Political Forgiveness

The power of pardon enjoyed by duly established political authorities may be at best a loose cognate of forgiveness, but this is not to say that all legal or political analogues to forgiveness are implausible. It remains to discuss whether individual political actors and institutions, and collective efforts to respond to such moral atrocities as slavery, legally enforced racial segregation, ethnic cleansing, and other large-scale immoralities may be regarded as forms of forgiveness.
P.E. Digeser (2001) has argued in favor of a conception of political forgiveness that breaks sharply with the standard philosophical accounts of forgiveness as involving the overcoming of resentment or other negative emotional states by victims of wrong. Instead, Digeser seeks to divest political forgiveness of any personal feelings whatsoever in favor of a performative account in which such overt behaviors as pardoning a criminal or waiving a debt signify forgiveness. Digeser claims that separating the action of forgiving from its underlying motive and from the constellation of feelings often thought to accompany interpersonal forgiveness better suits a conception of justice as one in which people get their due. On this secular, performative concept, forgiveness consists in political actors or institutions opting not to get their due, for whatever reasons.
Digeser claims to have created a serviceable political notion of forgiveness shorn of its usual psychological and even theological baggage. And surely, as noted earlier, there is a sense of forgiveness in which an action such as waiving a debt or an utterance such as “I forgive you” is sometimes all that forgiveness is about. To this extent and in this sense debt forgiveness and political pardons may reasonably be regarded as political forms of forgiving.
MacLachlan (2012) notes that some philosophers have been skeptical about what they regard as the uncritical promotion of forgiveness in political contexts which they see as detracting from its moral value and side-stepping concerns about justice and accountability for wrongdoing. But, like Digeser, she thinks such worries may be a product of “conceptual conservatism” linked to the emotional model of interpersonal forgiveness (i.e. the view that forgiveness requires overcoming unhappy emotions such as resentment) and that a more performative model makes room for meaningful political forgiveness.
It might be thought that these notions of political forgiveness are but special cases of the interpersonal forgiveness noted above in which a speech act such as “I forgive you” or “Forget about it” is all that is needed to accomplish forgiveness. But this would be a mistake, for even in such cases of interpersonal performative forgiveness it is the victim of the wrong who proffers forgiveness to the wrongdoer. This is not the case with political forgiveness as conceived by Digeser or MacLachlan, however, since the person or institution proferring forgiveness is either an agent of the state (e.g. the President) or an agent or agents of a collective entity such as a bank to whom a debt is owed, and these people are not plausibly regarded as the victims of the wrongdoing they forgive. This observation reinforces the idea that political forgiveness is as noted above at best a loose cognate of interpersonal forms of forgiving. Indeed, political forgiveness in this sense may be an instance of third-party forgiving by those who do not have the proper standing to forgive, at least if the parameters of interpersonal forgiveness outlined above are correct. Perhaps, instead, such acts as waiving a debt, especially if it is a crushing debt, and pardoning a convicted felon, are in the final analysis more akin to acts of mercy than they are to acts of forgiveness.
It should be pointed out that the past thirty or so years or so have seen a rapid increase on the part of political leaders apologizing for and seeking reconciliation between perpetrators and victims of moral atrocities. The ostensible aim of such efforts has not only been to rectify past wrongs and give those who have been wronged their due, but to heal deep and sometimes longstanding wounds caused by such wrongs as well. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the mid 1990s is probably the best known example of such attempts to achieve reconciliation between perpetrators and victims of intra-national collective wrongs. Other instances of political apology, aimed in part at effecting some form of forgiveness or reconciliation, include Australia's “sorry book,” which records citizens' remorse over a former government policy mandating the forced removal of aboriginal children from their natural parents in the name of cultural assimilation, President Clinton's apology to African Americans and subsequent proposals by scholars and policy-makers of reparations for slavery, and Northern Ireland's 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the peace process initiated thereby (Brooks, 2004; Biggar, 2008). Understanding forgiveness as roughly synonymous with reconciliation supports the notion that these collective endeavors are institutional forms of forgiveness (Etzioni, 1999; Radzik, 2009).
In general, such efforts are a combination of morally significant gestures some of which seem close to forgiveness while others do not. For example, they may serve one or more of the ends common to interpersonal and self-forgiveness, such as helping victims, bystanders, and perpetrators of moral atrocities come to terms with their pain and guilt, or by offering amnesty to wrongdoers in exchange for the truth about their roles in wrongdoing they may ensure that a dark period in a nation's history is remembered so that such behavior may be avoided in the future. Despite the fact that one of the main objectives of political reconciliation efforts is to unite perpetrators and victims of wrong after a period of hostile relations, interpersonal forgiveness does not necessarily share this goal. Moreover, dead people may be forgiven, and interpersonal forgiveness may occur even when the wrongdoer is ignorant of the fact that he has been forgiven, neither of which is possible with reconciliation, personal or political. Reconciliation of the political variety is by its nature public, and involves opposing parties at least knowing about the effort, if not participating in it together. Because such schemes are only superficially personal, they may leave intact the wounds and reactive attitudes of victims many of whom must continue to live alongside the neighbors who victimized them prior to the public truth and reconciliation exercise (Williams, 2008). Moreover, such efforts are usually predicated upon some form of public apology for or acknowledgment of wrongdoing as a preliminary to re-uniting victim and oppressor. Interpersonal forgiveness may be conditioned upon apology, but it need not be. It is also unclear what a successful collective effort to effect moral healing between or within large groups of people would mean in terms of individual wrongdoers and their specific victims. As noted, interpersonal forgiveness seems to be a deeply personal response to having been wronged, one that often involves overcoming resentment directed at a specific wrongdoer. A public apology and accounting of crimes committed by participants in collective wrongs may be too abstract and psychologically distant from particular victims to achieve what genuine interpersonal forgiveness seems to require.

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Political Forgiveness

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Political Forgiveness

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