3 Third-party forgiveness

Many contemporary philosophers who have written on forgiveness claim that there can be no third-party forgiving, where that is understood to mean one person forgiving a wrongdoer for another. That this is impossible seems to follow from the essentially personal nature of the reactive attitudes, such as resentment, often engendered by being wronged, the overcoming of which is central to much forgiveness. Because it has seemed clear to many writers on the topic that such emotions can only be overcome by victims of wrong, only victims can forgive. Others may forgive a wrongdoer for a wrong that also victimizes them. For example, the parents of a murdered child are wronged by the murder of their child, and for this they may forgive the wrongdoer. But they cannot forgive for the primary victim or for other victims of the crime because they have no moral standing or authority to do so. Put differently, forgiveness is the victim's prerogative (Swinburne, 1989; Govier and Verwoerd, 2002). This clearly does not mean that third-parties cannot convey forgiveness on behalf of someone wronged, but that is acting in the role of a messenger of forgiveness, not in the role of a forgiver per se.
With regard to self-forgiveness, this is, as noted above, a conceptual truth, and some have argued that it is an empirical (psychological) truth with respect to interpersonal forgiveness. And within the traditional Christian religious ethic there is at least and, apparently, at most, one case of third-party forgiveness, namely, God forgiving us our trespasses against other people. Within this tradition, we are required to forgive others who wrong us in order to secure God's forgiveness of our own sins, without which we cannot gain salvation. This entails that for those who are saved, God forgives their sins against other people, which is the essence of third-party forgiveness.
It might be thought that any sin against another person is ipso facto a sin against God the creator and, thus, that God's forgiveness of human wrongdoing is really for wrongs done to Him, making God's forgiveness of human wrongs not a genuine case of third-party forgiveness. But as the example of the parents of the murdered child shows, there may be primary and secondary victims of wrong, and it is simply false to say that a wrong done to a particular person is actually a wrong done to someone else, or to God, and not to that person. Perhaps all injuries done by human beings to other human beings are in some sense also wrongs done to God, but that is consistent with the observation that wrongs endured by particular people are done to them.
It might also be supposed that political pardons are a type of third-party forgiving. Suppose, for example, that in the final days of her tenure a State Governor offers a pardon to the oldest, most feeble inmates in the state penitentiary who have already served most of a life sentence. Remitting the remainder of the prison sentences seems to be an instance of third-party forgiving, at least if forgiveness is understood as broadly synonymous with pardoning.
However, official or institutional acts of pardon are not interpersonal in the same sense as is forgiveness between two persons. In modern criminal justice systems like that of the United States, crimes are, strictly speaking, offenses against the state, and it is the state that takes up the prosecution and punishment of criminal offenders. As such, people victimized by crime do not personally respond to the wrongdoer. The recent development of victim's rights groups and the use of victim impact statements in court proceedings underscore the emotional distance victims often experience in having the cause of action against a wrongdoer taken away from them and put into the hands of impersonal agents of the state. These considerations suggest that an analogy between official acts of pardon and the often deeply personal interaction of forgiveness between victim and wrongdoer may be untenable.
Despite the widespread assumption that only the primary victim of wrong has the standing or authority to forgive wrongdoers, a number of philosophers have challenged it. Murphy (2009) acknowledges his departure from this assumption, and Pettigrove, in his “The Standing to Forgive” (2009), argues that four common arguments that purport to show that only the immediate or direct victim of harm has the standing to forgive are unpersuasive, and that second or even third parties, who are not properly regarded as “victims” of the wrong, can nevertheless forgive a wrongdoer. And Radzik (2010) claims that the idea that only the immediate victim of wrongdoing can forgive is false, since it is a commonplace that people who are neither direct nor indirect victims of a wrong may nevertheless experience moral anger over a wrong (e.g. an injustice) done to others. Forgiveness in such cases may be part of an effort to repair a relationship between a wrongdoer and those non-victims whose relations to the wrongdoer have been compromised by the wrong that was done.

3 Third-party forgiveness

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3 Third-party forgiveness