Forgiveness has over the past forty or so years engendered the interest of scholars and practitioners in such disparate fields as psychology, law, politics, international affairs, sociology, and philosophy. This article is concerned with what philosophers have had to say about forgiveness within secular ethical frameworks and, to a lesser extent, the Christian religious tradition.
Generally regarded as a positive response to human wrongdoing, forgiveness is a conceptually, psychologically, and morally complex phenomenon. There is disagreement over the meaning of forgiveness, its relation to apparent cognates, the psychological, behavioral, conceptual, and normative dimensions of forgiveness, and when and under what conditions forgiveness is morally permissible, required, or wrong. Moreover, the many legal and political analogues to forgiveness raise questions about what human behaviors may be properly described as forgiveness. These and related issues are discussed in the following sections of this article.4. Forgiveness as a Process of Overcoming Anger
5. Other Types of Forgiveness
5.1 Forgiveness as a Virtue
5.2 Self-Forgiveness
5.3 Third-party forgiveness
5.4 Political Forgiveness
6. Forgiveness and Justice
7. Forgiveness and God
8. Concluding Remarks
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[size=30]1. The Standard Definition of Forgiveness
From the ancient Greeks through the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to the present day, forgiveness has typically been regarded as a personal response to having been injured or wronged, or as a condition one seeks or hopes is bestowed upon one for having wronged someone else.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘forgivable,’ the first entry under the general term ‘forgive,’ as that which “may be forgiven, pardonable, excusable,” referring thereby to the quality of deserving to be forgiven. This sense is illustrated in Jesus' appeal “God forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), which suggests that ignorance is sometimes a condition that negates or tempers culpability, rendering wrongdoers forgivable. Notwithstanding the association with excusing conditions, forgiving is not, strictly speaking, equivalent to excusing. For wrongdoing that is excused entirely there is nothing to forgive, since wrongs that are fully excused are not blameworthy or culpable. And although excuses that mitigate, rather than negate, culpability, may serve as a rationale for forgiveness, they are not the same as forgiveness. Moreover, the application of the concept of forgiveness to nonmoral behavior, as in the case of a forgivably poor musical performance by a pianist, shows that forgiveness is not always or necessarily a moral term.
The term ‘forgive’ derives from ‘give’ or to ‘grant’, as in ‘to give up,’ or ‘cease to harbor (resentment, wrath).’ More specifically, ‘forgive’ refers to the act of giving up a feeling, such as resentment, or a claim to requital or compensation. And the term ‘forgiveness’ is defined as the action of forgiving, pardoning of a fault, remission of a debt, and similar responses to injury, wrongdoing, or obligation. In this sense of the term, forgiveness is a dyadic relation involving a wrongdoer and a wronged party, and is thought to be a way in which victims of wrong alter their and a wrongdoer's status by, for instance, acknowledging yet moving past a transgression. Though a dyadic relation, this general conception is not an account of forgiveness between two persons only, since it allows for forgiveness between individuals and groups, such as the forgiving of an individual's debt by a financial institution, or the commutation of a prison sentence by an act of official pardon. And forgiveness may occur between groups of people, as evidenced by intra-national restorative justice efforts and government commissions established to effect truth and reconciliation between perpetrators and victims of historical wrongs.
[size=30]2. The Ends of Forgiveness[/size]
The standard definition of forgiveness makes clear that its main purpose is the re-establishment or resumption of a relationship ruptured by wrongdoing. The notion that forgiveness is teleological is also a central element of forgiveness both in contemporary philosophical accounts, which frequently stress the moral and nonmoral purposes to be achieved by it, and within the Christian religious tradition, which links forgiveness to human redemption by God (Hobbes, 1969; Wolterstorff, 2009). In keeping with the standard definition, many contemporary philosophers argue that the resumption of relationships disrupted by wrongdoing often requires a moral reassessment of the wrongdoer by the victim, and that, following Butler (1846) such a reassessment involves relinquishing resentment or some other form of morally inflected anger (French, 1982; Murphy, 1988, 2001), or behavior such as seeking revenge (Griswold, 2007; Zaibert, 2011). This does not entail that forgiveness is a literal return to the state of affairs anterior to the transgression for which it is a response. Yet it also does not mean that forgiveness is merely a metaphorical return to a pre-transgression state of affairs between wrongdoer and victim. Rather, in granting forgiveness, a victim of wrong re-orients a relationship that has been disrupted or compromised by wrongdoing. This theme is an integral part of forgiveness common both to western philosophical and theological traditions, and is often envisioned as part of a more elaborate interaction in which people seek to atone for wrongs and secure forgiveness in the name of interpersonal reconciliation or in the pursuit of the ultimate human benefit, divine salvation (Moser, 2009).
Maintaining or perpetuating personal relationships is one of the clearest and most important ends of forgiveness, though not the only important one. Forgiving those who wrong us often helps us move beyond strong negative emotions which, if allowed to fester, could harm us psychologically and physically. Forgiveness benefits wrongdoers, as well, by releasing them from the blame and hard feelings often directed toward them by those they wrong, or helping them transcend the guilt or remorse they suffer from having done wrong, thereby allowing them to move forward in their lives. These ends of forgiveness may be regarded as in general enabling in the sense that they show how forgiveness sometimes helps people move beyond the wrongs they endure or cause and the sometimes debilitating effects those wrongs have on wrongdoers and victims alike. For some, forgiveness has these forward-looking benefits because of the way it transfigures the past. Emmanuel Levinas claims that “Forgiveness acts upon the past, somehow repeats the event, purifying it,” a notion similar to Hannah Arendt's view that forgiveness alters the ethical significance of a wrongdoer's past by keeping it from having a permanent or fixed character (Guenther, 2006).
However, forgiveness may also go awry, deliberately or inadvertently serving more dubious ends, as when a victim of domestic violence routinely but without good reason forgives her abuser, thereby fueling increasingly violent cycles of abuse. Moreover, perpetrators of such wrongs often feign apology and repentance, thereby fraudulently securing forgiveness from the victim. In these ways, forgiveness may become complicit in or collude with wrongdoing, converting what is generally regarded as a good or virtuous reaction to wrongdoing into its opposite. These considerations raise the general question of the relation between forgiveness and desert. It may be thought, for example, that for behavior typical of forgiveness to qualify, conceptually, as forgiveness, it must be grounded in morally legitimate considerations, including whether the wrongdoer deserves to be forgiven (Murphy, 2001). Deserving to be forgiven may hinge, in turn, on whether the wrongful deed was partly excusable (a complete excuse or justification would leave nothing to be forgiven) or whether the wrongdoer displays guilt or remorse (Murphy and Hampton, 1988). On the other hand, it might be argued that forgiveness cannot be justified by definitional fiat, and that experience seems to warrant the view that not all forgiveness is justified, and that one way in which forgiveness may be inappropriate is if it is tendered to the undeserving, if, that is, forgiveness is a matter of justice or desert at all.
A disposition to too readily forgive may also be symptomatic of a lack of self-respect, or indicative of servility, ordinarily viewed as moral infirmities or vices (Novitz, 1998). This recalls Aristotle's idea that the person deficient in appropriate anger is “unlikely to defend himself” and “endure being insulted” and is for this reason a “fool” (
Nicomachean Ethics, 1126a5), Kant's notion that a person who fails to become angry at injustices done to him lacks dignity and self-respect (Kant, 2001), and Hume's assertion that since anger and hatred are “inherent in our very frame and constitution” the lack of such feelings is sometimes evidence of “weakness and imbecility” (Hume, 1958, p.605). That interpersonal forgiveness does not always serve morally laudable aims suggests that a general account of the criteria for justified and morally permissible or even obligatory forgiveness is needed to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate forgiving[/size]
Forgiveness
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