forgiveness consists in attitudes that are responsive to the reasons we take ourselves to have. When we forgive, we do so for reasons that, we think, do not just explain our forgiving but also justify it; we can reasonably ask each other to justify forgiving or not forgiving someone. For example, we may think that it is wrong not to forgive a close friend for a small slight because the friendship is so important. Or we may think that it is wrong to forgive someone who is unrepentant because it is demeaning (Hieronymi 2001). Or we may think that forgiveness is justified for self-interested reasons, like not wanting anger to consume us. In having views about when forgiveness is right or wrong, justified or unjustified, appropriate or inappropriate, we acknowledge that there are normative reasons to forgive and that the attitudes that constitute forgiveness should be responsive to them. Forgiveness is, in this way, a state formed and maintained by rational agency. To be clear, forming and maintaining a state does not require conscious awareness of that state. We can form and maintain beliefs without conscious awareness of them, and the same is true of emotions. For example, we can begin resenting someone without noticing it, only coming to see it when our hostile behavior toward the wrongdoer is brought to our attention. And we can maintain resentment without conscious awareness while we are immersed in something else. For my purposes, it does not matter how attitudes can be formed and maintained without awareness, but it is reasonable to think that dispositions play an important role. For example, one disposition that plausibly partly constitutes the state of foreswearing resentment is: if the wrongdoing came to mind, the agent would not feel hostile attitudes toward the wrongdoer. Even if my argument above is correct, you might still worry that forgiveness cannot simply be constituted by having certain attitudes on the grounds that it matters how one arrives at having those attitudes. To illustrate the worry, imagine that you could take a pill that gives you whichever attitudes are necessary for forgiving someone who has wronged you. If you take the pill and end up having those attitudes, you might think that you have not actually forgiven the wrongdoer. What seems to be missing is some mental act that forms those attitudes. If that is so, then perhaps forgiveness is partially constituted by having certain attitudes and partially constituted by the mental act of forming those attitudes. In my view, if you take such a pill and thereby have those attitudes, you do forgive the wrongdoer. The pill does not affect whether you forgive but rather how we should view you for forgiving. Typically, when a victim forgives, it is a credit to her, as we assume that she forgives for good reasons. (Set aside cases in which forgiving may be impermissible, imprudent, 307

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self-destructive, or the like.) More specifically, in typical cases when a victim forgives, the attitudes constitutive of forgiveness are formed and maintained by her rational agency, and so she deserves credit for forgiving. Yet, in unusual circumstances, those attitudes might not be formed by rational agency but by some nonrational cause, such as a pill. In such cases, the victim either deserves no credit for coming to forgive or deserves only derivative credit in the event, say, that she takes the pill in order to forgive and deserves direct credit for only that. Yet, the agent might still deserve some direct credit in such cases: she would deserve direct credit for continuing to have those attitudes, if the attitudes are maintained by her rational agency. It is therefore not a problem for the view that forgiveness is a state that it says that forgiveness can come about as a result of an external intervention, such as taking a pill. In such cases, the agent forgives but deserves no direct credit for coming to forgive; she would only deserve direct credit for maintaining that forgiveness. But could the attitudes constitutive of forgiveness be maintained by a nonrational cause, such as a long-lasting pill? And, if so, does the agent forgive? The attitudes constitutive of forgiveness could be maintained by a nonrational cause (although this strikes me as even more unusual than the attitudes being formed by a nonrational cause, especially as our attitudes are typically integrated to some extent). However, unlike in the case of forming those attitudes, the agent does not forgive unless those attitudes are maintained by her rational agency. This is because attitudes maintained by a nonrational cause plausibly do not belong to the agent; they are not attributable to her. Instead, they are simply implanted in her. Thus, she does not forgive unless the requisite attitudes are maintained by her rational agency. In support of this, note that the same plausibly holds for other attitudes that are responsive to reasons that we take ourselves to have. A belief could be formed by a nonrational cause, such as a pill. Even so, it counts as a belief—just one that the agent deserves no direct credit for (unlike in the case in which an agent forms a belief due to a particularly good assessment of reasons). Further, the agent would deserve direct credit for maintaining that belief, if the belief were maintained as a result of her rational agency. But if the belief were maintained by a nonrational cause, then the agent does not believe it. It is not her belief; rather, it is a belief implanted her. If forgiveness is a state, as I claim, under what conditions does it end? Clearly, forgiveness ends if the wrongdoer moves back into unforgiveness. It also ends if the forgiver permanently forgets about the offense. But it seems wrong to think that forgiveness is a state that otherwise continues. The aim of forgiveness is reconciliation, and it is reasonable to think that forgiveness ends when reconciliation is achieved. At that point, forgiveness has done its job. It has, along with the wrongdoer’s repentance, repaired the breach in the relationship done by the wrongdoing. In this way, forgiveness is analogous to a state like hope, which is also constituted by attitudes. When the aim of hope is achieved—when you obtain the thing you hoped for—you no longer hope for it, since you have it. (This assumes that certain epistemic conditions are met, such as that the agent is aware of obtaining the thing hoped for.) I think that ordinary language provides some support for this idea. Suppose that you forgive a wrongdoer before she repents. In this case, it is natural for others to ask you, “Have you forgiven her?”, and for you to respond, “I have forgiven her.” The verb form “have forgiven” indicates a present state, one that started at some point in the past. You are and have been in a state of forgiveness with respect to the wrongdoer and particular wrongdoing. But after reconciliation, it would be odd to say that you have forgiven the wrongdoer. Instead, you would say, “She repented, and I forgave her.” Forgiveness is no longer a present state. It is in the past. (And so is the repentance.) For example, if your partner apologizes for hurtful comments and you forgive her, it would be odd to say the next day that you forgive her or have forgiven her for those hurtful comments. You have reconciled, and it is over. You forgave her. I do not take this ordinary language argument to be definitive. But I do think that this argument provides support for something intuitive. Intuitively, 308

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forgiveness achieves its aim in reconciliation, and so it makes sense that forgiveness would no ­longer be a present state once reconciliation occurs. I think that this intuitive idea presents a problem for the above-mentioned view that forgiveness is foreswearing hostile attitudes toward the wrongdoer plus having positive regard for them. This view correctly makes forgiveness a continuing state, but it cannot adequately explain why forgiveness ends when reconciliation is achieved. After all, reconciliation is compatible with continuing to foreswear hostile attitudes toward the wrongdoer and having positive regard for them. This is not the only problem with how the view handles the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation. As I argue elsewhere (Strabbing 2020), this view (like the view that identifies forgiveness with forswearing resentment) does not adequately explain forgiveness’s power to effect reconciliation with repentant wrongdoers. This is because, however we understand the attitudes that constitute positive regard, the view may account for the power of forgiveness to reconcile some relationships, but it cannot explain that power across the full spectrum of relationships. For example, if we understand positive regard as good will, then foreswearing hostile attitudes plus having good will is plausibly enough to reconcile acquaintances, but reconciling close relationships requires more than good will. The view that forgiveness is openness to reconciliation solves these problems. Recall that a person is open to reconciliation in virtue of having attitudes and intentions toward the wrongdoer such that, if the wrongdoer were repentant, they would be reconciled. This view straightforwardly explains the power of forgiveness to effect reconciliation with repentant wrongdoers across the full spectrum of relationships. To see this, I need to explain one more feature of the view, which is that, on this view, forgiveness happens on different relationship levels, depending upon which type of relationship the victim is open to restoring. Thus, we can forgive a friend who betrayed our confidence as a friend or just as a person, depending upon whether we are open to restoring the friendship or just open to restoring something like a relationship of good will with her. This idea explains why forgiveness only sometimes reconciles a close relationship with a repentant offender. I say more about this elsewhere (Strabbing 2020). The point for now is that the view that forgiveness is openness to reconciliation explains the power of forgiveness to effect reconciliation across different kinds of relationships, as we can be open to reconciling different kinds of relationships. Further, this view explains why forgiveness is a state that ends when reconciliation occurs. Clearly, on this view, forgiveness is a state: it is the state of being open to reconciliation. This state is constituted by attitudes and intentions toward the wrongdoer, and hence it is formed and maintained by rational agency. Further, reconciliation puts an end to the state of being open to reconciliation because, once you are reconciled to the wrongdoer, there is no need to be open to it anymore. It has already happened. Whether this view is ultimately correct or not, the point is that an adequate view of forgiveness should not only make forgiveness a state but also explain why that state ends when reconciliation occurs. In this chapter, I have argued that accountable agents are the kind of agents that can give and receive forgiveness. Forgiveness is an interpersonal phenomenon that takes place in the context of accountability relationships. I have also argued that forgiveness is a state constituted by having certain attitudes toward the wrongdoer. Acts characteristic of forgiveness, such as the speech act performed by uttering “I forgive you,” are important because they express forgiveness and commit the agent to treating the wrongdoer as forgiven, but they do not even partially constitute forgiveness. But just because forgiveness is a state does not mean that it merely happens to agents. The attitudes that constitute forgiveness are responsive to the normative reasons that we take ourselves to have. The upshot is that forgiveness is a deeply agential phenomenon. It is a manifestation of our rational agency. 309

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to Daniel Jacobson, Glen Pettigrove, and, especially, Terence Cuneo for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1 This formulation of the general view follows (Pettigrove 2012: 8–9). 2 For cognitivist theories, see Solomon (1976), Greenspan (1988), and Nussbaum (2001).   3 For a perceptual theory, see Prinz (2004). For views close to the perceptual theory, see Roberts (2003) and Oddie (2005). 4 See D’Arms and Jacobson (2017).

References Austin, J.L. (1975) How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (eds.). ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (first edition 1962). Bell, M. (2008) “Forgiving Someone for Who They Are (and Not Just What They’ve Done),” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77(3): 625–58. D’Arms, J. and D. Jacobson. (2017) “Whither Sentimentalism? On Fear, the Fearsome, and the Dangerous,” in R. Debes and K. Stueber (eds.), Ethical Sentimentalism: New Perspectives (pp. 230–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwall, S. (2006) The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: ­Harvard University Press. Darwall, S. (2010) “But It Would Be Wrong,” Social Philosophy and Policy 27(2): 135–57. Garrard, E. and D. McNaughton. (2010) Forgiveness. Durham: Acumen. Greenspan, P. (1988) Emotions and Reasons. New York: Routledge. Haber, J.G. (1991) Forgiveness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hampton, J. (1988) “The Retributive Idea,” in J.G. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds.), Forgiveness and Mercy (pp. 111–61). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hieronymi, P. (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological ­Research 62(3): 529–55. Kolnai, A. (1973) “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74: 91–106. Murphy, J.G. (2003) Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits. New York: Oxford University Press. Novitz, D. (1998) “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 299–315. Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oddie, G. (2005) Value, Reality, and Desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, G. (2004) “The Forgiveness We Speak: The Illocutionary Force of Forgiving,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 42(3): 371–92. Pettigrove, G. (2012) Forgiveness and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prinz, J. (2004) Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, R.C. (2003) Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scanlon, T.M. (1998) What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Shoemaker, D. (2011) “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility,” Ethics 121(3): 602–32. Shoemaker, D. (2015) Responsibility from the Margins. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, A.M. (2005) “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life,” Ethics 115(2): 236–71. Solomon, R.C. (1976) The Passions. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Strabbing, J.T. (2020) “Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98(3): 531–45. Wallace, R.J. (1994) Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warmke, B. (2016) “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94(4): 687–703.

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Forgiveness and Agency Watson, G. (2004) “Two Faces of Responsibility,” in Agency and Answerability. Oxford: Oxford U ­ niversity Press (Original work published 1996) 260–288. Watson, G. (2011) “The Trouble with Psychopaths,” in R.J. Wallace, R. Kumar, and S. Freeman (eds) ­ Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon (pp. 307–31). New York: Oxford­ University Press. Wolf, S. (2003) “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility,” in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will. Oxford: ­Oxford ­University Press (Original work published 1987) 372–387.

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23 MEMORY AND THE SCOPE OF PERSONAL FORGIVENESS Crystal L’Hote

1.  The Standard Account What are we doing when we forgive someone? What happens when we, ourselves, are forgiven? On a standard philosophical account, forgiveness requires letting go of the negative emotions and attitudes associated with being wronged by someone, e.g., moral anger, resentment, or disappointment. Accordingly, if Claude betrays Sylvia’s confidence and Sylvia forgives him, she foregoes anger and commits to overcoming it in the future. Now, Sylvia may be less likely to confide in Claude in the future. That is to be expected and is compatible with forgiving him. Persistent anger and vengeance are not. Notably, on the standard account, forgiveness is not achieved by overcoming blame-feelings in any manner whatsoever. For example, Sylvia cannot forgive Claude just by taking a pill to delete her painful memories, even if doing so eliminates her anger. Genuine forgiveness requires overcoming hard feelings in the right way (and for the right reasons). If forgetting were sufficient for forgiveness, then someone who suffered severe memory loss would thereby forgive a multitude of possibly grievous – unforgivable? – wrongs. The total amnesiac would forgive all. A sufficiently violent blow to the head would be forgiven almost as soon as it was delivered, but a glancing blow wouldn’t be. These and other absurd consequences tell loudly against the wishful view that forgetting is forgiving. On the standard account, forgiveness is not achieved by pills, head injuries, or idly letting memories fade. On the contrary, forgetting impedes forgiveness by obscuring the moral reality that forgiveness is essentially fitted to meet. According to the standard account, a would-be forgiver must fully acknowledge the wrongdoer’s wrongdoing as such, however difficult or easy, rare or common, forgiveness may be as a result. Responses to wrongdoing that bypass this acknowledgement may be said to be ignorant in that respect. In a seminal essay, Hieronymi (2001) points to others. She says: If you try to forgive by saying to yourself, ‘look, these things happen all the time,’ or ‘I just can’t get upset by this,’ then you are giving up on either the seriousness of the wrong, saying it doesn’t rate being worked up about, or the worth of the wrongdoer, saying in effect that she is not worth the emotional difficulty. If you say to yourself, ‘you really can’t expect any better of her,’ you are not forgiving the offender, but rather adjusting your expectations of her, lowering her moral standing. If you try to forgive by thinking, ‘who am I to be angry about this; my hands are far from clean,’ then you are giving up on your own worth saying that your past wrongdoings somehow either undermine your ability to protest such treatment or 312

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make legitimate the mistreatment you received, in effect forfeiting your claim against being wronged, and so, in some sense, condoning her action. (Hieronymi 2001: 531) An ignorant response may enable us to overcome hard feelings and generally get along, but is not thereby a form of forgiveness. If Sylvia responds to Claude’s violation of her trust by deciding it was no big deal (minimizing), that he could not help it (excusing), that it was ultimately the right thing to do (condoning), or by refusing to think about it (ignoring), she is not forgiving him for what he has done. Now, those judgments might be correct. Perhaps what Claude did was insignificant, or he was drugged, or his revelation saved Sylvia’s life. For Sylvia to reach these conclusions, however, is for her to determine that forgiveness is unnecessary. Forgiveness makes sense only to the extent she thinks Claude did something wrong.1 To forgive Claude, Sylvia must acknowledge the wrongness of the wrong done, which means acknowledging his moral agency and her moral value, and nonetheless forgive him. Is this rare? Or common? Regardless, forgiveness is otherwise unintelligible. Philosophers disagree about many matters – e.g., whether forgiveness should wait on an apology, whether love demands it, or whether only victims can forgive. It is striking, then, how many converge on the view that forgiveness requires acknowledgment. Agreement about this seems stronger than any agreement about forgiveness’s affective requirements. Although ­Pettigrove (2012), for example, denies that would-be forgivers must initially feel things – like anger or ­resentment – he keeps to the idea that forgivers must acknowledge the wrongdoing as such. As cool as forgiveness may be, on his analysis, it cannot be blind. MacLachlan’s (2009) expansive pluralism, too, keeps to this requirement. Although she denies that forgiveness “necessitate[s] the (eventual) end to angry feelings,” MacLachlan (2009: 200) is sure that “it makes no sense to say, ‘I forgive you, and I think you did nothing wrong’.” If one believes that forgiveness is generally good, then forgiveness is at least one phenomenon that affirms a link between knowledge and goodness. Debates about this link, e.g., about whether virtue requires some kind of knowledge (or not), date back to the ancients. That knowledge sometimes enables goodness is clear: one who learns medicine can heal and save lives. Since the standard account requires forgivers to acknowledge wrongdoings, it may also provide modest support for a link.

2.  The Explicit Memory Imperative Of course, much depends on what it means for a forgiver to acknowledge a wrongdoer’s ­w rongdoing as such. And the room for disagreement is largely unmapped. In what follows, I advance what I call the explicit memory imperative (EMI). Here, I advance the strongest possible formulation of the imperative: forgivers must explicitly remember the wrongdoer’s wrongdoing as such.2 Three features merit emphasis. First, explicit remembering includes both episodic memories and beliefs about the past that are present to consciousness. Sylvia might replay the scene with Claude, recalling the place, occasion, people’s reactions, and so on. Or, if Sylvia was not there at the time, she might bring to consciousness that Claude violated her trust. Second, a would-be forgiver must remember (present tense) the wrongdoing. It is not enough to have remembered the wrongdoing at some point in the past. If Sylvia explicitly remembered the event five years ago and it hasn’t since crossed her mind, then her explicit memory is not appropriately connected to any present change in her attitude toward Claude. The memory does not figure in. And it must. Third, false memories or quasi-memories of the past will not do. This is not to deny the selectivity, narrativity, or subjectivity of memory. But it is to deny that we can be forgiven for things we did not do. Below, I defend the EMI against common objections. The first objection, often raised by non-philosophers, is that forgiveness requires forgetting the past. The second objection is that we 313

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can and do forgive what we do not remember, not only past wrongdoings but also wrongdoings in the future. If we could forgive wrongdoings in advance, the EMI would be false for the simple reason that we humans cannot remember the future. After treating these two objections, I explore refinements to the EMI and suggest a way forward.

3.  Objection: Forgiveness Requires Forgetting Blustein (2014: 111) defines rumination as “repetitive thinking about the causes, consequences, and symptoms of one’s negative affect,” noting that one might ruminate about wrongs suffered or committed, how they feel, or the consequences of feeling that way. Blustein reasons: since rumination is connected to heightened negative emotions like anger, and persistent anger is incompatible with forgiveness, it follows that forgiveness requires putting a stop to rumination. In Blustein’s analysis, interrupting rumination is a kind of forgetting. Rightly noting that the word “­ forgetting” is ambiguous, he reasonably defines it as reducing the (relative) accessibility of memory to consciousness. Accordingly, if focusing on the present or future keeps a ruminator from thinking about past wrongs, it is conducive to forgiveness. “Forget and (or so that you can) forgive,” he adds (Blustein 2014: 124). Blustein does not recommend deleting or obliterating memories but just making them less accessible to consciousness. However, Blustein oversimplifies the nature of the obstacle even in the special case of the ruminator. What makes ruminative memories a barrier to forgiveness is not their accessibility. Consider Breonna, whom Isaiah left stranded at the airport after promising to pick her up. If Breonna thinks and talks about Isaiah’s broken promise for months on end, it is reasonable to doubt that she has forgiven him or is ready to do so. In the typical case, forgivers do not repeatedly revisit their memories of being wronged. Forgive and forget is the usual order of things. It is also thought by some to be the divine order of things. As Volf (2006: 132–35) notes, Christian theologians from Gregory (of Nyssa) to Rahner have claimed forgiveness requires forgetting, an idea also confirmed by the Hebrew Bible, wherein God promises to “forgive… and remember their sin no more” (31: 34). The relationship between divine and human memory is beyond this chapter’s scope. But note that Breonna may be a philosopher who writes about forgiveness and frequently reflects on this example from her life. She may be an artist, and the event may figure into her creative ­ reonna may be lovingly interested in Isaiah’s whole person and sustain this attitude while work. B ­continuing to reflect on his actions. Or, like real-life Nima Veiseh, Breonna may have a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). “Some say forgive and forget, but since forgetting is a luxury I don’t have,” says Veiseh, “I need to learn to genuinely forgive” (Robson 2016). These possibilities suggest that what presents an obstacle to forgiveness, even in the particular case of the ruminator, is not the high accessibility of their memories but the affective attitude that so often accompanies high accessibility.3 And if forgetting need not follow forgiveness, there is less reason to think forgetting must precede forgiveness. As Volf also notes, we find even in Dante the view that “the redeemed can forget their sins only after they have faced their sins’ reality unadorned” (2006: 142). Phenomenologist Ricoeur seems to go beyond Blustein in asserting that all of us – i.e., not only the ruminator – must forget to forgive. “Forgiveness pairs up with forgetting: is it not a sort of happy forgetting?” he asks. But Ricoeur goes on: “Even more fundamentally, is it not the figure of reconciled memory? Surely” (2006: 285). Importantly, then, Ricoeur does not construe remembering and forgetting as opposites. He reiterates this in the epilogue of the same work: And our celebrated duty of memory is proclaimed in the form of an exhortation not to f­ orget. But at the same time and in the same fell swoop, we shun the specter of a memory that would 314

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never forget anything. We even consider it to be monstrous. Present in our mind is the fable of Jorge Luis Borges about the man who never forgot anything, in the figure of Funes el memorioso … Could forgetting then no longer be in every respect an enemy of memory, and could memory have to negotiate with forgetting, groping to find the right measure in its balance with forgetting … Could a memory lacking forgetting be the ultimate phantasm…? (Ricoeur 2006: 413) Several ideas are in play in the work. Among them, that memory devoid of forgetting is repulsive, an excess that is fictionally possible in Funes and perhaps approximated by real-life hyperthymesiacs. Ideally, then, memory and forgetting are balanced on the fulcrum of the present. The second idea is that memory without forgetting is not remembering at all, but is a re-living of the sort experienced in flashbacks. Likewise, forgetting without memory is not forgetting but oblivion. Ricoeur additionally suggests that memory is forgetting simply to the extent memory is selective. To remember is to forget. On any reading, crucially, Ricoeur emphatically opposes amnesia (or amnesty) as a mode of forgiveness. Instead, forgiveness requires what is both and between memory and forgetting, what Elshtain (2003: 43) called “knowing forgetting.” The view that forgiveness requires forgetting seemed a direct objection to the EMI, ­according to which forgiveness requires the explicit memory of wrongdoing. That objection is offset if memory and forgetting are not construed as opposites, as in Ricoeur. But the objection is not wholly neutralized unless the forgetting that forgiveness purportedly requires is also compatible with explicit remembering. The EMI requires not only accessibility to consciousness but actual access that figures into the change that is forgiveness. The forgiver must have the wrongdoer’s wrongdoing directly in view. The EMI invites us to shine a light on the past rather than relegate it to the shadows. ­Accordingly, forgiveness does not require a change in what the forgiver sees. It requires a change in how she sees. Allais, for example, says that forgiveness “essentially involves a view of the wrongdoer as a person: it is a change in the way you affectively see her” (2008: 66). Accordingly, a villainous wrongdoer may be recast as one fallible human among others or “as better than her wrong actions indicate her to be” (2008: 68). Crucially, coming to see the reality of the wrongdoer’s wrongdoing in a different light does not require minimizing, excusing, condoning, or denying it. Nor does it require averting one’s eyes.

4.  Objection: Forgiveness in Advance Philosophers sometimes use the phrase “proleptic forgiveness” to refer to a forgiveness that comes before and is not conditioned by an apology, even if it anticipates or hopes for an apology. That is not the sense in which I use the phrase here. By proleptic forgiveness, I mean forgiveness issued in advance of wrongdoing or possible wrongdoing. Whether Jesus’ kiss meant that Judas was forgiven in advance for his betrayal is a theological matter beyond the scope of this chapter (Cornell 2017). But if someone could forgive their partner for infidelity before the infidelity occurred, this forgiveness would be proleptic. If forgiveness can be proleptic in this way, then the EMI is false for the simple reason that we humans do not remember the future. There are at least two reasons to doubt the intelligibility of proleptic forgiveness, so u ­ nderstood. The first is that proleptic forgiveness lacks an appropriate object. On the occasion that Jim seems to forgive Alex for infidelity before it occurs, there is nothing yet in existence for him to forgive. There may be related things to forgive: Alex’s past affairs or present traits. Forgiving Alex for these is intelligible but not proleptic. By contrast, Alex’s future infidelity exists only as an object of thought, however inevitable it may seem. It is in this sense that there is nothing for proleptic forgiveness as such to forgive. 315

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More to the point, there may never be anything for proleptic forgiveness to forgive. What is anticipated may not occur. Alex may have second thoughts or get in a traffic jam, or the other party may not show. How can someone be forgiven, proleptically or otherwise, for something they did not do?4 It is one thing to be forgiven for something that is not ultimately wrong; it is another to be forgiven for something that did not even occur. Suppose an older Jim believes Alex had an affair and also believes he forgave her. If Jim learned that Alex did not have an affair, he would cease to believe he forgave her for the affair. Jim would come to deny the truth of the statement, “I forgave Alex for the affair.” Likewise, the proleptically forgiving younger Jim will come to reject this statement if the affair never occurs. Although the perspective of fully informed forgivers is not decisive, it gives us reason to doubt the intelligibility of proleptic forgiveness. Infidelity cases highlight a second reason why proleptic forgiveness is especially problematic. Jim may be surprised by how deeply he resents Alex’s affair. If Jim forgave the affair in advance, no satisfying description of this situation is available. One unsatisfying option is suggested in the work of Wonderly (2021), who defends the possibility of “un-forgiving,” a more or less justified way of taking back forgiveness after it has been given. If un-forgiveness is an option, then Jim might un-forgive Alex after he forgives her. However, little on this approach prevents Jim from re-forgiving and un-forgiving Alex again (and again), a possibility that would significantly change the meaning and role of forgiveness. A second and equally unsatisfying option endorses an opposing principle, that “forgiveness, once truly granted, cannot be taken back” (Scarre 2016: 933). Accordingly, if Jim proleptically forgave Alex, he does not have the option of taking it back. True forgiveness is forever. Jim’s forgiveness remains “a done deal” (Scarre 2016: 933) even if his anger deepens and he seeks revenge. This possibility, too, would significantly change the meaning and role of forgiveness. Although this dilemma is not unique to proleptic forgiveness, proleptic forgiveness intensifies it. Finally, the intuitions that motivate a defense of proleptic forgiveness are perhaps better ­captured by the idea of preparation for forgiveness. Unlike proleptic forgiveness, preparation for forgiveness does not conflict with the EMI. Accordingly, Jim is better understood as preparing to forgive Alex or as being disposed to forgive her. As with many kinds of preparation, it may turn out that Jim’s preparation was unnecessary or unsuccessful.

5.  Refining the Explicit Memory Imperative According to the EMI, the total amnesiac cannot forgive, and anyone who fails to explicitly acknowledge wrongdoings cannot forgive. But exactly how much and how well must we explicitly remember? What of those whose explicit memories are incomplete or partly false? In other words, what about humans? What is within our power to forgive, and what is beyond it? Imagine that Martin is an adult victim of child abuse. On the standard account, if Martin has no memory or knowledge of the abuse, he is in no position to forgive his abuser. From his perspective, there is nothing to forgive. Imagine, however, that Martin remembers some things and has forgotten or mis-remembers others. He remembers his father yelling at him and shoving him. But he cannot remember for how long his father withheld food. Martin has forgotten that his father locked him in the closet. He never knew his father was the person who destroyed his school project, and he falsely remembers that his father killed his pet frog. The abuse Martin suffered may be unforgivable, and he may not want to forgive his father. But if Martin wants to forgive him, for what can he forgive him? All of the abuse? Only some of it? Here, the question is as much philosophical as psychological. At one extreme, the EMI might allow that we can forgive a wrongdoing even if the only thing that we explicitly remember (or get right about it) is the bare fact of its existence, i.e., that someone wronged us in some way. Accordingly, we may forgive we-know-not-whom for we-know-not-what. 316

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The expressions “whoever you are, I forgive you” and “whatever you did, I forgive you” aspire to forgiveness of this ultra-generic and unlimited sort. Often, of course, those who use these expressions do not actually mean to forgive anyone for any trespass whatsoever; it would make a great difference to them if they were to discover that the wrongdoer was a trusted friend rather than a stranger, or that the offense was serious rather than slight. But, at this extreme, it is possible for us to forgive without ever knowing or realizing what or whom we forgive, so long as we explicitly remember that we were somehow wronged by someone.5 Accordingly, Martin remembers far more about the abuse than forgiving it requires. Martin may forgive his father for the totality of the abuse, which includes locking him in the closet and destroying his school project, and Martin may do this in spite of the fact that he is wrong about the frog and much else besides. He might be wrong about everything but still succeed in forgiving whatever there was to forgive. At the opposite extreme, the EMI might be refined in a way that requires us to explicitly remember everything about the wrongs that we wish to forgive. Accordingly, it is within Martin’s power to forgive his father only for what Martin wholly and 100% accurately remembers about his past. Accordingly, Martin can at most forgive his father only parts of the abuse, e.g., for shoving him, but cannot forgive him for withholding food or destroying his school project. Moreover, on this view, Martin may not even be able to forgive his father for shoving him if Martin does not also recall that he suffered a concussion as a result, or if Martin falsely remembers that he had a bloody nose, and so on. Even at this exacting extreme, however, Martin need not remember or be right about such details as dates or times or the color of the walls. He need not remember such details, at least, unless they are somehow morally relevant. Martin and other would-be forgivers must entirely and accurately remember all of the relevantly wrong-making features of the wrongdoer’s wrongdoing. Notice that the more Martin needs to know before he can forgive, the lower the risk is for inadvertent forgiveness, and the smaller the role is for something like un-forgiveness. If Martin cannot forgive his father for withholding food or destroying his school project, for example, then un-forgiveness won’t be needed when Martin finally finds out about these things and becomes furious once again. On the preceding analysis, Martin didn’t forgive his father to begin with. Likewise, un-forgiveness will not be needed when Jim is outraged to learn that Alex’s latest affair was just the latest in a long series. Since Jim didn’t know about this morally relevant (relational) property of Alex’s latest affair, he didn’t forgive her in the first place. Un-forgiveness has no work to do if forgiveness hasn’t yet occurred. There still might be a role for un-forgiveness in the event that a forgiver underestimates their resentment and desire for revenge, but it will be curtailed. The first refinement of the EMI has us forgiving too much and inflates the need for something like un-forgiveness. Although the second refinement almost entirely dispenses with the need for un-forgiveness, it drastically narrows the scope of what we can forgive. It has us forgiving too little, if we even manage to forgive anything at all. Any plausible middle path will need to rule out the possibility of inadvertent forgiveness while allowing us to forgive what we (explicitly) remember only incompletely and imperfectly. And there are many paths to try.6 For example, we might say that Martin can forgive all and only those wrongdoings that fall under a specific category (abuse), provided that Martin has an explicit memory of enough wrongdoings in that same category. Accordingly, Martin can forgive his father for the school project because he remembers the yelling, shoving, and so on. Likewise, Jim can forgive Alex for all affairs by virtue of having an explicit memory of the most recent one. Again, any plausible refinement must rule out inadvertent or accidental forgiveness. Any refinement that allows Jim to inadvertently forgive all of Alex’s affairs by forgiving one affair also allows too much. And any refinement that allows Martin to inadvertently forgive all abuses by forgiving some abuse allows too much. It is not enough that the other abuses are in the same category or cluster as the abuses that forgivers want to forgive. Forgivers must actually want to forgive the other abuses. 317

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Yet, Martin may not know exactly what he wants to forgive, especially when it comes to unknown abuses. For example, Martin might not want to forgive unknown abuse if the abuse was sexual. Or he might not be inclined to forgive the abuse if it lasted four years rather than two. Appealing to dispositions or counterfactuals can help to clarify what the forgiver does and does not want to forgive. Accordingly, if Martin would not forgive his father for sexual abuse if he were to find out about it, then Martin does not (intend to) forgive him for this now. If Jim would not forgive Alex for the other affairs if he were to find out about them, then Jim does not (intend to) forgive her for these other affairs now. Conversely, if Martin would forgive his father, then Martin does (intend to) forgive him now. And if Jim would forgive Alex, then Jim does (intend to) forgive her now. Here we see the limits of an appeal to counterfactuals. Suppose Jim does not know about the series of infidelities, but that he would forgive Alex if he were to find out about them. It follows from the present approach that when Jim forgives Alex for her infidelity, he thereby forgives all of it. Jim forgives the affairs not (only) counterfactually but actually. Suppose that, after forgiving Alex, Jim actually learns about the affairs. If already forgave Alex for these affairs, then he cannot forgive her for them now. At most, he can renew his forgiveness. Likewise, and somewhat paradoxically, if Martin would have forgiven his father (before he found out about the sexual abuse), then he cannot forgive his father when he actually does find out about it. At most, he can renew his forgiveness. These kinds of puzzles are familiar to philosophers and not a reason to be discouraged. What we succeed in thinking about, speaking about, and doing does not depend only on what we know. One who is ignorant of the chemical structure of water can succeed in thinking about H20. One who knows little can talk about a lot. Without knowing it, one can tip over a plant or block an entryway. The world we occupy and the knowledge held by our communities variously extends the reach of our minds, language, and action. But exactly how far our reach extends and how it does so is a matter for debate. That the scope of (explicit) memory and personal forgiveness, in particular, extends beyond what we know is to be expected. Here, too, further inquiry is needed to provide an account of how far it extends and how it does so. What have we forgiven? For what have we been forgiven? Is it possible to worry too much about details? Too little? We live out these questions daily, and much depends on how we answer them. As Elshtain (2003: 51) points out, victims of wrongdoing may especially care about the explicit memory of details: “What happened-when, where, how: we should never underestimate how important this is to survivors.” Details often matter to those who seek forgiveness, too. True, some offenders simply want the victim’s blame-feelings to stop, for life to go on as before, by whatever means. But at least some offenders wish for the victim to know what they forgive and, nonetheless, to forgive. If a knowing-forgiveness is hoped for, being forgiven by someone who barely remembers what happened will not bring as much healing. Being forgiven by someone who knows about only one of several affairs will not ultimately heal. Being forgiven by third parties and proxies will not ultimately heal. And what ultimately heals may reveal the very nature of forgiveness. In whatever way the EMI is refined, this refinement has consequences for how we ought to go about the work of forgiveness and what we accomplish when we do it.

6.  The Value of Forgiveness The foregoing is neutral on the matter of the desirability, appropriateness, or value of forgiveness. If forgiveness is a good thing and requires knowledge, it follows that some good things require knowledge. However, this chapter leaves ample room for the fact that responses to wrongdoing grounded in ignorance or nescience may reduce suffering or promote greater goods. In all-toocommon circumstances, responses such as denying, ignoring, excusing, minimizing, or condoning may be adaptive, justified, or best. After severe trauma, Brison (2002) notes, acknowledging 318

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how one has been wronged may shatter one’s worldview, relationships, and sense of self, and may painfully compound injuries. More broadly, those who feel powerless may ignore or accept wrongdoing if a protest is dangerous or impossible. Yet others may ignore wrongs done to them because the wrongs are insignificant or simply because they wish to move on. According to Nietzsche (1887), forgetting is “no mere vis inertiae,” but an active force without which there would be “no hope, no pride, no present.” Forgetting, too, may be the only or only practical course available to us. As with ignoring, excusing, minimizing, or condoning wrongdoings, forgetting wrongdoings enables people to get along, move on, or just survive whole. Driver, in the course of defending “virtues of ignorance,” maintains that “it is good to forget harms when remembering them does no good and, indeed will harm oneself or others” (2001: 32). Like other modes of not-knowing, forgetting might be best. However, even when forgetting is adaptive, justified, or best, it is not a form of forgiveness. More strongly: to the degree forgetting obscures wrongdoings as such, it also obstructs forgiveness.

Notes 1 Wrongdoers may be responsible for only some part or aspect of a wrongdoing. It is for this part or aspect that we can forgive them. 2 On a weaker formulation, EMI is the thesis that explicit remembering is required to realize an ideal that is approximated by non-ideal or imperfect forms of forgiveness. On a still-weaker formulation, EMI is the thesis that explicit remembering is required for in importantly distinct kind of forgiveness (among other kinds) that has importantly distinct ends. My own view is neutral between these formulations. 3 True, someone who thinks of nothing besides being wronged cannot forgive because there is no time to think about anything else (including forgiveness). However, since any repetitive thought presents the same obstacle, the content is irrelevant. It is for the same reason that someone who can think only about the pilot light on the stove cannot forgive. In this case, the obstacle is not repetitive thinking about wrongdoing but repetitive thinking simplicter. 4 Alex can be forgiven for what is actual: that she tried or wanted to have an affair, that she is presently steadily disposed to having such affairs, and so on. 5 According to what is sometimes called Russell’s principle, by contrast, a person cannot think about an object unless they know which object it is that they’re thinking about. As Evans (1982) puts it, the person must have a “discriminating conception” of the object. 6 Thanks to the editor for suggesting these possible strategies and for generally thoughtful and helpful comments.

References Allais, L. (2008) Wiping the slate clean: The heart of forgiveness. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 36, 33–68. Blustein, J. M. (2014) Forgiveness and remembrance: Remembering wrongdoing in personal and public life. New York: Oxford University Press. Brison, S. J. (2002) Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cornell, N. (2017) The possibility of preemptive forgiving. Philosophical Review, 126, 242–72. Driver, J. (2001) Uneasy virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elshtain, J. B. (2003) Politics and forgiveness. In Biggar, N. ed., Burying the past: Making peace and doing justice after civil conflict. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Evans, G. (1982) The varieties of reference, ed. John McDowell. New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford ­University Press. Hieronymi, P. (2001) Articulating an uncompromising forgiveness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62(3), 529–55. MacLachlan, A. (2009) Practicing imperfect forgiveness. In Tessman, L. ed., Feminist ethics and social and political philosophy: Theorizing the non-ideal. Dordrecht: Springer. Nietzsche, F. (1887) On the genealogy of morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. Pettigrove, G. (2012) Forgiveness and love. New York: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (2006) Memory, history, forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: ­University of Chicago Press.

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Crystal L’Hote Robson, D. (2016) The blessing and curse of people who never forget, viewed 30 January 2021, . Scarre, G. (2016) On taking back forgiveness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19, 931–44. Volf, M. (2006) The end of memory: Remembering rightly in a violent world. Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Wonderly, M. (2021) Forgiving, committing, and un-forgiving. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 104(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12772

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PART IV

Normative Issues

24 THE STANDING TO FORGIVE Linda Radzik

1. Introduction Victor and Wanda are close friends and co-workers. At a recent office party, Wanda had a little too much to drink and told a very funny story about Victor to the crowd. In her inebriated state, Wanda did not pause to consider whether this was the sort of story that Victor could laugh along with or whether, as was in fact the case, he would find it deeply humiliating. She also forgot that the story included information that Victor told her in strictest confidence. The next morning, Wanda comes to Victor’s desk with a cup of his favorite fancy coffee and a basket of homemade muffins. She delivers a sincere and tearful apology and begs Victor to forgive her. “I forgive you,” Victor says. Their co-worker, Theo, looks up from the neighboring desk and says, “I forgive you too, Wanda.” The intuition that there is something wrong with Theo’s pronouncement of forgiveness to Wanda is typically articulated as the claim that Theo lacks the standing to forgive. Whatever else might make forgiving Wanda appropriate in this case—for example, that she was indeed blameworthy for her actions but that her apology is sincere—Theo’s positionality with respect to the situation precludes him from forgiving. Victor was the one humiliated and betrayed by Wanda, not Theo. We might be able to defend Theo’s declaration of forgiveness if he were himself indirectly wronged by Wanda’s action. Perhaps her story insulted Victor qua accountant or gay man and Theo is also an accountant or a gay man. Or perhaps the party was for Theo’s birthday and Wanda’s mistreatment of Victor brought the evening to an unpleasant halt. But absent some such detail, Theo is merely a third party to the wrong, not a victim. And this seems to be at the heart of what is problematic in his telling Wanda, “I forgive you too.” Indeed, it seems to justify both Wanda and Victor in taking offense and telling him to mind his own business. Cases like these frequently lead theorists of forgiveness to claim that only victims can forgive (e.g. Horsbrugh 1974; Govier and Verwoerd 2002; Zaragoza 2012). Yet the “victims only” view of forgiveness seems to be an unreasonably strong position given that it entails that Wanda would also be unable to forgive herself for her behavior (Milam 2017). Many people believe self-­forgiveness to be a genuine and valuable form of forgiveness. As in the Theo example, one might try to defend Wanda’s self-forgiveness by interpreting her as an indirect victim of her own misdeed. She “let herself down” in mistreating a friend and this is why it makes sense to forgive herself. Perhaps this sort of coming to terms with self-wronging is part of the experience of self-forgiveness. But I doubt it is the entirety of it. Wanda also needs to forgive herself for what she did to Victor and not simply what she did to herself. A second popular view holds that both victims and wrongdoers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-31

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have the standing to forgive, but third parties do not. Again, standing seems to be based on the parties’ positions in relation to the wrong. Yet the claim that victims and wrongdoers have the standing to forgive may also be too simple. For example, perhaps victims themselves sometimes lack the standing to forgive. Say that Victor has repeatedly humiliated Wanda in public and regularly reveals her secrets. Suppose further that he has never apologized or made any effort to improve. It would be hypocritical of Victor to blame Wanda for her behavior at the party. Lacking the standing to blame her (Wallace 2010), perhaps he also lacks the standing to forgive her. The proper response to Wanda’s apology is “I should be apologizing to you” or “Who am I to forgive you when I’ve done so much worse?” Or suppose that Wanda has doggedly refused forgiveness to another friend, Patricia, for the same sort of behavior for which Wanda now forgives herself. If hypocrisy can undermine the standing to forgive, then standing requires something more than simply filling the role of victim or wrongdoer. Perhaps there is even something to say in defense of broadening the standing to forgive so as to include at least some third parties. Notice that while there is something odd and jarring about a third party declaring that he forgives, third-party declarations of refusal to forgive are often treated as unexceptional. “I will never forgive the Minneapolis Police Department for the death of George Floyd” is not at all puzzling, even when it is declared by people who are not members of Floyd’s family or Black Americans—that is, by people who cannot be classified as indirect victims of Floyd’s murder. If third parties can have the standing to refuse forgiveness, does it follow that they also can have the standing to forgive? This chapter reviews and evaluates the most common strategies for defending the view that, whatever other reasons might support forgiving in a particular case, forgiveness is defective when the person forgiving (or purporting to forgive) lacks standing. As James Edwards explains, “the defect in which a lack of standing consists is a defect the existence of which depends on facts about [the subject],” here, the person purporting to forgive (Edwards 2019: 442; cf. Herstein 2020). Implicit in the claim that standing is required is the idea that some people lack standing at least some of the time. Rather than attempting to define “standing” more precisely at the beginning of the discussion, in Sections 2–6, I use various arguments in favor of limiting standing in order to clarify what standing might be. Similarly, rather than insisting on a specific account of forgiveness, I instead show how some popular ways of conceiving of forgiveness give rise to different claims about standing. In Section 7, I endorse the general outlines of David Owens’ interpretation of the standing to forgive as involving the possession of a normative power, though I disagree with his specific claims about the content and extent of that power.

2.  The Attitude-Centered Argument for Limited Standing People occasionally claim that the very meaning of the word “forgiveness” entails that only victims can forgive. However, it is easy to find examples in ordinary discourse of people describing both wrongdoers and third parties as forgiving or refusing to forgive. Still, many authors are drawn to the view that there is something in the very concept or nature of forgiveness that places limits on who is capable of forgiving. Take, for starters, Jeffrie Murphy’s influential account of forgiveness as the overcoming or forswearing of resentment for moral reasons (Murphy and Hampton 1988). Resentment, according to Murphy’s Strawson-inspired account, is a negative reactive attitude that is distinctive of the person who has been wronged. Of course, people besides victims might be angered by a transgression, but their reactive attitude is what Strawson calls indignation, not resentment (Strawson 1962). Since only victims can resent, only they can overcome or forswear their resentment. It follows that only victims can forgive. 324

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The distinction between overcoming resentment and forswearing it is interesting here. The claim that only the victim can overcome his own resentment simply states a psychological fact (Benn 1996; Govier and Verwoerd 2002). One person’s emotions and attitudes cannot be directly controlled by anyone else. Indeed, they often cannot even be directly controlled by the person whose emotions and attitudes they are. This is why theorists like Murphy include the forswearing of resentment in their analyses of forgiveness. Victor may sincerely desire to give up his resentment of Wanda but find that it is not immediately responsive to his choice. Yet Victor can still forgive her by forswearing his resentment. He commits himself to exorcising his resentment and renounces any entitlement to act on the resentment that remains. Given the attitude-based argument for the conclusion that the standing to forgive is limited to victims, what does “standing” appear to be? When we concentrate on the “overcoming resentment” idea, the standing to forgive amounts to something like an ability to forgive that is limited to a certain position or role. The ability to forgive is limited to the victim because only the victim can feel and only they can overcome their own resentment. However, when we concentrate on the “forswearing resentment” idea, the claim that only victims can forgive becomes normative rather than merely descriptive. It appears to turn on an entitlement to resent and also to renounce that entitlement. Can only victims forswear their own resentment? A child’s mother renouncing his entitlement to resent his sister for hitting him is not inconceivable. After all, mothers can renounce other entitlements their minor children possess, such as a right to an inheritance. Those who reject the mother’s standing to forgive the wrong done to her son instead claim that the son is the one who properly possesses the right to forswear his own anger over having been wronged, at least in normal circumstances. Theorists who conceive of standing as an entitlement to retain or forswear resentment might debate whether such an entitlement could be legitimately transferred to another party. Perhaps a victim can designate his mother to act as his agent in an engagement with the wrongdoer and make the decision to forgive for him. When victims have been killed, their survivors sometimes claim proxy powers to forgive for the victim (and not merely for their own loss).1 It is a bit puzzling to claim the entitlement to forswear the resentment of a person who is no longer capable of resenting. Still, the survivor’s claim that the victim would have forgiven is often comforting to wrongdoers. While the attitude-based argument for limited standing was influential, it quickly lost its force as theorists chipped away at Murphy’s account of forgiveness. Some theorists rejected the claim that only victims can resent wrongs (Walker 2006). Theo may not be able to overcome Victor’s resentment of Wanda, but he can overcome his own. Others complained that the distinction between resentment (the victim’s reactive anger) and indignation (other people’s reactive anger) is merely verbal and so fails to provide a sufficiently deep justification for why only victims can forgive (Radzik 2010). We may describe Victor as resentful and Theo as indignant, but both are angry at Wanda because of her wrongful behavior and reasonably so. Both resentment and indignation can be intense and difficult to shake (at least in some circumstances), and both attitudes can be overcome for moral reasons (Pettigrove 2009). Others objected that the focus on angry reactive attitudes and emotions is too narrow to account for all cases of forgiveness (Richards 1988). Disappointment, sadness, grief, and other negative but less aggressive emotions are experienced by victims in the aftermath of wrongdoing. Overcoming or forswearing those emotions for moral reasons also looks like a form of forgiveness. Once we adjust the definition of forgiveness so that it includes changes in this large set of possible emotions and attitudes, the definition of forgiveness no longer provides an easy argument for the claim that only victims can forgive. After all, third parties too may feel sad or disappointed about wrongs done to other people. And surely third parties are permitted to overcome such feelings, rather than obliged to permanently suffer from them. 325

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3.  The Relationship-Centered Argument for Limiting Standing An alternative argument for why the standing to forgive is limited to certain parties starts with a different account of forgiveness. Here, forgiveness is a matter of repairing the damage that the wrong caused to the relationship between the victim and the wrongdoer (North 1987; Atkins 2002; Scanlon 2008). Relationships involve not just attitudes and emotions but also patterns of behavior. In order to count as forgiving, Victor would need to not only let go of his resentment of Wanda (at least to a large degree), he would also have to resume their friendship. One way of developing the relationship-centered argument regarding standing is to claim that only victims and wrongdoers have the standing to forgive since only they are party to the relationship that is repaired by forgiveness. Here, the notion of standing seems to be a notion of a role-limited ability; only they are capable of changing the attitudes, emotions, and behaviors that constitute their relationship. Talk of standing, on this version, is descriptive of people with that ability. Alternatively, we could argue from the relationship-centered view to a more normative conception of standing. Only the victim and wrongdoer possess the entitlement to decide whether to repair their relationship. What would it be to deny Victor such an entitlement? To force him to resume his friendship with Wanda? It is not clear that friendships can be forced, in which case the talk of an entitlement is unnecessary and we can fall back on what I have called the more descriptive notion of standing as a role-limited ability. Perhaps instead Victor is denied the entitlement to forgive when other people, such as Wanda or Theo, criticize or punish him for refusing to resume his friendship with Wanda. Here, talking of standing as kind of entitlement is more clearly normative. If Victor has standing, then Wanda and Theo wrong him with their criticism and pressure to forgive. Relationship-centered theories of forgiveness are not particularly popular. I believe they overlook the distinction between forgiveness (which extends from forgiver to forgiven) and reconciliation (which is mutual). They also set too demanding a standard for forgiveness. To my ear, it makes sense to claim that Victor could forgive Wanda while still choosing to end their friendship. Yet, even if one accepts a relationship-centered view of forgiveness, the argument from that view to limited standing is insufficiently motivated. Wrongdoing can damage a number of relationships besides the one between the victim and the wrongdoer (Pettigrove 2009; Radzik 2010). Various third parties may also be unwilling to trust or continue cooperating with the wrongdoer in the aftermath of the wrong. Victor’s husband may be itching to tell Wanda off and may refuse to have her to their home again. Wanda’s boss may be inclined to reprimand or fire her. Theo and other co-workers may be reluctant to work or socialize with her. If these relationships are damaged by Wanda’s transgression and repaired in response to her heartfelt apology to Victor, why would these forms of repair not count as forgiveness? Merely stipulating that forgiveness is our label for the reconciliation that takes place specifically between the victim and the wrongdoer is unsatisfying. It renders disputes about whether third parties can forgive merely verbal. The relationship-centered argument also fails to account for the offense that Wanda and Victor take when Theo declares that he forgives Wanda too. Rather than telling Theo to get lost and mind his own business, this account suggests that their response should merely be, “We’re glad you want to renew a good relationship with Wanda, but ‘forgive’ is the wrong word.” Perhaps anger would be an appropriate reaction to Theo’s declaration if it were inappropriate for him to have let Wanda’s misdeed affect his relationship with her in the first place. But, given the details of the case, Theo’s alienation from Wanda was not inappropriate. After all, she mistreated Victor in front of Theo. He works with both of them. He has good reason to take an interest in whether Victor is treated with respect in their shared office and whether Wanda is trustworthy. Although 326

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Theo was not the victim, he did not fail to mind his own business by letting the transgression alienate him from Wanda or in treating her apology as a reason to repair his relationship with her.

4.  Relevant-Connection Arguments for Limiting Standing The next set of arguments about the standing to forgive is not wedded to the claim that only victims, or only victims and wrongdoers, can forgive. Building upon the theories of forgiveness that we have already seen, and the fact that non-victims too can overcome or forswear their negative reactive attitudes to wrongdoing and repair their relationships with wrongdoers, some theorists simply accept that third-party forgiveness is possible (Griswold 2007; Norlock 2009; Radzik 2010). We should take care here to distinguish third-party forgiveness from the forgiveness of indirect victims of wrongdoing. The idea is that Theo forgives Wanda for what she did to Victor, not for any harm or wrong done to himself. However, theorists who extend standing to third parties generally deny that just any third party can forgive just any wrong. Instead, they require that the third party be relevantly connected to the situation in some way. Glen Pettigrove requires that the potential forgiver must be part of “a social context in which her purported forgiveness (or its absence) would matter” (2009: 595). Unless a person has some sort of relevant connection to the wrongdoer or the victim, their change of heart toward the wrongdoer does not qualify as forgiveness. If I become indignant upon hearing the story of an extramarital affair involving people I’ve never met, my overcoming that emotion doesn’t deserve the virtue-laden name of “forgiveness.” Why not? For one thing, “[i]t is not likely to make a discernable difference either in [my] behavior or in that of any other agent” (595). Furthermore, Pettigrove argues, my indignation is “mysterious” (595). It doesn’t make sense for me to respond so emotionally to the affair in the first place. I would also add that a third party’s negative response to a wrong does not provide an opportunity for forgiveness if it violates reasonable moral restrictions. For example, Theo’s indignant reaction to Wanda would not make sense if it is hypocritical (because Theo habitually mistreats his friends in the way Wanda just did). It would also not make sense if Theo should have diverted his attention from the entire situation in the first place in order to respect Victor and Wanda’s privacy. What exactly is the category of standing in Pettigrove’s account? In part, it seems to describe an ability to engage in a particular kind of activity (the required change of heart and relational repair). But there is also a more normative aspect to Pettigrove’s discussion of standing. Forgiveness marks a change in fitting attitudes and appropriate negative reactions to wrongdoing; and it is a change that either the victim or the wrongdoer has good reason to care about. Notice that in interpreting Pettigrove’s discussion of the standing to forgive, it is helpful to suppose that there is also such a thing as the standing to be indignant or resentful and the standing to alienate oneself from the wrongdoer as a response to the wrong. This sort of standing seems to amount to a permission to hold a wrong against a transgressor. For Pettigrove, the standing to forgive appears to be either an ability that is restricted to people who are permitted to hold the wrongdoer accountable, or a permission to relent in holding the wrongdoer accountable. This interpretation of the standing to forgive also seems to shed light on Alice MacLachlan’s discussion of standing (2008, 2017). MacLachlan suggests that the standing to forgive is related to “the right to take a wrongdoing personally,” a right shared by the victim, the wrongdoer, and those third parties who are “‘called upon’ or ‘drawn in’ – either literally, by one of the primary figures, or in light of their own commitments, identification and care, for [the victim or wrongdoer]” (2008: 9). MacLachlan also requires that third-party forgivers be in “moral solidarity” with the victim. Moral solidarity requires that the third party both understand the victim’s interests and show some willingness to defer to the victim’s own understanding of his interests (9). 327

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MacLachlan’s moral solidarity requirement is motivated by concerns about how third parties’ responses to wrongdoers affect victims (2008, 2017). On the one hand, third parties can play a valuable role in standing up for victims and pressuring wrongdoers to make proper amends to them. At times, this requires third parties to refuse forgiveness despite the victim’s own willingness to forgive. On the other hand, third-party forgiveness could instead undermine the victim. One reason why Victor may be annoyed at Theo’s declaration of his forgiveness for Wanda is that it risks distracting attention from Victor, perhaps by suggesting that Wanda’s behavior was wrong because it brought down the mood at the party rather than because she betrayed and humiliated Victor. The situation would have been even worse had Theo voiced his forgiveness before Victor had a chance to make up his own mind. This may have pressured Victor to forgive or weakened Wanda’s motivation for continuing to offer amends to Victor. If Theo is in moral solidarity with Victor, he will be better equipped to avoid these pitfalls. In MacLachlan’s view, Victor’s status as the victim of the wrong typically makes his interests in the aftermath of wrongdoing of central moral importance (2008: 5). The centrality of the victim’s interests then restricts who else has the standing to forgive. Standing is limited to those people who, in forgiving or (sometimes more importantly) in refusing to forgive, are able and motivated to support the victim’s interests. This will often, but not invariably, require third parties to wait upon the victim’s decision about forgiveness and allow it to influence their own.2 What is the standing to forgive in MacLachlan’s account? She describes standing as the possession of a “prerogative,” that is, an authority or entitlement to forgive (2008: 3). This is stronger than a mere permission to forgive in that it suggests that other parties would be wrong to unduly pressure the one exercising the prerogative (Govier and Verwoerd 2002). Victims, wrongdoers, and third parties who are in solidarity with the victim all have a permission to forgive. However, the victim’s authority has “priority” over the third party’s in typical cases (MacLachlan 2008: 5). A persistent objection to accounts that permit third-party forgiveness is that there continues to be something odd and presumptuous about interventions like Theo’s. While it seems perfectly permissible and sensible for relevantly connected third parties to experience the changes of heart or relationship that appear to be distinctive of forgiving, third parties seem to lack the standing to declare forgiveness. This objection will be especially influential for theorists who conceive of forgiveness as a performative utterance rather than (or in addition to) a change of heart or relationship (Cornell 2017).

5.  The Cost-Absorption Argument for Limiting Standing Margaret Urban Walker agrees that people other than victims can resent and then overcome their resentment, or become alienated from and then reconciled with wrongdoers (2013). She attempts to improve upon the attitude-centered and relationship-centered arguments for limiting the standing to forgive by looking for a different task that can be performed only by victims. She takes her inspiration from Pamela Hieronymi’s writing on forgiveness (2001). Following Aurel Kolnai (1974), Hieronymi asks what work forgiveness performs when the wrongdoer has fully made amends for the wrong. Imagine the wrongdoer offers a sincere apology, pays restitution for the harm caused, and successfully reforms his character. When the wrongdoer’s response is fully satisfactory, one might claim that there is nothing left to forgive. Insofar as the victim changes her attitude toward or restores her relationship with the wrongdoer, she is merely acting justly, not forgiving. Hieronymi identifies two tasks that are left to the victim in such cases. First, the victim must “ratify” the wrongdoer’s change of heart, thereby helping the wrongdoer change the socially constructed meaning of the past action such that it no longer communicates a continuing insult and threat to the victim (Hieronymi 2001: 549). Is it the case that only victims can provide such ratification? I return to this interesting line of thought in Section 7. 328

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The second task left to the victim, and the one that Walker emphasizes, is to absorb the consequences of the wrong that the wrongdoer cannot undo or compensate. No matter how thoroughly the wrongdoer makes amends, the victim must live with the fact that she was insulted and mistreated by this person. Hieronymi writes, With forgiveness, the offended agrees to bear in her own person the cost of the wrongdoing and to incorporate the injury into her own life without further protest and without demand for retribution. (In some cases forgiveness can be uncomfortably intimate: You must allow me to creatively incorporate the scars that bear your fingerprints into the permanent fabric of my life, and trust that I can do so.) (551) Forgiveness is not simply a revision in judgment or a change in view or a wiping clean or a washing away or a making new. Someone will bear the cost in his or her own person. The wrong is less ‘let go of ’ or washed away than it is digested or absorbed. (551n) If it is true that forgiveness always requires the absorption of those costs of wrongdoing that cannot be compensated, Walker argues, then only victims can forgive (Walker 2013: 496). One attractive feature of Walker’s discussion, to my mind, is that she accommodates the insight that third parties sometimes play important and constructive roles in the aftermath of wrongdoing. She agrees that it is often appropriate for third parties to react negatively to transgressions. In fact, she writes that not reacting negatively risks abandoning the victim, showing disrespect for the wrongdoer’s status as a responsible agent, or condoning the violation of moral norms (2013: 505). Furthermore, when third parties come to the defense of victims, they help clarify moral norms. They reinforce the claim that the victim deserves respect and that the wrongdoer has an obligation to make amends. This may make it easier for victims to lay down their own protests, make their peace with the scars left on them by the wrong, and forgive. As Walker puts it, third parties provide the “social scaffolding” for moral norms that makes forgiveness a reasonable option (506). But they themselves cannot forgive. This looks at first like what I’ve been calling a “descriptive” notion of standing. When Theo declares, “I forgive you too, Wanda,” he is making a mistake. Being a mere third party rather than an indirect victim, he has no costs of his own to absorb and he cannot bear Victor’s psychological scars for him. If Theo is merely making a mistake in falsely claiming to do something he lacks the ability to do, why are Victor and Wanda so annoyed with him? Walker’s account suggests it is because Theo’s claim to be able to forgive misrepresents him as a victim, which is both to accuse Wanda of an additional wrong she didn’t commit and to distract attention away from (or even mock) Victor’s difficult and generous act of forgiveness (502). But Walker also suggests a more normative account of the standing to forgive as a “prerogative” to decide whether the victim will absorb the costs of the wrong (508). Notice that this version of standing does not simply fall out of her analysis of the nature of forgiveness. It is not enough to point out that the absorption cannot take place without the victim’s acquiescence. To defend the victim’s entitlement to decide for himself, we must also argue that anyone else who would order or pressure the victim to drop his protest and absorb those costs acts wrongly. In other words, we cannot reason directly from the descriptive to the normative version of the standing claim. One worry about the cost-absorption view of forgiveness is that it may preclude the possibility of self-forgiveness, which is a bullet Walker says she is willing to bite if necessary (2013: 496n). Perhaps serious wrongs also leave additional scars on the wrongdoers that only they can absorb. “I am, and to the end of endless time shall remain, the doer of that willfully traitorous deed,” Wanda 329

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realizes.3 Can we describe her as forgiving herself when she learns to accept those costs without protest? That doesn’t sound quite right. Accepting that one is a traitor without protest seems to be the mark of the shameless wrongdoer rather than the reformed one. If self-forgiveness is possible, it needs a different analysis. Another worry is that this view of forgiveness as the victim absorbing the unpaid and unpayable costs of the wrong means that many cases that are normally described as forgiveness no longer count. Imagine that Wanda promised to bring Victor coffee and simply forgot. She apologizes, calls a co-worker who is still in the café, and asks her to bring a cup of coffee for Victor. Victor says, “I forgive you,” and it seems that he does. Yet in this case Wanda had already fully repaired the wrong. There are no lingering costs or scars that Victor must simply absorb—or, at least, if he does feel scarred, the fault is his and not Wanda’s. Here too Walker bites the bullet by writing, “it seems trivializing or ridiculous to speak of ‘forgiving’ someone for negligible wrongs or for wrongs that do little or no harm” (501). But I would prefer to avoid that position, if possible. I think that there is something true and important in the idea that practices of forgiveness are thoroughly woven into the texture of everyday social life.

6.  Normative Power Arguments for Limited Standing David Owens’ theory of forgiveness argues that forgiveness involves the exercise of a normative power (2012: Ch. 2). By a “normative power,” Owens refers to one party’s power to change the normative situation. He argues that a number of action types involve normative powers. For example, promises create an obligation for the one who makes the promise (3). Typically, they also give the party to whom the promise is made the power to release the promisor from that obligation. In other words, the promisee has the power to change the promisor’s normative situation from being obliged to perform some action to not being so obliged. In forgiving, according to Owens, the forgiver changes the normative situation of the person being forgiven and other people as well. The standing to forgive is simply the possession of this normative power. Owens characterizes the standing to forgive as an ability and a right (51). Describing it as a right suggests that others have a duty not to interfere with the exercise of this power. Standing is limited insofar as only certain parties rightfully possess these powers in particular situations. Owens’ interpretation of forgiving as the exercise of a normative power is related to some older ways of thinking of forgiveness. For example, forgiveness has often been characterized as releasing the wrongdoer from a debt (Warmke 2016a). While many see the language of debt cancellation as overly economic (Bennett 2018), Owens’ theory enables us to better see the point of the metaphor. The “forgiveness” of monetary debts and the forgiveness of wrongs are both exercises of power that release people from normative binds. This account also resonates with analyses of forgiveness as a performative utterance, insofar as it might clarify exactly what is achieved by declarations of forgiveness (Cornell 2017). But Owens himself denies that forgiveness is best thought of as a performative, both because a person can forgive without actually saying, “I forgive you,” and because such a statement unaccompanied by psychological changes in the forgiver does not suffice for forgiveness (Owens 2012: 53). But what exactly is the normative power that is distinctive of forgiveness? According to Owens, the forgiver changes the normative situation so that “guilt and blame for that wrong are no longer apt” (52). That is, the wrongdoer’s guilt is no longer fitting, nor is the victim’s or any third party’s blame appropriate (51–2, 56). Note that describing guilt and blame as “inapt” is not the same thing as saying they are wrong, since someone might have an excuse or all things considered justification for harboring and expressing inapt attitudes (51–2n). The power to forgive, on this account, is highly morally significant. It alters the conditions for appropriate guilt and blame for all parties to the interaction—wrongdoer, victim, and third 330

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parties. Owens claims that only victims possess this normative power; only victims have the standing to forgive (51). His reasoning focuses on the victim’s status as the one to whom the original obligation, which was violated by the wrongful action, was owed. Drawing a distinction between wrongings (which have victims) and mere wrongs (which don’t), Owens claims that only the former can be forgiven (44–6). Furthermore, Owens argues that “human beings have normative interests, interests in being able to shape the normative landscape they inhabit. In particular they have an interest in being able to determine when (certain) actions are blameworthy” (59). Since the victim presumably has the most at stake in whether the action that wronged him is blameworthy, he has a right to the power to shape this part of the normative landscape. Owens’ interpretation of the standing to forgive as the possession of normative power allows us to explain why Theo’s claim to forgive Wanda is not merely mistaken but offensive. Theo’s presumptuous claim to forgive Wanda undermines Victor. He is claiming the power to shape the normative landscape too, which appears to weaken Victor’s own power to do so. We can also understand why Wanda takes offense at Theo’s declaration of forgiveness. Theo is inappropriately claiming a kind of power over her, which involves not just a power to release her from apt guilt (which would benefit her) but also to keep her trapped in it (which would not). The normative power account can also explain why victims are often offended when third parties ignore their decisions to forgive by continuing to overtly blame the wrongdoer. Suppose that Victor’s husband had an affair. Victor has forgiven him, but Victor’s extended family continues to treat his husband like a pariah at family functions. Victor is likely not only to feel distress for his husband’s sake but also to feel that the family is disrespecting him (Victor). Owens’ account suggests that the family is denying or undermining Victor’s power to release his husband from apt blame and guilt. A normative power account might allow victims to designate proxies to make decisions about forgiveness for them. At least in certain cases, it may also permit survivors of dead victims to forgive on their behalf. In these cases, the power to free wrongdoers from apt guilt and blame is passed on to the proxy or survivor. Owens’ account is also compatible with the view that a victim’s presumptive standing to forgive can be forfeited, for example, through hypocrisy, complicity in the wrong, or vice.4 Under the heading of hypocrisy, we might include a case where Victor has betrayed and humiliated Wanda and never atoned. An example of complicity is one where Victor provoked Wanda into committing the wrong in question. Under the heading of vice, imagine a case where Victor is excessively hard-hearted or petty. When Victor has lost the standing to forgive, his choices about how to respond to the wrong will no longer be able to put an end to apt guilt or blame. However, one might object that this leaves Wanda worse off than when these objectionable versions of Victor retain standing, if no one else can release her from her own guilt or third-party blame. Owens’ analysis of forgiveness as a normative power to put an end to apt guilt and blame is appealing in many ways. An explicitly normative interpretation of standing improves upon merely descriptive versions, which seem too weak to account for what is morally objectionable about declaring forgiveness when one lacks the standing to do so. Compared to other normative notions of standing, such as those that depict it as a permission or entitlement to undergo a change in one’s own attitudes or one’s own relationship with the wrongdoer, Owens’ account can better explain what is distinctive of the standing of victims. Rendering victims “able to control the normative significance of the wrong done to them” not only for themselves but also for the wrongdoer and third parties can be a way of vindicating them (Owens 2012: 59–60). It presents forgiveness as a social practice that grants victims the respect that the wrongful action denied them. However, I am hesitant about some of the details of Owens’ normative power account. Does the victim’s forgiveness really render the wrongdoer’s guilt inapt all by itself? Victims sometimes forgive wrongdoers very quickly, before the wrongdoers have fully understood the 331

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significance of their own actions or satisfactorily reformed their characters so as to avoid repeating such actions in the future (Bennett 2018). Perhaps these considerations simply suggest that, while victims possess the normative power Owens identifies, they are only justified in exercising that power when wrongdoers repent. But, given the benefits victims sometimes receive from forgiving, asking them to wait for a repentance that may never develop is problematic. For these reasons, making the complete erasure of the unrepentant wrongdoer’s appropriate guilt a cost of forgiving strikes me as too strong. We should also resist the suggestion that the victim’s forgiveness is the only way for the appropriateness of guilt and blame to come to an end. Are wrongdoers to be permanently saddled with guilt when their victims decide not to forgive? Given that not all victims are reasonable or virtuous, and that some may even have forfeited their standing to forgive, this seems unduly harsh. Can wrongdoers consider themselves free after enough time has passed? Can they free themselves through some process of atonement and self-forgiveness? Should third parties be allowed to intervene in some way to the wrongdoer’s benefit? In Jewish tradition, when wrongdoers had twice apologized to their victims and been rejected, they could bring a set of witnesses when they returned a third time. The witnesses were then able to declare the matter resolved (Newman 1987). I also worry about the claim that a victim’s forgiveness always renders third-party blame inapt. Say that Wanda’s transgression against Victor at the office party involved not just a spilled secret but a homophobic attack. Suppose Victor chooses to forgive Wanda on the strength of their past friendship. It seems to me that the other members of the office may have good reason to continue blaming Wanda given the broader social significance of this kind of wrong and the fact that ending oppression requires social action. Owens’ response appears to be that third parties can continue to aptly blame Wanda for the wrong of homophobia but not the wronging of Victor (Owens 2012: 56n). But he also says that no one is in a position to forgive wrongs that are not wrongings (51). This appears to leave Wanda permanently trapped in her guilt, or, as Josiah Royce put it, “the hell of the irrevocable” (1968: 162).

7.  An Alternative Version of the Normative Powers Account One can agree with Owens that forgiving involves the exercise of normative powers without agreeing with his specific account of what those powers are (cf. Warmke 2016b; Cornell 2017; and Bennett 2018). In this section, I sketch another version that builds on Hieronymi’s memorable description of the forgiving victim as ratifying the wrongdoer’s remorseful change of heart (2001: 549). As I imagine ratification power, it amounts to an entitlement to put one’s stamp of approval on a process that is not completely in one’s own hands. Where the wrongdoer does not do her part by repenting, the victim’s forgiveness does not by itself make guilt inappropriate. The wrongdoer’s repentance cannot render guilt inappropriate all by itself either; she also needs the victim’s permission to let go of her guilt. The victim is entitled to make his own decision about whether to grant this permission free from the pressure of other parties. This picture of forgiveness as a ratification power includes a more moderate power to change the moral landscape for third parties as well. The victim’s stamp of approval might be required to permit third parties (or, at least those who have the standing to blame) to cease blaming.5 This is weaker than claiming that the victim’s forgiveness renders continued third-party blame inapt or impermissible, since third parties might aptly or permissibly blame after victims have forgiven. This may help explain a phenomenon I mentioned in Section 1. While it is odd for third parties to declare their forgiveness, it is less odd for them to declare their refusal to forgive. By saying things like, “I will never forgive the Minneapolis Police Department for the death of George Floyd,”

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third parties indicate that they will not stop blaming, even if the survivors and other indirect victims do so (cf. Owens 2012: 52). However, a declaration of forgiveness by third parties would make the stronger claim that their choice to cease blaming would help put an end to either the aptness of the wrongdoer’s guilt or someone else’s blame. So far, I have suggested some ways in which to weaken Owens’ account of the normative power wielded by the forgiving victim. One might also recommend the extension of normative power to the wrongdoer, which would yield an account of self-forgiveness. Perhaps both the victim’s and the wrongdoer’s stamps of approval are necessary to bring apt guilt and blame to an end. We might add to this the claim that the wrongdoer can only properly exercise this power to give her own stamp of approval by first undergoing a particular sort of change of heart or other process of atonement (Holmgren 1998; Radzik 2009). Where the victim has forfeited his own power to forgive, the wrongdoer’s self-forgiveness might suffice. Could third parties also have the standing to forgive on this model? The idea here would be that (some) third parties must also add their stamp of approval in order for apt guilt and blame to come to an end. In my opinion, there are many cases of wrongdoing where third parties have no standing to forgive and any pretense that they do would be offensive to both victim and wrongdoer. However, I am not prepared to say that third parties never have the standing to forgive, that is, that their stamp of approval is never necessary for bringing apt blame and guilt to an end. In fact, I suspect that an answer to the question “Who has the standing to forgive?” will have to be tailored to the specific sorts of wrongs in question (cf. Edwards 2019: 444). When Wanda’s transgression against Victor is specific to their particular friendship (e.g. a revealed secret), it may make more sense to deny third parties like Theo the standing to forgive than when the transgression has a broader social significance (e.g. a homophobic slur). To emphasize the special place of the victim, we might add that the community’s decision about whether to forgive or refuse forgiveness must wait upon and be informed by (though not determined by) the victim’s decision, yet the community’s stamp of approval would still be required to fully bring an end to apt guilt and blame for these sorts of wrongs.

8. Conclusion One lesson that I think we can draw from this review of the literature on the standing to forgive is that a proper analysis of standing is unlikely to simply fall out of an analysis of the concept or nature of forgiveness. Forgiving is not merely something that people do, it is something that people do that has normative implications for how other people act and feel about one another and themselves. Even Owens’ account of forgiveness, in which the act of forgiveness is fundamentally normative, still leaves room for disagreement about the precise content and extent of these normative implications. Distinct traditions and social practices of forgiving may fill out these details in different ways. In thinking through what our social practices of forgiveness should be, I recommend that theorists consider how those practices intersect with the broader, interconnected set of social practices by which we assign responsibility and hold ourselves and one another accountable for our actions. The standing to forgive should be theorized alongside the standing to feel and to express blame. This will require us to consider the interests not only of victims but also of wrongdoers and communities.

Notes 1 Others claim that no one can forgive on behalf of a dead victim. This is a major point of debate in Wiesenthal (1998). 2 Similar sorts of considerations lead theorists to conclude that secondary or tertiary victims’ decisions about forgiveness should typically wait upon and be guided by primary victims (Govier and Verwoerd 2002).

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Linda Radzik 3 Wanda is here quoting Josiah Royce (1968: 161). 4 Edwards’ work on the standing to blame draws a helpful distinction between conditions that ground standing and those that defeat standing (2019: 443). Hypocrisy, for example, is a defeating condition in that it eliminates standing that the subject would otherwise have. Owens’ own position on whether the victim’s “bad record” defeats the standing to forgive is not clear. See (2012: 50–1n). 5 There are many reasons why third parties may not have the standing to blame in the first place. They may lack a relevant connection to the case. They may be in too poor an epistemic position with respect to the facts of the case to blame responsibly. Their standing may be defeated by hypocrisy, complicity, or vice. For more discussion of the standing to blame, see Wallace (2010), Radzik (2011), and Edwards (2019).

References Atkins, M. 2002, “Friendship, Trust and Forgiveness,” Philosophia, vol. 29, pp. 111–32. Benn, P. 1996, “Forgiveness and Loyalty,” Philosophy, vol. 71, no. 277, pp. 369–83. Bennett, C. 2018, “The Alteration Thesis: Forgiveness as a Normative Power,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 207–33. Cornell, N. 2017, “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving,” Philosophical Review, vol. 126, no. 2, pp. 241–72. Edwards, J. 2019, “Standing to Hold Responsible,” Journal of Moral Philosophy, vol. 2019, no. 4, pp. 437–62. Govier, T. & Verwoerd, W. 2002, “Forgiveness: The Victim’s Prerogative,” South African Journal of Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 97–111. Griswold, C., 2007, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. Cambridge University Press, New York. Herstein, O.J. 2020, “Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One’s Place,” Philosopher’s Imprint, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 1–18. Hieronymi, P. 2001, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 529–55. Holmgren, M. 1998, “Self-Forgiveness and Responsible Moral Agency,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 75–91. Horsbrugh, H.J.N. 1974, “Forgiveness,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 269–82. Kolnai, A. 1974, “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 74, pp. 91–106. MacLachlan, A. 2008, “Forgiveness and Moral Solidarity,” in Forgiveness: Probing the Boundaries, ed. S. Schulman and D. White. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, pp. 3–16. ——— 2017, “In Defense of Third Party Forgiveness” in The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, ed. K. Norlock. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, pp. 135–60. Milam, P. 2017, “How is Self-Forgiveness Possible?,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 49–69. Murphy, J.G. & Hampton, J. 1988, Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge University Press, New York. Newman, L.E. 1987, “The Quality of Mercy: on the Duty to Forgive in the Judaic Tradition,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 155–72. Norlock, K. 2009, Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD. North, J. 1987, “Wrongness and Forgiveness,” Philosophy, vol. 62, no. 242, pp. 499–508. Owens, D. 2012, Shaping the Normative Landscape. Oxford University Press, New York. Pettigrove, G. 2009, “The Standing to Forgive,” The Monist, vol. 92, no. 4, pp. 583–603. Radzik, L. 2009, Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law and Politics. Oxford University Press, New York. ——— 2010, “Moral Bystanders and the Virtue of Forgiveness” in Forgiveness in Perspective, eds. C. Allers & M. Smit. Rodopi, New York, pp. 69–87. ——— 2011, “On Minding Your Own Business: Differentiating Accountability Relations within the Moral Community,” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 574–98. Richards, N. 1988, “Forgiveness,” Ethics, vol. 99, pp. 77–97. Royce, J. 1968, The Problem of Christianity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Scanlon, T.M. 2008, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Strawson, P.F. 1962, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 48, pp. 187–211. Walker, M.U. 2006, Moral Repair. Cambridge University Press, New York. ——— 2013, “Third Parties and the Social Scaffolding of Forgiveness,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 495–512. Wallace, R.J. 2010, “Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 307–41.

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The Standing to Forgive Warmke, B. 2016a, “The Economic Model of Forgiveness,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 4, pp. 570–89. ——— 2016b, “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 94, no. 4, pp. 687–703. Wiesenthal, S. 1998, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, rev. and exp. ed. Schocken Books, New York. Zaragoza, K. 2012, “Forgiveness and Standing,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 84, no. 3, pp. 604–21.

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25 FORGIVENESS AND OPPRESSION Macalester Bell

1. Introduction In 2019, an image of a Black man embracing a White woman and offering her his forgiveness went viral. The man, Brandt Jean, publicly forgave former Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, who shot and killed his brother, Botham Jean. Botham Jean was in his own apartment when Guyer entered his unit and shot him after mistaking his apartment for her own, one floor below. The case drew public attention and outrage, and Guyger was convicted of murder. During the sentencing phase, Brandt Jean stated that he forgave Guyger and embraced her for over a minute in the courtroom. Many observers were inspired and moved by this act of forgiveness, but others were less sanguine. “Why do black folks always have to forgive?” tweeted CNN commentator Bakari Sellers (2019). He went on to suggest that Jean may have even done something morally wrong in forgiving: “We can have a conversation about black folk and our unconscionable forgiveness in the face of hate and violence. I don’t get it.” Yolanda Wilson (2019) does not cast aspersions on Jean’s response, but she does question why Americans seem more receptive to stories of Black forgiveness than Black anger: Jean has every right to do the thing that helps him heal and honor the memory of his brother. But in instances of unjust killings of Black victims, why does the public laud responses of forgiveness and criticize those that include anger? As Wilson points out, there is social pressure on Black people to immediately forgive their wrongdoers, and this pressure is the product of long-standing stereotypes of Black Americans as suffering martyrs which have a specific function for White Americans: “Stereotypes of black docility that go back to the days of the ‘happy slave’ and continue presently with the ‘Magical Negro’ primarily serve to make white people feel good about themselves.” For Wilson, the moral value of forgiveness cannot be divorced from oppressive circumstances. Under oppressive conditions where Black anger is dismissed and demonized, we should question and push back against the apparent White hunger for Black forgiveness. Myisha Cherry (2018) also raises concerns about ubiquitous stories of forgiveness, especially Black forgiveness of Whites, in the United States. As she sees it, part of the problem with these stories is a more general worry about the role of exemplars in determining what attitudes a person should or should not have; sharing stories about the socially marginalized forgiving their oppressors is a rhetorical strategy. While she allows that exemplars may be helpful in illustrating moral

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principles, simply appealing to the actions and attitudes of exemplars in an attempt to goad people into forgiving does not respect the autonomy of victims. Direct appeals to exemplars often rely on a kind of fallacious argument from authority which is disempowering to victims (Cherry 2018: 64). In other cases, the use of forgiveness exemplars is manipulative; by pointing to an exemplar who suffered a great deal, victims may come to feel pressured to forgive out of guilt or sadness (Cherry 2018: 67). Others may take Wilson’s point about the history of White supremacy and the controlling images and stereotypes that seek to tamp down justified Black anger and valorize forgiveness and argue that a particular instance of a Black person forgiving a White offender is even more admirable than forgiveness under non-oppressive contexts. It is comparatively easy to overcome one’s hard feelings for a one-off wrong under the circumstances of justice, but it is much harder to let go of merited hostile emotions when they take as their target not just one act of wrongdoing but an ongoing pattern of wrongdoing. According to this point of view, for the oppressed, who are entitled to be angry always and forever (Callard 2018, Bell 2009, Srinivasan 2018), to forgive their oppressors reveals an almost superhuman good will that deserves special praise and admiration as “super” supererogatory. Stories of Black forgiveness of White wrongdoing are not new, nor are worries about the meanings and messages of Black forgiveness. Brant Jean’s forgiveness (and the responses it elicited) cannot be fully understood in isolation, for it is part of a larger ongoing pattern of stories about Black forgiveness and reconciliation. Perhaps one of the most famous was Frederick Douglass’ story of his apparent forgiveness of his former slave master, Thomas Auld. While Auld was the target of Douglass’ wrath for many years, in a chapter entitled “Time Makes All Things Even” in the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he also tells the story of his reconciliation with Auld on the latter’s deathbed. This encounter, which had been reported by the press, was the source of much public controversy and derision. Douglass (1881: 447) notes that this visit “[h]as been made the subject of Mirth by heartless triflers, and regretted as a weakening of my life-long testimony against slavery, by serious minded men…” Like many contemporary commentators writing about similar cases, some suggested that Douglass’ response to his former master condoned the wrongs done both to Douglass and to Blacks generally, and was, for this reason, morally egregious. To condone wrongdoing is to not take it seriously, and finding a way to distinguish forgiveness from condonation is a persistent theme in the forgiveness literature. But Douglass himself pushed back against this interpretation, and I will return to this story, and what light it may shed on the possibilities, dangers, and complications of forgiveness under circumstances of oppression, at the end of this chapter. While forgiveness is generally lauded as an especially admirable response to wrongdoing, how should we understand the nature and moral value of forgiveness under oppression? Do oppressive contexts render individual acts of forgiveness less admirable or more admirable? In what ways do oppressive contexts complicate forgiveness? These questions have gained surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature on forgiveness; my aim here is not to offer complete answers to these questions, but I do hope to provide a general roadmap for thinking about forgiveness under oppression. I will primarily be focused on the way anti-Black racism complicates forgiveness in the context of racial oppression as found in the United States. However, I hope my discussion of forgiveness in these specific circumstances can be applied to oppressive contexts, more generally (although it is important to note that different oppressive contexts will likely complicate forgiveness in unique ways). While philosophers have become increasingly interested in distinct forms of political forgiveness, I will focus my attention on how oppression raises fundamental questions and puzzles about the possibilities and pitfalls of interpersonal forgiveness, such as exemplified in the case of Jean and Guyger.

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2.  Oppression and Oppressive Wrongs There are a wide variety of theories of the nature of oppression and forgiveness, and I shall not aim to provide a complete or thorough overview of these accounts here. I will assume that oppression is wrong and that we have some moral responsibility to resist it. I’ll begin with a few remarks about some key features of oppression before turning to the topic of how forgiveness, and its philosophical treatment, is complicated by oppression. Oppression is the systematic maltreatment of members of some group of persons qua group members. As Ann Cudd (2013: 3721) characterizes it, oppression is a harm “…through which groups of persons are systematically and unfairly constrained, burdened, or reduced by any of several social forces.” Oppression is maintained by ideology and a host of social forces including exploitation, coercion, and double binds. Often, these social forces encourage oppressors to see themselves as justified in their treatment of the oppressed and encourage the oppressed to see themselves as deserving of their treatment. Oppressive institutions often normalize the maltreatment of group members which sometimes makes it difficult to identify the wrongs done as wrong (Hill 2010, Frye 1983). According to Cudd (2006: 25), there are four primary features of oppression: 1 The harm condition: there is a harm that comes out of an institutional practice. 2 The coercion condition: there is unjustified coercion or force that brings about the harm. 3 The social group condition: the harm is perpetrated through a social institution or practice on a social group. 4 The privilege condition: there is another social group that benefits from the institutional practice in 1. Oppression is systematic, and one’s position within the system is relevant to one’s moral responsibilities and vulnerabilities. In his discussion of forward-looking dimensions of moral responsibility, Thomas Hill (2010) distinguishes between what he calls the primary oppressor, bystander, and victim. Hill acknowledges that this may be a somewhat artificial classification system, and contemporary intersectional theories of oppression (e.g., Crenshaw 1989, Collins 1990) stress that persons are members of multiple groups, some of which may be more or less oppressed or privileged. Nevertheless, this tripartite classification system still has its uses. In what follows, I will be concerned primarily with how oppression complicates the availability of forgiveness as a response for victims of oppression; there are further important questions about how oppression may complicate the forgiveness of primary oppressors and bystanders that, due to space constraints, I will not be able to pursue here. Given that oppression is maintained through social forces and practices, rather than simply the actions of individuals, there are deep questions about who, if anyone, is morally responsible for oppression and whether blame is an appropriate attitude to take toward individual oppressors. One response is to argue that collectives, not individuals, are morally responsible for oppressive social practices. But defending this claim is complicated by the fact that the collectives in question, e.g., “the patriarchy” or “White supremacists,” are not clearly structured groups with formal decision procedures.1 According to some theorists, we should give up on talking about backward-looking moral responsibility when it comes to oppression. Young (2011), for example, argues that we should focus on what she calls the “responsibility of connection” which is a forward-looking form of moral responsibility which does not seek to attribute moral responsibility to individuals. Others have argued that this way of thinking about the relationship between individuals and social practices does not fully capture the ways individuals perpetuate social practices. Cheshire Calhoun

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(1989: 402) notes that while social practices work to mold individual thought and action, it is also the case that [s]ocial practices can be sustained only through the concerted thought and action of individual practitioners. Thus, an excusing response to individuals who participate in harmful social practices sanctions those social practices by obscuring the individual’s role in sustaining and, potentially, disrupting them. For Calhoun, causing harm is not the same as being responsible for harm. In “abnormal moral contexts,” many will be blamelessly morally ignorant about the harm they cause, and therefore not responsible for this harm. In these circumstances, a subgroup within a given community advances moral knowledge but this new understanding is opaque to outsiders (Calhoun 1989: 396). Whether to blame those who are blamelessly ignorant will depend on what goods such blame could bring about. Of course, the conditions under which ignorance should excuse is a topic of much philosophical discussion and debate. Calhoun (1989: 396–7) does not think all claims of ignorance excuse under circumstances of oppression; we have general agreement that some oppressive wrongs are wrong, and we have developed the language and concepts to discuss these wrongs: Public consensus on the wrongness of discriminatory hiring, sexual harassment, and marital rape makes the moral context in which these oppressive acts occur a normal one. But feminists also critique a wide range of actions and practices that would not, in popular consciousness, be considered wrong (male bias in psychological and other theories, the design of female fashions, the use of ‘he’ neutrally, heterosexual marriage, and so on). Here the context of these actions shifts to an abnormal one. In thinking about the ethics of forgiveness under oppression we will need to take into account whether there is general consensus about the wrong to be (or not to be) forgiven. If we are in an abnormal moral context, then we face questions about whether the apparent ignorance of oppressors and bystanders is genuine moral ignorance that should excuse, or motivated “affected ignorance” which should not.2 To simplify matters, I will focus on instances of wrongdoing where there is general consensus that the act, practice, or attitude is wrong, although there may be debate about whether the person in question was culpable for the wrongdoing.

3.  Central Features of Forgiveness Forgiveness is one, especially lauded and normatively significant, way of going on after wrongdoing. While there is some disagreement among theorists, many characterize forgiveness as the giving up or forgoing of hard feelings which were originally justified by the wrong as part of a process of relational repair.3 But overcoming hard feelings may not be sufficient for forgiveness. Forgiveness is thought to be distinct from excusing, justifying, accepting, or condoning the wrong done, even if these activities all involve overcoming hard feelings. In order to distinguish forgiveness from these other activities, it is often claimed that when forgiveness is apt, the hard feelings that were originally justified are no longer warranted (Griswold 2007, Hieronymi 2001). However, some have argued that if we make this move, forgiveness would no longer be fully elective, and the idea that forgiveness is always elective and never owed or deserved is central to many accounts of the nature and moral value of forgiveness (Allais 2013). Overcoming negative emotions through a process of forgiveness is something the forgiver does, although, like other activities

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of affect regulation, it is unlikely under a person’s direct voluntary control. Because of this, forgiveness is also thought to be distinct from passively forgetting about the offense. The difficulty of understanding forgiveness centers around the fact that it is unclear how a person can acknowledge the wrong done, and can transform her attitude toward the wrongdoer by giving up an attitude she is entitled to maintain, without condoning, exempting, or excusing it. One of the biggest debates in philosophical discussions of forgiveness is whether forgiveness is conditional on the reparative activities of the offender: those who defend forgiveness as unconditional characterize it as a free gift that may legitimately be granted, without moral objection, whether or not the wrongdoer takes responsibility and apologizes for the wrongdoing. Those who argue that forgiveness is conditional insist that it is an agential, reason-responsive activity and that the paradigmatic reason to forgive is the offender’s remorse and attempt at repair.4 While I won’t take a stand on the debate between those who defend conditional and unconditional accounts of forgiveness here, it is worth stressing that the worries that might arise about the coherence and moral value and disvalue of forgiveness under oppression will be especially pressing for those who defend a conditional account of forgiveness. Forgiveness is best understood as a process that begins with the recognition of wrongdoing and ends with the forgiver forswearing the blaming attitudes that the wrongdoing renders apt. According to Michael McKenna’s conversational account of blame, we should understand holding persons responsible as analogous to a conversation. Like conversations, our moral responsibility practices are exchanges which usually proceed in stages, and one way to bring these exchanges to a close is through forgiveness. As he characterizes it, the conversational model of holding responsible has three stages (McKenna 2012: 89):5 1 Moral Contribution: Through act or omission, the wrongdoer reveals something objectionable about the quality of her will. 2 Moral Address: The victim responds with a reactive attitude such as resentment, blaming the offender. 3 Moral Account: The wrongdoer responds with offering an account of her actions. She may point to excusing or exempting conditions or attempt to show that what she did was not actually wrong. Alternatively, she might apologize and accept responsibility of the wrong done. At this point, the victim might give the moral account uptake and forgive the wrongdoer by overcoming the hard feelings that were originally justified.6 Given that oppression can complicate forgiveness at each step of this process, it is striking that little philosophical attention has been paid to the ethics of forgiveness under oppression. In a recent paper, Luke Brunning and Per-Erik Milam (2018: 144) argue that “…the circumstances of oppression systematically compromise the ability of oppressed people to forgive and that this deprivation constitutes a significant but neglected harm.” According to their argument, oppression makes it difficult for the oppressed to identify wrongs and get uptake for their resentment and other hard feelings. Moreover, the oppressed are less likely to receive genuine apologies and other reparative gestures and therefore will not have access to good reasons to forgive those who wrong them. Since Brunning and Milam subscribe to a conditional account of forgiveness, they conclude that it is often impossible for the oppressed to forgive, and because of this, the oppressed are wrongly deprived of an important good. As we have seen, not everyone accepts the conditional account of forgiveness upon which Brunning and Milam’s argument depends. Putting this debate to one side, we might question whether being able to forgive is an independent good, the deprivation of which should count as a harm, as Brunning and Milam suggest. To make this move seems to involve some sort of double counting; that is, to live under circumstances of oppression is to suffer multiple harms, such as the 340

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harm of not being able to identify wrongs or get uptake for one’s hard feelings, but it isn’t clear that in addition to these harms, victims suffer a further harm, i.e., the harm of not being able to forgive. Since there are other ways of going on in the face of wrongdoing including simply putting the wrong out of one’s mind, what exactly is the harm of not being able to forgive? In addition, forgiveness in oppressive contexts is complicated in ways that Brunning and Milam don’t seem to appreciate, and that cannot be adequately captured in terms of thinking of the oppressed as harmed by an inability to forgive. But even if we have reasons to question their conclusions, surely Brunning and Milam are right to draw our attention to the important ways in which forgiveness is rendered more complex under circumstances of oppression. Under circumstances of oppression, it may be difficult for victims to identify wrongs and respond with apt hard feelings. These feelings may not be given uptake at all due to longstanding stereotypes. Often justified and apt hard feelings will be dismissed as unfitting, and wrongdoers may refuse to take responsibility for the wrong done. Oppression complicates the standard categories of apology which makes it more challenging for wrongdoers to offer the type of apology that could provide a reason to forgive. The received view as to who has standing to forgive is also troubled under circumstances of oppression. I will consider each of these complications in turn.

4.  Forgiveness under Oppression: Identifying and Protesting the Wrong According to McKenna’s Conversational Model, after a wrong is committed, the victim may hold the wrongdoer responsible by judging that a wrong has been committed and responding with blame. Under circumstances of oppression, this process may become distorted in a number of ways. First, victims of oppression may be less likely to categorize a slight as a wrong (Brunning and Milam 2018: 162). Circumstances of oppression involve systematic wrongdoing across time, and since being a victim of oppression can undermine one’s sense of one’s own value, the oppressed may be unable to register wrongdoing as wrongdoing. The oppressed may become simply inured to the day in, day out wrongdoing that surrounds them. Second, victims of oppression may become embittered and see wrongdoing in morally innocuous interactions. When a group of people are regularly and repeatedly the victims of wrongdoing, some might, over time, become distrustful and suspicious about people generally and perceive wrongdoing when, in fact, no wrong has been done. In some circumstances, the oppressed may focus their rage on those who are also oppressed rather than direct it outward toward those who are oppressors (Lorde 1984b). Third, while typical philosophical accounts of forgiveness and blame often take as their paradigms one-off wrongdoing within the context of close personal relationships, the true target of blame under oppression may not be a single, identifiable, person but may also include collectives and institutions (Brunning and Milam 2018: 163). Sometimes, this will mean that a victim will fail to fully identify the wrong done; she may focus all of her anger at the police officer who wrongly shot her brother without acknowledging that this action was part of a larger pattern of oppressive police violence. Other victims may reverse this and direct all of their anger at “the system” while failing to acknowledge the personal responsibility of individual actors who acted unjustly. In addition, there is a deeper question of whether institutions and collectives can be fitting targets of resentment and other hard feelings at all; some institutions would seem to lack the kind of foreknowledge or intent that many think are required to be held morally responsible. If collective agency doesn’t exist, it would seem that it would be impossible to harbor fitting resentment toward a collective like the police department. For similar reasons, it is also unclear how collectives could accept an apology, harbor resentment themselves, or forgive. There has been much 341

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discussion of whether group attitudes and group forgiveness are possible and what sort of agency must be ascribed to groups to render these notions coherent, and this is still an area of active, unsettled debate (Govier 2002, Gilbert 2002, May 1991, Tollefsen 2006). Finally, the victim may be aware that the target of her blame and bystanders may respond to her hard feelings in unfair ways: she may be dismissed as a stereotypical angry Black woman or a long-suffering pious mammy figure, for example. Knowing about the possibility of this dismissal may make a subject less likely to respond to the wrongdoing with hard feelings in the first place, or she may become detached or alienated from her blaming emotions, seeing her experience of them as either playing into the stereotypes that keep her constrained in various ways or impossible to fully inhabit due to other stereotypes.

5.  Forgiveness under Oppression: Getting Uptake for Hard Feelings The third stage of McKenna’s Conversational Model involves the offender responding to the hard feelings of the victim by offering an account of his actions. This account giving may take the form of pointing to excusing conditions or attempting to justify his actions. Offering a moral account may also involve acknowledging that a wrong was done and apologizing. All these forms of providing moral account involve giving the hard feelings characteristic of blame a limited form of uptake. But under conditions of oppression, the blaming emotions are less likely to be expressed or given uptake. Marilyn Frye (1983: 88) has argued that anger is akin to a speech act; when you respond to another with anger, you “reorient” yourself and another person. But if the other does not give your anger uptake, this change in relation between the two of you does not take place and “[y]our speech just hangs there—embarrassed, unconsummated” (Frye 1983: 88). To give a ­person’s anger uptake is not necessarily to agree with the claim being made through the anger—I can give your anger uptake while thinking you are wrong; I can, for example, challenge the claim made by your anger or question it. However, under circumstances of oppression, the claims made through anger and other negative emotions are often not simply rejected as false or unjustified; instead, they are often treated as “…claims so wildly and obviously off the mark as to confound response” (Frye 1983: 89). A tragic example of this kind of dismissiveness can be found in the interaction between Sandra Bland and Trooper Brian Encinia. On July 13, 2015, Sandra Bland was found dead in her jail cell after being pulled over for a minor traffic violation and arrested for assaulting an officer. Bland was apparently found hanged in her jail cell, and her death was ruled as a suicide, but many family members have questioned the official cause of her death. Bland was pulled over after failing to signal when changing lanes in an apparent attempt to get out of the trooper’s way. After taking her driver’s license back to his patrol car, trooper Brian Encinia returned to Bland’s car and they have the following exchange: ENCINIA:  “You OK”? BLAND:  “I’m waiting on you. This is your job. I’m waiting on you. What do you want me to do?” ENCINIA:  “You seem very irritated.” BLAND:  “I am. I really am. Because of what I’ve been stopped and am getting a ticket for. I’ve

been getting out of the way. You’ve been speeding up, so I move over and you stop me. So yeah, I am a little irritated. But that didn’t stop you from giving me a ticket.” ENCINIA:  “Are you done?” BLAND:  “You asked me what was wrong, and I told you. So now I’m done, yeah.” ENCINIA: “OK, OK” (Pause) “Do you mind putting out your cigarette, please?” (Associated Press 2015) 342

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From here the interaction between them gets increasingly tense, and after threatening to “light her up” Bland is forced to exit her vehicle and is arrested for assault. There is much that is troubling about this case, but I want to focus on the portion of Bland’s interaction with Encinia that I have just highlighted for I think it is illustrative of the kind of affective dismissiveness that is the characteristic of oppressive circumstances. Encinia goes out of his way to call attention to and then quickly dismiss Bland’s apparent anger at being pulled over for what she sees as a minor infraction. Encinia’s first question upon returning to Bland’s car is to ask if she is “OK.” This is an odd question since she does not seem to be in distress. She reasonably replies that she is waiting for him to do his job, and at this point he explicitly declares that she seems irritated. Bland takes this as an invitation to explain her reasons for her frustration, but instead of acknowledging those reasons or challenging them, Encinia ignores the reasons she cites and dismisses her by asking if she is done. In asking if she is irritated in a flippant tone and then refusing to engage with what she offers up as reasons for her anger, Trooper Encinia is not taking the claim made by Bland through her anger seriously. How one’s anger is dismissed often depends on the specific stereotype that members of the group labor under. So Black women, such as Bland, are often stigmatized as being overly and threateningly angry all the time, and White women are dismissed as being “cute” when they are mad or ineffectual in their anger, as exemplified in the Karen meme. While the stereotypes and prejudices are different, the end result is the same: members of some oppressed and stigmatized groups do not have their anger taken seriously as anger. Their anger is not given uptake. When anger and other negative emotions are dismissed in this way, they cannot do the moral work that many have attributed to them. The relationship between the subject and the target is not transformed, and the emotion is incomplete in an important sense. Even if they do acknowledge the hard feelings of victims, offenders may not respond to these emotions productively. As Margaret Urban Walker (2006: 134) points out, when one is in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis one’s offender, attempting to address with resentment may backfire and usher in further mistreatment: “There, the victim’s vulnerability might cause expressions of resentment to have exactly the wrong sort of effect: a provocation to further aggression, bad treatment, ridicule, or contemptuous flouting of the rules.” Offenders under oppression are more likely to fail to take responsibility when they should or apologize adequately. As Brunning and Milam (2018: 164) point out, under oppression, [t]he offender may refuse or fail to apologize, apologize for a different offense, or give a partial or limited apology. For example, the Japanese government recently apologized for its treatment of Korean ‘comfort women’ during World War II, but only for the ‘involvement of Japanese military authorities.’ They thereby failed to take responsibility for the misdeeds of others acting on their behalf. If oppression makes it less likely that members of the oppressive group will take responsibility for their actions, this may, depending on one’s preferred characterization of forgiveness, mean that victims of oppression would have fewer opportunities to forgive or forgive in a morally praiseworthy way.

6.  Forgiveness under Oppression: Apologies and the Standing to Forgive It is not entirely clear how a wrongdoer could successfully apologize under circumstances of oppression. Nicholas Tavuchis (1990) categorizes apologies and acts of forgiveness as follows: One to One One to Many 343

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Many to One Many to Many But if a person has been wronged as both an individual and a member of a collective, what kind of apology should be offered by the wrongdoer? It would seem that one should apologize to the individual who was wronged but also to the group, and it might also be the case that one should apologize both as an individual who has wronged and as a member of a group who has wronged. In short, the best kind of apology under circumstances of oppression troubles the standard categories of apology. Forgiveness under oppressive circumstances also complicates the standard account of who has standing to forgive. According to this position, only the direct victim has the authority or standing to forgive. If I am the person deceived by my best friend, Oona, it seems out of place for another friend, Jorge, to forgive Oona for the wrong done to me. Only I have the standing to forgive Oona, or at least it is commonly supposed.7 Of course, defenders of the standard account can allow that one instance of wrongdoing can have multiple victims. While Botham Jean was the direct victim of Guyger’s shooting, his brother, Brandt, was also a victim, albeit a secondary victim, and so Brandt would have standing to forgive. But it would make no sense, according to this position, for someone with no personal connection to the case who read about it in the local paper to forgive Guyger; while such a person may experience apt anger or outrage at the shooting, it would be incoherent for that person to undergo some process of overcoming those hard feelings and forgive the former officer. Under circumstances of oppression, at least some wrongs (and perhaps most wrongs) experienced by direct victims of oppression will also be group wrongs. That is, they will wrong the individual qua member of some group. It is wrong to murder anyone, but when a person is murdered because he is Black, many believe he is wronged not simply as an individual but also as a Black man. Moreover, some will suggest that all members of the relevant group are wronged by group wrongs. However, if we accept this, then it looks difficult to endorse the standard account of who has standing to forgive, for we are no longer able to easily sort the world into the categories of primary victim, secondary victim, and third parties. While we could say that all Black people are primary or secondary victims of Guyger’s shooting, it still seems odd for a Black person on the other side of the world who never met Botham Jean to forgive Guyger for her shooting; it does not seem that such a person has the authority to forgive, but if this person is a primary or secondary victim, it is difficult to see the basis on which one could come to that conclusion. For those who defend third-party forgiveness, this will not be an odd or troubling result. In fact, some theorists have argued that the standard view depends on an individualistic conception of harm that misconstrues group harms from the outset (Lamb 2006). The suggestion that third parties may have the standing to forgive or withhold forgiveness may be ameliorative, especially under circumstances where the oppressed are pressured by stereotypes to forgive quickly and automatically. For MacLachlan (2018: 145), third parties have standing to forgive when they stand in relationships of moral solidary with either the primary victim or the wrongdoer. Family and friends naturally stand in these relations, but so can strangers who undergo common experiences and shared identifications that give rise to sympathy (MacLachlan 2018: 145–6). With this authority to forgive comes the power to withhold forgiveness, and she suggests that this third-party refusal to forgive can help uphold and support the actual interests of victims who, through oppression or other means, have a tendency to forgive too readily. MacLachlan’s suggestion is interesting and important, but even if we allow that third-party refusal to forgive can have the kind of solidarity value described, we might wonder if there would be other ways for third parties to express solidarity that didn’t come with some of the apparent costs of third-party forgiveness. It might be objected that MacLachlan downplays the costs of giving up on the idea that forgiveness belongs exclusively to victims of wrongdoing. One aspect 344

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of the badness of wrongdoing is the way wrongdoers run roughshod over the authority of victims, and holding on to the idea that only victims have the authority to forgive may help victims regain a sense of their own power. Imagine if the family and friends of Brandt Jean did not forgive Guyger but other Black people forgave and expressed this forgiveness. In this case, the third-party forgiveness would call into question the reasonableness of the refusal to forgive and put pressure on Jean’s friends and family to give up their hard feelings. As social creatures, we constantly monitor others’ reactions to determine whether our own are reasonable. Those who are victims of wrongdoing shouldn’t be seen as infallible or the sole interpreter of what happened, but it seems disrespectful for those with attenuated connections to the wrongdoing to set the norms for the aptness of continued hard feelings. Moreover, there are other ways for third parties to signal their solidarity with the victim or non-acquiescence with the wrong done; third parties may harbor (and voice) indignation and other hard feelings for the wrong done and the wrongdoer.

7. Conclusion Forgiveness under oppression is complicated in multiple ways. In the introduction, I noted that stories of Black persons’ forgiveness of their White oppressors and criticism of these processes of forgiveness have a long history. Some worry that forgiveness under oppression is either impossible or immoral. It would be impossible if we thought that forgiveness is conditional upon the sincere repentance of the offender and if we had reason to believe that the offender could not experience or express adequate contrition under circumstances of oppression. It would be immoral if forgiveness under oppression always amounts to a servile condonation of the wrongs done. In closing, I’d like to return to the story of Douglass’ narrative of meeting and reconciling with his former slave master in order to illustrate some of the dangers, attractions, and complications of forgiveness under oppression. Auld is an old man nearing the end of his life when he and Douglass meet again. Auld greets Douglass warmly and addresses him by his formal title, “Marshall Douglass,” to which Douglass immediately responds, “Not Marshall, but Frederick to you as formerly” (Douglass 1881: 448). While some of Douglass’ contemporaries apparently saw this gesture as subservient, Douglass clearly does not. Instead, he seems to suggest that this invitation to a less formal mode of address is born out of his own sense of and confidence in himself and his social standing. Douglass (1881: 448) goes on to describe the beginning of their short meeting: We shook hands cordially, and in the act of doing so, he, having been long stricken with palsy, shed tears as men thus afflicted will do when excited by any deep emotion. The sight of him, the changes which time had wrought in him, his tremulous hands constantly in motion, and all the circumstances of his condition affected me deeply, and for a time choked my voice and made me speechless. We both, however, got the better of our feelings, and conversed freely about the past. When asked what he thought of Douglass running away Auld stated that he always knew Douglass was too smart to be enslaved, and “…if I had been in your place I should have done as you did.” In response, Douglass replied, “Capt. Auld, I am glad to hear you say this. I did not run away from you, but from slavery; it was not that I loved Caesar less, but Rome more” (Douglass 1892: 536). Douglass also acknowledged making a mistake in his earlier autobiography about Auld’s treatment of Douglass’ grandmother, incorrectly attributing to Auld poor treatment of the woman. Auld went on to say that he never liked slavery and planned to release all his slaves when they were 25 years old. Douglass ends his description of the encounter by dryly noting, “His death was soon after announced in the papers, and the fact that he had once owned me as a slave was cited as rendering that event noteworthy” (Douglass 1892: 538). 345

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After narrating this encounter, Douglass goes on, in much greater detail, to describe “another incident of something of the same nature” (1892: 538), his return to Easton, the town where he had been jailed and sold as punishment for attempting to run away, and his visit to the Lloyd estate where he had lived as an enslaved person. On this journey, his is received with great honor and deference by the descendents of his former slave master, and he reflects on the passage of time and the changes it has brought. The chapter concludes with a visit to Harper’s Ferry where he gave an address on John Brown. While there are questions of how, exactly, we should describe this encounter between Douglass and Auld, if it is to be understood as a narrative of forgiveness, it is remarkable and complicated. On the one hand, it is easy to understand why people were disturbed by Douglass’ actions and response to Auld: while he does declare that he never liked slavery, Auld does not take responsibility for his actions or apologize for his role in the institution of slavery. It is hard to understand why Douglass would forgive under these circumstances, and his attitude shift could be read as a kind of failure of self-respect.8 On the other hand, Douglass is aware of this criticism and still goes out of his way to include this story in his narrative. Whether forgiveness under oppression devolves into condonation depends on a variety of factors. While defenders of conditional accounts of forgiveness might argue that the wrongdoer must first publicly apologize before genuine, non-condoning forgiveness is possible, those who defend unconditional accounts of forgiveness will dispute this. When we look closely at the story, we can see a few specific features that might have allowed Douglass to forgive, even in the absence of Auld’s apology, without condoning.9 First, at the time of their meeting, Auld is no longer a slave master “in fact or spirit,” and the fact that he is on his death bed and infirm highlights his vulnerability and may even make him pitiable in Douglass’ eyes. While it would be objectionably ableist to characterize Auld’s infirmities as something akin to just punishment for his past actions and attitudes, I take it that this is not Douglass’ response. Instead, Auld’s physical disabilities seem to invite Douglass to recognize Auld’s human vulnerabilities, both physical and moral, and thereby give rise to a fuller conception of him as a person. With this richer picture in place, Douglass is apparently able to appreciate all aspects of Auld, and he no longer sees him as reduceable to just an evil slave master. This new interpretation is also made possible by the social transformation that had taken place that fundamentally altered the power balance between the two: But now that slavery was destroyed, and the slave and the master stood on equal ground, I was not only willing to meet him, but was very glad to do so. The conditions were favorable for remembrance of all his good deeds, and generous extenuation of all his evil ones. (Douglass 1892: 535) Second, and relatedly, it matters to Douglass that Auld is near death. Cross-culturally, there are norms not to speak ill of the dead (Fileva 2020). Whatever we might think of these norms, they seem to weigh on Douglass and his assessment of Auld, even though the latter is not yet dead. That is, Douglass is motivated to alter his overall assessment of Auld at least in part because he perceived Auld to be at death’s door. Third, Douglass had previously been able to express his apt anger toward Auld in a very public way, and he was at least somewhat successful in making his anger felt (Douglass 1848).10 Thus, before forgiving Auld Douglass had been given ample opportunity to harbor and express his justified anger toward Auld, slavery, and the injustices that pervade life in the United States more generally. This publicly expressed anger served to counter, at least to some degree, those who sought to use his story of the reconciliation with Auld as evidence of Douglass’ condonation of the evils of slavery. 346

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I’m suggesting that the details of Douglass’ status and position along with the social changes brought about during Reconstruction may have allowed Douglass to forgive Auld without condonation even though the latter never apologized for his role in the institution of slavery, but these circumstances are unusual. While it may be possible for the oppressed to forgive their oppressors without compromising their own self-respect or commitment to justice, it is a possibility that is fraught with moral challenges. Moreover, we may have reason to question why forgiveness is regularly encouraged and celebrated while other, harder to handle, apt responses to injustice are discouraged. While admirable and inspiring, there is also something troublingly sentimental about the story of Jean’s forgiveness of Guyger and how their encounter was depicted in the mainstream media. Media portrayals encouraged a reductively reassuring narrative about the possibility of White redemption through Black sacrifice that allowed White viewers to come away feeling good about themselves and hopeful about the future of race relations. These narratives can sometimes do important moral work in reassuring people of their values, and as we have seen with the discussion of Frederick Douglass’ story of reconciling with Auld, these narratives are sometimes utilized in a deliberate and clear eyed manner by those who have worked hardest to stand against oppression. But we should be cognizant of the allure of these narratives as well as their dangers when considering the multiple ways in which forgiveness is complicated by oppression.

Notes 1 For a discussion of how collectives can be morally responsible for oppressive practices, see Stahl (2017). 2 See Moody-Adams (1994) for a discussion of affected ignorance and Mills (2007) for a discussion of White ignorance under oppression. 3 Of course, not all philosophers argue that forgiveness involves giving up hard feelings or repairing relationships. Cherry (2016) defends what she calls “Outraged Forgiveness” according to which one may maintain one’s resentment while forgiving, and other philosophers such as Pettigrove (2012) and Nelkin (2013) also argue that forgiveness does not necessarily involve the overcoming of resentment. 4 Defenders of the Conditional View include Bell (2008), Griswold (2007), Murphy and Hampton (1988), Richards (1988), and Wilson (1988); those who defend the Unconditional View include Allais (2008), Calhoun (1992), Garrard and McNaughton (2003), Holmgren (1993), Pettigrove (2004), and Westlund (2009). Hieronymi (2001) wishes to remain neutral on the question of whether the offender’s remorse is a necessary condition of genuine forgiveness, but insofar as she insists that forgiveness is always “articulate,” her view is incompatible with versions of the Unconditional View that characterize forgiveness as a leap of faith, rather than a response to reasons. 5 Also discussed in Brunning and Milam (2018). 6 While not included in his account of the Moral Responsibility Exchange, McKenna (2012: 89) suggests that the wrongdoer might express contrition and thereby “instigate further conversation which [the victim] might take up in the form of forgiveness.” 7 Philosophers who defend the claim that only victims of wrongdoing have standing to forgive include Downie (1965), Holmgren (1993) Kolnai (1973–74), Griswold (2007), and Roberts (1995). Several philosophers have pushed back against the claim that only direct victims have standing to forgive. Murphy (2009), Pettigrove (2009) Radzik (2010), Chaplin (2019), and MacLachlan (2018) all argue that third parties can forgive. 8 On the moral dimensions of self-respect, see Boxill (1976) and Hill (1973). 9 Of course, it is possible that Douglass did not forgive at all or, depending on one’s view of what forgiveness requires, did so merely as a kind of publicity stunt or power play. For an interpretation along these lines see Levine (2014). 10 While he claimed not to harbor any malice toward Auld personally, he publicly denounced Auld and used him as a symbol for the evils of slavery even writing in an open letter: “I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening their horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men. I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation with yourself to repentance” (Douglass 1848: 111).

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References Allais, L. (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 36(1), pp. 33–68. ———. (2013) “Elective Forgiveness” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 21(5), pp. 637–53. Associated Press (2015) “Transcript of Traffic Stop Where Sandra Bland Was Arrested” https://apnews.com/ article/6f 7eccac3d3546acbf6a53acfe9e8302 (Accessed: 4 January 2022) Bell, M. (2008) “Forgiving Someone for Who They Are (and Not Just What They’ve Done)” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 77(3), pp. 625–58. ———. (2009) “Anger, Virtue, and Oppression” Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal. London: Springer, pp. 58–77. ———. (2012) “Forgiveness, Inspiration and the Powers of Reparation” American Philosophical Quarterly, 49(3), pp. 205–21. Boxill, B. (1976) “Self-Respect and Protest” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6(1), pp. 58–69. Brunning, L. and P. Milam (2018) “Oppression, Forgiveness, and Ceasing to Blame” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 14(2) pp. 143–78 Calhoun, C. (1989) “Responsibility and Reproach” Ethics, 99(2), pp. 289–406. ———. (1992) “Changing One’s Heart” Ethics, 103(1), pp. 76–96. Callard, A. (2018) “The Reason to be Angry Forever” The Moral Psychology of Anger, ed. M. Cherry and O. Flanagan. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Chaplin, R. (2019) “Taking it Personally: Third-Party Forgiveness” Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, 9, pp. 73–94. Cherry, M. (2016) “What Does it Mean to Ask Blacks to Forgive and How Should They Respond?” https:// politicalphilosopher.net/2016/02/12/featured-philosop-her-myisha-cherry/ (Accessed: 4 January 2022) ———. (2018) “Forgiveness, Exemplars, and the Oppressed” The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, ed. K. Norlock. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Collins, P. (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Politics, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman Crenshaw, K. (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” The University of Chicago Legal Forum, pp. 139–67 Cudd, A. (2006) Analyzing Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press ———. (2013) “Oppression” International Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. H. LaFollette, pp. 3721–30. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Douglass, F. (1848) Letter to Thomas Auld Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. P. Foner. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books ———. (1881) Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History to the Present Time. Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing Company ———. (1892) Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Revised Edition). Boston: De Wolfe and Fiske Co. Downie, R. (1965) “Forgiveness” Philosophical Quarterly, 15(59), pp. 128–34. Fileva, I. (2020) “What Do We Owe the Dead?” The Stone New York Times https://www.nytimes. com/2020/01/27/opinion/kobe-bryant-death-tweets.html (Accessed: 4 January 2022) Frye, M. (1983) “A Note on Anger” The Politics of Reality. Berkeley: The Crossing Press Garrard, E. and D. McNaughton (2003) “In Defense of Unconditional Forgiveness” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103, pp. 39–60. Gilbert, M. (2002) “Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings” The Journal of Ethics, 6(2), pp. 115–43. Govier, T. (2002) Forgiveness and Revenge. New York: Routledge Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. New York: Cambridge University Press Hieronymi, P. (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62(3), pp. 529–55. Hill, T. (1973) “Servility and Self-Respect” The Monist, 57(1), pp. 87–104. ———. (2010) “Moral Responsibilities of Bystanders” Social Philosophy, 41(1), pp. 28–39. Holmgren, M. (1993) “Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons” American Philosophical Quarterly, 30(4), pp. 341–52. Kolnai, A. (1973–74) “Forgiveness” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 74, pp. 91–106. Lamb, S. (2006) “Forgiveness Therapy in Gendered Contexts: What Happens to the Truth?” Trauma, Truth, and Reconciliation, ed. N. Potter. New York: Oxford University Press

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Forgiveness and Oppression Levine, R. (2014) “Frederick Douglass and Thomas Auld: Reconsidering the Reunion Narrative” The Journal of African American History, 99(1–2), pp. 34–45. Lorde, A. 1984 “Eye to Eye: Black Women Hatred and Anger” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Tramansburg, NY: Crossing Press MacLachlan, A. (2018) “In Defense of Third-Party Forgiveness” The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, ed. K. Norlock. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers May, L. (1991) “Metaphysical Guilt and Moral Taint” Collective Responsibility: Five Decades in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, ed. L. May and S. Hoffman. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield McKenna, M. (2012) Conversation and Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press Mills, C. (2007) “White Ignorance” Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. S. Sullivan and N. Tuana. Albany: State University of New York Press Moody-Adams, M. (1994) “Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance” Ethics, 104(2), pp. 291–309. Murphy, J. (1988) “Forgiveness and Resentment” Forgiveness and Mercy, ed. J. Murphy and J. Hampton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ———. (2009) “The Case of Dostoevsky’s General: Some Ruminations on Forgiving the Unforgivable” The Monist, 92(4), pp. 556–83. Nelkin, D. (2013) “Freedom and Forgiveness” Free Will and Moral Responsibility, ed. I. Haji and J. Caouette. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press Pettigrove, G. (2004) “Unapologetic Forgiveness” American Philosophical Quarterly, 41(3), pp. 187–204 ———. (2009) “The Standing to Forgive” The Monist, 92(4), pp. 583–604 ———. (2012) Forgiveness and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press Radzik, L. (2010) “Moral Bystanders and the Virtue of Forgiveness” Forgiveness in Perspective, ed. C. Allers and M. Smit. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press Richards, N. (1988) “Forgiveness” Ethics, 99(1), pp. 77–97. Roberts, R. (1995) “Forgivingness” American Philosophical Quarterly, 32(4), pp. 289–306. Sellers, B. (2019) [Twitter] Available at: https://twitter.com/Bakari_Sellers/status/1179527505922985987?ref_ src=twsrc%5Etfw (Accessed 4 January 2022) Srinivasan, A. (2018) “The Aptness of Anger” The Journal of Political Philosophy, 26(2), pp. 123–44. Stahl, T. (2017) “Collective Responsibility for Oppression” Social Theory and Practice, 43(3), pp. 473–501. Tavuchis, N. (1990) Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. Stanford: Stanford University Press Tollefsen, D. (2006) “The Rationality of Collective Guilt” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 30, pp. 222–39. Walker, Margaret Urban (2006) Moral Repair. New York: Cambridge University Press Westlund, A. (2009) “Anger, Faith, and Forgiveness” The Monist, 92(4), pp. 507–36. Wilson, J. (1988) “Why Forgiveness Requires Repentance” Philosophy, 63(246), pp. 534–35 Wilson, Yolanda (2019) “For Black Shooting Victims, Sometimes Anger (Not Forgiveness) Is the Best Response” USA Today, published October 19 https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ policing/2019/10/10/black-police-victims-anger-forgiveness-brandt-jean/3913590002/ (Accessed: 4 January 2022) Young, I. (2011) Responsibility for Justice. New York: Oxford University Press

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26 FORGIVENESS AND HOPE Claudia Blöser

One can imagine many different points of connection between forgiveness and hope. It has been suggested, for instance, that forgiveness is able to instill a hopeful view in others, thereby facilitating moral repair (Walker 2006: 162). In this contribution, I focus on a specific question: What role do the hopes of the victim concerning the wrongdoer play in forgiveness, such as the hope that the wrongdoer will improve? In the first section, I introduce the challenge of providing an account of forgiveness that explains how forgiveness can be compatible with retaining central moral judgments, most importantly that the act in question was wrong and the wrongdoer blameworthy. The second section outlines the current debate on the concept and rationality of hope. In the next two sections, I discuss two accounts of forgiveness that aim to be uncompromising and articulate: the account offered by Owen Ware (Section 3) and that offered by Lucy Allais (Section 4). Neither of these accounts explicitly assigns hope a central place. I will explicate the role of hope in both accounts by showing that their crucial aspects are best expressed in terms of hope. In Section 5, I discuss in what sense Allais’ and Ware’s accounts are “articulate”, i.e., provide a justification of forgiveness. In Section 6, I map the discussion of the rationality of hope onto that of the rationality of forgiveness, in particular regarding the question whether forgiveness is elective.

1.  Providing an “Uncompromising”, “Articulate” Account of Forgiveness There are many accounts of what forgiveness is. Here, I focus on “emotion-based” accounts that hold that the core of forgiveness consists in overcoming resentment toward the wrongdoer—a resentment that is justified due to having been wronged.1 Emotion-based accounts have found widespread acceptance, although alternatives have also been developed (e.g., Nelkin 2013). While I won’t argue in favor of emotion-based accounts here, I do think that they capture important intuitions about forgiveness. For instance, they are able to explain our reluctance to say that a person has forgiven another if she continues to harbor strong resentment against her.2 Emotion-based accounts need to accommodate the fact that not all cases of overcoming resentment count as forgiveness. Overcoming resentment by persuading oneself that the act was not so bad after all amounts to justifying the wrong, while pointing to the fact that the wrongdoer didn’t really know what they were doing amounts to excusing. Thus, an account of forgiveness should explain how forgiveness can be compatible with maintaining the following two moral judgments: (1) The act was morally wrong (questioning this would amount to justifying the wrong) and 350

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(2) the wrongdoer is blameworthy for this particular wrongdoing (questioning this would amount to excusing the wrongdoer). An account that explains how forgiveness preserves these two judgments shows how forgiveness can be “uncompromising”, to use a term coined by Pamela Hieronymi (Hieronymi 2001: 531).3 Further, Hieronymi urges that we give an “articulate” account of forgiveness—one that articulates a “justification” for forgiveness (Hieronymi 2001: 530). This contrasts with the view that overcoming resentment is a process that cannot be rationally evaluated and that needs to be initiated by non-rational strategies, such as taking a pill. The underlying assumption is that emotions are not mere feelings but have intentional content—they represent the world as being a certain way (see, e.g., Allais 2008: 41f. and Hieronymi 2001: 535). For instance, fear represents an object as dangerous. It is in virtue of having intentional content that emotions can be rationally evaluated. In the case of fear, when a person learns that the object she fears is in fact not dangerous (e.g., a harmless domestic spider), her fear can be evaluated as inappropriate, and she has good reason to overcome it. Even if she is ultimately unable to overcome it, as a rational person she has to agree that this would amount to a failure of rationality. Similarly, the authors discussed in this chapter agree that resentment has an intentional object, although they disagree as to how exactly to construe this object. Forgiveness involves the overcoming of resentment, and an articulate account is supposed to give a justification of this emotional change. I will discuss the question of what exactly makes an account articulate in Section 5, where it becomes clear that Allais and Ware have a slightly different understanding than Hieronymi of what constitutes a “justification” for overcoming resentment. Providing an uncompromising, articulate account of forgiveness has proved challenging.4 The problem is due to the tight connection between resentment and the two moral judgments. It is hard to explain how we can justifiably give up resentment without giving up the judgments that ground it and show its appropriateness. The solution depends on other assumptions that differ from account to account. In particular, just how resentment is related to the two judgments remains controversial. Is resentment primarily a way of recognizing the wrongdoer as a moral being (as Ware holds), or rather a defensive response to one’s self-respect (as Hieronymi assumes)? The answer to whether and how overcoming resentment might be justified depends on the details of the specific account of resentment. My central question concerns what role hope can play in an account of uncompromising, articulate forgiveness. In order to explore this question, I will discuss the accounts provided by Owen Ware and Lucy Allais.5 Before delving into the discussion of the relation between hope and forgiveness, however, we need a clearer grasp of what hope is.

2.  Hope and Its Rationality Most contemporary accounts of hope start from the “standard definition”, according to which a person A hopes that p if and only if A wishes or desires that p and believes that p is possible but not certain (e.g., Day 1969). Note that according to this definition, we can hope for what we take to be improbable.6 If we believe that the object will likely come about, we are optimistic about its realization. Thus, the standard definition implies that one can have hope and be pessimistic (assign a low probability to the outcome) at the same time, about the same thing. There is widespread consensus that the standard definition does not provide sufficient conditions for hope. First, many critics assume that a desire and a belief in possibility can also be present in cases of despair or demoralization, and thus are not sufficient to demarcate hope from these other states (Meirav 2009; Moellendorf 2006). Second, others hold that while the belief-desire model describes a minimal sense of hope, it does not account for substantial hope, which can play an important role in people’s lives, e.g., by sustaining action in the face of uncertainty (Pettit 351

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2004; Calhoun 2018). The common response to these objections is to search for a third component that is able to complement the definition. For instance, Philip Pettit suggests that hope involves a cognitive resolve to act as if the hoped-for object is likely to obtain (Pettit 2004). On Adrienne Martin’s account, hope involves seeing oneself as being justified in engaging in hopeful activities (acting to promote the outcome, fantasizing about it, etc.) (Martin 2013). Andrew Chignell holds that focusing on the low chance of the outcome occurring is the characteristic of despair, while focusing “on the chance of its occurring—even just the mere possibility”—amounts to hoping (Chignell 2018: 305). To date, no analysis of hope has found widespread agreement (see for discussion Milona 2020). It seems that all suggestions capture important features of a certain class of hopes, but not all hopes. For instance, Martin seems right to say that hoping often implies that a person sees herself as justified in hopeful activities, but this does not apply to cases of “recalcitrant” hopes, where a person wants her hope to die, as opposed to seeing herself as justified in her hope. Elsewhere I have argued that we shouldn’t even assume that desire and a belief in possibility are necessary conditions for hope; rather, hope is an irreducible concept, and different instances of hope are related by way of family resemblance (Blöser 2019). In light of the controversy about the nature of hope, I won’t presuppose any substantial sense of what hope is in what follows.7 Rather, I will assume a minimal sense of hope as having two aspects, namely, an evaluative and an epistemic one: Hope is an intentional attitude that represents its object as good and as possible (but not certain).8 I will indicate the consequences of different conceptions of hope where necessary. If hope is an intentional state that represents its object in a certain way, this opens up the possibility of rational evaluation. There is a theoretical or epistemic dimension of rationality, namely, the question of whether hope “fits the world”. Hope can be evaluated as correct or incorrect, depending on whether the object really is good (or desirable) and possible (but not certain). Further, the person can be rational with regard to a particular hope (in short: her hope is rational) depending on whether she is ready to revise (adopt, relinquish, or maintain) her hope in response to reasons pertaining to the fulfillment of the correctness conditions. For instance, the person needs to be responsive to evidence that is relevant to the question of whether the hoped-for object is possible or not. Here, a question arises: How strong must the evidential support for the possibility of the outcome be in order for hope to be rational? It is common ground that hope that p can be theoretically rational (permitted) even if the evidence is not sufficient for knowledge or justified belief that p or not-p—in other words, in situations of epistemic uncertainty, it can still be rational to hope. However, is the mere lack of sufficient evidence for the belief that the outcome is impossible (“epistemic minimalism”) enough? Or do we need positive evidence in favor of the outcome, showing that it is probable to a certain extent? Hope is only theoretically rational, on this latter view, if it is realistic, i.e., appropriately grounded in reality, and the subject can provide evidence for this being the case. In the context of forgiveness, for instance, we will discuss the hope that the wrongdoer will improve. In this case, the fact that the wrongdoer has apologized can function as a reason for the assumption that such improvement is possible, thus speaking in favor of the hope being realistic. The question of whether epistemic minimalism is sufficient for hope to be rational connects back to the phenomenon of “pessimistic hope”: Can hope be rational if the hoped-for object is deemed extremely unlikely and one does not have positive evidence for it? While some authors emphasize that such hope can be rational (e.g., Martin 2013), others point out that hoping for unlikely outcomes can come with high costs and that epistemic minimalism is therefore too weak (Moellendorf 2020). Even though these positions differ at first glance, I detect consensus: Doubts about epistemic minimalism being sufficient for the rationality of hope mainly stem from concerns about practical risk. Often, hope is bound up with actions, and the rationality of action plausibly depends (among other factors) on the probability of success. For instance, if a victim of 352

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domestic violence hopes that her abusive partner improves merely because she lacks evidence to the contrary, it is very risky—and irrational, insofar as it violates the interests of the victim—to resume the relationship without hesitation. Thus, whether or not one finds epistemic minimalism plausible crucially depends on whether one agrees that hope can be evaluated independently of particular actions that might follow. Is there also a practical dimension to the rationality of hope? While Martin agrees and holds that hope is rational as long as it promotes the agent’s ends to do so (Martin 2013: 38; see also McCormick 2017), others argue that practical reasons are wrong-kind reasons for hope (e.g., Döring 2014). On this latter view, practical reasons are (at best) reasons to cultivate hope or bring it about that one hopes, but are not reasons for hope directly, since they do not bear on the correctness conditions.9 My view of this controversy (for which I cannot argue in detail here) is that it is based on different assumptions about the nature of hope: If one describes hope as a purely representational state, practical reasons are wrong-kind reasons; if one conceives of hope as actionlike—as involving “seeing oneself as justified” (Martin), or “acting as if ” (Pettit), or “focusing” (Chignell)—practical reasons can be genuine reasons for hope. Correspondingly, some hold that hope is subject to moral norms (Chignell 2023), while others would argue that there are no moral reasons to hope, but rather only moral reasons to cultivate (or try to abandon) hope. I will discuss the relevance of these controversies about hope for forgiveness in Section 6.

3.  Hope That the Wrongdoer Will Improve (Owen Ware) My aim in the next two sections is to make explicit the role of hope in Owen Ware’s and Lucy Allais’ (Section 4) accounts of forgiveness. I do not argue in favor of or against any one of these accounts. Instead, I want to show that endorsing these existing accounts of forgiveness implies endorsing a central role for hope, albeit different kinds of hope with different objects. Owen Ware wants to ground forgiveness in respect for persons in virtue of their moral capacities.10 What makes the account articulate, on Ware’s view, is that it provides a “reason for overcoming negative feelings like resentment” (Ware 2014: 247).11 Ware’s idea is that one reason to forgive is to focus on recognition respect, and thereby on the wrongdoer’s dignity. The Kantian idea in the background is that what gives an offender dignity are the “capacities that mark him out as a member of the moral community” (Ware 2014: 254). Following Stephen Darwall’s distinction between recognition and appraisal (or esteem) respect, Ware holds that both kinds of respect are expressed in resentment. On the one hand, resentment expresses appraisal of the misdeed (Ware 2014: 249). On the other hand, and most importantly for his purposes, “[t]o resent another is to […] recognize her as a person, as someone free and responsible for her actions” (Ware 2014: 249). When we forgive, we “let go of the appraisal [of the wrongdoing] that informed [our] resentment” (Ware 2014: 249). We do this by “foregrounding” (Ware 2014: 249; 254; 255; 256) recognition respect. What makes this account articulate, on Ware’s view, is that it offers a reason to forgive: “foregrounding your offender’s dignity is one reason you may have to overcome resentment” (Ware 2014: 256, my emph.). Even though the notion of “foregrounding” occupies a central role in the account, it is not entirely clear what it is supposed to mean. What does the activity of “foregrounding” involve? And what exactly is being foregrounded? As to the first point, Ware also says that respect is “made salient” (Ware 2014: 254), which suggests that he has a certain mental focus in mind. As to the second point, Ware oscillates between claiming that it is the offender’s dignity (Ware 2014: 256) and that it is respect for the offender (Ware 2014: 254) that is foregrounded. These are two very different objects, however, since dignity is a trait and respect an attitude. Consequently, there are two possible interpretations as to what constitutes a reason to forgive on Ware’s view: First, he could be understood as holding that the consideration that the offender has dignity in virtue of having moral 353

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capacities is a reason to forgive. Second, he could be understood as holding that having a certain kind of respect is a reason to forgive.12 I suggest that both interpretations require specification in order to circumvent problems and that this specification leads to a reformulation in terms of hope: First, respect can be a reason to forgive only insofar as it is hopeful, future-directed recognition respect. Second, that the offender has dignity in virtue of having moral capacities is a reason to forgive only insofar as these capacities warrant hope that the offender will improve morally. These modifications are necessary to answer objections that Ware already anticipates. The first objection holds that respect for moral agents does not lead to forgiveness but is a condition for holding them blameworthy in the first place. Respect therefore cannot be the reason for forgiveness. Ware replies: [T]his objection would hold if respect for persons only served as a background assumption for negative reactive attitudes. Yet there is another role respect for persons can play in our lives, that is, when it is made salient or foregrounded. (Ware 2014: 254) It is unclear, however, in what sense respect is a “background assumption” for resentment but “foregrounded” in forgiveness. Ware himself uses temporal terms to explicate the spatial metaphor: In foregrounding respect, we view the wrongdoer as a member of the moral community “regardless of his track record up to this point” (Ware 2014: 254), i.e., regardless of the past, and with a “capacity for moral change” (Ware 2014: 255). Thus, Ware’s reply to the objection is that while respect for moral agents is indeed a condition for resenting them when looking into the past, respect can also disregard past wrongdoing and be directed to the capacity for moral change in the future. Thus, Ware emphasizes that it is future-directed respect that can be a reason to forgive. I submit that this amounts to hopeful respect (or: respect that is bound up with hope), since it is respect that is directed to a possible good future use of one’s moral capacities. Future-directedness is also key to Ware’s reply to the second objection, which holds that the focus on moral capacities cannot be a reason for forgiveness, since their past misuse caused the wrongdoing in the first place. Ware replies that by “foregrounding recognition respect, victims can make their offenders’ moral capacities salient by disassociating them from their past misuse” (Ware 2014: 255). In short, Ware acknowledges that focusing on moral capacities as such cannot be a reason to forgive, but focusing on the offender’s possible good future use of these capacities can generate such a reason. This reply can be reformulated in terms of hope, since possible good future use of moral capacities warrants hope that the wrongdoer will improve morally. The consideration that the offender has moral capacities is a reason to forgive because these capacities allow for the hope that they will morally improve. The two reconstructions of Ware’s position are closely related. The relevant kind of hopeful respect is granted to the offender in virtue of their moral capacities, which allow for hope. The crucial difference between the statements “I forgive her because she has capacities that allow me to hope for her improvement” and “I forgive her because I hope that she will improve and therefore respect her” is that in order to endorse the first, one does not in fact need to have hope (or respect). Rather, it suffices to hold that hope would be appropriate or warranted. We find both views in different formulations of Ware’s text: Ware’s formulation of foregrounding capacities suggests that the warrant for hope is taken to be a reason to forgive, since no particular attitude toward these capacities is required. Ware’s formulation of foregrounding respect, however, refers to an attitude held by the victim that must be bound up with hope. As the victim is supposed to have this future-directed recognition respect, she is also supposed to have hope. The reason for forgiveness, on this formulation of Ware’s position, is the hope that the wrongdoer will improve (or hopeful recognition respect).13 354

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At this point, two questions arise: First, does Ware’s conception of future-directed recognition respect really involve hope, instead of the mere belief that moral change is possible? Second, is his reply to the two objections satisfactory, given that the possibility of change is already presupposed in blaming the wrongdoer in the first place? Bearing in mind the distinction between a substantial and minimal conception of hope, it seems that hope in a minimal sense is indeed implied by future-directed recognition respect, at least in cases where full-blown belief is absent. However, Ware’s account does not imply any substantial sense of hope. This leads to the second question. Heidi Giannini (2017) has argued—considering the analogous objection to Trudy Govier’s (1999) account that also bases forgiveness in respect—that a substantial conception of hope is needed to successfully answer the challenge: Hope for the wrongdoer’s improvement “demands more than recognition of possibility” (Giannini 2017: 75). Presupposing Adrienne Martin’s account of hope, Giannini suggests that hope involves seeing oneself as justified in performing hopeful activities, which is not implied in resentment. Thus, depending on one’s preferred conception of hope, there are two possibilities: One might hold that Ware’s account implicitly accords hope (namely, minimal hope) a central place, but it is questionable whether he can answer the objection that this is compatible with resentment. Alternatively, one might suggest (as Giannini does) that it must be supplemented by a substantial conception of hope that goes beyond what is already implied in respect.

4.  Hope That the Wrongdoer’s Character Is Better than the Wrongdoing Indicates (Lucy Allais) Lucy Allais also defends an emotion-based account that is uncompromising or “ambitious” because it leaves intact the two moral judgments mentioned above, i.e., “it aims to show that we can make sense of wiping the slate clean while continuing to recognize unexcused, unjustified, unacceptable wrongdoing” (Allais 2008: 36). What makes Allais’ account articulate is her “specific account of the relevant change in feeling” (Allais 2008: 41): It does not present overcoming resentment as an irrational or arational change in feeling; instead, it describes the change in affective attitudes as a change in focus or attention. Similar to Ware, Allais holds that resentment expresses two kinds of respect. In contrast to Ware, however, she focuses not on recognition respect but on esteem respect. Central to her account is the claim that resentment “involve[s] something like an evaluation of character, in the sense of affectively seeing a person in a particular ‘lowered’ or more negative way” (Allais 2008: 55). That is, if we overcome resentment, this amounts to changing our affective view of the person. The problem of how forgiveness can be uncompromising thus takes the following form: How can we change our affective attitude toward the wrongdoer, which involves a change in evaluation of the wrongdoer’s character, without changing our evaluation of the wrongdoing? Allais’ central idea is that in forgiving, we change the object of evaluation. More precisely, we evaluate the object—the wrongdoer’s character—under a different aspect: When we resent a person for her wrongdoing, we evaluate her character under the aspect of wrongdoing, whereas when we forgive, we see her character under a different aspect and thereby “come to have an attitude towards her [i.e., the wrongdoer] that sees her as better than her wrong actions indicate her to be” (Allais 2008: 59). Thus, on Allais’ view, forgiveness involves a shift in view from (affectively) evaluating the wrongdoer’s character under the aspect of wrongdoing toward evaluating the wrongdoer’s character as better than past actions indicate. My suggestion is that we can understand this shift as the adoption of a hopeful view of the wrongdoer’s character:14 Forgiving involves having hope that the wrongdoer’s character is better than past actions indicate. Note that this hopeful view is not future-directed. It does not amount to hope that the wrongdoer will improve in Allais’ view. Rather, this hope concerns the evaluation of character as it presently is. The uncertainty involved in 355

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hoping is uncertainty not about what will happen in the future but about what the wrongdoer’s character “really” is. However, one might object that this is not an appropriate reconstruction of Allais’ view. Allais claims that forgiveness involves affectively seeing the person as actually better than past actions indicate. This amounts to having an optimistic view of their character: The possession of a better character is taken to be more likely than not, or even to be certain. Hoping that the person is better than past actions indicate, by contrast, only implies seeing them as possibly better. Thus, forgiveness involves more than hope, in Allais’ view. As a matter of fact, optimism might often be involved in forgiveness.15 However, note that it might not always be psychologically possible to be optimistic about the wrongdoer’s character, and in some cases, it might not be rational to do so. If we want to allow for (rational) forgiveness even when it seems very unlikely that the wrongdoer is better than his wrongdoing indicates, we should allow for the shift in view being constituted by hope. We do not need optimism—hope is already sufficient for overcoming resentment (in Allais’ framework):16 In order to discard the negative evaluation involved in resentment, it is not necessary to assume that the wrongdoer is actually better; one need only acknowledge the possibility of the person’s being better.

5.  Two Senses of Articulation In both Ware’s and Allais’ accounts, hope is supposed to play a crucial role in making the account articulate, i.e., in providing a rational account of the change in view involved in forgiveness.17 However, Allais’ and Ware’s understanding of what an articulate account of forgiveness is differs slightly from Hieronymi’s original suggestion. It is therefore apt to distinguish two ways in which an account of forgiveness can be articulate. This has consequences for the prospects of an account of forgiveness that can be both articulate and elective, which I will discuss in the next section. Recall Hieronymi’s characterization of what an articulate account is supposed to accomplish: Ridding oneself of resentment by taking a specially-designed pill, for example, would not count as forgiveness. Genuine forgiveness must involve some revision in judgment or change in view. An account of genuine forgiveness must therefore articulate that revision in judgment or change in view. It must be an articulate account. (Hieronymi 2001: 530) To be sure, both Ware and Allais go beyond presenting forgiveness as a matter of taking a pill. They agree with Hieronymi on a minimal sense of “articulation”: An articulate account describes forgiveness as a change in view.18 However, there are two ways in which one can give a rational account of this change, which I will identify with a stronger and a weaker sense of articulation. An account of forgiveness is articulate in the first, stronger sense, if it articulates a sufficient reason to overcome resentment. This is what Hieronymi aims at by articulating a “good reason” (Hieronymi 2001: 530) (where this means: sufficient reason) to forgive. Her view of resentment is different from Allais’ and Ware’s. On her view, resentment “protests a past action that persists as a present threat” (Hieronymi 2001: 546) and is founded on the judgment “that the event in question makes a threatening claim” (Hieronymi 2001: 548).19 New evidence might render this judgment false—Hieronymi holds that an apology of the wrongdoer constitutes such evidence.20 If the wrongdoer apologizes, it is no longer true that the wrongdoing persists as a threat; therefore, one has sufficient reason to revise one’s judgment involved in resentment, and this means: sufficient reason to give up resentment. This is in stark contrast to Allais and Ware, who do not present a sufficient reason to forgive.21 In what sense could their account nevertheless be called “articulate”? I submit that this is the case 356

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on a weaker reading of articulation, where the account shows that this change in view is rationally permitted. Allais argues for this view by drawing on the epistemic uncertainty of the forgiving subject. She emphasizes that we lack sufficient evidence, and hence knowledge or justified belief, regarding people’s characters.22 This opens up a rational space in how we (affectively) judge other people. In particular, “beliefs about a person’s culpable wrongdoing, which we hold firm, do not epistemically mandate judgments about her as a person” (Allais 2008: 60). That is, we are not obliged on the basis of evidence to judge the wrongdoer to be a bad person. When we forgive, “we choose to make a shift in our (affective) view of her as a person, where this shift in view is neither epistemically mandated nor epistemically forbidden” (Allais 2008: 61). Lack of sufficient evidence about quality of character undermines the possibility of knowledge and justified belief, but it allows for different affective evaluations, and hence a “shift in view” from one evaluation to another. Similarly, Ware emphasizes “non-evidentialism” regarding respect (Ware 2014: 258, fn 14). In claiming that respect, as the “recognition of your offender’s standing, […] is nonepistemic” (ibid.), Ware suggests that one does not need evidence for this attitude to be warranted. In sum, while Allais and Ware do not provide a sufficient reason to forgive that shows resentment to be inappropriate, they aim to show that it is rationally permitted to overcome resentment. In other words, their accounts are suited to answer the criticism that a victim is naïve (i.e., epistemically gullible or irresponsible) in forgiving. However, on their accounts (in contrast to Hieronymi’s), resentment also remains permitted—both resenting and overcoming resentment are rational options.

6.  Articulation, Electivity, and Hope In this section, I want to elucidate the consequences of understanding forgiveness as based on hope for the question of whether forgiveness is elective. The core idea of elective accounts is that the potential forgiver has latitude whether or not to forgive. Whether forgiveness should be understood as elective is disputed; however, elective accounts can account for widespread intuitions about forgiveness.23 Elective accounts do justice to the fact that “forgiveness is often thought of as a gift” (Allais 2008: 37), i.e., as something that the victim cannot be required to give (even in the face of an apology). Also, elective accounts account for the idea that “unconditional […] forgiveness is possible” (Allais 2008: 37), i.e., forgiveness that is not conditioned by an apology. If we want to leave room for the idea that we can (permissibly) forgive unrepentant wrongdoers, we must describe forgiveness as elective. Rather than defending or criticizing the view that forgiveness is elective, I aim to show that grounding forgiveness in hope is particularly well suited for elective accounts. Thus, assigning hope a central place in forgiveness is a particularly good option for those who favor an elective account of forgiveness. Forgiveness is elective if there are no requiring reasons to forgive (or to withhold forgiveness) (Milam 2018). In principle, there could be reasons showing that forgiveness is rationally or morally required. If electivity is understood in a rational sense, it means that there are no reasons that require us to give up the judgment or view that justifies resentment. In particular, forgiveness can be rationally withheld even in the face of an apology, and it can be rational even without an apology from the wrongdoer. This is compatible with the view that there might be moral reasons that require a person to forgive.24 On the basis of our discussion about the rationality of hope in Section 2, it becomes apparent that grounding forgiveness in hope renders forgiveness elective in a rational sense, while the question of whether it is morally elective depends on further assumptions about hope that are disputed. Let me elaborate. As for rational electivity, it is obvious that an account of forgiveness that is articulate in the strong sense that Hieronymi presupposes cannot describe forgiveness as elective. If there is a sufficient reason to forgive (as Hieronymi conceives an apology to be), there is no rational latitude 357

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whether or not to forgive: It is rationally required to forgive in light of an apology, and it is irrational—the victim continues to hold a judgment that is no longer correct—without an apology. Thus, one might have the impression that it is impossible for an account of forgiveness to be both articulate and elective.25 However, the features of articulation and electivity do not stand in conflict if one presupposes the second, weaker sense of articulation: If both options—continuing to resent and overcoming resentment—are rationally permitted independently of an apology, the victim has rational discretion over whether or not to forgive. This rational discretion is mirrored by the rationality of hope (that the wrongdoer will improve, or that the wrongdoer’s character is better than past actions indicate). It is common ground that even though evidence can support hope, evidence cannot rationally compel a person to hope: Even if an outcome is probable to a certain degree, a person might lack hope for it (and rationally so)— either because she is indifferent to the outcome or because she views the probability as too low to be able to hope. That is, on the basis of evidence, hope can only be permitted, or a rational option. Applied to the context of forgiveness, this means that it can be rational not to hope in the face of an apology. An apology is just one piece of evidence, which can serve as a positive evidential reason to hope. However, if the evidence does not rationally compel us to hope, an apology does not rationally compel us to hope and hence to forgive. Is it rational to hope (and hence to forgive) even without an apology? Defenders of epistemic minimalism might give a different answer than defenders of the more ambitious criterion of realistic hope. For the epistemic minimalist, the crucial question is whether the lack of an apology is sufficient evidence showing that one’s hope won’t be fulfilled. This does not seem to be the case. As long as one assumes a person to have moral capacities, moral improvement is possible (even if the person has not repented yet).26 With regard to the quality of character, the lack of an apology is not a sufficient reason showing that their character is as bad as past actions indicate. If we follow Allais, there is always the possibility that it is better than one’s evidence suggests, since one cannot know the other person’s character. Thus, hope is epistemically rational (permitted) even in the absence of an apology. Defenders of realistic hope, by contrast, will answer the question of whether an apology is needed with an eye to the practical risk associated with hope. For example, consider a victim of domestic violence who hopes that her abusive partner will improve even though they have never apologized. It is risky to hope, and hence to forgive him, if doing so entails wholeheartedly resuming a relationship with the wrongdoer. In this case, one might give the advice: “Your hope is unrealistic! You should not forgive without an apology—this is naïve!” In reply, the defender of epistemic minimalism can emphasize the possibility of severing hope and forgiveness from particular actions that contingently follow: If what is at stake is merely overcoming resentment, practical reasons concerning risk are not as weighty. Defenders of epistemic minimalism can hold that while hope is permitted on the basis of evidence, practical reasons speak against certain hopeful activities (such as resuming the relationship without precaution). What about considerations that are normatively—in particular, morally—relevant, such as the gravity of the wrong or the time that has passed after the wrongdoing: Could these be requiring reasons to hope and hence to forgive? This seems to be commonly accepted, e.g., when we say “You should forgive your friend for forgetting your birthday—it’s been half a year!” As I indicated in Section 2, it is controversial whether there are moral norms for hope, and whether or not one accepts those norms depends on one’s conception of hope.27 If one holds that there are moral reasons that can require us to hope (or not) (like Chignell), this implies that there can be requiring moral reasons for forgiveness (if one has a hope-based account of forgiveness). If one views practical reasons as wrong-kind reasons for hope (if one favors a representational account of hope), this means that practical reasons are also wrong-kind reasons for forgiveness, i.e., they can only be reasons to try to forgive. 358

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Thus, forgiveness based on hope is elective in the rational and the moral sense if one assumes epistemic minimalism about the theoretical rationality of hope and the view that there are no practical (in particular, moral) reasons for hope.28

7. Conclusion My discussion of Owen Ware’s and Lucy Allais’ accounts of forgiveness shows that acknowledging a central role for hope in forgiveness is not restricted to one specific view about forgiveness. It also shows that hope might play a number of different roles in forgiveness, since the object of the hope that one envisages depends on other assumptions of the account. On Ware’s account, it is either the consideration that hope for the wrongdoer’s improvement is warranted (on the basis of the wrongdoer’s moral capacities) or hope for such improvement itself that is a reason to forgive. On Allais’ account, it is a hopeful view of the wrongdoer’s character that suffices to articulate the change in view involved in forgiveness. I argued that accounts that describe the change in view involved in forgiveness as constituted by hope are articulate, but in a weaker sense than assumed in Hieronymi’s original suggestion: Allais and Ware do not present a sufficient reason to forgive, but argue that hope—and hence forgiveness—is rationally permitted. Thus, accounts of forgiveness based on hope are particularly suited to describe forgiveness as elective in a rational sense: They capture the common idea that we are neither rationally required to forgive in the face of an apology nor committing a rational mistake if we forgive unrepentant wrongdoers. A controversial question is whether there are moral reasons for hope; a negative answer leads to an account of forgiveness that is elective in a moral sense, while an affirmative answer may ground a morally non-elective account. Rather than deciding this issue here, I wanted to stay as neutral as possible with regard to the nature of hope and controversies surrounding its rationality. My aim was to make transparent what consequences different theoretical decisions regarding hope have for forgiveness. Hence, there are various possibilities for constructing hope-based accounts of forgiveness.29

Notes 1 Resentment might not be the only relevant negative emotion but also, for instance, hurt feelings and disappointment (Allais 2008: 58). Some accounts describe the process involved in forgiving as “forswearing” (Griswold 2007: 39) or “forgoing” (Hieronymi 2001: 529) resentment instead of “overcoming” it, but not much hinges on this for my purposes. 2 In Blöser (2018), I briefly defend emotion-based accounts against action-directed accounts and argue that Kant holds a mixed account. 3 Hieronymi mentions a third moral judgment that has to remain in place in forgiveness: “You, as the one wronged, ought not to be wronged” (Hieronymi 2001: 530). However, this judgment seems to be implied by the first one, namely, that the act was wrong. 4 Most philosophical accounts of forgiveness assume that not all instances of overcoming resentment or anger amount to forgiveness and embrace some version of the “uncompromising” and “articulate” conditions. However, see Boleyn-Fitzgerald (2002) for a rejection of this view. He takes his account of “simple forgiveness” to be in line with Buddhist conceptions. 5 While Ware adopts Hieronymi’s terminology (Ware 2014: 247), Allais uses different terms but has similar ambitions. I will return to differences between these accounts in Section 5. 6 This is commonly assumed in the current debate, but note it hasn’t always found such ready acceptance. In the Enlightenment, for instance, the predominant view was that we can hope only for what we take to be probable above some threshold (see Blöser 2020). 7 Giannini (2017) develops a hope-based account of forgiveness that presupposes Martin’s analysis of hope. 8 This is compatible with an understanding of hope as an emotion (see Döring 2014). 9 D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) argue that we must distinguish the question of whether an attitude is fitting or correct from whether there are prudential or moral reasons speaking in favor or against it.

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Claudia Blöser 10 Previous attempts to do so include Holmgren (1993, 2012) and Govier (1999). 11 Ware wants to present a reason for forgiveness instead of giving an account of what forgiveness is, as Allais does. This does not entail any difference in substance, however, since Ware holds that only forgiving for a reason is “genuine”, i.e., uncompromising and articulate, forgiveness. Thus, he holds that the reason for forgiveness that he argues for is part of genuine forgiveness. 12 In my reconstruction, “foregrounding” would be a way of paying attention to or focusing on the reason to forgive (i.e., focusing on the consideration that the wrongdoer has dignity or on respect), not part of the reason itself, as Ware formulates it. 13 Not every kind of hope seems to be able to figure as a normative reason: recalcitrant hopes don’t. This is a problem with Ware’s account (he seems to hold that future-directed recognition respect is always justified) that I don’t discuss further. 14 In a recent publication, Allais herself employs the language of hope: “In forgiving, we express this optimistic hopeful view to others: we give them the gift of affectively evaluating them in a way that sees them as better than their wrong actions indicate them to be (and in a way in which it is possible for them to be)” (Allais 2021: 281). 15 In personal conversation, Allais suggested that optimistic attitudes toward the wrongdoer that go beyond hope might constitute higher degrees of forgiveness. Allowing for degrees of forgiveness seems promising and may account for the fact that forgiveness sometimes (but not always) allows us to rebuild trust. 16 Note that in Allais’ framework, this does not render hope necessary for forgiveness in cases where we are and rationally can be optimistic. Hope is not necessary in these cases if we plausibly assume that hope is not implied by the stronger attitude (such as optimism). 17 As mentioned, I do not defend either of the two accounts. One objection seems to apply to both accounts: that they construe the object of resentment and the view involved in forgiveness in a too general way. Allais wants to distance herself from accounts claiming (like Ware) that forgiveness involves seeing the wrongdoer as “overall decent, or as capable of change” (Allais 2008: 57). To these accounts, she objects that judgments about the wrongdoer’s character “are too general, and do not tell us what it is to forgive someone for a specific offense” (Allais 2008: 45). It is hard to see, however, how Allais can avoid the claim she wants to reject: “that forgiving involves coming to a general view about the perpetrator’s overall character” (Allais 2008: 57). The change in view from resentment to forgiveness just involves a change in aspect under which the character is evaluated, but the object of evaluation—the character— remains general. That is, Allais’ own resistance to connecting forgiveness to a general view about the wrongdoer’s character motivates the suggestion that she should also construe the object of resentment in a less general way. My aim here is not to provide an alternative view, but to spell out some of the consequences of assigning hope a central place in forgiveness—a feature that might be instantiated by other accounts with different assumptions about the nature of resentment as well. 18 Describing forgiveness as a “change in view”, however, does not rule out ridding oneself of resentment by taking a specially designed pill that induces the change in view. Allais’ and Ware’s accounts do not exclude this possibility. 19 Hieronymi is “being deliberately vague about just what is being threatened: whether your worth, or the relationship, or something else” (Hieronymi 2001: 548, fn 33). 20 “An apology undermines that judgment. It changes the significance of the event. And so resentment loses its footing” (Hieronymi 2001: 549). 21 Another difference between Allais’ and Hieronymi’s view, which I do not focus on here, is that while Hieronymi identifies a change in view with a “revision in judgment”, Allais (more explicitly than Ware) describes the change as a “shift in our (affective) view of her [the wrongdoer] as a person” (Allais 2008: 61). That is, Allais does not focus on judgments, but emotions. What does this difference amount to? On some traditional cognitivist views, emotions necessarily involve judgments, and hence they could agree with Hieronymi in describing the change in view as a change in judgment. By contrast, if one does not want to commit to a cognitivism of this sort, one would favor characterizing the change in view as a change in how the other person is (affectively) represented, as Allais does. 22 Allais’ claim is that we always lack sufficient evidence regarding people’s characters. However, one might suspect that we sometimes do have sufficient evidence to judge another person—for instance, if we have experienced their bad behavior for a long time. 23 Milam (2018) criticizes arguments for electivity. Positions that argue for electivity include Calhoun (1992), Allais (2008), and Ware (2014). 24 Warmke argues in favor of moral ought-norms for forgiveness (Warmke 2015: 499), but against reasons that rationally require the victim to forgive (at least if these reasons depend on a change of the wrongdoer, to the effect that the wrongdoer is imbued with a power to rationally obligate the victim) (ibid., 503).

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Forgiveness and Hope 25 As Hieronymi points out, it might seem that “any ‘articulate’ account might run into problems with those […] who insist that forgiveness be ‘elective’” (Hieronymi 2001: 551). 26 We need to assume that the wrongdoer is a being with moral capacities in order to hold the person responsible for the wrongdoing in the first place. Things are different if the wrongdoer is dead—in this case, there would be sufficient evidence that he or she cannot improve anymore. At least, this is the case in a secular framework. Giannini (2017) develops a Christian account of forgiveness that is based on hope and points out that Christian background beliefs about an afterlife and God’s redemptive power justify hope even for wrongdoers who are already dead. 27 In the context of forgiveness, Warmke makes the methodological suggestion that “certain intuitive views about the norms of forgiveness should be used to constrain our theories about its nature” (Warmke 2015: 490). As indicated in Section 2, this mutual dependency of assumptions about the nature of forgiveness and its norms holds for hope as well. 28 On these assumptions, one can defend the electivity of forgiveness with the following argument: Reasons to forgive are reasons to hope; reasons to hope cannot generate requirements; therefore, reasons to forgive cannot generate requirements. Milam suggests that Allais’ view is based on such an argument; however, he considers “love” instead of “hope” (Milam 2018: 581). Milam further argues that the argument fails for “love”. If I am correct, “hope” is a better candidate for making this argument. 29 I thank Lucy Allais, Monika Betzler and her colloquium, Jakob Huber, Sean Neagle, Glen Pettigrove, Owen Ware, Marcus Willaschek, as well as the audience at the FAU Erlangen for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this text.

References Allais, Lucy (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 36 (1): 33–68. ——— (2021) “Frailty and Forgiveness: Forgiveness for Humans”, In B. Warmke, D. K. Nelkin, M. McKenna (eds.) Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, New York: Oxford University Press, 257–84. Blöser, Claudia (2018) “Forgiveness and Love of Human Beings. A Kantian Two-Aspect-Account of Forgiveness”, In V. L. Waibel, M. Ruffing, and D. Wagner (eds.) Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kogresses, Berlin/Boston, 1737–44. ——— (2019) “Hope as an Irreducible Concept”, Ratio 32 (3): 205–14. ——— (2020) “Enlightenment Views of Hope”, In S. C. van den Heuvel (ed.) Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope, Cham: Springer, 61–76. Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Patrick (2002) “What Should ‘Forgiveness’ Mean?” Journal of Value Inquiry 36: 483–98. Calhoun, Cheshire (1992) “Changing One’s Heart”, Ethics 103 (1): 76–96. ——— (2018) Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaning ful Living, New York: Oxford University Press. Chignell, Andrew (2018) “Religious Dietary Practices and Secular Food Ethics; or, How to Hope That Your Food Choices Make a Difference Even When You Reasonably Believe That They Don’t”, In A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, and T. Doggett (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Vol 1, New York: Oxford University Press, 287–312. ——— (2023) “The Focus Theory of Hope”, The Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1): 44–63. D’Arms, Justin and Daniel Jacobson (2000): “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotions”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 65–90. Day, J. P. (1969) “Hope”, American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (2): 89–102. Döring, Sabine (2014) “What May I Hope? Why It Can Be Rational to Rely on One’s Hope”, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (3): 117–29. Giannini, Heide Chamberlin (2017) “Hope as Grounds for Forgiveness”, Journal of Religious Ethics 45 (1): 58–82. Govier, Trudy (1999) “Forgiveness and the Unforgivable”, American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1): 59–75. Griswold, Charles (2007) Forgiveness. A Philosophical Exploration, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hieronymi, Pamela (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 529–55. Holmgren, Margaret (1993) “Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons”, American Philosophical Quarterly 30 (4): 341–52. ——— (2012) Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Adrienne M. (2013) How We Hope: A Moral Psychology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Milam, Per-Erik (2018) “Against Elective Forgiveness”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3): 569–84.

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Claudia Blöser McCormick, Miriam Schleifer (2017) “Rational Hope”, Philosophical Explorations 20 (sup1): 127–41. Meirav, Ariel (2009) “The Nature of Hope”, Ratio 22 (2): 216–33. Milona, Michael (2020) “Philosophy of Hope”, In S. C. van den Heuvel (ed.) Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope, Cham: Springer, 99–116. Moellendorf, Darrel (2006) “Hope as a Political Virtue”, Philosophical Papers 35 (3): 413–33. ——— (2020) “Hope and Reasons“, Normative orders working paper 02/2020: Normative Orders, Cluster of Excellence at Goethe University Frankfurt. Nelkin, Dana (2013) “Freedom and Forgiveness”, In Ishtiyaque Haji and Justin Caouette (eds.) Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 165–88. Pettit, Philip (2004) “Hope and Its Place in Mind”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592 (1): 152–65. Walker, Margaret Urban (2006) Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing, Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Ware, Owen (2014) “Forgiveness and Respect for Persons”, American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (3): 247–60. Warmke, Brandon (2015) “Articulate Forgiveness and Normative Constraints”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (4): 490–514.

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27 THE VIRTUE OF FORGIVENESS? Glen Pettigrove

Alfred insulted Beatrice in the staff meeting at 10:15 on Monday morning. It was shocking. It was maddening. It was offensive. It was wrong. And the relationship between Beatrice and Alfred has been strained since then. Today is Thursday, and Alfred has just apologised for Monday’s actions. He has acknowledged that he was wrong and that Beatrice deserves more respect and better treatment than he gave her. Now both of them are wondering whether Beatrice is ready to forgive him. Most philosophical investigations of forgiveness have focused on discrete interactions like those just described. A wrongs B at time t1. Then, at some later time, t2, B considers forgiving A, perhaps prompted by an attempt on A’s part to mend fences. And the questions that have been asked are things like, “If Beatrice were to forgive Alfred for insulting her on this occasion, what would she be doing?” “What emotional state would Beatrice be in if she were to forgive?” “What would her forgiving mean for their future relationship?” “When is it appropriate (or inappropriate) for her to forgive him?” Although their focus is on Alfred’s and Beatrice’s interactions between t1 and t2, in the course of answering these questions, investigators often hint at a wider canvass. In answering the normative question, in particular, they wonder whether forgiving in this situation would be consistent with – or display a deficiency of – self-respect. And many of them appeal to the idea that “forgiveness is a virtue” (Holmgren 2012: 26; see also Downie 1965, Murphy 1988a, Roberts 1995, Kowalski 2002, Schimmel 2002, Griswold 2007, Warmke 2015, Enright and Song 2017, and Swanton 2021). “Self-respect” and “virtue” are not discrete actions or events. They are aspects of a person’s character. And appealing to them invites us to think about the bearing traits of character might have on what it means to forgive, what makes it possible, and when doing so is good. This chapter will focus on some of these character questions and, in particular, on what thinking about virtue might teach us about forgiving. Section 1 will address the question, “Is forgiving virtuous?” Sections 2 and 3 will ask, “If forgiving is virtuous, what virtue does it manifest?”

1.  Is Forgiving Virtuous? Before we turn to the question of whether forgiving is virtuous, it will be useful to clarify what is and is not being asked. The question is not, For any agent (A) who is guilty of a moral failing (x), any person (B) who has undeservedly suffered on account of that failing, and any time (t), is it always virtuous for B to forgive A for x at t? DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-34

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The answer to that question is straightforwardly, “No.” Forgiving is not always well-motivated. Forgiving is not always well-timed. An agent may forgive, but her forgiving may be out of character. And it may be the case that some moral failings should not be forgiven (see Pettigrove 2007 and 2012). The question being explored here is much more modest: “For some agents (A and B), some moral failings (x), and some times (t), is it virtuous for B to forgive A for x at t?” All that an affirmative answer to this question commits one to are the following claims: a b c d

Forgiving is something that can be done well. Some people are better at forgiving than others. Some people are more disposed to forgive than others. b and c are not mutually exclusive.

Why might one think forgiving is something that can be done well? Part of what makes this thought plausible comes from reflecting on occasions where people forgive badly. Chad forgives Donna begrudgingly, and only after he has made her grovel in a way that plays up his moral superiority and her moral inferiority. Elmer nurses resentment over a minor offence long after the offender has repented of their misdeed, reformed their ways, and done their best to make amends. Both Chad and Elmer forgive badly, in Elmer’s case by not forgiving at all and in Chad’s by demeaning Donna and arrogating to himself an inflated moral superiority. Francine, by contrast, responds to Donna’s heartfelt apology for a minor offence with willing forgiveness, and the sincerity of her forgiving makes it possible for Francine and Donna to leave the infraction in the past. Even without comparing Francine’s forgiveness to Chad’s and Elmer’s, we’re likely to look favourably upon it. But if we line it up side by side with Chad’s begrudging forgiveness and Elmer’s refusal, Francine’s forgiveness looks very good indeed. If we were Donna, there is no question which response we would rather receive. Not only can forgiving be done well or badly, but some people are also characteristically better (or worse) at it than others. Grant is quick to take offence and eager to nurse a grudge; he spends much of his life in the past, rehearsing old hurts. If you offend him, you should not expect him to forgive you, no matter how much effort you put into making it up to him. Hilda, by contrast, while quick to take offence, is equally quick to get over it and be reconciled with a repentant offender. Irene’s dispositions differ from both Grant’s and Hilda’s. Her unshakeable fondness for her fellow human beings is so strong that, unlike them, she is slow to anger. And even when she becomes angry, Irene ordinarily remains benevolently disposed towards those who have wronged her. Whether one should aspire to be more like Hilda or more like Irene is up for debate. Which side one takes in that debate will depend partly on personal temperament, partly on personal experience and socialisation, and partly on how much room there is within one’s normative worldview for unmerited favour.1 But irrespective of where one falls in that debate, everyone will agree that Hilda and Irene are characteristically better at forgiving than Grant. If forgiving can be done well and some people are characteristically well-disposed to forgive, then we have good reason to think that at least sometimes forgiving is virtuous. What more can be said to support the claim that those who characteristically forgive well are manifesting a virtue? To answer that question, it will be useful to say a bit more about virtue. Philippa Foot (2002) identifies four distinguishing marks of a virtue. A virtue is (1) a characteristic that is (2) beneficial, (3) corrective, and (4) an excellence of the will. We spoke to the first condition in the previous paragraph. Let us turn now to the second. Foot, like David Hume (1739–40), notes that some virtuous traits are noteworthy because they benefit the agents who possesses them, some because of the benefits they confer on others, and some because they benefit both the agent herself and those with whom she interacts. The trait or traits manifested in admirable instances of forgiving are of the third sort. The emotions triggered 364

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by being wronged – especially anger, resentment, and hatred – take both a psychological and a physical toll on those who have been wronged (Witvliet et al. 2023). Insofar as forgiving reduces those emotions, it is beneficial to the forgiving agent. Our relationships with others are strained by unresolved grievances. To the extent that (a) being in harmonious relationships with (at least some) others is conducive to our well-being, and (b) forgiveness can help resolve grievances and restore harmony in relationships, forgiving is beneficial to self and other. Transgressors, too, can be weighed down by the emotional and relational aftermath of their transgressions. The burden of guilt and the pain of estrangement can be profound. Insofar as being forgiven can help them resolve their guilt and bring an end to their estrangement, forgiving can benefit others. Ongoing hostilities between a wrongdoer and those they have wronged can also have an adverse effect on the people around them. So the scope of those who might benefit from forgiveness extends beyond forgiver and forgiven to include others within their respective communities. In addition to being beneficial, virtues correct common human temptations (Foot 2002: 8). We are tempted to run in the face of danger, even on occasions when we need to stand our ground in order to protect a good that is greater than the safety of our own skin. The virtue of courage corrects this common human inclination. We are tempted to selfishness, devoting our time, talents, and material resources solely to the satisfaction of our own desires, even when our abilities and resources might be used to alleviate others’ more urgent needs. Generosity corrects this tendency. A forgiving disposition is similarly corrective. We are prone to excessive anger. We are often inclined to nurse a grudge long after it would have been better to let it go. When we have been wronged it is easy to get stuck in the past, continuing to rehearse our grievances, even when it would be better to move on. We are tempted to define wrongdoers in terms of their moral failings, refusing to acknowledge their other and better qualities and actions. A forgiving disposition corrects these temptations. When Foot says virtues are excellences of the will, she does so in order to contrast them with “excellences of the body” and other skills (2002: 4). Virtues involve caring about and wishing for what is good and important rather than what is trivial, unimportant, or bad. They lead one to form admirable intentions and to act on them wisely. How does forgiveness fare with respect to this condition? A disposition to forgive well is clearly not just an excellence of the body or a physical or intellectual skill. It involves what we care about, what we value, the intentions we form, and how we enact them. So it looks to be a matter of the will, in Foot’s distinctive sense. Is it also an excellence? The admiration we feel for those who forgive well certainly suggests it is. There are clearly occasions when caring for one’s own peace of mind or for reconciling with someone one has loved but from whom one is now estranged is both good and more important than remaining angry and at odds. There are times when being inclined to let go of old grievances is more important than being inclined to remain fixed in the past. And someone who is kindly disposed towards not only those who treat them well but even towards (some of ) those who have let them down displays a quality of the will that, upon reflection, we approve. The disposition to forgive well, then, looks like it possesses the marks of virtue Foot proposes. Another feature that speaks in favour of approaching the study of forgiveness from the vantage of virtue theory is that, over time, we can improve our disposition to forgive. One thing Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and other ancient virtue theorists agreed upon was that virtues could be cultivated (Sharpe 2014; Russell 2015). They might not be easy to acquire. Indeed, their full acquisition might be exceedingly difficult (Kamtekar 2004). To have a chance of developing them, a person’s training might need to begin in early childhood (Aristotle 2000: 1103). One’s chances of developing a virtue might depend in various ways upon the community in which one lives and the cultural, conceptual, and social support it offers (Herdt 2015). And even after one has acquired a virtue, it might remain fragile (Pettigrove 2015). Without continued cultivation and social support, even a trait in which a person has been well-trained and in which they 365

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have shown genuine skill may deteriorate. Like physical excellences and skills, virtues might require regular – but not too regular – exercise for their optimal maintenance (Muraven and Baumeister 2000). But although their development might be difficult and they might always remain a work in progress, virtue traditions have assumed that with training, practice, and the right support, one could get better at being temperate, courageous, just, benevolent, patient, and the like. The same can be said of forgiveness. Both therapeutic and educational interventions confirm our common experience: Forgiving is something at which we can improve (Enright and Song 2017). Virtue theorists have proposed a variety of other marks that might be used to identify virtuous traits of character, and a forgiving disposition displays these marks, as well. For example, Linda Zagzebski proposes we identify virtues by looking at the traits we admire in exemplary people: “A virtue is a deep and enduring acquired trait that we admire upon reflection.” When we analyse these traits, she argues, we will find they “consist of a disposition to have a certain emotion that initiates and directs action towards an end, and reliable success in reaching that end” (Zagzebski 2017: 113). Martha Nussbaum, however, recommends we begin by identifying a sphere of human experience that figures in more or less any human life, and in which more or less any human being will have to make some choices rather than others, and act in some way rather than some other. (Nussbaum 1988: 35) A virtue will be a trait that disposes us “to choose and respond well … in that sphere” (Nussbaum 1988: 36; similarly Roberts 1995: 289). Whether we start with exemplars (like Jesus of Nazareth or Nelson Mandela) or with spheres of human experience (like falling out and making up), in each case we will find that the trait or traits exemplified by those who are characteristically good at forgiving have the identifying marks of virtue.

2.  Forgiveness and Justice Although the nature of forgiving has not yet been spelled out in any detail, it should nevertheless be clear from what has been said thus far why so many theorists have taken it to be virtuous. The next question to ask, then, is “What trait is manifested by those who are disposed to forgive well?” And since the question, “Should I forgive or not?” characteristically arises in contexts where one person has failed to give another their due, it is not surprising that those approaching the latter question have often done so with justice on their mind. Many of those who take a forgiving disposition to be virtuous have treated it as a manifestation of the virtue of justice. This section will consider two forms such an account might take. However, before we look at theories that take forgiving to manifest justice, we should first consider an objection to the idea that forgiving might be virtuous which is itself rooted in a concern for justice. The objection, articulated by John Kekes (2009) and Jiwei Ci (2002), begins with the thought that the person who forgives appears to set the concerns of justice aside and, rather than giving a wrongdoer the hard treatment they deserve, they offer them a kindness they do not. John Kekes builds his argument on the assumption that “Morality aims at human well-being by maintaining a system of conventions in order to come as close as the contingencies of life allow to individuals getting what they deserve and not getting what they do not deserve” (2009: 504). Insofar as forgiving offers wrongdoers something they do not deserve (such as good will) and refrains from offering them something they do deserve (namely, blame), Kekes contends, forgiving is immoral. There are several points at which one might part ways with Kekes. One might reject his claim that the aim of morality is to give people what they deserve. Desert is clearly one of the things we 366

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care about and is central to the virtue of justice. But other virtues, like beneficence, respond not to desert but to need (Pettigrove 2021). Virtues like love, cheerfulness, and ambition are likewise not about desert (Pettigrove 2022). If virtues can be concerned with things other than just giving people what they deserve, then the fact – if it is a fact – that forgiving involves giving a wrongdoer something they do not deserve no longer rules forgiving out as a potentially virtuous activity. (This possibility will be explored more fully in the next section.) However, one need not reject Kekes’s assumptions about the aim of morality in order to avoid drawing the conclusion that forgiveness is immoral. Even if morality – understood either as an abstract system or as a collection of social practices – aims to give people what they deserve, it does not follow that it requires each individual to enforce this arrangement. We customarily assume it is permissible for the enforcement of some offences to be entrusted to someone other than their victim. Criminal offences are characteristically enforced by agents of the state. Other offences are enforced by employers, teachers, parents, friends, or neighbours (Radzik 2020). There are interesting questions about which offences should be enforced by whom (Radzik 2011). If I am late meeting a friend for coffee or fail to turn up altogether, it would be out of place for anyone but the friend to be cross with me. But serious offences are a different matter. They adversely affect the offender’s relationship not only with their victims but also with other members of the moral community. A man who cheats on his wife should expect her family and friends to be angry and to distance themselves from him. Someone who makes a racist, sexist, or homophobic remark should not be surprised if others within the community call them out, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. It is perfectly reasonable for these others to contribute to the wrongdoer’s social punishment in these ways. And if they are contributing to the wrongdoer’s social punishment, it may not be necessary for the victim to do so. Indeed, in some cases, if everyone in the community with the standing to punish did so, the wrongdoer’s punishment could end up being much greater than they deserve. In such cases, it is not only permissible for some people to refrain from socially punishing the wrongdoer; it is required (Radzik 2020). And there are good reasons to excuse the victim from the obligation to maintain the balance of justice. They have already born the cost of the offence. Imposing the further cost of enforcing social punishment would unduly burden victims. Third, one might accept that morality is about giving people what they deserve but deny that forgiving amounts to giving someone something undeserved. There are two forms a theory of virtuous forgiving might take, each of which treats it as manifesting the virtue of justice. In what Miranda Fricker (2019) calls “moral justice forgiveness,” the virtuous agent’s forgiveness is conditional on the wrongdoer repenting, reforming, and making amends. Forgiveness, on this picture, is justice for a wrongdoer who has settled his accounts. When Alfred wrongs Beatrice, what Alfred deserves is punishment. For non-criminal wrongs, that punishment takes the form of hostile attitudes – anger, blame, contempt, disdain, hatred, indignation, resentment, and the like – as well as social exclusion and harsh words (Bennett 2002; Allais 2008; Zaibert 2012; Russell 2016). For criminal offences, Alfred might deserve all of the above plus the imposition of physical suffering, financial penalty, or loss of liberty. But for most offences, the punishment that is due does not last in perpetuity. It should only last as long as the offence merits. And there are steps the wrongdoer can take to shorten their term. For example, Alfred can repent, change his ways, apologise to Beatrice, and try to compensate her – and perhaps others in the moral ­community – for the injuries suffered as a result of his moral failings (Swinburne 1989; Schimmel 2002; Griswold 2007; Radzik 2009; Wolterstorff 2011; Bash 2015). By so doing, Alfred can make the case that he is no longer blameworthy and he no longer owes Beatrice (or the wider community) any further recompense. Once he has served his time, expiated his wrong, and ceased to be blameworthy, continuing to punish him would no longer be just. The just person would discontinue all forms of punishment. This includes the anger, blame, and resentment to which the original 367

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offence gave rise. Forgiving, on this picture, consists in the elimination of these hostile attitudes and any other form of punitive social or relational estrangement.2 Like Kekes, advocates of “moral justice forgiveness” assume that bad people – or people who do bad things – deserve hard treatment or at least hard feelings. But, of course, not everyone shares this retributive assumption. Some, like Martha Nussbaum (2016), think a retributive response is rooted in magical thinking. Others, like Margaret Holmgren (2012), think the attitudes and treatment moral agents deserve – including agents who have transgressed moral standards – are positive and compatible with forgiving even unrepentant, unreformed wrongdoers. Holmgren’s view depends upon a number of assumptions: (1) Resentment involves an epistemic error, (2) resentment and respect are inconsistent attitudes, and (3) respect is what moral agents are due. The epistemic confusion exemplified in resentment, Holmgren thinks, involves thinking better of oneself and worse of the offender than is warranted. Both mistakes, she contends, are rooted in the same fundamental error. We mistake the morally objectionable attitudes and actions of the other for who they fundamentally and essentially are. They are the wrongdoer, the offender, the transgressor, the “wholly and utterly bad” (Holmgren 2012: 100). We think of ourselves in similarly oversimplified terms. We are the innocent who did not deserve such hard treatment and whose outrage expresses our virtuous commitment to the moral order. However, both we and they are more complicated than that. A person is more than the actions or attitudes of a single moment or even a collection of moments. It is a mistake, Holmgren argues, to allow our attitudes towards a person to be determined by our attitudes towards some action they performed or attitude they displayed. The epistemic error expressed in resentment also involves confusing the conditions for esteem with those for recognition, Holmgren argues. In extending our assessment of a wrong action (as deficient) to the whole person, we have allowed the conditions required for one kind of respect (esteem) to be substituted for another (recognition). 3 And in the context of wrongdoing, these two attitudes are at odds with one another. One is negative and the other positive. If moral agents are owed the positive response of recognition respect, and respect and resentment are at odds, then resenting a moral agent is at odds with what we owe them (Holmgren 2012: 89–90). Consequently, the just person will not foster resentment towards someone who has wronged them, but will continue to display the respect, compassion, and goodwill we owe other moral agents. Since having respect, compassion, and goodwill towards someone who has wronged us is to forgive them, on Holmgren’s account, forgiving is the just thing to do.4 For all their differences, the account that explains forgiveness in terms of respect and the one that explains it as part of the cycle of retribution both agree that the virtue displayed by the person who forgives well is justice. The admirable forgiver is concerned with giving people their due. The two accounts simply disagree about what is due someone when they have done wrong, about what kind of difference things like repentance and reform make to what they are due, and about how much of what the wrongdoer is due is owed to them by their victim (rather than other members of the moral community). In short, they disagree about what justice requires and of whom. However, as noted above, desert is only one of the qualities to which a virtue might respond. Let us turn now to other virtues that might be displayed by those who forgive well.

3.  Beyond Justice There are three kinds of reasons one might invoke when evaluating the adequacy of accounts of the virtue displayed by those who forgive well. Some of these will be empirical. If, for example, we found there was little correlation between those who are good at forgiving well and those who reliably display a concern for determining what people are due and ensuring they get it, that would raise questions about whether justice is the disposition displayed in virtuous forgiving.5 A second kind of 368

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reason one might appeal to when determining which virtue is displayed in forgiving is conceptual. One might, for example, wonder whether the sense in which resentment is a negative attitude is really inconsistent with the sense in which respect is a positive attitude. If not, there would be a gap in the argument Holmgren has offered to support her account. A third kind of reason is normative. One might disagree about when it is objectionable to give someone something other than what they are due. Of course, these three kinds of reasons frequently overlap. How one conceptualises a trait will have a bearing on what counts as empirical evidence of that trait as well as on whether the trait is admirable and under what conditions. And the norms one thinks apply have a bearing on how one conceptualises a trait. One might appeal to any of these kinds of reasons to motivate developing an alternative to accounts of virtuous forgiving that treat it as a manifestation of justice. Most of the research that has been done thus far on virtuous forgiving has focused on normative and conceptual reasons, and the discussion offered in this section will follow that trend. But it is worth noting there are empirical questions in the neighbourhood that warrant further investigation. One conceptual reason for thinking forgiving well is not solely a matter of justice emerges when we reflect upon forgiveness between friends. Keiko has recently been diagnosed with a serious medical condition and shares that information with her friend Lawrence in confidence. However, Lawrence decides that Keiko’s neighbour, Maria, who is a mutual friend, should be informed so that she can look after Keiko in the event of an emergency. So he breaks Keiko’s confidence and alerts Maria to Keiko’s condition. Because Keiko is a private person, when she learns that Lawrence has shared her secret, she is irate. Over time, however, in response to Lawrence’s displays of contrition, Keiko foreswears her anger. Nevertheless, she remains cold and emotionally withdrawn in subsequent interactions with Lawrence. From Keiko’s vantage, the salient feature in this scenario might be that she has foresworn her anger. And on that account, she might insist she has forgiven Lawrence. However, from his vantage, it may not yet feel like he has been forgiven. Prior to the wrong, they were close friends. Since their relationship is still adversely affected by his decision to share Keiko’s secret with Maria, it will seem to him that she has not yet forgiven him. With minor transgressions between close friends, we generally think forgiving involves more than just foreswearing anger. Why? Because that is how people’s emotions work. If all a friend can muster after a trivial wrong is no longer feeling active hostility, that is a sign that the event in question still poses an obstacle to their relationship. They may no longer be irate. But they clearly have not yet let it go. What bearing does this example have on the question of whether justice is the virtue displayed by those who forgive well? The answer is to be found in the relationship between friendship and justice. Friendship, intimacy, and affection are not things we are owed. To reduce the dynamics of friendship and intimacy to relations of justice is to misunderstand them. That is not to say that friends cannot treat each other unjustly or that there cannot be things one owes a friend that one does not owe others. But friendship is a gift and one that need not be permanently bestowed. If friendly relations with the other are a necessary condition for forgiving well in some contexts, and friendship is a gift that exceeds what is owed, then at least sometimes, forgiving well must manifest more than simply a disposition to give others their due. Among those who take forgiving to be an alternative to meting out justice, some have proposed mercy, others love, humanity, or benevolence as the virtue manifested in forgiving. Finally, there are those who take virtuous forgiving to stem from a bespoke virtue specifically concerned with forgiving. We shall consider these possibilities in turn. If one thinks of forgiveness not as an instantiation of justice but as an alternative to it, then mercy presents an attractive option. Perhaps what explains the actions and attitudes of those who 369

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forgive well is that they are merciful. The merciful judge does not punish a wrongdoer as harshly as the law or their authority permits, and their actions are characteristically motivated by a compassionate concern for the person in the dock (Hampton 1988; Murphy 1988b; Tasioulas 2003; Lenta 2019). A merciful landlord might waive her tenants’ rent at Christmas so that they will have money to spend on presents for their children (Twambley 1976; Murphy 1988b; Lenta 2019). More generally, the merciful are those whose compassionate concern leads them to refrain from imposing some cost on others that they would be entitled to impose. It is easy to see why, historically, the concepts of forgiveness and mercy were often treated interchangeably. Being resented or sanctioned by others is costly. If, as many have proposed, forgiving involves foregoing, forswearing, or reducing warranted hostile attitudes or other forms of social punishment and doing so for the sake of the one forgiven, then mercy is a promising fit. Thomas Aquinas, for example, responding to the question of whether God is merciful, moves seamlessly from talking of mercy to talking of forgiveness. God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a man who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing him only one hundred, does nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against him, for in remitting it he may be said to bestow a gift. Hence the Apostle calls remission a forgiving: “Forgive one another, as Christ has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32). (Aquinas 1274: I.21.3) 6 Aquinas’s observations not only assume a link between being merciful and forgiving, they also propose an alternative to the conception of justice that featured in Section 2. There, following Aristotle, we took the virtue of justice to be defined by a concern to give people their due. But there are at least two ways in which this idea could be unpacked. The first is illustrated by Kekes: The concern of the just is to give someone exactly what they are due, no more and no less. Aquinas offers a second way to unpack the concern of the just: The just person does not treat others less well than they deserve (Diller 2013).7 Construed in the first way, justice is at odds with traits like generosity and civility as well as social practices like politeness, insofar as these routinely involve treating others better than they might deserve. Construed in the second way, by contrast, a person can be both just and generous. One need not worry about determining what another party deserves and adjusting one’s degree of politeness or civility accordingly. And, to return to the topic at hand, one’s forgiving need not be conditioned on the transgressor’s merits. If a merciful disposition can be virtuous, then it is plausible to think that, at least sometimes, when people who are good at forgiving forgive, it is a manifestation of the virtue of mercy. However, it is less plausible to think a merciful disposition can account for all virtuous forgiving. It is not hard to imagine cases in which someone displays mercy even though they do not forgive. This is because there is more to forgiving than just compassionately withholding punishment. The kind of forgiving we admire often involves not only a forgoing but also a giving.8 In such cases, the forgiver does not just stay the hand of punishment, they also extend the hand of friendship. They do not just suspend hostility, they also express love. A number of theorists have proposed that the trait displayed by those who forgive well is love (Novitz 1998; Enright 2001; Kearns and Fincham 2004; Garrard and McNaughton 2010; Stump 2010; Pettigrove 2012; Giannini 2017; Allais 2019; Swanton 2021). Augustine, for example, writes, No act of charity “is greater than to forgive from the heart a sin that has been committed against us. For it is a comparatively small thing to wish well to, or even to do good to, a man who has done no evil to you. It is a much higher thing, and is the result of the most exalted 370

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goodness, to love your enemy, and always to wish well to, and when you have the opportunity, to do good to, the man who wishes you ill, and, when he can, does you harm.” (Augustine 1961: 86) Why might one link forgiving to loving? Augustine’s discussion highlights one reason. There is a long tradition, going back at least to the Christian gospels, that presents forgiving as an instance of loving one’s enemies. And it is not hard to see why. Both enemies and those who are candidates for forgiveness tend to be people who have wronged us and from whom we are estranged. Love, Eleonore Stump suggests, involves desires for “the good of ” and “union with the beloved” (Stump 2021: 180), and forgiveness is often good for the one being forgiven and reunites those who had been separated by past wrongdoing. Of course, thinking about forgiveness solely in terms of love for enemies would be inadequate. Many of the wrongs we forgive have been done by friends or family members who have not at any point been enemies. A sibling inconsiderately leaves their clothes scattered about the floor of your shared room even though they know it bothers you. A father forgets to water the houseplants while the rest of the family is away on vacation. A child comes home after curfew, worrying her parents. It is easy enough to see why we might think forgiving the minor grievances of day-to-day life is a manifestation of love. Even though one party has let the other down – failing to meet their legitimate expectations, to follow through on a promise, or to show the level of consideration the other is due – the love of the virtuous will not be altered by such trivial failings. And their desires for the good of and union with those they love will encourage the loving to metabolise their anger and put the incident behind them (Pettigrove 2012). But it would be hyperbolic, at best, to describe such forgiving as loving our enemies. One might also balk at calling some instances of forgiving – even when performed by someone who is well-disposed to forgiving well – manifestations of love. “Love” implies a stronger form of attachment than is present in many cases of excellent forgiving. Consider the following scenario: Ida is on her way to her connecting flight in a busy airport. She has an hour before her plane will begin boarding, so she stops off for a coffee. While she is waiting to place her order, a stranger walks in and jumps the queue. He is dressed like a business executive or a law partner and is so focused on the conversation he is having (loudly) on his mobile phone that he pays no attention to the people around him. He interrupts his phone call long enough to order a coffee. Then he moves to the end of the counter where completed orders are delivered. Here, too, he is inattentive to other customers. Even though several people who ordered ahead of him are clearly waiting to collect their drinks, he plants himself directly in front of the pick-up counter. Each time someone else’s order is brought up, they have to squeeze around him to get it. Finally, his order is ready and, still talking on his phone, he takes it over to the condiment station to add milk and sugar. Having doctored his drink, he pops the lid back on, turns around abruptly, and heads for the door. Unfortunately, Ida is directly in his path, having just collected her own coffee. He collides with her, knocking both of their beverages to the floor and splattering coffee on each of them. Abruptly ending his phone call, the stranger apologises to Ida and returns to the counter to order two more coffees. He apologises twice more while they wait for their replacement drinks. Ida tells him not to worry about it and, once the drinks are ready, they leave for their respective gates. Entirely in keeping with her character, Ida quickly moves on. She doesn’t replay the event on a loop in her mind. She doesn’t spend time gritting her teeth and thinking, “What a self-important, narcissistic S.O.B.!” She doesn’t hop on social media and recount the incident to all her friends and acquaintances, complete with photos. When he passes her in the waiting area 20 minutes later (back on his phone) she gives him a polite smile and nod. The only time 371

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she mentions the incident to anyone is when she reaches her destination and the friend who meets her at the airport, noticing the brown splotches on her clothing, asks what happened. “This guy collided with me at Costa Coffee,” Ida says. “He wasn’t watching where he was going and made a bit of a mess.” Ida’s response to the self-absorbed stranger has the characteristic marks of forgiveness. He was inconsiderate and his disregard for the people around him imposed undeserved costs on her. Ida recognises he was in the wrong and that she and others deserved more consideration. His actions and attitudes make the stranger a fitting object of anger or resentment. But even if she was angry at first, by the time they part ways, Ida has let go of that anger. She has even conveyed to him that they can put the incident behind them. At least for her part, their subsequent interactions will not be haunted by this moment. While Ida’s attitudes, actions, and interactions display the characteristic marks of forgiveness, they do not have all the marks of love. If, as Stump contends, love involves a desire for the other party’s good and for union with them, then Ida’s dispositional stance towards the stranger would not be loving. That is not because she is at odds with him or wishes him ill. She simply does not have any desires in relation to him whatsoever. If, as Josef Pieper (1997: 163–4) suggests, love involves a positive orientation towards the beloved that expresses something like the thought “It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in this world,” then, again, the disposition Ida displays does not look to be love. It is not that she wishes he did not exist or thinks it is bad that he is in the world. She just doesn’t have any wishes or beliefs about the matter. He is a stranger about whom she knows next to nothing and with whom she is unlikely to have much further interaction. Her wishes, desires, and beliefs are commensurate with these facts. The upshot of the last few paragraphs is that, while some instances of virtuous forgiving might be manifestations of the virtue of love, that virtue does not appear to account for the dispositions of all who are well-disposed to forgive well. However, the force of the argument depends on some assumptions about love that not everyone will share. The Ida example, for instance, depends on the assumption that love involves some degree of attachment to the beloved. Although this assumption holds for many types of love, perhaps it does not hold for all. Many have argued for a virtue of universal love that would extend to all humanity. If there is such a virtue, presumably it would not involve a special degree of attachment to those who are its object in the way that, say, the love characteristic of friendship does. What would universal love involve? Christine Swanton, following Immanuel Kant, understands love of all forms to be dispositions to “come close” to the person who is its object (Swanton 2021: 237; Kant 1797: 449).9 What might such a disposition look like when that person is not someone to whom one has any special attachments? Hume offers one picture when speaking of the virtue of humanity. Hume argues that, in general, humans are not “totally indifferent to the well or ill-being of [their] fellow-creatures.” At least when the person we are dealing with is not a rival, we think “what promotes their happiness is good, what tends to their misery is evil” (Hume 1751: 5.43).10 But some people are disposed to sympathise with the misery or happiness of others more readily, more vigorously, and more constantly than others. And their capacious and lively sympathy reliably directs their actions in ways that are conducive to the welfare and preventative of the misery of others. Such a sympathetically disposed person could be said to “come close” to those towards whom their attention is directed, both emotionally and behaviourally, by seeing things from the other’s point of view, caring about what they care about, and on suitable occasions acting to promote the same kinds of ends they do. In the aftermath of wrongdoing, we often fail to imagine what was going on with the wrongdoer when they acted. They are the cause of our pain, and we allow this fact to fully define who they are. Or if we do imagine their circumstances and their motives, we imagine the worst. The virtue of humanity corrects this tendency. And 372

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by correcting this tendency, it facilitates forgiveness by enabling us to see the wrongdoer not as wholly rotten but, typically, as someone of mixed character – like us – who got it wrong on this occasion but who might still be redeemable. Not surprisingly, Kant’s own preferred way of understanding the virtuous orientation towards human beings in general is not developed in terms of vivid sympathy but rather in terms of what he calls benevolence or practical love. The benevolent person – literally, the person of good will – takes “satisfaction in the happiness (well-being) of others” and wishes them well (Kant 1797: 450–2). When occasions arise in which a benevolent agent can promote or support the other person’s happiness, she does so (unless, by so doing, she would expose them to shame or place them uncomfortably in her debt). She acts to alleviate the other’s need or to further their objectives – provided those objectives are not immoral – “without hoping for something in return” (Kant 1797: 450, 453). Benevolence, in other words, characteristically displays itself in beneficent actions. Since many of the attitudes with which we respond to wrongdoing – such as anger, resentment, hatred, and contempt – involve wishing the other ill, they would be at odds with the characteristic dispositions of the benevolent person. So we would not expect her to nurse long-standing resentments. And on many occasions, one way in which she can promote a wrongdoer’s happiness or alleviate their misery will be by forgiving them and restoring the relational bonds their wrongdoing had damaged (Swanton 2021). It is plausible, then, to think the forgiving done by those who forgive well might be explained by universal love, whether in the form of Hume’s virtue of humanity or Kant’s virtue of benevolence. Ida’s response to her inconsiderate fellow traveller looks like such a case. However, once again, it is implausible to think all instances of excellent forgiving can be explained by one or the other of these traits. To see why, let us imagine another case. Jerome is benevolently disposed towards his fellow human beings. But he does not give people second chances. This means that, although he gets on well with mere acquaintances, he does not form lasting friendships. He responds to every wrongdoer – no matter how trivial the infraction or how close the relationship had been – merely with the level of goodwill a decent person would have towards a stranger. Anytime someone lets him down, they effectively become a stranger to him. He is nice to strangers and wishes them well, but any previous intimacy he and the wrongdoer might have had is over. When Jerome is in situations like Ida’s, his general benevolence would leave him well disposed to forgive fellow travellers. But those who, at one point or another, have gotten close to him would not think him well disposed to forgive friends. By taking up the attitudinal stance that he adopts towards strangers, Jerome’s response to friends who have let him down is not one of drawing close but rather of drawing away. As such, it will be experienced by them not as forgiveness but as its absence. To this point we have been considering multi-purpose virtues that have a bearing on a wide range of situations, relationships, and actions. Justice is relevant whenever something is owed to one thing – be it a person, animal, ecosystem, or work of art – by another. Benevolence is pertinent on any occasion when good will might be expressed. Humanity is apt whenever one encounters others for whom things might go well or badly and with whom one might sympathise. Love can be manifested towards anyone whose existence one might celebrate, whose good it is reasonable to desire and promote, and to whom one might unobjectionably want to draw close. They are traits that may fittingly be expressed by anyone towards almost anyone in almost any context. And they express themselves in dizzyingly diverse forms of action – from punishing to rewarding, helping to inhibiting, encouraging to discouraging, intervening to refraining, speaking out to keeping quiet. The list could go on indefinitely. Since what we are looking for is a trait that might be manifested in a more narrowly defined set of contexts and actions, perhaps we should consider a bespoke virtue tailor-made for such contexts and actions. Perhaps we should be looking for a distinct virtue of forgivingness. 373

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One thing that speaks in favour of a bespoke virtue of forgivingness is the body of research showing that a person who reliably displays a trait (e.g., courage) in one context (e.g., the boardroom) may not display it in a markedly different context (e.g., the battlefield). The more detailed our specification of the trait, the more likely it is that we will identify a quality which is useful both for evaluating a person and for predicting how she will handle future situations. What might forgivingness be like? Robert Roberts describes it as a mixture of honesty, self-control, humanity, and generosity. The honest aspect of forgivingness is displayed in a refusal to turn a blind eye to moral failing. Excellent forgiving is not simply pretending that nothing is wrong. Forgiving well also characteristically involves an exercise of self-control (Roberts 1995: 300) over one’s anger and the thoughts and actions that might express it. “[F]orgivingness is the disposition to abort one’s anger (or altogether miss getting angry) at persons one takes to have wronged one culpably” (290). Part of what facilitates the “suppressing, forgoing, starving, or by-passing the anger” (296) is what Hume calls humanity. The forgiving person is disposed to view the situation compassionately, seeing the situation from the point of view of the offender (296–7). Of course, such sympathy is more likely to move us to forgive if the wrongdoer is suffering the pangs of remorse or the punishment his actions deserved. But these are not required. The forgiving person is also marked by a generosity of spirit (299) and a desire to enjoy “benevolent, harmonious fellowship with others” (297). It is, admittedly, easier for a good person to live in harmony with other good people than with those whose moral flaws are often on display. And there may be some with whom it is impossible for a good person to live in fellowship, such as those who still actively seek to harm them (301). But the virtuous person’s ability to live in peace with others is not limited only to the good. It extends also to those with rough edges that may never be smoothed and those whose feet of clay may often let them down. Even when dealing with those who persist in their wrongdoing, the virtuously forgiving person hopes they will change their ways and displays “a readiness to forgive whenever real repentance becomes evident” (301).

4.  The Way Forward In Section 1 I argued that those who are “well-disposed to forgive well” manifest a virtue. Sections 2 and 3 explored six different traits that might plausibly be the virtue displayed by those who are good at forgiving, namely, justice, mercy, love, humanity, benevolence, and forgivingness. In the case of five of these traits, I have provided reasons to think that even if some admirable instances of forgiving (by those who are good at it) can be explained by the trait, not all can. Where does that leave us? One possibility is that it leaves us with the sixth trait, namely, forgivingness. However, my hunch is that a more pluralistic answer is likelier to be true. What equips some people to be good forgivers in some contexts is likely to differ from what enables other people to be good at forgiving in other contexts. Even the trait whose limitations have not been showcased, namely, forgivingness, would seem to point in this direction, constructed as it is from qualities borrowed from other virtue profiles. But, while a pluralistic account strikes me as the leading hypothesis, it is no more than that. Testing the hypothesis will require more than merely conceptual work. It will also require empirical investigation. Only careful observation will tell us whether people who are characteristically just or merciful or loving or humane are also characteristically well-disposed to forgive well. Only careful observation will indicate whether those who are good at forgiving in one kind of context are also good at forgiving in another. And only careful observation will disclose whether those well-disposed to forgive well display a single shared trait or a diverse set of complimentary, partially overlapping traits. One thing approaching the study of forgiveness from the vantage of virtue does, then, is highlight a place where empirical study might advance our understanding both of the nature and of the ethics of forgiveness. Another thing such an approach offers is a different way of carving 374

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up the conceptual landscape than what others have proposed. Miranda Fricker (2019), for example, has divided those working on the ethics of forgiveness into two camps: those who advocate what she calls “moral justice forgiveness” and those who liken forgiveness to a gift. Sections 2 and 3 resemble this division. However, important differences remain. What we are investigating in a virtue-based approach are dispositions and their admirability. What Fricker is explaining, by contrast, are social practices and their functions. Fricker’s functional story is built on the desirability (or propriety) of certain outcomes for the community that engages in one or another social practice. But dispositions can be admired because they characteristically benefit the person who has the disposition, rather than the community of which they are a part (Hume 1739–40: 3.3.1.9ff.).11 And not all dispositions are admired on account of their outcomes. Some are admired on account of their motivations. Furthermore, the condition for the possibility of admiring some dispositions might be that other dispositions (or practices) are well represented within one’s community. Attending to virtues, then, highlights normative dimensions that a practice-focused approach could easily overlook.

Notes 1 See McCullough and Hoyt (2002) on personal temperament, Enright and Song (2017) on socialisation, Schimmel (2002) on normative culture, and Pettigrove (2012) on unmerited favour. 2 That need not mean the offender and offended go back to being bosom buddies. They may not have had such a relationship to begin with. And even if they did, some of the emotions triggered by the offence, such as distrust, may not have been punitive. They might simply have been tracking reliability (as opposed to guilt). And doing one’s time and making amends will not always be enough to rebuild trust. Not all relational estrangement is punitive. 3 On the distinction between these two types of respect, see Darwall (1977). 4 Although Robin Downie (1965) takes the virtue expressed in admirable forgiving to be agape – “a loving concern for the dignity of persons conceived as ends in themselves” (133) – his account is in many ways quite close to Holmgren’s. He thinks “respect for persons and agape are merely two sides of the same thing” (134). He proposes that “the mode of behaviour which is appropriate among persons as such” is one that expresses agape (133). And he contends “the forgiving spirit is not in fact different from the attitude which … should always characterize interpersonal behaviour” (133). What is distinctive about forgiveness is simply that the person to whom my agape is directed on this occasion is someone who has wronged me. This is why he not only commends “readiness to forgive [as] a virtue” but also condemns an “inability to forgive, or at least unwillingness to try [as] a vice” (128). Agape is the just orientation towards persons as such, simply in virtue of their being ends in themselves. Their being ends in themselves is unaltered by whether they behave well or badly. Consequently, forgiving, on Donnie’s account, ends up being the just orientation towards persons who have wronged me. 5 The weight of such questions will depend in no small part on whether justice is the kind of trait that is displayed consistently across widely divergent contexts or whether it is more domain specific, so that people who are just with regard to property frequently differ from those who are just with regard to punishment or respect. Theorists like John Doris (2002) have argued for a more domain-specific account of virtues. 6 When citing Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, it is customary to do so by reference to part, question, and answer numbers. For example, I.21.3 indicates the quoted passage is taken from part I, question 21, answer 3. 7 The idea of “treating” is being construed broadly, so as to include the thoughts and attitudes one has towards someone as well as the actions one performs. 8 This thought may explain why Aquinas speaks of both mercy and liberality in the passage quoted above. 9 The standard way of citing Kant’s works is by reference to the Royal Prussian Academy edition of his collected works. The Metaphysics of Morals is published in volume 6 of the Academy edition. This and subsequent citations refer to the pagination of this volume. 10 The standard way of citing Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals is by section and paragraph. For example, paragraph 43 of section 5 is denoted as 5.43. 11 The standard way to cite Hume’s Treatise is by reference to book, part, section, and paragraph numbers. For example, 3.3.1.9 refers to book 3, part 3, section 1, paragraph 9.

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References Allais, L. (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36: 33–68. ———. (2019) “The Priority of Gifted Forgiveness,” Australasian Philosophical Review 3: 261–73. Aquinas, T. (c. 1274) Summa Theologica. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.) Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981. Aristotle (2000) Nicomachean Ethics. Roger Crisp (trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Augustine (1961) Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love. J.F. Shaw (trans.) Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway. Bash, A. (2015) Forgiveness: A Theology, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Bennett, C. (2002) “The Varieties of Retributive Experience,” Philosophical Quarterly 52: 145–63. Ci, J. (2002) The Two Faces of Justice, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Darwall, S. (1977) “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics 88: 36–49. Diller, J. (2013) “Merciful Justice,” Philosophia 41: 719–35. Doris, J. (2002) Lack of Character, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Downie, R. (1965) “Forgiveness,” Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–34. Enright, R. (2001) Forgiveness Is a Choice, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Enright, R. and Song, M.J. (2017) “An Aristotelian Perspective on Forgiveness Education in Contentious World Regions,” in The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, K. Norlock (ed.) London: Rowman and Littlefield. Foot, P. (2002) Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, M. (2019) “Forgiveness – An Ordered Pluralism,” Australasian Philosophical Review 3: 241–60. Garrard, E. and McNaughton, D. (2010) Forgiveness, Durham: Acumen Publishing. Giannini, H.C. (2017) “Hope as Grounds for Forgiveness,” Journal of Religious Ethics 45: 58–82. Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hampton, J. (1988) “The Retributive Idea,” in Forgiveness and Mercy, J. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herdt, J. (2015) “Frailty, Fragmentation, and Social Dependency in the Cultivation of Christian Virtue,” in Cultivating Virtue, Nancy Snow (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmgren, M. (2012) Forgiveness and Retribution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. (1739–40) A Treatise of Human Nature, D.F. Norton (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. (1751) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, T. Beauchamp (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kamtekar, R. (2004) “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character,” Ethics 114: 458–91. Kant, I. (1797) The Metaphysics of Morals, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, M. Gregor (trans. and ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kearns, J. and Fincham, F. (2004) “A Prototype Analysis of Forgiveness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30: 838–55. Kekes, J. (2009) “Blame versus Forgiveness,” The Monist 92: 488–506. Kowalski, R.M. (2002) “Whining, Griping, and Complaining,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 58: 1023–35. Lenta, P. (2019) “Amnesty and Mercy,” Criminal Law and Philosophy 13: 621–41. McCullough, M.E. and Hoyt, W.T. (2002) “Transgression-Related Motivational Dispositions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28: 1556–73. Muraven, M. and Baumeister, R.F. (2000) “Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources,” Psychological Bulletin 126: 247–59. Murphy, J. (1988a) “Forgiveness and Resentment,” in Forgiveness and Mercy, J. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1988b) “Mercy and Legal Justice,” in Forgiveness and Mercy, J. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novitz, D. (1998) “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 299–315. Nussbaum, M. (1988) “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13: 32–53. ———. (2016) Anger and Forgiveness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, G. (2007) “Hume on Forgiveness and the Unforgivable,” Utilitas 19: 447–65. ———. (2012) Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2015) “Re-Conceiving Character,” Res Philosophica 92: 595–619. ———. (2021) “Fitting Attitudes and Forgiveness,” in Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, B. Warmke, D. Nelkin, and M. McKenna (eds) Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2022) “Cheerfulness,” in Neglected Virtues, G. Pettigrove and C. Swanton (eds) New York: Routledge.

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The Virtue of Forgiveness? Pieper, J. (1997) Faith, Hope, Love, R. and C. Winston (trans.) San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Radzik, L. (2009) Making Amends, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2011) “On Minding Your Own Business,” Social Theory and Practice 37: 574–98. ———. (2020) The Ethics of Social Punishment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, R. (1995) “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32: 289–306. Russell, D. (2015) “Aristotle on Cultivating Virtue,” in Cultivating Virtue, N. Snow (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, L. (2016) “Forgiving While Punishing,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94: 704–18. Schimmel, S. (2002) Wounds Not Healed by Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharpe, M. (2014) “Stoic Virtue Ethics,” in The Handbook of Virtue Ethics, S. van Hooft (ed.) Durham: Acumen. Stump, E. (2010) Wandering in Darkness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2021) “The Sunflower: Guilt, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation,” in Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, B. Warmke, D. Nelkin, and M. McKenna (eds) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swanton, C. (2021) “Forgiveness as a Virtue of Universal Love,” in Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, B. Warmke, D. Nelkin and M. McKenna (eds) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swinburne, R. (1989) Responsibility and Atonement, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tasioulas, J. (2003) “Mercy,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 101–32. Twambley, P. (1976) “Mercy and Forgiveness,” Analysis 36: 84–90. Warmke, B. (2015) “Articulate Forgiveness and Normative Constraints,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45: 490–514. Witvliet, C.V.O., Cheadle, A.C.D. and Luna, L.M.R. (2023) “Psychological and Physical Responses of (Un)Forgiveness,” in Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Forgiveness, G. Pettigrove and R. Enright (eds) New York: Routledge. Wolterstorff, N. (2011) Justice in Love, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Zagzebski, L. (2017) Exemplarist Moral Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaibert, L. (2012) “On Forgiveness and the Deliberate Refusal to Punish: Reiterating the Differences,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 9: 103–13.

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28 FORGIVING GOD Daniel Speak

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me. —Robert Frost

The central question of this chapter is this: can God be forgiven? It is a provocative question, no doubt; but it is not merely so. The serious attempt to address it has promise for at least two substantive results. First, in light of the conceptual reorientation the question forces, we can expect the attempt to answer it to deepen our general philosophical understanding of the nature and limits of forgiveness. Second, we might also advance our understanding in the domain of philosophical theology regarding, for example, the implications of divine perfection for our ubiquitous experience of putatively innocent suffering. Beyond these intellectual results, we may hope that, given the widely recognized physiological, psychological, and spiritual benefits of forgiveness, increased understanding of the possibility of forgiving God will be of some use for theorists and practitioners whose work brings them into therapeutic contact with those who feel wronged or harmed by God. However, our principal focus will be upon the potential philosophical fruits of this inquiry. So that our inquiry can be both intriguing and useful, we will maintain a fairly traditional conception of God throughout. We will assume, then, that God is the maximally knowledgeable, powerful, and benevolent creator and sustainer of the universe. After all, it is at least something like a commitment to this form of divine omnicompetence that animates traditional theists, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other. In addition, understanding God in any much less demanding moral or metaphysical terms will undermine even the initial appearance of intrigue in our question. That is, what we are interested in is whether a perfect creator can be forgiven by its imperfect creatures. And, by contrast, it will seem nearly obvious that Zeus or Thor could, at least in principle, be proper targets of human forgiveness—in part by virtue of the fact that, in lacking the full panoply of perfections, it would not be particularly controversial to insist that both could stand in the relevant position with respect to human beings whom they may have wronged.1 Once we commit ourselves to holding fixed the complete moral and metaphysical perfections of God, however, a phalanx of concerns about the coherence of forgiving God present themselves. On the standard view, certain specific conditions must be met in order for forgiveness to be “on the table.” For example, it has been natural to assume that forgiveness can be on the table in a

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specific relationship only if the party to be forgiven has harmed or wronged the would-be forgiver. Intuitively, the traditional conception of God as morally and metaphysically perfect is going to make it difficult to see how the relationship between human beings and God could ever meet these required conditions. This is because it will seem nearly obvious to many that a perfect God cannot harm or wrong creatures in the way required by the common accounts of these conditions. As we will see, a powerful set of arguments—what we will call the “incoherence arguments”— can be extracted from careful reflection on these considerations. Here at the outset, it will be helpful to recognize a distinction drawn by Brandon Warmke between enabling conditions for forgiveness and constitutive elements of forgiveness (2017). Enabling conditions are those that have to be met in order for an instance of forgiveness to occur. They make an instance of forgiveness a possibility—they put forgiveness on the table. The constitutive elements, by contrast, describe what a forgiving agent, so to speak, does in forgiving. They characterize what constitutes forgiveness from the point of view of the one forgiving. Of course, debate rages regarding just what the enabling conditions and constitutive elements of forgiveness are (as this volume indicates); but it is easy enough to see, for example, that someone’s having been wronged purports to be among the enabling conditions while foreswearing resentment purports to be among the constitutive elements. With this distinction in mind, we can gloss the incoherence arguments as efforts to support the claim that humans cannot forgive God because the relevant enabling conditions for forgiveness cannot be met. Our central aim will be to test the strength of these incoherence arguments.

1.  Wrongdoing and Incoherence As we noted, our intuitions do not have to be pumped very hard to get us to suspect that there is something conceptually problematic about forgiving God. The incoherence arguments we will consider are efforts to regiment these intuitions into a compelling form. Each of the arguments we will consider rests on a particular account of the enabling conditions for forgiveness. We begin with the idea that wrongdoing is such an enabling condition. That is, we can begin with the assumption that one person is in position to be forgiven only if she has wronged someone. Thus, the wrongdoing version of an incoherence argument might take the following form:

1.1  Wrongdoing Version 1 A person can be a coherent target of forgiveness only if the person has wronged someone (Wrongdoing Principle) 2 God cannot wrong anyone (Divine Wrongdoing Claim) 3 Therefore, God cannot be a coherent target of forgiveness2 This argument has much going for it. Both premises are intuitively plausible. The first, expressing the Wrongdoing Principle, has wide appeal both because it puts forgiveness properly in the context of interpersonal friction and because it emphasizes that the relevant form of interpersonal friction is that which is caused or constituted by bad action. Furthermore, this principle stands to explain the appearance of incoherence in the following kind of case. Cal asks Agnieszka whether she was with Bartolo on the previous day. Agnieszka answers honestly and without inner conflict that she was not. Unbeknownst to Agnieszka, Bartolo had falsely claimed to Cal to have been with Agnieszka on the previous day in order to avoid an awkward conflict over a missed social obligation. So, Bartolo has been outed by Agnieszka’s honesty. When Bartolo sees Agnieszka at their next meeting, he says, “I forgive you for what you said to Cal.” In this case, we understand

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Agnieszka’s befuddlement and her passionate response: “You forgive me?! For WHAT?! I just told the truth. I didn’t do anything wrong!” In other words, we can see that there is something fundamentally confused about Bartolo’s claim to forgive in this case. Forgiveness is simply not on the table in the circumstances—and the Wrongdoing Principle provides us with a powerful explanation. Since Agnieszka did nothing wrong, this appears to explain why she is not a coherent target of forgiveness. Similarly, the second premise of this argument, expressing the Divine Wrongdoing Claim, is plausible. If God wrongs someone, then God has done something morally wrong. But, holding fixed divine perfection, it can be hard to see how God could do something morally wrong. Surely a morally perfect being, then, cannot behave in ways that would constitute moral wrongdoing. So, both premises look compelling and, thus, the overall argument has substantial force. How might one resist this version of the incoherence argument? Though the Divine Wrongdoing Claim is initially compelling, a first point of concern may be with the assumption that an omnibenevolent being cannot wrong anyone. The issues here are controversial and we will want to address them somewhat more systematically below. For now, let’s note just this: the evaluation of this premise is going to turn substantially on our views about fundamental value pluralism. That is, the plausibility of the claim that God might not be able to avoid wronging some creatures (a claim the truth of which would render the second premise of the wrongdoing argument false) is likely to depend on an independent judgment regarding the so-called “fragmentation of value.”3 A fuller treatment of the issues here will be more illuminating after we consider the Harm Version of the incoherence argument in Section 2. Turn, then, to the Wrongdoing Principle. Is it so clear that forgiveness is appropriate only when the person to be forgiven has done something morally wrong? An alternative account might allow that forgiveness is appropriate when one person is the agent of another’s innocent or unjust harm—even when the one to be forgiven has not violated a moral obligation (as would seem to be required for moral wrongdoing). For example, suppose that D’Angelo is in the unfortunate position of having to distribute scarce resources between two equally needy people, Edna and Frank. The singular resource—say, a full dose of a certain medication—cannot be divided between them. Further suppose that D’Angelo decides, in some objectively fair way (perhaps by flipping a coin), to give the dose to Edna. As a result, Frank has to endure two weeks of substantial discomfort while he overcomes the illness he would otherwise have avoided. Here it looks like D’Angelo has not wronged Frank, though he has certainly been the agential conduit of a harm that Frank did not deserve. It does not immediately seem inappropriate, under these conditions, for Frank to forgive D’Angelo. Nor would Frank’s utterance of forgiveness strike us with the timbre of incoherence we detected in Bartolo’s case above. If D’Angelo were to reply to Frank’s proffered forgiveness with a response like Agnieszka’s (“You forgive me?! For WHAT? I didn’t do anything wrong!”), we will be more likely to side with Frank and judge D’Angelo somewhat insensitive to the normative dynamics. This line of response to the wrongdoing argument is suggestive but far from decisive. A great deal turns on whether our sensitivity to Frank’s forgiveness should be taken to be coherent in a way that vindicates the view that wrongdoing is not a necessary enabling condition on forgiveness. After all, another interpretation of our readiness to side with Frank is that it comes not from our considered judgment about the conditions for forgiveness but from our sympathy with Frank’s innocent suffering. What we may be judging is only that D’Angelo should be more sensitive to the fact that Frank has suffered unjustly and should express this sensitivity by withholding his defensive response, even if the response is, in fact, strictly accurate. We will have more to say about this case and its connection to forgiving God soon enough. For now, let’s accept that there is enough pressure on the Wrongdoing Principle to give us grounds for

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considering a second version of the incoherence argument, one based on something like the Harm Principle.

2.  Harm and Incoherence 2.1  Harm Version 1 A person can be a coherent target of forgiveness only if the person is the agent of another’s innocent harm (Harm Principle)4 2 God cannot be the agent of anyone’s innocent harm (Divine Harm Claim) 3 Therefore, God cannot be a coherent target of forgiveness5 Much of what the first premise has going for it emerged in the presentation of the case of D’Angelo, Edna, and Frank—combined with the judgments that initially led us to the Wrongdoing Principle. That is, we began by taking notice of the infelicity of Bartolo’s forgiveness of Agnieszka when she had simply told the truth. That got us to the Wrongdoing Principle. But the apparent coherence of Frank’s forgiveness leads naturally to the Harm Principle. And note that this harm premise continues to explain Bartolo’s misfire. Forgiveness is not on the table for Bartolo, according to this premise, because Bartolo has not been innocently harmed by Agnieszka’s honesty, if he has been harmed at all. If there is any harm, it has come upon Bartolo by way of his own wrongdoing in lying initially to Cal. The first premise of the Harm Version of the Incoherence Argument, then, appears to share the basic plausibility of the Wrongdoing Principle though it permits Frank’s forgiveness of D’Angelo. The second premise, expressed in the Divine Harm Claim, gets initial traction from the traditional notion of omnibenevolence, just as did the earlier Divine Wrongdoing Claim. If God is taken to be without moral failing of any sort, then it will be very tempting to conclude that God will never be the agent of an innocent person’s harm.6 Put another way (and edging us up to our concerns with the fragmentation of value), it will be natural to assume that an omnibenevolent being will do everything within its power not to impose innocent harm on creatures. Once we consider, in addition, divine omnipotence, we will be pressed to conclude that there can be no coherent limits to the divine power to avoid imposing such harms. Therefore, it will appear impossible for God to be the agent of anyone’s innocent harm. But this line of support for the Divine Harm Claim surely moves too quickly. Even if God will do everything within divine power to avoid allowing innocent harm, it does not follow that God will not allow some innocent harms. This is because it may be impossible (in the broadly logical sense) for God to avoid allowing some innocent harms. That is, there may be unavoidable conflicts between fundamental sources of value such that allowing instances of innocent harm is the very best that omnipotent omnibenevolence can do. Suppose, for example, that some form of fundamental value pluralism is true. In particular, suppose that both moral rights, on the one hand, and facts about human flourishing, on the other, are independent sources of moral value. Having one’s rights violated is one way to suffer a harm. Having one’s flourishing impeded is another. It seems obvious that there can be irresolvable conflicts between rights and flourishing – cases wherein a choice will have to be made between honoring one person’s rights and respecting another person’s claim on flourishing. If each of these sources is genuinely fundamental—if, that is, value can indeed be fundamentally fragmented—then it may be that not even God can avoid such dilemmas. Anything omnipotent goodness could do in cases of this kind of conflict would involve allowing innocent harm to befall someone. The somewhat tempting thought that God could surely order things so that no such conflicts would ever occur would seem to be premised, ultimately,

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on the denial of the claim of value pluralism. It would have to depend on independent confidence that there is, appearances notwithstanding, some overarching way of ordering the values so that the conflicts are not, in fact, irresolvable. And that will seem to demand that one or another of the competing sources of value is not, in fact, fundamental, which will be to deny value pluralism. The point, then, is that, assuming fundamental value pluralism, we will have strong grounds for resisting the second premise of the Harm Version of the incoherence argument. Returning to a strand of thought we left loose above, and though it is markedly more controversial, a similar line of reasoning with respect to the second premise of our first incoherence argument (the Divine Wrongdoing Premise) is also not wholly implausible. According to this premise, God cannot wrong anyone. And, again, there are forceful reasons, grounded in views about omnibenevolence, to be attracted to this premise. However, the acceptance of fundamental value pluralism may provide us with grounds to be suspicious even here. Consider a case with parallels to D’Angelo’s. Suppose that Glen is placed in a grotesque Sophie’s Choice scenario. He has to decide which of Hao or Ingrid will be unjustly put to death (choosing neither is not a live option, since he is credibly threatened with the alternative that, without choosing one, both Hao and Ingrid will be unjustly killed). Supposing that Glen chooses to save Ingrid and thereby condemns Hao to an unjust death, it should be clear enough that Hao will end up wronged. Of course, had Glen opted instead to save Hao, then Ingrid will end up wronged. It may be tempting to insist, however, that, in our “actual” case, Hao has not been wronged by Glen but, rather, by whoever has imposed this situation upon Glen and is committed to executing the unjust killing. But it is clearly true, given the set-up, that, but for Glen’s decision, Hao would not suffer the unjust death. That is, Hao’s being wronged is clearly dependent on Glen’s choice. This seems to undercut the claim that it is not Glen who (at least in part) has wronged Hao. Another approach to undermining the claim that Glen has wronged Hao in this case might come by way of defense of the view that Glen has not done something morally wrong in making this decision. He has violated no moral obligation, it might be argued. Delicate issues loom about whether Glen’s obligation to avoid sending Hao to his death is pro tanto or merely prima facie, with our supposed interlocutor here resting her case on the prima facie interpretation.7 But the pro tanto reading of this obligation is not without merit. After all, on the prima facie reading, Glen is not, strictly speaking, obligated to avoid sending Hao to his death. He is only prima facie so obligated. Nor is he, strictly speaking, obligated to avoid sending Ingrid to her death, but, again, only prima facie so obligated. Instead, his formal obligation is only to this: either not to send Hao to his death or not to send Ingrid to her death. But notice that, on this reading, when Glen opts not to send Ingrid to her death, he does not thereby satisfy an obligation not to send Ingrid to her death, since this is not an obligation he, in fact, ever had. The obligation he fulfills in this case is only the disjunctive one in italics. And Glen would have fulfilled this very same obligation whichever choice he made. This result of the prima facie interpretation—that Glen does not fulfill any obligation he had to Ingrid in making his choice—is a cost to be considered, a cost that plausibly counts against this interpretation. Furthermore, one thought pressing us toward the prima facie interpretation may be that Glen cannot, in the spirit of “ought” implies “can,” be obligated to perform each of two actions that are, under the circumstances, practically incompatible with one another. But the blow can be softened here (once again pointing forward to our next incoherence argument) by noting that one may be obligated to perform an action without being blameworthy for failing to perform it. If Glen has pro tanto obligations both to avoid sending Hao to his death and to avoid sending Ingrid to her death, then, in our case where Glen satisfies his obligation to Ingrid but fails to satisfy his obligation to Hao, we may conclude that Glen has done something to Hao that is morally wrong

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but for which he is not blameworthy. Thus, Glen wrongs Hao but cannot be blamed for doing so. To be clear, the aim here is not to give a full defense of this approach to the case but only to take note of its initial consistency and attractions. In taking this view seriously, it is possible to see how an agent might find herself, like Glen, in circumstances in which she cannot help but wrong someone. Perhaps, then, it is not unreasonable to imagine that even God could end up facing dilemmas of this sort. To illustrate, suppose that an earthquake will have to be allowed either in Lisbon or New Delhi. God has the ability, further assume, to determine, by choice, which city is destroyed by an earthquake, though God does not have the ability, given constraints regarding the natural laws and other values justifiably animating divine omnibenevolence, to eliminate the earthquake altogether. If God opts to have the earthquake strike Lisbon, the Portuguese are wronged. If God opts to have the earthquake strike New Delhi, the Indians are wronged. In what sense will the relevant people be wronged? Well, we are assuming that God has something sufficiently resembling a pro tanto obligation to protect innocent people from unjust harm.8 This is not a radically implausible assumption. At the very least, we expect maximal goodness to be moved to prevent unjust suffering where it can, while keeping fixed the range of constraining values. Assuming (again, plausibly) that the suffering of the Portuguese and the suffering of the Indians provide God with roughly equivalent grounds for divine action, then whichever event God allows (or causes), the actual sufferers can rightly claim that God had an undefeated reason to block it, since (per stipulation) reasons of the very same sort apply to the actual sufferers just as they do to those who are spared. The same line of reasoning that led us above to the plausible conclusion that Glen’s reasons for saving Hao remain in force even as Glen saves Ingrid can be deployed to make the same point here regarding God’s reasons for allowing the Lisbon earthquake rather than the New Delhi earthquake. So, given the set-up, God will be unable to avoid wronging someone. A natural response here will be to resist the set-up. That is, it may seem sensible to insist that Glen (along with all other human creatures) can get caught in such circumstances, but that God cannot. Perhaps what will seem optional for God is that some earthquake has to be allowed. Surely, it may be thought, omnipotent benevolence will be able to guarantee that circumstances do not unfold in such a way that an earthquake must occur in one or another location. Obviously, we are here creeping up on the general problem of evil for theism, and we will be in no particularly strong position to say much here that could count as addressing that perennial cluster of concerns. Still, we should note that if theism has anything to say in response to this problem, then it is going to have to accept that God’s permission of, say, the actual Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is somehow consistent with divine omnicompetence.9 This is to say that the theist will already have to accept that God’s failure to save those who suffered from the Lisbon earthquake was morally justified. Why, then, resist the suggestion that God could end up skewered—in the chessstrategy sense—by an incommensurate choice between Lisbon and New Delhi, with sufferers being wronged either way? Presumably, the answer will have to come from something like a view that God can always avoid wronging creatures, even if God does sometimes have to allow very bad things to occur. But this view, it seems, will have to depend on an assumption of value monism. For if values really are plural at the fundamental level, then it is hard to see what could rule out, in principle, the possibility of conflicts between them—conflicts between incompatible courses of action commanding equivalent moral authority—that not even God can avoid. Once again, the arguments here should not be thought to be decisive; they are suggestive at best. The tentative conclusion we approach, however, is that both the Wrongdoing and Harm versions of the incoherence argument have vulnerabilities. Given plausible assumptions (that appear to be consistent with theism), the second premise of the Harm Version (the Divine Harm Claim) and both premises of the Wrongdoing Version (the Wrongdoing Principle and the Divine

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Wrongdoing Claim) might sensibly be resisted by someone aiming to defend the coherence of forgiving God. But the vulnerabilities we have uncovered point the way to a potentially more powerful version, based on a more nuanced view of the enabling conditions for forgiveness.

3.  Blame and Incoherence Consider:

3.1  Blame Version 1 A person can be a coherent target of forgiveness only if the person is properly to blame for another’s innocent harm (Blame Principle). 2 God cannot be properly to blame for anyone’s innocent harm (Divine Blameworthiness Claim). 3 Therefore, God cannot be a coherent target of forgiveness.10 This version of the incoherence argument inherits many of the virtues of the earlier versions but looks to steel itself against some of our complaints as well. Crucially, however, the logic of this argument must be understood in terms of what we mean by a person’s being “properly to blame.” What is built into this is that a person can be properly blamed only if the action targeted for blame is morally unjustified. No one can be properly blamed, in the sense we are deploying here, for actions that cannot be morally criticized. As a consequence of this specification, the Blame Principle should be taken to entail that forgiveness is on the table only when someone has behaved in a morally indefensible way. Similarly, for the Divine Blameworthiness Claim, the connection to moral justification will mean that God cannot be targeted with forgiveness precisely because God cannot act in any morally unjustified way. Notice, now, that the Divine Blameworthiness Claim can avoid the central concern we raised in response to the parallel premise in the Harm Version; namely, the Divine Harm Claim. Our worry with the claim that God cannot be the agent of anyone’s innocent harm arose from considerations regarding the ways that, given value pluralism, even God might get caught in an unavoidable conflict between two values so that some innocent or other would end up suffering a harm. What we assume in the present context is that even if God does face such conflicts, the divine choice regarding which person to allow to suffer the innocent harm will, by virtue of omnibenevolence, be a morally justified one. So, whereas God may be forced to cause or allow an innocent person to suffer a harm, God will never be blameworthy for doing so. In other words, the grounds we offered for resisting premise 2 of the Harm Version will not impugn premise 2 of the Blame Version. We can make a similar point with respect to our more controversial concerns with premise 2 of the Wrongdoing Version. There we raised the possibility that even the Divine Wrongdoing Principle could be false because value pluralism may be taken to support the view that satisfying one pro tanto obligation need not undercut the wrongness of failing to satisfy another incompatible pro tanto obligation. Thus, even if God could not avoid imposing an earthquake on either Lisbon or New Delhi, those who suffer the actual earthquake may have been wronged. Here, though, we are explicit about the fact that the way to explain this case would be in terms of God having wronged the citizens but not being blameworthy for having done so. This allows us to see how the Blame Version of the argument fares better. Since, ex hypothesi, God has done nothing morally unjustifiable in this case, it is not a counterexample to the Divine Blameworthiness Claim, even if it is a counterexample to the Divine Wrongdoing Claim.

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We should note, however, that it is less clear that the first premise of this argument (the Blame Principle) can do better than the first premise of the Wrongdoing Argument (the Wrongdoing Principle) with the case we took to give us grounds for developing the Harm Principle. That case, you will recall, involved D’Angelo’s dilemmic decision to give the drug to Edna rather than to Frank. Our initial judgment in this case was that it is at least not obviously infelicitous for Frank to forgive D’Angelo even though, as we developed the case, D’Angelo has not wronged Frank. This is what led us to the Harm Principle according to which it is the fact that Frank is innocently harmed (though not morally wronged) by D’Angelo’s decision that explains the propriety of the forgiveness. If this is right, then D’Angelo’s case looks to count equally against the Blame Principle in the present version of the incoherence argument. This is because the Harm Principle is taken to imply that the person who can be a proper target of forgiveness must have acted in a morally unjustifiable way; this is just what it means for the person to be “properly to blame” for the harm suffered. So, given that D’Angelo has not behaved in a morally unjustified way in deciding to give the drug to Ingrid, the Blame Principle would issue in the conclusion that D’Angelo cannot be a coherent target of Henry’s forgiveness. To the degree, then, that we want to maintain that Frank is coherent in forgiving D’Angelo, we have reason to be in doubt about the Blame Principle. But before adjudicating this point more fully, it will be illuminating to consider two intriguing lines of argument that have been directed at what we are calling the Blame Principle. Espen Gamlund (2011) argues that our Blame Principle (which rests on what he calls “the standard view”) can be challenged by reflection on moral dilemmas. Embellishing the Ticking Bomb scenario made famous by Michael Walzer (1973), Gamlund ask us to imagine that a politician is forced to decide whether or not to authorize the torture of the wife of a would-be terrorist in the reasonable hope that the terrorist will reveal the whereabouts of a devastating bomb, giving authorities the time needed to deactivate it before detonation. On the basis of this case, he formulates two distinct arguments that would seem to undercut the Blame Principle. The first is the argument from reasonable rejection of justification. The second is the argument from moral remainder. With respect to the first, Gamlund emphasizes that the Ticking Bomb case raises quite fundamental concerns about the nature of moral justification, with competing moral theories issuing in plausible but competing judgments about whether the torture can be justified. A consequence of this, he argues, is that even on the assumption that the politician is morally justified (by whatever turns out to be the true moral theory) in authorizing the torture, it would not be unreasonable for someone to be unpersuaded by the justification. He contrasts this case with one in which Nazis blame you for not joining in on the destruction of Jewish businesses. No one seriously entertains the moral reasonability of the Nazi blame here. We are in no sincere doubt about whether your decision not to join in on the destruction can be morally justified. For this reason, Gamlund asserts that it would be incoherent for the Nazis to forgive you for what you have done—not just because what you have done is not wrong (which, of course, it is not) but also because no one could reasonably reject the justification you would offer for refusing to join in. By contrast, however, this is not obviously true in Ticking Bomb. Given the legitimate contestability of the justifications that could be offered in this case, Gamlund argues that, for example, the wife who undergoes the torture could reasonably reject the justification. This, he contends, means that there is something for the wife to forgive, even though the politician has not performed an unjustified act; that is to say, the politician can be forgiven even though he is not properly to be blamed for what he has done. Thus, the Blame Principle is false. The second argument that Gamlund attempts to leverage against our Blame Principle proceeds from the view sketched earlier regarding the pro tanto moral force of incompatible obligations. One way of thinking about the Ticking Bomb case is to suppose that, given the moral justification that the politician has for authorizing the torture (remember that we are assuming, for the sake

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of argument, that this act is, in fact, morally justified), the competing obligation he has not to torture an innocent person is voided. This will be to treat the obligation not to torture innocent people as merely a prima facie one—not as one that the politician has all things considered. But, as we have seen, an alternative way to see the situation will involve maintaining that the obligation not to torture an innocent person remains in force and is, therefore, not merely a prima facie one. Thus, though it can be overridden, its being overridden does not indicate that it was merely prima facie. On this account, it remains a pro tanto obligation for the politician not to torture even when the competing obligation to save innocent lives has outweighed it in the given circumstance. Accepting this picture of the pro tanto force of competing moral obligations, Gamlund claims that the politician is left with a “moral remainder” in the form of a violated pro tanto obligation, specifically to the wife. The wife does, then, have something to forgive. She can forgive him for failing to satisfy an obligation that has remained in force even in the presence of a sufficient moral justification for doing so. Once again, then, the politician can be a coherent target of forgiveness without being properly to blame for what he has done. The Blame Principle is, again, false. These two arguments are extremely interesting. What might the proponent of the Blame version of the incoherence argument attempt to say in response? We can begin with the argument from reasonable rejection of justification. One way to approach Gamlund’s argument on this point would be to concede the force of the concern but deny, in the end, that it tells forcefully against the central thrust of the incoherence argument. To see why this might be plausible, note that Gamlund’s claim is that a person can be a coherent target of forgiveness for doing something for which she has a sufficient moral justification provided that it is reasonable for the forgiver to reject the justification. Cast into the context of the forgiveness of God, this will mean that God may be a proper target of forgiveness in cases where, despite God’s being fully morally justified, some human creature (who is also a theist, remember—otherwise, why would “forgiving God” so much as be of interest) is in a position reasonably to reject the claim that God has the relevant justification. In putting the point this way, perhaps the puzzlement speaks for itself. Given that the putative forgiver in this case purports to accept that God is omnicompetent, it is exceedingly hard to see how the person could be reasonable in doubting the legitimacy of God’s moral justification. In Gamlund’s Ticking Bomb case, it seems that our sympathy with the wife’s reasonable rejection of the justification of the torture comes from the fact that, given the moral difficulties of the case, it is reasonable for her to be in doubt about whether the politician really is justified in authorizing it. But insofar as a person maintains the view that God is omnicompetent, there seems to be no similar room for doubt about whether God is really justified in whatever it is God has done or allowed. Put another way, it seems that doubt about whether God is justified in doing or allowing something will have to be doubt about whether God really is omnibenevolent, or really is omniscient—in short, about whether God (understood in traditional theism) really exists. Thus, holding the theistic commitments fixed, it does not appear that Gamlund’s first argument is going to help the person who wants to defend the claim that God can, indeed, be a coherent target of forgiveness. But what of Gamlund’s argument from moral remainder? Applied to forgiving God, the claim would seem to be that just as there is a moral remainder in the Ticking Bomb case such that there is something for the wife to forgive with respect to the politician, so also in a case like the earthquake scenario there can be something for those who suffer harm to forgive with respect to God; and this is so even though there is nothing in God’s permitting the earthquake (say, to strike Lisbon) for which God is properly to blame. Admittedly, however, the notion of moral remainder is somewhat elusive. Recall that Gamlund underwrites this idea by appeal to the claim that the politician does violate a pro tanto obligation not to torture an innocent person. And since the weighting of concerns that justify this violation does not eliminate the force of the obligation completely (as it would if the counter-volitional obligation were taken to be merely prima facie), 386

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the politician does perform a wrong (though, again, justified) action in authorizing the torture. The moral remainder appears to lie somewhere in this vicinity. Thus, one possible line of response will be to reject the picture of moral obligation according to which, in dilemmic circumstances, the legitimately overridden obligation maintains any of its moral authority. That is, one can simply reject the pro tanto account of the force of our moral reasons in conflict cases. But this account, as we said earlier, is not without its attractions. To the degree that it continues to attract, the moral remainder argument retains some force. We can, however, anticipate another style of reply on behalf of the Blame Version of the incoherence argument. To see it, we need to probe somewhat more deeply into just what the moral remainder is supposed to be, by Gamlund’s lights, in the Ticking Bomb case. To get us to attend to the possibility of moral remainder in this case, Gamlund strategically draws our attention to what intuitively appears to be the propriety of an apology. It is not hard to imagine that a morally sensitive version of our politician will indeed feel some compulsion to express something on the order of an apology to the wife upon being confronted by her appeals for recognition in response to being tortured. One interpretation of Gamlund’s moral remainder is that it is whatever makes it appropriate for the politician to offer his apology. Put another way, the force of the argument from moral remainder may be coming from a form of inference—an inference from the propriety of apology to the existence of something worthy of forgiveness. Furthermore, and upon reflection, this form of inference may, indeed, be sound. But we should note that it is at least possible (and more likely probable) that many instances of speech acts of the form “I am sorry” or “I apologize” do not amount to forms of moralized apology that license this inference. In many cases, such utterances express not that there is something worthy of forgiveness but only, for example, that one is sad about an outcome or that one wishes things would have turned out differently or, even, that one merely sympathizes with another’s suffering. Nor should we dismiss the independent moral importance of these kinds of expressions. In some cases, they may very well be morally obligatory, since it can often be morally necessary to empathize with those who suffer. However, when the utterances are not, in fact, moralized apologies but rather expressions of one or more of these alternative but appropriate attitudes toward another person’s suffering (most common when one’s blameless agency has played some causal role in the suffering), it seems markedly less clear that it would be appropriate to infer the existence of something properly to be forgiven. The temptation to understand the intuitive demand on the politician in Ticking Bomb in these terms may be strong. If the politician does not make some effort to express sympathy for the wife’s innocent suffering, especially in the light of his causal role in it, he does not show proper concern—either for her or for the seriousness of the decision he has made to authorize her torture. And the wife’s moral expectation that some such sentiment be conveyed is just as reasonable. Nevertheless, while there may be a certain cultural naturalness in the politician expressing this sympathy by saying, “I am sorry,” he can also seem to have fulfilled his obligation (if that is what it is) by saying such things as, “I realize this was a devastating thing for you to go through” or “I sincerely regret that it came to this.” It is, then, not unreasonable to understand his utterance of “I am sorry” as on a par with the utterance of “I am sorry for your loss” in the expression of condolences. Here it is perfectly clear that “I am sorry for your loss” does not create a context in which forgiveness is in order. The suggestion here, then, is that identifying the moral remainder by appealing to whatever it is that makes the politician’s apology appropriate may involve a bad inference from the propriety of a particular kind of recognition that can easily enough be expressed in apology-like terms to the presence of moral remainder, left in the wake of the politician’s morally justified action, that can be addressed by forgiveness.11 With these points in mind, we might worry about a similarly suspicious form of inference that could easily be made in the context of our earlier cases. Recall that in Glen’s horrible Sophie’s Choice case, he must decide whether Hao or Ingrid will go to an unjust death. If Glen is a morally 387

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sensitive person, as we suspect he is, we can fully understand how it might make sense for him to express his heartbreaking decision by saying to Hao, “I am so sorry, Hao, but I am choosing to save Ingrid.” Furthermore, assuming that Hao, too, is a person of impressive moral sensitivity, we can picture a very touching scene in which Hao responds by embracing Glen and declaring, “I forgive you, Glen. Go in peace.” But it may be a mistake to draw conclusions about the propriety of forgiveness from our judgments about the legitimacy, indeed the beauty, of Glen’s “apology” and Hao’s “forgiveness.” And this is because it is not perfectly clear that the utterances are being made with their standard moralized import. To see this, note that it seems we can retell this story without apology and forgiveness. What Glen says, let us imagine, is, instead, “It is breaking my heart to decide this, Hao, but I am choosing to save Ingrid.” And the story is no less beautiful when Hao embraces Glen and says, “I understand, Glen. A decision had to be made. You’ve done nothing wrong. Go in peace.” Given that this second way of filling in the story can be plausibly thought to capture the full moral significance of what was communicated in the first, it seems we can have grounds to resist any temptation to infer that Glen is a proper target of genuine forgiveness. The point is, once again, that not everything that looks like an apology licenses a conclusion that forgiveness is in order. An analogous inferential problem may be afoot in the early case we used to motivate the possibility that forgiveness does not require wrongdoing; namely, in the case of D’Angelo’s decision to give the drug to Edna rather than to Frank. In this case, D’Angelo has done nothing that violates a moral obligation in deciding to give the drug to Edna. Nevertheless, we took notice of what appears to be the intuitive propriety of Frank’s forgiving D’Angelo even though D’Angelo had done nothing wrong. This intuitive propriety, we may see more clearly in retrospect, got some of its traction from our appeal to the fact that, upon hearing Frank utter “I forgive you,” it would seem transparently inappropriate for D’Angelo to respond (as we were happy to see Agnieszka respond) by denying that he has done anything meriting forgiveness. But the worry, now, is this: perhaps our unhappiness with D’Angelo’s defensiveness should not be taken to indicate that he is, in fact, a proper target of forgiveness but only that Frank is owed some grace and recognition in being subjected to an innocent harm that D’Angelo had it in his power to redirect. If something like this is right, then our willingness to let Frank have his statement of forgiveness, and even to object to any defensiveness on D’Angelo’s part with respect to it, need not be taken to reveal that D’Angelo really is a proper target of forgiveness. Where do these reflections leave us with respect to the soundness of one or another of the incoherence arguments? The situation is not perfectly clear. On one hand, it is almost certainly true that theistic conviction about the force of one or another of these arguments will turn out to be both common and reasonable. There is little question that these arguments express theological and philosophical impulses that will be widely and rationally accepted by theistic believers. Still, on the other hand, we have also seen some routes to resistance that appear to be consistent with theism. The crucial decision points seem to be these: whether God could face unavoidable conflicts between fundamental sources of value, whether perfectly benevolent responses to such conflicts would nevertheless leave a moral remainder, and whether such moral remainder, even in the absence of culpable blame, could ground the propriety of forgiveness. In short, then, we might sensibly conclude that many thoughtful theists will reasonably reject the claim that God can be forgiven even while some will reasonably maintain the coherence of seeking to forgive God.

4. Conclusion Our space has been taken up almost completely with the incoherence arguments—and perhaps justifiably, because of the fundamentality of the challenge to the idea of forgiving God that these kinds of concerns represent. But there are a great many less fundamental but equally intriguing 388

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issues raised by reflection on the possibility of forgiving God. We can finish by taking notice of just a few of these. For example, on the assumption that the incoherence arguments fail, we might still worry about the moral legitimacy of any such forgiveness, since the highly contested debate regarding the propriety of unapologetic forgiveness will be distinctively relevant here.12 Must God apologize if human forgiveness is to avoid becoming morally problematic? Is the idea of divine apology incoherent, even if our forgiving God is not? Could any divine acts (for example, the sacrifice of Jesus in the Christian tradition) sensibly be understood as serving as divine apologies? The second tantalizing line of reflection about forgiving God might move forward from the assumption that one or another of the incoherence arguments is sound. If it is incoherent to forgive God because the enabling conditions cannot be met, does this render practically irrational any effort to enact the constitutive elements of forgiveness? It can certainly seem so; but might there be circumstances—circumstances, perhaps, featuring especially horrendous evils, in which the comparative rationality of attitudes of resentment and indignation directed toward God insulate a putative God-forgiver from rational complaint even while she endorses an incoherence argument? In any case, we can conclude with the sincere hope that much future work will be done to expand our understanding of the philosophical, theological, psychological, and practical limits of forgiving God.13

Notes 1 Philosophical treatments of the topic of forgiving God are currently scarce, though it is nevertheless a surprisingly common topic in semi-popular religious conversations. Nearly alone among serious philosophical approaches to the topic is Verbin (2007). Though there is a great deal of sensitive insight in this chapter, much of it will be ignored here because Verbin essentially assumes that the Jewish God to be forgiven (in the biblical book of Job) is a morally problematic abuser. In other words, her approach does not appear to maintain the commitment to divine omnicompetence that we are taking to establish the philosophical intrigue of our question. 2 This argument is not, as it stands, strictly valid. However, it can be made valid easily enough with the addition of premises that would be accepted by most theists (regarding the personhood—or near enough—of God) that would only add unnecessary annoyance to the present discussion. 3 See Nagel 1979; chapter 9. 4 We assume that when someone wrongs another, the one wronged is also the subject of innocent harm. That is, all instances of wronging are also instances in which someone is innocently harmed. We do not assume (because it is fairly obviously false) that all instances of innocent harming are also instances of someone being wronged. 5 Again, this argument is not formally valid, but could easily be made so with essentially useless and ugly additions. 6 Some theists will be inclined to insist that no human person is innocent, strictly speaking. But the “innocence” relevant to the discussion here is relative to the harm. Has the agent done something such that this very harm is deserved? In calling the person innocent, we mean only that the answer to this question is “no”—and hereby remain silent on cosmic or global innocence. 7 As a crisp explanation of the distinction invoked here, Shelley Kagan says: A pro tanto reason has genuine weight, but nonetheless may be outweighed by other considerations. Thus, calling a reason a pro tanto reason is to be distinguished from calling it a prima facie reason, which I take to involve an epistemological qualification: a prima facie reason appears to be a reason, but may actually not be a reason at all. (1989: n.17) Cast in terms of obligation, then, a prima facie obligation may be no obligation at all but only what looks, at first glance, to be one. By contrast, a pro tanto obligation really is an obligation, though competing obligations of equal or greater importance may give an agent sufficient reason to neglect it. 8 A number of theologians and philosophers have been hesitant to attribute moral obligations to God, often because this appears to treat God as a mere additional member of our moral community—just

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Daniel Speak one more among the rest of us. On classical theism, it is supposed to be a mistake to think of God this way, since God is, rather, the ground of all being and not one of the beings. Another kind of objection to speaking of God as having moral obligations might come from a particular kind of theory—a social theory—of the phenomenon. Some have argued that moral obligations must arise out of specific forms of social life—those in which demands can be made and requirements imposed. In the limit case, this leads naturally enough to a divine command theory of the nature of moral obligation (see Adams 1999; chapters 10 and 11). In this vein, the objection to attributing moral obligations to God will arise from the thought that we cannot be in the relevant position of commanding or requiring anything of God, and especially if it turns out that obligations really do bottom out in divine commands. In response, notice that the text somewhat cautiously proceeds by assuming only that “God has something sufficiently resembling pro tanto obligations.” If you are squeamish about God having moral obligations, feel free to translate these into whatever language you would prefer to deploy in explaining why some actions or permissions would be unbecoming of, or inconsistent with, divine omnibenevolence. All that is needed for the argument here is that these “pseudo-obligations” can be pro tanto rather than merely prima facie and that they can be grounded in sources of value that can be fragmented. 9 The actual Lisbon earthquake of 1755 has been a touch point for philosophical reflection on the problem of evil for theism ever since Voltaire used it to savage Leibniz’ infamous claims that, appearances notwithstanding, ours is “the best of all possible worlds.” For Voltaire’s savagery, see his Candide (1947). For Leibniz’ claim about the best-ness of our world, see his Theodicy (1952). 10 Once again, as with endnotes 2 and 5, the formal validity of this argument could be secured with untidy additions that will be of no good use for our discussion. 11 It is clear that Gamlund would have more to say about this quick handling of the argument from moral remainder. He specifically addresses a reply much like the one in the text due to Luc Bovens (2008) who argues that it is the expression of regret rather than apology that will handle the moral remainder. Gamlund rejects this suggestion by arguing that in merely expressing regret, the politician would not be accepting appropriate responsibility for “his deliberate decision to set aside an important moral duty or constraint for the sake of other considerations” (118). Details would matter here, one supposes. But even if it is true that the politician is indeed obligated to express something that entails his taking this kind of responsibility, fully moralized apology may not seem to be required. This is to say that in expressing all that Gamlund insists must be expressed by the politician he need not have revealed the existence of genuine moral residue properly handled by forgiveness. On the other hand, if one is impressed by Gamlund’s reasoning here, then it may very well apply even to God—in which case there could be reason to conclude that it is not incoherent to forgive God. 12 Proponents of the view that forgiveness ought to be conditioned upon apology, repentance, or the like include Kolnai (1974), Murphy (1988), Novitz (1988), Swinburne (1989), and Griswold (2007). Opponents of this view include Pettigrove, (2004), Hoffman (2009), Garrard, and McNaughton (2011). 13 Many thanks are due to Jason Baehr, Manuel Vargas, Lori Speak, Judy Speak, and Lucy Allais for thoughtful conversations that helped considerably in the structuring and development of this entry. Special thanks to Glen Pettigrove for the initial prodding that brought this project into existence and for a number of excellent questions about the arguments constructed here that, in virtue of space limitations, have gone unaddressed—but not at all unappreciated.

References Adams, R. (1999) Finite and Infinite Goods, New York: Oxford University Press. Bovens, L. (2008) “Apologies,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 219–39. Gamlund, E. (2011) “Forgiveness Without Blame,” in C. Fricke (ed.) The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays, London: Routledge. Garrard, E. and McNaughton, D. (2011) “Conditional Unconditional Forgiveness,” in C. Fricke (ed.) The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays, London: Routledge. Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hoffman, K. (2009) “Forgiveness Without Apology: Defending Unconditional Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 82 135–51. Kagan, S. (1989) The Limits of Morality, New York: Oxford University Press. Kolnai, A. (1974) “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 91–106. Leibniz, G.W. (1952) Theodicy, New Haven: Yale University Press. Murphy, J. (1988) “Forgiveness, Mercy, and Retributive Emotions,” Criminal Justice Ethics 7 3–14.

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Forgiving God Nagel, T. (1979) “The Fragmentation of Value,” in T. Nagel Mortal Questions, New York: Oxford University Press. Novitz, D. (1988) “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 299–315. Pettigrove, G. (2004) “Unapologetic Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 41 187–204. Swinburne, R. (1989) Responsibility and Atonement, New York: Oxford University Press. Verbin, N. (2007) “Forgiving God: A Jewish Perspective on Evil and Suffering,” in J. Gort et al (eds.) Probing the Depths of Evil and Good, New York: Rodopoi. Voltaire (1947) Candide, New York: Penguin. Walzer, M. (1973) “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 160–80. Warmke, B. (2017) Forgiveness. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ forgiveness/

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29 COLLECTIVE FORGIVENESS Katie Stockdale

1. Introduction In 2008, Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada at the time, publicly apologized to Indigenous peoples in Canada for the Indian Residential School System that forced over 150,000 Inuit, First Nations, and Métis children into boarding schools which were explicitly designed to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian culture and erase Indigenous cultures, spiritual practices, and ways of life (cf. MacLachlan 2013). In his apology, Harper stated: “the government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks forgiveness of the Aboriginal people of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry.” Five Indigenous leaders and six residential school survivors were present but none of them explicitly offered forgiveness (Government of Canada 2008; Changfoot 2020). On June 11–13, 2010, Chief Kenny Blacksmith, a residential school survivor and former Deputy Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees in Quebec, held a “National Forgiven Summit” in Ottawa following a months-long “Journey of Freedom” across the nation through which Blacksmith advocated forgiveness across Indigenous communities. A few thousand people attended the summit at which a “Charter of Forgiveness” was presented to Federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl signed by elders, survivors, and Indigenous youth (CBC News 2010; Rushdy 2018: 267; Changfoot 2020).1 Ashraf H.A. Rushdy (2018) argues that because each individual who forgave at the summit decided to forgive personally, the National Forgiven Summit is not a case of collective forgiveness. More strongly, he suggests that “there is, as of yet, no such thing as a clearly discernible act of collective public forgiveness in the same way as there is such a thing as an act of collective public apology” (Rushdy 2018: 264). On Rushdy’s view, for collective forgiveness to take place, there must be “a collective, public forgiveness on behalf of the population” (Rushdy 2018: 267). Collective forgiveness in the Canadian context would thus consist in forgiveness on behalf of all Indigenous people in Canada for the Indian Residential School System. But this has obviously not happened, and the forgiveness offered at the National Forgiven Summit was itself extremely controversial. It was, for example, criticized by Indigenous people who found the National Forgiven Summit insulting to residential school survivors (e.g., Windspeaker 2010). Many scholars have also pointed out that colonialism is not in the country’s past, and so forgiveness in this context is inappropriate (MacLachlan 2012; Coulthard 2014; Flowers 2015). Does collective forgiveness require that all members of a social group harmed by injustice forgive? If it does, then Rushdy is likely right that collective forgiveness is at least quite rare. But answering this question requires addressing a number of philosophical questions about the nature 392

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of collectives and the nature of forgiveness. What is a collective? And if a collective were to forgive, what would their forgiveness look like? This chapter addresses these questions. I begin by distinguishing between different forms of forgiveness in response to injustices that harm many different people: individual forgiveness, group-based forgiveness, and collective forgiveness. I suggest that individual forgiveness takes place when one individual forgives for a wrongful act or injustice done to them personally. Group-based forgiveness takes place when an individual (or multiple individuals) forgives for a wrongful act or injustice done to a social group to which they belong (e.g., Indigenous people forgiving acts of colonial violence or disabled people forgiving ableist acts). Collective forgiveness takes place when the entity forgiving is a group itself. I then consider how some prominent views about the nature of forgiveness might extend to capture the phenomenon of collective forgiveness. I show that problems with widely popular emotional models of collective forgiveness lead us toward a more performative, social practice model of collective forgiveness. I close by reflecting on the ethics of collective forgiveness, returning to the case of the National Forgiven Summit, and then considering more broadly the ethics of political collective forgiveness.

2.  Individual, Group-Based, and Collective Forgiveness The question of collective forgiveness arises because it is often the case that wrongful acts and injustices harm a great many people. Scholars have considered the nature and role of forgiveness in contexts such as the Holocaust (Minow 1998; Brudholm and Rosoux 2009), the Rwandan Genocide (Tutu 2000; Brudholm and Rosoux 2009; Carse and Tirrell 2010), and Apartheid in South Africa (Minow 1998; Tutu 2000; Govier 2002; Bennett 2003; Walker 2006). But there has been less discussion of what it might look like for Jews, Tutsis, or Black South Africans to come together and forgive as collectives, rather than as individual victims. My strategy will be to construct a case in which it seems, intuitively, as though a collective has offered forgiveness that is distinct from both the individual and group-based forgiveness of its members. We will then be better positioned to address questions about the possibility of collective forgiveness in these more complicated political contexts. Suppose that multiple women university students come forward with sexual harassment allegations against a campus fraternity, Iota Alpha. Norah, Tiffany, and Maria all publicly share credible stories about having been victims of sexual harassment by fraternity members. An environmental assessment of Iota Alpha reveals that “there is a climate of sexism and misogyny endemic to the group,” and the fraternity is suspended as punishment. Although each of these women is a direct victim of serious moral wrongs done to them as individuals, there is an important sense in which all women on campus are harmed by Iota Alpha, to varying degrees and depending on other aspects of their identities and closeness to the event. The fraternity’s sexist and misogynistic culture is part of an unjust patriarchal society, and so it makes sense to say that women (not just direct victims of sexual harassment) have reason to resent Iota Alpha for their behavior (cf. Stockdale 2013). And if women can reasonably resent, then perhaps women (as a social group) can also forgive. It is not difficult to imagine Norah, Tiffany, and Maria forgiving Iota Alpha as individuals in this case. Suppose that Iota Alpha responds by accepting full responsibility for the climate of misogyny and sexism they have promoted and issue a public apology in the campus newspaper on behalf of the group, committing to changing the fraternity’s culture going forward. Norah, Tiffany, and Maria – after working through their emotions with therapists individually – each decide to forgive Iota Alpha as well as the particular fraternity members who sexually harassed them. Their forgiveness is individual because each woman personally forgave the fraternity (and its members) for the harm done directly to them as women who were victimized at Iota Alpha’s parties. 393

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We can also imagine other women experiencing resentment and forgiveness as women in this case: that is, group-based forgiveness as members of the social group harmed by the injustice. Even women students who had not once attended a party at Iota Alpha might reasonably point out that they resent the group for its contribution to the systemic harms of misogyny and sexism on campus that they, too, endure as women students in daily life. But they also note that, due to Iota Alpha’s subsequent actions which show a change in the group’s culture, they have personally decided to forgive the fraternity. These women’s forgiveness is group-based, that is, it is forgiveness of Iota Alpha for the harm done to them as women, and not any individual in particular. But it does not yet seem as though there is reason to think that collective forgiveness has taken place, since many individual women forgiving Iota Alpha on their own terms (for individual and group-based reasons) is not the same as a collective forgiving itself (Rushdy 2018). Trudy Govier (2002) considers what it would take for a collective to forgive. She points out that collectives (as a form of social group) have qualities that are logically distinct from their individual members. Importantly, they have formal organizational structures, which enable them to make decisions and undertake actions together (Govier 2002: 86). For example, an environmental group might have a ten-member executive committee that is elected by group members and authorized to make decisions and undertake actions on behalf of the group, which might consist of thousands of individual members. Through discussion to determine the group’s beliefs and goals, and its formal decision-making procedure, the group might make an executive decision to campaign against a development proposal – a collective decision not reducible to the decisions of individual members (Govier 2002). So while an environmental group constitutes a collective, “women” as a social group does not. There is no organizational structure to the social group “women” or even “women on campus” that enables them to determine the group’s beliefs and goals, and to act as a group. Thus, multiple women’s forgiveness of Iota Alpha does not constitute collective forgiveness. But suppose that an emotional support group is formed called Sexism Survivors on Campus. Members meet regularly to share their experiences, hurt feelings, and concerns about sexism and misogyny across campus. After months of meeting to work through their thoughts and emotions, and after witnessing Iota Alpha’s genuine shift in culture, the question of forgiveness arises. Norah is present, and she remarks that she is ready to forgive Iota Alpha and inquires what her group members are thinking. Tiffany and Maria remark that they, too, think that the fraternity’s genuine remorse, apology, and subsequent actions warrant forgiveness. Most other women agree, and they collaboratively discuss a formal voting procedure to determine whether the group should forgive. Almost all members vote “yes,” with two group members voting “no.” In line with their procedure for determining the votes required for a collective decision, the group decides that they are ready to forgive Iota Alpha. They arrange a meeting with Iota Alpha where Norah says, on behalf of the group, “we forgive you.” Fraternity members express gratitude for what they see as a supererogatory act of forgiveness. Following the meeting, Sexism Survivors on Campus publishes an open letter in the campus newspaper explaining the group’s reasons for forgiveness and re-stating their commitment to ending sexism and misogyny across campus. There are many questions related to this case of what might plausibly be described as collective forgiveness. For example, we might ask whether it makes sense to hold a collective responsible for its actions (or just its individual members), whether the fraternity’s behavior actually warrants forgiveness, and who has the moral standing to forgive (direct victims, women on campus, or even women everywhere?). Some people may disagree with women’s decisions to offer individual and group-based forgiveness, and with Sexism Survivors on Campus’s decision to forgive. But setting these questions aside, there seems to be an important sense in which it makes sense to say that Sexism Survivors on Campus forgave Iota Alpha, not just that its individual members forgave

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the group (and not all of them did). This is because the readiness to forgive, and the act of forgiveness, was brought about by procedures, reasoning, and actions of a collective. This case illustrates that collective forgiveness is distinct from both individual and group-based forgiveness. It is not enough for multiple women on campus to forgive Iota Alpha on their own terms for collective forgiveness to take place, even if all of them do. This is because their forgiveness would not necessarily be forgiveness of a collective. As Claudia Card argues, “group [collective] forgiveness is not simply reducible to members of one group forgiving members of another” (Card 2002: 10). Collective forgiveness is a form of forgiveness offered by a collective itself, and it can be genuinely offered even if not all members of the collective agree with the group’s decision to forgive. If this is right, then we have reasons to resist the idea that collective forgiveness for the Canadian Indian Residential School System would require all Indigenous Canadians to forgive. In fact, in the absence of an official, recognized body with the authority to represent all Indigenous people in Canada, it does not seem as though “Indigenous Canadians” constitute a collective with a mechanism through which collective forgiveness could be offered. But what is collective forgiveness? It is, importantly, not the same thing as political forgiveness (even if the cases discussed so far count as political forgiveness). For example, it is possible that collective anger and forgiveness might occur between sports teams during a tournament. If the Boston Bruins play dirty, the Montreal Canadiens might resent the Boston Bruins for their actions. But if the Boston Bruins apologize for their collective actions that amount to unfair play on the ice, the Montreal Canadiens might, as a team, forgive them. I take it that the forgiveness in this scenario could plausibly be construed as collective, even if it is not obviously political (cf. MacLachlan 2012). By the same token, some instances of political forgiveness are individual. For example, if a protestor at a political rally screams a hateful message at the politician, and if they subsequently apologize to the politician on social media, the politician’s forgiveness might be political forgiveness (e.g., because it’s politically motivated) even if not collective. So, although many instances of collective forgiveness might also be political forgiveness, it is important not to conflate the two. In what follows, I consider how some prominent views of the nature of individual forgiveness might extend to capture the phenomenon of collective forgiveness. I begin with widely popular emotional models of forgiveness.

3.  Emotional Models of Collective Forgiveness On emotional models of individual forgiveness, forgiveness takes place when a person experiences a change in emotion from resentment or other hostile feelings toward a wrongdoer (e.g., Strawson 1974; Murphy 1982; Roberts 1995; Hieronymi 2001; Griswold 2007; Allais 2008). As Jeffrie G. Murphy puts it, forgiveness is “primarily a matter of how I feel about you” (Murphy 1982: 506, emphasis added). It is a process by which victims of wrongful acts undergo a change of heart, and typically for a moral reason. Unlike excusing, justifying, or explaining away a wrongdoer’s behavior that might lead to a diminishing of hostile feelings, and unlike merely extinguishing resentment for therapeutic reasons, forgiveness consists in a commitment to overcome hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer because the reasons for these hostile feelings have been undermined. For example, when we resent another person, our resentment signifies self-respect. It signifies that we see ourselves as deserving of some degree of goodwill or benevolence from others, and that the wrongdoer has not afforded us that treatment. But when a wrongdoer apologizes and displays remorse for an action, and when he commits to changing his ways for the future, there are no longer reasons to resent him. Such things as apology and remorse constitute moral reasons to forgive, replacing hostile feelings with friendlier ones.

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There is disagreement about which positive feelings toward the wrongdoer replace hostile feelings when we forgive. David Novitz argues that forgiveness requires replacing negative feelings toward the wrongdoer with “empathetic thinking” (Novitz 1998: 309) whereas Martin Hughes talks of “friendly attitudes” more generally (Hughes 1975). David McNaughton and Eve Garrard argue that forgiveness consists in replacing hostile feelings with goodwill (McNaughton and Garrard 2019). There is also disagreement about whether resentment must precede forgiveness, or whether forgiveness consists in the forswearing of other hostile or hurt feelings as well (Walker 2006; MacLachlan 2009; Pettigrove 2012). The important point for our purposes is that, on emotional models of forgiveness, those who are harmed by wrongful acts undergo a change of heart, forswearing hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer and replacing them with more friendly or positive feelings toward them. How might an emotional model of forgiveness make sense of collective forgiveness? One potential theory of collective emotional forgiveness is the joint commitment account. Margaret Gilbert has recently proposed what she refers to as the “joint commitment account of collective emotion” (Gilbert 2014: 23). Joint commitments, on Gilbert’s view, are formed when people express their readiness to commit, as one, to a cause. For example, I might be personally committed to social justice. But if I express a readiness (verbally or through other behavior) to commit alongside others to a social justice pursuit, I contribute to the formation of a joint commitment to the pursuit of social justice. Once a joint commitment has been established, each person is individually committed to doing their part to carry out the joint commitment and responsible for doing so. Group members are thus bound by an “obligation criterion” through which they have the standing to rebuke one another if they fail to behave in the “spirit of the collective emotion” (Gilbert 2014: 23). No one person can rescind a joint commitment, either. Doing so requires cooperation among group members (Gilbert 2014: 24). Gilbert extends her view to collective emotions as follows: Persons X, Y, and so on (or: members of a population P) are collectively E if and only if they are jointly committed to be E as a body. So, on this view, a collective emotion is an emotion to which members of a collective are jointly committed. In other words, “the parties are jointly committed to emulate, by virtue of their several actions and utterances, a single subject of the emotion in question, in relevant circumstances” (Gilbert 2014: 25). Gilbert uses the example of excitement to illustrate, where three people are excited about their friend, Stella, winning an award. If Alice, in conversation, angrily blurts out frustration about Stella winning yet another reward, such an expression would betray the collective excitement. Other friends in the group might feel that Alice is doing something wrong and rebuke her for her behavior (Gilbert 2014: 23). To fulfill her responsibility to participate in collective excitement for Stella, Alice must show excitement through her “public performance” of the emotion (Gilbert 2014: 25). This does not mean that Alice must be personally excited about Stella winning an award, but that she is committed to showing excitement as part of a collective (i.e., the friend group) that is collectively excited about Stella’s success. How might a joint commitment theory of collective emotion make sense of the collective forgiveness of Sexism Survivors on Campus? On Gilbert’s view: Norah, Tiffany, Maria, and so on (or: members of Sexism Survivors on Campus) collectively forgive Iota Alpha if and only if they are jointly committed to forgive. On this account, collective forgiveness is an emotion to which members of a collective are jointly committed. To carry out collective forgiveness, Norah, Tiffany, Maria, and other members must 396

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emulate, in relevant contexts, expressions of forgiveness. For example, members of Sexism Survivors on Campus might emulate forgiveness by smiling at fraternity members if they walk by them on campus, talking about the group sympathetically, and resisting hostile feelings toward the fraternity when they arise. The commitment to emulate friendly feelings, on this account, captures the common idea that forgiveness is partly constituted by a commitment to rejecting hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer that may arise moving forward (Walker 2006: 157; Pettigrove 2012: 18). If Maria, in conversation, angrily blurts out that maybe Sexism Survivors on Campus should continue to hate Iota Alpha after all, other members might feel that Maria is doing something wrong and rebuke her for her angry expression. “We have forgiven them, remember?” they might ask, reminding Maria that she must display forgiving rather than hostile feelings as a participant of the group’s collective forgiveness. There are several virtues of a joint commitment theory of collective forgiveness. First, it captures the intuitive difference between group-based and collective forgiveness, where forgiving a wrongful act for the harm done to me as a woman is not the same thing as a collective of women forgiving. Second, the account does not require group members to have succeeded in extinguishing all of their hostile feelings and replacing them with friendlier ones for the group to forgive. As Gilbert argues, the idea of publicly performing the emotion “indicates that what goes on in each mind and heart is not at issue with respect to what the parties are committed to” (Gilbert 2014: 25). Glen Pettigrove and Nigel Parsons similarly suggest that “it is possible for a group to forgive wrongs that were suffered as a group, even though some members of the group do not forgive what they suffered as individuals” (Pettigrove and Parsons 2010: 678). Maria might continue to harbor resentment toward members of Iota Alpha for their sexual harassment of her, as a direct victim, even though she is jointly committed to forgiving Iota Alpha as a member of Sexism Survivors on Campus and to emulating, through her behavior, a “single subject of the emotion in question” (Gilbert 2014: 25). She might, too, be personally committed to overcoming her own hostile feelings toward fraternity members so that she can individually forgive them. But this is a separate matter from her participation in the collective forgiveness. There are, however, some disadvantages of a joint commitment account of collective forgiveness. One is the obligation criterion. The idea that a collective emotion generates obligations on the part of group members to emulate the emotion in their own individual behavior runs the risk of dismissing, or encouraging suppression of, individuals’ genuine emotional experiences about injustices that harm them. For example, those who voted “no” to Sexism Survivors on Campus’s decision to forgive may be forced to either leave the group or accept their obligation to emulate the group’s forgiveness. And this choice situation itself can be harmful to victims who are already struggling to cope with injustice. Notice, too, that although it is possible for members to leave Sexism Survivors on Campus if they choose to, there will be many cases in which leaving a collective is very difficult, if not impossible (e.g., if we accept that at least many whole nations are collectives). And since forgiveness is often thought to provide release for victims of injustice, not further burdens, a theory of collective forgiveness according to which some individuals are harmed by forgiveness might seem implausible. Glen Pettigrove (2006) raises a further concern about representatives of a collective offering forgiveness on behalf of the collective, since one might worry that representatives do not have the authority or ability to commit their members not to act from particular emotions, such as when a representative of a nation offers forgiveness on behalf of citizens. But he argues that there is nothing “in principle” problematic about this, noting that legal systems do regulate citizens’ emotions (e.g., through laws against acts motivated by hatred) (Pettigrove 2006: 492–543). Another response is that, although the obligation criterion might very well be problematic for moral and political reasons, it is this requirement of genuinely collective forgiveness that makes sense of our hesitation about practices of collective forgiveness. I return to these concerns in the final section. 397

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Proponents of the emotional model might also avoid some of these problems by defending an account on collective forgiveness that is less burdensome on group members’ expressions of emotion than Gilbert’s joint commitment account. For example, they might defend a view on which collective forgiveness consists not in a group’s positive commitment to emulating a particular emotion, but in a group’s decision to no longer be committed to hostile feelings as a defining feature of membership in the group (cf. Parsons and Pettigrove 2012: 512). On this view, Sexism Survivors on Campus would still be committed to a change in emotional orientation toward Iota Alpha, but group members would not be obligated to emulate friendly feelings toward the fraternity. This weaker view does come at a cost, however. It is not clear that no longer being committed to resent Iota Alpha is enough to count as forgiveness. In other words, it may be that the stronger sense of commitment to emotional change (e.g., emulating friendly feelings, a public commitment to those feelings, uttering “I forgive you” as an expression of them) is what makes the joint commitment emotional model a plausible theory of collective forgiveness. But one might also worry that, on a joint commitment account of collective forgiveness, collective emotions look more like a commitment to acting in certain ways rather than a commitment to having a genuinely collective emotion. Theories of collective emotion which recognize the role of affect in collective emotional experiences seem to fare better in capturing the felt experience of collective emotions and how they are constituted by the emotions of individuals. For example, Michael S. Brady (2016) defends an account of collective anger where the collective emotion involves, or is at least partly constituted by, the anger of individuals. He provides the example of students’ collective anger at a 2011 protest in London in response to the government’s proposal to increase tuition fees. Individual students present were angry about the spike in tuition fees, and they were aware that others present were angry as well. The combined experience of each individual student’s anger along with their awareness of others’ anger led, in this scenario, to an emotional contagion of anger that stretched across the group. As Dario Páez and Bernard Rimé (2014) argue, collective emotions come about when individuals’ gestures, movements, and speech result in “an atmosphere of emotion and fervor” which transforms individual emotional feelings into shared emotional feelings (Páez and Rimé 2014: 207). These shared emotional feelings, along with the experience of being in community with others, combine in such a way that “participants evolve to a sense of group membership” and “experience the ‘we’ in place of the ‘I’” (207). Collective emotions, on this view, emerge from the collective experience of an emotion (cf. Stockdale 2021). In other words, what is collective about the emotion is not a joint commitment but the emotional contagion, which cannot be reduced to the emotional experience of any one member of the collective. Collective forgiveness, on this sort of view, would be the forswearing of resentment and other hostile feelings, where members’ own positive feelings toward the wrongdoer converge with those of others, producing collective forgiveness. And this view might get something right about collective forgiveness. If I witness others’ readiness to forgive as well as their sympathetic, friendly attitudes toward a wrongdoer for their change of heart, I might feel myself experiencing forgiving attitudes, too. In the context of Sexism Survivors on Campus, group members’ hostile feelings toward Iota Alpha might have plausibly softened in hearing others express how their own feelings were changing, and in hearing them articulate reasons for the group to forgive. (It’s also plausible that expressions of hostile feelings on the part of individual members would strengthen the hostile feelings of others, contributing to collective anger.) On this view, collective forgiveness is not a commitment to forgiving, but rather an emotional convergence of the forswearing of hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer and the emergence of friendlier ones stretching across the group. One disadvantage of the emotional convergence account of collective forgiveness is that it does away with joint commitment altogether. People’s emotional experiences converge with those of others, but there is no decision-making process that results in a collective decision to undergo a 398

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change in emotional orientation toward the wrongdoer(s). In fact, an emotional episode of collective forgiveness can take place just by being in the same room as others. This account of collective forgiveness therefore leaves us without resources for making sense of the processes by which collectives decide to forgive and to display acts of forgiveness. It is, after all, Sexism Survivors on Campus’s collaborative decision-making process by which they decided to change their attitudes and behavior toward Iota Alpha, the utterance “we forgive you,” and the open letter publicly documenting their forgiveness that seem central to what establishes collective forgiveness in this case. As Alice MacLachlan argues, focusing on the emotional dimensions of forgiveness risks overlooking or even undermining “the ritualistic, behavioural, and even pragmatic elements of forgiveness… [the wrongdoer’s] being ‘let back in’ may be as much a matter of social gesture as it is a matter of deep emotional transformation” (MacLachlan 2009: 189). In what follows, I explore how performative and social practice models of forgiveness, which decenter (but do not eliminate entirely) the role of emotional experience in forgiveness, are more capable of preserving the virtues of emotional models of forgiveness without their problems.

4.  Performative and Social Practice Models Two features of Sexism Survivors on Campus’s forgiveness are left out of the emotional model of forgiveness according to which collective forgiveness is an emotional convergence of group members’ forgiveness: namely, the expression “we forgive you” and the publication of an open letter declaring the group’s forgiveness. Performative models of forgiveness do better to accommodate these features, while preserving the importance of the role of commitment to collective forgiveness. Following J.L. Austin (1972), to say “I forgive you” is a performative utterance that is itself an action (Haber 1991; Digeser 2001; Pettigrove 2012). On some performative views, merely saying “I forgive you” can amount to forgiveness (Neblett 1974), and so collective forgiveness would merely consist in a representative of a collective saying, “we forgive you.” But most philosophers who defend performative views of forgiveness think that forgiveness requires more than just the utterance. For example, Joram Graf Haber argues that, when we offer forgiveness, our forgiveness implies that the wrongdoer is responsible for performing a wrongful act, that one was personally injured by the act and resents it, and that one has either succeeded or is working toward overcoming resentment (Haber 1991: 40). Glen Pettigrove (2012) offers an alternative performative account of “commissive forgiving” that does not require the person to be personally injured by the wrongful act and that admits of a wider range of hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer beyond resentment prior to forgiveness taking place. It is thus a more natural starting point for a performative theory of collective forgiveness than Haber’s. On Pettigrove’s view, the utterance “I forgive you” commits a person to a course of action which includes no longer retaliating, forswearing hostile attitudes, and offering goodwill toward the perpetrator (or at least the degree of benevolence one would have offered the person prior to the act of wrongdoing). It is thus possible to offer genuine forgiveness while still feeling angry about the wrongful act, as long as one commits to not acting from these hostile attitudes moving forward (Pettigrove 2012: 13). Kathryn J. Norlock (2009) similarly argues that forgiveness is a moral act involving (1) the decision to take a new attitude toward the wrongdoer, which functions to release them from full blameworthiness, or (2) “the performative utterance to the wrongdoer of one’s accomplishment of, or commitment to, the choices and actions that releasing them requires” (Norlock 2009: 97; Norlock forthcoming). Brandon Warmke (2016) adds that forgiveness as a communicative act has declarative force: it brings a new state of affairs into existence, whereby the norms between victims and wrongdoers have been altered. When forgiveness is offered, on Warmke’s view, the wrongdoer is released from obligations (e.g., to repent), the victim gives up certain rights (e.g., to demand an apology or request restitution), and norms governing 399

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the relationship are changed moving forward (e.g., how the wrongdoer and victim ought to treat one another) (Warmke 2016; cf. Bennett 2018). How might a performative account of forgiveness capture cases of collective forgiveness? Prior to offering forgiveness, members of the collective would participate, through the collective’s established structures, in discussion about whether the group is ready to forgive (as on the joint commitment emotional model). A representative, perhaps accompanied by other group members, would utter “we forgive you” where the utterance signifies a joint commitment to not retaliating, forswearing hostile attitudes, and offering goodwill or benevolence toward the wrongdoer. In collective contexts, these commitments would be carried out by the collective actions of the group. For example, Sexism Survivors on Campus might commit to stop demanding that Iota Alpha be shut down, or they might even publicly declare that their suspension should end. The group might also focus on creating space in their support group sessions to cultivate friendlier attitudes toward Iota Alpha, ending their practice of using group sessions to articulate and express hostile feelings. This view might even be extended to highly complex cases of political forgiveness. For example, Glen Pettigrove and Nigel Parsons (2010) argue that Palestine’s forgiveness of Israel in the future might be possible. They take the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to be a collective that could potentially be in a position to offer collective forgiveness of Israel, as a highly organized body with the authority to represent the Palestinian people. The authors argue that, through a formal decision-making procedure involving the perspectives of Palestinians, the PLO might collectively decide to forgive (Pettigrove and Parsons 2010: 676). For example, if a representative were to say “we forgive you,” if the PLO altered institutional structures that dispose Palestinians to resent Israel, and if a significant number of Palestinians approve of these actions and experience diminished resentment replaced by goodwill toward Israel, Pettigrove and Parsons argue that collective forgiveness would have taken place (Pettigrove and Parsons 2010: 677). In the previous section, I suggested that one potential disadvantage of the joint commitment emotional model of forgiveness is the obligation criterion. In jointly committing to forgive, each member of the collective is responsible for emulating the collective’s forgiveness in their own actions, and they are appropriate targets of rebuke by fellow group members when they fail to do so. Some performative models of forgiveness might actually endorse this criterion in the context of collective forgiveness as well. For example, on Warmke’s (2016) view of forgiveness (which draws upon Gilbert’s notion of personal commitment), forgivers are criticizable when they behave inconsistently with their forgiveness because, in offering forgiveness, the norms granting them the rights to blame, demand an apology, etc. have been altered. Christopher Bennett (2018) similarly endorses the idea that, in forgiving, forgivers take on obligations toward the wrongdoer. Thus, on at least some emotional and performative models of collective forgiveness, group members might be obligated to emulate forgiveness of the collective. But a performative model of collective forgiveness need not endorse the obligation criterion (cf. Wigura 2017: 20). As Margaret Urban Walker writes: Forgiveness as a moral commitment to a practical policy… can extend to cases of forgiveness by groups, including peoples or nations, where forgiveness is more easily seen as a commitment to proceed without continuing demands for repair even though individual feelings of members are not something one can fully assess or control. (Walker 2006: 157) On a performative model of collective forgiveness, the group’s commitment to forswear hostile attitudes and cultivate friendlier attitudes toward the perpetrator might instead be promoted or fostered (Watkins 2015; Enright et al. 2016). Robert D. Enright et al. (2016) suggest that promoting forgiveness is a feature of collective forgiveness. One way to foster forgiveness is through 400

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establishing and promoting norms and values, such as the norm supporting forgiveness and the values of peace and cooperation (Enright et al. 2016: 159). Other strategies include issuing proclamations that foster forgiveness among group members (e.g., saying things like “we as a group do our best to lessen conflict…”), and showing gestures of goodwill toward wrongdoers. Leaders can also act as role models for forgiving, and they can both receive and offer forgiveness education (Enright et al. 2016: 159–60). The authors suggest that the Amish community’s response to the killing of schoolchildren in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania is an example of collective forgiveness through which the community used its own decision-making processes and structure for collective action to express and demonstrate forgiveness of the offender (159). Forgiveness, on this understanding, begins to look a lot like a multidimensional social practice (MacLachlan 2009; Norlock 2009). Beyond the important public aspect of communicating “we forgive you” to the wrongdoer, carrying out forgiveness involves a range of activities: from working through one’s emotions, to treating the wrongdoer differently, to giving up demands for restitution, and so on. Alice MacLachlan (2009) defends a social practice model of forgiveness. She describes forgiveness as a happening and an action: something that takes place, and something that we do (MacLachlan 2009: 187). It is not primarily about how one person feels about another, and there is no one way that people forgive (cf. Walker 2006: 153). Rather, there are a variety of practices of forgiveness, including overcoming hostile feelings, a change in belief about what the wrongdoer’s action says about their character, refraining from retaliating, and offering words of forgiveness (MacLachlan 2009: 188). Whether one or more of these acts of forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness will depend on the context. For example, offering words of forgiveness might be insufficient in complex family relationships in which there is longstanding conflict, and overcoming anger might be out of place in the case of very minor wrongs. The perspectives of those who offer and receive forgiveness also matter in determining what counts as forgiveness (MacLachlan 2009: 188). But MacLachlan argues that, through a variety of practices of forgiveness, victims of moral wrongdoing are able to achieve relief from the wrong and find themselves capable of coping moving forward. Drawing upon Card (2002), Walker (2006), and Hannah Arendt (1958), she emphasizes forward-looking aspects of forgiveness that are left out of emotional models which are focused on relinquishing hostile feelings. These scholars argue that forgiveness helps to repair or improve relationships through the restored values of trust and hope in others, and the presumption of goodwill and respect moving forward (MacLachlan 2009: 190). Following Card and Walker, Alisa Carse and Lynne Tirrell (2010) draw upon survivors’ testimony to explore the nature of forgiveness in the context of the Rwandan genocide. They argue that forgiveness is a long process through which survivors and perpetrators build a shared moral world in the aftermath of world-shattering harms. This process begins through cohabitation, followed by small gestures at reconciliation, mutual understanding and respect, empathy, and the slow establishment of trust (Carse and Tirrell 2010). The forgiveness process is not necessarily linear, but “a multifaceted, complex, and often jagged process” (Carse and Tirrell 2010: 46). There is thus no particular moment that can be identified when individual survivors decide to forgive. Rather, forgiveness is emergent, taking place through the process of world-building and the cooperative actions of survivors and perpetrators who begin to relate to one another in new ways. In the Canadian context, Nadine Changfoot (2020) similarly suggests that “forgiveness borne of actions both ethical and socio-economic remains on the horizon, yet paradoxically, for forgiveness to occur, these actions are what would bring us closer to that horizon” (Changfoot 2020: 10). An emergent model of forgiveness might capture instances of collective forgiveness that take place in the context of wide-reaching injustices such as genocide. For example, we can imagine a group of survivors who decide, together, to forgive a perpetrator or a group of perpetrators as they find themselves engaging in the emerging practices of forgiveness that Carse and Tirrell identify. They might see the collective offering of forgiveness as beneficial to this process, saying 401

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“we forgive you” to a perpetrator (or group of perpetrators) as a way of marking out and affirming their joint commitment to diminish hostile feelings, goodwill towards (at least some) perpetrators, and to continuing the collaborative work of establishing positive, trusting relations. Collective forgiveness, on an emergent view, would include a group of survivors’ collective decision to forgive together. But the practices of forgiveness between survivors and perpetrators would already be taking place through the slow process of improved relations. If we give up the search for one definition of forgiveness and admit that practices of forgiveness vary widely between contexts, the possibility of collective forgiveness might seem more within reach. Practices of collective forgiveness will vary depending on the victimized group’s prior relationship to the individual or collective wrongdoer(s), the nature and severity of the wrong, and the nature and size of the collective. We should expect that Sexism Survivors on Campus’s forgiveness will look very different from whole nations’ forgiveness for mass genocide. There will likely be procedural, emotional, ritualistic, behavioral, and relational dimensions of collective forgiveness that will vary depending on the context. But we can still observe at least three features of collective forgiveness that help us to distinguish collective forgiveness from individual and group-based forgiveness. First, the forgiveness offered is a result of a collective’s established decision-making process. Second, the collective forgiveness involves a joint commitment to change the group’s attitudes and behavior toward the wrongdoer(s), or to affirm the group’s commitment to the more positive, already emerging relationship built on mutual understanding and trust. Third, practices of forgiveness are at least fostered among group members through policies, shared norms and values, and the everyday actions of individuals. There is a further question of when, if ever, collective forgiveness is appropriate. Even if we agree that Sexism Survivors on Campus has forgiven Iota Alpha, that the Amish community forgave for the killing of schoolchildren, or that a collective of Indigenous people in Canada forgave the government for the Indian Residential School System, we might wonder whether collective forgiveness in these cases was the right thing for the collectives to do. In some cases, such as the National Forgiven Summit, collective forgiveness might seem clearly out of place. I close by reflecting on some moral questions and concerns about practices of collective forgiveness.

5.  The Ethics of Collective Forgiveness So far, I have considered some potential models of collective forgiveness that begin to make sense of what it might look like for a collective to forgive. And I have given some reasons for thinking that performative and social practice models of collective forgiveness are more promising than emotional models. One reason I have been working with an imagined case is that it is much less controversial than real ones, with made-up agents who mostly agree – as members of a collective – that it is time for the group to forgive. But of course, very few cases of collective forgiveness will look like this. And as collectives become even larger (e.g., whole nations), with multiple and overlapping wrongs and injustices done to individuals and smaller groups within the broader group harmed (e.g., harms done to women in particular), and when some victims of injustice are dead, matters become far more complex. There is a real question of whether collective forgiveness for severe, wide-reaching, and decades-long injustices should ever be offered. Recall the forgiveness offered to the Canadian government at the National Forgiven Summit for the Indian Residential School System. It is possible that the forgiveness was or could have been collective, with Chief Kenny Blacksmith acting as a representative and performing an act of forgiveness on behalf of a collective of Indigenous people. He was not acting as a representative for all Indigenous people in Canada, but rather for the attendees of the National Forgiven Summit who all decided to sign on to the Charter of Forgiveness. But criticisms of forgiveness articulated by Indigenous people in this context reveal a serious objection to practices of collective forgiveness. 402

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Windspeaker News, an Indigenous communications organization in Alberta, called the National Forgiven Summit “insensitive, insulting, and, in some ways, intimidating” (Windspeaker 2010). When members of a social group harmed by injustice strongly disagree with a collective’s decision to forgive, the collective forgiveness offered might seriously harm victims even further. For example, practices of fostering or promoting forgiveness among the collective may reach non-members of the collective who are not prepared to forgive. Non-Indigenous Canadians might also take the collective’s forgiveness as evidence that colonial violence is in the past and that Indigenous people who fail to forgive are unreasonable. Collective forgiveness might thus contribute to the dismissal of victims’ ongoing anger and their very reasonable refusal to forgive (Campbell 1994; Flowers 2015; Stockdale 2017). As Changfoot (2020) cautions, “forgiveness risks being linked to a line in the sand over which one steps not to look back and allows to be swept away into oblivion” (Changfoot 2020: 9). There are also moral concerns about offering collective forgiveness within the collective itself. If collective forgiveness generates obligations on the part of individual members within a collective to forgive, then these obligations threaten the common thought that forgiveness is always elective (e.g., Card 2002; Moody-Adams 2015; Minow 2015). Even if collective forgiveness does not generate obligations among individual members but instead consists in fostering and promoting forgiveness across the group, individuals might still feel obligated and pressured to forgive in harmful ways. Thomas Brudholm and Aarne Gron (2011) raise concerns about the practice of promoting forgiveness in response to political mass violence. They point out that victims are often pressured to forgive through truth and reconciliation commissions, church sermons, presidential addresses to the nation, group therapy, and other policies and practices. The authors discuss the case of Rwililiza, whose wife and son were murdered in the Nyamata church massacre during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Rwililiza testifies that humanitarian organizations’ practices of promoting forgiveness through posters, public awareness meetings, and other strategies are themselves oppressive (Brudholm and Gron 2011: 160). Calls for forgiveness “are rarely embraced among survivors” in these contexts (Brudholm and Rosoux 2009: 42). Brudholm and Gron thus worry that “the public promulgating of the ideal [of forgiveness] may further burden the victims and turn their personal attitudes into some kind of public property” (Brudholm and Gron 2011: 164). Perhaps forgiveness ought to be a personal, rather than collective, process. Alice MacLachlan (2012) responds to a number of objections to political forgiveness (of which collective forgiveness is one form). She admits that political forgiveness is sometimes offered on behalf of a harmed social group before all group members are prepared to forgive, and that there are potential harms and risks of these instances of political (collective) forgiveness in practice. But MacLachlan also points out that there are reasons to worry about the negative effects of ongoing cultures of resentment (cf. Tutu 2000). Sometimes, a political decision to forgive can be valuable for ending hostile and resentful cultures between groups that define them, and for promoting improved relationships moving forward. Political collective forgiveness might thus be valuable even if it doesn’t reflect the attitudes of all individuals, and it can even be combined with creating space for honoring victims’ experiences and providing reparations to individual victims (MacLachlan 2012). As Martha Minow (2015) argues, empirical research should also inform nations’ approaches to forgiveness of past atrocities. For example, research on public attitudes toward past injustices (e.g., victims’ attitudes about Apartheid in South Africa and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission) can reveal whether forgiveness is valuable or harmful, and how nations might best pursue truth commissions in the future (Minow 2015: 1615). But can collective political forgiveness, or any case of collective forgiveness, be genuine collective forgiveness if it doesn’t reflect the attitudes of all or at least most group members? In extreme cases, a collective might formally recognize just one individual as having the authority to act on behalf of the collective. So it might be in theory possible for collective forgiveness to be offered 403

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when only one member of the collective has decided that the group should forgive. Some scholars might insist that at least many or most members ought to agree with a collective decision to forgive for the forgiveness to be genuinely collective (Pettigrove and Parsons 2010). So perhaps this concern is best addressed in discussion about the nature of collective forgiveness. Others might see this problem as a moral one, about whether a collective should offer forgiveness when some or even many group members disagree with the collective’s decision to forgive. On this view, whether collective forgiveness is genuine depends upon whether collective forgiveness resulted from a correct application of the collective’s formal structures for decision-making and action (whether or not those formal structures for decision-making and actions are just). But if a collective’s formal structures for decision-making and action are themselves unjust, then perhaps the collective forgiveness resulting from that process cannot be morally appropriate. I take it to be an open question how these issues should be addressed, and there are many remaining questions about the nature and ethics of collective forgiveness. This chapter has considered how emotional, performative, and social practice models of forgiveness might extend to collective forgiveness. But there are further theories to consider. For example, Leo Zaibert (2009) argues that forgiveness consists in a deliberate refusal to punish. It is thus possible that collective forgiveness consists in a group’s decision to refuse to punish regardless of whether the group or its members have made an emotional transition away from hostile feelings (Zaibert 2009: 386–8). In political contexts, amnesty might also be a collective act of forgiveness through the waiving or canceling of punishment (Bennett 2003). Luke Russell (2016) defends a similar view to Zaibert’s according to which forgiveness is incompatible with continuing to punish in cases where wrongdoers do not accept their punishment. These are plausible alternatives to the theories considered in this chapter. It is thus not yet clear what, exactly, collective forgiveness is, and whether or when we should value collective forgiveness in the wide range of social and political contexts in which the question of forgiveness arises. But any plausible theory of forgiveness must be able to account for how the forgiveness is of a collective, distinct from the individual and group-based forgiveness of its members. There is much room to explore potential theories for how this might work.

Note 1 I owe thanks to Dave Dexter, Avigail Eisenberg, Colin Macleod, Mara Marin, and Glen Pettigrove for valuable feedback on drafts and ideas.

References Allais, L. (2008) “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 36 (1): 33–68. Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Austin, J.L. (1972) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bennett, C. (2003) “Is Amnesty an Act of Collective Forgiveness?” Contemporary Political Theory 2: 67–76. ———. (2018) “The Alteration Thesis: Forgiveness as a Normative Power,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 46 (2): 207–33. Brady, M.S. (2016) “Group Emotion and Group Understanding,” in M.S Brady and Miranda Fricker (ed.) The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brudholm, T. and A. Gron. (2011) “Picturing Forgiveness after Atrocity,” Studies in Christian Ethics 24 (2): 159–70. Brudholm, T. and V. Rosoux. (2009) “The Unforgiving: Reflections on the Resistance to Forgiveness After Atrocity,” Law and Contemporary Problems 72 (2): 33–50. Campbell, S. (1994) “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression,” Hypatia 9 (3): 46–65. Card, C. (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press. Carse, A. and L. Tirrell. (2010) “Forgiving Grave Wrongs,” in C. Allers and M. Smit (eds.) Forgiveness in Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press.

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Collective Forgiveness CBC News. (2010) “Native Residential School Forgiveness Granted,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 12 June. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/native-residential-school-forgiveness-granted-1.956939. Changfoot, N. (2020) “Theorizing Political Forgiveness: An Unexpected Response to Apology.” Unpublished manuscript available at https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2011/Changfoot.pdf. (Cited with permission.) Coulthard, G. (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Digeser, P. (2001) Political Forgiveness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Enright, R. et al. (2016) “Examining Group Forgiveness: Conceptual and Empirical Issues,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 22 (2): 153–62. Flowers, R. (2015) “Refusal to Forgive: Indigenous Women’s Love and Rage,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4 (2): 32–49. Gilbert, M. (2014) “How We Feel: Understanding Everyday Collective Emotion Ascription,” in C. von Scheve and M. Salmela (eds.) Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Government of Canada. (2008) “Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools.” 11 June 2008 Available at https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1571589171655. Govier, T. (2002) Forgiveness and Revenge. New York: Routledge Press. Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haber, J. (1991) Forgiveness. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Hieronymi, P. (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXVII (3): 529–55. Hughes, M. (1975) “Forgiveness,” Analysis 35 (4): 113–17. MacLachlan, A. (2009) “Practicing Imperfect Forgiveness” in L. Tessman (ed.) Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal. New York: Springer. ———. (2012) “The Philosophical Controversy over Political Forgiveness,” in P. van Tongeren, N. Doorn, and B. van Stokkom (eds.) Public Forgiveness in Post-Conflict Contexts. Cambridge: Intersentia Press. ———. (2013) “Government Apologies to Indigenous Peoples,” in C. Allen Speight and A. MacLachlan (eds.) Justice, Responsibility and Reconciliation in the Wake of Conflict. Dordrecht: Springer. McNaughton, D. and E. Garrard. (2019) “Once More with Feeling: Defending the Goodwill Account of Forgiveness,” in K.J. Norlock (ed.) The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Minow, M. (1998) Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. (2015) “Forgiveness, Law, and Justice,” California Law Review 103 (6): 1615–45. Moody-Adams, M. (2015) “The Enigma of Forgiveness,” Journal of Value Inquiry 49: 161–80. Murphy, J.G. (1982) “Forgiveness and Resentment,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7 (1): 503–16. Neblett, W. (1974) “Forgiveness and Ideals,” Mind 83/330: 269–75. Norlock, K. (2009) Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective. Lanham: Lexington Books. ———. (Forthcoming) “Forgiveness as a Volitional Commitment,” R. Enright and G. Pettigrove (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Forgiveness. London: Routledge. Novitz, D. (1998) “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (2): 229–315. Páez, D. and B. Rimé. (2014) “Collective Emotional Gatherings: Their Impact Upon Identity Fusion, Shared Beliefs, and Social Integration,” C. von Scheve and M. Salmela (eds.) Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, G. (2006) “Hannah Arendt and Collective Forgiving,” Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (4): 483–500. ———. (2012) Forgiveness and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, G. and N. Parsons. (2010) “Palestinian Political Forgiveness,” Social Theory and Practice 38 (3): 661–88. Pettigrove, G. and N. Parsons. (2012) “Shame: A Case Study of Collective Emotion,” Social Theory and Practice 38 (3): 504–30. Roberts, R.C. (1995) “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (4): 289–306. Rushdy, A.H.A. (2018) After Injury: A Historical Anatomy of Forgiveness, Resentment, & Apology. New York: Oxford University Press. Russell, L. (2016) “Forgiving While Punishing,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 704–18. Stockdale, K. (2013) “Collective Resentment,” Social Theory and Practice 39 (3): 501–21. ———. (2017) “Losing Hope: Injustice and Moral Bitterness,” Hypatia 32 (2): 363–79. ———. (2021) Hope Under Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press. Strawson, P.F. (1974) Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. London: Methuen.

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Katie Stockdale Tutu, D. (2000) No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday. Walker, M.U. (2006) Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. New York: Cambridge University Press. Warmke, B. (2016) “The Normative Significance of Forgiveness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 687–703. Watkins, J. (2015) “Unilateral Forgiveness and the Task of Reconciliation,” Res Publica 21: 19–42. Wigura, K. (2017) “Declarations of Forgiveness and Remorse in European Politics,” The European Legacy 22 (1): 16–30. Windspeaker. (2010) “Insensitive, Insulting, and, in Some Ways, Intimidating,” Windspeaker 27 (4). Available at https://ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/editorial-insensitive-insulting-and-someways-intimidating. Zaibert, L. (2009) “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6: 365–93.

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30 FORGIVENESS IN POLITICS Trudy Govier

The issue of forgiveness in politics is an exciting one because of its relevance to matters of conflict and sustainable peace. Throughout history nations, groups, and individuals have committed serious wrongs against each other, and their relationships are often characterized by deep resentment and hatred. Too often those attitudes endure only to result in further animosity, bitterness, and war. Could relationships between enemies somehow get a fresh start? If there could be such a thing as forgiveness in politics, fresh starts would be possible and would offer improved prospects for peace. Belief in political forgiveness would strengthen opportunities for peacebuilding and hopes of success in these pursuits. As we shall see, the notion of political forgiveness has been challenged in interesting ways. But its importance has not. Obviously, the terms ‘political’ and ‘forgiveness’ are both contested; it is necessary to make reasonable stipulations as a basis for discussion. Let us begin with ‘political’. A political matter is one related to power over the governance or public affairs of a territory. It has to do with acts and positions for or against the government or a group or individual governing or aspiring to govern. Electoral campaigns and elections are clearly political in this sense; so too are organizations and campaigns regarding health, peace, environment, agriculture, and much else. Politics is not always regional or national; some politics is international, involving relationships between national or sub-national groups or authorities that govern or aspire to govern. Forgiveness will be understood here as a shift away from attitudes favoring vengeance, resentment, and hostility to attitudes of acceptance toward a wrongdoer or wrongdoers, who come to be regarded as capable of participating in relationships of moral equality. If forgiven in this sense, such agents are not defined by their wrongdoing, which is set in the past. Forgiveness in this sense is both conative, having to do with feelings, and cognitive, having to do with beliefs.

1.  Theological Foundations? A number of accounts recommending and praising forgiveness in politics come from a religious (Christian) perspective. These indicate the importance of political forgiveness for faith-inspired humanitarians who have reflected on peace and reconciliation. One account in this context is that of Donald Shriver (Shriver 1995) who stresses particularly the case of African Americans within the United States, giving special attention to the work and thought of Martin Luther King. King offered a sermon on the theme of loving your enemies, based on the Biblical text Matthew 5, verses 42 and 43. In this sermon, he urged doing good to them that hate you, and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-37

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defended the message as a matter of practical realism (King 1952). King urged that hate results in further hate, and distorts the personalities of those who hate. He urged that we should love the person and hate the deed; we should forgive others, even those who have been our enemies, because God loves all human beings. Forgiveness is necessary for our survival and that of our civilization. Another prominent Christian theorist is Desmond Tutu, who was politically active as head of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s and later wrote of the importance of political forgiveness for a human future. Tutu was hailed around the world for his efforts toward reconciliation in the ‘rainbow nation’. He urged victims of political crimes during the apartheid period to forgive those who had wronged them as killers, torturers, or enforcers of brutal policies. Tutu’s experience, position, and status as a religious leader gained him authority and attention; forgiveness became a prominent theme in South African politics. Individual and group attitudes were closely linked in Tutu’s theoretical account, offered in his book No Future without Forgiveness (1999). Practical and theological themes combine in Tutu’s powerful and influential account. Yet shifts in analysis from the individual level to the group level and back raise questions central to political forgiveness. From an individual case, one cannot infer a group shift in attitude; to do so would be to commit the fallacy of composition. (This line of inference amounts to a logical mistake; a group does not necessarily have the characteristics of individuals within it.) Nor can one infer an individual response from that of a group of which the individual is a member; to do that would be to commit the fallacy of division. (It is also a logical mistake to infer that a characteristic of a group belongs to all the individuals within that group.) Indeed, the fallacies of composition and division are of great interest with regard to forgiveness in politics.) In the accounts of Shriver and Tutu there is a strong link presumed between forgiveness and the reconciliation of previously opposed groups. This presumed link also merits scrutiny. Will forgiveness guarantee reconciliation? Does reconciliation require forgiveness, or can it be achieved in its absence? John Paul Lederach, a mediator, educator, and author of Mennonite background, is also idealistically motivated by his Christian faith. Lederach explores notions of conflict transformation and reconciliation, drawing on themes from his faith and extensive practical background (Lederach 2005). His analysis is based on four notions: truth, mercy, justice, and peace; these four aspects, he claims, should be understood as the necessary elements of reconciliation. Philosopher Daniel Philpott is interested primarily in political forgiveness as it relates to reconciliation and peace (Philpott 2006). He argues that reconciliation should be understood as a key element of justice, finding resources for this view in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Far from requiring forgetting, forgiveness requires remembering, Philpott argues. Another faith-based theorist of reconciliation is Nicholas Wolterstorff, who maintains that forgiveness is an act of supererogatory grace that makes political reconciliation possible (Wolterstorff 2015). He seems to think in terms of bilateral forgiveness, in which the wrongdoers acknowledge their wrongdoing and repent and, given that acknowledgment, victims forgive. (With unilateral forgiveness, no acknowledgment or repentance by perpetrators is presupposed.) The presumption of repentance by wrongdoers will be limiting for political forgiveness because there are so many cases in which injuring parties do not acknowledge wrongdoing. Notions of bilateral and unilateral forgiveness also provide important subjects for philosophical reflection. Emerging from these accounts are a number of fundamental philosophical questions. These include the interpretation that can be given to forgiveness as an attitudinal shift by groups as distinct from individuals; the distinction between bilateral and unilateral forgiveness and its relevance to political relationships; the normative status of unilateral forgiveness; the extent to which forgiveness is to be understood in theological terms; the role of religious norms in public life; and, most fundamentally, the connection between forgiveness and reconciliation. 408

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2.  Groups and Individuals An early and instinctive reaction by many regarding accounts of forgiveness in politics was to question their conceptual integrity on the grounds that politics concerns relationships between groups, and forgiveness must be understood as an intimate emotional response within relationships between individuals. A short reply to such questions is that political forgiveness does not always have to involve groups. It may involve individuals in central roles, as, for instance, in a case where one leader forgives another or where an individual victim of a politically motivated wrong forgives the individual perpetrator of that wrong. Nevertheless, questions about collectives loom large in this topic. Such thinkers as Tutu and Lederach (and before them, Gandhi and King) clearly envisaged groups overcoming enmity and hatred with forgiveness and love. Skeptics about collective forgiveness would allege that to speak of political forgiveness involves a category mistake. Indeed, such a skeptical response might appear to be an obvious application of common sense. Though groups exist and may act – as when they perform a choral work, campaign in an election, or conduct a parliamentary debate – there is no such thing as a group mind. If we are to make sense of group attitudes and emotions, we must do it without positing a group mind. Groups may be harmed – as when needed infrastructure or cultural resources are damaged. And groups may adopt policies and initiate actions in response to circumstances, including circumstances in which they have been wrongfully harmed. In fact, the skeptical response to collective forgiveness is readily undermined if we focus on group attitudes. To think and speak of groups as having attitudes is common and not commonly questioned. It is a familiar fact that surveys are done to determine group attitudes toward such matters as climate change, carbon taxes, same-sex marriage, and immigration. If, for example, a survey indicates that 75% of Canadians surveyed in a well-selected sample express approval of immigration, then it may be said that Canadians as a collective have a favorable attitude to immigration. In this case, a claim about the attitude of the collective is supported by a claim about a number of statistically selected individuals within it. Another basis for making such claims about collective attitudes is through the statements and acts of persons who through elections or accepted appointment procedures constitute its leadership. Attitudes attributed to a leader or leaders may be taken as attitudes of the collective that person represents, provided there is no significant public objection to them (Govier 2012, pp. 25–36; MacLachlan 2012, pp. 37–64). If attitudes can, without logical error, be attributed to collectives, then shifts in attitudes can also be so attributed. And some such shifts may amount to forgiveness; the possibility remains open. Groups can be wrongfully harmed and can thereby be in a position where the issue of forgiveness arises for them. If Group A wronged Group B, and Group B has (as indicated by individual members and leaders) in the aftermath felt resentment and hatred toward A for its actions, there are attitudes of enmity and hostility in their relationship. In such a case, both enemy parties, A and B, are collectives. A acted, A’s actions harmed B, and B has hostile, resentful attitudes toward A because of A’s actions. In such a situation, there is the possibility that B will shift away from those attitudes, foregoing them and shifting toward acceptance of A and a willingness to maintain a relationship of moral engagement and equality toward A, its former enemy. Such shifts could occur for various reasons, including, but not restricted to, acts of acknowledgment, apology, or redress undertaken by A. Now some allege that such magnanimity and generosity on B’s part simply would be impossible because people ‘naturally’ seek revenge and simply are not all that nice. It may be said, after all, the South African activist and leader Nelson Mandela, who forgave those who had imprisoned him for 27 years, was a saint and not a typical human being. Mandela was amazingly forgiving and this was in a political context. But skeptics will argue that such generosity and grace would be impossible for most people. (Human nature, on their view, is simply not that generous.) But 409

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if this is the argument against the possibility of political forgiveness, it is based not on logical or metaphysical concerns about group attitudes and emotions but rather on beliefs and expectations about human nature. In this skeptical response, it is assumed that collectives may have negative attitudes of enmity and hatred; what is denied is their capacity for positive attitudes. Such a stance amounts to a bias in favor of the negative. The bias is without warrant.

3.  Bilateral and Unilateral Forgiveness in Political Contexts Bilateral forgiveness occurs when a victimized entity with appropriate standing to forgive changes its attitudes to a perpetrator group away from enmity and vindictiveness to acceptance; and, in the case, the perpetrator group has acknowledged wrongdoing and indicated repentance through apology or other relevant initiative. There are then (at least) two participating parties in relationship in the case of bilateral forgiveness. The wronging party has indicated that it is accepting responsibility for its past actions and now disavowing them, no longer regarding them as legitimate. The party that has committed wrongs acknowledges having responsibly committed them and disavows them; forgiveness comes as a response to this acknowledgment. In other words, the wrongdoers and the wronged have come to agreement that the harming action or actions committed should not have been committed. Bilateral forgiveness occurs in the context of such agreement about what was done. Bilateral forgiveness is sometimes called ‘conditional forgiveness’ because it is conditional on acknowledgment and disavowal by the perpetrating party. Bilateral forgiveness is distinguished from and contrasted with unilateral forgiveness, wherein forgiveness is offered in the absence of acknowledgment, repentance, or atonement on the part of the perpetrating party. Unilateral forgiveness is sometimes called ‘unconditional’ because it does not presume acknowledgment of wrongdoing by perpetrators. Normatively, bilateral forgiveness is relatively easy to defend; unilateral forgiveness is less so. Nevertheless, a number of authors have defended unilateral forgiveness (Holmgren 1993; Govier 2002; Bennett 2003a; Garrard and MacNaughton 2003; Pettigrove 2004; Wolfendale 2005; Moody-Adams 2015). Grounds for defending unilateral, or unconditional, forgiveness vary. One refers to victims’ feelings and attitudes. If forgiveness is normatively ruled out as inappropriate in the absence of perpetrator repentance, then a victim whose perpetrator is unrepentant is left with a burden of resentful and grievous emotion, with attitudes of enmity over which he or she has no power. Such a burden is also left with victims in contexts where the perpetrator is absent or dead, and unable to indicate repentance. Other arguments in support of unconditional forgiveness are Kantian or based on a moral theory of respect for persons, urging that perpetrators be regarded as moral agents not reducible to their actions but capable of moral transformation and right action in the future and, due to that status, deserving to be regarded as members of a moral community (Holmgren 1993; Govier 2002; Wolfendale 2005). Another argument for unilateral forgiveness looks not high but low in notions of human nature, urging unilateral forgiveness on the grounds of shared humanity and shared capacity for wrongdoing (Garrard and McNaughton 2003). The idea here is that one knows one is a human being who has committed wrongs and could do so again; accordingly one should understand that others who have committed wrongs are similarly human. This argument echoes themes in the Lord’s Prayer ‘forgive us as we forgive those who have trespassed against us’. Largely unremarked in these discussions is a key aspect of political contexts. Rarely do warring or seriously opposed groups apply norms to their conflict in a similar way; rarely are they likely to agree on whose actions amounted to wrongs in what circumstances. Our-side bias is a common aspect of political reasoning. (Should we seek examples of this matter, Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland offer convincing cases. Arguably, Germany and South Africa are different in this regard.) If a victimized group B is urged to forgive a victimizing group A, a question arises as to 410

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whether such forgiveness would be bilateral (conditional) or unilateral (unconditional). Accounts urging forgiveness in politics do not always make this matter clear (Shriver 1995; Tutu 1999; Lederach 2005). They generally advocate forgiveness in politics, often urging it as a necessary prelude to reconciliation in the aftermath of serious conflict. But they do this without distinguishing bilateral from unilateral forgiveness, or clarifying the more difficult normative situation of unilateral forgiveness in cases where groups disagree with each other about the historical narrative. Normative issues arise here. Lack of acknowledgment of their own past wrongdoing is rather common for groups. Indeed, most groups have a pronounced tendency to favor narratives emphasizing their status as harmed victims of their enemies, and setting their own actions in a positive light. If A has wrongfully and seriously harmed B and yet insists that justice was on its side, B is likely to be resistant to any suggestion that A should be forgiven in the absence of that acknowledgment. A has not disavowed its wrongdoing and could again commit damaging actions against B. B may not wish to leave itself vulnerable by moving toward acceptance and forswearing attitudes and actions of revenge. At this point, such recommendations as those of King 1952 and Tutu 1999 may indeed seem utopian, even to the point of being offensive. Reading their accounts gives the impression that these leaders would recommend forgiveness in politics even in a case when it was unilateral. However their comments often refer to apology and repentance in contexts of forgiveness, as though such acknowledgments could be presumed for forgiveness in politics. As a result, the matter is unclear. An intermediate notion that can be proposed in response to this dilemma is that of invitational forgiveness (Govier and Hirano 2008). With invitational forgiveness, there is no prior condition of acknowledgment; in this regard, invitational forgiveness is similar to unilateral forgiveness. Yet there is a hopeful anticipation of response from the other party; in this regard invitational forgiveness is set in the context of a relationship to be improved and is similar to bilateral forgiveness. The message of invitational forgiveness is ‘this was wrong and you were wrong to do it but we are overcoming our resentment and enmity and, in doing so, inviting a positive response from you’. Such forgiveness invites and anticipates acknowledgment by the other party. Perhaps what is recommended for former enemies is most plausibly interpreted as invitational forgiveness.

4.  Standing to Forgive A common position on the question of who is entitled to forgive is that the entitlement belongs only to the person injured by the wrongdoing that might be forgiven. In other words, only the victim or victims of a wrong have the standing to forgive the perpetrator. This rather common restriction would be limiting for forgiveness in politics because the attitudes of many individual people and various groups of people are fundamental in political relationships. In recent accounts, the traditional position restricting standing to direct victims has been set in question. One such account argues for expanding the category of victims (Govier and Verwoerd 2002b). In addition to the primary victim (V1), Govier and Verwoerd argue for secondary (V2) and tertiary (V3) victims. To understand the extension here, consider a case in which a man’s house is burned down by racist thugs. That man is the primary victim, V1, of the action. But then suppose that his mother is harmed by the burning insofar as she is upset and fearful about the harm done to her son, and further disadvantaged in terms of her own well-being by the fact that she can no longer visit her son and his family, due to the destruction of their house. His mother is a secondary victim of the arson: V2. And in such a case, presuming that the man’s neighbors share his race, they become fearful of attacks on themselves and their property if there is further racially motivated arson in the community. The neighbors may be regarded as tertiary victims: V3. On this analysis, the range of 411

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victims is broadened and the standing to forgive is thereby broadened. More people are involved, but the background assumption that only victims are entitled to forgive is not questioned in this account. Glen Pettigrove’s account of standing to forgive offers a more fundamental questioning of the victim’s prerogative (Pettigrove 2009a). Pettigrove points out that there is an important sense in which the Govier/Verwoerd account still incorporates the traditional assumption about victim standing, given that V1, V2, and V3 are all victims of the wrong. He further argues there is an implausibility in Govier/Verwoerd account, because it would have V2 and V3 forgiving the wrongs done to them as a result of the attack on V1. Counter-intuitively, the account portrays secondary and tertiary victims as forgiving for harms done to themselves as distinct from harms done to the primary victims. This interpretation of attitudes is most implausible for many cases. For example, the mother whose son’s house was burned down would primarily be concerned with what was done to her son, not with harms to herself as a result of the arson. She is upset because his house was burned down, and that is the main thing for her, not the fact that she cannot visit. Pettigrove defends a third-party account, where a person or agency X may have standing to forgive, or withhold forgiveness, from a perpetrator in a context where X is not directly or indirectly a victim. On his account a third party, X, can feel anger, resentment, and other emotions toward a perpetrator when X simply knows about the offense and is in no sense a victim of it. X can overcome or seek to overcome hostile attitudes toward the perpetrator in a willingness to restore or establish a relationship with that party. On Pettigrove’s account, this attitudinal shift can make sense when X is a third party and not in any sense a victim. Thus, the set of those who can forgive is expanded beyond victims; wrongdoing may disrupt relationships with a wide range of people. Our social lives are interconnected and varieties of forgiving or not forgiving extend to moral agents whether or not they are direct or indirect victims of wrongdoing. A similar stance is taken by Alice MacLachlan, who argues that bystanders can experience powerful and negative emotional responses to wrongdoing, directing their anger toward perpetrators (MacLachlan 2008, pp. 135–58). These bystanders may overcome their anger and resentment, shifting their attitudes, and when they do this, they make a contribution to improved relationships. The shifts amount to a kind of forgiveness by persons who have not been victims of the wrongs. The extension of standing to forgive has been questioned by Margaret Walker, who argues for restricting standing to primary victims (Walker 2013). Walker, obviously thinking of victims of serious wrongs, claims that such victims have experienced profound harm and emotional upset, meaning that they have powerful feelings not shared by others. She maintains that third parties, in contrast, have not experienced such feelings and do not have to struggle with them. Acknowledging that third parties may play important roles in contexts where forgiveness is an option, Walker maintains that they may sanction offenders and vindicate victims. But on her account, third parties do not have the standing to forgive. An application of these views to issues of forgiveness in politics would considerably restrict its scope, although there are cases where a collective political entity is the primary victim of a wrong and would thus have standing to forgive, on Walker’s analysis.

5.  The Unforgivable We often say things of the type ‘I could never forgive P for what he did to A’, and if a broadened notion of standing to forgive is accepted, such responses are not out of order even when we are bystanders. Such remarks indicate a deep anger toward an agent for what he did. If we were to ask historically informed people whether they could forgive Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein, they would likely say ‘no’, giving as grounds the terrible nature and extreme harmfulness of the deeds committed by these agents. 412

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The notion of unconditional forgiveness can be misleading when we come to consider the unforgivable. There is an ambiguity that may result in confusion. The term ‘unconditional’ may be interpreted as meaning that there should be no conditions at all placed on forgiveness. That in turn would imply no conditions placed on forgiveness with regard to the seriousness of the wrongdoing in question. Unconditionality in that sense would rule out the unforgivable: all agents of wrongdoing would be forgivable because no conditions would be required for the normative appropriacy of that forgiveness. The term ‘unilateral forgiveness’ is preferable to ‘unconditional forgiveness’ because it avoids this ambiguity. In articulating the contrast between conditional (bilateral) and unconditional (unilateral) forgiveness, the adjective ‘unconditional’ is not to be understood in this way. Rather, it is to be understood as meaning that the forgiveness in question is not conditional on the specific factor of perpetrator acknowledgment. On this interpretation, to defend unconditional (unilateral) forgiveness is not to take a position on the issue of unforgivability. The questions surrounding unilateral forgiveness and those concerning the unforgivable are distinct. The question of the unforgivable arises in politics: there is no need to cite examples to show that wrongs such as massacres and de-humanizing practices have often characterized political conflicts. Persons who have committed gross acts are often referred to as moral monsters and said to be unforgivable. Leaders and groups who have committed and supported such acts will seem to merit the same label; their acts are often said and thought to be unforgivable. Whether this line of thinking is morally correct is disputed in some academic work on the topic. Some have urged that, while acts may be unforgivable due to their horrific nature, acts are not people and it is people, after all, who are forgiven or not. Emphasizing the distinction between acts and agents, it may be argued that the quality of evil acts does not suffice to render unforgivable the agents who have committed those actions. Because it is persons, not acts, who are candidates for forgiveness, even the horrendous quality of their acts does not suffice to show that the agents who committed them are unforgivable. If we forgive, it is people we forgive, not acts. If we do not forgive, it is people we do not forgive, not acts. So the terrible quality of acts does not demonstrate the unforgivability of their agents. Now against this view it may be urged that the character of agents is displayed through their actions, so there is a logical link between the assessment of acts and the quality of their agents. On this account, a person or group who has committed terrible and evil wrongs shows itself to have a terrible and evil character and to be unforgivable. We can and do infer from act to agent. Yet there are serious problems with the notion that some human beings are moral monsters, never to be forgiven under any condition, having committed serious and gross wrongs. If we take ‘monster’ status literally, such beings would not in the full sense be human agents at all and would not be responsible for their deeds. On that interpretation, questions of forgiving them would not arise. If we interpret the label ‘monster’ in a less literal sense, it need not imply wrongdoing because the monster would lack any moral responsibility. But what is being said? There is in the label ‘monster’ an implication that these agents of evil are wicked beyond redemption – that while other human beings are capable of reform and moral transformation, these ‘moral monsters’ are not. The implication seems to be that such beings lack any capacity to change. We encounter again questions about their agency. Are these beings then so permanently altered by their evildoing that they have become incapable of moral change? What is the relevance of their capacity to reform, or lack thereof? If such persons should manage to reform, would they at that point become forgivable? If they never reform, are they in virtue of the lack of transformation, unforgivable? If so, are they absolutely unforgivable in the sense that if anyone were to forgive them, that person would be wrong to do so? Several distinctions are in order here (Govier 1999, 2002). One is the distinction between psychological and moral factors. It may be said that a person or group is unforgivable in the sense that it would be psychologically impossible, for anyone with the standing to forgive, to forgive 413

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that agent. This psychological matter is not what is at issue presently. It may be said that a person or group is unforgivable in the sense that it would be morally inappropriate, morally wrong, for anyone with the standing to forgive, to forgive that agent. This is the question asked here: the perspective is an ethical one. And again we may make a distinction between conditional (in some circumstances) and absolute unforgivability. An agent may be unforgivable in the circumstance where a grievously injured primary victim has not forgiven him (or it), or where – far from repentance – he (or it) has continued his wrongful actions and has even boasted about them, as is the case with some terrorist groups. One can support arguments to the effect that such an agent is unforgivable in those circumstances. But such arguments do not yet support a claim of absolute unforgivability, a claim to the effect that the agent should not be forgiven by anyone, in any circumstance. It is the issue of absolute unforgivability that will be further pursued here. Several philosophers support the notion of absolute unforgivability. In his book Political Forgiveness, Peter Digeser advocates a kind of performative account, emphasizing actions and initiatives of states as distinct from the attitudes of individuals or groups (Digeser 2001). Notwithstanding this initial stance, he nevertheless offers comments on attitudes and shifts in attitudes (Govier 2004). Digeser maintains that some wrongs (and by implication the agents who have committed them) are too ‘severe’ (horrific) to be forgiven, and explains that an act would be ‘too severe’ if it were to result in the obliteration of an individual’s personhood. He does not develop this account, which would seem to entail that any act of murder would be unforgivable. Absolute unforgivability would also be entailed by any account in which primary victims were deemed to be the only agents with standing to forgive, and those primary victims were murdered. Fiala (2012) appears to support notions of unforgivability if one is reflecting outside a Christian framework. Against absolute unforgivability are accounts by Govier (1999, 2002) and Wolfendale (2005), who argue on the grounds that even the agents of horrendously evil actions are capable of moral transformation, potentially meriting forgiveness if they do reform, and that to regard them as moral monsters incapable of transformation is to de-humanize them. Long (2008) argues against a permanent stable self that is forever attached to wrongs committed.

6.  Reconciliation and Forgiveness A major reason for interest in political forgiveness has been its connection to reconciliation. This theme emerges clearly in theological accounts. Considering the matter, there is a temptation to respond very quickly on the grounds that forgiveness is neither sufficient nor necessary for reconciliation – not in individual cases and not in collective ones. It is not a sufficient condition of reconciliation in individual cases; for example, an abused wife might forgive her husband without reconciling to resume their previous relationship of living together. Though she has forgiven him, she might prudently believe that such a resumption would pose unnecessary risks for her and her children and hence refrain from reconciliation in the sense of resuming their relationship. A similar gap between forgiveness and reconciliation can be seen for political cases. For example, a minority group might shift its attitudes toward an oppressive majority and in that sense forgive that group, and yet be unwilling to relinquish legal guarantees or separate political institutions providing for some autonomy in its arrangements. In such a case, we could say that there is forgiveness in the absence of reconciliation. We can see that, whether in individual or collective cases, forgiveness is not a sufficient condition for reconciliation. Neither is it a necessary condition. In a minimal sense, groups that have been in conflict may be said to be reconciled if they simply manage to live in the same territory without committing acts of violence against each other. In a richer sense, some levels of cooperation and trust in the groups’ relationship will be required. But cooperation may emerge out of circumstances and trust can develop from working together (Govier and Verwoerd 2002c; Govier 2006). In such cases, there may not be the acknowledgment 414

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of wrongdoing and shifts in attitudes that would be characteristic of forgiveness; yet the trust developed may provide a basis for saying that the groups are reconciled. Constituted by attitudinal shifts, forgiveness is not to be identified with amnesty. Amnesty may be offered by political authorities for a variety of pragmatic and moral reasons; these do not require the shifts needed for forgiveness (Moore 1997; Verwoerd 2007). A rather related point may be made about punishment. Punishment, imposed by authoritative institutions, is imposed when persons are found, by agents in a position of some authority, to have violated laws or norms. A person who is punished for an offense may be later forgiven for it, after having served his or her term. In fact, that person may be forgiven even while undergoing the punishment, for reasons connecting with expectation about his or her future status or relationships. There are known cases of victims of crime forgiving the perpetrators while those people remain in prison and establishing relationships with them that turn out to be of great value. It is primarily in theologically motivated accounts that we find the assumption that reconciliation will be achieved when victimized individuals and groups forgive those who have wronged them. Such accounts are grounded in notions of human brotherhood and sisterhood, and a rich humanitarian tradition based on divine creation and community. Absent such traditions, they do not seem credible. And yet we would not wish to dismiss these conceptions too quickly. Surely the matter of political forgiveness is at least relevant to the challenges and tasks of reconciliation. Attitudes matter, when previously conflicting groups and individuals begin to live together again. They matter for communication, practical arrangements, the building of institutions, and much else. If group A has oppressed group B and group B can be said to have shifted its attitudes away from hatred or enmity toward A in the direction of accepting A as capable of good and generous actions, these shifts in B will make working together easier and facilitate the development of trust between the groups. It is by no means irrelevant, then, to consider political forgiveness when seeking political reconciliation. A number of writers have sensed that requiring forgiveness when attempting to resolve a deep political conflict and reconcile is unrealistic. Writing about Northern Ireland, Nigel Biggar (Biggar 2008) urges the forswearing of vengeance and the cultivation of compassion and sympathy as attitudes of contending Republicans and Unionists. Nir Eisikovits, considering relations between Israelis and Palestinians, argues against vindictiveness but stops short of urging forgiveness (Eisikovits 2004, 2006, 2010). Instead he urges sympathy and generosity toward a previous opponent. Geoffrey Scarre maintains that the idiom of forgiveness is too stretched to be appropriate for context of political reconciliation. His recommendation is to substitute the notion of grace (Scarre 2011). Darrell Moellendorf also stops short of urging forgiveness in the aftermath of conflict. He stresses regret (presumably on the part of perpetrators) and respect (presumably from each party, for the other) as attitudinal shifts (Moellendorf 2007). Whether or not forgiveness is necessary for reconciliation, one aspect of it certainly is, and we can see this in the accounts of Biggar, Eisikovits, Moellendorf, and Scarre. For reconciliation, it is necessary to forswear vindictiveness, vengeance, and actions of revenge. Forgiveness involves more than that but does not involve less. An agent that feels continued animosity and hatred toward an oppressor and seeks to avenge itself by violence or other wrongdoing as ‘payback’ is in no position to improve its relationship with its former enemy and cannot reconcile, even on a minimal understanding of what reconciliation would involve. At this point it is necessary to avoid a dichotomous understanding of forgiveness and revenge. Forgiveness and revenge are alternatives, but not exclusive alternatives; it is not a matter of either/ or and nothing in between. In reflecting on these attitudes, there is a risk that the possibility of intermediate stances may escape our attention. Intermediate possibilities do exist in the aftermath of wrongdoing. People may, for instance, not hate or seek vengeance but yet continue to feel rather angry about what was done and seek restitution. In such cases they are neither vengeful 415

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nor forgiving. Or they feel a degree of compassion for another group but nevertheless continue to remember with bitterness and blame past suffering at its hands. Again, they are neither vengeful nor forgiving. We can see from such possibilities that to be against revenge is not yet to be in favor of forgiveness. To think of forgiveness and revenge as exhaustively opposite from each other is to fall into the trap of false dichotomy.

7. Conclusion Related to questions about political forgiveness are considerations about regret, remorse, public apology (Tavuchis 1991; Smith 2008; Govier and Verwoerd 2002a), acknowledgment (Cohen 2001), repair (Walker 2006), and restitution. All these topics merit consideration and all are of considerable importance. The necessary restriction of this account to the topic of forgiveness has left them out, but those omissions do not deny their interest and significance. There are so many political contexts in which people cling to and cultivate sentiments of enmity that we might be skeptical about the very idea of forgiveness in politics. But such skepticism is not warranted: examples can be found. The idea of forgiveness in politics does make sense; there is no valid logical or metaphysical reason to rule it out. As has been urged by leaders such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu, forgiveness in politics will serve the interests of peace and progress. That can be said even when the wrongs have been very serious. This is not, of course, to say that in every circumstance attitudinal shifts in the direction of forgiveness are to be recommended. Many of the questions concerning such shifts are not philosophical at their base; they are to a considerable extent empirical and political, and depend on circumstances, including, importantly, circumstances of leadership.

References Bennett, C. (2003a). ‘Personal and redemptive forgiveness’. European Journal of Philosophy 11(2), p. 127–44. Bennett, C. (2003b). ‘Is amnesty a collective act of forgiveness?’ Contemporary Political Thought 2(1), p. 67–76. Biggar, N. (2008). ‘Forgiving enemies in Northern Ireland’. Journal of Religious Ethics 36(4), p. 559–79. Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity. Digeser, P. (2001). Political Forgiveness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Eisikovits, N. (2004). ‘Forget forgiveness: On the benefits of sympathy for reconciliation’. Theoria 52(1), p. 1–61. Eisikovits, N. (2006). ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’. Metaphilosophy 37(3/4), p. 489–514. Eisikovits, N. (2010). Sympathizing with the Enemy: Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, Negotiation. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Fiala, A. (2012). ‘Radical forgiveness and human justice’. The Heythorp Journal 53, p. 494–506. Garrard, E. and McNaughton, D. (2003). ‘In defense of unconditional forgiveness’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series 103, p. 39–60. Govier, T. (1999). ‘Forgiveness and the unforgivable’. American Philosophical Quarterly 36(1), p. 59–75. Govier, T. (2002). Forgiveness and Revenge. New York: Routledge. Govier, T. (2004). Review of Peter Digeser Political Forgiveness’. Dialogue 43(2), p. 380–86. Govier, T. (2006). Taking Wrongs Seriously: Acknowledgment, Reconciliation, and the Politics of Sustainable Peace. Amherst: Humanity. Govier, T. (2012). ‘Public Forgiveness: A Modest Defense’. In Bas van Stokkom, Neelke Doorn, and Paul van Tongeren (eds) Public Forgiveness in Post-Conflict Contexts. Antwerp: Intersentia. Govier, T. and Hirano, C. (2008). ‘A conception of invitational forgiveness’. Journal of Social Philosophy 39(3), p. 429–44. Govier, T. and Verwoerd, W. (2002a). ‘The promise and pitfalls of apology’. Journal of Social Philosophy 33(1), p. 67–82. Govier, T. and Verwoerd, W. (2002b). ‘Forgiveness: The victim’s prerogative’. South African Journal of Philosophy 21(2), p. 97–111.

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Forgiveness in Politics Govier, T. and Verwoerd, W. (2002c). ‘Trust and the problem of national reconciliation’. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32(2), p. 178–205. Govier, T. and Verwoerd, W. (2002d). ‘Taking wrongs seriously: A qualified defense of public apologies’. Saskatchewan Law Review 65, p. 139–162. Holmgren, M. (1993). ‘Forgiveness and the intrinsic value of persons’. American Philosophical Quarterly 30(4), p. 341–52. King, Martin Luther. (1952). ‘Loving your enemies’. In (1998) Caron, C. (Ed.) A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: IPM/Warner Books, p. 126–28. Lederach, J. (2005). The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford: Oxford. Long, W. (2008). ‘A philosophical account of radical forgiveness’. Philosophy in the Contemporary World 15(1), p. 64–65. MacLachlan, A. (2008). ‘Forgiveness and moral solidarity’. In Block, S. and White, D. (Eds.) Forgiveness: Probing the Boundaries. Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, p. 3–16. Maclachlan, A. (2012). ‘The philosophical controversy over political forgiveness,’ in Stokkom, B., Doorn, N., and Tongeren, P. (Eds.) Political Forgiveness in Post-Conflict Contexts. First edition. Cambridge: Intersentia, p. 37–64. Moellendorf, D. (2007). ‘Reconciliation as a political value’. Journal of Social Philosophy 38(2): 205–21. Moody-Adams, M. (2015). ‘The Enigma of Forgiveness’. Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (1–2): 161–180. Moore, K. (1997). Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest. New York: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, G. (2004). ‘Unapologetic forgiveness’. American Philosophical Quarterly 41(3), p. 187–204. Pettigrove, G. (2009a). ‘The standing to forgive’. Monist 92(4), p. 583–603. Pettigrove, G. (2009b). ‘Palestinian political forgiveness: Agency, permissibility, and prospects’. Social Theory and Practice 36(4), p. 2–28. Scarre, G. (2011). ‘Political reconciliation, forgiveness and grace,’ Studies in Christian Ethics 24, p. 171–182. Shriver, D. (1995). An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics. New York: Oxford. Smith, N. (2008). I Was Wrong: The Meaning of Apologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tavuchis, N. (1991). Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tutu, D. (1999). No Future without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday. Verwoerd, W. (2007). Equity, Mercy, Forgiveness: Interpreting Amnesty Within the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Leuven: Leuven Peeters. Walker, M. (2006). Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. New York: Cambridge. Walker, M. (2013). ‘Third parties and the social scaffolding of forgiveness’. Journal of Religious Ethics 41(3), p. 495–512. Wolfendale, J. (2005). ‘The hardened heart: The moral dangers of not forgiving’. Journal of Social Philosophy 36(3), p. 344–63. Wolterstorff, N. (2015). Justice in Love. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans

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31 FORGIVENESS IN TREATMENT The Importance of Careful Definitions and Realistic Objectives Everett L. Worthington, Jr. and Sharon Lamb If a patient wants to forgive someone who harmed him or her, what should a provider of psychological treatment do? Is forgiveness good or harmful for patients? Is the patient ready to forgive? Are there problematic motives? How do psychotherapists determine which is likely in a particular case?

1.  The Case for Psychotherapists Helping Patients Who Want to Forgive to Do So Generally, when a person is carrying a grudge that is showing up as unforgiving motives (like revenge and avoidance) or emotions that have become toxic (like bitterness, resentment, hatred, intense anger, and intense anxiety), forgiveness will be suggested by some psychotherapists as a way to deal with those feelings. Chronic unforgiveness is to be differentiated from states in which individuals have not forgiven wrongdoers but for whom the injury no longer matters. Chronic unforgiveness for some involves continuing to battle the demons that arose after the injury. And chronic unforgiveness has its costs. These costs can be physical. In a recent edited book, 17 teams of researchers wrote chapters showing that chronic (or at least frequent intermittent and strong) unforgiveness is related to increased likelihood of physical problems in cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, sexualreproductive, and immune systems (Toussaint et al. 2015). In a recent review of forgiveness and physical health, individuals with the following illnesses and diseases were found to be aided by having been given help in forgiving when they wanted to forgive: (a) fibromyalgia, (b) spinal cord injury, (c) chronic heart failure, (d) traumatic brain injury, (e) stroke, (f ) chronic pain, (g) HIV, (h) arthritis, (i) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ( j) diabetes, and (k) posttraumatic stress disorder (Toussaint et al. 2019). Witvliet (2019) has also adduced much evidence showing psychophysiological mechanisms by which forgiveness can affect health (e.g. cortisol and adrenaline levels, peripheral nervous system reactivity). While this is impressive health research, many of these studies do not differentiate between relieving negative feelings of unforgiveness (in some unspecified way) and relieving negative feelings specifically through forgiveness. It goes without saying that relieving negative feelings in general improves health, so reducing resentment, bitterness, hostility, hatred, anger, and fear should help—as the research shows. Forgiveness is one way to bring relief, but its specific benefits are less well established than are the benefits of reducing unforgiveness. The relationship between relieving negative unforgiving feelings through forgiveness and improved mental health is also clear. Many research studies show a relationship between forgiveness 418

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and depression, anxiety, stress, suicide, and addiction. There is particularly strong evidence for the relationship of forgiveness to success in treating addiction (Toussaint et al. 2019). Research on forgiveness and psychological well-being suggests that not only is forgiveness protective against poor mental health, but it also helps promote subjective well-being (Webb and Toussaint 2019). In addition to direct effects of having better mental health and stronger subjective well-being, mental health benefits are indirectly related to positive physical health. Research shows that spiritual benefits can also accrue to people who forgive (Davis et al. 2013; Worthington and Sandage 2016). This is particularly true if forgiveness is perceived as mandated or is even just recommended by one’s religious or spiritual social group. Spiritual benefits can also provide indirect gain to one’s physical health (McCullough et al. 2000). However, guilt and shame can be experienced when people believe they should forgive but have difficulty forgiving (or just don’t want to forgive), compounding the interpersonal and intrapersonal stresses due directly to the offense. Research that focuses on relationships, such as marriage or relationships in organizations (for example, work and religious institutions), shows a more complicated relationship. While many of the studies on the relationship of forgiveness to physical and mental health involve forgiving a person independent of contact with that person, often in order to find peace in himself or herself, forgiveness within a relationship can bring in other issues—especially when one communicates that he or she has forgiven the other (Lamb 2006). How is one’s statement of forgiveness received? Are there power dynamics to consider? Can statements of forgiveness be manipulative? Even if not intended as manipulative, can partners perceive them that way? Fincham (2019) reviewed benefits to marriage of forgiving. He observed that if people misunderstood what forgiveness was, or how it has been defined in forgiveness studies (see also McNulty 2019), there could be problems. For example, a partner could misunderstand forgiveness to require reconciliation, which might lead to a battered woman returning to an unsafe relationship. If a person verbally grants unasked-for forgiveness, the act could be interpreted as a high-minded condemnation of the other because forgiveness implies that the forgiven did wrong. Or, if an offended party feels guilty for not forgiving, he or she might be consumed with shame or guilt. Fincham argues, however, that forgiveness, when rightly applied, is almost always beneficial in marriages. Within families and organizations, norms often govern communications around transgressions that inhibit or facilitate people dealing with the transgressions using forgiveness or in other healthy ways. Interdependence theory (Kelley and Thibaut 1978) may be useful in understanding the power dynamics when amends or forgiveness is offered or received. An individual’s commitment to the group may depend on relationship satisfaction, alternatives, investments, and power differentials. Because power is important in both parent-child and organizational politics, there is always the potential for misuse of power when transgressions occur. Few researchers have investigated how power itself changes through a relationship that involves forgiving and whether institutionalized power imbalances, sometimes appropriate, get in the way of what researchers have called “genuine” forgiveness (Green et al. 2019). Most of the studies cited above focus on forgiving another person. There are also those individuals who might seek to be forgiven for a wrong done or for failing to meet their own standards (or others’ standards). Those people often seek self-forgiveness and they bring that goal to psychotherapy. In these cases, psychotherapists are working only with the wrongdoer and are not necessarily answerable to the person from whom forgiveness might be sought. When working with people who are self-blaming, accountable, or honestly assessing their misdeeds or the harm they caused another, the psychotherapist should also help them to do no further harm. Helping a patient in this direction can contribute to the seeker’s desire to be “not that person anymore” or, in one word, changed. When discussing self-forgiveness, there are few worries about patients’ own processes toward self-forgiveness if, as in any good psychotherapy practice, psychotherapists assist patients in 419

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uncovering blind spots and help them truly understand the consequences of their actions. This may be a part of all holistic therapies because individuals often bring to psychotherapy that which they are ashamed of doing or have caused them to have negative opinions of themselves. Selfforgiveness and seeking forgiveness from others are important topics to consider. However, in the current chapter, we focus primarily on those who wish to forgive others. Returning to the research that applies to individuals who come to psychotherapy wanting to forgive, it is important to remember that research findings are based on averages. Not every participant in each treatment study had the outcome the general findings suggest. Likewise, in psychotherapy, there is typically one person in treatment. It is impossible to predict how forgiveness or paths toward self-forgiveness might affect individuals in their particularities. Research statistics— based on averages—cannot be translatable directly to any particular individual. Each person is unique, with intrapsychic, interpersonal, historical, and injury-related factors that might play a part on whether treating forgiveness in psychotherapy will work for him or her. There may be differences as well regarding the act or acts to be forgiven, the mental health of the individual, the strength of the need to forgive, the burden of self-blame the individual carries, the ability to stay with a sometimes painful process, and the ego strength to withstand the issues that arise, including that the person one wishes to forgive may never hold himself or herself accountable. There are indeed individuals who simply may not be able to forgive, may find forgiveness morally repugnant, or may even experience any encouragement to forgive as a judgment from the psychotherapist that he or she is not a good person. If it is true that “forgiveness is a choice,” as Enright (2001) writes, patients can choose to forgive or not and this choice is open to them their entire lives. Patients may choose not to forgive. Many choose not to forgive because they handle the problem of injustice or unforgiveness in other ways. They may have religious or philosophical reasons for not forgiving, beliefs about what forgiveness means (e.g., a mistaken belief that it means reconciliation or an accurate belief that it means seeing the offender as a human whom they don’t want to humanize), or they may not be ready to forgive. Readiness can have something to do with the individual’s development that comes from being harmed, the kind of self-care they are engaging in, or the defenses that the person is not yet ready to let go of. While anger is painful to patients, most wish to be less angry. When a patient is ready to let go of anger is a deeply personal decision. Nudging a patient toward forgiveness may be perceived as invalidating to their feelings and process. A psychotherapist needs to assess all these factors before encouraging a person to forgive. But the psychotherapist should also consider the detriments of holding a grudge. According to grudge theory, Exline and Baumeister (2001) argue that there are good reasons individuals withhold forgiveness. They might feel as if grudges may protect them from future victimization. Or they might reap benefits from the victim role, for example, feeling justified in expressing anger (Exline and Baumeister 2000). Rapske et al. (2010) found that some people withhold forgiveness because they believe others need to make reparations or change in some way before they are able to forgive. In Rapske et al.’s study, undergraduates who withheld forgiveness were similar to those who forgave. They had been injured by betrayals, trauma, and even indifference. There is also conditional “if-then” forgiveness—i.e., if a wrongdoer does x, then forgiveness might be offered—which can be communicated or not. As one might imagine, conditional forgiveness does not show positive effects (Kelley et al. 2018), especially when uncommunicated. Uncommunicated conditional forgiveness involves a victim holding private conditions without letting the offender know what they are. These are virtually always detrimental to the relationship. Sometimes when conditions for forgiveness are clearly communicated by victims (i.e., “I’ll forgive you if you attend AA meetings regularly for the next year”), this has resulted in improved negotiated relational standards. However, at other times, they were taken by the offender as intrusive judgments and evidence of non-forgiveness of control tactics. That usually contributed to relationship difficulties. If conditions seemed impossible to meet or were so vague they could not be interpreted—even 420

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if clearly communicated (i.e., “I’ll forgive you if you are sensitive from now on”)—that usually resulted in poor relational outcomes. Merely because an Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology (EBPP) exists and has a large amount of support, that does not mean a psychotherapist must use it. While it might be the treatment of choice for 70% of patients who seem similar to the research study’s (or meta-analysis’) participants, rarely (or never) will a psychotherapist enter into a treatment knowing nothing about a patient other than that the patient is like the research participants. Therapeutic sensitivity prescribes that psychotherapists make reasoned judgments about treatments to recommend based on (1) clinical acumen, experience, and assessment; (2) patient characteristics and preferences; (3) the presence of EBPPs and trust in the research presented; and (4) the presence of other treatments (with judgments weighted appropriately if no research evidence is available). Thus, the conscientious practitioner is placed in a position of discernment. On the one hand, he or she should do no harm—thus not recommending or participating in a practice that the practitioner thinks might harm a patient, or a process that might harm someone outside of the session—perhaps by their patient’s unthoughtful seeking of forgiveness from a victim or even granting forgiveness (unbidden) from one whom they believe to have offended them (when the “offender” might not share that belief ). On the other hand, the principle of beneficence states that practitioners should not withhold positive interventions from patients, so a practitioner should understand the research evidence regarding forgiveness and be able to neutrally offer the process of forgiveness as one way (among many) to address feelings related to being unjustly treated or harmed. Although forgiveness may be a choice, it may be, for some individuals, that that choice is one that must be remade repeatedly. To listen to an individual’s choice and reasons for it and respect the patient’s choice at that moment in psychotherapy, knowing it may change down the path, would be a way to work toward forgiveness non-coercively. Key to leaving the potential for forgiveness open is listening deeply and over time to patients’ pain and suffering, and acknowledging them to be valid. To do that, as well as to suggest that the patient might at some time think of forgiveness as a potential way to live with what has happened, needs sharp discernment by the practitioner. Forgiveness should never be offered as a “miracle cure.”

2.  Understanding Forgiveness Psychotherapists have many therapeutic methods to promote inner peace in people who are emotionally injured or upset. Several sources argue promoting inner peace is similar to any practice that encourages perspective-taking, “letting go,” and mindfulness, all of which are used to address obsessions, negative thinking, depression, and anxiety (e.g., Lamb 2002, 2005; Milam 2018). Lamb (2005) also suggests that good psychotherapists can help people learn to live with their wounds and integrate them into who they are as people, with or without forgiveness. Haaken (2002: 189) wrote that a psychotherapist should “enlarge the scope of awareness and assist the patient in ‘holding’ countervailing parts of the self, with their associated voices and affective valences.” Some forgiveness advocates, however, believe that forgiveness is different from these other processes in that forgiveness requires an emotional transformation (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015; Worthington 2006). Unlike many of these other strategies, forgiveness historically had religious overtones. If a psychotherapy patient wants to walk a religious path to forgiveness, a psychotherapist might not offer mindfulness (which has overtones of Buddhism and might be objectionable to Christians or Jews), CBT (which is often seen pejoratively as “secular” by many highly religious people), Christian forgiveness (which might be objectionable to people who are not Christians), or a vague suggestion merely to “let go.” The psychotherapist follows the patient’s lead, knowing 421

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that individuals everywhere “let go” of past pain in various ways. Forgiveness is one option that could indeed lead to that more holistic integration of what happened to them and who they are, but the religious approach to forgiveness should be congruent with the religious beliefs, values, and practices of the patient. There are several definitions of forgiveness but most focus on decisional and emotional components. Exline et al. (2003) separate these as two types of forgiveness—decisional and emotional forgiveness. McCullough et al. (2000) define forgiveness as an “intraindividual, prosocial change toward a perceived transgressor that is situated within a specific interpersonal context” (p. 9). Enright et al. (1998) have used the word “gift” and describe forgiveness as “a willingness to abandon one’s right to resentment, negative judgment, and indifferent behavior toward one who has unjustly hurt us, while fostering the undeserved qualities of compassion, generosity, and even love toward him or her” (pp. 46–47). Decisional forgiveness is making a decision about how one intends to behave toward the offender, to not seek revenge and to treat the person as a valuable human (Worthington and Sandage 2016). While decisional forgiveness is not necessarily a rational, explicit decision (see Worthington and Sandage), it implies that there are reasons for forgiveness, some adequate and some not, and some that can be verbalized and others that are intuitive and implicit. Emotional forgiveness appears to be a change of heart in which hatred, resentment, anger, bitterness is replaced with empathy, sympathy, compassion, or love for the other. It is important to look at forgiveness from both perspectives because psychotherapists may present the option of either, and patients might be satisfied with one, but not the other, or want to pursue (or eschew) both. Is forgiveness an individual decision? Forgiveness can be treated by psychotherapists as an intraindividual experience. However, forgiveness—like transgressions—might involve other people’s participation. Even when reaching a state of forgiveness doesn’t involve addressing the person who harmed the individual, it is possible that others will be affected. For those who want to communicate their forgiveness to the offender directly or even publicly, the offender will necessarily be affected. And if a victim is public with her or his communication of forgiveness, friends and family may feel an impact. Depending on how widely the person communicates the forgiveness, the act may change only the person forgiving or an entire community. The victim who publicly expresses her or his forgiveness might come to represent a “class” of people as Lamb (2006) wrote about rape victims. One’s acts, thus, will not only be personal but might come to reflect on and urge others toward action. In becoming a symbol, the person might inadvertently push people in the group toward forgiveness (or not forgiving). Thus, forgiveness—and particularly its communication publicly—can affect others, even distant others, at the group level. One might ask, is forgiveness a decision at all? While forgiveness may be a “choice,” as many who have developed forgiveness programs argue (e.g., Enright 2001), this does not imply that a decision is always first. Sometimes forgiveness can begin with a decision and end with an emotional transformation, and at other times, people experience an emotional transformation and later decide how they intend to act toward the offender. Furthermore, decisions are often processes that require time. If emotional forgiveness may, at times, come to one completely unbidden. At other times, it may be the result of practices that follow the decision. Unlike reconciliation, which occurs interpersonally, forgiveness can be seen as intrapsychic changes involving emotion and motivation as well as stated intentions about future behavior. What forgiveness is not is as important as what it is. Affinito (2002) cautions that there are many nuances, cultural meanings, and places to misunderstand forgiveness. She says forgiveness is not excusing, condoning, nor forgetting the injury. It is also not absolution, a form of self-sacrifice, a clear-cut one time decision, approval of injustice, pretending everything is fine when you know it is not, assuming an attitude of superiority 422

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or self-righteousness, simply allowing angry feelings to diminish across time, pardon, or justification. (Affinito 2002: 91) Enright and the Human Development Study Group (1991) have also cautioned that forgiveness has nothing to do with legal leniency. Affinito claims it is important for psychotherapy patients to understand what forgiveness is not, and also to have a working definition for what it is. She argues that even if the research may be persuasive with regard to mental and physical benefits, forgiving as a form of self-care is what Enright was concerned about when he wrote that it should not be reduced to something self-centered. While Affinito believes a working definition need not include compassion for the offender and that it only needs to involve the forgoing of the pursuit of punishing the offender, Enright, Worthington, and others believe that seeing the other as a valuable human being and fostering undeserved qualities of compassion, generosity, and love to the offender are essential to true forgiveness. There are still a few disagreements among experts in forgiveness about how to define it, so psychotherapists should take care not to impose a definition on patients if the patients are not defining forgiveness harmfully. This may be important to remember when perusing forgiveness treatment programs, as we describe later in this chapter.

3.  Forgiveness in Treatment Consider whether and how to introduce forgiveness. As many psychotherapy theorists and researchers can confirm, transference in psychotherapy is real. Whether one abides by long-held psychoanalytic theory regarding the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, all other models of psychotherapy understand the power that psychotherapists have over their patients and the special feelings that patients develop toward their psychotherapist (Wachtel 2011). In cases of victimization, moral injury, and injustice, patients are especially vulnerable. Thus, psychotherapists need to be measured in their response to a patient’s desire to forgive and careful when introducing forgiveness as an option. Responding to a patient’s own wish to forgive should be followed with an exploration of motives, goals, hopes, and desired outcomes. This process can’t be rushed. Recommending forgiveness as an intervention should be made with therapeutic discernment, and must be offered along with other paths toward the patient’s goals and not foisted upon him or her. Some particular patient goals might bring forgiveness to mind. If a patient’s goal might be to simply stop re-experiencing a moment in the victimization, other treatment strategies could be more specific to that goal. If a patient’s goal is to “let go” or “be at peace” with what has happened, forgiveness might be offered among other strategies. If the patient is distinctly troubled by his or her attitude toward the offender and seeks to have a more compassionate and understanding view of the offender, with or without reconciliation, this goal seems more in line with forgiveness, though there also might be other ways to attain this goal. In addition, reconciliation might be pursued with or without forgiveness. In all of these cases, the meaning of forgiveness to the particular patient ought to be explored within the context of the patient’s goals. Be especially alert not to pressure a patient to forgive—even unintentionally. Pressuring a patient to forgive, or even to give it a try, has no place in psychological treatment. Patients experience enough pressure from other directions. Sometimes people seek a forgiveness treatment because they are driven by some imperative, some “should,” that’s barely articulated. Sometimes the urge derives from their own sense of guilt and responsibility, as it is well known that victims often take too much of the blame for what has befallen them. Sometimes the motivator for forgiveness is poor self-esteem, and the act of forgiveness calls out as a way to show oneself or others that one is a good person. Sometimes forgiveness derives 423

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from sincere religious or philosophical conviction firmly held, but it not practiced because the wound is too deep. Sometimes pressure is applied by a well-meaning person who is important to the patient and who believes strongly that forgiveness is a moral necessity or will bring relief to the person. That pressure-applying person can be a respected family member, a clergy person, a long-term mentor, or the patient’s best friend. The desire to forgive can arise from one’s upbringing, life experiences, or even from insecure attachments in one’s childhood that impel one to use forgiveness to reestablish a damaged adult attachment relationships (Mallinckrodt 2010). Stories of beautiful forgiveness acts abound in the media. And forgivers are more likely to be described as saintly whereas non-forgivers might be seen as troubled. All of these pressures can be invisible to the psychotherapist, whose job it is to ferret them out and not add another pressure with a hasty, well-meaning suggestion that pushes the patient toward an uneasy seeking of forgiveness. Even when forgiveness is not based on pressure from others, these pressures can still exist and should be part of the exploration of what it means to the patient to forgive. The existence of the pressures do not necessarily get in the way of a patient’s choice or ability to forgive, but when they alone are the motivators, it seems less likely that forgiveness will be salutary for the patient. One important pressure to keep in mind is the pressure on all victims to not be a victim. Our culture and many other cultures stigmatize victimization. We see victims coping with this reality in the way they proclaim “I am not a victim” and through the use of the word “survivor” (Lamb 1999). There is something in the label “victim” that disempowers and further victimizes, creating shame for a person only deserving of compassion. Herman (1992) wrote in her important book, Trauma and Recovery, It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. (Herman 1992: 28) Psychotherapists need to keep in mind this tendency of victims and onlookers alike to make harms invisible and live in the glorified light of a person who has forgiven harm. This is a warning to themselves when countertransference feelings arise that suggest this patient has been suffering too hard, too long, and unrelentingly. And it is a warning regarding the feelings of a patient who is looking to shed that victim status through the believed magic of forgiveness. Using forgiveness in psychotherapy suggests, in some ways, what kind of victim ought you to be (Lamb 2005), and this can be a problem. Let care guide you around whether and how to pursue forgiveness. What happens when a psychotherapist recommends forgiveness instead of introduces it? Generally, patients have positive feelings toward their psychotherapist, whether these have been earned or not. As the expert in the room, even the most patient-centered psychotherapist will experience their patient’s admiration and trust. When a psychotherapist recommends any treatment strategy, the psychotherapist needs to give a full accounting of what it might entail, present what research has offered about the treatment, whether the psychotherapist trusts the research or not, and present alternatives—along with their evidence and psychotherapist evaluation. But different from presenting, say, exposure therapy, where a victim will need to be ready to revisit painful moments of their victimization, to relieve symptoms, explicitly treating forgiveness in psychotherapy asks for something more. It asks for an emotional, moral, and cognitive outcome that is more than symptom relief. And in recommending this change, the psychotherapist is not only saying that he or she wants to help the patient to be relieved of symptoms, but he or she wants to help the patient make a choice to change 424

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his or her stance toward their offender. This may seem like simple CBT “reframing” practice that is often done. In reframing, a psychotherapist offers a reframe rather than recommends it. With forgiveness, because it is so easy for the patient to assume that the psychotherapist thinks this is the only moral thing to do, and not just a choice of a way to relieve symptoms, the psychotherapist potentially could no longer be perceived as a nonjudgmental guide and instead be perceived as something like a spiritual advisor. We believe that forgiveness is not to be prescribed by a practitioner to those struggling with harms and injustices. Rather, at best, a struggler can be invited neutrally to consider forgiveness as one way some have dealt with injustices. If the practitioner hears in the patients’ words the struggle to forgive, that is when the practitioner has the leeway to state simply, “I am hearing that you are struggling with forgiveness. If this seems to be an option you’d like to consider, I can help you explore that.” Forgiveness is never the only choice a patient will have. Recall that the practitioner has many other ways that patients can deal with injustices—like seeking justice, seeing justice done, turning the matter over to God, forbearing, accepting, and others. Most of the options are even true options for highly religious people who often believe that they must (because of their religion) forgive. And importantly, some of those alternatives can co-exist with forgiveness. When seeking to forgive is preferred by patients, when a patient comes to psychotherapy with the goal of forgiveness, or reaches a point in the exploration of the harm done to him or her that he or she might want to consider it, a psychotherapist needs to be prepared and not impose his or her own beliefs. For example, the second author had a patient who forgave her abuser ten years earlier while working with another psychotherapist. The patient found, however, ten years later that she did not feel her offender had done enough at the time to deserve her forgiveness. At the present time, she wanted more of a statement from him, more acknowledgment of the harm he had done. Her attitude of forgiveness had faded, even though her life had gotten better and she hadn’t obsessed for years on the harm. Her desire to revisit the forgiveness decision had actually only resurfaced as part of the #metoo movement, hearing other victims expressing their anger. In discussing what had happened ten years ago, the present psychotherapist asked about the former psychotherapist’s attitude. This patient told her that the former psychotherapist had followed her lead at that time and supported her forgiving efforts in every way, even though it was clear to this patient that the psychotherapist herself did not think the offender should have “gotten off so easily” and said so. Interestingly, the patient remembered her psychotherapist’s less-forgiving attitude and also the way that the psychotherapist supported the patient’s different attitude. One might even argue that between patient and psychotherapist there was a sharing whereby, if the psychotherapist could hold the anger and condemnation, it freed the patient to be more compassionate and forgive. But it is also clear that the psychotherapist, by “holding” the negative feelings that the patient was so wanting to let go of, kept those feelings safe, so to speak, in case she ever wanted to return to them, which she, at a later point in time, did. Thus, it isn’t necessary for a psychotherapist to believe in forgiveness or even see to it that a patient not forgive too easily. It is merely necessary that the psychotherapist explores the reasons for seeking forgiveness so that the patient can understand why, at that moment in her or his life, forgiveness might be his or her right choice. A psychotherapist doesn’t need to believe forgiveness will last, or might be important down the line. A psychotherapist needs only to understand what forgiveness entails, what components the research shows are important to forgiving (and not short-cutting the full expression of anger seems to be one of them), and that the patient wants to try it. Stay aware of ethical (and moral) mandates. As we discuss forgiveness within treatment, from the beginning, we both affirm that in treating people who seek help from a practitioner, we must first do no harm. Second, we are to provide help and succor for those who are vulnerable, such as those who have been abused, neglected, harmed, disempowered either by a system (e.g., patriarchy, racism, economic, or other power structure) or by an individual (such as an abusive parent, 425

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work supervisor, or romantic partner). This is why, for some patients, forgiveness might not always be the treatment of choice. For those who come to psychotherapy having been abused, neglected, abandoned, and betrayed, a premature offering of forgiveness within the psychotherapy can be a secondary violation, another betrayal. A person who presents with the desire to forgive might be trying to easily rid him- or herself of the anger and hatred that comes with relational trauma. A request for forgiveness could be a consciously justified, morally related, well-meaning attempt to keep from dealing with psychodynamics that are much more complex than mere forgiveness. Forgiveness might be part of the struggles, but forgiveness might be the pole of the issue that is easier to present than an emotional issue more deeply buried. It is necessary for psychotherapists to be “naively” questioning, and to probe beneath the request to forgive. Sometimes, a patient has done that earlier work, feeling the pain, understanding the emotions, exploring guilt, and revisioning the past. In such cases, that patient has reached the point that she or he would like help to forgive. But our experience suggests that this is more often an exception than a rule when the person is in psychotherapy. Whenever forgiveness enters the conversation, it is important for the psychotherapist to discuss what forgiveness is, and is not, and what motives and internal and external pressures the patient is facing. After these discussions, which may take many sessions given that motives and pressures are not always fully known by patients, if a patient chooses to seek to forgive, the psychotherapist should be ready and able to assist. Reasons for failure of forgiveness in therapy—once a person starts treatment—are legion. People might lose interest, lose motivation to work toward forgiveness, experience new hurts or offenses within the midst of considering forgiveness, or revisit old hurts in a different way that might suggest to the patient that he or she no longer wants to forgive. The psychotherapist must be flexible. There are also power differentials to be considered. In some relationships, forgiveness might disempower women or other marginalized individuals where their specific relationship is coercive. Is forgiveness a temporary means to address that imbalance of power? Is forgiving empowering vis-à-vis someone with systemic or institutionalized power? Or is the seeking to forgive something that derives from the pressure of that unequal relationship and even maintains inequality? A feminist perspective could argue that women are inclined to yield, to be “nice and kind,” and pay a price for holding a grudge or resentments. In this way social pressures for her to forgive must be considered, whether actual or internalized. Given societal admonitions about the resentful or bitter woman, abused women are given two alternatives: to be traumatized forever or to forgive and rise above it. That same experience can be applied to other groups. Christians, for example, are “supposed to” forgive because forgiveness is consistent with Christian religion. And people from some theological traditions within Christianity can be insistent on forgiveness being granted by parishioners. Because of this, psychotherapists need to pay close attention to beliefs that one should forgive and that one is not a “good” or “compassionate” or “Christlike” person if one doesn’t forgive. Those might be legitimate beliefs and values of strongly religious people, and psychotherapists are wise to value their patients’ religious values (as shown by the recent meta-analysis by Captari et al. 2018). However, strong feelings and very damaging harms might create powerful conflicts within religious people between their beliefs and values about forgiveness and their emotions and motivations arising from the harm experienced and other Christlike emotions like righteous anger and societal drives for justice. Psychotherapists may patiently give these particular patients more time to process their actions. Potter (2001) writes that we need to understand how structural power relations have socialized us to view virtues and vices differently for different groups. In long-standing racial and ethnic conflict, a person might have been the target of prejudice, discrimination, and a cascade of 426

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harms (i.e., microaggressions or macroaggressions) from numerous people. Clearly, such systemic and personal injustices need to be dealt with in ways that help psychotherapy patients function with integrity. Forgiveness, as in all psychotherapy situations, is up to the individual patient, and whether forgiveness can empower the person to fight effectively against racial and ethnic systems that are oppressive and can empower people to work to eradicate personally encountered discrimination and prejudices is something to work out between psychotherapist and patient. It is clear, however, that to address every individual harm specifically would bog down the person and the psychotherapy; yet to forgive, for example, all White people, might feel futile given that harms continue, and, for some, perpetrators of these harms do not care nor do they seem willing to avoid perpetrating further harm. This is where aspects of forgiveness rather than forgiveness as a whole might bring relief. And perhaps most importantly, the recognition that forgiveness does not mean one cannot hold someone accountable is crucial. Forgiveness therapy or exploring forgiveness gives individuals the opportunity to pursue compassion for others while holding them accountable for their wrongdoings, to see others as human and to rail against the harm they do. And it would violate a psychotherapist’s ethical mandate to do the forgiveness therapy, even when requested, without a multicultural psychotherapy that permits the emotions that accompany victimization and oppression and helps the individual to build coping skills to address these in their interpersonal interactions and in society. In couples therapy, hurts, offenses, and betrayals often accumulate to what seems to one or both partners as a “critical mass.” One might naively assume that, when couples therapy succeeds, near the end of couples therapy both partners would want to address forgiveness. Several approaches work with couples who seek forgiveness (see Greenberg, and Meneses 2019; Ripley and Worthington 2014; Ripley et al. 2014; Worthington et al. 2015). However, both partners within a couple do not always have the same agenda. They also frequently disagree about who needs forgiveness, about what acts, and why. Thus, addressing forgiveness in couples therapy can bring new tensions to the surface. Family members also have many agendas, which can lead to conflict instead of or before healing. Lamb (2006) has written about gender dynamics playing a part in forgiveness and how gender is rarely considered in examples of those promoting forgiveness in psychotherapy. She draws on Frye (cited in Lamb 2006), who states that women’s anger seems only acceptable when directed on behalf of someone else, that the angry woman must be stopped or condemned. And those promoting forgiveness in couples’ therapy sometimes find their way to that point of introducing forgiveness by asking women to buy into a new understanding of what happened as “mutual.” What is incorrectly understood, perhaps, by some couples’ therapists is that, while it may be that both individuals were unhappy in a marriage, nevertheless, all acts in response to that unhappiness are not morally equal (Lamb 2006). While a woman may want to forgive a man in a traditional heterosexual couple dealing with infidelity, the psychotherapist must ensure that the forgiveness doesn’t reinstate the differential power that each partner had in the couple, reproducing systemic and societal power differences.

4. Conclusion Some patients come to psychotherapy wanting to forgive. We agree that there are no shortcuts to forgiveness and that many manualized treatments for forgiveness contain valid insights with regard to what components of any psychotherapy toward forgiveness must contain. In short, forgiveness will almost certainly take time. We cannot delude ourselves as psychotherapists that we can help a woman experience thorough forgiveness if she has wrestled for a lifetime with hatred of her father by working with her for two hours of psychotherapy. Nor that once forgiveness is reached, can we assume that the individual will retain that peace of mind accomplished forever. 427

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However, we should not be pessimistic either. We can indeed help patients for whom forgiveness becomes the focal point of psychotherapy. Coming to a shared understanding of what forgiveness is must happen early in psychotherapy. And any psychotherapist who wants to derail or take a shortcut through the expression of anger, injustice, sadness, or pain that patients bring with regard to the harm they have experienced, is probably simply not a very good psychotherapist. Even for the careful psychotherapist who has read the literature on forgiveness in psychotherapy, for and against, there are concerns. Many of these concerns can be overcome by a talented psychotherapist. But it is important to remember that if the psychotherapist is alert to the stresses discussed earlier—for example, the power imbalances or the desire to have forgiveness avoid the experiencing and processing of a painful experience—the client’s wish to forgive might disappear entirely. Helping patients to forgive is truly like helping patients to reach any goal. One does so with the knowledge of what evidence there is that forgiving helps, and with much attention to the therapeutic relationship factors (Norcross and Lambert 2019; Norcross and Wampold 2019). It is possible, however, that many of these concerns present roadblocks that challenge the nature of what good psychotherapy does and should do. Introducing the possibility of forgiveness in treatment is not something to be thrown out without forethought. Rather, it requires wisdom, discernment, and understanding of the desire for forgiveness in the particular patient’s life, with an eye to what it means at that moment in that patient’s life, in connection to all the patient’s identities, and who might even wish to pursue forgiveness when it might seem self-destructive or might wish to eschew forgiveness when it seems salubrious.

References Affinito, M.G. (2002) “Forgiveness in counseling: Caution, definition, and application,” in S. Lamb and J.G. Murphy (eds.) Before Forgiving: Cautionary Views of Forgiveness in Psychotherapy (pp. 88–111). New York: Oxford University Press. Captari, L.E., Hook, J.N., Hoyt, W.T., Davis, D.E., McElroy, S.E., & Worthington, E.L., Jr. (2018) “Integrating clients’ religion and spirituality within psychotherapy: A comprehensive meta-analysis,” Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session 74: 1938–1951. Davis, D.E., Worthington, E.L., Jr., Hook, J.N., and Hill, P.C. (2013) “Research on forgiveness and religion/spirituality: A meta-analytic review,” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 33(4): 233–241. Enright, R.D. (2001). Forgiveness Is a Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Enright, R.D., and Fitzgibbons, R.P. (2015) Forgiveness Therapy: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Enright, R.D., Freedman, S., & Rique, J. (1998) “The psychology of interpersonal forgiveness,” In R.D. Enright & J. North (eds.) Exploring Forgiveness (pp. 46–62). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Enright, R.D., and The Human Development Study Group (1991) “The moral development of forgiveness,” in W. Kurtines and J. Gerwirtz (eds.) Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development (pp. 123–152). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Exline, J. J., and Baumeister, R. F. (2000) “Expressing forgiveness and repentance: Benefits and barriers,’ In M.E. McCullough, K.I. Pargament, and C.E. Thoresen (eds.) Forgiveness: Theory, Research, and Practice (pp. 133–155). New York: Guilford Press. Exline, J.J., Worthington, E.L., Jr., Hill, P.C., and McCullough, M.E. (2003) “Forgiveness and justice: A research agenda for social and personality psychology,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 33: 337–348. Fincham, F.D. (2019) “Forgiveness in marriage,” in E.L. Worthington, Jr. and N.G. Wade (eds.) Handbook of Forgiveness, 2nd ed. (pp. 142–152). New York: Routledge. Green, J.D., Reid, C.A., Coy, A.E., Hedgepeth, M., and Kneuer, M. (2019) “An interdependence analysis of forgiveness, amends, and relational repair in family and work relationships,” in E.L. Worthington, Jr. and N.G. Wade (eds.) Handbook of Forgiveness, 2nd ed. (pp. 131–141). New York: Routledge. Greenberg, L.S., and Meneses, C.W. (2019) Forgiveness and Letting Go in Emotion-Focused Therapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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Forgiveness in Treatment Haaken, J. (2002) “The good, the bad, and the ugly: Psychoanalytic and cultural perspectives on forgiveness,” in S. Lamb and J.G. Murphy (eds.) Before Forgiving (pp. 172–191). New York: Oxford. Herman, J.L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Kelley, D.L., Waldron, V.R., and Kloeber, D.N. (2018). A Communicative Approach to Conflict, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation: Reimagining Our Relationships. New York: Routledge. Kelley, H.H., and Thibaut, J.W. (1978) Interpersonal Relations: A Theory of Interdependence. New York: Wiley. Lamb, S. (1999) “Review of masculinity and morality,” Journal of Moral Education 28(1): 105–106. ———. (2002) “Women, abuse, and forgiveness: A special case,” in S. Lamb and J.G. Murphy (eds.) Before Forgiving: Cautionary Views of Forgiveness in Psychotherapy (pp. 155–171). New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (2005) “Forgiveness therapy: The context and conflict,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 25(1): 61–80. ———. (2006) “Forgiveness therapy in gendered contexts: What happens to the truth?” in N.N. Potter (ed.) Trauma, Truth, and Reconciliation: Healing Damaged Relationships (pp. 229–256). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Mallinckrodt, B. (2010) “The psychotherapy relationship as attachment: Evidence and implications,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27(2): 262–270. McCullough, M.E., Pargament, K.I., and Thoresen, C.E. (eds.) (2000) Forgiveness: Theory, Research and Practice. New York: Guilford Press. McNulty, J.K. (2019) “Highlighting the dark side of forgiveness and the need for a contextual approach.” in E.L. Worthington, Jr. and N.G. Wade (eds.) Handbook of Forgiveness, 2nd ed. (pp. 33–42). New York: Routledge. Milam, P. (2018) “Against elective forgiveness” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21(3): 569–584. Norcross, J.C., and Wampold, B.E. (eds.) (2019) Psychotherapy Relationships that Work, 3rd ed., Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press. Potter, N.N. (2001) “Is refusing to forgive a vice?” in P. DesAutels and J. Waugh (eds.) Feminists Doing Ethics (pp. 135–150). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Rapske, D.L., Boon, S.D., Alibhai, A.M., and Kheong, M.J. (2010) “Not forgiven, not forgotten: An investigation of unforgiven interpersonal offenses,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 29(10): 1100–1130. Ripley, J.S., Leon, C., Worthington, E.L., Jr., Berry, J.W., Davis, E.B., Smith, A., Atkinson, A., and Sierra, T. (2014) “Efficacy of religion-accommodative strategic hope-focused theory applied to couples therapy,” Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice 3: 83–98. Ripley, J. S., and Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2014) Couple Therapy: A New Hope-Focused Approach. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. (a CAPS Book). Toussaint, L.L., Worthington, E.L., Jr., and Williams, D.R. (eds.) (2015) Forgiveness and Health: Scientific Evidence and Theories Relating Forgiveness to Better Health. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science + Business. Toussaint, L.L., Worthington, E.L., Jr., Williams, D.R., and Webb, J.R. (2019) “Forgiveness and physical health,” in E.L. Worthington, Jr. and N.G. Wade (eds.) Handbook of Forgiveness, 2nd ed. (pp. 178–187). New York: Routledge. Wachtel, P.L. 2011 Inside the Session: What Really Happens in Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Webb, J.R., and Toussaint, L.L. (2019) “Forgiveness, well-being, and mental health,” in E.L. Worthington, Jr. and N. G. Wade (eds.) Handbook of Forgiveness, 2nd ed. (pp. 188–198). New York: Routledge. Witvliet, C.V.O. (2019) “Forgiveness, embodiment, and relational accountability: Victim and transgressor psychophysiology research,” in E.L. Worthington, Jr. and N.G. Wade (eds.) Handbook of Forgiveness, 2nd ed. (pp. 167–177). New York: Routledge. Worthington, E.L., Jr. (2006) Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application. New York: BrunnerRoutledge. Worthington, E.L., Jr., Berry, J.W., Hook, J.N., Davis, D.E., Scherer, M., Griffin, B.J., Wade, N.G., Yarhouse, M., Ripley, J.S., Miller, A.J., Sharp, C.B, Canter, D.E., and Campana, K.L. (2015) ­“Forgiveness-reconciliation and communication-conflict-resolution interventions versus rested controls in early married couples,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 62(1): 14–27. Worthington, E.L., Jr., and Sandage, S.J. (2016) Forgiveness and Spirituality in Psychotherapy: A Relational Approach. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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32 BEGGING FOR MERCY The Dangers and Hopes of Forgiveness in Criminal Law Nick Smith A sixth law of nature is that upon caution of a future time, a man ought to pardon the offense past of them that, repenting, desire it. For pardon is nothing but granting of peace, which (though granted to them that persevere in their hostility be not peace but fear, yet) not granted to them that give caution of the future time is a sign of an aversion to peace; and therefore contrary to the law of nature. Hobbes 1651

1. Introduction An obvious tension repels law and forgiveness.1 If aggrieved people can achieve forgiveness and something like reconciliation, why would they need to involve the often slow, expensive, and unpredictable mechanisms of the law? If parties can work things out, legal institutions will seem unnecessary or even counterproductive. Isn’t law, in other words, a kind of lesser second choice, a Plan B, or even the option of last resort when all else fails? If disputants cannot reconcile without resorting to law, how could involving attorneys and adversarial institutions bring them closer to deeply personal attitudes of forgiveness? When peace fails, war follows. When forgiveness fails, law follows. The analogy between interpersonal forgiveness and legal forbearance can appear rather grotesque because of the asymmetrical power dynamic—one friend forgiving another in the back and forth of a relationship is very different from the state unilaterally lifting its boot from the throat of the condemned. It should be forgiveness or law, not forgiveness and law. Or so it might seem. Perhaps due to their apparent opposition, law and forgiveness offer a seductive combination. Many forces and reasons steer these concepts toward each other despite their prima facie incompatibility. Especially for progressives, forgiveness in criminal law promises some relief from the horrors of over-incarceration. As Elliot Curie describes the situation in the United States, “short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time” (Curie 1998: 21). Finding a way to “forgive” crime speaks to the restorative and rehabilitative ambitions of the left while offering some potentially humane countermeasures to racial injustices. More forgiveness suggests less punishment in an overly punitive world. “Debt forgiveness”—for developing nations or for student debt, for example—also finds favor on the left and demonstrates how the concept has drifted into many applications with a variety of moral nuances.

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On the right, libertarians increasingly see mass incarceration as a fiscally irresponsible use of government funds. If more forgiveness equals less wasteful imprisonment—wasteful in terms of both financial cost and privations of liberty—then economic conservatives show interest in the cost-effectiveness of restorative justice. As explained in this volume, forgiveness shares deep resonances with various religious traditions and their constellations of grace, mercy, and repentance. Given the current state of prisons, it can be easy to forget that modern incarceration originated as a place to isolate with the holy book, see the light, and reform—to become a penitent in the penitentiary. Although “law and order” nationalists might associate forgiveness with lawlessness in the same way that they find apologizing a form of weakness, many social and economic conservatives see the appeal of forgiveness playing an increased role in law. Law and forgiveness therefore attract strange bedfellows from the left and right. Coalitions can be built around these themes, and it is just the sort of topic suitable for a rather bipartisan book from the dean of Harvard Law School (Minow 2019). This chapter will attempt to outline various pitfalls related to apologies in law while steering the discussion toward what I consider the most constructive possibilities. I will focus on criminal law, but forgiveness in civil law presents many parallel issues.2 If you doubt that more forgiveness in law could increase injustice, imagine police deciding on the streets who deserves forgiveness and who warrants the opposite. Or consider how easily legal forgiveness might befall the privileged sex offender with his “whole life in front of him” while a young immigrant convict would likely face uncompromising “law and order.” Imagine President Trump wielding even more power to reduce punishment for blatant offenders like Roger Stone or Joe Arpaio, noting that he would be unlikely to label such actions as anything like forgiveness because in his view the accused are victims of unjust persecution rather than offenders who should experience remorse. President Trump might even demand that Stone and Arpaio “deserve an apology” for how they have been treated.3 Moreover, an advocate for the abolition of police, prisons, and punishment might be generally sympathetic to increased forgiveness of offenders, but resist lenience for police brutality. Forgiveness is not unconditionally good, especially in legal contexts. Because most perceive it as an instrument of peace, forgiveness can be an especially devious and brutal weapon.4 I have written two books on apologies. I Was Wrong considered the inexact science of identifying the distinct spheres of apologetic meaning (Smith 2008). That book considers a wide variety of apologetic meanings and warns against thinking of apologies in binary “all or nothing” terms. Instead, we should be clear about what we seek in apologies and evaluate them accordingly. I provided benchmarks to guide the standards for what I call “categorical apologies” and to serve as touchstones for thinking about apologies. In Justice through Apologies, I argued that all major theories of punishment should in principle typically endorse “apology reductions” for criminal sentences only if offenders demonstrate moral transformation by satisfying rigorous standards for apologies and remorse (Smith 2014). Apologies and forgiveness are companion concepts that share many features and challenges. Others in this volume have expertly discussed the conceptual debates in the forgiveness literature and the competing theories vying for status as the most compelling view. I will not wade into those debates here other than to make a few meta-conceptual points that pertain to how we understand forgiveness in law. For further study, I recommend Jeffrie Murphy’s 2014 Punishment and the Moral Emotions. The concept of “apology” has many nearly synonymous but nuanced terms (such as remorse or repentance), and forgiveness in law also goes by many names: mercy, leniency, clemency, pardon, commutation, forbearance, amnesty, restoration, and others. These terms have subtle and contested boundaries of meaning. Your preferred terms and definitions will largely depend on your legal and ideological allegiances.

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Discussions of forgiveness in law often focus on what has come to be called the ­“punishmentforbearance” account, meaning that reducing or eliminating punishment or intentional negative treatment of the offender is a central feature of forgiveness. Leo Zaibert, for example, has argued that “forgiveness is deliberately to refuse to punish” (Zaibert 2009: 368). Debates persist within the punishment-forbearance literature regarding how and why forgiveness entails a reduction in punishment. Is intentionally not punishing equivalent to forgiving, or just one aspect? Must you forswear all punishment, or only some? Does punishment include the suffering associated with negative emotions such as guilt? Once one forgives, are they obligated to see to it that the offender is released from all related punishment—including state sanctions? And as considered briefly in this chapter, can we be morally obligated to forgive and reduce punishment when the offender demonstrates sufficient remorse and reform? Should we forgive after, rather than before, punitive measures such that we forgive the moral debt only after the offender has “paid her dues”? Others reject the punishment-forbearance model altogether (cf. Mabbott 1939 and Warmke 2013). According to a high-altitude overview of the literature, therefore, we should appreciate that little is settled even on this front of what Pettigrove dubs the forgiveness “definition wars” (Pettigrove 2016: xiii). Just as binary views of apologies will be too coarse to capture their fine-grained and varied meanings, we should be suspicious of any theory of forgiveness that claims to definitively capture the necessary and sufficient conditions for all forms and subtleties of forgiveness. Like apologies, notions of forgiveness seem to identify a loose constellation of interrelated beliefs, judgments, emotions, and actions. We can value and emphasize different aspects of forgiveness in different contexts. “Does X satisfy the conditions for forgiveness?” can be an illuminating question, but it often results in oversimplifications that miss the intricacies that breathe trust or distrust into relationships.5 We might check all of the boxes that indicate that we have forgiven, yet still subtly view the offender through the lens of the offense. We might, without even realizing it, interpret their pre- and post-offense behavior a little differently. We might, decades in the future, feel a pang of suspicion that dredges up resentful emotions and steers our behavior. I doubt that forgiveness for serious harms is the sort of thing that one can ever definitely complete, and it shares this temporally indeterminate structure with apologies. Imagine if I provide an exceptionally well-crafted and sincerely intentioned apology that hits all of the right notes. You then “forgive” me. If I reoffend a year later, this will create screeching dissonance with the previous apology and inscribe it with new meaning that should probably alter your forgiving attitudes. As Cheshire Calhoun puts it, “trust is scalar” (Calhoun 2009). Forgiveness does not flip a switch to “restore” relationships. Apology and forgiveness are each, individually, complex and slippery concepts indexed to a variety of diverse cultural practices. When you place them into a dialectic with each other—for example expecting an apology before forgiving—the complexity amplifies exponentially. What do we mean by apology? What do we mean by forgiveness? What must an apology accomplish to warrant what sort of forgiveness? Instead of either apologies or forgiveness flipping a sequence of binary switches—flip the apology switch and the forgiveness switch should come on—they work more like dimmers of multicolored lights illuminating highly diverse and rapidly transforming situations. The situations are fluid. Because it allows us to identify aspects of forgiveness that cannot be met in certain cases, non-binary approaches help make sense of assertions that some offenses are “unforgivable.” This enables parties to work toward other aspects of reconciliation when scars endure. Moreover, apologies and forgiveness create feedback meaning between each other based on the reactions of the parties. Sometimes victims dramatically reject even compelling apologies, and this response resonates against the apology and infuses it with new meanings. An apology that produces a profound moral transformation in the offender might still leave the victim unmoved.

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Perhaps the victim refuses to even listen to or otherwise receive the apology, causing considerable additional regret and suffering in the offender. Alternatively, the victim might amplify certain aspects of the apology by receiving it with enthusiastic forgiveness and eagerness to restore the relationship. Or, as is probably most common, ambiguity and unresolved hard feelings may linger under the surface of the relationship in perpetuity and fade or resurface depending on any number of circumstances. All of this nuance and non-binary fluidity will present challenges to legal procedures. Consider a sentencing judge attempting to determine how an offender’s remorse should impact punishment. Even if a judge can accurately divine an offender’s mental states and justly translate those into some kind of “forgiveness” of punishment that accounts for the indeterminate and evolving situation, she will still face the challenge of threading the needle to satisfy various potentially conflicting objectives of punishment. A court in the United States reviewing a drug sentence will emphasize different objectives than a transitional justice tribunal that seeks to strike a balance between emphasizing principles of forgiveness in order to maximize political stability and establishing a historical record and assigning blame to offenders in order to honor the victims. As hard as we try to satisfy different views of justice and forgiveness, some will reasonably object to any assertion that the state—a nebulous collection of impersonal institutions—can achieve anything like the mental states or spiritual conditions associated with the ancient traditions of forgiveness. From this perspective, forgiveness falls outside the jurisdiction of law and pretending otherwise is legalistic voodoo. Apologies and forgiveness have many meanings and moving parts, and some parts are more valued in some contexts than in others. I mention this not to assert that this is a difficult subject, but to emphasize with as much clarity as possible that there are not many simple or undisputed answers here. Especially in the United States, the criminal justice system and its punishments do not aim toward a coherent set of objectives. Justice serves many masters: deontological, utilitarian, various religious and cultural traditions, countless variants of restorative justice, a hodge-podge of leftist beliefs, some libertarianism, and frankly who knows what else at any given moment. For anyone working in or on the justice system—whether a theorist or a practitioner—we cannot forget the elephant in the room: no coherent theory of punishment guides this massive system. I admire how Christopher Bennett puts it: penal justice can be described as a set of institutions in search of a narrative or a ‘practice without a policy’…. It seems that for many victims and officials who run the institutions, it is not clear what the system is actually meant to be doing, what the overall purpose of criminal justice is—or whether the officially given purposes are compelling ones. (Bennett 2008: 13) I sometimes think of modern criminal justice as a very crowded expensive bus rapidly plowing forward without a driver or a destination. Even the simplest questions in law will therefore generate multiple ideologically charged answers somewhere between “Defund the Police!” and “Law and Order!” We should keep our heads on a swivel when introducing highly nuanced concepts like forgiveness into these ham-fisted brawls. And we should not view these feuds as impulsive disagreements of pig-headed ideologues, but rather as the byproduct of longstanding cultural, political, and economic forces. Reasonable people can disagree here. This makes it particularly important that we attend to the details, evaluate according to multiple theories of justice simultaneously, and remain flexible and open to changing our minds. I will first address what I consider the most serious dangers of naïve endorsements of forgiveness in law. I will then identify the most promising applications for forgiveness in legal contexts.

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2.  Dangers of Forgiveness in Law We can first note some basic questions that a compelling account of forgiveness in law should attempt to answer. Who deserves forgiveness in legal institutions? Should only remorseful offenders receive forgiveness, for example? What does forgiveness in law mean? To what extent does forgiveness equal something like reduced punishment? Who has the ability and power to evaluate remorse and to forgive? How can forgiveness be applied fairly in a way that advances the theories of justice that motivate our legal institutions? Can we find applications and procedures for forgiveness that do not beg central questions about the purposes of law and punishment? Most generally, we can appreciate objections to the assertion that the state, rather than the victim, can forgive an offender. It is one thing for a victim to forgive an offender, and something quite different for the state—via a judge, prosecutor, officer, or otherwise—to forgive. Apologies and forgiveness raise issues of standing because certain kinds of meaning can only attach to certain people based on assignments of blame and experiences of injury. If I apologize to survivors for injuries committed against Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide, my act would lack various kinds of meaning—for example an acceptance of blame—because I have never been to Africa and did not cause any of the harm. I’m the wrong person for the job of accepting blame for these harms. Such standing issues arise regarding forgiveness as well. If someone who murdered Tutsis asked me for forgiveness, it would be quite odd and presumptuous for me to offer my forgiveness because I was not one of the victims. Much of the work of forgiving can only be done by the victim, or by someone we might consider a proxy for the victim. Perhaps some might consider a priest or other religious official as possessing standing to forgive in some spiritual jurisdiction. But if the state finds an offender remorseful enough to warrant something like forgiveness in the form of reduced punishment, the state seems to usurp the victim’s exclusive authority to forgive—at least certain aspects of forgiveness that attach exclusively to the victim. As Martha Minnow states, “forgiveness is and must remain the exclusive prerogative of the individual; forcing or even pressuring a victim to forgive causes them to experience a new harm, loss of autonomy, and subordination arising from the prior harm” (Minow 2019: 6). Pettigrove challenges this view and provides compelling arguments for expanding the possibility of meaningful forgiveness to second and third parties, especially as we think more broadly about different kinds of meanings related to forgiveness and how they extend beyond the victim and offender (Pettigrove 2009). We therefore want to be mindful when we describe state actions in terms of forgiveness. The state may have many legitimate reasons to reduce punishment or otherwise redeem and reintegrate offenders, but describing these actions within the language of forgiveness can confuse matters and encroach on the victim’s moral jurisdiction to decide whether and how to forgive. Note how additional layers of complexity arise when there are many victims and issues of collective forgiveness arise. Suppose a murderer kills two people, and eventually repents. One victim’s family seeks to forgive the offender, but the other family doubts the sincerity of the offender’s remorse and seeks to maximize punishment. What should the state do? These issues can prove especially challenging in situations of international criminal law and human rights abuses, where it is unlikely that large groups of victims will all individually agree on the extent to which they forgive offenders—especially when large-scale human rights abuses are committed by networks of offenders who bear different levels of culpability and who express varying degrees of remorse. If one constituency declares that they forgive the offenders but others explicitly reject forgiveness, it would be rather deceptive for the offenders to declare themselves as “forgiven.” In some cases, prosecutors will consult with victims and their families in order to determine sentences. Justice though Apologies recounts in some detail the murder of nineteen-year-old Ann Grosmaire, who was shot in the head as she tried to flee her abusive boyfriend Connor McBride (Smith 2014: 4–8). McBride had been close with the Grosmaire family before the murder, and 434

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they mourned McBride’s ruined life along with Ann’s death. Ann’s father told the prosecutor that his comatose daughter asked him to forgive Connor, and her father stated that “it was not just Ann asking me to forgive Conor, it was Jesus Christ.” “I hadn’t said no to [Christ] before,” he explained, “and I wasn’t going to start then.” Because of these explicitly Christian motivations of Ann’s parents, McBride’s sentence was reduced from life to twenty years of prison and ten years of probation. Those who find life imprisonment of a twenty-year-old excessive in nearly all circumstances might applaud the wisdom of the law here to reduce punishment and suffering. But what is the penological purpose of this reduction as it relates to efforts to reduce violence against women? Should a parent hearing the voice of Jesus play such a decisive role in the state’s punishments of lethal domestic violence against women? Forgiving the murderer of your child provides a truly inspiring and complex moral narrative. But should the state allow the private religious values of an aggrieved family to steer public policy? This case reminds us that there are good reasons why the law takes measures to insulate its decision-making procedures from the passions of victims. McBride’s case also makes us wonder if forgiveness would have been so readily offered if he was not a young white man. When the legal system allows individual police, prosecutors, judges, and others the option to exercise discretion regarding who deserves forgiveness and who does not, this invites discrimination of various kinds. At a time when police have killed innocent black men for “appearing dangerous” while young white active shooters and mass murders are calmly brought into custody, we have many reasons to doubt whether the justice system should be trusted to evaluate something as complex as remorse and forgiveness. If perceptions of threat and responses to those perceptions are so distorted by race, how can we expect the justice system to provide evenhanded treatments of the nuances of someone’s inner life? If we imagine a young wealthy student at an elite university discovered with illegal recreational drugs, it is easy to extrapolate all of the ways that the legal systems will provide “offramps of forgiveness”: a warning from the officer rather than an arrest, counsel from expensive attorneys who coach on how to appear remorseful, a favorable plea arrangement, access to top treatment programs and health care, resources to redress harm they caused, a lenient sentence, and so on. At all of these decision points, the option of forgiveness can provide moral cover for racism and privilege. The system can appear merciful rather than discriminatory. Much of the bias in the cases can be implicit because the privileged offender is more likely to hit the right notes of remorse and display the proper demeanor to satisfy those in power. And, of course, the wealthy have better opportunities for success in life, which colors how the justice system extrapolates their future. It might genuinely seem like a bad idea for this person with otherwise positive prospects to suffer maximum punishment, and exercising discretion to forgive may be wise. But as I have written elsewhere, discretion tilts toward power and favors those with resources. A similar offense committed by a poor black man or immigrant of the same age with little education seems less likely to benefit from such discretion for a variety of reasons. Even deeply repentant poor offenders may lack language and cultural skills to express their inner states, their dress and demeanor might look suspect, and they will likely lack resources to provide redress or receive quality legal counsel. The pervasiveness of these class and racial biases and their impact on everyday judgments of remorse and forgiveness should not be underestimated. Forgiveness in law invites discretion and informality, and although these might seem like welcome countermeasures to rigid and punitive formalities they come at the expense of consistency and proportionality. Similar offenses should, for many reasons, be treated similarly and receive similar punishments. Similarly remorseful offenders should receive similar forgiveness. Yet the more discretion and informality, the greater the risk of inequality—and racial inequality in particular— as the privileged seem likely to benefit more often from forgiveness and therefore receive less punishment for similar crimes. Forgiveness in law can provide another inflection point in the “two systems of justice,” one for white-collar criminals and another for people like George Floyd. 435

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Such unfairness not only violates the principles of consistency and equality, but also can run afoul of proportionality. Proportionality in punishment refers to the punishment fitting and being proportionate to the wrongdoing such that we should not punish murder with a small fine or execute jaywalkers even if doing so a few times would eradicate jaywalking. But should a remorseful murderer be forgiven while the remorseless is not? I challenge this assumption later in this chapter and elsewhere, but many retributivists believe that if two people commit the same crime then it would seem both inconsistent (different punishment for the same crime) and disproportionate (insufficient punishment for murder) to forgive one offender because of her post-offense remorse (Smith 2016a). Some will assert that post-offense behavior such as remorse should be irrelevant to determining punishment because whatever happens after the offense cannot make the offense itself “less bad” and deserving of less punishment.6 Retributivists find these principles especially important according to their “do the crime do the time” attitude, but many will agree with the basic notion that law should seek proportionate punishments applied consistently. Introducing forgiveness into the system threatens both proportionality and consistency by offering, as retributivists would view it, morally unjustified lenience. This brings us to a general point often lost in conversations regarding restorative justice. We commonly speak of someone begging for forgiveness. This phrase has historical roots in oppression. We might tend to consider forgiveness as progressive, but we often find it in the context of authoritarian tactics of accusation, denunciation, torture, confession, repentance, and forgiveness. Here the act of forgiveness is the ultimate flex of power—not only can we bend the will of the deviant to denounce her previous beliefs, but we are so powerful and gracious that we also forgive. President Trump often demands apologies for petty offenses, while himself refusing to apologize for obvious wrongdoing (Smith 2017). He also pardons even remorseless offenders who are loyal to him, providing further evidence that he views such morally coded mechanisms as means to personal ends. When the law traffics in forgiveness it endows its officials with spiritual powers. Instead of commanding compliance through brute violence, the state crafts the souls of its subjects while presenting itself as a merciful power. Douglas Hay describes this dynamic in eighteenth-century England (Hay 1976). Instead of enforcing the various property laws that would effectively slaughter the poor and incite rebellion, the rich would expect the poor to beg for mercy. Not only would this allow the wealthy to exercise great discretion, but they could grandstand their moral superiority through merciful generosity. This further buttressed the class system as a byproduct of the good and just (the wealthy) and the criminal penitents (the poor). Servants became spiritually indebted to their masters for sparing their lives. According to Hay, this “allowed the rulers of England to make the courts a selective instrument of class justice, yet simultaneously to proclaim the law’s incorruptible impartiality, and absolute determinacy” (Hay 1976: 48). Hay describes how mercy in the context of unjust laws allowed “a prosecutor to terrorize the petty thief and then command his gratitude” (Hay 1976: 49). We can notice a parallel dynamic in drug courts in the contemporary United States, where indigent offenders plead for forgiveness from draconian penal codes. Note there the expectation in the Sentencing Guidelines that an offender must express remorse or face maximum punishment. Sometimes apologizing and begging for forgiveness comes at the expense of fighting for reform of unjust laws under which one is being subjugated. These may sound to some like overstated concerns, but many still understand penitentiaries as saving the souls of the racial underclass and condemning the remorseless to hell on Earth. The two systems of justice operate with such an asymmetry of power that we can predict who will control the pen when writing ideological narratives emphasizing personal responsibility and forgiveness and ignoring structural oppression and unjust laws and law enforcement. I mention this here as a reminder that apologies and forgiveness in law are not always a progressive alternative for healing social injustice—they can also be weapons of authoritarianism, social control, and the degradation of being coerced to bow to your master. 436

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We can return to the core questions with eyes wide open regarding the dark side of atonement. Who deserves forgiveness in law? What is the relationship between forgiveness and reduced punishment? How can legal institutions grant forgiveness fairly and in a manner that generally advances rather than undermines justice, even as we attempt to consider multiple conceptions of justice working at cross purposes?

3.  Hopes for Forgiveness and Justice As currently practiced, evaluating remorse and granting forgiveness in justice systems is typically an archaic and often unjust ritual where states expect officials to “know it when they see it” by conducting an “examination of the criminal’s soul” (U.S. v. Vance 1995). Excessive discretion exercised from gut feelings predictably leads to discriminatory and ineffective outcomes. These “on the fly” decisions are also often unappealable and leave little paper trail—the officer just “had a feeling” based on a few observations that this person expressed sufficient contrition to walk away with a warning. I have spent considerable efforts trying to clean up this mess. I have written long and short versions of both (a) justifications for why apologetic offenders deserve reductions in punishment and (b) the various mechanisms and procedures that could best foster the fair application of apologies and forgiveness in criminal law. I will not repeat those arguments here, but instead I will emphasize a few points regarding why we should invest the efforts to properly integrate forgiveness into criminal law. I cannot recount the details here regarding why apologetic defenders deserve reductions in punishment, other than to note that categorically apologetic offenders clear such a high bar for remorse that they will have already satisfied most of the usual objectives of punishment. Categorically apologetic offenders are effectively reformed and rehabilitated as well as incapacitated and deterred. The restorative benefits are obvious, and many studies suggest that victims seek apologies and forgiveness above all other legal remedies.7 Unlike conveyor belts of criminal justice that process violations as quickly as possible, procedures that make time for apologies and forgiveness help to humanize all parties as they work together to understand the causes of the crime and the suffering occasioned by the offense. The process can create many opportunities for victims to participate in the justice procedures and empower them to play an active role at a time when they might feel especially fragile and victimized. This also speaks to the “broken windows” aspect of apologies: if the victim continues to be perceived as a victim without being recognized as deserving the recognition and respect provided by an apology, this encourages others to see her as damaged and ripe for additional harms (Kelling and Coles 1996). Apologies and forgiveness can recognize both the victim and the offender as moral interlocutors deserving of dignity. Recipients of such apologies experience mitigated anger and reduced aggression toward offenders, which in turn contributes to their willingness to forgive, their general recovery, the well-being of the offender, and strengthened community bonds. Apologies and forgiveness work especially well within Braithwaite’s framework for reintegrative shaming, where legal disapproval “is followed by efforts to reintegrate the offender back into the community of law-abiding or respectable citizens through words or gestures of forgiveness or ceremonies to decertify the offender as deviant” (Braithwaite 1989: 100–01). Reintegrative shaming seeks to identify the wrongness of the act while working to return offenders into the moral community rather than labeling them as deviant outcasts, and apologies and forgiveness provide two powerful tools for preventing offenders from identifying as irredeemable criminals. According to Braithwaite, “apology is the most powerful and symbolically meaningful form of shaming” and the “deeper the evil, the more profound the comparative advantage of rituals of repentance and forgiveness over rituals of degradation” (Braithwaite 2000: 129; Braithwaite 2001: 52). 437

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Retributive justifications for punishment appear, at first glance, to be the least likely to forgive remorseful offenders. I have argued that the suffering inherent to categorically apologizing should be credited to the moral balance incurred by the offense. Punishments should be reduced accordingly. Remorse can also reduce the gravity of the offense, for example by ending certain vectors of harm associated with being injured. Failing to apologize for an offense causes certain aspects of the offense to compound, for instance by increasing the humiliation associated with being injured and the anxiety of living with that injury being unaddressed—perhaps because you fear that an offender who has not apologized will do it again. Apologies can, in other words, stop offenses from continuing to toll more moral debt. Just as remorseless offenders deserve increased punishment, remorseful offenders deserve less. Retributivists should endorse such symmetry and perhaps even defend the view that the state has a duty to forgive sufficiently apologetic offenders by reducing punishment accordingly. This also raises the table-turning question of whether a categorically apologetic offender should be demanding—rather than begging for—mercy because her contrition has triggered a moral debt in the victim that should be repaid in the currency of forgiveness. This flips the script on the “do the crime, do the time” narrative: failing to forgive amounts to wrongly overcharging the offender. This relates to the various arguments regarding when or whether anyone is required to “accept an apology,” what sorts of apologies might trigger this requirement, and if accepting an apology somehow entails forgiveness. Collective apologies raise many additional complexities, and we can ask here whether reductions in punishment amount to something like state-sanctioned collective forgiveness. Determining who is remorseful, and how remorseful they are, presents the challenge of reading the minds of offenders who have considerable incentive to appear contrite. Apologize or get in the cruiser. Express remorse or serve ten more years. In millions of cases around the world, justice systems expect officials to consult their intuitions regarding an offender’s remorsefulness. Situations can range from the officer deciding not to ticket an apologetic jaywalker, to a sentencing court deciding if a convict demonstrates enough remorse to be spared execution. I seek a means of making explicit the criteria for the sorts of apologetic substance warranting reductions in punishment as well as outlining formal and institutionalized methods for identifying these meanings. The following questions guide analyses of categorical apologies in criminal law: Has the offender corroborated the factual record? Has the offender accepted blame for the crime? Does the offender possess appropriate standing to apologize and accept blame? Does the offender identify each harm? Does the offender identify the principles underlying each harm? Does the offender share a commitment to the principles underlying each harm? Does the offender recognize the victims as moral interlocutors? Has the offender expressed and demonstrated categorical regret? Has the offender performed the apology? Has the offender demonstrated sufficient reform? Has the offender provided appropriate redress for her offenses? Does the offender intend for the apology to advance the victim’s well-being and affirm the breached value rather than merely serve her self-interests? 13 Does the offender demonstrate appropriate emotions? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The guidelines I provide attempt to maximize our ability to reduce punishment when appropriate in the fairest possible way and in a manner subject to reasoned analysis and public scrutiny. Such careful coding of apologies in accordance with accepted criteria by experienced administrators 438

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is more just, effective, and fair than allowing sentencing judges and other state actors to render impressionistic and often biased decisions. Making findings of remorse and providing forgiveness requires a great deal of fine-grained analysis of continuously evolving behavior. But the stakes are high, and it is important to take the time to get it right. As should hopefully be evident at this point in this chapter, criminal law already allows for apologies and forgiveness. But it does so in an ad hoc and biased manner that seems unjust according to every major theory of justice. Considering how we currently deploy these concepts, I am sympathetic to arguments that criminal law might be better off if it abandoned remorse and forgiveness and disallowed their use altogether. If they cannot be applied fairly and usually end up being another ambiguous tool manipulated by the wealthy, perhaps they do more harm than good. The use of remorse in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines provides a potent example for how even the best-intentioned reform can pervert these moral concepts. The Guidelines sought to enhance consistency and proportionality in the penal code by providing sentencing reductions for all who “accept responsibility,” but within the system “accepting responsibility” usually means agreeing to a plea even while denying guilt. The reality on the ground of how terms like remorse and forgiveness are used in practice defies any moral logic. We should be able to clean this up in a commonsense manner that appeals to most of our beliefs regarding why the state punishes. And to repeat: from the retributive perspective we probably have a moral duty to properly forgive remorseful offenders. In addition to this obligation, many non-deontological perspectives should view correcting the relationship between apologies and forgiveness in law as good policy. If we continue to reduce punishment for remorseful offenders, we should develop consistent standards regarding what sorts of remorse should warrant what sorts of reductions of punishment and how those reductions map onto something like forgiveness. Whatever standards we promulgate, these standards should be fairly and transparently applied and reviewed. State agents empowered to make such determinations regarding remorse and forgiveness should receive training and close oversight to protect against bias, abuse, and other misapplications. Principles of equality, consistency, and proportionality should guide the application as reviewers calibrate how apologies impact moral desert and how moral desert relates to forgiveness. Sometimes apologies will begin soon after the offense. Sometimes remorse will surface only after considerable punishment. Indeterminate sentencing can accommodate these variations, but again this requires the system to maintain awareness of the nuances of moral development. Tailoring punishment to an individual’s moral development requires indeterminate sentencing, and part of the challenge is allowing for flexibility without granting state officials the kind of excessive discretion that creates unfairness. Clear guidelines and scrupulous oversight can help balance discretion with standardization and can prevent abuses. Lest some worry that this sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal theory of punishment, we should apply these principles symmetrically as we deploy the same fine-tuned conceptual tools to deny aspects of forgiveness to remorseless offenders. When we consider where and when the justice system should evaluate apologies and forgiveness, we must confront the inconvenient fact that both are always ongoing processes. The categorically apologetic offender reforms and forbears from reoffending over her lifetime. Apologies are treatments rather than cures. An offender who seems remorseful and deserving of forgiveness might reoffend at any time. This leaves no definitive occasion to judge, but more time between offense and evaluation creates more data points to review. The data points include pre-offense, immediately post-offense, pre-arrest, arrest, arraignment, plea negotiations, plea allocutions, trial, sentencing, various restorative processes, time served, parole, probation, and post-release. Longitudinal data and longer records of reform should increase confidence. Even evidence-based reviewers do not have crystal balls to predict future behavior. Justice systems may sometimes need to retract forgiveness and reinstate punishments, and we should dispel any illusion of judicial infallibility. 439

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Who should evaluate offender remorse and forgiveness? Given the complexity, we can appreciate the need for qualified and well-trained reviewers who consistently apply appropriate standards that advance coherent objectives. Unbiased neutrality also seems essential, and we should avoid political appointees who will either forgive everyone or no one. In an adversarial system, this suggests that neither the prosecutor nor the defense should have oversized influence in forgiveness determinations. Because prosecutors typically wield considerable autonomy to charge and plea bargain, we should be especially mindful of abuses of power related to who receives lenience and forgiveness under their watch. Victims should have a voice, but they are perhaps the most biased party and therefore we should be careful not to allow them to unduly influence forgiveness determinations. Juries will also usually lack training to evaluate remorse and the penological objectives served by forgiveness, so it seems unwise to grant them the final determination. Sentencing judges surely have a role to play in evaluating remorse and granting forgiveness, and they would benefit from training in how to apply such principles optimally. Experts in remorse and forgiveness could also add systematic rigor to the process by synthesizing information from all data points and stakeholders—for example victims, arresting officers, social workers and healthcare professionals, employers, family members, and others. Such a composite could produce something like a “Remorse and Forgiveness Index.” Appellate oversight should have rigorous standards of review.8 Moral transformations take time, and each stage in the review process deserves de novo review that incorporates new evidence of reform or recidivism. It may be inconvenient, but we should retire the legal fiction that justice systems can simply “read the soul” of offenders at the designated time of sentencing to determine their remorse. Some remorseless offenders will transform only years into their sentences; some who appeared sincerely contrite will reveal themselves as sociopaths with good apology coaches. Confronting this reality requires the justice system to do the hard work of applying apology reductions, and this means that the justice system should: a b c d

establish clear standards regarding the sorts of meanings expected of apologies to warrant forgiveness reductions in punishment; promulgate those standards widely and train experts to apply these metrics; rely on experts to gather longitudinal data and synthesize data provided, and to make evaluations of offender apologies based on this information; and provide rigorous oversight of these determinations to maximize accuracy and consistency.

If this is all possible, the question remains regarding how much of a reduction in punishment something like forgiveness entails. I recommend a sliding scale, with more thorough apologies deserving greater forgiveness and reductions in punishment. But how much, exactly, depends on many context-sensitive factors including the underlying justifications for punishment. One might even hope that formally integrating forgiveness into justice systems might provide occasion to debate and make those objectives more explicit. Issues related to forgiveness could drive criminal justice reform as all constituencies realize just how divorced practice and principle have become. The more we reflect on the role of forgiveness in law, the more questions arise. Our criminal procedures seem increasingly inhospitable to moral interactions, and perhaps the international community might learn from each other.9 Transitional justice and international criminal courts have been especially innovative as they confront complex issues, especially as they grapple with questions regarding collective forgiveness (Smith 2021).

4. Conclusion I hope to have provided an overview of how forgiveness in law presents both dangers and promise. Criminal law can and should create spaces for forgiveness, and there are many aspects of 440

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forgiveness beyond reductions in punishment. Theoretical issues in forgiveness in law can have high stakes, and reductions in punishment provide prominent concrete applications. As a final warning, law should exercise caution when asserting claims that forgiveness somehow restores the community to some sort of pre-offense condition. Minow, for example, speaks of forgiveness “wiping the slate clean” (Minow 2019: 162). Many colloquialisms and euphemisms have grown around this ancient concept. We want to believe that we can undo the past and that some ritual can erase guilt and suffering. Spiritual desires to rise above pain can introduce magical thinking and excessive optimism regarding the power of forgiveness. Pollyanna attitudes about apologies and forgiveness may have a place in “live, laugh, love” or “forgive and forget” home décor, but criminal justice is a dangerous place for such metaphysical sloppiness. Even if remorseful offenders deserve forgiveness and reductions in punishment, this does not entail that their previous offenses become invisible to the justice system. Just as we would be extra cautious with a lover who once betrayed us, we need to find the evidence-based balance between excessive trust and excessive skepticism in an offender’s reform. To conclude on a fittingly bipartisan note, we can cite Ronald Reagan citing a Russian proverb: “trust, but verify.”

Notes 1 This chapter restates and builds upon portions of arguments appearing primarily in Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment. Please refer to that work as well as I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) for much more extensive treatments of these issues. 2 Please note that Justice through Apologies (Smith 2014) contains a lengthy discussion of apologies and forgiveness in civil law. 3 Please see my discussions of President Trump’s frequent tactic of demanding apologies (Smith 2017a). 4 For consideration of the weaponization of apologies, please see my “Why Public Apology is a Friend of the Powerful” (Smith 2016b). 5 For an especially nuanced account, see Griswold (2007). 6 See (Mabbott 1939: 157): “the punisher is not entitled to consider whether the criminal is penitent any more than he may consider whether the law is good.” 7 See sources collected in Smith (2014: 334–6). 8 For a contrasting view, see Bibas and Bierschbach (2004: 130): “prosecutorial discretion raises the dangers of discrimination and abuse of power. But these dangers are inherent in existing prosecutorial discretion; remorse and apology make them no worse.” See also Bibas (2007). 9 The practice of active remorse (tätige reue) in Germany and elsewhere offers a promising example.

References 2012 Guidelines Manual § 3E1.1 Bennett, C. (2008) The Apology Ritual, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bibas, S. (2007) “Forgiveness in Criminal Procedure,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, 4: 329–47. Bibas, S. and Bierschbach, R. (2004) “Integrating Remorse and Apology into Criminal Procedure,” Yale Law Journal, 114: 85–148.Braithwaite, J. (1989) Crime, Shame, and Reintegration, New York: Cambridge University Press. Braithwaite, J. (2002a) Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation, New York: Oxford University Press. Braithwaite, J. (2000) “Repentance Rituals and Restorative Justice,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, 8–1: 115–31.Calhoun, C. (2009) “Review of Radzik’s Making Amends,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/making-amends-atonement-in-morality-law-and-politics/ Curie, E. (1998) Crime and Punishment in America, New York: Henry Holt. Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hay, D. (1976) “Property, Authority, and Criminal Law,” in D. Hay, E.P. Thompson, P. Linebaugh, J. Rule, and C. Winslow (eds.) Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, New York: Pantheon. Hobbes, T. (1651, 1969) Leviathan, Menston, England: The Scholar Press Limited.

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Nick Smith Kelling, G. and Coles, C. (1996) Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crimes in Our Communities, New York: Touchstone. Mabbott, J.D. (1939), “Punishment,” Mind, 48: 152–67. Minow, M. (2019) When Should Law Forgive?, New York: Norton. Murphy, J. (2014) Punishment and the Moral Emotions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, G. (2009) “The Standing to Forgive,” Monist, 92–4: 583–603. Pettigrove, G. (2016) Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press Smith, N. (2008) I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies, New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, N. (2014) Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment, New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, N. (2016a) “Dialectical Retributivism: Why Remorseful Offenders Deserve Reduced Punishment,” Philosophia, 44–2: 343–60. Smith, N. (2016b) “Why Public Apology is a Friend of the Powerful,” Aeon Magazine. https://aeon.co/ essays/how-the-public-apology-became-a-tool-of-power-and-privilegeSmith, N. (2017) “Apologies as Remedies, Apologies as Weapons: Advice for Prime Minister Trudeau,” University of Toronto Center for Ethics Journal. https://c4ejournal.net/2017/11/02/nick-smith-apologies-as-remedies-apologies-asweapons-considerations-for-the-trudeau-administration-2017-c4ej-7/ Smith, N. (2021) “Apologies and Transitional Justice: Myths, Ideologies, and Complexities,” in J. Meierhenrich, A. Hinton, and L. Douglas (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, New York: Oxford University Press. Warmke, B. (2013) “Two Arguments Against the Punishment-Forbearance Account of Forgiveness,” Philosophical Studies, 165(3): 915–20. Zaibert, L. (2009) “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy, 6–3: 365–93. U.S. v. Vance, 62 F.3d 1152, 1158 (9th Cir. 1995).

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PART V

Empirical Findings

33 THE MEASUREMENT OF FORGIVENESS Suzanne Freedman

1. Introduction The examination of interpersonal forgiveness from a psychological perspective has greatly expanded in the past 30 years. Topics such as what forgiveness is and is not, how to go about forgiving, and how to measure forgiveness have garnered much attention in the literature and the general population. The value of knowing about forgiveness as a coping mechanism after ­experiencing a deep hurt cannot be overemphasized. Research illustrates how important forgiveness is to emotional well-being as well as interpersonal relationships (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015; Worthington, Lavelock, Witviliet, Rye, Tsang, and Toussaint 2015). The quote below, from a student in this author’s university class on interpersonal forgiveness, highlights the power and value of forgiveness for individuals’ psychological well-being, as well as the value in knowing about forgiveness as an option for healing. No matter how my own healing process continues to unfold, and no matter what conflicting feelings I might have about seeing my mother – I am grateful right now to know that forgiveness is an option, to know forgiveness is a healthy option, and to know I have the information and support I need to keep going on my healing journey. As a human who has suffered, I now have faith in the healing potential of forgiveness… even as I am still working towards giving that gift to my offender. As a counseling student, I am now genuinely awed by the possibility of forgiveness as an option for my clients to consider in their own healing journeys. (Kelly Fischer, written communication 2019) Previous research illustrates that definitions of forgiveness differ among those in academia, as well as between academics and individuals in the general population (Legaree, Turner, and Lollis 2007). McCullough, Worthington, and Rachal (1997) describe forgiveness as including decreased motivation to retaliate against and avoid one’s offender and increased motivation to offer goodwill toward one’s offender. Enright and Fitzgibbons (2000) conceptualize forgiveness in context and state, People upon rationally determining that they have been unfairly treated, forgive when they willfully abandon resentment and related responses (to which they have a right) and endeavor to respond to the wrongdoer based on the moral principle of beneficence, which may include DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-41

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compassion, unconditional worth, generosity, and moral love (to which the wrongdoer, by nature of the hurtful act or acts, has no right). (p. 29) One’s definition and understanding of forgiveness is critical to their practice of forgiveness. Related and equally as important to the definition and understanding of forgiveness is the measurement of forgiveness. Accurate and sound measurement of forgiveness and the forgiveness process impact research on forgiveness, forgiveness therapy, and forgiveness education. Students in this author’s university class on interpersonal forgiveness and individuals in the general population often express surprise when they hear that it is possible to measure forgiveness. The multiple measures in existence illustrate that forgiveness is measurable (Worthington et al. 2015), although some of these measures vary greatly in their conceptualization and assessment of forgiveness. Analysis and examination regarding the conceptualization and validity of forgiveness measures is important for the appropriate selection of forgiveness assessments by researchers, clinicians, and educators (Thompson and Snyder 2003). The purpose of this chapter is to describe and analyze, as well as compare and contrast, the conceptualization, development, and validity of four self-report measures of forgiveness. Specifically, this chapter will focus on three episodic assessments – the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (Subkoviak, Enright, Yu, Gassin, Freedman, Olson, and Sarinopoulos 1995), the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (McCullough, Rachal, Sandage, Worthington, Brown, and Hight 1998), and the Rye Forgiveness Scale (Rye, Loiacono, Folck, Olszewski, Heim, and Madia 2001) – and one dispositional assessment – the Heartland Forgiveness Scale (Thompson and Snyder 2003). These measures were selected because of their popularity in the literature. Emphasis will be placed on the conceptualization of forgiveness represented by the measure, as well as construct validity, specifically whether the aspect of forgiveness being assessed by the measure reflects the true construct of forgiveness as most commonly described in the literature. Construct validity is important as it determines whether a measure truly represents the construct it is intended to measure, and is central to establishing the overall validity of a method (Middleton 2020). Recommendations for use in specific contexts based on the analysis of each measure are also discussed. Fernández-Capo, Fernández, Sanfeliu, Benito, and Worthington (2017) point out how not enough attention has been given to the strength of evidence supporting the construct validity of forgiveness when analyzing measures of forgiveness. Specifically, more attention needs to focus on whether the forgiveness assessment actually measures the construct of forgiveness as most commonly agreed upon, or some other construct.

2.  Definitions of Forgiveness According to Rye et al. (2001), “a major challenge with developing measures of forgiveness involves settling upon a satisfactory operational definition of forgiveness” (p. 260). Rye et al. (2001) point out that it is easier to identify what forgiveness is not than what forgiveness is. Enright, Freedman, and Rique (1998) specifically mention how new definitions and understandings of forgiveness are not retaining the moral aspect of forgiveness, such as recognition of the offender as a human being worthy of respect. For example, Thompson and Snyder (2003) define forgiveness as “… the framing of a perceived transgression, such that one’s attachment to the transgressor, transgression, and sequelae of the transgression is transformed from negative to neutral or positive” (p. 302). This definition focuses on changing one’s negative reaction and/or response to a transgression, but does not include a specific focus on changing one’s feelings, thoughts, and/or behaviors toward the offender, or a moral component in which one comes to view the offender with empathy and compassion as well as recognize his or her humanity. 446

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Although there is a range of definitions discussed by researchers, most agree that forgiveness includes the affective, cognitive, and behavioral systems, with affect, cognitions, behavior, motivations, and physiological responses toward the offender becoming less negative and more positive over time (Enright and the Human Development Study Group 1991; Fernández-Capo et al. 2017; McCullough 2000). However, not all authors agree that positive feelings, cognitions, and behaviors need to be present for complete forgiveness to occur (Fernández-Capo et al. 2017; Thompson and Snyder 2003; Worthington 2005). Worthington (2005) makes a distinction between forgiving strangers and those we are not in a close relationship with, in which forgiveness need not include positive affect toward an offender, compared to forgiving friends and family, in which positive affect most likely develops in the forgiveness process. McCullough et al. (1998) define forgiveness as the absence of negative responses toward an offender, specifically, the absence of both revenge and avoidance responses. In contrast, Wade, Hoyt, Kidwell, and Worthington (2014) believe that forgiveness is more than “simply” reducing anger, bitterness, and revenge. Thompson et al. (2005) explain how confusion about what forgiveness is and is not also stems from the fact that the essential components of forgiveness involve intrapersonal processes that are hard to observe directly and measure. In addition to varied definitions, misunderstandings of forgiveness are also quite common. This lack of knowledge is reflected in various misconceptions of forgiveness, such as the equating of forgiving with excusing, condoning, and/or reconciliation, often resulting in negative beliefs about forgiveness (Freedman and Chang 2010). The idea that one can forgive and choose not to reconcile is recognized by most researchers; however, reconciliation is often linked with forgiveness by those in the general population (Freedman and Chang 2010) and some academics (­Hargrave and Sells 1997). Forgiveness is even beneficial when the relationship between the offended and offender does not continue or if there never was one. It is also true that for some cultures and groups, forgiveness cannot occur without reconciliation. North (1987) discusses how forgiveness is often confused with excusing the wronged party. She goes on to explain that when we forgive, the wrongdoer’s responsibility for the act is always recognized, and thus, forgiveness is not the same as excusing, condoning, denying, or forgetting. Thompson et al. (2005) discuss how the dictionary definition of forgiveness includes both “excuse” and “condone” as synonyms of “forgive”, contributing to the confusion of what forgiveness really means. Although many variables influence whether forgiveness is achieved – such as the offense, the offender, and the relationship between the two – one’s understanding and beliefs of what forgiveness is and is not is one of the strongest variables influencing one’s decision and willingness to forgive (Freedman and Zarif kar 2016; Worthington et al. 2015). Thus, as Enright and Fitzgibbons (2000) emphasize, “definition matters” (p. 305). Enright et al. (1998) highlight a concern they refer to as “definitional drift”, defined as, “…new definitions are being generated which seem to contradict existing views without showing how the new definition is an advance over the former views” (p. 50).

3.  Measurement of Forgiveness Not surprisingly, varied definitions of forgiveness are affecting measurement of forgiveness. Enright and Fitzgibbons (2015) examined four different measures of forgiveness and found at least three different constructs represented. Thompson and Snyder (2003) also found a variety of definitions and understandings of forgiveness in their review and analysis of seven measures of forgiveness. Enright and Fitzgibbons (2015) express their specific concerns that new measures are being created without reflection and discussion on the need for the new measure, the flaws in previous measures, how the new scale is an improvement over prior measures, and what the new scale adds to the definition, scale structure, and/or psychometric properties. As proof of this, 447

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Fernández-Capo et al. (2017) reviewed and evaluated 45 forgiveness measures (33 self-report scales – 15 assessing episodic forgiveness, one dyadic forgiveness scale, and 17 dispositional forgiveness scales) and only recommend five out of the 45 measures reviewed. DeShea (2007) claims that the multitude of definitions of forgiveness shouldn’t affect measurement of the concept because “researchers and clinicians can choose a forgiveness scale without subscribing to a particular viewpoint, as most forgiveness scales do not define the term” (p. 21). This statement by DeShea (2007) raises two concerns. The first is the assumption that researchers and clinicians do not need a specific understanding of forgiveness to choose an appropriate forgiveness measure, and the second is that most forgiveness scales do not define the term. Although this last statement may be true in the sense that forgiveness scales don’t include actual definitions in the scales themselves, the construct of the scale should represent and be based on the author’s understanding and conceptualization of forgiveness. As stated earlier, because multiple definitions and conceptualizations of forgiveness exist, it is critical that researchers who develop measures of forgiveness discuss the conceptualization of forgiveness their measure represents, how that conceptualization compares to the construct of forgiveness that is most commonly represented in the literature, and how the new measure differs from and/or is an improvement over existing measures (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015).

4.  Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI) One of the earliest developed and most popular (Worthington et al. 2015) measures of f­orgiveness toward a specific offender in both research and clinical settings is the Enright Forgiveness ­Inventory (Subkoviak et al. 1995). Subkoviak et al. (1995) based their working definition on North (1987) and state, In forgiving, a person overcomes resentment toward an offender, but does not deny him/ herself the right to such resentment. The forgiver tries to have a new stance of benevolence, compassion, and sometimes love toward the offender, even though the latter has no moral right to such a merciful response. (p. 642) Enright et al. (1991) expanded North’s (1987) definition to also include changes in cognitions and behaviors toward an offender. Subkoviak et al. (1995) operationalized this definition into an objective measure known as the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI). Consistent with the definition of interpersonal forgiveness above, the EFI is an objective measure of the degree to which one person forgives another who has hurt him or her deeply and unfairly (International Forgiveness Institute). The EFI reflects Subkoviak et al.’s (1995) conceptualization that forgiveness includes a cessation or decrease in negative feelings, thoughts, and behaviors toward an offender, as well as a possible gradual increase in the presence of positive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors toward an offender. To begin their construction, Subkoviak et al. (1995) spent two years thoroughly examining and analyzing the construct of forgiveness. The scale follows directly from their definition and is made up of six subscales, including the Absence of Negative Affect, Cognition, and Behavior, and the Presence of Positive Affect, Cognition, and Behavior. In the initial measure, the Attitude Scale, each subscale included 25 items that seemed to best represent forgiveness. For example, the item “I think of ways to get even” assessed the presence of negative cognitions toward the offender and the statement “I think he or she is worthy of respect” assessed the presence of positive cognitions. The statement “I feel warm toward him/her” assessed the presence of positive affect and the statement “I feel negative toward him or her” assessed the presence of negative affect. The 150 items 448

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were coded on a 6-point Likert format from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6) with higher scores representing greater forgiveness (Subkoviak et al. 1995). The revised and current form of the EFI includes 60 items selected from the initial 150 items on the basis of high correlation with the appropriate subscale, and low correlation with a social desirability measure (Subkoviak et al. 1995). The 60 items reflect three subscales of 20 items each that assess the domains of Affect, Behavior, and Cognition. Each subscale is divided into two internal subscales composed of ten positive items and ten negative items (i.e., Positive Affect, Negative Affect, Positive Behavior, Negative Behavior, Positive Cognition, and Negative Cognition). The range of scores for the 60-item EFI is from 60 to 360, with each subscale ranging from 10 to 60. All negative items are reverse scored. Five additional items assessing pseudo forgiveness, such as excusing, condoning, and denying of the injury, are included at the end of the scale and scored separately, assessing construct validity. The statement “There really was no problem now that I think about it” represents an item on the pseudo forgiveness scale. Subkoviak et al. (1995) recommend removing data for anyone who scores higher than 20 on this scale as the individual is most likely not demonstrating genuine forgiveness. One last item also assesses construct validity of the EFI and asks, “To what extent have you forgiven the person you rated on the Attitude Scale (EFI)?”. This item is rated on a 5-point Likert scale from “not at all” to “complete forgiveness” and is the only time the word “forgiveness” is used in the scale. The purpose of this item is to assess how well one’s response to this question matches their profile on the six subscales of the EFI. A cover sheet asks the respondent to “think of the most recent experience of someone hurting them unfairly and deeply”. The respondent is asked to indicate how deeply they were hurt, how unfairly they were treated, and who the offender was. They are asked if the offender is living, how long ago the hurt occurred, and to briefly describe the offense. These responses provide contextual information regarding the specific offense and offender, and allow the researcher or clinician to determine how certain variables, such as type of offense, offender, and time since offense, may be related to one’s forgiveness process and/or struggles with certain units in the 20-unit model of forgiveness. The directions on the cover sheet can also be modified to ask about a specific offender and injury, rather than the most recent. The initial study included 394 participants: 204 women and 190 men. Half of the participants were college students (mean age = 22.1 years), and the other half were the same-sex parent of the student (mean age = 49.6 years). In addition to the EFI, subjects were given an anxiety inventory, a depression inventory, and a religiosity scale assessing behavioral practice of one’s religion. Chronbach’s alpha of internal consistency was very high for the initial validation study (0.97 and 0.98) as well as several other studies (see Subkoviak et al. 1995). Correlations among the EFI’s affect, cognition, and behavior subscales are quite high (0.80–0.87) and thus provide strong evidence for creating an EFI total score by summing the three subscales (Subkoviak et al. 1995). Strong construct validity was also illustrated with the one-item question asking specifically about forgiveness. According to Subkoviak et al. (1995), “… the substantial Pearson correlation (0.68) with this item is direct evidence that the EFI total score measures the intended construct of forgiveness” (p. 648). The EFI also shows strong internal consistency reliability and construct validity across other cultures, as illustrated in a five-nation study that included the countries of Austria, Brazil, Israel, Korea, and Taiwan. The EFI total score showed no correlation with the Crowne-Marlowe Social Desirability scale, indicating that participants were not “faking good” or trying to please the researchers (Subkoviak et al. 1995). The EFI is currently available in 12 different languages. A test-retest administration of the EFI was conducted with a sample of 36 college students with a four-week interval between testing. Results illustrated that the EFI remained stable over time, as Pearson’s correlation coefficient was positive and strong (r = 0.86) between time 1 and time 2 for the EFI total score. See Subkoviak et al. (1995) for additional statistics. 449

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When working with a client, student, or research participant on the forgiveness process, we would expect to see an increase in the degree of forgiveness toward the offender when the EFI is given over time, as illustrated in multiple intervention studies (Coyle and Enright 1997; Freedman and Enright 1996; Hebl and Enright 1993). Although Worthington et al. (2015) express concern that the EFI is too long to be completed by clients at the end of therapy or by participants in a brief forgiveness intervention, this author respectfully disagrees. It takes approximately 11–15 minutes to complete the EFI and with 60 items and six subscales, the EFI is currently the most thorough, valid, and internally consistent assessment of forgiveness. The scale is based specifically on the authors’ definition and understanding of forgiveness, and strongly reflects the construct of forgiveness most often described and defined in the literature. Worthington et al. (2015) also view the fact that the EFI must be purchased as an obstacle. It is this author’s opinion that the charge for the measure is not cost prohibitive, as illustrated in the fact that it is currently one of the most widely used measures of forgiveness (Worthington et al. 2015). In addition, Mind Garden, the publisher, offers reduced rates, including student rates. Responding to comments from researchers and counseling psychologists regarding the length of the EFI, Enright et al. (2021) recently developed a short form of the EFI, the EFI-30, which has no cost associated with it. Thus, individuals who have concerns about the length and the cost of the current EFI can choose to use the EFI-30 for free. The EFI-30 reduces the number of items from 60 to 30, allowing for a more expedient and practical assessment of forgiveness. Specifically, the goal was to reduce the number of items in each of the six subscales from 10 to 5 (Enright et al. 2021). Data from the United States were used in the development of the EFI-30 and then tested in seven nations: Austria, Brazil, Israel, Korea, Norway, Pakistan, and Taiwan. Results from the EFI-30 validation study (Enright et al. 2021) illustrate that the discrimination values are positive and each subscale has strong internal consistency. Enright et al. (2021) conclude that more research is needed to verify similarities and differences of the forgiveness process in therapy, education, human development, as well as cross-cultural validation among countries. The EFI-30 is a valid and reliable tool that enables assessment of interpersonal forgiveness across a wide variety of cultures in a briefer format. Fernández-Capo et al. (2017) evaluated current dispositional and episodic forgiveness measures on ten aspects and the factors were summed together with the highest possible score equaling ten. Only two out of the 17 episodic self-report measures of forgiveness reviewed were recommended based on the total score and psychometric evidence (Fernández-Capo et al. 2017). With a total score of 8 out of 10, the EFI was not recommended by Fernández-Capo et al. (2017). However, Fernández-Capo et al. (2017) made several errors in coding certain aspects of the EFI (confirmed by email communication with the first author (March 2019)). Specifically, the authors did not recognize that the EFI assesses the presence of positive variables, in addition to the absence of negative variables, or that the EFI includes items assessing cognitions and behaviors in addition to emotions. Taking these coding errors into consideration, it is assumed that the EFI would be strongly recommended by Fernández-Capo et al. (2017) as a valid episodic measure of forgiveness for research and clinical use. Although the EFI assesses how forgiving a person is toward a specific offender, it does not tell us specifically where an individual is in the process of forgiveness. As Enright and Fitzgibbons (2010) recommend, we also need measures that assess whether a person is struggling with a certain unit, guidepost, or phase within the process model of forgiveness. During therapy and/or education/intervention, it would be beneficial to be able to assess exactly which unit or step an individual is working through and the ease or difficulty he or she is having during the process (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015). As a self-report measure, like the other measures reviewed in this chapter, individuals’ responses may reflect bias and desire to look good, as well as be affected by the injured’s mood at the specific time of measurement (McCullough, Fincham, and Tsang 2003). It is also true that more research with minority populations is needed on the EFI and forgiveness 450

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measures in general to determine external and ecological validity, as the majority of research conducted in the United States has been with majority populations (Tittler and Wade 2019). ­Specifically, Tittler and Wade (2019) state, “The application of forgiveness interventions for people with marginalized identities has not been thoroughly examined. An overreliance on western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) and majority samples might not provide accurately generalizable results” (p. 181). Research on the validity and reliability of the EFI with minority populations would offer additional information about the EFI’s use with marginalized populations. Based on the EFI’s strong internal consistency reliability, construct validity across cultures, as well as thoughtful and thorough development, it is strongly recommended as a valid and reliable measure of forgiveness. It can be used effectively by researchers, clinicians, and/or educators, when wanting to determine how forgiving an individual is toward a specific offender in a wide variety of cultures. Because of its ability to illustrate clinical changes in forgiveness, Worthington et al. (2015) highlight the EFI’s usefulness in clinical settings, especially for the use of diagnosis and prognosis with disorders involving anger and unforgiveness. In addition to its strong construct validity, one of the greatest strengths of the EFI is that it assesses the absence of negative thoughts, feelings and behaviors, as well as the presence of positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward an offender with its six subscales. One can analyze each subscale separately to determine which area an individual is lacking in forgiveness, as evident in a low score on a specific subscale, and also determine which subscale shows the greatest change initially or over time. According to Subkoviak et al. (1995), decreases in negative affect and increases in positive affect are the slowest to develop. Participants in the initial study had the lowest means on these two subscales compared to the means of the cognition and behavior subscales, with participants most positive first in how they think about the offender. Specific results showed that individuals tend to decrease negative judgments toward an offender most easily (Subkoviak et al. 1995). Changes in the subscales, in relation to increased psychological well-being, can also be determined which can provide more evidence related to the specific healing properties of forgiveness. For example, does having empathy and compassion toward one’s offender lead to greater psychological well-being in the injured compared to only decreasing anger and revenge thoughts and/or behaviors? The EFI is also the only measure reviewed in this chapter that asks the respondent to report information regarding the injury, injurer, timing of the injury, as well as including items to assess pseudo forgiveness and one question assessing construct validity. This contextual information provides additional information that can be used by researchers, therapists, and educators. Although one of the earliest forgiveness measures developed, the EFI is one of the most popular measures due to its strong validity.

5.  Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM-12 and TRIM-18) The Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivation-12 (TRIM) Inventory is a self-report e­ pisodic assessment of forgiveness developed by McCullough, Rachal, Sandage, Worthington, Brown, and Hight (1998). The TRIM is based on the Wade Forgiveness Scale (Wade 1989), developed as part of Susan Wade Brown’s doctoral dissertation in 1990. The WFS was published in 2001 and includes 83 items (it originally included 600 items), divided into 11 subscales (Brown, Gorsuch, Rosik, and Ridley 2001). Considered too lengthy by some (Worthington et al. 2015), McCullough et al. (1998) shortened Wade’s measure to 12 items including two subscales: a Revenge subscale with five items and an Avoidance subscale with seven items called the TRIM-12. The TRIM-12 is based on McCullough et al.’s (1998) conceptualization of forgiveness as both the absence of revenge and avoidance responses (unforgiveness) toward an offender. Examples of items from the Revenge subscale are “I’ll make him/her pay” and “I want to see him/her hurt and miserable”. Examples of 451

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items from the Avoidance subscale are “I’d keep as much distance between us as possible” and “I’d live as if he/she doesn’t exist”. Responses are chosen from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) on a 5-point Likert scale, with lower scores representing decreased unforgiveness. As defined by Worthington et al. (2015), unforgiveness is an emotional and motivational state toward an offender that includes grudges, revenges, and other negative responses. A limitation of the TRIM-12 is that it does not include any assessment of positive thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors or motivations toward an offender, which have been determined to be a part of the forgiveness process (Rye et al 2001; Worthington et al. 2015; Enright 2001). Thus, the TRIM-12 measures the absence of unforgiveness, as reflected in revenge and avoidance behavior, but not, necessarily, the presence of forgiveness. This is a problem because, as Worthington et al. (2015) point out, the act of forgiveness is not the only way to decrease or reduce unforgiveness. One can reduce unforgiveness, without forgiving by getting justice and/or revenge, just accepting, feeling indifference, and/or moving on. As Wade and Worthington (2003) explain, we cannot automatically equate lower scores on the TRIM-12, illustrating reduced unforgiveness, with forgiveness. We cannot determine for certain if forgiveness has occurred or is in process without any specific items that assess the addition of positive thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors toward an offender. The TRIM-18 scale was created by McCullough, Luna, Berry, Tabak, and Bono (2010), who used Rasch modeling and Item Response Theory to scale the initial TRIM-12 and a six-item benevolence scale (known as the TRIM-B6). This combined measure of forgiveness assesses both reduced unforgiving motives and increased benevolence motives by reverse scoring the items on the TRIM-12. Examples of items that assess benevolence include “Even though his/her actions hurt me, I have goodwill for him/her” and “Despite what he/she did, I want us to have a positive relationship again”. An examination of the six items assessing increased benevolence in the TRIM-18 shows that four of the six items focus on the restoration of the relationship. These include “Although he/she has hurt me, I am putting the hurts aside so we can resume our relationship”; “I want us to bury the hatchet and move forward with our relationship”; “Despite what he/she did, I want us to have a positive relationship again”; and “I have released my anger so I can work on restoring our relationship to health”. Although this last item mentions releasing anger, it is linked to restoring the relationship with the offender. The other three items all emphasize resuming the relationship with the offender. The other two B6 items, assessing benevolence, include the mention of goodwill and decreasing negative feelings, important aspects of forgiveness: “Even though his/her actions hurt me, I have goodwill for him/her” and “I have given up my hurt and resentment”. Thus, the majority of the “Benevolence” items appear to assess behaviors equated with relationship continuation, in contrast to the injured recognizing the inherent worth of the offender and/or increasing his or her positive thoughts and/or feelings toward an offender. Both Worthington et al. (2015) and Fernández-Capo et al. (2017) suggest scales that only include the negative construct of forgiveness may be best to use when the offense is committed by a stranger or someone not close to the offended, and scales that also include assessment of the positive construct of forgiveness should be used when the offender is someone valued and close to the offended. Fernández-Capo et al. (2017) mistakenly correlate the presence of positive affect, judgment, and behavior with the value of the relationship between the offender and the victim, which assumes that one is not likely to develop positive feelings, thoughts, and/or behaviors toward an offender who is not a friend, family member, or in a relationship with the victim, and equates the act of forgiveness with reconciliation. Although an increase in positive feelings and thoughts may include a desire for reconciliation, it may not. Forgiveness can occur even if the relationship does not continue and sometimes relationship continuation occurs without forgiveness (Freedman 1998). The TRIM-18 may not be able to identify forgiveness, which does not include reconciliation, based on the fact that four of the six items that make up the TRIM-B6 are asking about reconciliation. 452

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McCullough et al. (1998) assessed psychometric data on the TRIM-12 with a sample of 239 university students who initially responded to the 18 items on Wade’s original revenge and avoidance subscales. According to McCullough et al. (1998), internal consistency for both the Avoidance (Chronbach’s = 0.86–0.94) and Revenge (Chronbach’s = 0.90) subscales is high. Test-retest stability is moderate with Trim-12 scores over three weeks correlating at r = 0.86 (TRIM-R) and r = 0.79 (TRIM-A) and nine weeks at r = 0.64 (TRIM-R) and r = 0.65 (TRIM-A). The TRIM-R was correlated with negative affectivity (r = 0.32) and self-deception (r = 0.30). According to McCullough et al. (1998), discriminant validity was illustrated through small correlations with measures of positive affectivity, negative affectivity, and social desirability. TRIM subscales were also found to be correlated with relationship-specific variables such as relational satisfaction, closeness, and commitment (McCullough et al. 1998). Results from McCullough, Hoyt, and Rachal (2000) also report evidence of construct validity. Although, as discussed above, the TRIM-12 is measuring unforgiveness more than forgiveness, this is reflected in decreases in both revenge and avoidance behavior, which may or may not imply that forgiveness has occurred. Analysis supports the TRIM-12 as a valid and reliable measure of unforgiveness. Advantages include the fact that it is quick to administer (less than 10 minutes) and can be used for free. Low scores on the TRIM-12 may indicate that an individual is decreasing in unforgiveness, illustrated in decreased avoidance and revenge behavior. However, without positive items, it cannot be determined for certain that forgiveness is in progress as discussed earlier. Adequate reliability for the TRIM-18 is reported by McCullough et al. (2003), by McCullough and Hoyt (2002), and by Fernández-Capo, Recoder, Gomez-Benito, Gamiz, Gual-Garcia, Diez, and Worthington (2017), who investigated the Spanish version of the TRIM-18, known as the TRIM-18-S. The TRIM-18 does allow forgiving behavior to be measured and is an improvement of the assessment of forgiveness compared to the TRIM-12 (Fernández-Capo, Recoder et al. 2017). However, the issues mentioned above, regarding the six items intended to measure benevolence, affect the construct validity of the TRIM-18. Specifically, the items assessing benevolence appear to assess reconciliation, in addition to forgiveness. Thus, it is recommended that the TRIM-18 be used to assess forgiveness primarily in the context of ongoing relationships rather than between an offender and a victim who are not very close or in a relationship with each other. Even then it may be difficult to determine where a person is in the process of forgiveness if reconciliation has not yet occurred or is not the goal. Scores on the TRIM-18 may not reflect forgiveness if the individual is not going to reconcile with their offender. The TRIM-18 may also communicate to respondents that reconciliation and forgiveness are automatically linked, which, as discussed earlier, is not the case, and may inadvertently turn individuals away from forgiveness. McCullough et al. (1998) recommend additional research using nonstudent samples due to the ­ ernández-Capo, limited range of hurts that college students may report compared to adult samples. F Recoder et al. (2017) also recommend that future research should assess the TRIM-18-S (Spanish version) with other populations, such as clinical samples and victims of crime or abuse. This will provide additional information regarding external validity and whether forgiveness can be assessed with the TRIM-18, even if reconciliation is not likely to occur. As with the EFI, more research with diverse samples in different sociocultural contexts is necessary to enhance the external and ecological validity of the TRIM-18.

6.  Rye Forgiveness Scale (RFS) Rye et al. (2001) developed the Rye Forgiveness Scale (RFS), a brief 15-item measure of forgiveness of a specific offender, that includes questions about both positive and negative responses toward offenders. Rye et al. (2001) developed their measure in response to the length of the EFI (Subkoviak et al. 1995) and the lack of assessment of positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors 453

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in the TRIM-12 (McCullough et al. 1998). Rye et al. (2001) conceptualize forgiveness as a “response toward an offender that involves letting go of negative affect (e.g., hostility) cognitions, (e.g., thoughts of revenge), and behavior (e.g., verbal aggression), and may also include positive responses toward the offender (e.g., compassion)” (p. 261). Rye et al. (2001) discuss the value of developing measures that include both the absence of negative responses and the presence of positive responses toward an offender. According to Rye et al. (2001), this type of measure can allow researchers to determine if there are differences in psychological well-being and mental health of individuals who have been wronged and respond positively toward their offender compared to wronged individuals who only decrease their negative responses. The RFS was initially developed as part of an earlier study investigating college women who had been hurt in a romantic relationship (Rye 1998). Questions included 16 items measuring affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to interpersonal wrongdoing, similar to the EFI (Rye et al. 2001). Questions were evaluated on whether they measured important indicators of forgiveness as suggested by the research literature. According to Rye et al. (2001), although psychometric data were promising in this initial study, the sample size was small and items were specifically focused on romantic wrongdoing. Rye et al. (2001) revised the scale to include questions that relate to any type of interpersonal hurt or wrongdoing and one item was removed from the original scale due to factor analytic results. The revised scale makes up the current Rye Forgiveness Scale and includes 15 items with a likert-type format with responses ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). ­Directions ask respondents to think about ways they have responded to the person who has wronged or mistreated them and indicate the degree to which they agree or disagree with the 15 items. The “Absence of Negative” (AN) subscale is made up of ten items measuring the extent to which one has decreased negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward an offender, and includes items such as “I can’t stop thinking about how I was wronged by this person” and “I have been able to let go of my anger toward the person who wronged me” (Rye et al. 2001). Eight of the ten items assessing the absence of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are reverse scored. The “Presence of Positive” (PP) subscale is made up of five items measuring the presence of positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward an offender and includes items such as “I wish for good things to happen to the person who wronged me” and “I have compassion for the person who wronged me”. Scores can range from 10 to 50 for the “Absence of Negative” subscale and from 5 to 25 for the “Presence of Positive” subscale and from 15 to 75 for the total Rye Forgiveness Scale. Thus, the majority of items on the scale are assessing the absence of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward one’s offender. As reported by Rye et al. (2001), both subscales of the Forgiveness Scale have adequate internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Specifically, Chronbach’s alpha was 0.87 for the entire Forgiveness Scale, 0.86 for the Absence of Negative subscale, and 0.85 for the Positive of Presence subscale. Test-retest reliability was conducted on a sample of 287 students with an average of 15.2 days between administrations and was reported as 0.80 for the entire scale and 0.76 for both the subscales (Rye et al. 2001). Construct validity was strong as both subscales were significantly related to the Enright Forgiveness Inventory and the global single-item question asking specifically about forgiveness from the EFI. Rye et al. (2001) also report that subscales of the Forgiveness scale were significantly correlated in the expected direction with other measures that were previously found to be related to forgiveness. These include anger, hope, spiritual well-being, religiousness, and social desirability (Rye et al. 2001). As with the EFI, forgiveness interventions have resulted in an increased score on the RFS (Worthington et al. 2015). Rye et al. (2001) report several limitations of their study, including the self-report nature of the scale. In addition, the subjects were all college students, and the majority were Caucasian and 454

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female. As stated earlier, more research with minority populations and populations other than college students are needed for thorough assessments of the external validity and reliability of forgiveness measures. Rye et al. (2011) recommend examining the relationship between behavioral observations and self-report forgiveness scales for additional evidence of validity. Interviews with close family, friends, colleagues, employers, and/or teachers of the injured related to their observations of forgiveness in the injured could also lend additional support to the validity of these self-report scales. The Forgiveness Scale developed by Rye et al. (2001) illustrates adequate psychometric properties and is recommended as a valid measure of episodic forgiveness that can be used for research, clinical, and educational purposes. Rye et al.’s (2001) conceptualization of forgiveness is very similar to Subkoviak et al.’s (1995) conceptualization of forgiveness and the RFS is similar to the EFI in scale content and composition. Benefits of the Rye Forgiveness Scale are that it takes very little time to complete, is free, and includes two subscales which assess both the absence of negative and the presence of positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in 15 items. Rye et al.’s (2001) conceptualization of forgiveness is reflected in the composition of the measure and represents the definition of forgiveness most commonly agreed upon in the literature. The two scales allow researchers to determine “whether positive responses toward an offender contribute to mental health above and beyond the absence of negative responses” (p. 271), which is also true for the subscales of the EFI and the TRIM-18. Different contexts of forgiveness can also be examined in relation to the subscales and psychological well-being. For example, are there benefits to developing positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in certain relationship or in certain situations compared to other relationships or situations? Rye et al. (2001) believe the question of whether forgiveness necessarily includes positive responses toward the offender will continue to be debated in the literature due to the varying definitions. These authors suggest examining what the general population’s practice of forgiveness looks like compared to the conceptualizations provided by social scientists.

7.  Heartland Forgiveness Scale Thompson and Snyder (2003) developed the Heartland Forgiveness Scale (HFS), an 18-item self-­ report dispositional (trait) assessment of forgiveness. In contrast to episodic scales of forgiveness, dispositional measures assess how forgiving an individual is in general. Specifically, the scale asks respondents to think about how they “typically” respond to negative events, in contrast to how they are feeling at the moment. According to Thompson et al. (2005), forgiveness is defined as the framing of a perceived transgression such that one’s responses to the transgressor, transgression, and sequelae of the transgression are transformed from negative to neutral or positive. The source of a transgression, and therefore the object of forgiveness, may be oneself, another person or persons, or a situation that one views as being beyond anyone’s control (e.g., an illness, “fate,” or a natural disaster). (p. 318) Specifically, Thompson et al. (2005) state that reframing consists of constructing a new narrative in which the response to the transgression changes in the components of valence and strength of attachment. Valence refers to whether one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are negative, neutral, or positive, and strength refers to the attachment or connection the injured has to the transgressor or transgression. Thus, forgiveness is complete when the intensity and frequency of one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change from negative to neutral or positive and become weaker in attachment or connection to the transgressor or transgression (Thompson et al. 2005). Thompson et al. (2005) do not believe that the development of positive feelings or love for the 455

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offender is an essential component of forgiveness, and forgiveness is said to occur when the valence reflects neutrality in thoughts and feelings. Reflecting Thompson and Snyder’s (2003) definition, three subscales make up the Heartland Forgiveness Scale, forgiveness of self, others, and situations. The initial version of the HFS consisted of 90 items (30 items for each subscale with an equal number of positively and negatively worded items). The results of an exploratory factor analysis resulted in the HFS scale being revised to 18 items, with six items per subscale. The first subscale, the “Forgiveness of Self Subscale”, indicates how forgiving someone is of themselves, and makes up the first six items in the scale. Examples of items include “I hold grudges against myself for negative things I’ve done” and “Although I feel bad at first when I mess up, over time I can give myself some slack”. The “Forgiveness of Others Subscale” reflects how forgiving someone tends to be of other people, and includes items 7 through 12. The statements “I continue to punish a person who has done something that I think is wrong” and “When someone disappoints me, I can eventually move past it” are examples from this subscale. The “Forgiveness of Situations Subscale” illustrates how forgiving one tends to be of negative circumstances, events, or situations that are beyond their own or anyone else’s control, and comprises items 13–18. Examples from this subscale include “With time I can be understanding of bad circumstances in my life” and “It’s really hard for me to accept negative situations that aren’t anybody’s fault”. Items are rated from 1 “Almost Always False of Me” to 7 “Almost Always True of Me”. Half the items on each subscale are positively worded (assess forgiveness) and half are negatively worded (assess unforgiveness). Negatively worded items are reverse scored. High scores indicate higher levels of forgiveness. Scores on each subscale range from 6 to 42 with a total HFS score range of 18–126. The HFS has been translated into a variety of languages including but not limited to Chinese Thai, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, and Spanish (https://www.heartlandforgiveness.com/translations). Thompson and Snyder (2003) calculated internal consistency reliabilities for the HFS with five student and two nonstudent samples, ranging in size from 123 to 651. The alphas ranged from 0.84 to 0.87 for the complete HFS and from 0.71 to 0.83 for the subscales. Test-retest reliability, with a three-week follow-up, in a sample of 193 students was found to be 0.83 for the entire HFS and from 0.72 to 0.77 for the subscales. Thompson and Snyder (2003) also report the test-retest reliability of a nonstudent sample (N = 57) with a nine-month follow-up as 0.77 and from 0.66 to 0.70 for the subscales. Thompson et al. (2005) evaluated convergent and discriminant validity as well as internal consistency of the HFS. Results illustrated that the HFS was significantly correlated with three measures of dispositional forgiveness. For non-dispositional measures of forgiveness, the HFS Others subscale correlated significantly with the EFI, and the HFS Others and the HFS total were both correlated with the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory. The HFS also correlated positively with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, illustrating that participants’ scores may be influenced by their motivation to look good (Thompson et al. 2005). Thompson and Snyder (2003) discuss how their definition differs from others (Enright et al. 1998; Subkoviak et al. 1995; McCullough 2000; McCullough et al. 1998), in that they are the only ones to discuss forgiveness of situations. They claim that because it is possible to feel transgressed against by the impersonal world, it is also possible for the impersonal world, such as natural disasters, illnesses, and/or random occurrences, to be targets of forgiveness. Thompson et al. (2005) assert that forgiveness of situations occurs when individuals’ negative responses to a situation are transformed from negative to neutral or positive. However, as Enright et al. (1991) highlight, forgiveness occurs between people or within oneself. One does not talk about forgiving tornadoes or cancer, as it does not make sense to talk about developing positive feelings, thoughts, or behaviors toward a tornado or an illness. Worthington et al. (2015) reviewed 20 different definitions of forgiveness, given by different research groups, and emphasize how all definitions required that “…the forgiver affirm that a moral wrong was committed” (p. 475). Natural disasters and illnesses, such as cancer, although 456

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very harmful, are not typically described as “wrongs” because they don’t involve a moral component and, thus, do not meet the necessary criteria of contexts appropriate for forgiveness. Recognizing the offender’s humanity and value as a person is an important part of forgiveness (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2000; Holmgren 1993). Freedman and Zarif kar (2016) highlight this moral aspect of forgiveness, and how forgiveness differs from purely a self-help strategy used to feel better. One may initially choose to forgive to decrease anger and other negative emotions, but during the process, a focus on the offender begins to occur. In addition, one cannot wish well or hope to reunite with a tornado or cancer, as we may do with an individual. Instead of forgiving a natural disaster or disease, it makes more sense to talk about accepting, or moving beyond the pain associated with such events. Thompson and Snyder’s (2003) definition of one’s attachment to the offender or situation becoming less negative and more neutral can be compared to how one may feel less angry after going out for a run or punching a pillow. Although anger has decreased and one may feel more neutral toward an offender, whether forgiveness actually occurred is debatable. As stated earlier, no changes regarding how one views the offender as a person/situation worthy of respect have occurred, and thus, the moral component of forgiveness is absent. Thus, a major concern with the Forgiveness of Situations subscale relates to construct validity and the fact that this subscale seems to be measuring acceptance more than forgiveness. This is also true for one item in the Forgiveness of Others subscale, #12, which states, “When someone disappoints me, I can eventually move past it”. One can move past an injury without any change in thoughts, feelings, or behaviors toward the offender. Moving past something does not mean that forgiveness has occurred. According to Enright and Fitzgibbons (2000), forgiveness is a moral virtue because it includes qualities such as empathy, compassion, and generosity. Thus, the HFS represents Thompson and Snyder’s (2003) understanding of forgiveness as an adaptive method of coping following an injury, but not the construct of forgiveness agreed upon by most researchers in the field. At the time the HFS was developed, only two dispositional forgiveness measures included the assessment of forgiveness of self as well as assessing forgiveness of others (Thompson et al. 2005). According to Thompson and Snyder (2003), the Heartland Forgiveness Scale is short, reliable, and the most comprehensive measure of the disposition to grant forgiveness. Thompson and ­Snyder (2003) identify the HFS as a valid assessment of forgiveness. However, as highlighted above, based on a distorted conceptualization of forgiveness, the construct validity of the scale is weak. S­ pecifically, the “Forgiveness of Situations Subscale” is not truly assessing forgiveness, but a concept more like acceptance. As Fernández-Capo et al. (2017) emphasize, the evidence supporting construct validity of forgiveness measures is not always strong or thoroughly investigated. Because of validity issues concerning the “Forgiveness of Situations Subscale”, Worthington et al. (2015) only evaluated the “Forgiving of Self Subscale” in their review and analysis of forgiveness measures. Thompson et al. (2005) propose that forgiveness is a “coping process whereby people resolve the distress and dissonance created by events that violate their assumptions” (p. 339). They go on to state, “In forgiving, people turn their attention away from adverse life experiences and toward more satisfying aspects of their lives” (p. 339). Although this reframing may help a person feel better, it does not capture the moral component involved in forgiveness. There are many ways one can heal from a deep hurt but not all qualify as forgiveness. Thus, for the three subscales that make up the HFS, only the Forgiveness of Self subscale is recommended as a valid measure of forgiveness for research, therapy, and educational purposes.

8. Conclusion The increased interest in the psychology of interpersonal forgiveness and its connection to mental and physical health and moral and character education are both exciting and promising for individuals, students, schools, and society in general (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015; Rye et al. 2001). 457

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This chapter reviewed four popular self-report measures of forgiveness including three episodic assessments – the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (Subkoviak et al. 1995), the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (McCullough et al. 1998), and the Rye Forgiveness Scale (Rye et al. 2001) – and one dispositional assessment – the Heartland Forgiveness Scale (Thompson and Snyder 2003). Although all measures reported psychometrics illustrating adequate or strong validity, the conceptualization of forgiveness was found to be incomplete and/or distorted in the HFS, the TRIM-12, and the TRIM-18, potentially impacting the validity of these scales as well as the validity of research studies using these scales. As the variety of conceptualizations of forgiveness illustrates, there are many understandings of forgiveness. One’s definition of forgiveness also impacts ideas of how to measure forgiveness. Flawed definitions and measures can have serious implications for clients in therapy, results of research studies, and students in educational interventions. To develop a comprehensive and valid instrument, one must understand and recognize how forgiveness is more than just acceptance, indifference and/or letting go anger, revengeful feelings, thoughts, or behaviors. The uniqueness of forgiveness, as a way to heal after experiencing an injury or wrongdoing, is reflected in the moral component of forgiveness, which involves viewing the offender as a human being deserving of respect (Enright et al. 1998). Because forgiveness is so easily misunderstood by individuals in the general population, it is critical that those who conduct research, as well as mental health professionals and educators, communicate an accurate understanding of what forgiveness is and is not, expressed in both definitions and carefully chosen valid and reliable assessments. Even review articles evaluating forgiveness measures can be misleading in their analysis and recommendations. For example, in Fernández-Capo et al.’s (2017) review, the Heartland Forgiveness Scale is recommended as a valid instrument for the assessment of dispositional forgiveness due to the authors’ rating of ten out of ten on specific criteria and psychometric properties. This recommendation is concerning based on the inclusion of the Forgiving Situations subscale in the total HFS. There is no mention of validity concerns with this subscale or Thompson and Snyder’s (2003) conceptualization of forgiveness by Fernández-Capo et al. (2017), and thus, the validity of their recommendation can be questioned. Focusing on diverse cultures and wide representation of different populations outside of the western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) is greatly needed to improve external and ecological validity of current measures of forgiveness. Research on these measures can include participants from different social and economic contexts, such as rural vs. urban populations, different religious groups, and individuals of different ages and cultures. Research that is culturally and ecologically diverse, and expands beyond self-report assessment, can greatly enhance both the external and ecological validity of the current measures used to assess forgiveness. According to McCullough et al. (2000), improvement of forgiveness measures is critical for creating a sustainable future for the psychology of forgiveness, and improvement of forgiveness measures depends on a focus on the construct validity of the measure, specifically the moral aspect of forgiveness. This moral component is critical in distinguishing forgiveness from purely self-help strategies or other ways of healing. Future reviews of forgiveness measures need to focus on construct validity to determine if the definition of forgiveness represented in the literature includes this moral component.

References Brown, S. W., Gorsuch, R., Rosik, C. H., and Ridley, C. R. (2001) “The development of a scale to measure forgiveness,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 20(1): 40–52. Coyle, C. T., and Enright, R. D. (1997). “Forgiveness intervention with postabortion men,” Journal of ­Consulting and Clinical Psychology 65(6): 1042–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.65.6.1042 DeShea, L. (2007) “Measuring forgiveness,” In W. Malcom, Decourxille, K. Belicki (Eds.), Women’s ­Reflections on the Complexities of Forgiveness, New York: Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group: 21–38

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The Measurement of Forgiveness Enright, R. D. (2001).  Forgiveness Is a Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Enright, R. D., & Fitzgibbons, R. P. (2000). Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10381-000 Enright, R. D., & Fitzgibbons, R. P. (2015). Forgiveness Therapy: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/14526-000 Enright, R. D., and The Human Development Study Group. (1991) “The moral development of ­forgiveness,” In W. Kurtines and J. Gewirtz (Eds.), Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum: 123–52 Enright, R. D., Freedman, S., and Rique, J. (1998) “The psychological of interpersonal forgiveness,” In R. D. Enright and J. North (Eds.), Exploring Forgiveness, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press: 46–62 Enright, R. D., and Rique, J. (2004) The Enright Forgiveness Inventory Sampler Set Manual, Instrument, and Scoring Guide, Menlo Park, CA: Mind Garden. Enright, R., Rique, J., Lustosa, R., Song, M. J. Y., Komoski, M. C., Batool, I., Bolt, D. Sung, H. J., Huang, S. T., Park, H., Leer-Salvesen, P. E., Andrade, T., Naeem, A., Viray, J., Costuna, E. (2021). Validating the enright forgiveness inventory – 30 (EFI-30): International studies. European Journal of Psychological Assessment. https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000649 Fernández-Capo, M., Fernández, S. R., Gamiz Sanfeliu, M., Gomez Benito, J., and Worthington, Jr., E. L. (2017) “Measuring forgiveness: A systematic review,” European Psychologist 22(4): 247–62 Fernández-Capo, M., Recoder, S., Gomez-Benito, J., Gamiz, M., Gual-Garcia, P., Diez, P., and ­Worthington, E. (2017) “Exploring the dimensionality and the psychometric properties of the ­T RIM-18 in the Spanish context,” Anales de Psicologia 33(3): 548–55. Fisher, K. (2019). Written communication. Freedman, S. (1998) “Forgiveness and reconciliation: The importance of understanding how they differ,” Counseling and Values 42: 200–16 Freedman, S., and Chang, W. C. R. (2010) “An analysis of a sample of the general population’s understanding of forgiveness: Implications for mental health counselors,” Journal of Mental Health Counseling 32(1): 5–34 Freedman, S. R., and Enright, R. D. (1996). “Forgiveness as an intervention goal with incest survivors,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 64(5): 983–992. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.64.5.983 Freedman, S. and Zarif kar, T. (2016). “The psychology of interpersonal forgiveness and guidelines for forgiveness therapy: What therapists need to know to help their clients forgive,” Spirituality in Clinical Practice 3(1): 45–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/scp0000087 Hargrave, T. D., and Sells, J. N. (1997) “The development of a forgiveness scale,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 2: 41–62 Hebl, J. H., and Enright, R. D. (1993) “Forgiveness as a psychotherapeutic goal with elderly females,” ­Psychotherapy 30: 658–67 Holmgren, M. R. (1993) “Forgiveness and the intrinsic value of persons,” American Philosophical Quarterly 30(4): 341–52 Legaree, TAI, Turner, J., and Lollis, S. (2007) “Forgiveness and therapy: A critical review of conceptualizations, practices, and values found in the literature,” Journal of Marital Family Therapy 33(2): 192–213 McCullough, M.E., Worthington, E.L., and Rachal, K. O. (1997) “Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73: 321–36 McCullough, M. E., Rachal, K. O., Sandage, S. J., Worthington, E. L., Brown, S. W., and Hight, T. L. (1998). “Interpersonal forgiveness in close relationships: II. Theoretical elaboration and measurement,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75: 1586–603. McCullough, M. E. (2000) “Forgiveness as human strength: Theory, measurement, and links to well-­ being,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 19: 43–55 McCullough, M. E., Hoyt, W. T., and Rachal, K. C. (2000). “What we know (and need to know) about assessing forgiveness constructs,” In M. E. McCullough, K. I. Pargament, and C. E. Thoresen (Eds.), Forgiveness: Theory, Research and Practice, New York: Guildford Press: 65–88 McCullough, M. E., and Hoyt, W. T. (2002) “Transgression-related motivational dispositions: Personality substrates of forgiveness and their links to the Big Five,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28: 1556–73 McCullough, M. E., Fincham, F. D., and Tsang, J. -A. (2003) “Forgiveness, forbearance and time: The temporal unfolding of transgression-related interpersonal motivations,” Journal of personality and Social Psychology 34: 540–57 McCullough, M. E., Luna, L. R., Berry, J. W., Tabak, B. A., and Bono, G. (2010) “On the form and function of forgiving: Modeling the time-forgiveness relationship and testing the valuable relationships hypothesis,” Emotion 10: 358–76.

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Suzanne Freedman Middleton, F. (2020). https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/types-of-validity/ North, J. (1987) “Wrongdoing and forgiveness,” Philosophy 42: 336–52 Rye, M.S. (1998). Evaluation of a secular and a religiously integrated forgiveness group therapy program for college students who have been wronged by a romantic partner. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH. Rye, M. S., Loiacono, D. M., Folck, C. D., Olszewski, B. T., Heim, T. A., and Madia, B. P. (2001) ­“Evaluation of the psychometric properties of two forgiveness scales,” Current Psychology 20: 260–77 Subkoviak, M. J., Enright, R. D., Wu, C., Gassin, E. A., Freedman, S., Olson, L. M., and Sarinopoulos, I. (1995) “Measuring interpersonal forgiveness in late adolescence and middle adulthood,” Journal of ­Adolescence 18: 641–55 Thompson, L. Y., & Synder, C. R. (2003). Measuring forgiveness. In S. J. Lopez & C. R. Snyder (Eds.), Positive psychological assessment: A handbook of models and measures (pp. 301–312). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10612-019 Thompson, L. Y., Snyder, C. R., Hoffman, L., Michael, S. T., Rasmussen, H. N., Billings, L.S., … Roberts, D. E. (2005) “Dispositional forgiveness of self, others, and situations,” Journal of Personality 73: 313–59 ­ otential Tittler, M. V. and Wade, N. G. (2019) “Forgiveness interventions from a multicultural perspective: P applications and concerns,” In L. E. Van Zyl and S. Rothmann Sr. (Eds.), Theoretical Approaches to Multi-cultural Positive Psychological Interventions, Nature, Switzerland: Springer Books: 179–99 Wade, S. H. (1989) “The development of a scale to measure forgiveness,” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena, CA. Wade, N. G., and Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2003) “Overcoming interpersonal offenses: Is forgiveness the only way to deal with unforgiveness?,” Journal of Counseling and Development 81: 343–53 Wade, N. G., Hoyt, W. T., Kidwell, J. E. M., and Worthington, Jr., E. L. (2014) “Efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions to promote forgiveness: A meta-analysis,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 82: 154–70 Worthington, E. L. Jr. (2005). Handbook of Forgiveness, New York: Brunner-Routledge. Worthington, E. L. Jr., Lavelock, C., Witvliet, C. V. O., Rye, M. S., Tsang, J.-A., and Toussaint, L. (2015) “Measures of forgiveness: Self- report, physiological, chemical, and behavioral indicators,” In G. Boyle, D. Saklofske, and G. Matthews (Eds.), Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs, Waltham, MA: Elsevier/Academic: 474–504

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34 FORGIVENESS Psychophysiological Side Effects and Pathways to Health Charlotte V. O. Witvliet, Alyssa D. Cheadle, and Lindsey M. Root Luna Forgiveness research in psychology continues to proliferate, with the majority of work focused on granting forgiveness from one person to another. Smaller bodies of work address receiving forgiveness from another or engaging in self-forgiveness. Within these domains, empirical investigations have included physiological variables, especially those associated with cardiac health (e.g., blood pressure, BP), cardiac regulation (e.g., heart rate variability, HRV), and stress responses (e.g., cortisol). Because this chapter emphasizes pathways to health, our review of the empirical literature focuses on variables that connect interpersonal forgiveness to health. To do so, we employ a working model that considers psychosocial ‘X’ variables, physiological pathway ‘Y’ variables, and health outcome ‘Z’ variables (Kemeny, 2003). This approach provides a framework to conceptualize how psychosocial variables such as forgiveness and unforgiveness may have an indirect impact on health (e.g., X Unforg/Forgorg→Y Physio→ZHealth). We also consider health models that illuminate important research directions to further develop the field.

1.  Forgiveness: Theoretical Foundations Forgiveness is a multifaceted moral response to a relational injustice that can be characterized by truth-telling and transformation with accountability (see Witvliet, 2020). Whether one is the victim or the transgressor, forgiveness can: (1) retain a focus on the humanity of the person responsible—refusing to confuse the identity of the person with his or her wrongdoing, (2) honestly acknowledge the hurtful interpersonal injustice and its impact—without minimizing or excusing the wrong, (3) interpret the wrongdoing as evidence that the person responsible needs to experience positive change, and (4) desire the genuine good of the person who committed the injustice and those affected by it. When forgiveness is given to another person, this can involve a process of responding to the wrongdoer by supplanting resentment and retaliation toward the person with wishing him or her well, often desiring that person’s positive transformation with accountability. When forgiveness is sought, this can involve a process of reckoning with oneself as the wrongdoer and accountably responding to those impacted by one’s wrongdoing (e.g., owning one’s responsibility, acknowledging the impact of one’s actions/inactions, making amends, and undergoing positive transformation in oneself to ensure one does not repeat the injustice). When accountably engaging in self-forgiveness, the transgressor supplants self-condemnation with positive transformation such as engaging in the humble change and repair responses just described to reckon with and root out one’s wrongdoing, while honoring the humanity of those affected including oneself. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-42

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Substantial work on types of forgiveness and their definitions also clarifies that forgiveness can be a process that unfolds over time, that forgiveness can hinge on one’s worldview-guided commitments, that it can involve a decision and/or change of heart, and that genuine forgiveness may occur with or without overt language of forgiveness. Forgiving someone does not necessarily entail full relational reconciliation or restoration of the wrongdoer to a prior role or position because these processes require additional features of safety and accountability within the dyadic or communal context (see Witvliet, 2020). The psychosocial processes engaged by those who have been wronged and by those who have committed wrongdoing can be embodied physically. A hurtful injustice is often perceived as an interpersonal stressor, activating stress responses that are experienced psychologically and ­physiologically. If unforgiveness is sustained over time, the associated psychological and physical processes are more likely to contribute to adverse health consequences. Conversely, to the extent that forgiveness fosters positive emotions, health behaviors, and social behaviors, forgiveness may also have positive health implications. However, we wish to make clear that forgiveness is not merely a stress management strategy. Nor do we see forgiveness as the only response to interpersonal injustice that has stress-reducing side effects. Furthermore, we also wish to emphasize the importance of safety. Both morally and with regard to biopsychosocial health consequences, it is of utmost importance that injustices are halted, perpetrators are accountable, and those who have experienced injustice live in freedom from ongoing harm. Indeed, all relationship partners are more likely to flourish when forgiveness occurs in the context of relational, psychological, and physical safety. In this chapter, we review the published, peer-reviewed research on forgiveness with relevant physiological findings that may serve as pathways to health outcomes. To do so, we focus on the connections between unforgiveness (X U ) and forgiveness (X F) with physiological and biochemical (Y Physio) variables and health (ZHealth) variables. For a review of studies measuring additional variables (e.g., facial EMG), readers are directed to Witvliet (2020); for self-report and physiological measures of forgiveness, see Worthington et al. (2014); for clinical applications of psychophysiology studies, see Witvliet and Root Luna (2018); for a handbook on forgiveness and health, see Toussaint, Worthington, and Williams (2015). As the field of forgiveness, psychophysiology, and health has developed, various biopsychosocial frameworks have advanced conceptualizations of potential pathways to health. In the following sections, we will focus on the relationship of unforgiveness and forgiveness to other psychosocial variables, the association of psychosocial to physiological variables, and the pathways from these physiological variables to health outcomes.

2.  Forgiveness and Health-Relevant Psychosocial Variables: X→X Connections Unforgiveness (XU ) and forgiveness (X F) may be linked to health through their connections to other psychosocial, or X, factors which are, in turn, linked with physiological and biochemical (Y Physio) variables and health (ZHealth) variables. Potential psychosocial pathways to health outcomes include stress, positive emotions, social support, and health behaviors. First, forgiveness is theorized to promote good health by reducing stress (Worthington & Scherer, 2004). Conversely, unforgiveness itself could be a cause of stress through interpersonal conflict and related emotions such as hostility and anger which are, in turn, associated with poor health outcomes including cardiovascular disease and mortality (Miller, Smith, Turner, Guijarro, & Hallet, 1996). Forgiveness may reduce the stress of unforgiveness and prevent or reduce these poor outcomes (X F→X U↔XStress→Y Physio→ZHealth). Furthermore, forgiveness may replace negative, aroused emotions with more positive, calm, prosocial emotions (see Witvliet & Root Luna, 2018), as found in the reviewed psychophysiology 462

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studies. The emotion regulation literature has shaped methodological and interpretive approaches in this research. For example, researchers have used experiments to investigate cognitive reappraisal strategies associated with forgiveness (e.g., compassionate reappraisal, benefit-focused reappraisal) contrasted with suppression as a coping effort to down-regulate negative emotion and rumination—which is associated with stress responses (e.g., Witvliet, DeYoung, Hofelich, & DeYoung, 2011; Witvliet, Hofelich Mohr, Hinman, & Knoll, 2015) as well as sleep delays, disturbances, and difficulties due to intrusive images and thoughts about the offense (Witvliet, Blank, & Gall, 2022). In addition to undoing the adverse effects of unforgiveness, the positive and prosocial emotions that arise from emotion regulation or forgiveness experiences may eventuate in positive impacts on health (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Furthermore, trait forgiveness as well as related positive, prosocial emotions may be associated with greater social support or more social integration (X SS). Social support and integration are generally beneficial to health (Cohen, 2004). Thus, by maintaining or increasing social support and integration, forgiveness—and other resulting positive and prosocial emotions—may buffer or promote health (X F↔XSS→Y Physio→ZHealth). Supporting this view, Webb, Hirsch, Visser, and Brewer (2013) demonstrated that perceived social support mediated associations of forgiveness of self and others with physical health status, mental health status, and psychological distress. Another potential mechanism of the associations of forgiveness and unforgiveness with health is through health behaviors (X HBx) such as physical activity, sleep, diet, substance use, and medical regimen adherence. Various studies suggest that forgiveness is associated with better health behaviors which are, in turn, associated with better health including lower disease incidence and mortality. For instance, forgiveness may be associated with lower use of substances or better sleep, both of which promote health. Webb and colleagues demonstrated that a composite measure of health behaviors (including diet, physical activity, sleep, and seeking health care) mediated associations of forgiveness of others and self-forgiveness with somatic symptoms and mental health status (Webb et al., 2013). Though this study provided evidence that health behaviors may be a mechanism of associations of forgiveness and health, additional studies are needed to identify which behaviors are most potent or relevant. In a recent study of nationally representative adults, sleep quality and quantity mediated the associations of both forgiveness of others and self-forgiveness with health (Toussaint, Gall, Cheadle, & Williams, 2020). Given the strong associations of sleep and health outcomes, if forgiveness impacts sleep, it could be an important behavioral pathway through which forgiveness influences health. Additionally, several studies have suggested that dimensions of forgiveness are related to other health behaviors including medication use (Lawler-Row, ­K arremans, Scott, Edlis-Matityahou, & Edwards, 2008), smoking and alcohol use (Webb & Jeter, 2015), and seeking health care (Lawler et al., 2003). Because health-related behaviors may pose risks to or protect health, they may explain the associations of unforgiveness and forgiveness with health outcomes (XU/F↔X HBx→Y Physio→ZHealth). Future studies are needed to substantiate claims that stress reduction, positive and negative emotions, social support, and health behaviors mediate the relationship between forgiveness and health outcomes.

3.  The Physiology of Unforgiveness and Forgiveness: X→Y Connections The forgiveness-health association can also be understood by examining health-relevant ­physiological or biochemical (Y) factors. Researchers have designed studies that provide windows into the physiological processes that unfold in real time during and after conditions associated with unforgiveness and forgiveness. Some designs have included interviews that allow participants to talk about interpersonal injustices and their responses to the people they believe should be held accountable. Physiology may be measured at different points during and after the interview to provide repeated snapshots of bodily responses. Other designs have used mental imagery 463

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related to the offense so that heartbeat by heartbeat, millisecond by millisecond measures of ­continuous physiological change could be documented as real-time processes, giving perspective on the bodily implications of adopting different responses to one’s offender. Mental imagery mimics the internal cognitive and affective responses people have as they process lived experiences and possible responses to them. These real-time research methods allow for linking the psychological (X) and physiological (Y Physio) variables directly and can form the basis for theorizing pathways to health (ZHealth) outcomes if such responses are sustained over time. Thus, assessments of unforgiving and forgiving states are valuable. However, it is more likely that when such states come to characterize a person’s responses—as a disposition or trait—that associations with health will be identifiable.

3.1.  Cardiovascular Patterns: Unforgiveness and Forgiveness 3.1.1.  Blood Pressure and Heart Rate Interview methods have pointed to the overarching inverse association between forgiveness and cardiovascular measures deemed relevant to health: blood pressure, heart rate, and heart rate × systolic blood pressure (rate pressure product). Collectively, these interview studies show that trait and state forgiveness had inverse relationships with cardiovascular activity, and that the nature of the forgiveness granted also mattered. Cardiovascular variables were measured during interviews about real-life betrayals that college students experienced from a partner/friend and a parent (Lawler et al., 2003). States of forgiveness toward offenders and trait-like personality measures of forgivingness were shown to be inversely associated with systolic BP, diastolic BP, and mean arterial pressure measured repeatedly during interviews. Additionally, a cardiac stress measure that indicates myocardial oxygen demand—rate pressure product—had an inverse relationship to state and trait forgiveness levels. Consistent with these findings, a subsequent study by Lawler-Row and colleagues (2008) found that state forgiveness levels had an inverse relationship with heart rate and with self-reported physical symptoms. Further, trait forgiveness levels had an inverse relationship with BP and rate pressure product. At both the state and trait levels, outwardly directed anger was a mediator of the associations between forgiveness and heart rate-based measures. In a marital discussion study, one partner was randomly selected to be in the victim role, and the couple conversed about a real-life transgression in the relationship (Hannon, Finkel, Kumashiro, & Rusbult, 2012). After eight minutes of discussion, partners separately reviewed and coded conciliatory behaviors—construed as forgiveness-oriented behavior if shown by the victim, or amends-oriented if shown by the transgressor. Forty minutes later, after engaging in unrelated tasks, blood pressure was assessed in each partner. Transgressors’ systolic and diastolic blood pressure corresponded inversely to victims’ forgiveness-oriented behaviors. This is the first in vivo dyadic forgiveness study with cardiovascular measures showing later reductions in blood pressure or any cardiac measure. How people approach forgiveness—as a response of moral love or of moral obligation—may be relevant for cardiovascular response patterns. Specifically, Huang and Enright (2000) conducted interviews using a paired samples analysis of Taiwanese men who differed in their motivations for forgiving. When examined at the start of the interview, forgiving out of moral love (vs. obligation) was associated with lower systolic BP. A minute into the interview, forgiving out of moral love (vs. obligation) was associated with both lower diastolic and systolic BP. This suggests that approaching forgiveness as a gift to be given unconditionally out of love has an associated benefit for BP. Imagery studies have been designed to collect data throughout the duration of the imagery periods and sometimes during the subsequent recovery periods. A series of studies measured 464

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cardiac variables during unforgiving rumination about the hurt of an interpersonal offense as well as alternative approaches including reappraisal, suppression, and distraction. Within repeated measures designs, rumination about one’s interpersonal offense consistently corresponded to cardiovascular patterns that indicated sympathetic activation and impaired parasympathetic activity. In the first of these imagery studies (Witvliet, Ludwig, & Vander Laan, 2001), offense rumination and grudge-holding against a real-life offender were associated with more negative and aroused emotion (e.g., anger, fear) as well as heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance (i.e., sweat) elevations (an indicator of sympathetic nervous system activation). By contrast, the empathy and forgiveness imagery was associated with more forgiveness and positivity, less negative and aroused emotion, and reliably less reactive BP, heart rate, and skin conductance. This study showed that the activation of the sympathetic nervous system by unforgiving vs. forgiving conditions occurred both during imagery and the recovery periods during which participants engaged in a relaxation task. Similarly, heart rate was higher for the unforgiving imagery and recovery periods compared to their forgiving counterparts. The mean arterial blood pressure elevations for unforgiving conditions were evident during imagery only. An additional study provided self-report, heart rate, rate pressure product, and skin conductance evidence associated with forgiveness (Witvliet et al., 2008). Specifically, conditions that included forgiving (vs. not forgiving) were associated with less negative and aroused emotion, lower sympathetic nervous system activation (skin conductance levels) during imagery, lower myocardial oxygen demand (rate pressure product scores) during imagery, and lower heart rate during imagery and recovery periods. The design of this study was more complex, investigating forgiving vs. not forgiving, crossed with three different justice outcomes to a burglary scenario (restorative justice, retributive justice, no justice). Interactions added nuance to the interpretive picture. In the absence of forgiveness, retribution vs. a no-justice outcome decreased rate pressure product scores during imagery and recovery periods—suggesting retribution imagery may reduce cardiac stress more than imagery of an offender who is not held accountable when forgiveness is not engaged. In the absence of forgiveness, restorative justice imagery was also associated with lower skin conductance levels compared to retributive justice. Because skin conductance is an indicator of sympathetic nervous system activation, this result suggests that retributive justice alone activated the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight response) to a greater extent than restorative justice imagery. Overall, the self-report data in this study showed that restorative justice often prompted response patterns similar to those generated by forgiving responses, and forgiving responses were associated with lower heart rate and cardiac stress. A follow-up study further examined forgiveness and cardiovascular implications of experiencing an offender’s accountable responses—receiving an apology, restitution, both, or neither— from the perpetrator in a burglary scenario (Witvliet, Root Luna, Worthington, & Tsang, 2020). ­Apology and restitution each showed main effects of increasing forgiveness. Similar to lab-­induced offense studies, this imagery study found that receiving an apology (with or without restitution) calmed heart rate during imagery while reducing myocardial oxygen demand (rate pressure products) during imagery and recovery periods. Readers may wonder whether forgiveness imagery differs from distraction regarding its effects on the cardiovascular system. Larsen and colleagues (2012) conducted such a study, randomly assigning 202 participants to one of three conditions: angry rumination about their offender, distraction through reliving their weekend, or imagery of forgiving their offender. This investigation found that angry rumination was associated with higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure compared to the other groups, although heart rate did not show this difference. Later in the study, participants could engage in an open-ended way of reliving their offense that focused on their emotions. Forgiving imagery not only had an immediate effect of lowering blood pressure but also was associated with the lowest systolic and diastolic blood pressure of the three groups during the 465

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later task. Thus, the immediate effect of rumination was to activate blood pressure responses to a greater extent than forgiveness and distraction, but the longer-term effect of forgiveness was to decrease blood pressure responses to subsequent emotional recall of the offense. In sum, whereas distraction had an immediate effect on blood pressure compared to rumination, forgiveness had both an immediate and a sustained effect on blood pressure. The body of work assessing blood pressure and heart rate shows that unforgiveness toward a real-life offender escalates cardiovascular reactivity, whereas forgiveness reliably calms cardiovascular responding. Furthermore, the beneficial heart rate effects of forgiveness versus unforgiveness lingered into recovery periods (Witvliet et al., 2001), with blood pressure benefits found during later recollections of the offense (Larsen et al., 2012). Provided that victims are safe, forgiving responses (X F) rather than hurt and angry responses (X U ) over time may have buffering effects on physiology (Y HR, Y BP), thereby protecting their cardiovascular health (ZHealth).

3.1.2.  Heart Rate Variability (HRV) A set of programmatic imagery studies was also developed to examine the cardiovascular implications of emotion regulation approaches that may foster and impede forgiveness. These studies primarily focused on a cardiac regulation variable, HRV, because the high-frequency component of the power spectrum generated by ECG R-R intervals over two-minute periods provides a window into parasympathetic innervation to the heart (Task Force, 1996). This variable is crucial for self-regulation, as emphasized in Kemp, Koenig, and Thayer’s (2017) Neurovisceral Integration Model across the Continuum of Time. This model emphasizes that neural networks involved in cognitive and emotional regulation connect the heart to the brain through the vagus nerve. Higher HRV is an indicator of the functional self-regulatory neural network which supports flexible and adaptive responding to emotional stimuli whereas lower HRV reflects reduced functionality and impaired cognitive and emotional regulation (Park & Thayer, 2014). Thus, forgiveness studies have measured emotion regulation and HRV. To the extent that conditions are associated with reduced HRV, this indicates dysregulation, whereas conditions with higher HRV levels or those matching relaxation baselines are associated with greater regulation. To the extent that unforgiving responses (X U ) are associated with decreased HRV (YHRV ), if sustained over time, chronic parasympathetic impairment would be associated with adverse health outcomes (ZHealth). Several studies have associated offense-related rumination with impaired parasympathetic indicators of cardiac regulation. Specifically, when victims ruminated about a real-life offense in contrast to a relaxation baseline, their HRV levels reliably decreased (Witvliet et al., 2011; Witvliet, Knoll, Hinman, & DeYoung, 2010). Similarly, when transgressors ruminated about a real-life offense they committed against another person compared to a relaxation baseline, their parasympathetic response—indicated by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) which is similar to HRV—also reliably decreased. The studies of victim responses showed that engaging in any compassionate reappraisal of one’s transgressor was associated with HRV that did not differ from relaxation levels (Witvliet et al., 2010, 2011). One of these studies also assessed a benefit-focused reappraisal approach to one’s reallife experience as the victim of the transgression (Witvliet et al., 2010). Benefit finding—which was associated with the highest levels of gratitude—prompted reliably higher HRV than rumination. Compassion reliably reduced heart rate, but not HRV, compared to rumination. Compassionate reappraisal HRV was equivalent to relaxation baseline levels. Another of these studies assessed not only rumination and compassion but also suppression from the victim perspective. Witvliet and colleagues (2011) found that suppressing one’s experience and expression of negative emotions about an offense reduced heart rate compared to rumination whereas compassion did not. Both suppression and compassionate reappraisal were 466

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associated with HRV equivalent to relaxation baseline levels, whereas rumination about one’s experience of an offense reliably reduced HRV in comparison to relaxation levels.

3.1.3.  Cardiac Pre-ejection Data Two studies of forgiveness assessed cardiac pre-ejection in an effort to understand the role of this sympathetic nervous system-driven cardiac response. One study used a between-subjects design to test the effects of learning either suppression or compassionate reappraisal as an immediate response to rumination about the real-life experience of having been wronged by another person (Witvliet et al., 2015). Participants who were randomly assigned to learn compassionate reappraisal (vs. negative emotion suppression) as an immediate follow-up to rumination increased their empathy, forgiveness, and positive emotion; they also showed lower sympathetic nervous system innervation to the heart, as indicated by their cardiac pre-ejection period data. A study by da Silva, Witvliet, and Riek (2016) focused on the transgressor’s perspective. They measured cardiac responses as participants ruminated about a real-life injustice they committed in comparison to three conditions that included humble repentance: imagery of being begrudged by one’s victim, receiving forgiveness from the victim, or forgiving oneself. Imagery of receiving ­forgiveness from another or engaging in self-forgiveness had similar physiological effects—­decreasing heart rate and increasing parasympathetic regulation of the heart compared to ruminating about one’s own wrongdoing, but not affecting the sympathetic indicator of cardiac pre-ejection period patterns.

3.1.4.  Myocardial Perfusion Defect in Heart Patients The aforementioned studies were conducted with non-medical populations, whereas Waltman and colleagues (2009) studied male heart patients who were randomly assigned to a control therapy or a forgiveness intervention (ten-week duration) with follow-up. Participants underwent SPECT imaging of the heart as they recalled real-life interpersonal offenses. Findings showed increased self-reported forgiveness from pretest to both posttest and follow-up, with the cardiac data showing a decrease in myocardial perfusion defects of follow-up compared to pretest. To the extent that medical outcomes change in relationship to forgiveness, this study suggests that self-­ reported forgiveness changes may need to be sustained over time in order for the health outcome to be manifest.

3.2.  Cortisol: Unforgiveness and Forgiveness Several studies have examined forgiveness-related responses in connection to cortisol, a stress hormone. The first study found that trait forgivingness scores were inversely associated with salivary cortisol levels at baseline and after a lab task of imagining typical scenes from a relationship (Berry & Worthington, 2001). Additionally, participants who were in an unhappy relationship and were randomly assigned to the added stress of a blood draw (vs. not) showed higher cortisol levels. Finally, this study found that trait forgivingness was inversely associated with self-reported health. Cortisol levels have also been assessed using longitudinal methods (McCullough, Orsulak, Brandon, & Akers, 2007). Salivary cortisol samples taken across several weeks were related to levels of rumination about the real-life offense, which occurred in the week prior to the study. When participants engaged in greater than typical levels of rumination about that wrongdoing, their salivary cortisol levels also exceeded their typical levels. Additionally, participants’ fear of their transgressors mediated this rumination-cortisol relationship. 467

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Another study indicated an inverse relationship between forgiveness and plasma cortisol, with an important mediator (Tabak & McCullough, 2011). Women simulated giving a speech to their real-life transgressor and evaluated their offenders’ personalities. To the extent that the transgressor was perceived as agreeable, forgiveness levels were associated with lower levels of the stress hormone. Finally, a study focused on the first half year of marriage examined the effects of two randomly assigned nine-hour interventions compared to a test-retest control group (Worthington et al., 2015). The marital enrichment interventions were Forgiveness and Reconciliation through Experiencing Empathy (FREE) or Handling Our Problems Effectively (HOPE). Both interventions were found to increase positive self-reports and decrease cortisol from pre-test to one month post-treatment in comparison to the control group. Collectively, these studies point to an association between forgiveness-related responses (X U/F) and cortisol (YCort).

3.3.  Immune Markers: Unforgiveness and Forgiveness Given theoretical approaches situating unforgiveness as stressful and forgiveness as one possible ­pathway to resolving stress, researchers have theorized that unforgiveness and forgiveness may impact the body’s immune response, including inflammatory processes. For instance, empirical research indicates that hostility, particularly cynical distrust, correlates with inflammation among adults (e.g., Interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, fibrinogen; Ranjit et al., 2007). Therefore, inasmuch as forgiveness mitigates hostility, trait forgivingness may impact inflammatory markers (Worthington & Scherer, 2004). In the only published study supporting this connection, Seybold, Hill, Neumann, and Chi (2001) examined a wide range of psychological and physiological variables as potential correlates with forgiveness using scales that assessed levels of difficulty forgiving others and oneself. Difficulty forgiving others was associated with hematocrit (i.e., blood viscosity) and difficulty forgiving oneself was related to white blood cell counts, a marker of immune activity. Additionally, difficulty forgiving others inversely correlated with lipoprotein toxicity preventing activity (TxPA) levels and directly correlated with T-helper/T-cytotoxic cell ratios. However, no statistically significant relationships were found between reported forgiveness and overall levels of other immune cells including lymphocytes, neutrophils, monocytes, activated T-cells, T-helper cells, T-cytotoxic cells, B-cells, NK cells, or activated T-cells. If forgiveness and unforgiveness (XU/F) have associations with immune activity (YImmune), this could impact overall health (ZHealth).

3.4.  Overall physiological findings Two recent meta-analyses have made an effort to synthesize many of the findings described above. Rasmussen, Stackhouse, Boon, Comstock, and Ross (2019) examined the connection between forgiveness and health indicators (e.g., blood pressure, cortisol, heart rate, general physical symptoms, pain). Two of these indicators (i.e., physical symptoms, doctor visits) had small, reliable associations. Stronger and more reliable associations were found between forgiveness and somatization, blood pressure, and heart rate or heart problems. All of the other physical indicators they reviewed were nonsignificant (i.e., cortisol, alcohol and drug use, pain, infection). Lee and Enright (2019) defined physical health outcomes broadly in their meta-analysis (i.e., physiological markers, health outcomes, self-reported health). Among the 128 studies included, a small, reliable association between forgiveness and physical health emerged.

4.  Forgiveness and Health: X→(Y→)Z The preceding summary of how forgiveness and unforgiveness are associated with physiological effects is particularly important in trying to understand how and why these factors are linked 468

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with health outcomes. In our model, physiological pathways (Y Phys variables) can connect the p­ sychosocial X variables of forgiveness (X F), unforgiveness (XU ), and related states and traits to health outcomes (ZHealth). Forgiveness and unforgiveness have been associated with health outcomes in both healthy (Cheadle & Toussaint, 2015) and patient populations (Friedberg, Tuvia, & Cha, 2015) assessing mortality (Krause & Hayward, 2013; Toussaint, Owen, & Cheadle, 2012), cardiovascular disease (Lawler et al., 2003; Lawler et al., 2005; Toussaint & Cheadle, 2009a; Waltman et al., 2009), physical health symptoms (Lawler et al., 2003; Lawler et al., 2005; Lawler-Row et al., 2008), and mental health outcomes such as somatic symptoms (Krause & Ellison, 2003; Webb, Toussaint, Conway-Williams, 2012) and depression (Toussaint & Cheadle, 2009b; for a full review types of forgiveness and related health outcomes, see Cheadle & Toussaint, 2015; cf. Lee & Enright, 2019). In a longitudinal study following female nurses in midlife over seven years, their responses to a single item about spiritually motivated forgiveness predicted their subsequent dietary decisions and psychosocial and mental health variables; however, no significant relationships were found for other health behaviors or outcomes (Long et al., 2020). In a meta-analysis of 19 studies examining self-forgiveness and health, Davis et al. (2015) found an overall moderate association (r = .32), which was stronger in college samples than community samples, among those without rather than with specific psychological and physical diagnoses, and among younger participants. The associations of unforgiveness and forgiveness with health can be understood as part of a larger impact of psychological stress on the body. The health influences of stress are broad and have been explained through various overlapping physiological processes, including ­hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis function and release of cortisol, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity, cardiovascular reactivity, HRV, immune function, and inflammation. Though the systems responsible for these processes are interrelated, here we assess the potential of individual physiological (Y) factors to contribute to the associations of forgiveness or unforgiveness and health by examining the importance to health of each physiological factor associated with forgiveness (as reviewed above).

4.1. Cortisol Cortisol is a hormone released by the HPA axis in response to stress. It is helpful in preparing the body for the fight or flight responses necessary in the face of potential physical danger by stimulating the release of glucose; however, its physiological actions are generally unhelpful in the face of psychological stressors. This can increase risks of health consequences like cognitive decline, anxiety and depression, obesity, sleep disturbance, and cardiovascular disease. In some cases, repeated triggering of the HPA stress response can lead it to underperform which can increase risk for immune diseases. These are all potential health consequences (ZHealth) of the impacts of unforgiveness (XU ) and forgiveness (X F) on the HPA axis stress response (YHPA).

4.2.  Nervous system control Within the autonomic division of the peripheral nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system is responsible for preparing the body for action. It drives responses to significant stressors and strong emotions, and it meets the demands of physical activity. Thus, the sympathetic nervous system plays a role in the physiological stress response. The parasympathetic nervous system functions reciprocally to the sympathetic nervous system. Because of their shared contributions to involuntary physiological functions, some variables are markers of activation of these systems. Heightened skin conductance is considered a marker of increased sympathetic nervous system activity, whereas elevated heart rate variability (HRV) is considered an indicator of increased 469

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parasympathetic nervous system activity. Other autonomic markers of stress with health-relevant consequences include heart rate and blood pressure.

4.3.  Heart rate variability (HRV) Forgiveness and unforgiveness are associated with HRV (Witvliet et al., 2011; Witvliet et al., 2010). In addition to being an indicator of self-regulation and emotional function, Kemp and colleagues (2017) hypothesize in their Neurovisceral Integration Model that HRV may be a link between psychosocial experiences and health outcomes. HRV is a marker of vagus nerve function, or vagal tone. The vagus nerve regulates the parasympathetic nervous system and impacts several physiological processes that are related to stress reactivity such as sympathetic nervous system activation, cardiovascular reactivity, inflammation, HPA axis activation, and glucose metabolism (Kemp et al., 2017). These processes are associated with poor health, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and, ultimately, mortality. Because unforgiveness and forgiveness are associated with HRV, this may be a pathway through which they impact health and illness (e.g., diabetes, X U/F↔YHRV→Zdiabetes).

4.4.  Cardiovascular health Physiological and biochemical risk factors for cardiovascular disease include high blood pressure, high resting heart rate, high cholesterol, and chronic inflammation. Forgiveness and unforgiveness have been shown to be associated with cardiovascular disease (Lawler et al., 2003; Lawler et al., 2005; Toussaint & Cheadle, 2009a; Waltman et al., 2009). Forgiveness and unforgiveness have also been shown to be associated with the aforementioned physiological and biochemical risk factors for cardiovascular disease, particularly blood pressure and heart rate (Hannon et al., 2012; Lawler-Row et al., 2008; Witvliet et al., 2001; Witvliet et al., 2008). Increased blood pressure and heart rate are indicators of cardiovascular reactivity. The cardiovascular reactivity hypothesis suggests that repeated heightened cardiovascular reactivity to stressors is associated with higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease, particularly hypertension (Phillips & Hughes, 2011). Higher blood pressure and heart rate both cause more blood to flow through blood vessels. This increased volume can cause wear and tear on the blood vessels thereby causing them to thicken and to enable plaques to develop in damaged areas of the vessel walls. Thickened and damaged blood vessels will be less dynamic, leading to reduced blood flow and vulnerability to aneurysm development. When blood flow is reduced, the heart must work harder to supply oxygen and nutrients to the body’s tissues. This extra effort can damage the heart, leading to coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure. If people are unforgiving routinely (e.g., trait unforgiveness), they are likely to experience high heart rate and/or blood pressure consistently, whereas people high in trait forgiveness are unlikely to experience these elevations. Because such elevations are risk factors for cardiovascular disease, it is likely that forgiveness and unforgiveness have their associations with cardiovascular disease through these physiological processes (e.g., blood pressure, X U/F→Y BP→ZCVD).

4.5.  Immune system function and inflammation The immune system is responsible for ridding the body of non-self pathogens like viruses and bacteria, and it has both general mechanisms (i.e., nonspecific immunity) and actions specific to particular pathogens (i.e., specific immunity). The components of the immune system include B-cells, T-cells, and natural killer (NK) cells; cells (all lymphocytes); neutrophils and eosinophils (phagocytes); monocytes; and other cells and cellular messengers, including cytokines, that 470

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regulate immune mechanisms, including the inflammatory response. Low numbers of these cells in the face of an immune threat can indicate an underperforming immune response; high numbers of these cells can indicate an active infection or threat. Inflammation is one type of immune response. Though adaptive for physical stressors such as illness, infection, or injury, inflammation can also be activated by psychosocial stressors. Chemical messengers called cytokines regulate the inflammatory response. Chronic activation of the inflammatory response is detrimental and can contribute to allostatic load and disease (Miller, Chen, & Cole, 2009). Though only one published study suggests that unforgiveness or forgiveness and related processes may be associated with immune responses including inflammation (i.e., Seybold et al., 2001), such a relationship is theoretically supported by research that shows robust associations between stress and immune function, including inflammation. To the extent that unforgiveness causes stress and forgiveness reduces stress (X U/F →X stress), we would expect unforgiveness to predict worse immune profiles and higher chronic inflammation whereas forgiveness would predict better immune profiles and lower inflammation (e.g., cytokine IL-6, X U/F →X stress→Y IL-6). Immune function is key for recovery from common viruses and bacterial infections as well as from more serious health threats, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Chronic inflammation is a risk factor for several diseases, including autoimmune conditions, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer progression (Glaser & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2005). Thus, unforgiveness and forgiveness could contribute to risk for or protection from these outcomes via immune function (e.g., X U/F →Y Inflammation→ZCancer and X U/F →Y T-Cells→Z HIV ). However, given the limited and mixed evidence, more research is needed to examine these theoretically indicated associations.

5.  Conclusion and Future Directions Forgiveness is a moral response to relational injustice that contrasts with unforgiving processes in ways that have physiological and health implications. To date, substantial evidence links unforgiveness to cardiovascular reactivity (HR, BP, and rate pressure products), with some evidence for sympathetic nervous system reactivity (skin conductance and cardiac pre-ejection periods), decreased parasympathetic nervous system engagement (HRV and RSA), elevated cortisol, and immune markers. By contrast, forgiveness-related responses buffer against stress reactivity and dysregulation while transforming emotion to become more positive, calm, and prosocial. These psychophysiological changes, along with as-yet-unstudied physiological measures that are part of the allostatic load model, likely serve as pathways to health outcomes. The concept of allostatic load has been a helpful model of how stress can impact physiological systems and, ultimately, health outcomes. Allostatic load is the cumulative consequence, or wear and tear, on the body’s systems from repeated physiological responses to stress (McEwen, 1998). Overall allostatic load predicts physical and cognitive decline as well as risk for cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and mortality over time ( Juster, McEwen, & Lupien, 2010). To assess allostatic load, biomarkers from the various body systems involved in and affected by the allostatic response are measured in combination ( Juster et al., 2010; Seeman, Singer, Rowe, ­Horwitz, & McEwen, 1997). These biomarkers typically include neuroendocrine (epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol, dehydroepiandrosterone or DHEA-S), metabolic (glycosylated hemoglobin or HbA1c, cholesterol), cardiovascular or respiratory (blood pressure, heart rate), anthropometric (waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index), and, in some cases, immune (cytokines and other inflammatory markers) measures. To the extent that unforgiveness and related processes are stressful and forgiveness reduces stress, we would expect them to be associated with allostatic load. However, thus far, there is strong evidence only for associations with cardiovascular markers and limited evidence for cortisol and immune markers. Thus, allostatic load (Y) remains an area ripe for future 471

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study that could clarify the mechanisms by which forgiveness (X F) and unforgiveness (X U ) are associated with health (ZHealth). The relational and moral nature of forgiveness connects it theoretically and empirically to prosocial processes. A potentially productive lens through which to consider the forgiveness-health relationship is eudaimonic (vs. hedonic) well-being. Eudaimonic well-being is deeper than positive affect (i.e., hedonic well-being), involves meaning and purpose, and is thought to be related to prosocial behaviors (Fredrickson et al., 2013). Though both eudaimonic and hedonic well-being are related to each other and have similar associations with positive affect, recent evidence suggests that they have distinct associations with gene expression, which could differentially impact physical health. Specifically, in a study of 80 healthy adults, eudaimonic well-being was associated with down-regulation of a transcriptional profile called the conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA; Fredrickson et al., 2013). CTRA is a stress-related response that involves increased proinflammatory gene expression and decreased antibody and antiviral gene expressions. Ongoing activation of this response, then, would increase risk for inflammatory conditions including cardiovascular diseases as well as risk for viral infection. Though CTRA likely evolved as an adaptive response to physical threats, activation from the perception of threats in the modern world is often psychosocial (Slavich & Cole, 2013). Because forgiveness is a relational and moral act that can have prosocial effects, it connects more closely to eudaimonic than hedonic well-being. Furthermore, forgiveness likely reduces perceptions of social threats, for example, through compassionate reappraisals of offenders (Witvliet et al., 2015). As such, forgiveness may be associated with gene expression profiles beneficial to health. Conversely, unforgiveness and rumination may be associated with increased CTRA expression and risk of poor health because these processes can function like social stressors. The associations of forgiveness and unforgiveness with CTRA expression would be a unique contribution to this burgeoning area of research. Thus far, research directly investigating genetic and allostatic load in connection with forgiveness is quite limited. Initial genetics research on forgiveness has shown that a genotype marker— the oxytocin receptor gene single nucleotide polymorphism rs53576—indirectly predicted state forgiveness of a real-life offender and the propensity to be forgiving via empathy (Witvliet, Root Luna, VanderStoep, Gonzalez, & Griffin, 2019). Future work remains to fruitfully integrate genetic and allostatic load variables in multi-method studies of forgiveness to understand better how and why forgiveness and unforgiveness are related to health.

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35 THE DEVELOPMENT OF FORGIVENESS Etienne Mullet

The studies on the development of forgiveness analyzed in this chapter are of three types: cross-sectional studies involving samples of children, adolescents, adults, and elderly people; studies involving at least one sample of children and/or adolescents; and studies involving parents and their offspring even when the latter were adults. We first discuss Piaget’s views on forgiveness and present Enright’s (1994) theory on the development of forgiveness. We then review (a) the developmental studies on willingness to forgive specific transgressions, (b) the studies that examined the impacts of situational factors on willingness to forgive and their variations as a function of age, (c) the studies on the development of the disposition to forgive (or forgivingness), (d) the few studies directly comparing parents’ and offspring’s conceptualization and practice of forgiveness, and (e) several studies conducted in post-conflict settings (e.g., Uganda) that involved former child soldiers. Intervention studies conducted on young participants have not been reviewed in the current chapter.

1.  Early Work on the Development of Forgiveness The first mention of forgiveness in the developmental psychology literature can be traced back to Piaget’s (1932), in which he contrasted, mostly as a matter of illustration, the two concepts of justice – the focus of his book – and forgiveness. As forgiveness would imply a sense of ideal reciprocity, a complete understanding of this concept would be attained “when the behaviors that are considered as right are the behaviors which demonstrate infinite reciprocity” (p. 258). People forgive because they have been forgiven in the past and in order to be forgiven in the future. Owing to the complexity of the notion of infinite reciprocity, forgiveness should not be understood by young children. Darby and Schlenker (1982) reported an empirical study focused on children’s and adolescents’ reactions to apology. They used an analog design. Children aged 6–12 years were presented with short stories in which a pupil inadvertently bumped into another one. They were asked to indicate their reactions to the apologies (less blame and punishment, liking, and more forgiveness, but the children were not asked how they understood the term forgiveness). In all groups, the mean of more positive ratings toward the transgressor consistently increased as a function of the pupil’s apologies, from 4.30 out of 10 (no apologies) to 5.40 (“Excuse me”), to 6.40 (“I am sorry, I feel badly about this”), to 7.30 (the same, plus “Please let me help you”). In a second experiment, the consequences for the victim were more severe (the child was knocked to the ground, and apparently hurt), and the transgressor’s intent was sometimes bad. Among 12-year-olds, 476

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-43

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apologies had the same facilitating effect of a positive response, but among six-year-olds, they had no effect. Enright and his developmental psychology group (1989) presented the first developmental theory of forgiveness. Forgiveness would develop according to a series of six stages that parallel ­Kohlberg’s (1976) stages of moral development. They were called (a) revengeful forgiveness (e.g., I can forgive only if I can punish the offender to a similar degree), (b) conditional forgiveness (e.g., only if I can get back what was taken away from me), (c) expectational forgiveness (e.g., only if others put pressure on me), principled forgiveness (e.g., because my philosophy of life or my religion demand it), forgiveness as social harmony (e.g., because it restores harmony or good relations in society), and forgiveness as love (e.g., because it promotes a true sense of love). In order to test their model, Enright et al. (1989) presented US participants aged 9–25 years with two dilemmas borrowed from Kolberg (1976, e.g., the well-known druggist scenario) and slightly altered. A set of questions, devised to correspond with one and only one level of forgiveness development, was presented in an interview format (e.g., “Suppose the druggist gives Heinz lots of money. Will this make Heinz feel better? Will this help him to forgive?”). Nine- to tenyear-olds considered, on the average, that forgiveness can only occur after what had been taken away has been properly replaced or compensated; 15- to 16-year-olds considered that forgiveness can occur as a consequence of favorable attitudes expressed by close others, even if what had been taken away has not been restored; and college students and adults considered that forgiveness can occur as a consequence of religious or philosophical attitudes, without any intervention from the family or friends, even if restitution has not occurred. Responses from 12- to 13-year-olds were similar either to that of younger or that of older participants. Only seven adults expressed at least once a forgiveness-as-love attitude. Age and stage were strongly associated (.70) although substantial individual differences were observed within groups: at each age level, about 40% scored below or under the observed modal forgiveness level. No gender differences were observed. Forgiveness stage was also associated with moral development (.50). These findings have been subsequently replicated in a Taiwanese sample (Huang 1990, quoted in Enright et al. 1992) and in a Korean sample (Park and Enright 1997).

2.  The Enright Forgiveness Inventory The Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI) is derived from this model. It is an objective measure of the degree to which, after a transgression that has severely hurt a person, this person has forgiven the transgressor. It comprises three subscales of 20 items. Each subscale assesses one kind of reaction: affective (e.g., “I feel warm toward the other”), cognitive (e.g., “I think he or she is an annoyance”), and behavioral (e.g., “Regarding the person, I do or would show friendship”). Flanagan et al. (2012) presented US adolescents with (a) a questionnaire assessing their experience of bullying behavior either as victims or as aggressor, (b) a questionnaire assessing four types of coping strategies for bullying (conflict resolution, cognitive distancing, seeking advice and support, and revenge), (c) two questionnaires assessing social anxiety and self-esteem, and (d) the EFI for children. All forgiveness ratings were close to 3.00 (on a 1–5 scale); that is, participants neither strongly agree nor strongly disagree with statements indicating that, following aggression by peers, forgiveness usually occurred. Mean revenge rating was, however, lower: 2.33. Females’ forgiveness (revenge) ratings were slightly higher (lower) than males’ ratings. Forgiveness was mainly associated with recourse to conflict resolution strategies (.29), self-esteem (.23), and experience of victimization (–.21). Revenge was associated with bullying behavior (.34). Shourie and Kaur (2016) presented adolescents aged 16–18 years and living in Chandigarh, India, with questionnaires assessing gratitude, positive and negative affects, satisfaction with life and psychological well-being scales and with the EFI. The forgiveness score was about 3.20 among 477

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males and 3.30 among females; that is, neither very positive nor very negative. It was moderately associated with positive affects (.27), satisfaction with personal relationships (.26), purpose in life (.25), and personal growth (.24). Other studies have used similar recall-and-rate paradigms. Peets et al. (2013) asked Finnish adolescents aged 14 years to evoke hurtful experiences at school caused either by liked peers or by disliked peers. Participants were then asked about the time when the incident took place, whether it was the first time (or not), and how well they knew this peer. They were also asked to assess (a) the level of perceived hostility, (b) how angry and sad they felt and how deeply they were hurt, and (c) how much they ruminated about the incident. Finally, participants evaluated, using the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM; McCullough et al. 1997), the degree to which they endorsed avoidance and revenge goals. When the transgressor was a disliked peer, avoidance and revenge ratings were quite high, and both goals were strongly associated with perceived hostility, rumination, and anger. When the transgressor was a liked peer, however, avoidance and revenge ratings were lower, although both goals were similarly associated with perceived hostility and, to a lesser extent, anger. Examining separately adolescents’ reactions to transgressions in different relational contexts is therefore important. Van der Wal et al. (2014) asked Dutch children aged 9–11 years to recall an incident in which they felt hurt by one of their classmates (e.g., not being invited to a birthday party). They were then asked to rate (a) the previous level of closeness with this friend, (b) the perceived severity of the offense, and (c) using the TRIM, the extent to which the offense has been forgiven. They were subsequently presented with a computerized go/no-go task, which is a measure of executive control. The forgiveness mean rating was 4.46 (on a 1–7 scale). Among children with a high level of control, the forgiveness level was higher in the close-friend condition (M = 5.30) than in the not-so-close-friend condition (M = 3.90). Among children with a low level of control, forgiveness was not related to closeness (M = 4.20). These finding were replicated using a different measure of cognitive control (a Flanker task). The authors interpreted their findings by suggesting that control works in the service of relationship value. When the offender is a good friend, executive control, when available, is recruited in order to transform impulses into a softer response that would preserve the relationship. Van der Wal et al. (2016) placed Dutch children aged 9–13 years in the same condition as in the previous study. After recalling the incident, the children were presented with scales assessing well-being and self-esteem and with Maio et al.’s (2008) forgiveness scale. Forgiveness ratings were higher in the friend condition (M = 5.16 on a 1–10 scale) than in the non-friend condition (M = 3.62). In addition, the relationship between forgiveness and a composite measure of well-­ being was stronger in the friend condition (.30) than in the non-friend condition (.02). Similar findings were found when a behavioral measure of forgiveness was used, a measure in which participants had to give credits to each of their friends in the classroom, including the offender. The positive relationship between this behavioral measure and well-being (in the friend condition) was stronger among females than among males. Kurniati et al. (2017) asked Indonesian children aged 8–14 years to remember and describe a recently experienced interpersonal transgression involving a close friend. They were then ­presented with scales assessing rumination and with Worthington et al.’s (2007) Decisional and Emotional Forgiveness scales. Mean forgiveness ratings were 2.97 (decisional, on a 1–5 scale) and 2.70 (emotional). The forgiveness measures were strongly correlated (.63). They were negatively associated with rumination (from −.41 to −.47). In summary, among young adolescents, willingness to forgive an offense committed by a peer is neither very high nor very low. It strongly depends on the relational context in which the transgression has occurred. Among adolescents with a high level of cognitive control, forgiving friends seems to be much easier than forgiving non-friends, and the consequences of forgiveness, in terms 478

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of well-being, are positive. Among adolescents with a low level of cognitive control, however, there is, seemingly, no difference. Unsurprisingly, forgiveness is, among young adolescents, usually associated with conciliatory behaviors (and revenge with negative behaviors). Adolescents’ and their parents’ levels of willingness to forgive positively correlate.

3.  The Forgiveness Schema: From Adolescence to Older Age The works reviewed in the preceding point have demonstrated that multiple factors are taken into account when people come to forgive. The studies reported under the present point are concerned with a central problem: how are the factors found in these studies (e.g., apologies, relationship closeness, or others’ attitude) integrated to form an overall judgment of willingness to forgive? Is there a developmental trend in the way these factors are integrated? A schema is a cognitive organization that may be applied to more or less complex stimulus fields (Anderson 1996, p. 23). In the early study by Girard and Mullet (1997), the stimulus field was the set of circumstances depicting various transgressions. As in Darby and Schlenker (1982), participants were asked to put themselves in the victim’s place and express their willingness to forgive in each case. Adolescents, young, middle-aged, and older adults (age range: 15–96 years) were presented with 64 vignettes depicting a conflict at work. A sample scenario is the following: Suzan and Judith are sisters. They both worked in the same firm. Judith, who had been working in the firm for several years, asked for a promotion. Suzan, who was very talkative but not mean, disclosed some information about Judith’s professional life. Judith’s section head heard about this information and began to doubt her working qualities so he refused her promotion. Suzan, remorseful, felt really sorry about what happened and asked Judith to forgive her. Judith’s best friend, who knows Suzan well, also asked her to forgive her sister. Judith asked another section head for a promotion, again, which she has got at the present time. Right now, do you think that you would forgive Suzan, if you were Judith? Each scenario was composed as a function of six (orthogonal) factors inspired by Enright et al.’s (1989) model: (a) the degree of social proximity to the target (brother or sister versus colleague), (b) the degree of intent of the act (clear intent versus no intent), (c) the severity of consequences of the act (moderate consequences versus serious consequences), (d) apologies/contrition for the act (apologies versus no apologies), (e) attitudes of others (favorable attitude versus unfavorable attitude), and (f ) cancellation of consequences (consequences still affecting the victim versus consequences currently canceled). Willingness to forgive ratings were higher among elderly people (M = 7.90 on a 0–12 scale) than among middle-aged adults (M = 6.60) or adolescents (M = 5.80). Four factors had a strong impact: cancellation of consequences, intent, apologies, and proximity. Ratings were higher when the consequences were canceled (M = 8.30), when intent was absent (M = 7.65), when apologies were present (M = 7.60), and when the offender was a member of the family (M = 7.45) than in the opposite cases (M = 5.50, 6.15, 6.15, and 6.40, respectively). Severity of consequences and attitude of others had smaller effects. The impact of three factors varied as a function of age: (a) attitude of others had an impact only in adolescents, (b) social proximity had a stronger impact among adolescents than among adults and elderly people, and (c) apologies had a stronger impact among adolescents and adults than among elderly people. Interactions involving two factors (e.g., Proximity × Intent), and higher-order interactions including age or gender were not significant. As a result, the 479

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following formula describing the forgiveness schema of most participants was suggested to be: Propensity to forgive = Cancellation of consequences + Intent + Proximity + Apologies. A cluster analysis showed evidence of clearly different positions, namely, a principled Always ­Forgive position expressed mainly by elderly people and a principled Almost Never Forgive position expressed mainly by younger and middle-aged adults. A majority of participants, however, took into account at least four factors, usually the ones in the formula above. Six months after the end of the main study, the members of the Always Forgive cluster were presented with a new set of eight similar scenarios. All of them maintained that they would forgive unconditionally in each of the eight cases and rated the scenarios accordingly. In a subsequent study, Girard and Mullet (2012) presented French adolescents aged 11–18 with 16 vignettes adapted to a young public. A sample scenario is the following: Benjamin has a new portable music player. His friend, Nicolas, who is clearly jealous takes it, and intentionally drops it on the floor. The music player falls to the ground, and as a result it is no longer functioning. Following the incident, Nicolas behaves as if nothing had happened. Benjamin avenges himself by puncturing the tires of Nicolas’ bike. The music player is not repaired yet, and it is still not functioning. If you were Benjamin, to what extent do you think you would be willing to forgive Nicolas? In this study, seven factors (also inspired by Enright et al.’s model) were manipulated using a Latin-square design: (a) the social proximity between the offender and the offended (sibling or friend), (b) the degree of intent in the act, (c) apologies/contrition for the act, (d) encouragement to forgive from parents, (e) from friends, (f ) the degree of cancellation of consequences, and (g) whether revenge has been taken. Mean forgiveness ratings were lower among the 13- to 14-year-olds (M = 6.34 on a 0–10 scale) than among all other adolescents (M = 7.12). Overall, cancellation had a strong impact, and this impact was stronger among younger adolescents than among older ones. The impact of intent was also strong, and it was stronger among older adolescents than among younger adolescents. The impact of apologies was weaker than the two previous ones. It was, however, stronger among older adolescents than among younger adolescents. The impacts of encouragements were either moderate (by friends) or weak (by parents), and did not differed as a function of age. The impact of social proximity was weak and only detectable among the two older groups. Revenge had a weak impact except among 15- to 16-year-olds for whom it was moderate. As in the previous study, there were no interactions involving within-subjects factors. Other studies have used similar analog designs. Vinsonneau and Mullet (2001) presented French adolescents aged 15–16 years from two different cultures – Western European and Maghrebi – with a set of vignettes depicting a fight between male adolescents. A sample story is the following: Because a jacket disappeared, a fight took place between John and Larbi. During the fight, John’s head hit the corner of a concrete wall. As a consequence of the impact, John fell on the ground, completely unconscious. He had to be hospitalized for surgery. During John’s stay in the hospital, Larbi tried to meet John and informed himself about his health state. He has begged for forgiveness. At present, John has not left the hospital yet: He is still in his bed. The doctor does not know when John will be able to come back home. In any case, a six-month reeducation therapy is appropriate. If you were John, to what extent would you be willing to forgive Larbi? Each scenario was composed as a function of five factors inspired by Azar et al.’s (1999) work: (a) the offender’s ethnic origin (Christian surname versus Muslim surname), (b) the victim’s one, 480

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(c) the degree of intent in the act, (d) the presence of apologies, and (e) the degree of ­cancellation of consequences. Mean forgiveness ratings were low (M = 3.52, on a 0–10 scale). They were slightly higher among Western Europeans (M = 3.71) than among Maghrebi (M = 3.25). I­nterestingly, they were also higher when the two characters were of different origins (M = 3.82) than when they were from the same origin (M = 3.22). In other words, when participants were confronted with scenarios in which West European adolescents hurt Maghrebi adolescents or in which Maghrebi adolescents hurt West European, they expressed more concern for forgiveness than in other cases. Ratings were higher when apologies were present (M = 5.26) than when they were absent (M = 1.79). Intent and cancellation of consequences also had an impact. There were no interactions associated with ethnic origin; that is, willingness to forgive manifested itself almost identically among Maghrebi and Western European participants, and it extended similarly to members of the other ethnic group. Ahmed et al. (2007) presented Kuwaiti participants aged 12–55 years with 24 vignettes depicting a harmful act committed against a child during a fight between hostile factions. Four factors were manipulated in the scenarios: (a) the offender’s religion (Christian surname vs. Muslim surname), (b) the degree of intent in the act, (c) the degree of cancellation of consequences, and (d) apologies/contrition for the act. Ratings were higher when intent was absent (M = 5.87 on a 0–10 scale), when apologies were present (M = 5.72), and when the consequences had been completely canceled (M = 5.44) than in the opposite cases (M = 2.96, 3.11, and 3.75, respectively). No interaction involving age or gender was significant. A cluster analysis showed that some participants (mostly adults) were unconditional forgivers, others (mostly children and young adolescents) were un-forgivers, and that a large majority took into account apologies, cancellation of consequences, and intent (but not religion) for judging their willingness to forgive. Only a small minority (mostly young adults and adults) took into account the religion factor (ratings were higher when the offender had a Muslim surname). Rogé and Mullet (2011) presented French children (7–14 years), adolescents (15–18 years), and adults (22–36 years) with autism with a set of vignettes describing transgressions that were intentional or not and were followed by more or less clear apologies. A sample story is the following: Patrick and Tom play with a ball. Patrick runs after John to get the ball. Patrick trips Tom up on purpose. Tom falls down and hurts his knees very badly. Immediately, Patrick regrets what he has done, and apologizes several times to Tom. If you were Tom, to what extent do you feel you would be willing to forgive to Patrick? Mean forgiveness ratings were lower among children (M = 4.50 on a 0–10 scale) than among adolescents and adults (M = 7.00), and the positive impact of apologies on forgiveness was stronger among adolescents and adults than among children. In the three groups, however, intent had only a very small impact, much smaller than the one found in a control group. In a condition in which they had to attribute blame, however, participants with autism were able to use the information on intent to the same extent than controls. De Castro et al. (2012) presented highly aggressive Dutch boys aged 7–11 years and controls with eight audio-taped vignettes that depicted various types of ambiguous provocations by peers. Among aggressive boys, 94% selected at least once a response that was favorable to aggression and only 19% a response that was against aggression. Among controls, the corresponding percentages were 72% and 52%. Among aggressive boys, 82% explained their response by referring to emotions (vs. 52% among controls). Most aggressive boys expressed motives for aggressive responses that were often based on the view that “getting even” is a justifiable and warranted response to experienced injustices: taking revenge was just “doing the right thing.” A few of them evoked positive feelings associated with aggression. 481

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Johnson et al. (2013) presented US adolescents aged 13–17 years with six vignettes depicting interpersonal transgressions involving violation of trust, backstabbing, deceit, missed appointment, irresponsibility, or broken promise. These transgressions were committed by one of their friends. Some vignettes ended with the friend apologizing for the transgression. Participants were asked to assess (a) the level of severity of the transgression, (b) the level of anger they would experience as a result of such a transgression, and (c) the extent to which they would forgive in each case. Participants were also presented with an empathy scale and a scale measuring the level of relationship commitment they have with their friends in general. Forgiveness ratings were close to the middle of the responses scale and did not differed as a function of gender. They were strongly associated with severity (−.46 for girls and −.68 for boys) and anger (−.57 and −.68). In addition, they were moderately associated with relationship commitment among boys (.38) and with the presence of apologies in the scenarios among girls (.29). Watson et al. (2017) presented Australian children aged 11–15 years with six hypothetical physical and verbal bullying scenarios that were followed by advice from a friend to either respond with forgiveness, or avoidance, or revenge. A sample scenario was the following: You are leaving school at the end of the day, and a classmate … trips you and you fall to the ground on the pavement. He is doing this type of thing a lot and you hate it but don’t know how to make him stop. In the next class, you talk to a friend that wasn’t involved, and he tells you that you should figure out a way to get even with him and hurt him as much as he hurts you. Participants in the forgiveness condition expressed slightly less anger (M = 3.66) than participants in both other conditions (M = 3.81). Participants in the avoidance condition tended to consider that the offense was more serious (M = 3.68) and that the bully was in pain (M = 2.75) than participants in both other conditions (M = 3.56 and 2.62, respectively). Riek and DeWit (2018) presented South African children, young adolescents, and adolescents with vignettes depicting a transgression. Participants had to imagine themselves in the role of the transgressor (e.g., Imagine that you see a friend being picked on by other students. You think that if you stick up for your friend, the others might stop picking on them. Instead, you also pick on your friend to fit in with the other students). There were three types of transgressions: friend being teased (as before), copying homework, and telling a secret. Three factors were manipulated: the severity of the transgression, whether the transgression was active or passive, and the relationship with the victim. After reading each scenario, participants were presented with questionnaires assessing guilt and shame, and with an ad hoc Forgiveness Seeking questionnaire. The participants’ teachers subsequently assessed these pupils’ prosocial behavior. Mean forgiveness seeking rating was 4.03 (on a 1–5 scale). It was higher among children (M = 4.37) than among young adolescents (M = 4.04) or adolescents (M = 3.66). Forgiveness seeking was strongly associated with guilt in each condition (from .52 to .65). Among adolescents but not among children, forgiveness seeking ratings were higher when the transgression was severe (M = 3.91) than when it was not severe (M = 3.02), whereas among all participants forgiveness seeking ratings were higher when the transgression was active (M = 4.58) than when it was passive (M = 3.97). There was no effect of relational closeness. Teachers’ assessments of prosocial behavior were associated with forgiveness seeking (.24). In summary, a clear developmental trend can be traced. This trend is not developmentally linear. Willingness to forgive seems to decrease from 11–12 years to 13–14 years, and then increase 482

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among older adolescents and young adults. Older people’s willingness to forgive is higher than mature adults’ or young adult’s one, and a small group of unconditional forgivers has been identified among them. Forgiveness seeking seems to follow the same trend. The forgiveness schema is in place very early (at least from 11 years). The main slots in this schema correspond to (a) the level of cancellation of the negative consequences of the transgression, (b) the transgressor’s level of intent, (c) the social proximity with the transgressor, and (d) the presence of sincere apologies. Differences in ethnics or in religious tradition do not seem to be part of the schema, except for a minority of people. At all ages, the structure of the schema is additive; that is, the negative impact of one of the situational factor (e.g., consequences not fully canceled yet) on willingness to forgive can be compensated for by the positive impact of another situational factor (e.g., presence of apologies). These factors have usually strong impact on willingness to forgive, which is consistent with the main findings from Fehr et al.’s (2010) meta-analysis suggesting that, regarding forgiveness, circumstantial factors matter much than personality factors. The impacts of these factors may vary as a function of age (but not as a function of gender), which is consistent with Enright et al.’s (1989) developmental model. For example, (a) the positive impact of apologies on willingness to forgive is stronger among young people than among elderly people, and (b) the positive impact of relationship closeness is stronger among young adolescents than among older adolescents (which is consistent with findings in the preceding point). Impacts may also vary as a function of children’s developmental challenges. In their judgments of willingness to forgive, children and adolescents with autism seem to be unwilling to take into account information about the transgressor’s level of intent although they are able to do so in other situations (e.g., blame attribution).

4.  The Development of Forgivingness Roberts (1995:290) defined forgivingness as “the disposition to abort one’s anger (or altogether to miss getting angry) at persons one takes to have wronged one culpably, by seeing them in the benevolent terms provided by reasons characteristic of forgiving.” Forgivingness must therefore be distinguished from forgiveness: it is a disposition that manifests itself in most daily life circumstances, whereas forgiveness applies to particular circumstances (see the two preceding points). Casullo (2007) examined the motives for forgiving in daily life expressed by adolescents living in Buenos Aires. Among females aged 13–15, 24% agreed that forgivingness is necessary because “everybody makes mistakes and as a result, everybody needs to be offered a second chance” or “for being forgiven when our turn will come” – which was reminiscent of Piaget’s views on infinite reciprocity; 16% agreed that it is “for being able to live in peace” or “for being able to experience good relationships with others”; and 8% agreed that it is because “we cannot live perpetually with rancor and negative feelings.” Among males, the percentages were slightly different: 42%, 12%, 4%, 18%, and 10% (negative feelings), respectively. Variations as a function of age were also observed: only 8% of females and 4% of males aged 16–18 agreed that it was “for being forgiven when our turn will come.” Chiaramello et al. (2008) examined whether three separate constructs of forgivingness found among adults (lasting resentment, sensitivity to circumstances, and unconditional forgiveness), as well as the disposition to avenge construct, were already in place among adolescents. They presented French adolescents aged 11–15 years with a modified version of the Forgivingness scale (Mullet et al. 2003) and with items assessing revenge tendencies (Stuckless and Goranson 1992). Four largely independent factors were found, and their meanings were the same as the ones found among adults. Lasting resentment consisted of items expressing a tendency to hold negative emotions and negative cognitions and exhibiting avoidance behaviors toward the offender, even in the presence of positive circumstances. Sensitivity to circumstances consisted of items expressing the ability to analyze the pro and cons of harmful situations and to build on the many circumstances 483

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of these situations for deciding whether to forgive or not the offender. Unconditional forgiveness consisted of items expressing a tendency to harbor positive attitudes toward the offender even in the absence of positive circumstances. Vengefulness consisted of items related to the infliction of harm on an offender in return for perceived wrong. Lasting resentment and disposition to avenge ratings were higher among older adolescents than among younger adolescents. Sensitivity to circumstances and unconditional forgiveness ratings were lower among older adolescents than among younger adolescents. Mary and Patra (2015) presented Indian adolescents with questionnaires assessing gratitude and resilience and with Thompson et al.’s (2005) Heartland Forgiveness Scale (HFS) (e.g., “If others mistreat me, I continue to think badly of them”). The mean forgiveness rating was 4.47 (on a 1–7 scale). Among girls, ratings were positively associated with gratitude (.47) and, among boys, with resilience (.25). Shepperd et al. (2015) presented US adolescents with questionnaires assessing religious commitment and reaction to conflicts and with the HFS’ Forgiveness of Others subscale. For religious and non-religious participants, the mean forgivingness ratings were 4.41 and 4.17, respectively (on a 1–7 scale). Forgivingness was associated with direct aggression and indirect aggression as a usual response to conflict (−.27 and −.29, respectively). Quintana-Orts and Rey (2018) presented Spanish students with a questionnaire assessing frequency of cyberbullying, either as a victim or as an aggressor, and with Park and Peterson’s (2006) disposition to forgive subscale. Mean forgivingness ratings were higher among younger adolescents (M = 3.41 on a 1–5 scale) and females (M = 3.45) than among older adolescents (M = 3.33) or males (M = 3.32). Aggression was negatively associated with forgivingness (–.18). The relationship between victimization and aggression was weaker among forgiving adolescents (.26) than among unforgiving adolescents (.50). Barcaccia et al. (2017) presented Italian adolescents with questionnaires assessing anger, positive and negative character attributes, depression, and the TRIM, adapted in this study for measuring dispositional forgiveness. Avoidance and revenge were positively associated with behavior problems (.24 and .27). In a subsequent study (2018), they presented Italian adolescents with questionnaires assessing victimization from bullying, depression, anger, and with the benevolence subscale of the TRIM. The mean benevolence rating was 2.45 (on a 1–5 scale). It was negatively associated with depression (−.09) and trait anger (−.09), and positively associated with anger control (.18). Among forgiving participants, having a best friend reduced the strength of the relationship between level of victimization and depression. Finally, Kaleta and Mróz (2018) presented Polish adults aged 19–67 with the HFS. Mean forgiveness ratings linearly increased with age: 4.40 (on a 1–7 scale) among very young adults (19–30 years), 4.60 among young adults (31–40 years), 4.70 among mature adults (41–50 years), and 4.80 among older people (51+ years). In summary, the three-factor forgivingness structure – lasting resentment, sensitivity to circumstances, and unconditional forgiveness – found among adults from different cultures (Mullet and Neto 2014, 2016) seems already in place among young adolescents. Overall, adolescents’ level of forgivingness is neither high nor low, which is consistent with findings reported in both preceding sections, and the motives they express seem to be similar to the ones found in adults (Ballester et al. 2011). Forgivingness seems, however, to be higher among younger adolescents than among older adolescents, and higher among elderly people than among young adults, a finding that is also consistent with the non-monotonous developmental trend suggested above. Forgiveness is, in a similar way as among adults, (a) positively associated with religious involvement (e.g., Mullet et al. 2003), gratitude, and resilience (e.g., Neto 2007), and (b) negatively associated with depression (e.g., Toussaint et al. 2008) and a host of problematic, aggressive behaviors (e.g., Gauché and Mullet 2009). 484

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5.  Forgiveness across Generations A few studies have been conducted in settings involving whole families (mother, father, and children). Although most of them did not involve children or adolescents, they allowed directly assessing similarities and differences regarding the way forgiveness was conceptualized and practiced between genetically and culturally linked generations. They also allowed assessing the relationship between parent’s educative attitudes and the way they perceive their children and their children’s psychological well-being. Subkoviak et al. (1995) asked US college students (aged about 22 years) and their same-gender parents (aged about 50 years) to think of the most recent experience of someone hurting them deeply and unfairly and then to complete the EFI. Parents’ ratings (M = 3.88 on a 0–6 scale) were slightly higher than adolescents’ ratings (M = 3.55). Among parent-adolescent dyads in which both indicated having experienced very deep hurt, the correlation was .54: in these cases, parent and offspring tended, therefore, to forgive to similar degrees. Mullet et al. (2004) presented young French adolescents and adults aged 16–40 years with a questionnaire comprising statements referring to conceptualizations of forgiveness, most of them inspired by Enright (1991). The same questionnaire was also presented to their fathers and to their mothers. A four-factor model of conceptualizations was found: (a) forgiveness as a change of heart process (e.g., “To forgive necessarily means to start feeling affection toward the offender again”), (b) forgiveness can encourage repentance (e.g., “To forgive means to encourage that person to behave better in the future”), (c) forgiveness is immoral (e.g., “To forgive someone who has done you wrong is to encourage the person to behave wrongly again”), and (d) forgiveness as a morethan-dyadic process (e.g., “You can forgive the person responsible for an institution that has done you wrong” (the state, the church, or an association). Between mothers and children, correlations were all positive and ranged from .20 (Immoral, M = 2.01 on a 0–10 scale) to .26 (Repentance, M = 4.93). Between fathers and children, they ranged from .17 (Change of heart, M = 4.45) to .21 (More-Than-Dyadic, M = 5.59). Mullet et al. (2006) presented young French adults aged 18–36 years with the Forgivingness Questionnaire and with revenge-related items. The same questionnaire was also presented to their fathers and mothers. Young adults’ lasting resentment ratings were positively associated with their mothers’ lasting resentment ratings (.23) and negatively associated with mothers’ unconditional forgiveness ratings (−.33). Young adults’ sensitivity to circumstances ratings were positively associated with their fathers’ sensitivity ratings (.26) and their mothers’ unconditional forgiveness (.21). Finally, young adults’ vengefulness ratings were positively associated with their fathers’ vengefulness ratings (.25) and lasting resentment ratings (.21). The authors suggested that when children have observed demands for reparation and apologies or when they have observed vengeful attitudes, they were more likely to have observed them in their fathers. This may explain why there was a link between the young adults’ and their fathers’ revengeful tendencies and sensitivity to circumstances. In the same vein, they suggested that when children have observed lasting resentment or unconditional forgiveness behaviors, they were more likely to have observed it in their mothers. This may explain why there was a link between the young adults’ and their mothers’ resentment tendencies, a link between the young adults’ lasting resentment and their mothers’ willingness to forgive, and, finally, a link between and the young adults’ sensitivity to circumstances and their mothers’ willingness to forgive. Christensen et al. (2011) presented US children aged 10–12 years with questionnaires assessing empathy, emotion regulation, and with two adjusted version of the TRIM measuring separately forgiveness of mother and father. Their parents assessed their level of connectedness with their child and were presented with three adjusted versions of the TRIM measuring separately forgiveness of child (by father and mother), forgiveness of mother by father from the mother’s viewpoint, 485

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and forgiveness of father by mother from the father’s viewpoint. The mean f­orgiveness scores (on a 1–7 scale) were 5.43 (child’s forgiveness of mother), 5.49 (child’s forgiveness of father), 6.33 (mother’s forgiveness of child), 6.09 (father’s forgiveness of child), 5.28 (mother’s view on father’s forgiveness), and 5.51 (father’s views on mother’s forgiveness). Child’s forgiveness of mother was mainly associated with child’s empathy (.33) and emotional control (.20), and with mother-child connectedness (.23) and mother’s forgiveness of child (.22). Child’s forgiveness of father was mainly associated with child’s empathy (.38) and emotional control (.28), and with father’s forgiveness of mother (.20). Other studies did not directly compare parents’ and children levels of forgiveness. Instead, they focused either on the relationships between parent’s educational attitudes (e.g., forgiveness attitude or frequent use of psychological aggression) and their child’s psychological status (e.g., anxious) or on the relationship between parent’s perception of their children and their children’s forgiveness attitudes. One study was about the consequences of the experience of incest during childhood on forgiveness in adulthood. Shah and Sharma (2018) presented Indian children aged 8–12 years with a questionnaire assessing self-esteem, and presented their parents with the HFS. Children’s self-esteem was positively related to mothers’ forgivingness (.35) and, to a lesser extent, to fathers’ forgivingness (.14). Kwok et al. (2017) presented Chinese parents of children aged three to six years with questionnaires assessing frequency of use of corporal punishment, psychological aggression toward children (e.g., “How often did you shake or grab this child to get his/her attention”), altruistic behavior observed in children, and a modified version of the HFS (e.g., “When someone disappoints my child, he or she can eventually move past it”). The level of violence reported by parents was high: 72% used corporal punishment and 98% used psychological aggression once or more in the past year. The mean forgiveness of the children rating was 4.62 (on a 1–7 scale). It was positively associated with perceived children’s altruism (.24) and negatively associated with the frequency of corporal punishment (−.26), of psychological aggression (−.24), and children’s anxiety (−.24). Walters and Kim-Spoon (2014) presented US adolescents with questionnaires assessing religiousness, behavior problems (typical of adolescents), emotion regulation, and the TRIM. Their caregivers assessed their perceptions of their children’s behavior problems and level of emotion regulation. Children forgiveness ratings were 2.01 (revenge), 3.06 (avoidance), and 3.18 (benevolence). Revenge was negatively associated with age (−.19), adolescent and parent-reported emotion regulation (−.30 and −.22), and positively associated with adolescent and parent-reported behavior problems (.20 and.21). Benevolence was associated with religiousness (.18). Mullet et al. (2015) examined the relationships between the experience of incest during childhood and forgiveness in adulthood. Participants aged 18–53 years were presented with the Forgivingness scale, the Disposition to Seek Forgiveness scale (Chiaramello et al. 2008), and the Self-Forgivingness scale (e.g., I can easily forgive myself even if I have not repaired the negative consequences of my acts). Among incest victims, lasting resentment toward others (M = 3.71 on a 0–10 scale), unconditional willingness to seek forgiveness (M = 6.88), and lasting resentment toward self (M = 4.13) were higher than controls’ ones (M = 2.57, 4.72, and 3.00, respectively). Incest victims, more than other people, experienced difficulties in fighting (appropriate) feelings of resentment toward themselves or toward others when they were the author or the victim of an offense, and considered that apologies must be readily offered after any transgression. In summary, parents and their offspring tend to conceptualize forgiveness in ways that are similar but it would be an exaggeration to state that the impact of parents’ conceptualizations on their children’s conceptualizations is strong. Parents and their offspring tend to share to some extent their disposition to forgive, but it would again be an exaggeration to state that children’s forgivingness mimics their parents’ forgivingness. Similarly, the relationship between parent’s forgiveness attitudes and children’s attitude seems to depend on relationship closeness and level of 486

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mutual forgiveness. Parents’ educational attitudes that are negative (e.g., corporal punishments) and parents’ perception of problem behavior among children are associated with lesser children’s forgiveness abilities and psychological well-being. Victims of incest were, more than other people, (a) reactive to any hurt that may be committed, by themselves or by others, and (b) expectant of sincere apologies from their offenders.

6.  Post-Conflict Studies Bayer et al. (2007) examined the relationship between openness to reconciliation, feelings of revenge, and PTSD among former Ugandan and Congolese child soldiers aged. They found a positive association between children’s expressions of non-openness to reconciliation, feelings of revenge, and PTSD. Hamama-Raz et al. (2008) examined the relationship between forgivingness and PTSD symptoms among Palestinian adolescents of Israeli nationality. Lasting resentment was found to be positively associated with PTSD. Hinton (2011) presented street children in Sierra Leone with his War Forgiveness Scale. All of the children have suffered trauma due to violence in the war (e.g., parents and siblings killed, homes burned, and amputations). Fifty-five percent of them stated that they are willing to forgive those who physically abused them during the war and 93% though that the people should forgive those who committed various types of violence and atrocities during the war. Alipanga et al. (2014) examined openness to reconciliation among war-affected adolescents living in Northern Uganda. They used scales for assessing the level of exposure to stressful war experiences and daily stressors, and an Openness to Reconciliation questionnaire (e.g., “I would never talk with the adversary”). Participants expressed surprisingly low levels of avoidant behaviors (M = 1.72 on a 1–5 scale) and revengefulness (M = 1.39). Former child soldiers (who experienced more stressful war experiences and daily stressors than anyone) had avoidance and revenge ratings that were higher than controls’ ratings. Leonard et al. (2015) examined intergroup forgiveness among Northern Irish adolescents and adults aged 14–80 years. They used scales for assessing in-group identification and collective guilt and an intergroup forgiveness questionnaire (e.g., “The two communities in Northern Ireland must learn not to retaliate against political violence”). Adults’ ratings (M = 3.33 on a 1–5 scale) were higher than adolescents’ rating (M = 3.04), and, in both groups, ratings were associated with collective guilt (.19 and .26). In summary, among war-affected African adolescents, expression of revengefulness and adoption of avoidant behaviors seem to be lower than expected. This finding is consistent with results observed in studies conducted among adults who were victims of the genocide in Rwanda (Mukashema and Mullet 2013). Also the positive relationship between un-forgivingness and PTSD observed among adults in post-conflict settings (e.g., Natheghian et al. 2015) seems to hold among adolescents. Finally, the developmental trend reported above seems to hold regarding intergroup forgiveness.

7. Conclusion Despite their limitations, the studies analyzed in this chapter have uncovered important findings. The forgiveness schema seems to be operative quite early among children, which is not surprising since this cognitive-emotional psychological structure is most probably inherited from our primate cousins (De Waal and Pokorny 2005). This schema enriches and differentiates itself gradually during childhood and adolescence, given that any child is regularly exposed to familial and social situations in which more or less severe transgressions occur and conflict resolution strategies that can considerably vary from one family to the other are implemented. As they age, children and 487

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adolescents are, as a result, able to express more and more elaborate justifications for forgiving or not forgiving. Among some people, the forgiveness schema seems to have evolved into an unconditional forgiveness philosophy of life. Among other people, it seems, in contrast, to have withered. A majority of children, adolescents, adults, and elderly people seem however to have developed a sensitivity to the multiple circumstances of transgressions (e.g., the presence of sincere apologies). Individual differences in the overall propensity to forgive and in sensitivity to circumstances are, however, considerable. Even if forgiveness – as part of our repertoire of conflict resolution ­strategies – is, somehow or other, biologically inherited, the forgiveness schema is strongly modeled by our early experiences as direct observers, as victims, and as transgressors, and by what others have reported and confided in their personal experiences in this domain. The forgiveness culture reigning within families certainly matters but not to the point of being completely determinant. Aggressive educational parental practices seem, nevertheless, to generate unforgiving attitudes, and dramatic experiences during childhood seem to strongly affect forgiveness abilities. The evolution of the forgiveness schema is not completely monotonous: older adolescents express more unforgiving attitudes than younger adolescents – the crisis of the teens. In some cases, pathology impedes its full development (e.g., among adolescents with autism). Correlates of forgiveness seem to be similar among adolescents and adults. Among young people, forgiveness is positively associated with gratitude, resilience, and religious involvement, and is negatively associated with depression and a host of problematic, aggressive behaviors. Among adolescents who have experienced bloody conflicts, it is, unsurprisingly, positively associated with PTSD. As, since Darby and Schlenker’s (1982) work, no research regarding the development of forgiveness before the age of ten years has been conducted, futures studies should focus on the three- to nine- year-olds. As in this early study, analog designs could be employed: the scenario technique that was used in the study by Rogé and Mullet (2011) could be applied to samples of young and very young children (Anderson 2019). This technique is a very flexible one that has already proven feasible with three-year-olds (Cuneo, 1982) and with adolescents with learning disabilities (Morales et al. 2016). Diverse situations of transgressions could be graphically depicted and young children could be asked to indicate the level to which they would be willing to forgive by just pointing their finger on an illustrated scale (ranging from not at all to completely). One additional advantage of this technique is that it possesses a checking device for internal coherence that allows knowing when the experiment has not been successful (Mullet et al. 2012). In the same vein, as only one longitudinal study involving young people has been conducted on forgiveness (Kwok et al. 2017), futures studies should try to trace the development of forgiveness among children and adolescents and relate its level with life events that have affected these participants, and with other aspects of their emotional and cognitive development (Denham et al. 2005). Longitudinal studies of this kind would allow drawing firm conclusions about the direction of the relationships between forgiveness and the many variables identified in this chapter that tend to correlate with it.

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M. and Patra, S. 2015. Relation between forgiveness, gratitude and resilience among adolescents. Indian Journal of Positive Psychology, 6(1): 63–8. McCullough, M. E., Worthington, E. L., and Rachal, K. C. 1997. Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(2): 321–36. Morales, G. E., Lopez, E. O., and Mullet, E. 2016. Blame judgments among people with Down Syndrome. Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability, 41(1): 61–5. Mukashema, I. and Mullet, E. 2013. Unconditional forgiveness, reconciliation sentiment, and mental health among victims of genocide in Rwanda. Social Indicators Research, 113(1): 121–32. Mullet, E., Barros, J., Frongia, L., Usai, V., Neto, F., and Riviere, S. 2003. Religious involvement and the forgiving personality. Journal of Personality, 71(1): 1–19. Mullet, E., Gauché, M., Menezes Fonseca, A. C., Neto, F., and Muñoz Sastre, M. T. 2015. ­Self-forgivingness: Factor structure and relationships with personality, physical symptoms, drug consumption and sexual abuse during childhood. In E. L. Olsen (ed.), Forgiveness: Social Significance, Health Impact and Psychological Effects (pp. 131–50). Hauppauge, NY: Nova. Mullet, E., Girard, M., and Bakshi, P. 2004. Conceptualizations of forgiveness. European Psychologist, 9(2): 78–86. Mullet, E., Morales, G. E., Makris, I., Rogé, B., and Muñoz Sastre, M. T. 2012. Functional Measurement: An incredibly flexible tool. Psicologica: International Journal of Methodology and Experimental Psychology [Special Issue on Functional Measurement]. 33: 631–54. Mullet, E. and Neto, F. 2014. Forgiveness. In K. Keith (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Psychology (pp. 565–9). New York: Psychology Press. Mullet, E. and Neto, F. 2016. Forgiveness and religious tradition. In D. A. Leeming (ed.), Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. 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Forgiveness and its determinants depending on the interpersonal context of hurt. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114: 131–45. Piaget, J. 1932. Le jugement moral chez l’enfant [The Moral Development of Child]. Paris: Alcan. Quintana-Orts, C. and Rey, L. 2018. Forgiveness and cyberbullying in adolescence: Does willingness to forgive help minimize the risk of becoming a cyberbully? Computers in Human Behavior, 81: 209–14. Riek, B. M. and DeWit, C. C. 2018. Differences and similarities in forgiveness seeking across childhood and adolescence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(8): 1119–32. Roberts, R. C. 1995. Forgivingness. American Philosophical Quarterly, 32(4): 289–306. Rogé, B. and Mullet, E. 2011. Blame and forgiveness judgments among children, adolescents and adults with autism. Autism, 15(6): 702–12. Shah, S. and Sharma, A. 2018. Parents’ forgiveness and coping styles as predictors of children’s self-esteem. 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36 FORGIVENESS WITH COUPLES AND FAMILIES Frederick A. DiBlasio

Relationships between family members are often knitted together in a powerful bond which ideally becomes the source of acceptance, nurturance, and love. However, effort is required in maintaining healthy relationships between family members as relationships are sometimes complicated and produce pain. Many would argue that closely related to the aspect of love that exists between family members is the need for forgiveness. Both love and forgiveness require actions which necessitate sacrifice and work. Given that humans are imperfect, when they live together as a family there can be times of misunderstandings and offenses. Thus, healing between family members (henceforth family members include parents, children, siblings, and couples) is often needed on a regular basis in order to maintain healthy and satisfying familial bonds. This healing element necessary for restoring and maintaining loving relationships requires family members to become resilient through the practice of seeking and granting forgiveness (DiBlasio 2010). Forgiveness is often difficult to both seek and grant. Family members can become trapped and hurt by a lack of forgiveness which can damage and sometimes extricate love and enjoyment out of family relationships. Occasionally, family members may seek out professional therapy in order to find a road to achieve forgiveness with their loved ones. ­Unfortunately, it is far more common for families to come to treatment as a result of conflict without realizing the extent to which resentment, anger, and unforgiveness have blocked them from solving problems and finding peace. Because of this lack of realization, family members may initially be unaware of the necessity of forgiveness in their lives. It therefore becomes necessary for the clinician to guide willing family members through the process of forgiveness. The clinical use of forgiveness is often the liberation of the impairing aspects of resentment and anger. Thus, through the use of forgiveness, family members often find effective resolutions to past offenses which leads to lasting change. Presented in this chapter will first be a discussion of the nature of family relationships and a proposition of a rationale for the development of research which considers the uniqueness of family relationships as opposed to other types of relationships. Second, a selective look at the empirical forgiveness literature from a 15 year period related to families will be presented. The focus of the review will be on forgiveness studies that are primarily emphasizing application for family relationships and use of family members as subjects. When utilizing this approach, two distinct types of research studies emerged: correlational studies related to descriptive information about family forgiveness and therapeutic family forgiveness interventions. Third, a brief section is provided that gives my closing thoughts as a clinician and researcher.

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1.  Nature of Family Relationships versus Other Relationships Many are familiar with the often used expression “blood is thicker than water” and interpret it to mean that allegiance to family is greater than commitment to other relationships. It can be argued that compared to friendship and other relationships a more loyal and obligatory relationship exists with family members throughout one’s lifetime. This is particularly strong in parents’ loyalty toward their children. Parental bonding is a strong emotional, behavioral, and neurobiological process that is an undeniable force in human and animal nature. Even when children are not biological offspring of the parents, some evidence is developing that neurobiological bonding occurs (Bick et al. 2013). A worthy area for future neurobiological and social research is to study bonding and attachment related to other family relationships, such as between siblings, and extended family members. Although much is still being discovered about romantic relationships, marriage and long-term committed sexual union between two people bring about neurobiological processes that cause a bonding attachment (Kandel et al. 2012). The loving relationship brings about reciprocal pleasurable stimulation of the amygdala, producing action-potentials (firing) to a number of brain structures throughout the brain. Among the critical brain structures for attachment, the interplay of three is especially significant: (a) the amygdala that leads to the release of the attachment oxytocin hormone, and has reciprocal firing with the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex; (b) the hippocampus that creates a short-term memory with automatic implicit reactions (the ongoing pairing of the relationship with positive emotions) which is later stored in higher cortical brain regions; and (c) the prefrontal cortex that moderates and regulates decision-making and interpersonal behavior among its functions. This repeated firing produces neuroplasticity (efficient and strong neuropathways develop) that establishes the hard-wiring so to speak of the relationship as central to attachment dynamics. “Based on recent neuroimaging findings, passionate love does not only activate subcortical brain areas mediating basic emotions, reward or motivation, but also higher-order cortical brain areas that are involved in social cognition, attention, memory, mental associations, and self-representation” (Cacioppo et al. 2012: 3). The neurobiological implications of attachment, the strength of family relationships, and forgiveness are an important next step in family-related forgiveness research. Some consider friendships, dating relationships, and other types of non-family relationships as voluntary because they are initiated, maintained, and engaged in by free-will choice “without contractual or biological obligations” (Carl and Wang 2012: 40). Whereas family relationships are more involuntary as they seldom involve free-will choice and are maintained throughout life out of love and/or duty. Albeit family bonds are sometimes severed for life during serious conflict, for the most part, family members have an intense propensity to forgive and bring peace so that the relationships can last through the years. Marriage presents a unique combination of often free-will choice to enter into a contractual relationship. The birth of a biological child to the parents (or a contractual agreement to adopt) can bind the parents together in a somewhat non-voluntary relationship with each other similar to biological family members. However, it can be argued that high divorce rates and other factors indicate that the marital attachment is less strong than actual biological bonds (Carl and Wang 2012). One study suggested that a more interactive approach is needed to address family conflict (Hoyt et al. 2005: 392). Their findings “encourage clinicians as well as researchers to conceptualize conflict reactions as embedded in relational contexts, and support efforts to address family patterns of conflict systemically, rather than focusing exclusively on the individual level of intervention.”

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2.  Search Criteria In anticipation that there may be differences when the relationships being studied are between family members as opposed to other types of relationships, this chapter has created a search criterion that mostly attempts to find recent research from the past 15 years that both had exclusively family themes and used family members as subjects. Thus, an interdisciplinary search of the literature was conducted in an attempt to find empirical research on families and forgiveness related to correlational studies or interactive psychotherapeutic interventions (studies where family-related subjects received interactive treatment to promote forgiveness). This limitation of the search not only helped to maintain a family focus, but also assisted in providing a selective lens to narrow the scope of an otherwise overwhelming number of empirical studies available. The search was conducted in the University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library’s OneSearch database, which is a database aggregator. Some of the databases included in OneSearch are Medline, PsycINFO, Academic Search Premier, and JSTOR. The search parameters were restricted to peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2005 and 2020 that included three parameters: (1) the title included some variation of the word forgiveness or unforgiveness (i.e. forgive, forgiven, forgiving); (2) the title contained some version of the word couple, family, or marital (i.e. couples, marriage, families); and (3) the abstract contained one of several empirical or therapy terms (i.e. correlations, data, subjects, intervention, therapeutic, or therapy). Additional citations were gleaned from the reference sections of forgiveness articles. Articles focusing on forgiveness related to divorce, separation, and infidelity merit special consideration that is beyond the objectives of this chapter and therefore for the most part were not included.

3.  Descriptive and Causal Correlation Studies One pervasive and robust theme that emerged in the family empirical literature is that a positive correlation exists between forgiveness and marital satisfaction (DiBlasio and Benda 2008; Fincham and Beach 2007; Ghiurca and Vintila 2019; Haversath et al. 2019). This positive effect on marital satisfaction appears to be true regardless of culture or country (i.e. Agu and Nwankwo 2019; Bell et al. 2018; Gayatrivadivu et al. 2014). Results of various studies show an increasing positive correlation between the number of years married and the perceived positive effect of forgiveness (Shola 2018; Pronk et al. 2019). One study found that an association exists between length of marriage and “the ability to forgive new hurts and move through the process of forgiveness more quickly” (Anderson and Natrajan-Tyagi 2016: 315). It was found that forgiveness and marital adjustment were interrelated to positive mental health, low negative repetitive thinking about offenses, and the importance placed on the offending behavior (Gumus and Kislak 2019). Paleari et al. (2005) found that spouses believed that seeking and granting forgiveness was foundational for a healthy marriage. Some researchers have attempted to find causal relationships between forgiveness and marital satisfaction and marital quality utilizing structural equation modeling to explore directionality of effects. For example, Fincham and Beach (2007: 260) using 91 couples in a one-year longitudinal study found: For women, paths emerged from forgiveness to marital quality and vice versa. For men, the direction of effect was from marital quality to forgiveness. The concurrent association ­between the two constructs mediated longitudinal relationship between them for wives but not for husbands. In a later study utilizing structural equation modeling (Braithwaite et al. 2016: 558), mediating effects influencing the positive correlation of forgiveness and romantic relationship satisfaction are increased 494

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relational effort and decreased negative conflict. The authors explain in their discussion: “when ­individuals have more forgiving tendencies, they are more likely to self-regulate with the goal of improving their relationship and to inhibit their tendency to damage their relationship by using negative interpersonal tactics like hitting, berating, or avoiding their partner.” They also point out that the these two mediating variables are bi-directional, that is to say, forgiveness levels are influenced in a reciprocal negative direction when there is a decrease in relational effort and an increase in negative conflict. Some indication exists that forgiveness may be enhanced when couples intentionally work to improve the relationship (Agu and Nwankwo 2019). However, “marital satisfaction can be improved through forgiveness even when an insecure attachment is present” (Chung 2014: 249). Whereas the positive correlation between marital satisfaction and forgiveness is well established with a reasonable number of studies that focus on family life, other correlations related to family are somewhat scattered across a spectrum of variables without much replication for additional support. Some studies identified correlations between forgiveness and family of origin variables. For example, in a group of 80 married fathers who were hurt by their own fathers during their childhood years, increased forgiveness levels correlated with reduced anger levels toward their own young sons. In other words, men who showed higher levels of forgiveness for their fathers in their family of origin showed lower levels of anger toward their sons (Lee and Enright 2009). Only one study was found that utilized a correlational design for discerning how forgiveness differs depending on type of family relationship (Maio et al. 2008). The study recruited 114 families, with each family consisting of two parents and a child. Two “Family Forgiveness Questionnaires” were completed by each family member where the target of each questionnaire was the relationship with the other two family members. For example, a mother completed a questionnaire related to her husband and another questionnaire related to her child. Findings indicated that forgiveness was associated with the likelihood of apology, the tendency to repeat offenses, dependent and anxious attachment, relationship quality, relationship closeness, and relationship conflict. As would be expected, it was easier for parents to forgive their child than it was for spouses to forgive each other. One year later, this study (Maio et al. 2008: 316) found that higher forgiveness within the family “predicted less subsequent attachment dependence and attachment anxiety. The mother’s forgiveness of the father also predicted better feelings about the quality of the relationship with him and more closeness to him.” The forgiveness led to “more expressiveness in the family, less family conflict (when the father was forgiven), and more family cohesiveness (when the mother was forgiven) one year later.” Another study (Naiemi et al. 2016) found that subjects who had healthy family of origin relationships in their childhood were correlated to forgiveness within their current families.

4.  Family-Oriented Forgiveness Psychotherapeutic Interventions In a comprehensive meta-analysis on forgiveness interventions, Wade et al. (2014: 167) conclude: Overall, the status of the research to date suggests that forgiveness is a viable and ­evidence-based treatment for dealing with transgressions. These interventions are more effective than alternative treatments and no treatment in promoting forgiveness of the offender and hope for the future and reducing depression and anxiety. Results from this meta-analysis indicate that forgiveness treatments are robust and effects are maintained following the termination of the treatment. Although this meta-analysis included a handful of studies where subjects were family members interacting to achieve forgiveness with comparisons made to alternative treatment and no treatment control groups, the overwhelming majority of the interventions were not psychotherapeutic forgiveness interventions between family members. 495

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5.  The Forgiveness Process Model Dr. Enright, a pioneer in the research and application of forgiveness, has applied the Forgiveness Process Model (FPM) to many types of problem situations such as incest survivors, suicide survivors, spousal abuse victims, and international crisis areas, to name a few. Many of these applications have received evidence-based research that showed efficacy (see Enright vita of numerous publications at https://internationalforgiveness.com). In 1995, Dr. Enright and I first met at the National Conference on Forgiveness held in Wisconsin that he founded and chaired. He subsequently invited me to be a board member of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI). I have had the privilege of sharing thoughts on forgiveness and his friendship for the past 27 years. The following is a description of the FPM given on the IFI website: Uncovering Phase: During this phase the individual becomes aware of the emotional pain that has resulted from a deep, unjust injury. Characteristic feelings of anger or even hatred may be present. As these negative emotions are confronted and the injury is honestly understood, individuals may experience considerable emotional distress. Deciding on the appropriate amount of energy to process this pain while still functioning effectively is an important consideration during this phase. However, as the anger and other negative emotions are brought out into the open, healing can begin to occur. Decision Phase: The individual now realizes that to continue to focus on the injury and the injurer may cause more unnecessary suffering and begins to understand that a change must occur to go ahead in the healing process. This person may then experience a “heart conversion” or, in other words, a life change in a positive direction. The individual entertains the idea of forgiveness as a healing strategy and then, commits to forgiving the injurer who has caused him/her such pain. Complete forgiveness is not yet realized but the injured individual has decided to explore forgiveness and to take initial steps in the direction of full forgiveness. An important first step at this point is to forego any thoughts, feelings or intentions of revenge toward the injurer. Work Phase: Here the forgiving individual begins the active work of forgiving the injurer. This phase may include new ways of thinking about the injurer. The injured individual may strive to understand the injurer’s childhood or put the injurious event in context by understanding the pressures the injurer was under at the time of the offense. This new way of thinking is undertaken not to excuse the injurer of his/her responsibility for the offense, but rather to better understand him/her and to see the injurer as a member of the human community. Often, this new understanding may be accompanied by a willingness to experience empathy and compassion toward the offender. The work phase also includes the heart of forgiveness which is the acceptance of the pain that resulted from the actions of the injurer. This must not be confused with any sense of deserving the pain but rather a bearing of pain that has been unjustly given. As the individual bears the pain, he/she chooses not to pass it on to others, including the injurer. This is often where the challenge of a “quest for the good” is most evident. Indeed, the individual may now become ready to begin to offer goodwill toward the injurer in the form of merciful restraint, generosity, and moral love. This may or may not include reconciliation. The goodwill may be offered while at the same time taking into consideration current issues of trust and safety in the relationship between the individual and the injurer. Outcome/Deepening Phase: In this phase the forgiving individual begins to realize that he/she is gaining emotional relief from the process of forgiving his/her injurer. The forgiving individual may find meaning in the suffering that he/she has faced. The emotional relief and new found meaning may lead to increased compassion for self and others. The individual may discover

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a new purpose in life and an active concern for his/her community. Thus, the forgiver discovers the paradox of forgiveness: as we give to others the gifts of mercy, generosity, and moral love, we ourselves are healed. (https://internationalforgiveness.com/need-to-forgive.htm) The FPM received early and strong support when it was successfully utilized in 54 individual sessions (a 14-month therapeutic program) to help incest survivors achieve forgiveness and move from depression to non-depressed levels (Freedman and Enright, 1996). In a later validation of the model (Reed and Enright, 2006), a randomized clinical trial was utilized with a sample of women who were recovering from spousal emotional abuse. The women had been permanently separated from their spouses for more than two years (mean of separation time = 5 years) and were suffering from negative psychological outcomes from the emotional abuse. A randomized clinical trial was designed comparing a forgiveness treatment group (FT) (n = 10) and an alternative treatment group (n = 10) (AT) for a mean therapeutic intervention for 7.95 months. “The robust findings of this study suggest that forgiveness can have a general effect on emotional regulation, reducing anxiety and depression while also increasing self-esteem and healthy (practical and moral) decision making” (p. 927). The FPM has had significant implications for family forgiveness interventions, especially with therapeutic approaches that are forgiveness-base group interventions for individuals suffering from hurtful offenses by family members. Another important contribution to forgiveness research was the development of the first forgiveness scale, the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI), which has received strong support and has stood the test of time as it has been used repeatedly in forgiveness research. After years of focus groups on forgiveness, the EFI was developed with three subscales (20 items each) that measure the affect, behavior, and cognition of forgiveness. By measuring these three components, Enright was one of the first to understand that forgiveness can be measured by more than emotional attributes. Each question is rated on a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The maximum possible score on the 60-item EFI is 360 and the minimum score is 60. Subkoviak et al. (1995) reported strong reliability with a coefficient alpha for the EFI of 0.98, and in my study (DiBlasio and Benda 2008) the coefficient alpha for the EFI was 0.97. Hanke and Fischer (2013) found that the EFI was found to be reliable across cultures as they found it to be valid in 13 ­d ifferent societies.

6.  The REACH Forgiveness Model One of the critically important intervention strategies was developed by Dr. Worthington, who is another pioneer in both research and practice of forgiveness. He shares self-help forgiveness resources to the public, as well as training materials and information for professionals for the application and study of forgiveness (see http://www.evworthington- forgiveness.com and Worthington and Wade 2019). For decades he and associates have not only demonstrated forgiveness efficacy of REACH (e.g. Burchard et al. 2003; Worthington et al. 2015) but also designed it to fit all types of personal and professional forgiveness situations. Since 1981, Dr. Worthington and I have enjoyed discussions, friendship, shared authorship, and presentations relating to the theory and practice of forgiveness. One of our early collaborations led to one of the few early peer-reviewed publications on the clinical use of forgiveness in therapeutic practice: Promoting Mutual Forgiveness within the F ­ ractured Relationship (Worthington and DiBlasio 1990). Interestingly, this publication would have been accepted and published by another top-rated family journal in 1988, but they insisted that the word “forgiveness” had to be changed to “forgetting” as a condition for publication. Their reasoning

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was that forgiveness was too closely associated with religiosity to be a professional ­concern. This example reflects the type of bias received by those exploring and using forgiveness in the scientific and professional community throughout the first 20 years of the scientific/­therapeutic exploration of forgiveness. Despite the bias, Worthington was determined to study forgiveness in his efforts to facilitate knowledge and training on forgiveness at scientific levels and for general use by the public. He created an acrostic of REACH to give us an easy and practical way to remember the steps in forgiving: R = Recall the hurt. To heal, you have to face the fact that you’ve been hurt. Make up your mind not to be snarky (i.e., nasty and hurtful), not to treat yourself like a victim, and not to treat the other person as a jerk. Make a decision to forgive. Decide that you are not going to pursue payback but you will treat the person as a valuable person. E = Empathize [with the person who has offended you]. Empathy is putting yourself in the other person’s chair. Pretend that the other person is in an empty chair across from you. Talk to him. Pour your heart out. Then, when you’ve had your say, sit in his chair. Talk back to the imaginary you in a way that helps you see why the other person might have wronged you. This builds empathy, and even if you can’t empathize, you might feel more sympathy, compassion, or love, which helps you heal from hurt. This allows you to give. A = Altruistic gift. Give forgiveness as an unselfish, altruistic gift. We all can remember when we wronged someone—maybe a parent, teacher, or friend—and the person forgave us. We felt light and free. And we didn’t want to disappoint that person by doing wrong again. By forgiving unselfishly, you can give that same gift to someone who hurt you. C = Commit. Once you’ve forgiven, write a note to yourself—something as simple as, “Today, I forgave [person’s name] for hurting me.” This helps your forgiveness last. H = Hold onto forgiveness. We write notes of commitment because we will almost surely be tempted to doubt that we really forgave. We can re-read our notes. We did forgive. (http://www.evworthington- forgiveness.com/reach-forgiveness-of-others) Although the REACH model has been designed for all types of relationships, it has particular relevancy to the family focus of this chapter, especially for couples. Hope-Focused Couple’s Therapy (HFCT) (Ripley and Worthington 2014) has been effective in enriching the lives of couples by adding practical psychoeducational information to teach and train couples about forgiveness and how to achieve it. Two interventions within HFCT—Forgiveness and Reconciliation through Experiencing Empathy (FREE) which incorporates REACH and Handling Our Problems Effectively (HOPE)—were tested in a clinical trial study (Worthington et al. 2015). Newly married couples within their first six months were randomly assigned as follows: HOPE (n = 47 couples), FREE (n = 49 couples), and the control group (n = 49 couples). The researchers report that having newly married couples go through the nine-hour psychoeducation of the FREE (with REACH) and the HOPE is “optimal for marriage enrichment interventions” (p.14). Lasting positive changes were found in self-report scales (such as empathy, communication, and feelings about previous transgressions), a behavioral measure that rated videotaped discussions for observable positive and negative affect demonstrated between the couple, and salivary cortisol measures. All hypotheses were either fully or partially supported. In another study, the efficacy of the FREE training was demonstrated with non-related parents and caregivers (n = 27) of 0- to 9-year-old children (Kiefer et al. 2010). Although this was not an intervention between parenting partners as reported in the first study above, it did demonstrate that parents and care-takers could independently forgive transgressions of their partners without direct interactive intervention. 498

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7.  The Decision-Based Forgiveness Model Decision-based forgiveness (DBF) (see DiBlasio 2010) is a treatment intervention that was designed to be used by professional mental health therapists and to serve as an adjunct to their therapy with family members. The therapy provides willing family members with an opportunity to disclose their own hurtful behaviors through a step-by-step session, in which the behaviors are thoroughly stated, explained, and there is a full understanding of the hurt and pain involved. The approximately four-hour session includes the creation of plans to stop and/or prevent the behaviors, and it gives the couple an opportunity to seek formal forgiveness. (This section draws from some of my articles with modification from the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.) The steps are organized into three segments: defining and preparing (Steps 1–3), seeking and granting forgiveness (Steps 4–12), and ceremonial act (Step 13). After family members are prepared via Steps 1 through 3, family members took turns completing Steps 4 through 12, followed by a ceremonial final step. The steps include the following: Step 1: Discuss Definitions of Forgiveness; Step 2: Opportunity to Seek Forgiveness for Self-Decided Wrongful Actions; Step 3: Introduction to Treatment and Decision to Participate; Step 4: Statement of the Offense; Step 5: Offender Provides Explanation; Step 6: Questions and Answers about the Offense; Step 7: Offended Person Gives Emotional Reactions; Step 8: Offender Shows Empathy and Remorse for the Hurt; Step 9: Offender Develops Plan to Stop/Prevent Behavior; Step 10: Offended Family Member Shows Empathy for the Offender’s Hurt; Step 11: Emphasis on Choice and Commitment to Let Go; Step 12: Formal Request for Forgiveness; and Step 13: Ceremonial Act. Describing each step is not practical given the limitations of this chapter. However, the following briefly describes Step 5 and 7 as examples of the 13 steps (also see DiBlasio 2010): Step 5: Offender Provides Explanation. The therapist begins by getting permission from the offended person to attempt to get a full explanation. When offended persons give permission to offenders to explain, they become proactive and relatively non-defensive participants in the goal of achieving understanding. This maneuver helps increase understanding for offended persons because, otherwise, hearing an explanation could provoke a self-protective response, thus creating misunderstandings and feelings of tension and defensiveness. The family is cautioned that this step is an impartial attempt to gain insight into the background and reasons why the family member committed the offensive behavior. The therapist clarifies that this step should not be considered by family members as an excuse, but rather a search for information that will allow a thorough assessment of the offense. Frequently, it is discovered that the offense has some history and connection to deeper individual and relational issues, and is not intentionally meant to be spiteful or hurtful. In one such client family situation, a sister’s harsh tone and unkind words toward her brother were better understood when she and her brother were able to gain insight to the harsh treatment she received from their father during her childhood. As multiple family members gain understanding as to the deeper insights of a wrongdoing, feelings of empathy and insight are created. Step 7: Offended person gives emotional reactions. With the offender’s assistance, the therapist attempts to assure the offended individuals are able to safely articulate their emotions regarding the offense. Frequently people who are hurt by an offense directly or indirectly want a compassionate responsiveness and understanding of their hurt feelings from the offending family member. Typically, by the time a couple or family comes to therapy, multiple attempts were undertaken by offended persons to express their hurt. However, a combination of the intensity of the expression and the corresponding defensive reaction of the offender often leaves both marred in misunderstandings and unacknowledged heartache. The strategy of the therapist from the beginning of the forgiveness session is to build a non-defensive atmosphere by increasing objectivity and insight into the offense, therefore bringing a measure of calm to hurt feelings. 499

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In Step 7, an emotional repair begins to crystallize as an offender empathetically listens to deep emotional expressions from the offended. Interestingly, the expression of upsetting emotions and the empathetic attention brings about increased intimacy between family members or couples. Because of this, humans tend to find connectedness as they share feelings of hurt, pain, and other deep emotions. When discussing an offense, family members often forgive more effectively when they believe the offender hears and understands their emotional reaction. Whereas on the surface it may seem to clients that this is counterintuitive to achieving intimacy, sharing hurt is one of the building blocks of intimate relationships. Because of the necessity of sharing hurt in building intimacy, considerable care and time is spent focusing on hurt feelings. Many clients may even find it difficult to verbalize their feelings fully, and may at first show discomfort in expressing themselves. It is therefore necessary for the therapist to be patient and gentle in exploring these feelings. The therapist may also ask the offender’s permission for the one offended to fully speak about their hurt. By giving permission, the offender both reduces their own feelings of defensiveness and becomes a willing participant in hearing the emotional responses. When the offender gives permission for the offended to openly express feelings, the brain shifts from a self-protective mode to a receiving mode, allowing the offender to better experience feelings of empathy for the offended. The offender then becomes a team participant in helping the family member to fully express feelings of hurt, thus helping in repairing damaged relationships. Two research projects utilizing DBF intervention using marital spouses as subjects were employed to test efficacy of a step-by-step forgiveness therapy session. Study One was a randomized clinical trial that included a total of 44 couples (n = 88). The randomly assigned groups consisted of a forgiveness treatment group (FT) (19 couples, n = 38); a problem-solving alternative treatment group (AT) (16 couples, n = 32); and a no-treatment control group (NT) (9 couples, n = 9 couples). A statistical analysis at pretest showed no difference between the groups on age, race, education, years married, religiosity, forgiveness level, marital satisfaction, and depression. Study One included subjects of various spiritual affiliations such as Christianity, Jewish, agnostic, atheistic, and other spiritual orientations. However, it was thought that Christians who answered two spiritual questions in a certain Jesus-­focused and salvation-oriented way (referred to as Devout Christians to avoid other stigmatizing labels) would respond in very positive ways to forgiveness and therefore were not included in the random sampling. These couples (n = 13 couples; 26 additional subjects) were not included in the random groups of Study One, but instead became subjects for Study Two. The purpose of Study One was to determine whether the FT is effective in facilitating forgiveness, increasing marital satisfaction, and decreasing depression in a three-hour session with spouses when compared to AT and NT. The findings indicated that spouses who received the forgiveness intervention were the most forgiving, followed by the problem-solving treatment group, and no improvement was seen in the control group. Related to depression, the FT group in this study showed significant improvement in depression and marital satisfaction. In Study Two, the findings indicated that this select group of devout Christian spouses had a very high increase in their levels of forgiveness, marital satisfaction, and contentment (even though the increase was impressive and showed more improvement than the FT groups in Study One, the group was not randomly assigned, and therefore it can only be conceptually compared to the groups in Study One). A casestudy design was used in another study to demonstrate that DBF led to healing and forgiveness in children whose parents were incarcerated (Lander 2012). Interestingly, the FPM, REACH, and DBF strategies were formulated over the past 30 plus years independently, but they have very similar concepts. For example, empathy, commitment to forgiveness once achieved, discussing the hurt and expressing emotions, understanding the offense, and working through negative emotions to name a few. Perhaps what sets DBF apart from the other two is the pivotal and strong focus on the conviction that humans have the capacity to make and 500

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accomplish forgiveness decisions on any given day of their choosing. The DBF leads to immediate emotional, behavioral, and cognitive forgiveness (see DiBlasio and Benda, 2008, where all three of these EFI subscales showed emotional, cognitive, and behavioral improvements in the forgiveness treatment groups). Although forgiveness is a process over time for many, there is an alternative. For example, often people decide to forgive or seek forgiveness when called to the bedside of a dying relative or friend. There is no more time for the process of forgiveness: forgiveness becomes an urgent matter. Clients are often amazed when they come to the conclusion that they can choose to make their forgiveness situation urgent. Without imposition and careful attention to client self-­ determination, I find that in discussing this with clients they want to hear more about DBF and they eagerly choose to do the session at the beginning of therapy instead of waiting.

8.  Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples Several studies that matched the search criterion were related to Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (henceforth EFT-C) (see Greenberg and Goldman 2008; Wiebe and Johnson 2016; for a review of EFT-C). In these studies, an EFT-C approach to forgiveness was applied with couples who received the intervention together rather than a group of individual subjects who were thinking about their partners as the forgiveness intervention was applied. Utilizing a waitlist control design, Greenberg et al. (2010: 28) tested the effectiveness of EFT-C in helping 20 couples forgive long-term hurt in the relationship during 10–12 treatment sessions. Eleven couples found complete forgiveness and six made progress toward forgiveness compared to no couples achieving complete forgiveness and only three couples making some forgiveness progress during the waitlist control period. The treatment couples “showed a significant improvement in dyadic satisfaction, trust, and forgiveness as well as improvement on symptom and target complaint measures.” Another study on EFT-C (Meneses and Greenberg 2011) utilized eight couples where a significant emotional injury was experienced by the female partner within each of the couple subjects. The emotional injuries committed by the male partners included emotional abandonment, exerting pressure on the partner to have an abortion, emotional affairs over the internet, infidelity, and the use of internet pornography. Although a preliminary study to explore the process of forgiveness and EFT-C and to develop a rating system to be applied to research with couples, the results showed that shame and empathetic distress have potential in understanding forgiveness between couples. They define empathetic distress as the offender expressing both empathy for the partner and an expression of feeling hurt for causing the pain. Shame and empathic distress serve to communicate that having hurt the other had a tremendous impact on the way the injuring partner views himself. Suffering and deep remorse are vividly expressed with a high degree of emotional arousal. In essence, our empirical investigation revealed that the injurer’s expression of shame or empathic distress seems to be central to forgiveness the offender expressing both empathy for the partner and expression of feeling hurt for causing the pain. (Meneses and Greenberg 2011: 498) Meneses and Greenberg (2014) studied the efficacy of EFT-C on forgiveness by observing in-­ session verbal and behavioral interpersonal responses of 33 couples. In EFT-C, “people are seen as primarily motivated by their affective goals and the regulation of emotional states. The three motivational systems of attachment, identity, and attraction/liking, viewed as reflective of the core concerns people bring to therapy” (Goldman and Greenberg 2013: 62). Conflict in the relationship occurs when there are “breakdowns in both other- and self-regulation” that interfere with the motivational systems. Achieving better ways to regulate affect and attend to emotional 501

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interactive cycles is accomplished through a five-stage approach to therapy: (1) validation and ­a lliance formation, (2) negative cycle de-escalation, (3) accessing underlying vulnerable feelings, (4) restructuring the negative interaction and the self, and (5) consolidation and integration. Their results showed that when offending partners expressed shame for their wrongful actions it evoked feelings of empathy in partners who were offended which in turn influences forgiveness feelings. The following three interpersonal variables were found to predict forgiveness and levels of trust and marital satisfaction: (a) the offender’s “expression of shame”, (b) the offended partner’s “accepting response” to the shame, and (c) the offended partner’s “in-session expression of forgiveness” predicted. They explain that couple discord interferes with basic “unmet adult needs for attachment (proximity, availability and responsiveness), identity (including having one’s status and identity validated), and liking (excitement, enjoyment, attraction).” Disturbance of these basic needs produces an emotional injury that is resolved through forgiveness because it brings about “reciprocal affect regulation, whereby one partner’s expression of a vulnerable emotion invites the other partner to respond in a particular way, and each individual’s emotional expression serves to regulate the emotional state of the other” (Meneses and Greenberg 2014: 52). In an earlier study, steps to forgiveness and reconciliation were evaluated for 24 couples receiving EFT-C to resolve an attachment injury (Makinen and Johnson 2006). Couples who were successful at resolving the injuries (n = 15) were compared to the unresolved couples (n = 9). The resolved couples showed significant improvements in forgiveness when compared to the unresolved couples. In addition, the resolved couples showed more affiliative behaviors and had “deeper levels of experiencing” than the unresolved couples.

9.  Closing Thoughts The forgiveness research related to families and couples during the period between 2005 and 2020 has demonstrated that forgiveness continues to play a major role in increasing family relationship satisfaction, attachment, understanding, empathy, hope, and other positive relationship-oriented qualities. Likewise, it has been shown to have a positive effect in decreasing depression and anxiety among family members, and resolving the ramifications of serious hurtful offenses. In the limited search performed for this chapter, I found no studies to show that forgiveness interventions were harmful to couples or families. Although there are significant limitations to the methodology of the search performed, the overall result may be encouragement for forgiveness researchers and practitioners to increase family-related research designs. Some of the couples’ research studies mentioned in this chapter are indication that family intervention research is on the right path. Unfortunately, studies on family-oriented forgiveness interventions have difficulties in recruitment of subjects, problems in recruiting and training of therapists to conduct interventions, high subjects’ attrition rates, and usually require significant funding. Although it will not be easy, the next challenge for forgiveness research is to conduct additional studies where forgiveness interventions are specific to family relationships and involve related family subjects working together toward forgiveness. Family members and professional therapists working together in a non-defensive atmosphere have certain synergistic effects in their mutual exchanges of interaction with each other that can empower the forgiveness experience.

References Agu, S.A. and Nwankwo, B.E. (2019) “Influence of Religious Commitment, Intentionality in Marriage and Forgiveness on Marital Satisfaction among Married Couples,” IFE PsychologIA 27(2), 121–33. Anderson, J. and Natrajan-Tyagi, R. (2016) “Understanding the Process of Forgiveness After a Relational Hurt in Christian Marriages,” Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy 15, 295–320.

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Forgiveness with Couples and Families Bell, C.A., Kamble, S.V. and Fincham, F.D. (2018) “Forgiveness, Attributions, and Marital Quality in U.S. and Indian Marriages,” Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy 17, 276–93. Bick, J., Dozier, M., Bernard, K., Grasso, D. and Simons, R. (2013) “Foster Mother—Infant Bonding: A ssociations between Foster Mothers’ Oxytocin Production, Electrophysiological Brain Activity, ­ ­Feelings of Commitment, and Caregiving Quality,” Child Development 84, 826–40. Braithwaite, S.R., Mitchell, C.M., Selby, E.A. and Fincham, F.D. (2016) “Trait Forgiveness and Enduring Vulnerabilities: Neuroticism and Catastrophizing Influence Relationship Satisfaction via Less Forgiveness,” Personality and Individual Differences 94 (May 1, 2016), 237–46. Burchard, G.A., Yarhouse, M.A., Worthington, E.L., Jr, Berry, J.W., Killian, M. and Canter, D.E. (2003) A study of two marital enrichment programs and couples quality of life. Journal of Psychology and Theology 31, 240–52. Cacioppo, S., Bianchi-Demicheli, F., Hatfield, E. and Rapson, R.L. (2012) “Social Neuroscience of Love,” Clinical Neuropsychiatry 9, 3–13. Carl, K. and Wang, T.R. (2012) “Forgiveness Isn’t a Simple Process: It’s a Vast Undertaking: Negotiating and Communicating Forgiveness in Non-voluntary Family Relationships,” Journal of Family Communication 12, 40–56. Chung, Myung-Sun (2014) “Pathways between Attachment and Marital Satisfaction: The Mediating Roles of Rumination, Empathy, and Forgiveness,” Personality and Individual Differences 70, 246–51. DiBlasio, F.A. (2010) “Christ-like Forgiveness in Marital Counseling: A Clinical Follow-up of Two E ­ mpirical Studies,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 29, 291–300. DiBlasio, F.A. and Benda, B.B. (2008) “Forgiveness Intervention with Married Couples: Two Empirical Analyses,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 27, 150–58. Fincham, F. and Beach, S.R.H. (2007) “Forgiveness and Marital Quality: Precursor or Consequence in Well-established Relationships?,” Journal of Positive Psychology 2, 260–68. Freedman, S.R. and Enright, R.D. (1996) “Forgiveness as an Intervention Goal with Incest Survivors,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 64, 983–92. Gayatrivadivu, Poonguzhali, Ofelia and Vijayabanu. (2014) “A Study on Relationship between Forgiveness, ­Resilience and Marital Satisfaction among Married Individuals,” Indian Journal of Positive Psychology 5, 382–87. Ghiurca, M.V., Vintila, M. (2019). “The Relationship between Forgiveness and Marital Satisfaction within Couples,” Social Research Reports 11, 26–34. Goldman, R.N. and Greenberg, L. (2013) “Working with Identity and Self-soothing in Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples,” Family Process 52, 62–82. Greenberg, L.S. and Goldman, R.N. (2008) Emotion-focused Couples Therapy: The Dynamics of Emotion, Love, and Power. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Greenberg, L., Warwar, S. and Malcolm, W. (2010) “Emotion-Focused Couples Therapy and the ­Facilitation of Forgiveness,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 36, 28–42. Gumus, I.G. and Kislak, S.T. (2019) “The Predictive Role of Forgiveness and the Level of Repetitive ­Thinking on Mental Health and Marital Adjustment in Married Individuals,” Journal of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences 32, 236–45. Hanke, K. and Fischer, R. (2013) “Socioeconomic and Socio-political Correlates of Interpersonal ­Forgiveness: A Three-level Meta-analysis of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory Across 13 Societies,” International Journal of Psychology 48, 514–26. Haversath, J., Gärttner, K.M., Kliem, S. and Kröger, C. (2019) “Factorial invariance of the German version of the Marital Offence-Specific Forgiveness Scale (MOFS): Analysis of Couples’ Data,” European Journal of Psychological Assessment 35, 490–97. Hoyt, W.T., Fincham, F.D., McCullough, M.E., Maio, G. and Davila, J. (2005) “Responses to Interpersonal Transgressions in Families: Forgivingness, Forgivability, and Relationship-Specific Effects,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89, 375–94. Kandel, E.R., Schwartz, J.H., Jessell, T.M., Siegelbaum, S.A. and Hudspeth, A.J. (2012) Principles of Neural Science, 5th edition, New York: McGraw Hill. Kiefer, R., Worthington, E., Myers, B., Kliewer, W., Berry, J., Davis, D., Kilgour, J., Miller, A., Van ­Tongeren, D. and Hunter, J. (2010) “Training Parents in Forgiving and Reconciling. American,” Journal of Family Therapy 38, 32–49. Lander, I. (2012) “Towards the Incorporation of Forgiveness Therapy in Healing the Complex Trauma of Parental Incarceration,” Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 29, 1–19. Lee, Y.R. and Enright, R.D. (2009) “Fathers’ Forgiveness as a Moderator Between Perceived Unfair ­Treatment by a Family of Origin Member and Anger with Own Children,” Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families,” 17, 22–31.

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Frederick A. DiBlasio Maio, G.R. et al. (2008) “Unraveling the Role of Forgiveness in Family Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, 307–19. Makinen, J.A. and Johnson, S.M. (2006) “Resolving Attachment Injuries in Couples Using Emotionally Focused Therapy: Steps toward Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical ­Psychology,” 74, 1055–64. Meneses, C.W. and Greenberg, L.S. (2011) “The Construction of a Model of the Process of Couples’ Forgiveness in Emotion-Focused Therapy For Couples,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 37, 491–502. Meneses, C.W and Greenberg, L.S. (2014) “Interpersonal Forgiveness in Emotion-Focused Couples” ­Therapy: Relating Process to Outcome,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 40, 49–67. Naiemi, G., Mohsenzadeh, F., Pirsaghi, F. and Maleki, T. (2016) “Role of Personality Characteristics and Family of Origin in Anticipation of Forgiveness,” Journal of Research and Health 6, 145. Paleari, F.G., Regalia, C. and Fincham, F. (2005) “Marital Quality, Forgiveness, Empathy, and Rumination: A Longitudinal Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, 368–78. Pronk, T.M., Buyukcan-Tetik, A., Iliás, M.M.A.H. and Finkenauer, C. (2019) “Marriage as a Training Ground: Examining Change in Self-Control and Forgiveness over the First 4 Years of Marriage,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 36, 109–30. Reed, G. and Enright, R.D. (2006) “The Effects of Forgiveness Therapy on Depression, Anxiety, and Post-Traumatic Stress for Women after Spousal Emotional Abuse,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical ­Psychology 74, 920–9. Ripley, J.S. and Worthington, E.L., Jr. (2014) Couple Therapy: A New Hope-focused Approach. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Shola, A.J. (2018) “Influence of Forgiveness as a Tool in Enhancing Marital Stability among Married ­Undergraduates of a Nigerian University,” IFE PsychologIA 26, 44–51. Subkoviak, M., Enright, R.D, Wu, C., Gassin, E.A., Freedman, S., Olson, L.M. and Sarinopoulos, I. (1995) “Measuring Interpersonal Forgiveness in Late Adolescence And Middle Adulthood,” Journal of Adolescence 18, 641–55. Wade, N.G., Hoyt, W.T., Kidwell, J.E; and Worthington, E.L. Jr. (2014) “Efficacy of Psychotherapeutic Interventions to Promote Forgiveness: A Meta-analysis,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 82, 154–70. Wiebe, S.A. and Johnson, S.M. (2016) “A Review of the Research in Emotionally-Focused Therapy for Couples,” Family Process 55, 390–407. Worthington, E.L., Jr., Berry, J.W., Hook, J.N., Davis, D.E., Scherer, M., Griffin, B.J., Wade, N.G., Yarhouse, M., Ripley, J.S., Miller, A.J., Sharp, C.B., Canter, D.E. and Campana, K.L. (2015) ­ ­“Forgiveness-Reconciliation and Communication-Conflict-Resolution Interventions Versus Retested Controls in Early Married Couples,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 62, 14–27. Worthington, E.L. and DiBlasio, F. (1990) “Promoting Mutual Forgiveness within The Fractured Relationship,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 27, 219–23. Worthington, E.L. and Wade, N.G. (2019) Handbook of Forgiveness (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.

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37 EXAMINING FORGIVENESS AND TRAUMA THROUGH CASE STUDY ANALYSES Jacqueline Y. Song and Shih-Tseng Tina Huang

The theme of person-to-person forgiveness has continued to gain attention in the areas of media, social science, and mental health treatment since some high-profile demonstrations of forgiveness have occurred. For example, when Pope John Paul II forgave the man who attempted to assassinate him on May 13, 1981, this gesture was captured on the cover story of Time magazine released on May 25, 1981. When Martin Luther King, Jr.’s house was firebombed in Montgomery, Alabama, on January 30, 1956, he encouraged his crowd of angry supporters to meet hate with love. The threats on his life and to his family did not stop him from writing the now-classic book, Strength to Love, in 1963, which reflects his deep understanding of agape, the highest type of sacrificial love, of going the extra mile to ensure the good of the other’s well-being. After Eva Moses Kor was imprisoned along with her twin sister Miriam in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, she proclaimed, in her name only, amnesty toward the Nazis who were responsible for that imprisonment and Miriam’s subsequent death because of kidney failure, brought about by unethical medical experiments on the twins. This astonishing proclamation and act of forgiving is captured in the film, Forgiving Dr. Mengele, in 2006. As one other high-profile example, when Nelson Mandela was giving his inaugural address in South Africa, he graciously placed his jailor of 20 years in Robbin Island Prison in an honored place during that talk, demonstrating by his actions that he was forgiving his jailor. Not only are there cases of well-known people offering forgiveness to others, but this heroic and virtuous act takes place daily in the hearts and actions of those who too often go unnoticed. Below we present four more cases in which people have forgiven others for horrendous acts of violent injustices against them and their families. We will meet a woman, Marietta Jaeger, who lost her daughter, Susie, to abduction and murder in 1973. We will meet Neftali Moses, whose son was killed in an act of violence in Israel in 2008. Then, we will meet Hui Mei Chang who struggled from her unfortunate life experience and was hurt by losing her mother at the age of four, being raised by harsh stepmother, and later getting divorced because her husband had another family outside their marriage. Finally, we meet Joy Tan-chi Mendoza who was a victim of gang rape at the age of 15 in 1992. We will look both for commonalities across these four cases and for their specific differences as we try to better understand the forgiveness process. Before we begin these case studies, we will first examine what is trauma and what is a case study within the social sciences.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-45

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1.  What Is Trauma? Trauma as a psychological construct takes the following forms. First, it is an event or series of events that are highly unusual, potentially psychologically and physically destructive, and even life-changing for people experiencing the event(s) (Trauma 2020). These atrocious events may lead to immediate short- and long-term repercussions for the person. Such events in childhood, often labeled as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), can have negative consequences into adulthood, affecting mental health and relationships (Romero et al. 2018). Examples of traumatic events are accidents and rape (Trauma 2020). All of these examples concern what the field of forgiveness studies calls unjust life events (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015) caused by persons who act unfairly or do not give the victim what is deserved, such as respect, a fair wage, or physical protection as examples. Other traumatic events are naturally occurring without persons behaving unjustly such as natural disasters. Besides a focus on events, either induced by others’ unjust actions or by naturally occurring phenomena, trauma in the published literature is sometimes equated with the psychological effects of events. Examples here include unhealthy anger or resentment (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015), post-traumatic stress symptoms (Silver et al. 2002), and low self-esteem (Freedman and Enright 1996). Our focus in this chapter is on events caused by other people who acted unjustly.

2.  What Is the Case Study? Case studies are forms of research in which the social scientist gathers in-depth information, ­usually about one person at a time, to understand that person’s phenomenological experience. It is a look into the subjective world of a person, using that person’s own words and life experiences. This is one of the oldest approaches to research in the social sciences, beginning with Freud (1909). The tradition has continued within the study of forgiveness with the descriptions from Dr. R ­ ichard Fitzgibbons’ psychiatric practice (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2000, 2015). There are at least four basic classifications of case studies as described by Cherry (2020) as follows: • • •

•

Exploratory case studies usually occur prior to developing testable hypotheses. What are people saying that we had not realized with our theory? Descriptive case studies tend to try to match people’s statements with existing models. The idea here is to look for evidence that supports the social scientist’s existing hypotheses. Explanatory case studies are centered on cause-and-effect issues. In other words, if a researcher is interested in how forgiveness impacts a person’s life after forgiveness occurs, the questions will center on the person’s newly found vitality or purpose in life. Collective case studies center on groups. Researchers try to describe a community’s behavior or to discern norms or attitudes within the group.

In this chapter, we use the case study approach in a retrospective sense, asking four people about their experiences with unjust trauma, their initial reactions to that trauma, their subsequent processes of forgiveness, and the outcomes after forgiving has occurred. We use a semi-structured interview format in which questions are posed to the person (What happened? How did you react? What is forgiveness? How did you go about your “forgiving” and how did that affect you? What is/are your motivation(s) for forgiving your offenders?). We also in some cases used what is called the diary technique (McLeod 2019) by examining information in a person’s published book or media interviews. We tended to use a hybrid technique for our case studies in which we combined three approaches. For the descriptive case study, we started with information from the Process Model of Forgiveness (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015) as a basis for analyzing the people’s description of 506

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their own forgiveness process. We further used the exploratory approach in that we were open to learning more about forgiveness by examining novel ideas not expressed in Enright and Fitzgibbons (2015). Finally, we were open to the explanatory approach, especially as forgiveness might have caused a change in the person’s worldview and purpose in life.

3.  Marietta Jaeger Lane A supposed one-month grand vacation full of happy memories for Marietta, her husband, their five children, and Marietta’s parents turned out to be a painful experience that completely changed Marietta’s life and the lives of her family. Susie, the youngest of the five children, at the age of seven, was kidnapped during the third and last night of the family’s camping vacation in the Missouri River Headwaters Park in Montana. That night was the last time Marietta ever saw and hugged her beloved daughter, Susie. She was nowhere to be found. Although the kidnapper demanded ransom money in exchange for Susie, such exchange did not take place, despite Marietta’s appeals to the kidnapper, through the media, that they will be willing to do whatever the kidnapper wanted them to do in exchange for Susie’s safe return. The kidnapper remained silent (Jaeger 1998).

4.  Anger and Even Hatred It is not uncommon for people to react to injustices with a high degree of anger. After all, this anger is showing the offender that the unjustly treated person has a sense of justice and that there has been, in this case, a serious breach of the moral order. As Marietta waited for news about her daughter, there was a river-search operation near where they had camped. As she watched the men in the boat searching for a body, Marietta realized that she was boiling with rage deep inside her. She recalled telling her husband that she felt overwhelmed with anger, which she suspected would remain even when the kidnapper brought Susie back alive. She was aware that she literally could kill the kidnapper with her bare hands, and with a smile on her face, for what he had done to her family. Several weeks went by, but there was no word about Susie ( Jaeger 1998).

5.  Insight That Anger Can Destroy the One Who Is Angry As weeks went by Marietta realized that the harbored hatred is not healthy for her psychological well-being and it was violating her own moral principles. The inner struggle became more apparent as she wrestled between her desire to seek revenge on the one hand and the awareness that she needed to care for her family on the other, which was becoming more difficult because of this challenge. In other words, her deep anger was interfering with her ability to carry out everyday responsibilities. The anger was not constant. Marietta relates that she went back and forth, “wrestling with the worst and the best of myself ” (Jaeger 1998: 11). As the fatigue was increasing, she decided to forgive.

6.  What Is Forgiveness? For Marietta, as she forgave, in her words, “I surrendered. I made a decision to forgive this person, whoever he was. Yet, so saying, I clearly understood that this was not an accomplished feat by any means” ( Jaeger 1998: 11). Forgiveness started as a decision, a willed sense that this is part of “the best of myself ” (p.11). She further is aware that the forgiveness is not completed upon making such a decision. Forgiving, in other words, came in increments, slowly, and with practice. Further, in understanding what forgiveness is, Marietta acknowledged the abductor’s “responsibility for the offense, but I chose to renounce/forego my hostility toward him and his indebtedness to me” (personal communication: March 10, 2019). For Marietta, “forgiveness is more than ‘moving on’ 507

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or ‘letting go’ of the offense” (personal communication, March 10, 2019). In forgiving, she makes a distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. More specifically, forgiveness “requires the attitude/action of the victim; reconciliation requires the participation of both parties” (personal communication: March 10, 2019). Forgiveness in her view is distinguished from forgetting, condoning, and absolving the offender from responsibility ( Jaeger 1998: 12).

7.  Continuing Trauma After several weeks in Montana, the family decided to move back to their home in Michigan. Still there was no word regarding Susie. Three months after the day Susie was abducted, Marietta’s family was only left with two pieces of information. The kidnapper and perhaps Susie were in Wyoming and the kidnapper still intended to exchange Susie for ransom money ( Jaeger 1998).

8.  Continuing Forgiveness After three more months, there were still no signs of where Susie was. On occasion, law ­enforcement officials would find a missing child, but she was never identified as Marietta and her husband’s child. This increased the stress even more. “It was a nearly unbearable time of stress and relentless psychological stretching to meet the challenges of coping with the anguish of Susie’s absence….” ( Jaeger 1998: 11). Yet, in spite of this immense burden, Marietta engaged daily in the process of forgiving. From her personal communication to us (March 10, 2019), below are some of the processes in which she engaged as she forgave the offender: 1 She engaged in a behavior of forgiving by praying daily for the one who abducted Susie. At first it was very difficult to do, but the practice over time made it easier. 2 She made a conscious decision to continue choosing forgiveness even though anger remained. 3 As she made this free-will decision to forgive, she asked God in prayer to change her heart. She knew by faith that God would work with her, given this choice of a higher moral ground. She did not hand the forgiveness over to God, but instead worked with God to change her heart from anger to love. 4 Eventually, she got the cognitive insight of inherent worth: that all people, including the abductor, are unique and therefore important (see Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015 on inherent worth). Seeing this unconditional worth in the offender is part of what is called the global perspective (Enright 2019). 5 This led to what is called the cosmic perspective (Enright 2019) in which she saw that the offender is made in the image and likeness of God, as is Susie and all others. 6 With the global and cosmic perspectives in place, Marietta was able to persevere in daily prayer not only for Susie but also authentically for her abductor.

9.  Forgiveness as Loving the Offender The waiting in the midst of uncertainties continued and hopes on occasion were raised, until the kidnapper called in the middle of the night of the first-year anniversary of Susie’s disappearance. He called to taunt her. Yet, Marietta already had about a year of forgiveness already established within her. In Marietta’s words, When he called me on the first-year anniversary of my daughter’s disappearance from my life – one year to the minute in the middle of the night – I heard his voice on the phone and I felt God love him through me. I was at peace with that, and finally set free. (personal communication: March 10, 2019) 508

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Marietta actually asked the man what she could do for him, even though she still did not know Susie’s fate. Her demonstration of concern and compassion on the phone with him led the kidnapper to lose control of himself as he earnestly wept. David was the name of the kidnapper. The one-hour conversation was enough for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to trace and identify him, and this eventually led to his arrest. Marietta learned that Susie had already been killed a week after her abduction. Despite all of this, she requested that David not be punished with the death penalty, but rather with a lifetime imprisonment without parole. Marietta realized that to kill somebody in her daughter’s name would be to violate and profane the name, goodness, beauty, and sweetness of who Susie was. Marietta knew clearly that forgiveness was and always will be her healthiest option for her and the most high-principled way to honor the beauty of her daughter’s life ( Jaeger 1998).

10.  Hatred Took Its Toll and the Personal Perspective Hatred found a way to take over her husband’s life ( Jaeger 2013). Although Marietta’s husband was a stoic and strong man, he buried all his feelings, and would not talk about them. In Marietta’s view, his holding onto those negative feelings deteriorated his physical health. His body began to give out and, in her view, he died early because of the resentment. Marietta, once she knew who the abductor was, began to take what is called the personal perspective (Enright 2019) in which the forgiver tries to see what life has been like for the offender, what wounds might have been inflicted on him to make him engage in murder. “I tried to learn as much as I could about his life/background/childhood, the knowledge of which facilitates understanding and compassion” (personal communication: March 10, 2019). David had a challenging past, living with many difficult problems. His parents divorced when he was very young. His father left his mother and the five children without financial support at all and married another woman. Inside of him, he desperately longed for his father’s affirmation. Later he became a child serial killer, a paranoid man. Marietta knew that trying to understand his background does not mean excusing or condoning his actions, or even forgetting what had happened. “When I forgave David, I acknowledged his responsibility for the offense, but I chose to renounce/forego my hostility toward him and his indebtedness to me” (personal communication: March 10, 2019).

11.  Finding Meaning and Purpose after Forgiving Susie’s loss is still painful to Marietta. At the same time, she reasons that it was God’s way of redeeming Susie’s suffering and death by giving a gift of life to those people hearing Susie’s story. She has found that her daughter’s story comforts other people. Marietta had helped start a number of murder-victim organizations. She wanted those who heard her story to know that “if Marietta can do that in that kind of a situation then I need to start working on that situation” ( Jaeger 2013). Marietta further remarks that with forgiveness “we are free to move into a new future. If not, we’re stuck in the past which we can never change” (personal communication: March 10, 2019). Forgiveness is a gift people give to those who have wronged them and to an even wider circle, to assist other hurting people as they try to transform their lives after unjust tragedy.

12.  Dr. Naftali Moses Dr. Naftali Moses was born in New York City and, because of his Jewish faith, decided to immigrate to Israel where he has lived for over 30 years. He holds a doctoral degree in medical history from Bar-Ilan University, and teaches and writes on the relationship between medicine and ­Judaism. He is the author of several books. 509

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His first-born son, Avraham David, aged 16, was one of eight innocent youths murdered by an Arab terrorist on the eve of Rosh Chodesh Adar Bet (the Beginning of the Month in the Hebrew calendar) on March 6, 2008 in the library of a religious studies college, Mercaz HaRav Yeshivah, in Jerusalem, Israel. The gunman was shot dead 16 minutes later after committing the mass shootings. Dr. Moses found himself in a state of uncertainty whether he would ever find the composure to actually forgive the murderer of his dear son for this heinous crime.

13.  What Is Forgiveness? Dr. Moses makes a distinction between forgiving and reconciling: “Reconciliation is a reestablishment of a connection. Forgiveness, on the other hand, may include just the opposite—moving onward with my own life detached from the injurious party” (personal communication: March 21, 2019). Forgiveness here is a moving on for the sake of one’s own well-being. This is consistent with other non-academic people’s views. When Freedman and Chang (2010) interviewed people in the general public of a mid-western city in the United States, the most common response (52% of the sample) is that forgiving is moving on from the unjust situation. Personal forgiving then is an adaptation to the challenging situation so that one can live well; forgiving is not necessarily, in such a case, a moral virtue deliberately given to another. This idea of “moving on” is seen again in this quotation: “I really don’t think someone who murdered eight boys and young men in cold blood is worthy of my thought, let alone my compassion. It is not [my] job. It is God’s” (personal communication: March 21, 2019).

14.  Processes Involved in Forgiving We see six themes in Dr. Moses’ forgiveness process. For the first theme, the final quotation above is insightful for us. At times, forgiveness is not between the offender and the one offended. Instead, it is between the offender and God. This is consistent with the psychiatrist’s, Richard Fitzgibbons’ (1998), observation that sometimes the pain is so deep that people can only give their forgiving to God rather than engaging personally in the forgiveness process. There is a de-coupling from a personal forgiving, but not an abandonment of this theme of forgiving. The person who turns it over to God is still engaged in the forgiveness process, but now the intent is for God to do the forgiving. A second theme in Dr. Moses’ forgiving is to do no harm to those who have acted unjustly. This is clearly seen in the first line of chapter 1 in his book, Mourning Under Glass: Reflections on a Son’s Murder (2011): “And cursed be he who says: Revenge! Revenge like this, revenge for the blood of a small child even the devil has not created…Haim Nahman Bialik, ‘On the Slaughter’” (p. 13). In other words, the reader is met immediately in the first chapter with the commitment to do no harm to the one who engaged in what Dr. Moses called a “monstrous” act (personal communication: March 21, 2019). This theme of do-no-harm is reflected eight years later in his personal communication to us: Defending ourselves can often come in the form of making sure that the injurious party gets hurt himself. By inflicting injury, we provide ourselves with a measure of safety, a measure of control. In my mind, forgiveness is related to letting go of this primal, understandable and natural instinct. (personal communication: March 21, 2019) A third theme in forgiving for Dr. Moses is to bear the pain of what happened. In his words: Something tremendously precious and important was taken from me. It has left me wounded. This wound will never fully heal. Sometimes it hurts more than others. But the pain will 510

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never fully go away. I accept this about myself. I allow myself to hurt. I allow myself to cry. I allow myself to ask for help—whether from God or from man. (personal communication: March 21 2019) This acceptance of his pain seems to be part of the process of not holding corrosive resentment in his heart. This pain is not the same as harboring anger because he revealed to us that he never experienced deep anger as much as he experienced mourning (this word is used in the title of his 2011 book). In that book he states, “…in the midst of my still-fresh mourning I hadn’t found the time to be angry…” (pp. 72–3). The fact that the one who murdered his son was killed on the same day as the attack on the boys seems to have lessened his anger. After all, there was a certain justice meted out toward the one who murdered. A fourth theme for Dr. Moses is that the other should repent of the offense if the offended person will forgive. In response the question, “What do you think makes some people difficult to forgive?” he responded, “They don’t take responsibility for the pain that they have caused. That is a red flag—for if they don’t understand their role, they are more likely to reinjure me” (personal communication: March 21, 2019). Haber (1991), who was a Jewish philosopher, makes the same point that waiting to forgive after the other person has repented will help the offender grow in character. This is in contrast to the argument that unconditional forgiving, without waiting for an apology, is a way to set the forgiver free from resentment. In other words, there may be other avenues for helping the other grow in character without preventing the self from healing emotionally (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015). A fifth theme is that the decision to forgive or not to forgive is based in part on the seriousness of the offense. As he says: “There are things which are less than possible to fully move beyond in one life time” (personal communication: March 21, 2019). As a final theme, many people in their suffering from the injustice of others develop a new purpose in life. Dr. Moses found purpose in his suffering. Soon after the death of his son he was asked by a journalist, “Where was God in all of this?” (p. 88). He responded: “I never found myself wondering where God was that night. Evil exists because Man exists; it thrives where Man denies the godly within himself ” (p. 88). He then added: “I believe that He was with my 16-year-old son as he breathed his last prayers” (p. 87). And still further in his book, this theme of purpose in life emerges: God was with me as I looked for the last time at my son’s face. And those who wish to emulate the Holy One in His kindness can try to be there for others in the face of our own all-toohuman pain and suffering. (p.88) His purpose is to be there for others as they suffer.

15.  Forgiveness as Light Dr. Moses gave a courageous talk at the Jerusalem Conference on Forgiveness in July, 2017, which added deeper insights into his views of forgiving. It was a courageous speech because he once again had to face his pain as he shared ideas about forgiveness with the audience. What made this talk especially compelling is that the conference venue was very close to where his son was murdered. In his talk, Dr. Moses used, as an analogy to forgiving, an ancient Jewish ritual. For the particular holiday which he describes, even though the day of worship in the temple started at sunrise, the holiday actually began at night, in the temple courtyard. The people participated by holding lighted torches high against the darkness. What is important in this ritual is that the people symbolically cast away the darkness in their hearts so that the light overcomes it. There is nothing so dark as the 511

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light cannot overcome it. Dr. Moses used that religious symbolism as ­further symbolism for his own ­woundedness, his own experience of adding light to the darkness of the death of his own son. ­Forgiveness is that light and the darkness has never overcome Dr. Moses.

16.  Hui Mei Chang Sixty-nine-year-old Hui Mei Chang has been involved in hospital volunteer work in Taiwan for more than two decades. She is optimistic and always smiling, but it is surprising to know that she grew up in a family without love. At the age of four, she lost his mother, and had been raised with severe discipline by her stepmother. After marriage, she found that her playful personality often clashes with her mother-in-law’s strict and stoic attitudes. Her stepmother was someone who would do anything for the sake of discipline without restraint. She was a heavy drinker and borderline alcoholic, and beating always seemed to come after drinking. When beating became so harsh, Hui Mei would escape from her home and run all the way to another city to find her aunt. Upon seeing bruises all over her body, Hui Mei’s aunt decided to write a letter to her father, asking him to come home from Quemoy before his child may be beaten to death. Hui Mei’s father returned and divorced Hui Mei’s stepmother. For a long time, Hui Mei harbored deep resentment and hatefulness toward her stepmother, exacerbated by the fact that her stepmother sold her sister to someone for a profit.

17.  Resentment Grows Beyond the Stepmother Later on, she turned that deep-rooted resentment and hatefulness toward her father. Thinking about ways to get revenge, shutting her Dad out of her life, Hui Mei would verbally accuse her father whenever she got the chance. “You give me back my sister! I lost my mom, and you said she went to a place far away. You must give me back my sister!” (interview: April 6, 2013; personal communication: March 12, 2019). Growing up with such deep-rooted resentment and hatefulness, Hui Mei sought refuge in marriage and longed for the happy and joyful family life that a marriage can bring. Unfortunately, her marriage was yet another nightmare. It never occurs to her that her husband was having another family outside their marriage. Her heart was again filled with resentment and hatefulness. Prior to discovering her husband’s other family, and as his business failing, Hui Mei s­elf-sacrificially tried every possible way she could to make money and help the family from collapsing. At times, Hui Mei admired herself that she was capable of containing those resentments and keeping herself in one piece. She even went as far as to swallow her pride, informing her husband that it would be all right if he is willing to come back home, provided that he left the other family. Her husband said to her that it was impossible. Thus, they divorced.

18.  The Turning Point toward Forgiveness Her husband’s response explains why the grievances and hate which Hui Mei felt ran so deep and were so hurtful. She was contemplating all the possible means to harm him and even pondering how to stab or kill him. However, Hui Mei is not the kind of person who knows how to handle a knife for a menacing intent. Instead, she told herself, “All right, I will die then, and after my death, I will become a ghost to hunt you down forever” (personal communication: March 12, 2019). Hui Mei and her husband have two children from their marriage. One day, her second child said to her, “Mom, I know what you’re thinking. I will find you wherever you go. I know what you’re thinking” (personal communication: March 12, 2019). The child was predicting that Hui Mei was going to leave permanently. 512

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The remark was like a lightning bolt and awakened her. Hui Mei suddenly realized that she lost her mother at a very young age and she will not let her children experience her own misfortune. That lightening moment led her to dismiss the idea of revenge. After dismissing the vengeful thought, Hui Mei was determined to restart her life and not to be trapped in hatefulness anymore. Hui Mei started practicing ikebana, and met Master Yang, a Buddhist monk.

19.  What Is Forgiveness? Master Yang saw her and advised her “You don’t want to hate, because hatred will follow you all your life” (personal communication: March 12, 2019). He said to her that she should let go, and even think about guiding her husband into the world of Buddhism. Thus, forgiveness here is the opposite of hatred. Forgiveness can set the forgiver free from the past. At the same time, forgiving is an unmerited gift to the other, as seen in the advice to bring the husband into the altruistic work of serving people in love and giving. Hui Mei thought to herself “How is that possible? He’s damned lucky that I didn’t kill him, leading him into altruistic work of Buddhism? No way” (interview: April 6, 2013; personal communication: March 12, 2019). “There is no one in the world that I don’t love, no one I don’t trust, and no one I don’t forgive. That’s how I can lay down all the troubles and sorrows,” which is a teaching she learned from the Grand Master of Buddhism (personal communication: March 12, 2019). Hui Mei thought to herself: How is that possible? But that was the revelation from the Grand Master. What should we do if we want our life to continue?

20.  The Process of Forgiveness Hui Mei’s forgiveness process included these points: (1) Once she decided to forgive, often at work, Hui Mei sang a song about forgiveness to herself to help clear her mind and cleanse her spirit. People around her, including Master Yang and a senior Sister at her religious community, constantly repeated the same message to remind her to love, trust, and forgive. (2) As time passed, Hui Mei slowly and gradually changed her thoughts about her husband and his need for emotional rehabilitation. She finally decided to bring her husband to her own religious community. She, thus, reduced resentment and gave a gift to her husband. (3) The hatred faded slowly and the Master’s teaching always remained in Hui Mei’s mind (thoughts) and heart (her emotions). (4) She received another teaching from the Master Yang: Life is full of pain such as the pain of childbirth, disease, old age, and death. Why, then, add more sickness, this time in your life suffering? This strengthened Hui Mei’s resolve to continue persevering in forgiveness across time. The point is to avoid dwelling on the resentment or hatefulness and gradually let it go. (5) Hui Mei then developed a new purpose in life, to have her ex-husband certified by her religious community because of his sincerity. Shortly thereafter, in an unexpected medical examination, he was diagnosed with a terminal stage of lung cancer. In an act of incredible magnanimity, Hui Mei laid down all those resentments and the hatred from the past. She not only looked after him in the hospital but also brought him and her mother-in-law home to take care of them. Thus, Hui Mei found the new meaning of love in her life and the purpose of aiding those in need, even if there was grave injustice toward her in the past.

21.  Joy Tan-Chi Mendoza On February 7, 1992, in the Philippines, the unthinkable experience happened to Joy that drastically changed her life and the lives of her family. The day went by as normal until the doorbell rang about six o’clock in the evening. The gate was opened for Joy’s father’s cousin to deliver five sacks 513

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of rice which is a typical routine he did every month. At the same time, ten uninvited men sneaked ­unnoticed through the gate. They all were massively armed with guns and knives (Tan-Chi ­Mendoza 2015). Subsequent information in this section is drawn from Tan-Chi Mendoza’s 2015 work. Joy’s father is a pastor and her mother serves in the church. That night, Joy’s parents were in another city teaching a Bible Study, which left Joy’s younger brother, two younger sisters, a missionary couple with their two children, two helpers, the driver, and six unleashed dogs in the house. Some of the men forcefully marched to the front door while others dispersed themselves to different parts of the house to make sure no one in the house would escape. It was the beginning of two hours of horror. Fourteen people in the house, including Joy’s father’s cousin, his wife, and their child, were all tied up, face down on the marble floor, in the living room – except for Joy. Joy, at the time, was in the bathroom in her parent’s bedroom, which was far from the living room. Although not witnessing the tumultuous motion from the living room, she could sense that something was wrong because of the sounds from quick footsteps and unfamiliar voices slowly became apparent. Joy went out from the bedroom and as she walked down the long hallway, she saw a man running toward her direction. Joy tried to hide herself, but the man entered the room and yelled at her for hiding. With a gun, he demanded jewelry and money. Joy then was sexually abused and raped in her own bed, in her own bedroom by seven men. The nightmare did not end here. At about seven o’clock in the evening, two of Joy’s female friends arrived at her home. The two friends were also raped. One was raped by four men and the other friend was raped by one of the men. The doorbell rang after an-hour-and-a-half of terror; one of the friend’s parents came to the house. Joy was instructed by one of the intruders to attend to the door and communicate with the visitors as if nothing was happening. Joy took the chance to seek help. She was able to whisper the message, “There are robbers inside.” Suddenly, the robbers decided to take three ­hostages – Joy’s father’s cousin, his wife, and their child – to drive them to a specific location. Fifteen minutes later after the robbers have left, family friends arrived. The terror ended but it had left a significant scar for Joy and her family for the rest of their lives. Joy’s parents decided not to pursue a criminal case. The decision was based on the belief that it will protect Joy’s emotional well-being from further destruction. For Joy and her family, this did not mean they have thrown justice away. They still were seeking justice at the time, but they were more convinced that vengeance belonged to God. Not too many years later, the family received a report that the members of the gang who intruded into their house were arrested and some were even killed. For Joy and her family, God’s justice had prevailed.

22.  Starting with Deep Sadness and Self-Doubt To be violated at such a young age and in such a heinous manner by seven unknown men, one can imagine Joy’s disrupted inner world after the tragic experience happened to her and all of the after-effects. In her book entitled When a Good God Allows Rape, written in 2015, Joy recalled that same night her parents’ comforting response. She cried all night. She felt embarrassed, ashamed, and humiliated that she was damaged in this way. She blamed herself for what happened to her two friends. This theme of falsely accusing the self and losing self-esteem after severe tragedy is not uncommon (Freedman and Enright 1996).

23.  Modeling the Parent’s Mercy Unlike other families, Joy’s parents did not file criminal charges. This helped her to see beyond justice and revenge. As she further stated, “As for my family, we believed that vengeance belonged to the Lord” (Tan-chi Mendoza 2015: loc 400). 514

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24.  Decision to Forgive The key insight for Joy was her understanding that keeping this injustice a secret would only damage her own inner world. Bringing what happened to sympathetic others seemed to be a path toward healing (Tan-chi Mendoza 2015: loc. 335). As she cried many nights, her emotional burden gave way to this insight: All people stumble and are imperfect; she, too, realized her own imperfections and injustices in which she engaged in the past (loc. 463). This, of course, did not lead her to equate the severity of what happened to her with her own past mistakes. Yet, she realized that she, too, can be unjust. This opened the door for the possibility of forgiving those who assaulted her.

25.  What Is Forgiveness? Joy did not see forgiveness as condoning the offender’s evil actions nor approving their evil choices. It is also not saying that the person needs to trust the offender right away or completely, especially when betrayal is involved. Thus, “Forgiveness does not have to be about trusting an offender immediately since trust may take years to rebuild” (personal communication: March 4, 2019). Joy’s strong family background influenced how she views forgiveness. She emphasized that forgiveness can be and should be about trusting God. It is trusting that God will deal with my offender’s heart and trusting that God’s command to forgive is for my good, to save me from the corrupting effects of bitterness. (personal communication: March 4, 2019)

26.  The Processes in Forgiving In her book, Joy relates the following processes in her forgiveness journey: 1 She relied on her earlier insight, when she was nine years old, that she is loved (loc. 475). This insight prepared her heart to respond to the tragedy (loc. 487). 2 As she realized that she has fallen short of human perfection, she had the insight that the men also have fallen short and for this she felt pity toward them (loc. 487). Of course, she never equated her own failings with the men’s failings, which were far worse than hers. 3 With the same kind of forgiveness that Joy had received from God for her sinfulness, she was able to forgive the men who hurt her (loc. 496). 4 Although she continued to feel emotional pain, she reports, “There was no residual bitterness” (loc. 496). 5 She is now aware that her process of forgiving has led her not to be “handcuffed to the offenses done” (loc. 496). She sets herself “free by making the choice to forgive” (loc. 496).

27.  Is Apology Necessary from the Other? Joy knew very clearly that her rapists and abusers will never apologize to her. As Joy reiterated, It is the same way for many of us who have been deceived, taken advantage of, injured, swindled, maltreated, violated, or physically harmed by others. The likelihood of these persons returning to us in order to ask for forgiveness is slim to nil. Therefore, we cannot make our forgiveness dependent on their apology. (personal communication: March 4, 2019) 515

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28.  Finding Meaning and Purpose through Suffering Forgiveness, for Joy, does not merely heal the broken and wounded person who chooses to forgive, it also heals what is broken and damaged in this world. Three activities that have come out from her trauma are: (a) She helps the victims of incest, sexually abused, and raped women; (b) she is involved in serving families through the church; and (c) she maintains her own website “Teach with Joy” that shares her failures, victories, and celebrations of her joys in life.

29.  Struggling with Residual Anger When faced with such horrendous injustices in life, there seems to be a natural tendency to first react in anger and then to have some anger even after forgiving. This is because the injustices that happen to people were wrong, are wrong, and always will be wrong (Enright 2012). When unaware that residual anger is present, there may be a tendency to displace that anger onto others, especially to our loved ones (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015). At first, it had crossed Joy’s mind that holding on to anger and hurt would give her power over people who have wronged her. However, she became aware that “bitterness only offers an illusion of control. Eventually, anger will control us and lead us to wrongdoing” (personal communication: March 4, 2019).

30.  Commonalities and Differences in Forgiving from Trauma across the Case Studies As we can see in these four case studies, each person had a unique first reaction to the trauma. For Marietta, there was the initial sense of rage and wanting to kill the person. For Dr. Naftali, there was a recoiling in horror knowing that he had to protect himself from this trauma. For Hui Mei it was a resentment that lingered, and for Joy it was sadness with crying. We do not all react initially in the same way to severe injustices. For all four people in our case studies, forgiveness includes a renunciation of both negative feelings and, when aggression is present, a negation in such a motivation toward the other. Forgiveness for all four people seems to be a recapturing of one’s own sense of humanity, what Marietta described as “the best of myself.” This eventually led her to a genuine sense of caring for the offender. In each case, there seems to be an awareness that the reaction toward the one who perpetrated the trauma has the potential to lower one’s own humanity. The insight in each case was life-changing. Each person has a theme that might be described as surrender. For Marietta, she even uses that word. For Dr. Naftali, he talks of giving this “to God.” For Hui Mei, this included a surrender to the teaching of the master about love, and for Joy it involved trusting God and trusting in the Christian teaching that forgiveness is goodness. Yet, there are differences. For Marietta, forgiveness eventually included caring about the other; for Dr. Naftali, in contrast, forgiveness is about moving forward without animosity. For Hui Mei, forgiving is an unmerited gift to the other and for Joy it is to offer forgiveness to another as she has been forgiven, in other words, to try to love the other. A unique feature is Dr. Naftali’s idea of forgiveness as light overcoming the darkness. This beautiful image likely serves as a reminder of the end point or goal of forgiving: to retain the highest qualities of humanity and not let the injustice destroy him. In all four cases, the forgiver saw the actions of the other as morally wrong. Thus, no one condoned the other’s actions or found excuses for those actions. Forgiveness and reconciliation are clearly distinguished in Marietta’s and Naftali’s narratives. There are at least five commonalities across the case studies in the process of forgiving. First, all had the free-will decision to forgive without pressure from others. In other words, there was no pressure to forgive put on any of those in our case studies. 516

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Second, all had a cognitive insight that aided their forgiveness. For Marietta, she began to see the inherent worth in the one who murdered Susie. For Dr. Naftali, he began to see the humanity in the other so that he would refrain from doing harm no matter how distressed he was. For Hui Mei, she began to see that her husband, despite his injustices, was in need of rehabilitation. Finally, for Joy, her cognitive insight was that both she and the one who violated her fall short of perfection. Third, all four of them engaged in perseverance for a long time. Marietta continues to speak to groups four decades after she lost Susie. Dr. Naftali wrote a book on his traumatic experience with his son and continues to speak about non-violence a decade after losing his son. Hui Mei started to persevere by singing a song that included the theme of compassion and cared for her ex-husband when he needed physical care. Joy wrote her book over 20 years after her trauma, showing the world what forgiveness can do. Fourth, all four developed new purposes in life. For Marietta, she started to advocate against the death penalty because all people have unconditional worth. As she said, she does not want others killed in the name of her daughter Susie. Dr. Naftali developed the purpose of trying to protect others experiencing trauma by writing his book and his speaking engagements. For Hui Mei, the purpose took the form of service, directly to the one who hurt her. For Joy, she serves those who have been sexually abused by her spoken and written words. For the most part, we find it interesting that those traumatized tend to help those who are traumatized in a similar way. Fifth, all identified important social support in their process of forgiving. In other words, none of the people forgave on one’s own, as a private process. For Marietta, her Christian faith tradition and going directly to God were important. For Naftali, his Jewish faith tradition helped him to see the importance of forgiving. For Hui Mei, she was able to receive instruction from a Master of Buddhism and support from this community. Joy, as an adolescent, received support from her parents, friends, and also from her Christian tradition. Although the traditions of Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity vary considerably in their expressed beliefs, having a tradition that supports forgiveness became a foundation for all four people. In sum, the process of forgiveness has important common themes for those who choose to forgive. At the same time, each person is unique and so there are individual processes not seen in most others. In the end, it seems that as a person gains the major insight that forgiveness is of great importance, one’s life transforms for the good, which opens up service to others.

References Cherry, K. (19 February 2020) How to Write a Psychology Case Study. Very Well Mind, https://www. verywellmind.com/how-to-write-a-psychology-case-study-2795722. Enright, R. D. (2012) The Forgiving Life. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Enright, R. D. (2019) Forgiveness Is a Choice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Enright, R. D., and Fitzgibbons, R. (2000) Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Washington, DC: APA Books. Enright, R. D., and Fitzgibbons, R. P. (2015) Forgiveness Therapy: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Fitzgibbons, R. (1998) “Anger and the Healing Power of Forgiveness,” in R. Enright and J. North (eds) Exploring Forgiveness. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Freedman, S., and Chang, W. C. R. (2010) “An Analysis of a Sample of the General Population’S ­Understanding of Forgiveness: Implications for Mental Health Counselors,” Journal of Mental Health Counseling 32: 5–34. Freedman, S. R., and Enright, R. D. (1996) “Forgiveness as an Intervention Goal With Incest Survivors,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 64(5): 983–92. Freud, S. (1909) “Analysis of a Phobia of a Five Year Old Boy.” in The Pelican Freud Library (1977). Case Histories 1(8): 169–306. Haber, J. (1991) Forgiveness. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Jacqueline Y. Song and Shih-Tseng Tina Huang Jaeger, M. (1998) “The Power and Reality of Forgiveness: Forgiving the Murderer of One’s Child,” in R. Enright and J. North (eds) Exploring Forgiveness. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Jaeger, M. (February 24, 2013) Marietta: A Journey of Forgiveness, Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wU6Fyt2orMw. McLeod, S. A. (August 3, 2019) Case Study Method, Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/ case-study.html Moses, N. (2011) Mourning Under Glass: Reflections on a Son’s Murder, Naftali Moses, Kindle Edition. Romero, V. E., Robinson, R., and Warner, A. N. (2018) Building Resilience in Students Impacted by Adverse Childhood Experiences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Silver, R. C., Holman, E. A., McIntosh, D. N., Poulin, M., and Gil-Rivas, V. (2002) Nationwide ­L ongitudinal Study of Psychological Responses to September 11. JAMA: The Journal of the American ­Medical Association, 288 (10): 1235–44. doi: 10.1001/jama.288.10.1235 Tan-Chi Mendoza, J. D. (2015) When a Good God Allows Rape. Metro Manila, Philippines: OMF Literature Inc. Trauma (2020) https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma/

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38 SELF-CONDEMNATION AND PATHWAYS TO SELF-FORGIVENESS Lydia Woodyatt

Regret is such a short word…and yet it stretches on forever. Ranata Suzuki

Often we (researchers) would begin a chapter like this by defining what our key concept actually is – in this case self-forgiveness. But, for this chapter, I would like us to go in another direction. Let us first skip over the somewhat murky puddle that can be stirred up when discussing self-forgiveness (debating what self-forgiveness is and isn’t, whether self-forgiveness is even an appropriate term, its moral or theological justification, its pros and cons, etc.), and instead consider a simpler question – does self-condemnation occur? If so, why? Should we help people to work through the experience of self-condemnation – and if so how can we do that? In this way, I will propose that pathway to self-forgiveness is one possible way of responding to self-­ condemnation – to the self that judges and can hold a grudge! What we have learnt through researching self-forgiveness ­provides us with useful tools that we can use to help those that are experiencing self-condemnation.

1.  When Does Self-Condemnation Arise? Self-condemnation can arise when we fail to live up to our own values, norms, or expectations of what we could or should have done. People can experience self-condemnation for a wide range of events. In my own research participants report feeling self-condemnation for all sorts of events: failures to parent effectively, verbally abusing friends or loved ones, having medical or mental health conditions that negatively impact on their family, or making decisions that end in negative consequences, paths not taken, or opportunities lost (Woodyatt, de Vel Palumbo, Barron, Wenzel and de Silva 2022). Indeed, clinicians and researchers have noted that there are a wide range of ways that self-condemnation (i.e. the need for self-forgiveness) can express itself (Cornish, Wade and Cikara 2017; Woodyatt and Wenzel, 2020). Let us consider an example. Imagine you are a clinician meeting with Anthony, a single parent in his early fifties who presents in therapy for help with his daughter. She has experienced serious peer bullying and has developed symptoms of depression. Initially you focus on approaches to work with Anthony to support his daughter. You notice some self-condemnation in the form of regret and self-anger, but think to yourself that it is likely that Anthony will be able to move

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-46

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forward as his daughter also moves forward. However, he doesn’t seem to recover. Twelve weeks later his daughter is doing much better, but Anthony continues to express feelings of sadness, guilt, and anger at himself. He remains stuck in the event. “I should have seen this. If I was a good father, I would have fixed this sooner,” he says repeatedly. At other times, he expresses anger and hostility at others involved – the other children involved, parents, or school. When you ask him what he is doing to work through his own feelings, Anthony says he tries not to think about them, although sometimes he can’t stop thinking about them. Then he does hard physical labor, or he has a drink, to quiet his mind. As well as helping him to support his daughter, you have encouraged him to be kind to himself and to take time for pleasurable activities for himself, but he has been resistant and says he feels guilty if he does things for himself. We can see that Anthony is exhibiting a range of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral consequences consistent with a cycle of self-condemnation (see Figure 38.1). Some may say Anthony has not committed an objective transgression, and perhaps the answer is as simple as convincing him that his self-condemnation is not appropriate. However, to the extent that Anthony has violated a personally held value – that as a father he should protect his child from harm – he perceives a transgression. This perception of failure or wrong and the resulting self-condemnation and its consequences occur whether we, as observers, agree that this person actually did anything wrong. In fact, when we look at instances where people experience self-condemnation, many include situations where objective responsibility should perhaps be quite low or where there is not true responsibility for what has occurred (e.g. cancer patients, trauma victims, survivors of people who have committed suicide). Perhaps most controversially, people can experience self-condemnation and feel the need for self-forgiveness when they themselves are victims. For example, examining the experience of those who struggled with self-condemnation, Woodyatt et al. (2019) found

Figure 38.1  The cycle of self-condemnation. Source: Replicated with permission from Woodyatt and Wenzel (2020).

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that some people who had been victims still expressed a desire to forgive themselves as they experienced strong regret for what they should have, or could have, done. Thus, the target of self-condemnation, as we see with our example of Anthony, is not necessarily the transgression per se, but their personal perceived limitations/failings, which impacted on their ability to act in a value-consistent way in the situation.

2.  Why Does Self-Condemnation Arise? 2.1  Violating Values Leads to Threatened Psychological Needs Violating a value (through either an explicit transgression/act or failure to act) can effect our fundamental psychological needs, particularly our need for social-moral identity (i.e. belonging) and our need for agency (Woodyatt, Wenzel and de Vel Palumbo 2017). Over the past several decades, social justice researchers have learnt a lot about the psychological needs that arise when one commits a transgression (e.g. Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather and Platow 2008). This research offers fundamental insights into how people respond to, and work through, wrongdoing as individuals, in relationships, and in groups. First, when we do something wrong (or perceive to do something wrong) this heightens our need for moral-social identity (Shnabel and Nadler 2008, 2015; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2014). We use the hyphenated term moral-social here because it is important to recognize the indelible connection between these needs. The need for moral-social identity can be broadly conceptualized as the need for belonging, with the proviso that this need is the generalized belief of that one is a “good” and appropriate1 group member or relationship partner (Leary 2000; Leary, Raimi, Jongman-Sereno and Diebels 2015). When we commit a public wrong, we threaten our social belonging, as exclusion is one way groups deal with transgressors of a group’s norms, values, or expectations. And, even when the misdeed is unknown by others, it can affect our own view of whether we are “good” and appropriate group members or relationship partners. This is because we have a need to be moral, and to maintain self-integrity and self-­consistency. The result is an experience of psychological uncertainty (or “cognitive dissonance”) if our “new” self-view is inconsistent with our previously held self-views, or confirmatory evidence if we already have low self-views. This threat to moral-social identity is a stressor – in that it leads to a physiological responses of stress (elevated cortisol, hyper-pituitary adrenal axis activations, immune system activity, etc.). The more central the violation is to our core domains of socially developed identity, the more intense this response is likely to be (Dillon 2001). This need can be expressed in a heightened desire: to demonstrate their goodness to others, for others to understand why they did what they did and confirm that they are good people anyway, or for respect and sensitivity to stigma/rejection. The second psychological need that can arise in the context of transgressions is the need for personal agency (Abele and Wojciszke 2014). Psychologically, agency refers to the capacity to act, take initiative, and have an influence over one’s own life situation (Abele and Wojciszke 2014). The need for agency can include concerns about power, autonomy, predictability, and/or control. Psychological research examining the need for agency was initially only examined in the context of victims’ experiences. However, philosophers have integrated this concern into their theorizing about self-condemnation (and self-forgiveness) for some time (e.g. Holmgren 1998, 2012). Dillon (2001, p. 65) argues that the revelation that we are “unbearably flawed” results in a persistent negative view of the self, which means we can no longer respect one’s self. This decrease in self-­ respect means that our agency, or belief that we are in control of our own life and circumstances, is reduced. The outcome of reduced agency is that an offender is unable to trust themselves to re-engage in life or community again as a “moral agent” (p. 71, see also Care 1996), i.e. as one who is trustworthy and capable. 521

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Psychologists are also beginning to explore the importance of agency for those who have perpetrated a transgression (Okimoto, Wenzel and Hedrick 2013; Okimoto and Wenzel 2014; SimanTov-Nachileli, Shnabel and Halabi 2016; SimanTov-Nachileli, Shnabel and Mori-Hoffman 2017). The need for agency may emerge in those struggling with self-condemnation in interesting (and non-linear) ways. In a recent qualitative study examining the experiences of people who struggled with self-condemnation Woodyatt et al. (2019) reported a vacillation between a heightened responsibility (as if one should have had perfect knowledge or foresight to act differently) and then a shift back to defensiveness (to deny responsibility or deflect blame to others). This vacillation around agency seemed to be a key theme of the experience of those who struggled with self-condemnation.

3.  Threatened Psychological Needs Are Associated with Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Consequences Understanding the psychological needs created by violating values gives us some understanding of the emotions and behaviors that arise when someone is stuck in self-condemnation. The cycle of self-condemnation (see Figure 38.1) can be marked by rumination about the event, and a range of aversive emotions like regret, remorse, guilt, shame, sadness, hopelessness, self-directed anger and resentment, and loss. Emotions like shame, guilt, and humiliation (and other self-­ conscious emotions) can be considered gauges of an underlying threat to social-moral identity and agency. Shame has been strongly linked to generalized beliefs about one’s status and acceptance – part of an adaptive response to negotiating human life where survival success is linked to the ability to negotiate hierarchical group life (Gilbert 2003). Hence, the experience of shame is associated with a similar stress-immune system response to what animals experience when occupying a low status position in group hierarchy (for a review, see Cibich, Woodyatt and Wenzel 2016). To the extent that we are not able to exert our agency (and fix the given situation) we may feel shame for not being capable of better. Guilt has been theorized to be an adaptive response that helps to sustain caregiving and minimize harm, particularly to those over whom we have responsibility (Gilbert 2003; Gilbert and Woodyatt 2017). In this way guilt can be an emotional gauge of our feelings of having done something that led to another’s harm or a failing to protect, care, or take responsibility for another. Feelings like regret, self-anger, and hopelessness may be closely linked to the need for agency, control, and one’s perceived in-ability to fix things that have happened in the past. These feelings can give rise to a range of cognitive and behavioral responses that are attempts at coping. Cognitively, rumination can arise in response to failing (Martin, Tesser and ­McIntosh 1993). Rumination and a feeling that the past is present (or close to mind) is a marker of self-­ condemnation (Woodyatt and Wenzel 2019; Woodyatt et al. 2019). A combination of negative appraisal styles, heightened threat perceptions, and construal of threatening events as being proximal in time has been associated with increased intrusive re-experiencing of negative life events, heightened emotional distress in response to those thoughts, and ongoing rumination (Marks, Franklin and Zoellner 2018). Behaviorally, people who struggle with self-condemnation can display a mix of avoidance, attempts at coping, defensive, and self-punishing behaviors as they attempt to cope with their aversive thoughts and feelings (Woodyatt and Wenzel 2019). Defensiveness has specifically been linked to feelings of rejections and stigma (Wenzel, Woodyatt and McLean 2019) and appears to be attempts to reassert one’s status and identity, but does this by denying personal responsibility (agency). If defensiveness is just avoidance then this is also likely to lead to increased rumination as the suppression of aversive emotions paradoxically increases the intrusion of those aversive thoughts (Wenzlaff and Wegner 2000). Self-punishment has been shown to be an attempt to reassert the importance of the values that one has violated and the identity they represent (de Vel-Palumbo, Wenzel and 522

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Woodyatt 2018). If this is done as penance – that is, as a pathway to repair (where p­ athways are available) – then self-punishment might lead to recovery. But if self-punishment is done in a context where there seems no pathway to repair (for example, if the person perceives only rejection or powerlessness) then self-punishment may only re-enforce low self-worth and the futility of the situation. These responses of defensiveness and self-punishment are not exclusive. One person can in fact vacillate between these various responses – cycling from defense to self-condemnation (even within one recount of an event (Woodyatt et al. 2019)). And, where the underlying psychological needs remain unaddressed, this cycle of self-condemnation is likely to continue.

4.  Should We Help People Recover from Self-Condemnation? Should we help people get over self-condemnation? The research suggests that we should, but not too quickly. These psychological needs (and the aversive emotions they elicit) actually foster effort to work through what has occurred and make changes (Woodyatt and Wenzel 2014; Woodyatt et al. 2017; Wenzel et al. 2019). Philosophers and psychologists have recognized this importance of aversive emotions and cognitive processes like rumination. Dillon (2001, p. 69) suggests that self-condemnation when we have committed an offense is not simply “pathological or egocentric” but “expresses our values and the seriousness with which we take these matters.” She suggests that putting aside warranted emotions like guilt and shame may “sacrifice integrity and self-respect” (p. 57). Murphy and Hampton (1990) raises a similar argument referring to forgiveness of others. Emotions like shame, guilt, regret, and remorse, even self-loathing, can be seen as an expression of our commitment to our (and the community’s) values. These emotions also function to motivate relational repair. This personal distress may carry a psychological payoff of assuring us we are not defined by our offense, but are actually still “good” through value affirmation (Dillon 2001). And rumination can play a role in keeping a person focused on, and processing, goal-relevant information (Martin, Tesser and McIntosh 1993). When we quickly meet a person’s psychological needs, we often remove the motivator for change (and enable the behavior to continue). Early self-forgiveness work that focused on reduced self-resentment and self-condemnation, and increased self-compassion, generosity, and love toward the self (Enright 1996; Mauger et al. 1992; Tangney, Boone, Fee and Reinsmith 1999) found that these outcomes alone were not positively associated with (or in interventions, predictive of ) change, empathy, or reconciliation (Bell, Davis, Griffin, Ashby and Rice 2017; Cornish, Woodyatt, Morris, Conroy and Townsdin 2018; Fisher and Exline 2010; Wohl and Thompson 2011; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013a, 2014; Woodyatt, Wenzel and Ferber 2017; Zechmeister and Romero 2002). However, prolonged self-condemnation is a problem – both for the individual and for those in relationship with that person. Self-forgiveness (when measured as an end state of having released self-condemnation) certainly seems to be associated with a range of well-being outcomes, and by extension, self-condemnation is negatively associated with these well-being outcomes (Davis et al. 2015). For example, forgiveness of self was negatively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress among Turkish participants (Gençoglu et al. 2018). Among Korean participants being assessed by the MINI within the context of a neuropsychological assessment, self-forgiveness (again tapping largely into the absence of self-condemnation) moderated the relationship between depression symptoms and suicidality: when self-condemnation was high, depression symptoms were more likely to be associated with suicidality ( Jung, Park, Baik, Kim, Kim, and Lee 2019). Fisher and Exline (2006) for example found that self-condemnation was not associated with reconciliation, and was negatively associated with psychological well-being. Ongoing self-­ condemnation has been shown to be associated with reductions in empathy for the victim and reduced desire to reconcile (Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013a). Pelucchi, Paleari, Regalia, and Fincham 523

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(2013) found that, in couples, if one person was not able to forgive themselves (i.e. experiencing self-condemnation), this was associated with less relationship satisfaction reported by their partner. We have described some of the potential mechanisms of this well-being effect earlier, namely threat to psychological needs results in ongoing stress-immune system activation creating problems for well-being overtime. Self-condemnation has been found to be associated with traits like neuroticism and higher levels of vulnerable narcissism (Cornish et al. 2018) which may explain why self-condemnation has negative implications for relationships. For some people, the question of should we help people recover from self-condemnation may not just be a pragmatic one – as in is it beneficial for individuals and relationships – but an ethical or theological concern. Some philosophers have argued that releasing self-condemnation is not just beneficial, but in some instances the ethical response that is required once responsibility and repair have been made and/or once forgiveness is granted (e.g. Holmgren 1998). Theologically, from the perspective of the Christian faith, hanging on to self-­condemnation is problematic as it is God alone who has the right to judge and God has surrendered that judgment role to Christ – in whom there is no condemnation! (For a discussion see Kim and Enright 2014.) Realization of being out of alignment with the law of love should lead to teshuva (repentance; turning back toward God’s law of love). Practices like penance should not therefore be understood as self-condemnation (as if one is paying for one’s wrongs) but rather contemplative practices of turning back toward God. In Buddhist traditions, practices of self-­compassion and mindfulness seem in direct contradiction to self-condemnation. Nonetheless, people within these traditions can still struggle with self-condemnation and may still need help to work through their perceived wrong. Whether or not we agree that the person has actually done wrong, considering the possibility of self-forgiveness as an option for a client who is stuck in self-condemnation may be offering them an important pathway to repair. Self-forgiveness may also offer them a way of working through the experience in a way that avoids reactance should a clinician attempt to convince the person that they simply have not done wrong. Ultimately, it is the person themselves who is taking the role of condemner – and thus has to themselves judge the ethicality of releasing self-­condemnation. Researchers examining military veterans’ experiences of moral injury have noted that they are the arbiter of whether self-forgiveness is an appropriate response to their own personal circumstances (Purcell, Griffin, Burkman, and Maguen 2018).

5.  Self-Forgiveness as a Pathway to Renewal How can we help people to work through what has occurred and move beyond being stuck in self-condemnation? Self-forgiveness has been proposed as one possible response available for people who need to work through feelings of self-condemnation after a perceived failure or transgression of values and recover from “moral-emotional low points” (Care 1996, p. ix). Philosophers have suggested that self-forgiveness is warranted when we have transgressed against the self by acting in a way that is in conflict with our self-concept or our values (Dillon 2001; Mills 1995).

6.  What Is Self-Forgiveness? In 1996 Enright and the Human Development Study Group described self-forgiveness as “a willingness to abandon self-resentment in the face of one’s acknowledged objective wrong, while fostering compassion, generosity, and love toward oneself ” (Enright et al. 1996, p. 116). This definition has been tweaked and adapted as psychologists have attempted to define and then measure self-forgiveness (e.g. Hall and Fincham 2005; Wohl, DeShea and Wahkinney 2008; for review see Woodyatt, Worthington, Wenzel and Griffin 2017). 524

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The study of self-forgiveness emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s as research ­interest in forgiveness was stimulated by philosophers, psychologists, and theologians. Across all the varied definitions of self-forgiveness there is general consensus that self-forgiveness involves ­ (1) a shift away from self-condemnation and associated self-condemning cognitions, ­self-punishing behaviors, and a reductions in associated aversive emotions. (2) Self-forgiveness involves a shift toward more benevolent, kind positive, or loving motivations, cognitions, and emotions. Finally, (3) self-forgiveness involves the experience of a shift in motivational states (from self-condemning to self-benevolent) while not releasing the self from a sense of responsibility for what has occurred. As Hall and Fincham (2005) noted, self-forgiveness is “the realization of wrongdoing and acceptance of responsibility generally initiate feelings of guilt and regret, which must be fully experienced before one can move toward self-forgiveness” (p. 626–7). In this way, self-forgiveness is not simply self-compassion or self-kindness. It is a decision (and ongoing process) of releasing the self from self-condemnation when that self-condemnation is perceived to be deserved. Hall and Fincham (2008) observe that self-forgiveness is similar to, but distinct from, forgiveness of others. They observe that both are processes that occur over time, require an objective wrong, and are given despite being unwarranted. Neither forgiveness nor self-forgiveness implies that a wrong should be ignored, forgotten, or excused. Self-forgiveness is not simply exonerating the self but rather involves acknowledging one’s responsibility for doing something wrong (Hall and Fincham 2005; Wenzel, Woodyatt and Hedrick 2012; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013a). For interpersonal forgiveness, forgiveness can occur with or without renewed trust and reconciliation occurring. But for self-forgiveness, renewed trust of the self seems essential (Hall and Fincham 2008). Self-forgiveness fits not only within the body of research focused on coping with aversive emotions or stressful past events but also within the psychology of justice and morality (i.e. how we as humans determine right and wrong, and how we work through injustice). Research on self-forgiveness has tended to arise from people or groups exploring one or both of these themes. In this way, researchers and clinicians have come to understand that self-forgiveness involves dual dimensions, emotional and social-moral repair (Griffin et al. 2018). Both dimensions need to be addressed for self-forgiveness to occur. Coping with self-condemnation may be understood as a hedonic (i.e. an “emotion- focused”) approach to coping: that is, reaching the state of reduced aversive feelings and renewed positive self-regard. Some have categorized self-forgiveness an emotion-focused coping strategy (Hall and Fincham 2008). Woodyatt and Wenzel (2017) have previously described this as a hedonic perspective of self-forgiveness, that is, where self-forgiveness is equated simply with the end state of reduced aversive emotions (guilt, shame, regret etc.) and increased positive self-regard. When self-forgiveness is understood (and measured) in this way we do find a range of benefits for well-being (see Davis et al. 2015). Early self-forgiveness measurements that tended to focus on trait measures of self-forgiveness (and the associated operationalized approaches) are still the most commonly used measures of self-forgiveness (Massengale, Choe and Davis 2017; Strelan 2017). Early state measures also tended to measure self-forgiveness in this way (Wohl, DeShea and Wahkinney 2008; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013a). These measures have taught us a lot about self condemnation, as items were largely assessed to measure the reduction of self-­condemnation (e.g., “I hold grudges against myself for negative things I’ve done,” reversed; “As I consider what I did that was wrong… I feel accepting of myself ”) (e.g. MFS; Tangney, Boone, Fee and Reinsmith 1999; HFS – Forgiveness of Self; Thompson et al. 2005; State Self-forgiveness Scale; Wohl et al. 2008). Thus, this early self-forgiveness research demonstrated that helping people to have lower self-condemnation was associated with a range of health, mental health, and well-being outcomes (for review see Davis et al. 2015; Massengale et al. 2017). A review of 60 studies using trait measures conducted by Massengale et al. (2017) showed 59 studies reporting a 525

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positive association between self-forgiveness and mental health. These benefits apply in a range of contexts, including women coping with breast cancer, people working through moral injury following war, survivors of domestic abuse, people coping with eating disorders, and people working through addictions. These studies showed benefits to reduced self-condemnation; however, they also revealed a potential “dark side” of self-forgiveness started to emerge. Hedonic self-forgiveness was associated with less remorse for victims following transgressions, increased victim blaming (Zechmeister and Romero 2002), and reduced efforts to change or reconcile (particularly when change may be hard or emotionally uncomfortable: Cornish et al. 2018; Strelan 2017; Wohl, Salmon, Hollingshead, Lidstone and Tabri 2017; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013a). For example, Wohl and Thompson (2011) found that self-forgiveness for current smoking reduced a person’s readiness to quit. Thus, seeing self-forgiveness primarily as a repair of positive emotions and/or positive self-­regard tended to ignore how one has arrived at this positive end state (Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013a). While any process of coping with stressors may have some benefits for well-being, this fell short of a full examination of what could be termed a pseudo self-forgiveness process (Tangney et al. 2005; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013b). Self-forgiveness is not reduced to a coping response alone. If self-forgiveness is transformation from self-condemning and aversive emotions toward more benevolent emotions alone this is not self-forgiveness but rather simply self-acceptance or self-compassion. While self-acceptance and self-compassion have many benefits (and are a part of self-­forgiveness), this approach is likely to leave any psychological need underlying the experience of self-­condemnation relatively unaddressed. These approaches offer one pathway for people struggling with self-­ condemnation, but have limitations, in that the benefits are largely self-focused. For example, in studies of interpersonal transgression, traditional self-affirmation (i.e., individuals reaffirm personal values unrelated to the domain of failure; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2014), self-compassion (i.e., expressions of kindness toward and common humanity of the self; Woodyatt et al. 2017), or affirmation of belonging (i.e., recall of experiences of feeling loved and accepted; Woodyatt and Wenzel 2014) led to participants feeling better – but not taking increased responsibility or making amends. And the benefits of feeling better in a short time may not last, as the underlying unaddressed needs and feelings may re-emerge and people may trust themselves less over time. So, defining self-forgiveness as a transformation of negative to positive feelings may present an overly simplified picture. As we think about our example we can imagine that, as Anthony self-forgives, even if he reduces his sense of being stuck in self-condemnation we would expect a reduction in the intensity of immediacy of aversive emotions or ongoing negative self-regard. However, while he may have a reduction in the intensity of negative emotions, he may still feel bad when he thinks about the event and may still carry some feelings of responsibility for what has occurred. Dillon (2001) specifies that indeed a self-respecting person “should not be entirely at peace with herself ” following a transgression (p. 83). This is an interesting tension in the research. While our definitions imply a reduction in negative emotions and our measures often operationalize self-forgiveness in that way, psychological research examining those that experience self-forgiveness suggests that the experience of someone who self-forgives is not simply guilt free – some negative emotions can still remain (Purcell et al. 2018; Woodyatt et al. 2019). Self-forgiveness research that focuses on the emotional repair alone may miss the complex “lived experience” of self-forgiveness which may not just involve feeling better but, at times, pain (as one takes responsibility for one’s wrong and seeks to integrate the transgression event into a broader story of one’s self ). And so, self-forgiveness should be understood as part of a broader eudeamonic (“growth orientated”) process where one addresses the dual concerns for moral-social identity and agency, and through that process arrives at self-forgiveness (Holmgren 2012; Woodyatt, Wenzel and Ferber 2017).

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For some researchers and clients, the concept of self-forgiveness may be unappealing. For ­example, Vitz and Mead (2011) disagree with the terminology and concept of forgiving the self because – in their view – forgiveness is only available from God (consistent with some other Christian perspectives, e.g., Gassin 2001, but for an alternative view see Kim and Enright 2014). However, even objectors to self-forgiveness (as forgiveness) concur that self-condemnation arises, that there is a need to release self-judgment (as being a usurping of God’s sole right to judge), and that people may need to be encouraged to experience self-acceptance and humility (Vitz and Meade 2011). This would be analogous to the processes of working through what we have described, and so the research we have described should equally apply when working with clients from a faith-based perspective or with other ethical objections to self-forgiveness.

7.  Self-Forgiveness as Working through Perceived Transgressions toward Moral Repair In contrast to a hedonic perspective on self-forgiveness (as simply “emotion-focused coping”), philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have all argued that self-forgiveness is actually a process of moral repair (Holmgren 2012). While this process allows the negative emotions associated with an offense to decrease to the point that they no longer dominate one’s whole sense of self (Dillon 2001), this does not imply that self-forgiveness always feels good – rather it is the complex and difficult work of reconstituting oneself so that one can move on from regret toward the future. Examining the recovery of veterans, Purcell et al. (2018) discuss the experience of self-forgiveness following moral injury as “finding a liveable path forward” or a “reconstituted moral identity” (Purcell et al. 2018, p. 6). Thus, we see that self-forgiveness cannot be equated to simply feeling better about what happened. Rather a person is confronted with a more difficult position of integrating their past wrongdoing into a “richer story” (p. 79) of the self. Mills (1995) refers to it, “having the courage to be imperfect” (p. 406). Dillon argues the “humble self-respect” is perhaps the best and most moral outcome of self-forgiveness rather than love and compassion to the self.

8.  Tools for Addressing the Need for Social-Moral Identity and Agency So, how do we help people to work through their experience of self-condemnation?

9.  Understand That Emotions Are Not Facts Working through self-condemnation is likely only to occur once a person is able to acknowledge and sit with their difficult emotions for a time. People can treat emotions like facts or evidence. When they do this, emotions (like shame, guilt, and regret) can reinforce a person’s unclear social-moral identity or lack of agency. Paul Gilbert has argued that understanding how our emotions (and brains) work is key to self-compassion. In the context of perceived transgressions, helping people to understand that emotions can be “faulty gauges” of our psychological needs (or threats) is likely to help the emotion-suppression-avoidance-rumination cycle. Approaches that help clients to acknowledge their emotions and thoughts as they arise may be a key part of helping people struggling with self-condemnation. Training that helps clients with distress tolerance may also foster working through their self-condemnation. Finally, it may be important to recognize that aversive emotions do not disappear completely as a result of self-­ forgiveness, and that is ok.

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10.  Be Surrounded by Community That Encourages Authenticity and Humility Avoidance and defensiveness can also be driven by perceptions of how likely we are to be rejected or stigmatized by others (Woodyatt and Wenzel 2013b). Alternatively, relationships can provide a place of security where it is possible to express our failures, and this can help with reintegration following shame eliciting events (Ahmed et al. 2001). If a person struggling with self-­ condemnation is not able to voice their failure then it is difficult for them to address the need for agency and moral-social identity. In fact, researchers have argued that psychological needs arising from transgression are often best met in a reciprocal way between victims and offenders (Shnabel and Nadler 2008). While this might not always be possible with a specific victim, others can still potentially fill the role of being a member of the social-moral community. While therapists, counselors, or pastoral care workers may fill this role to some extent, recent research into social identity and well-being suggests that humans need to be members of multiple social groups from which they gain a sense of self. Helping people to re-engage in community and build up multiple social identities may be key to helping people to begin to work through their self-condemnation by recreating a buffer of relationship security. So saying, a community that simply brushes the event aside may short cut important processes as we have described and new relationships that seem vulnerable to disruption may lead a person to hide their failure even further. Rather, a community that is respectful and caring but encourages humility and authenticity as values may be key to working through self-condemnation. So, where people work with groups where self-­ condemnation arises, it is important that they consider how to best foster these group dynamics. Self-forgiveness is not simply an intra-psychological event. Given the social nature of the underlying psychological needs, it is important that we recognize the role of others in helping people to work through self-condemnation. In fact, some researchers have suggested that the perceptions of others may matter more than self-related perception (Bell and Fincham 2019). Researchers have begun to suggest that it is important to consider conflict and relationship interactions on self-forgiveness (Wenzel, Woodyatt, Okimoto and Worthington 2019) and the role of interactions between forgiveness types (Fincham and May 2019) (e.g. the impact of forgiveness from partners or divine forgiveness on self-forgiveness). For example, McConnell and Dixon (2012) found that perceived divine forgiveness was positively related to self-forgiveness. Fincham and May (2019) found that the perception of divine forgiveness moderated the negative relationship between self-forgiveness and depression, suggesting self-condemnation was more strongly related to depression when there was low perceived divine forgiveness.

11.  Reaffirm Violated Values Value reaffirmation (in the context of justice research) is a process of reaffirming shared values that have been violated by a transgression – and thus reaffirming the shared identity that those values represent (Wenzel et al. 2008). Research on value reaffirmation arose out of research examining victim needs following transgressions. In this context, victims were better able to forgive and move toward reconciliation when they felt the offender had recommitted to the values that were shared or were now back on the same page about what was right and wrong. This research led to justice researchers demonstrating that re-affirming violated values reduce self-condemnation (negative self-regard) but did so without reducing responsibility (Wenzel, Woodyatt and Hedrick 2012). Value re-affirmation can be achieved implicitly via reparative actions, symbolic actions, or confessions or explicitly via value re-affirmation writing tasks (Woodyatt and Wenzel 2014; Woodyatt et al. 2017). Value re-affirmation writing tasks have been shown to lead to outcomes like reconciliation and self-trust via engaging the need for moral-social identity. In these tasks, participants write or talk about what value(s) they feel they may have violated by their actions. Participants 528

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then write about why these values are important to themselves. Finally, participants write about other times in the past that they have acted in a way consistent with those values. In qualitative research on people’s experiences of self-condemnation and self-forgiveness, people who were able to self-forgive often attached self-forgiveness to the values they felt they had violated. So if we return to our original example, helping Anthony to work through his struggles is likely to involve helping him to understand his emotional experience (and tolerate any arising distress). Second, coming alongside him in a way that provides support, but encourages honesty, about his perceived failings will encourage him to potentially connect with others in groups where he can be authentic and connected. Finally, we should aim to help him to identify specifically which values he feels he has violated, re-affirm those values, and use those values as a basis on which to plan his future actions. For example, if he was to identify that he has violated the value of being a good father, then being a good father can become a central motivator forward; e.g., to be a good father, Anthony needs to release the self-condemnation and shift his view from past values failure to future values expression. Self-forgiveness is surrounded by its debates and controversies. Nonetheless, the study of self-forgiveness has expanded our understanding of self-condemnation and how we can help people to move beyond this common human experience. While research on fostering self-compassion has boomed in psychology, we are only just beginning to explore humility, while self-respect has been largely left to the domains of philosophy. In many ways we are still only scratching the surface of understanding the many ways that people work through transgressions and move positively toward the future. Self-forgiveness research has suggested some possible pathways to repair and has particularly demonstrated that self-forgiveness in not a process one really does alone, but it is closely linked to our experience as social-relational beings that exist within community.2

Notes 1 Where any judgment of goodness or appropriateness has been socially derived and internalized. 2 Correspondence concerning this chapter should be addressed to Dr. Lydia Woodyatt, College of ­Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide SA 5001, ­Australia. Email: [email protected].

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39 FORGIVENESS AND RELIGION/ SPIRITUALITY What Science has Discovered about the Relationship between the Two Jichan J. Kim Religion/spirituality (R/S) has been an important consideration from the beginning of ­forgiveness psychology. Enright et al. (1989), who conducted arguably the first scientifically based study on the topic of forgiveness ever published in the social sciences, found that with age, Christian participants moved away from self-focused intentions in reasoning about forgiveness to other-focused intentions in reasoning about forgiveness (e.g., out of love). Also, Enright et al. (1989) found that participants’ religiosity, measured by attending religious services, reading the Bible, and discussing faith matters with peers, was associated with higher stages of forgiveness reasoning. A pertinent question to ask here is why it was expected that forgiveness would be linked to one’s religiosity in the first place. The answer to this question may be found by examining the early years in the development of the scientific study of forgiveness. For any new scientific field to flourish, a thoroughgoing conceptual analysis of the construct being investigated seems crucial. Enright and the Human Development Study Group’s (1991) seminal work that sparked the scientific study of forgiveness introduced forgiveness as a theological, philosophical, and psychological construct to other social scientists. It was carefully shown in their writing that forgiveness had its longstanding roots in religious/spiritual traditions (especially, in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) and that while the Hebrew and Christian views encompassed the most developed ideas about interpersonal forgiveness, similar ideas such as mercy and compassion were found in other religious/spiritual systems such as Buddhism and ­Confucianism (Enright et al. 1992a; Enright et al. 1992b). For instance, within the three great monotheistic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the idea of forgiveness from God seems crucial in the adherents’ relationship with God and others (Enright and the Human ­Development Study Group; see also McCullough and Worthington 1999). Fitzgibbons (1986), one of the first advocates of forgiveness as a psychotherapeutic treatment tool for treating anger, seems right in his evaluation that forgiveness with its deep roots in religious/spiritual traditions had long been ignored as a scientific topic due to the general sentiment against religious ideas having a place in the public sphere. Given the clear link between forgiveness and R/S, it seems reasonable to expect that religious beliefs, values, experiences, and so forth would be reflected in participants’ understanding of (and so reasoning about) forgiveness, which seems to explain why Enright et al. (1989) included a measure of religiosity in their first empirical study on forgiveness. I begin my examination of the relationship between forgiveness and R/S with the following idea in mind: There is something religious and thus spiritual about forgiveness that one must not neglect. The main question I will attempt to answer is as follows: What does the psychological science say DOI: 10.4324/9781003360278-47

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about the relationship between forgiveness of other persons and the forgiver’s R/S? To accomplish this goal, I will first provide definitions of forgiveness and R/S. Second, I will discuss research ­findings on how R/S might predict the act and process of forgiveness among R/S individuals. Do R/S individuals forgive in a different way when compared with those who are not religious/­spiritual? If so, in what ways might their R/S states influence the way that they forgive? Third, I will discuss research findings on the effects of forgiveness on spiritual outcomes among spiritually sensitive forgivers. More specifically, does research show that forgiveness leads to spiritual growth? Fourth, I will conclude this chapter with a summary of findings and implications with future directions.

1  Definitions of Forgiveness and Religion/Spirituality The first task in discussing the relationship between forgiveness and religion/spirituality would be defining the subjects under our discussion. The following section will provide definitions of forgiveness and religion/spirituality as discussed by the social scientists.

1.1  Defining Forgiveness Forgiveness is a moral virtue as justice, kindness, and gentleness are (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015). As a moral virtue, forgiveness is goodness shown to the one who has wronged the forgiver; it is agape love for the one who does not seem lovable by the nature of what was said and done against the forgiver (or what was not done in the case of love withdrawn from the victim). As a moral virtue, forgiveness has to start within; it involves the forgiver’s conscious choice and struggles (thus, forgiveness is a process) to morally love the one who has not earned such love. Based on this conception of forgiveness as a moral virtue, Enright and the Human Development Study Group (1991) provided the following definition of person-to-person forgiveness: Forgiveness is the overcoming of negative affect and judgment toward the offender, not by denying ourselves the right to such affect and judgment, but by endeavoring to view the offender with compassion, benevolence, and love while recognizing that he or she has abandoned the right to them. (p.126) As one struggles to forgive another, negative affect, behavior, and cognition toward the offender are replaced with positive affect, behavior, and cognition toward the offender (Enright and ­Fitzgibbons 2015). However, the manifestations of the virtue of forgiveness are not expected to be perfect as the emphasis is on the virtuous person’ progression toward the perfection of the virtue over time (Enright and Fitzgibbons 2015). McCullough et al. (1997) define interpersonal forgiveness as a set of motivational changes in which avoidant and retaliatory motivations decrease and benevolent motivations increase, all of which occur despite what the offender has done against the forgiver. This definition is similar to that of Enright and the Human Development Study Group (1991) in that forgiveness involves abandoning negative and developing positive attributes toward the offending person. A truly virtuous act has to spring from within, thus pointing to the importance of changes on the motivational level. Worthington (2003) argues, based on his understanding of Christian theology, that there are two types of forgiveness: Decisional forgiveness promises not to act in revenge or avoidance, but it doesn’t necessarily make a person feel less unforgiving. Emotional forgiveness is the emotional juxtaposition of positive other-oriented emotions against the negative unforgiveness. (p.53) 534

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Decisional forgiveness involves behavioral intentions not to seek revenge but to treat the offender as a person of inherent worth whereas emotional forgiveness involves replacing unforgiving emotions (e.g., resentment, hatred) with love (or with other oriented emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and compassion) (Worthington et al. 2019). When dealing with deeply hurt individuals, differentiating these two types of forgiveness seems helpful: Decisional forgivers focus on behavioral intentions (mandatory in Christian forgiving) while emotional forgivers focus on emotional changes (not mandatory but desirable in Christian forgiving) (Worthington et al. 2019). However, decisional and emotional forgiveness are closely connected as one’s decision to forgive often develops further into emotional changes, and also emotional changes leading to love and compassion (to varying degrees) must involve both conscious and unconscious mental processes (agape love is more than an emotion as it involves a commitment to love). These definitional differences are nuanced and are not completely settled in the field. Therefore, acknowledging some of these disagreements, differences, and distinctions would be relevant and necessary. However, as we have examined, they seem to be more similar than different, and thus, resisting the trend toward settling for and drifting toward simplistic and reductionistic definitions (e.g., forgiveness equated with its outcomes without noting its process or defined as a reduction in anger only) seems more crucial than having disputes over comparably minor differences.

1.2  Defining Religion/Spirituality Defining religion/spirituality is not an easy task due to its usage in a wide variety of contexts found in different cultural and religious expressions (King 1997). However, if R/S is a topic that cuts across different cultural and disciplinary contexts (though certain detailed nuances existing in different spiritual traditions might get lost in a more general attempt like this), an attempt to understand R/S seems to offer further opportunities for a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary scholarly engagement. Hill et al.’s (2000) article was one of the seminal articles that played a role in igniting a more active treatment of R/S within the social sciences where they careful expounded on what religion and spirituality are and how they differ. Religion has long been a topic within the social sciences, but as the public interest in spirituality arose, the authors carefully noted distinct features between religion and spirituality as well as the inseparable relationship between the two that opened the possibility for a more nuanced treatment of religion and spirituality. According to Hill et al.’s (2000) examination of the history of R/S in the Western society, the following three trends are noted: First, though not all spiritual traditions are under the category of religion, traditionally, spirituality has been a part of religion. Second, the schism between religion and spirituality has a short history which seemed to have coincided with the rise of secularization in the Western society and the decline of organized religions. Third, the decline of outward expressions of religious beliefs in favor of subjective spiritual experiences needs to be seen in the context of religious individualism and structural pluralism that led to the privatization of religion pushing religion out of the public sphere. If these observations are true, then one must not be quick to separate spirituality from religion but instead define it precisely so that there are points shared with and yet distinct from religion. In this chapter, I adopt the following as the essence of both spirituality and religion as discussed in Hill et al. (2000): “The feelings, thoughts, experiences, and behaviors that arise from a search for the sacred” (p.66). This search for the sacred is a process where one “attempts to identify, articulate, maintain, or transform” what they perceive as sacred such as “a divine being, divine object, Ultimate Reality, or Ultimate Truth” (p.66). Hill et al. (2000) further delineated that religion additionally has the methods and means through which one’s search for the sacred are legitimized and supported by an identifiable group and also might or might not involve a search for non-sacred goals (which can be sanctified and 535

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thus become sacred) where the primary goal of searching for non-sacred goals is facilitating the search for the sacred. In summary, religion shares an essential criterion with spirituality, but it requires additional elements whereas spirituality shares its essential criterion with religion but ceases to become a religion without the unique elements found only in religion. A church goer as an example would search for a relationship with God through participating in corporate worship and would seek psychosocial support through his membership in the congregation. In this example, participating in corporate worship and seeking church membership alone would not make him a spiritual person but his search for the sacred would. As another example, one might attempt to search for the sacred by pursuing a better connection with nature without engaging in communal rituals and practices. This person is spiritually sensitive but not religious. Spirituality often is experienced in traditional or non-traditional religious contexts and the distinction between the two, if forcibly made, can lead to conceptual and measurement issues (Hill et al. 2000; Hill and Pargament 2003). Therefore, following the trend in the scholarly treatment of the construct, I will continue to use religion/spirituality (R/S) when referring to religion and/ or spirituality. Also, when I refer to either of the two, I am doing so without excluding one from the other unless I make a clear distinction between the two.

2  How Religion/Spirituality Might Predict Forgiveness In examining the empirical findings on the relationship between forgiveness and religion/spirituality, Davis et al.’s (2013) distinction between the dispositional and contextual eras seems helpful. Here, the two eras are determined by how R/S constructs were treated and measured: Is an R/S construct treated and measured as a trait-like quality expected to be consistent in one’s life or a state-like quality specific to one’s current relational context (with the sacred, offender, and self )? Forgiveness as a moral virtue is to be practiced in a specific context of another’s injustice (which, when practiced repeatedly over time across situations and people, can lead to forgivingness or dispositional forgiveness; see Roberts 1995 for a further discussion). Then, seeing spirituality as related to that specific context of another’s injustice or as a general individual trait can have different outcomes and implications. I will begin this section by discussing how the relationship between forgiveness and R/S used to be investigated in the past, resulting in a weak, unimpressive relationship between the two.

2.1  Religion/Spirituality as a Trait-like Construct Early investigations of the relationship between forgiveness and R/S examined R/S as a dispositional construct where one’s stable religious identity, commitment, beliefs, values, practices, etc. were expected to influence one’s forgiveness. For instance, Enright et al. (1989) mentioned earlier adopted ten items from the Religious Belief Scale that focused on the participants’ church attendance, Bible reading, and religious discussions with peers (Allport et al. 1953) to examine how R/S might affect forgiveness. The reasonable expectation could have been that if one frequently engages in religious behaviors, the person is more likely to be exposed to the idea of forgiveness, thus leading him to have a greater understanding of what it means to forgive. As another example, in validating the Enright Forgiveness Inventory, a 60-item, self-report scale that measures one’s level of forgiveness within a specific context of one injustice against him/ her, Subkoviak et al. (1995) included religiosity to examine its relationship with forgiveness. In the study, religiosity was measured in a very similar way to that of Enright et al. (1989) as a dispositional construct by asking participants about their religious practice and behavior (e.g., service attendance and frequency of prayer). Subkoviak et al. (1995), based on both college and parent samples, did report that after controlling for age, educational level, time since the hurt, and degree 536

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of hurt, those who were affiliated with organized religions compared with those who were not showed a higher level of forgiveness. However, it perhaps was surprising that no stronger relationship between forgiveness and religiosity (r = .09) was found. In fact, a meta-analytic summary of the relationship between forgiveness and religiosity based on 28 effect sizes (N = 5,224) by Fehr et al. (2010) reported a mean r of .19, confirming a weak, unimpressive, relationship between the two. If forgiveness is deeply rooted in religious traditions and is highly valued among R/S individuals, why is it that there seems to be no strong relationship between forgiveness and R/S? Forgiveness is seen as the ethos or character of Christianity (Marty 1998), and despite the fact that most of the studies in the literature compared Christian with non-Christian participants, it perhaps seemed perplexing to many that forgiveness turned out not to be so strongly linked to R/S.

3  Disentangling the Weak Relationship between Forgiveness and Religion/Spirituality One might conclude that while religious people tend to have more positive attitudes toward forgiveness, their attitudes might not lead to actual forgiving (see for instance Brown et al. 2007). Are religious people hypocrites who say they value forgiveness but are not more forgiving than those who are non-religious in reality? Can there be any other explanations for the forgiveness-­religion discrepancy? McCullough and Worthington (1999) provided the following four explanations. First, it would be socially desirable for religious people to appear that they are forgiving while they might not be actively practicing forgiveness. McCullough and Worthington (1999) noted that while religious people are more motivated to forgive (which is socially more desirable for them), they might not necessarily know how to forgive in the face of actual injustices against them. This explanation seems to make sense because the “how” of forgiveness has been scientifically pioneered only since the late 1980s. Second, the issue of aggregation and specificity in measurement seems to be at play, resulting in weak correlations when two measures do not match in their levels of measurement, namely, trait and state, to which I will return later for a full discussion. Third, religion and spirituality might be causally distal from the actual expression of forgiveness due to various social-cognitive factors that might affect one’s forgiveness such as apology, severity of the harm, and prior relationships with the offender. Fourth, recall bias is suspected because ­transgression-specific forgiveness typically is measured by asking participants to think about one specific offender who has wronged them in the past. In other words, participants’ ability to recall or difficulty with recalling a specific offense might influence their forgiveness scores. Tsang et al.’s (2005) study provided initial evidence for this recall bias issue by showing that when a more restrictive recall procedure was used by asking the participants to think of a transgression that had occurred within the past two months, greater intrinsic religiousness was related to decreased motivations to revenge. Given these potential explanations for the forgiveness-religion discrepancy, a new approach to examining the relationship between forgiveness and R/S was necessary in order to capture their complex relationships in a more nuanced way.

4  Emergence of the Contextual Era Now I return to the issue of aggregation and specificity in measurement because it offered the rationale for a new era, namely, the contextual era in investigating the relationship between forgiveness and R/S. The issue of aggregation and specificity in the measurement of forgiveness, first raised by McCullough and Worthington (1999), referred to the idea that general measures of R/S (religious motivations, behaviors, attitudes, etc.) would correlate well with general measures of forgiveness (without reference to specific contexts of forgiving or one’s tendency to forgive), and 537

Jichan J. Kim

specific measures of R/S (e.g., specific to the context of a particular transgression) would correlate well with transgression-specific forgiveness. Tsang et al. (2005) provided initial evidence for this measurement aggregation and specificity issue: When more generalized forgiveness (based on multiple offenses/offenders) was compared to religiosity, there was a more considerable relationship between the two (r = .20). In fact, this measurement specificity hypothesis was strongly supported by Davis et al. (2013) whose meta-analysis has shown that the relationship between forgiveness and R/S was moderated by how R/S constructs were measured: The strength of the relationship between state or transgression-specific forgiveness and R/S changed from small (r = .10, p