BRANDON WARMKE, DANA KAY NELKIN, AND MICHAEL MCKENNA
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: Forgiveness and its moral dimensions / editors Brandon Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, Michael McKenna.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.| Contents: The forgiven / David Shoemaker—Institutional apologies and forgiveness / Angela Smith—Forgiveness and consequences / Richard Arneson.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051763 (print) | LCCN 2020051764 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190602154 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190602147 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190602178 (oso) | ISBN 9780190602161 (updf) | ISBN 9780197578032 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Forgiveness—Moral and ethical aspects.
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051763
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Preface
The original idea for this volume on forgiveness first came together when the three of us realized we had a shared interest in bringing together new work on this topic, one that had fallen out of fashion but just recently reemerged. Brandon was a graduate student at the time, and Michael his supervisor. Dana had recently given Brandon some excellent advice on one of his own articles. While we shared agreement on several matters, we realized that a good deal was up for debate. So we resolved to work together to help bring the topic even more into the spotlight. While forgiveness is a pervasive part of our ethical lives, there is considerable disagreement about what it is and what norms govern it. A pervasive view is that forgiveness most fundamentally involves forswearing resentment or anger directed at the culpable. But others dispute this. As for normative issues, some contend that forgiveness is inappropriate when the guilty do not forswear their wrongdoing or do not experience remorse. Others deny this, arguing that unconditional forgiveness is morally defensible. Naturally, some develop these views in the context of religious beliefs, while others explore the matter without considering these broader assumptions. Yet a further issue concerns forgiveness in wider, collective contexts, such as South Africa’s response to apartheid. The chapters in this volume represent a diversity of views on these issues by leading philosophers who have offered us new insights into this aspect of our ethical lives.
We continue to find forgiveness a fascinating and philosophically challenging topic. There is much unexplored terrain, and we believe these new chapters will take our conversations in new and fruitful directions. We hope you’ll join those discussions, too.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the authors for their contributions to this volume, and for their patience with our efforts to bring this book to print. We are especially indebted to Peter Ohlin for his support and guidance.
Author Bios
Lucy Allais is professor of philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Henry Allison Chair of the History of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She has published work on Kant, forgiveness, moral responsibility, and punishment, and she is working on freedom of the will.
Richard Arneson holds the Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, where he has taught since 1973. He teaches moral and political philosophy and writes mainly on theories of social justice and on act consequentialism and its critics. He also does work on applied philosophy topics.
Eve Garrard is a moral philosopher who is currently Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Manchester University. Her research interests are in moral theory, bioethics, and philosophical issues connected with the concepts of evil and forgiveness. She has coedited (with Geoffrey Scarre) Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust (2003), coauthored (with David McNaughton) Forgiveness (2010), and has published various papers on aspects of forgiveness and of evil. She is currently doing further work on the idea of evil. She has published several papers on bioethical issues, and in the past she sat on various Ethics Committees, including the Royal College of Pathology Ethics Committee, and has been involved in GP ethics and clinical ethics training.
Ishtiyaque Haji is professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. He has research interests in ethical theory, philosophy of action, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology. He is the author of Moral Appraisability (1998), Deontic Morality and Control (2002), (with Stefaan Cuypers) Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education (2008), Freedom and Value (2009), Incompatibilism’s Allure (2009), Reason’s Debt to Freedom (2012), Luck’s Mischief (2016), and The Obligation Dilemma (2019).
Margaret R. Holmgren is associate professor of philosophy emeritus at Iowa State University. She is the author of Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and of a number of articles in the areas of ethics, philosophy of law, and moral epistemology. With Heimir Geirsson, she also coedited the anthology Ethical Theory, which is now in its third edition, with Broadview Press. Before coming to Iowa State University, she taught at Oberlin College and Wellesley College.
Michael McKenna (PhD, Virginia) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. His areas of research are mostly devoted to free will and moral responsibility but also include issues in moral psychology, action theory, ethics, and metaphysics.
He is the author of Conversation and Responsibility (Oxford University Press), the coauthor with Derk Pereboom of Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge Press), and has also written numerous articles, most of which would impress you if you were to read them. He is also coeditor of Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, Free Will and Reactive Attitudes, and The Nature of Moral Responsibility He has a boundless lust for life, and he often drinks to excess.
David McNaughton is retired and lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Rosa, and their two dogs. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at both Keele and Florida State Universities, and he is currently Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Moral Vision (1988) and (with Eve Garrard) of Forgiveness (2010), and of a number of papers on ethics, philosophy of religion, and the relations between the two. His edition of Joseph Butler’s Fifteen Sermons came out in 2017 with Oxford University Press, and he is currently editing Butler’s Analogy of Religion. He and Piers Rawling are also writing a book on their approach to practical reasons.
Dana Kay Nelkin (PhD, UCLA) is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an affiliate professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Her areas of research include moral psychology, ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of law. She is the author of Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (Oxford University Press) and a number of articles on a variety of topics, including self-deception, friendship, the lottery paradox, moral luck, psychopathy, forgiveness, and praise and blame. She is also a coeditor of the The Ethics and Law of Omissions and The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. Her work in moral psychology includes participation in an interdisciplinary research collaboration of philosophers and psychologists, The Moral Judgements Project, which brings together normative and descriptive enquiries about the use of moral principles such as the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and the Doctrine of Double Effect.
Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in the Philosophy Department at Cornell University. He is the author of Living without Free Will (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford University Press, 2014), and of articles on free will, philosophy of mind, and in the history of modern philosophy.
Glen Pettigrove holds the Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Before joining the Glasgow department, he taught at the University of Auckland. He specializes in moral psychology, normative ethics, and early modern philosophy. He has a particular interest in the role of the emotions in our personal and collective lives and has written on anger, cheerfulness, forgiveness, guilt, love, and shame. He is the author of Forgiveness and Love (Oxford University Press, 2012) as well as numerous articles on virtue, religious ethics, and group attitudes.
David Shoemaker is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane University. He has written or edited numerous books and articles on topics in moral psychology, agency and responsibility, personal identity and ethics, and social/political philosophy. He is a recurring visiting researcher at Lund University, associate editor of Ethics, general editor of the series Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, and, with David Sobel, the coeditor of the long-running ethics blog PEA Soup.
Angela M. Smith is a Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Washington and Lee University. She is the coeditor (with Randolph Clarke and Michael McKenna) of The Nature of Moral Responsibility: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2015) and has published extensively on topics related to moral agency, moral responsibility, and moral blame.
Eleonore Stump is the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. She is also honorary professor at Wuhan University and at the Logos Institute, St. Andrews, and a professorial fellow at Australian Catholic University. She has published extensively in philosophy of religion, contemporary metaphysics, and medieval philosophy. Her books include Aquinas (2003), Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (2010), and Atonement (2018). She has given the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen (2003), the Wilde lectures at Oxford (2006), the Stewart lectures at Princeton (2009), and the Stanton lectures at Cambridge (2018). She is past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and the American Philosophical Association, Central Division; and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Christine Swanton is at the Philosophy Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has recently published The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche (Wiley Blackwell, 2015). Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View was published with Oxford University Press in 2003. Recent work incudes Perspectives in Role Ethics Routledge (with Tim Dare, ed.) and a book manuscript Target Centred Virtue Ethics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Richard Swinburne is a Fellow of the British Academy. He was professor of the philosophy of religion at the University of Oxford from 1985 until 2002. He is best known for his trilogy on the philosophy of theism (The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason), second editions of all of which have been published recently, and for the short “popular” book, Is There a God? which summarizes them. He is the author of several books, including Responsibility and Atonement, on the meaning and justification of central Christian doctrines. He is also known for his defense of substance dualism, developed in Mind, Brain, and Free Will and (in a more “popular” version) in his latest book Are We Bodies or Souls?
Author Bios
Brandon Warmke (PhD, Arizona) is assistant professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University. He works in ethics, social philosophy, moral psychology, and political philosophy. He is the author of several philosophical and empirical papers on public discourse and moral responsibility, and over a dozen papers on forgiveness. With Justin Tosi, he is the author of Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press, 2020). His work has been featured in The Atlantic, HuffPost, Scientific American, The Guardian, Slate, The New York Times Magazine, and Vox.
1 Forgiveness An Introduction
Brandon Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Michael McKenna
We are in the midst of a rich resurgence of philosophical interest in forgiveness. This interest reflects, at least in part, a large body of new work in psychology, several new and newsworthy cases of institutional apology and forgiveness, and intense and increased attention to the practices surrounding responsibility, blame, and praise. While until recently the negatively valenced elements of blame and attitudes such as resentment and indignation took center stage in discussions of responsibility practices, there has been much new recent work on positively valenced elements, such as praise, gratitude, and perhaps especially forgiveness. Questions concerning forgiveness can be broadly divided into those concerning the nature of forgiveness, and those concerning its norms, or the conditions, if any, under which it is permissible, obligatory, forbidden, supererogatory, good, admirable, and so on.
But before such questions can even be addressed, it is important to acknowledge that they appear to presuppose a single phenomenon picked out by a unitary concept when it is possible that there are instead multiple phenomena picked out by overlapping notions. In fact, there is not agreement even about exactly which cases fix the phenomenon to be investigated, reinforcing the challenge to confirm that debates are real and not merely apparent. Still, theorists have tended to agree about at least a significant set of paradigm cases, and it will help to have some cases in mind as we go forward. Among the most often discussed are cases within ongoing personal relationships, such as ones in which spouses who have had affairs repent and profusely apologize and are then forgiven by their partners who had been angry and resentful, followed by reconciliation. But forgiveness has also been thought by many not to be confined to personal relationships.
Brandon Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Michael McKenna, Forgiveness In: Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions
So, for many, it makes sense to say that one can forgive the person who recklessly caused an accident on the freeway causing one to be late to pick up one’s child after finding out more about the situation and reflecting on it. And moving even beyond cases of forgiveness between strangers, we find that institutional apology and forgiveness appear often at the heart of complex and complicated political relations. For example, an ongoing source of tension between Japan and Korea concerns whether there has been an adequate apology on the part of Japan for their treatment of Korean “comfort women” during World War II, and what it would take to achieve forgiveness.1
Now the cases of interpersonal forgiveness in which spouses have broken a promise, profusely apologized to their partners who were justifiably resentful, and were forgiven in response to their expressed remorse are almost universally agreed to be central cases of forgiveness. There is less consensus about cases that deviate in any of a whole host of ways, including, for example, those that lack initial resentment on the part of the victim or apology on the part of the offender, as well as those involving strangers or institutions like governments, as we will see. But it will be helpful to keep these different kinds of cases in mind as ones that commonly go under the label “forgiveness” and that are highlighted by many theorists as we distinguish various questions about the nature and norms of forgiveness, and introduce the chapters to follow.
The Nature of Forgiveness
What is forgiveness? The question is, as you can perhaps already see, more complicated than it might appear. We begin by highlighting some commonly accepted preconditions on forgiveness—facts that must obtain if someone is to be in a position to forgive at all. We will then move on to discuss various proposed accounts of the nature of forgiveness itself.
1 Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo, said the 2015 agreement was flawed because it was made between government leaders and did not include the voices of the victims. “When you are talking about victims of human rights abuses, you can’t come to a resolution without their presence and consent,” he said. “As long as there are people who are not convinced that the apologies are heartfelt or that the compensation is adequate, then of course the aggressor would continue to ask for forgiveness and atonement.” (“Japan Balks at Calls for New Apology over “Comfort Women,” New York Times, January 18, 2018).
Moral Badness or Wrongdoing
It is commonplace to think that to be forgiven, an agent must have done something morally bad or wrong.2 For if one did nothing wrong, then one’s conduct is justified. And if one’s conduct is morally justified, then it cannot be forgiven. If one is morally “in the clear” as it were, there is nothing to forgive. As Margaret Holmgren puts it, “Where there is no wrongdoing, there is nothing for the injured person to forgive, although there may be much for her to accept. . . . Forgiveness is an issue only when a moral agent commits an offense, without justification, and in the absence of an exculpating excuse” (2012: 35). While Holmgren focuses on wrongdoing, it may be possible to forgive others for behavior that is merely bad, perhaps because it was motivated by morally bad motives, or because it had bad consequences. And while most philosophers have focused on forgiving people for their conduct, it may also be possible to forgive them for their moral character, for who they are (Bell 2008). The precise nature of those things for which we can be forgiven is still a matter of debate.
The objective requirement that one must have done something morally bad or wrong to be forgiven can be challenged. Suppose you believe you forgive someone for something that all relevant parties justifiably believe was morally wrong. Yet years later all parties discover that it wasn’t morally wrong after all. An objective requirement on wrongdoing means that although all parties thought you had forgiven, you had not.
Are there alternatives to this objective requirement? One option is a merely subjective requirement on forgiveness: to forgive, the forgiver must believe that the forgiven has done something wrong. Indeed, virtually all parties to the literature on forgiveness affirm at least this much.3 A mere subjective requirement would enable forgiveness to be given in the earlier case but also in any case in which we believe someone has done wrong, even if there was no wrong. A modified version of the subjective requirement might add that forgiveness itself requires only that we believe someone has done wrong, but that forgiveness is appropriate only when the conduct is objectively wrong. On this view, even though someone could forgive an objectively innocent person, this would not be an appropriate thing to do.
2 See, for example, Murphy and Hampton (1988: 20), Holmgren (2012: 35), Haber (1991: 32), and Bash (2007: 5).
3 See, e.g., Haber (1991) and Hieronymi (2001).
These considerations make clear that there is much work yet to be done in articulating both the specific nature of that for which one can be forgiven, and to what extent there must be objective wrongdoing in order to forgive. We will proceed on the assumption that, minimally, the forgiver must judge the forgiven to have done something morally bad or wrong.
Moral Responsibility and Blameworthiness
In addition to wrongdoing, it is common to hold that forgiveness requires that the forgiven must be morally responsible and blameworthy for her conduct.4 In other words, to be a candidate for forgiveness, one’s behavior must not be excused. In an early and important essay on forgiveness, Jeffrie Murphy wrote that “we may forgive only what is initially proper to resent, and if a person has done nothing wrong or was not responsible for what he did, there is nothing to resent” (1988: 20, emphasis original). According to this common assumption, if one has a valid excuse for one’s conduct, then one cannot be forgiven for it. Furthermore, if a person is not a morally responsible agent at all—that is, not an agent that could act freely and responsibly, perhaps due to mental illness or injury—then she cannot be forgiven for any of her conduct. This is why forgiving very young children or the mentally disabled strikes many as out of place, a kind of category error.
As with wrongdoing, however, we might doubt whether a person needs to be morally responsible and blameworthy for conduct to be forgiven for it. Perhaps instead the forgiver only needs to believe that the wrongdoer is morally responsible and blameworthy. Indeed, most parties to the literature affirm at least this much. A subjective requirement also follows from a more general observation that forgiveness is to be distinguished from excusing. To excuse behavior involves judging that someone has done wrong, but that she is not responsible or blameworthy for it, perhaps due to nonculpable ignorance, or having been drugged or brainwashed. When we forgive, however, we continue to judge that the wrongdoer has done something for which she is morally responsible and blameworthy.5 And even if it is possible to forgive those we falsely believe to be responsible, it may still be inappropriate in some relevant sense to do so.
4 Holmgren (2012: 35); Murphy and Hampton (1988: 20); Haber (1991: 33).
5 Hieronymi (2001); Allais (2008).
Furthermore, a forgiver may not merely need to judge that the wrongdoer is blameworthy; she may also be required to hold her blameworthy, by being disposed or prepared to blame her. This feature of forgiveness distinguishes forgiveness from condonation, a kind of “putting up with” bad behavior that is distinct from forgiveness (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 40; Griswold 2007: 46–47).
As we noted, it is widely assumed that, minimally, the forgiver must judge the wrongdoer to be morally responsible and blameworthy. But even this assumption can be challenged. Suppose that, as Baruch Spinoza and other modern-day “free will skeptics” have argued, no one is ever morally responsible for anything we do, even though most of us think we are responsible. If no one is free and responsible, then no one is morally blameworthy for his or her actions, and presumably, we shouldn’t judge or hold people morally responsible and blameworthy for those actions either. Perhaps, then, an account of forgiveness should not require judging or holding blameworthy at all. Forgiveness can promote pro-sociality and foreclose moral protest after wrongdoing even if forgivers refrain from judging wrongdoers morally responsible and blameworthy.6
Standing
Who can forgive? Suppose that you are mean to your spouse. Your neighbor, who overheard your yelling, calls up to say that she forgives you for being so unkind. Is it possible your neighbor could forgive you for this? Many philosophers say no. Your neighbor, they say, lacks the standing to forgive.
We must note that the term “standing” has been used differently in the literature on forgiveness than it has been used in the literature on blame (Nelkin 2016; Warmke 2017). This can cause confusion. In the blame literature, “standing to blame” is typically taken to mean moral standing. To lack standing to blame means that one’s blame is inappropriate. Perhaps you could blame a friend for repeatedly lying, but since you are also such a liar, it would be hypocritical for you to do so. You could not blame appropriately and therefore lack the standing to forgive. But when philosophers say someone lacks the “standing to forgive,” they mean that one cannot forgive at all. For someone who lacks the standing to forgive, forgiveness—morally
6 Pereboom (2014); see Chapter 4, this volume.
appropriate or not—is not an option. For this reason, the “standing to forgive” can be thought of as a metaphysical standing, and not a moral one. With respect to our example of the “forgiving” neighbor, the thought is not simply that the neighbor could forgive but that it would be morally inappropriate for her to do so. Rather, it is that she cannot forgive at all because she lacks standing. Of course, we can talk about the “moral standing” to forgive as well, and we will address some questions regarding the norms of forgiveness later in this chapter.
Who, then, has “metaphysical standing” to forgive? And how does one get it? This is a matter of debate, and we will only briefly survey the terrain here. It is sometimes claimed that only the victim (in some relevant sense of “victim”) of a wrongdoing has the standing to forgive the wrongdoer for that wrong.7 This is why, it might be thought, your neighbor lacked standing to forgive you for being unkind to your spouse: you were not the victim. A victim has direct standing to forgive someone when she has been directly wronged by that person. When your spouse directly wrongs you, for example, you have the direct standing to forgive her.8
It is controversial whether direct standing is the only way to have standing to forgive. There are arguably four other general varieties of standing. When one has indirect standing, she can forgive a wrongdoer for what has happened to her even though she was not directly wronged. Suppose Betty lies to you, and this causes you to be late to pick up your brother. Your brother may have indirect standing to forgive Betty, even though she did not wrong him directly. One has proxy standing when one can forgive a wrongdoer for what she did to the victim on behalf of the victim.9 Suppose Ted’s adult daughter is killed by a drunk driver. If Ted can forgive the driver on behalf of Maria, he does so in virtue of possessing proxy standing. Even if proxy standing is possible, it is often claimed that the proxy forgiver must stand in some special relationship with the person on whose behalf he forgives.10 Third-party standing, perhaps the most controversial of the group, involves the forgiver forgiving a wrongdoer for what the wrongdoer did to someone else.11 A bit more precisely, these are scenarios in which “A forgives the offender B for
7 Jeffrie Murphy defended this “victim-only” view in his early work (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 12), but he has since repudiated it (2012: 185). Walker (2013) defends the victim’s exclusive right to forgive.
8 There are several varieties of direct standing, but we will ignore them here. See Warmke (2017).
9 Although he labels it “third party,” proxy standing is what Griswold has in mind (2007: 119).
10 Griswold (2007: 119).
11 Pettigove (2009: 591); Walker (2013: 495).
something B did to the victim C, where A is not plausibly seen as a fellow victim, and where A forgives B on A’s on behalf, not on behalf of C or anyone else who might be a victim of the wrong” (Walker 2013: 495). You might, for example, forgive your brother for being rude to your mother. Or your neighbor might call to forgive you for being unkind to your spouse. There is an ongoing debate as to whether third-party forgiveness is possible and, if so, under what conditions.12
The aforementioned varieties all involve standing to forgive others. But is it possible to forgive oneself? Some argue it is.13 If so, one might need a special kind of standing. Self-forgiveness might happen in two ways. First, you might forgive yourself for something you did to yourself, say the selfinfliction of a wound. This may be best understood as an interesting case of direct standing: the victim and wrongdoer just happen to be the same person. Self-forgiveness may instead involve forgiving yourself for what you have done to another, which is perhaps to be understood as a nonstandard variety of third-party forgiveness.14
Accounting for the standing to forgive poses a unique challenge when constructing a full theory of the nature and norms of forgiveness. Recall that “standing to blame” is used as a moral notion. One can blame even if one does not have the moral standing to do so appropriately. This allows theorists to give an account of the nature of blame and then explore the situations in which one’s blame would be morally inappropriate, that is, when one lacks standing. “Standing to forgive,” however, is not used as a moral notion, but as a metaphysical one. How, then, does a theorist account for the conditions of standing in relation to an account of the nature of forgiveness itself?
We see two main options. First, one might say that there are conditions on possessing standing to forgive, but that these restrictions are given by the constitutive conditions on forgiving itself. This approach builds standing into the nature of forgiveness. Here’s one way that strategy might proceed. Suppose you thought that (1) forgiveness requires the overcoming of resentment; (2) only victims of wrongdoing can experience resentment; and (3) only victims of wrongdoing can forgive that wrongdoer. On such a view,
12 For arguments against, see Walker (2013), and for arguments in favor, see Pettigrove (2009, 2012), MacLachlan (2007), and Chaplin (2019).
13 Milam (2015).
14 Norlock (2009).
the constitutive conditions themselves limit the class of potential forgivers. Only those who can meet the constitutive conditions therefore have the standing to forgive.
On a different approach, the class of persons who can meet the constitutive conditions on forgiveness is wider than the class of persons who have standing to forgive. A separate account is then required, detailing the conditions on the standing to forgive. Suppose you thought that forgiveness is the overcoming of hostile attitudes. Virtually anyone can do this, but not just anyone can do so and thereby forgive, it might be thought. In order to forgive, one must also have standing, and therefore a further account of standing would be required. Which of these two strategies is preferable for capturing both the standing to forgive and the constitutive conditions of forgiveness is an open question.
Thus concludes our discussion of some commonly held preconditions on forgiveness. Although there is ongoing debate, we proceed assuming, minimally, that in order to forgive, one must (1) judge that someone has done wrong; (2) judge and hold that person morally blameworthy; and (3) have standing to forgive that person.
We now turn our attention to accounts of the nature of forgiveness itself. What is to forgive? As you might imagine, there is a diversity of philosophical accounts of the nature of forgiveness. To simplify, we will package them into a handful of different approaches to the nature of forgiveness. Each of these general accounts should be thought of as a family of closely related claims about the nature of forgiveness. By necessity, and with apology, we do not canvass every extant theory, and hope our colleagues will forgive us for this.
Emotion Accounts
Emotion accounts of forgiveness are joined in their conviction that to forgive is to do something with one’s emotions. This family of views traces its lineage to English philosopher Joseph Butler’s two sermons on forgiveness and resentment, published in 172615 (although the details of that lineage have been challenged in recent years16). According to emotion accounts, forgiveness is thought to be, in the words of Jeffrie Murphy, “primarily a matter of how
15 Butler (2017).
16 See, e.g., Garcia (2011).
I feel about you (not how I treat you)” (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 21; see also Hughes 1993: 108). Since such views have, at least until recently, dominated the forgiveness literature, we will dwell on them longer than others. Defenders of emotion accounts themselves disagree about the two main aspects of the account: (1) which specific emotions are involved in forgiveness; and (2) the nature of the relevant emotional change. We briefly discuss each of these in turn.
For decades, it has been commonplace to hold that forgiveness crucially implicates resentment, where resentment is understood to be a negative morally reactive attitude that one experiences when one believes one has been unjustifiably wronged by someone who is morally responsible. The thought has been that forgiving a wrongdoer requires doing something with your resentment of her for what she did to you. While many philosophers still defend a resentment-based view, emotion accounts have witnessed two trends in the past decade.
First, there has been a trend toward permissiveness regarding the set of emotions that may be implicated in forgiveness. This is most clearly seen in the evolution in Jeffrie Murphy’s own emotion account. While in his landmark 1988 book with Jean Hampton, he defined forgiveness narrowly as the overcoming of resentment, by the release of his 2003 book, he loosened up a bit, encouraging us to “think of forgiveness as overcoming a variety of negative feelings that one might have toward a wrongdoer—resentment, yes, but also such feelings as anger, hatred, loathing, contempt, indifference, disappointment, or even sadness” (2003: 59).
The second trend involves a dawning realization over the years that there is no consensus about how resentment is to be characterized. Some think of resentment as a “hostile feeling” (Garrard and McNaughton 2002), while others think of it as a kind of “moral protest” (Hieronymi 2001), while still others think of resentment as the paradigmatic sort of “moral anger” (Hughes 1993). Some describe resentment as a “vindictive passion” (Murphy 2003: 16). Others claim that resentment “need not entail motivation to retaliate for the wrong” (Holmgren 2012: 31). Some classify resentment as a “feeling of insult” (Blustein 2014: 33; see also Murphy and Hampton 1988: 44–45). Even among those who defend resentment-based emotion accounts, there is more diversity than first appears.
Given both the move away from resentment-based emotion accounts to more inclusive ones and the diversity of resentment-based accounts themselves, it will be helpful to have a way of classifying the various emotions
thought to be implicated in forgiveness. We can break them down into three broad categories.
Narrow Emotionalism: Forgiveness responds to a narrow set of emotions: only “hostile retributive feelings,” attitudes whose aim is to see the offender suffer for what she has done (Garrard and McNaughton 2002: 44). Examples of such emotions include malice, spite, or ill will. One can retain many other nonhostile negative emotions and still forgive.
Moderate Emotionalism: Forgiveness responds both to hostile retributive emotions and to what we may call moral anger. Some moral anger, it is thought, doesn’t involve wishing that someone suffer. But this moral anger must also be dealt with in one’s forgiveness. One need not overcome all negative emotions about the event in question, though. For a view in this vein, see Griswold (2007).
Expansive Emotionalism: Forgiveness responds to all negative emotions that the victim has toward the wrongdoer on account of the wrongdoing in question (Richards 1988: 79). Examples include sadness, disappointment, contempt, bitterness, and loathing (Blustein 2014; Holmgren 1993; Murphy 2003).
Emotion-based accounts say that forgiveness crucially implicates a change in emotion. But what kind of change? This, too, has been a vexed question. Many writers speak of “overcoming” resentment or other attitudes (e.g., Murphy 2003; Holmgren 1993). But others talk about forgiveness as abandoning (Richards 1988), forbearing or withdrawing (Darwall 2006), letting go (Griswold 2007), or eliminating (Lauritzen 1987) the relevant emotion(s). Some philosophers have proposed more precise explanations of how the emotions are overcome or otherwise dealt with. Pamela Hieronymi (2001) argues that in forgiving, resentment is overcome by revising one of the judgments that undergirds it. Jeffrey Blustein (2014) argues that forgiving involves a certain kind of forgetting which moderates or eliminates the relevant emotions. Santiago Amaya (2019) argues that forgiveness involves a process he calls emotional distancing.
In addition, some philosophers have argued that purging negative emotions, even if necessary for forgiveness, is not also sufficient. Forgiveness requires more than mere indifference to one’s wrongdoer. Rather, the forgiver
must also take up some kind of positive attitude toward one’s wrongdoer. Jean Hampton, for example, argues that the forgiver must “reapprove” the wrongdoer (Murphy and Hampton 1988: 83), deciding to see him “in a new, more favorable light” (84), and “revising her judgement of the person himself” (85). Eve Garrard and David McNaughton argue that the forgiver, in addition to overcoming hostile attitudes, takes up a well-wishing attitude, one of good will, toward one’s wrongdoer (2010). And according to Eleonore Stump (2018), the negative, blaming attitude toward one’s wrongdoer can actually remain in forgiveness; to forgive, it is sufficient to love one’s wrongdoer, and this is compatible with blame. In a similar vein, Jada Twedt Strabbing (2017) argues that forgiveness crucially requires openness to reconciliation with the wrongdoer, though this “openness” may not be best described as an emotion, and so may not properly be counted as an emotion account.
Setting aside the finer details, philosophers who defend emotion-based accounts tend to agree on two points. First, the change in emotion involves some kind of action or process that is done for reasons, perhaps even specifically moral reasons (Murphy 2003; Griswold 2007). Were your resentment to abate because you fell and hit your head, for example, this would not qualify as forgiveness (Horsbrugh 1974). Defenders of emotion-based views also seem to agree that the emotional change must not be only done for reasons, but with what Marilyn McCord Adams called “agent effort” (1991). Suppose you could take a pill that eliminated your resentment. Even if you took the resentment-eliminating pill for reasons (“She apologized, no reason to keep blaming her”), this kind of elimination has struck some philosophers as being of the wrong sort. It’s difficult to say exactly why this couldn’t be forgiveness, though. (Maybe you think it could be.) Perhaps forgiveness cannot be so easy, or it must “pass through” one’s moral agency in a “deeper” way. However, perhaps it is possible to simply discover, upon waking up one day, that one has forgiven an old grievance, through no desire, effort, or intention to do so.
We must note that there is also a strand of emotion-based accounts that stresses the forswearing of resentment or other emotions. P. F. Strawson, for example, claimed that to forgive is, in part, to forswear resentment (1962). Sometimes in the forgiveness literature “forswearing” is conflated with “overcoming.” But as early as 1991, Marilyn McCord Adams distinguished the two. She characterized the forswearing of resentment as a “deliberate act,” and the overcoming of resentment, as we saw earlier, as involving “agent effort.” Her idea seemed to be that one can forswear resentment by making a
certain decision or commitment straightaway, but in doing so, one need not thereby overcome resentment.
Many questions about emotion-based accounts remain. Here are a few:
• Which emotions may or must be responded to or dealt with in forgiveness?
• Are emotion-based accounts of forgiveness committed to any specific account of the nature of emotion to begin with?
• What must be done with these emotions and what is the nature of this process?
• What happens if the emotions come back or flare up? Does one become unforgiven? Must one overcome them again?
• What kind of control do we have over the relevant emotions? Is this the kind of control we have over forgiveness?
• How active must a person be in bringing about forgiveness? Must one forswear one’s negative attitudes, or could the requisite emotional changes occur passively, perhaps over months or years, resulting in forgiveness?
Revenge and Punishment Forbearance Accounts
Other philosophers defend views according to which forgiveness is centrally the forswearing and forbearance of revenge or punishment. Punishment forbearance views claim that “forgiveness is deliberately to refuse to punish” (Zaibert 2009: 368).17 This might be thought of as either a necessary or sufficient constitutive condition on forgiveness.18 Others have argued for the closely related but distinct normative claim that if you forgive someone you should not then punish her (Swinburne 1989: 87n8; Bash 2015: 53).19 This normative claim should be assessed independently from the metaphysical or conceptual claim about the constitutive conditions on forgiveness.
17 For similar views, see Enright et al. (1992: 88), Wolterstorff (2009: 203), Londey (1986: 4–5), and Russell (2016).
18 For further discussion of this claim, see Haber (1991), Murphy (2003: 101), O’Shaughnessy (1967), Griswold (2007: 32–33), Pettigrove (2012: 117–121), and Warmke (2011, 2013).
19 For discussion of this claim, see Tosi and Warmke (2017).
Similar accounts of forgiveness claim that forgiveness is centrally the forswearing and forbearance of revenge. Though matters are complicated, this is how some commentators have interpreted Bishop Joseph Butler’s account of forgiveness, noted earlier, found in two of his Fifteen Sermons Preached at Rolls Chapel (1726), “Upon Resentment” and “Upon Forgiveness of Injuries.”20 According to Charles Griswold, for example, Butler thinks that forgiveness involves the forswearing of revenge and the moderation of any excessive resentment (2007: 36).
Notice that what distinguishes these views from the emotion views discussed earlier is that they do not identify forgiveness as emotional change—they do not claim that forgiveness is, as Murphy put it, primarily a matter of how I feel about you. This is because neither punishment nor revenge as such are emotions (attitudes may be described as punitive or vengeful, but those attitudes are not the same as punishing or taking revenge). These views stress that forgiveness is primarily a matter of renouncing some treatment of the wrongdoer and then forbearing to treat the wrongdoing in those ways. Here are some additional questions:
• How should we think of the differences between revenge, punishment, and blame?
• Does Joseph Butler have a consistent view of forgiveness to begin with?
• What does it mean to forswear or forbear punishment or revenge?
Performative Accounts
All the views canvassed thus far conceive of forgiveness as more or less a private affair. Another family of approaches, however, conceive of forgiveness as something performed. According to these views, to forgive is to engage in social (or at least overt) behavior. A bit of background can bring these views into relief. In his 1991 book on forgiveness, Joram Graf Haber argued that the question “What is forgiveness?” is best answered “in the context of what speakers mean when” they say things like “I forgive you” (29, 40, 53). For Haber, the key to understanding forgiveness was wrapped up in the question of what speakers do when they say “I forgive you.” It should be noted that
20 Butler (2017).
Haber was not the first to focus on the performative nature of forgiveness. William Neblett (1974), Richard Swinburne (1989), and Marilyn McCord Adams (1991) articulated performative accounts, arguing that one can forgive by saying “I forgive you.” But Haber was the first to construct a detailed framework for seeing how forgiveness could be a performative. He utilized the Austinian notion of illocutionary to force explain how saying “I forgive you” can be a social, communicative act that also had an effect beyond the mere utterance (i.e., the locutionary act). In addition to this mere utterance, we can perform a further, illocutionary act. For example, uttering “where is the cheese” also has the illocutionary force of asking a question. For Haber, the illocutionary force of “I forgive you” is behabitive. That is, this social act reveals to our communicant that we have taken up a certain attitudinal stance. It expresses an attitude much like “I applaud you” or “I welcome you.” On Haber’s own account, “I forgive you” is the clearest way to forgive, and expresses a forgiving attitude, crucially, that I’ve overcome my resentment or at least that I’m willing to try to do so (1991: 40).
Glen Pettigrove extended Haber’s account by arguing that paradigmatically, utterances like “I forgive you” possess both behabitive and commissive force (2004, 2012). For Pettigrove, the commissive force of forgiveness commits the speaker to forswear hostile reactive attitudes and retaliation toward the wrongdoer and to treat her with an appropriate level of benevolence (2004: 385).
Not to be outdone, Brandon Warmke extended the account even further, arguing that paradigmatic cases of forgiveness possess behabitive, commissive, and declarative force (2016a, 2016b). Declaratives, to put it crudely “change reality.” “I christen this ship” or “I hereby find you guilty” are examples of statements possessing declarative force when sincerely uttered by persons with the appropriate authority. On this view, to sincerely tell your wrongdoer “I forgive you” is to alter reality in some way. How does this happen, though? What part of reality is “changed”?
Here, several philosophers have relied on an analogy between the cancellation of a financial debt and moral forgiveness (Swinburne 1989; Nelkin 2013; Warmke 2016a). When you cancel someone’s debt through some performative action, you give up a right to demand payment and you relieve them from a duty to repay. Debt cancellation thereby alters the operative norms of interaction. Similarly, forgiveness “alters the norms of interaction between the victim and the wrongdoer in certain characteristic ways” and so can be thought of as the exercise of a normative power (Warmke 2016b; see
also Bennett 2018). For the wrongdoer, forgiveness can effect a release of certain personal obligations to the victim (e.g., to apologize, show remorse, offer restitution) (Nelkin 2013). For the victim, forgiveness relinquishes her right or license to regard or treat the wrongdoer in certain ways (e.g., ways constitutive of private or overt blame) (Warmke 2016a, 2016b). It is not clear, however, whether these norm alterations must be accomplished with an overt act or could instead be done privately. One might, for example, be able to release someone from a debt without engaging in any overt or communicative acts. And while extant performative accounts have focused on utterances like “I forgive you,” some argue that forgiveness may be performed with other kinds of social acts, such as gestures or facial expressions (Swinburne 1989: 85).21
Here are some further questions about performative accounts:
• Can performative accounts also allow for a kind of forgiveness of the heart?
• Must all performances of forgiveness function the same way?
• Can any of the norm-altering functions of overt acts of forgiveness be accomplished privately?
• Is it possible to engage in a performative act of forgiveness yet still maintain hostile, resentful attitudes?
Monist versus Pluralist Accounts
The accounts forgiveness just surveyed might be taken as attempts to identify the one thing that is forgiveness, wherever it is found. Call these monist accounts of forgiveness. But these extant accounts need not be understood that way. Many philosophers have been impressed with the idea that forgiveness is a diverse and diffuse practice and that there is no one thing that forgiveness is. Nick Smith gives voice to this thought, writing that “notions of forgiveness seem to identify a loose constellation of interrelated meanings among various beliefs, judgments, emotions and actions” (2008: 134). Many accounts of forgiveness are plausible in their own right. Are we forced to choose the one thing forgiveness is? How would we go about settling that issue? However, if we conceive of forgiveness as a diverse practice, new methodological
21 For more on performative accounts see Warmke (forthcoming).
possibilities emerge. According to pluralist accounts of forgiveness, the constitutive conditions on forgiveness vary from situation to situation, person to person. Indeed, there may be very little that is always the same in every case of forgiveness (Neblett 1974: 273).
A common distinction made by forgiveness pluralists is between overt modes of forgiveness and private modes of forgiveness. Marilyn McCord Adams, for example, distinguished “performative forgiveness” from “forgiveness from the heart” (1991; see also Zaibert 2009; Warmke and McKenna 2013). Forgiveness from the heart involves a process of letting go of one’s own point of view (regarding the situation, one’s self and/or the victim, and the offender), which will typically “involve many changes in feelings, attitudes, judgments and desires” (Adams 1991: 294–295). Performative forgiveness, however, “focuses on externals (material compensations or behavior) and the formal structures of relationships, not on inner attitudes or feelings” (294).
A pluralist account of forgiveness may be developed further by attending to the ways that moral blame is also commonly thought to be a diverse practice. Various philosophers have noted that blame may be manifested in different modes and so distinguished private blame from overt blame.22 Private blame involves regarding the wrongdoer in a certain way. This might mean manifesting one of the so-called reactive attitudes, such as resentment, indignation, or disapprobation,23 or judging that the wrongdoer has a “discredit” or “debit” in her “ledger,” a negative mark that diminishes her moral standing.24 Private blame therefore involves adopting a blaming attitude (whatever that attitude comes to) toward someone, but concealing (perhaps intentionally, perhaps not) the characteristic outward behavioral manifestations of that attitude.
Sometimes, however, we do not keep our blame to ourselves. We may not merely regard the wrongdoer in a certain way; we may also express how we regard the wrongdoer. In doing so, one can engage in overt blame. Overt blame is therefore blame’s outward manifestation, for it involves adopting a blaming attitude and making it manifest in one’s conduct. But not all overt blame is, as it were, directed at the blamed party. One might, for example, go out of one’s way to avoid the wrongdoer, which is an outward manifestation
22 See Coates and Tognazzini (2012), Haji (1998), McKenna (2012), Wallace (1994), and Zimmerman (1988).
23 See, e.g., Fischer and Ravizza (1998), Russell (1995), Fischer (1994), Wallace (1994), and Strawson (1962).
