About Forgiveness

I want to look at two questions here: what is forgiveness and when is it good to forgive.

I not going to go into an extended philosophical dialectic on the nature of forgiveness but instead I’ll just give you one fairly standard account that comes originally from Bishop Butler and is prominently employed in Jeffrie Murphy’s influential work on forgiveness. On this view, to forgive is to overcome and foreswear resentment over a significant wrong one has suffered. 

It’s worth taking a minute to distinguish forgiving from excusing something. If a student plows into me and knocks me over on the quad, I might reasonably feel I’ve been wronged.  If I later learn that the student was rushing to call 911 because his teacher was having a heart attack, I would excuse him for running into me. In excusing the act we recognize over riding circumstances that removes the blameworthiness from an act we would ordinarily consider rude or disrespectful. In excusing the act I judge that no wrong has been committed after all.  Forgiving is very different. When we forgive, we do not change our mind about the wrongness of the original act. We continue to believe we have suffered a wrong, but in spite of this, we cease to hold that wrong against the perpetrator.

[There is a nice philosophical puzzle lurking in this understanding of forgiveness.  I’m not going to delve into my preferred solution to it, but I do want to lay it out before moving on to the next question. This puzzle is known as the “paradox of forgiveness.” Moral judgments are “thick” in the sense that to make a moral judgment is not just to form a belief. Moral judgments also have an emotional component (and perhaps also a motivational component). To judge, for instance, that abortion is wrong is not just to form the belief that abortion is wrong, but it is also to adopt a disapproving emotional stance towards abortion. To judge that abortion is wrong involve acquiring an emotional disposition to feel sad, angry, abhorrent, or grieved at the thought of abortions being performed. To judge that one has been wronged in some significant way also brings with it some emotional baggage and resentment seems to be part of this. But, if moral judgments are thick in this emotionally laden way, then the concept of forgiveness understood as forswearing resentment while continuing to judge the action as wrong appears to be logically incoherent. A number of solutions to this puzzle have been proposed in the philosophical literature on forgiveness and I have my own preferred solution (which of course I think is far superior to the other contenders), but I haven’t written that paper yet and I’m not going subject you to it right now. So on to the next question.]

When is it virtuous to forgive?

That forgiveness is always a good thing is a popular view. Unconditional forgiveness is touted by therapists as necessary for the victim’s healing.  We are used to hearing that forgiveness provides closure. Once we have forgiven, we can move on with our lives.

Unconditional forgiveness is also a standard Christian teaching. When Jesus is asked how many times one should forgive he responds “70 times 7” But perhaps this is a special religious obligation for Christians, one that goes above and beyond the call of morality.

A contrasting view about when it is good to forgive is defended by my former teacher, Jeffrie Murphy. Murphy is critical of unconditional forgiveness.   Murphy thinks that in the absence of the victimizer acknowledging and repenting the wrong he has done, forgiveness comes at the cost of the victim’s self respect. To appreciate this point we should think about what is communicated through the wrongdoers injustice to his victim. In a case of assault, for instance, the attacker commits an act of violence. Through that act of violence the attacker denigrates the victim and asserts his superiority. The message communicated by the assault is that the victim is morally worth less and can be treated as a mere thing by the victimizer. The attacker can’t undo the act of violence. But we can understand the attacker’s repentance of the act as withdrawing the morally denigrating message expressed through the attack. If the victim forgives in the absence of repentance, he is foreswearing resentment towards the attacker while letting the attacker’s denigrating assessment of the victim stand.  In the absence of repentance, forgiveness may be damaging to the victim because in forgiving the victim withdraws resentment while the negative appraisal of his worth given in the victimizer’s action remains un-amended. In this light we can see forgoing forgiveness and continuing to harbor resentment towards the wrongdoer as an emotional defense on the victim’s part of his own moral worth. In the absence of acknowledgement and repentance of the wrong, continued resentment towards the wrongdoer is grounded in self respect.