. Concluding Remarks

Other questions pertaining to forgiveness include whether and in what sense people can be held responsible for their reactive attitudes and how they respond to them, and the place of forgiveness in such broadly secular ethical perspectives as utilitarianism (Scarre, 2004), contemporary virtue theories, and feminist ethics of care which emphasize responsibility for others and the importance of maintaining relationships.
Noting that “we grow angry with enemies and friends, with children and parents, yes, even with the gods, with wild beasts and soulless implements,” Plutarch (Moralia, Volume 6, p.107) implicitly raised the questions what sorts of things may cause us to experience angry or unpleasant reactive attitudes and what, among these sort of things, are proper objects of forgiveness. It may be that some objects that cause us anger or unhappiness cannot be forgiven because they are not moral agents. Perhaps, too, we can forgive even non-culpable moral agents or subjects, for example, those whose disabilities create hardships for people charged with their care. And the relation between forgiveness and children raises questions about who may be forgiven and who may forgive those who wrong them, perhaps challenging the mainstream philosophical conception of forgiveness as being overly cognitivist. Perhaps, too, the reach of forgiveness extends beyond responsible human agency, both in the sense that only culpable wrongs may be forgiven, and only full-fledged moral agents may forgive. A relatively under-explored conception of forgiveness, endorsed by some Buddhists, that insists that forgiveness be understood as “merely letting go of anger” (Boleyn-Fitzgerald, 2002) eschews altogether the notion that forgiveness must be about the principled overcoming of anger occasioned by culpable wrongs, and warrants closer scrutiny.
As noted above, there is reason to wonder why we should accept the claim central to the traditional Christian view of forgiveness as love that we suffer such a radical epistemological blind spot with regard to the desires, intentions, and motives of other people that we can have no moral standing to forgive them. Perhaps, instead, we do or can have sufficient understanding of other people to trust their apologies and other acts of contrition and base our forgiveness on reasonable grounds. On the other hand, even secular perspectives on wrongdoing and forgiveness recognize the fact that we all too often do not know much at all about wrongdoers' intentions, motives, desires, and thoughts to confidently pass judgment on whether we can reasonably forgive them, and so the connection between understanding wrongdoers and forgiving them in the light of that understanding remains contentious.
Finally, there may be some actions (or persons) that are beyond forgiveness not in the sense that they cannot logically be forgiven, for example, by third parties, or in the sense that victims lack the psychological resources to forgive them, but in the normative sense that they or their actions are so evil as to be beyond the pale of forgiveness and should not be forgiven.
These and related queries will continue to draw the interest of philosophers to the topic of forgiveness, which remains a complex, elusive, and contested moral phenomenon.

. Concluding Remarks

. Concluding Remarks :: تعاليق

. Concluding Remarks