Ancient Forgiveness

2012.07.38

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Interpersonal forgiveness, however, is tied to no such authority structures. When we are wronged, this typically damages our relationship with the wrongdoer. Minor offenses might put strains on relationships that put burdens on both persons involved; serious offenses might lead the victim to terminate the relationship altogether.

Further, when we blame others for their wrongs against us, we often do so at the cost of causing further relational damage. We might withhold expressions of good-will, or alter our behavior in ways that make clear that we no longer trust the other. Although in many cases forgiveness will be accompanied by reconciliation, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for forgiveness. One reason for thinking that reconciliation is not necessary for forgiveness is that the offending party may be, for whatever reasons, unwilling to reconcile.

But the fact that I am unwilling to restore our relationship does not, all by itself, make it impossible for you forgive me for the wrong I did to you. In other cases, reconciliation is practically impossible. Perhaps I have secretly moved to Fiji and you have no way to get in touch with me. You can forgive me whether or not you know I am in Fiji. Doing so might expose one to additional psychological damage, for example. Neither does reconciliation appear to be sufficient for forgiveness. Relationships may be restored, at least to some degree, for purely pragmatic reasons. All things being equal, reconciliation is the goal to which forgiveness points.

Although there are reasons that sometimes make reconciliation impossible or unwise, forgiveness is oriented towards promoting pro-sociality and friendly relations McCullough In some cases, this might mean that the end of forgiveness is to repair a relationship to its ex ante state. In some cases, however, only partial reconciliation may occur. Common conceptions of forgiveness make clear that its main purpose is the re-establishment or resumption of a relationship ruptured by wrongdoing.

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. It is standard to assume that not just anyone can forgive a wrongdoer for a certain wrong.

If I lack standing, then forgiving is not on the table for me; I am not a candidate for forgiving. And so to doubt whether someone has standing to forgive is not to doubt whether someone succeeded in forgiving. Rather, it is to doubt whether that person can forgive in the first place. Who has standing to forgive? Jeffrie Murphy expresses such a view when he says that. I do not have standing to resent or forgive you unless I have myself been the victim of your wrongdoing.

I may forgive you for embezzling my funds; but it would be ludicrous for me, for example, to claim that I had decided to forgive Hitler for what he did to the Jews. I lack the proper standing for this. Thus, I may legitimately resent and hence consider forgiving only wrong done to me. On this view, only those who have been directly wronged have standing to forgive. Suppose Alfred lies to Betty. Betty is thereby directly wronged by Alfred.

Betty therefore has direct standing to forgive. Suppose, however, that Alfred lies to Betty and this results in Betty being very late in picking up her brother Todd. Alfred did not lie to Todd, but by lying to Betty, there is a straightforward sense in which this resulted in a wrong being done to Todd.

Here, while we can say that Betty was directly wronged and so has direct standing to forgive, it is not true that Todd was directly wronged by Alfred.

Forgiveness

And because it would be fitting for Todd to blame Alfred, and for Alfred to apologize to Todd, it is plausible to think that Todd also has standing to forgive Alfred. Call this indirect standing. Though controversial, it may be possible to have standing to forgive while lacking either direct or indirect standing. Such standing is implicated in cases where one person forgives on behalf of someone else who has or would have had direct or indirect standing. Supposing that Maria has direct standing to forgive her assailant, if it is possible for Ted to forgive the assailant on behalf of Maria, he is able to do so in virtue of possessing what we may call proxy standing.

Finally, consider third-party standing. The standing to forgive that would accrue to such a person, Griswold says, would be to put it in our above terminology of the direct or indirect variety, depending on how the case is fleshed out. We identify as third-party standing what both Glen Pettigrove and Margaret Urban Walker have in mind in their recent discussions of third-party forgiveness.

Such cases, Walker writes, involve. This putative standing to forgive, therefore, is not reducible to any of the aforementioned varieties: It is widely thought that forgiveness is fundamentally a matter of how one feels about another. Broadly speaking, emotion accounts of forgiveness claim that forgiveness is best understood as fundamentally a change in emotion. According to such views, were you to be wronged, your forgiving the wrongdoer fundamentally involves your overcoming or abating, or eliminating, or forswearing some relevant negative emotion e.

Among the various emotion accounts, however, there is significant disagreement on two main points: We survey emotion accounts by taking these two issues in turn. One way to differentiate between the varieties of emotion accounts is according to the emotion or set of emotions that are thought to be relevant to forgiveness.

A cursory survey of the forgiveness literature might give one the impression that there is widespread agreement about which emotion is crucially implicated in forgiveness. That emotion is resentment. But any impression of wholesale agreement would be mistaken for two reasons. First, some emotion theorists argue that overcoming resentment is neither necessary nor sufficient for forgiveness. Such emotion theorists hold that in forgiving there are other emotions that may or must be overcome. And second, even among those who hold that overcoming resentment is either necessary or sufficient for forgiveness, there is disagreement about what resentment is.

It is difficult to know what exactly these characterizations of resentment amount to, what kinds of relations hold between them, and perhaps most importantly, which view is correct. Indeed, this is one of the more troublesome aspects of the philosophical literature on forgiveness: And as we have already noted, even though resentment is widely thought to be the central or paradigmatic emotion that forgiveness implicates, not all emotional accounts accept that view.

So here is a rough and ready way of categorizing the various emotion accounts as regards the set of relevant emotions that forgiveness implicates. Let minimal emotionalism be the view that in order to forgive, one must overcome a very narrow set of emotions: Examples of such emotions include the feelings of malice, spite, or ill-will that might arise as a response to being wronged. The minimal emotionalist can allow that there are lots of negative emotions that one might experience upon being wronged e. Alternatively, let moderate emotionalism be the view that in order to forgive, one must overcome both hostile retributive feelings and what we may call moral anger.

According to moderate emotionalism, overcoming hostile feelings is not enough for forgiveness. One may harbor moral anger towards a wrongdoer so the view goes without thereby wishing that she suffers for what she did. But both moral anger and hostile feelings must be given up in order to forgive. Paul Hughes defends something like moderate emotionalism. As Hughes notes, not all anger is moral; if you are angry because a bird drops a gift on your head, your anger is non-moral for it is not constituted by a belief that the bird has done you a wrong.

But because resentment is, according to Hughes, a paradigm case of moral anger, it must be overcome in order for one to forgive. Charles Griswold also appears to have in mind a kind of moderate emotionalism:. In this respect his view differs from Garrard and McNaughton, who do target those emotions that involve desires to inflict suffering on the wrongdoer. Finally, let expansive emotionalism be the view that in order to forgive a wrongdoer, the victim must overcome all negative emotions that the victim has towards the wrongdoer on account of the wrongdoing in question.

Norvin Richards is commonly cited as a defender of what we are calling expansive emotionalism: In recent work, Jeffrie Murphy has also endorsed a more expansive emotionalism. Although he once argued that forgiveness ought to be construed narrowly as the overcoming of resentment, Murphy has now, citing the influence of Richards and others, become more ecumenical, writing that we should. The set of emotions that victims might possess in response to being wronged by another agent therefore form a large and diverse landscape.

But what kind of changes must occur? Writers on forgiveness often speak of the overcoming of resentment. In doing so we follow precedent e. We therefore want to know what kinds of changes are at issue with respect to each of these claims, and what relations hold between them? Does, for example, overcoming resentment entail that one has totally eliminated it? There are at least two facts about the relevant notion of overcoming about which most emotion theorists seem to agree.

First, emotion theorists have been keen to clarify that it is not just any kind of elimination of resentment that is at issue. Were you accidentally to fall and hit your head on a rock, thereby causing your resentment to be eliminated, you would not have forgiven. Or if your resentment simply withered away over the years via a process outside of your control or ken, it is widely thought that you would not have forgiven cf.

What kinds of reasons? Sometimes the right kinds of reasons are claimed to be specifically moral reasons Murphy But here, we should be careful to distinguish between two different questions. One question is a conceptual one, concerning what kinds of motivating reasons make forgiveness possible at all. But another kind of question, a normative one, concerns what motivating reasons make forgiveness, on any given occasion, appropriate or permissible or praiseworthy. If Murphy is right, then it appears that one cannot forgive because one wanted to win a bet.

This raises questions as to how moralized our conception of forgiveness ought to be. Should our account of forgiveness require that in order to forgive, one must do so for only moral reasons? Or could one forgive for merely prudential reasons Ingram ? We will return to this issue below. Even when one eliminates resentment for the right reasons, it is possible to do so using the wrong kind of process. Forgiveness therefore must have the right kind of history. It has seemed to many that taking the resentment-eliminating pill does not qualify as forgiving even if one were to take the pill for the right kinds of reasons.

Still, many questions remain. First, which processes of overcoming the relevant emotions are the right ones? For discussions of this judgment-based approach to how forgiveness overcomes resentment see Zaragoza , Nelkin , and Warmke Blustein argues that overcoming the relevant emotions should be understood as involving a certain kind of forgetting. One might, for example, hold that a forgiver must eliminate all traces of the relevant negative emotion s. It is uncommon to find this view stated explicitly, but Haber has attributed to it to some philosophers Others have claimed that what is needed is not the total and final elimination of resentment, but rather, some sort of moderation.

Margaret Holmgren, for example, allows that resentment can reoccur:. By overcoming her negative feelings at the time she forgives, the victim does not necessarily eliminate these feelings without a trace. They may recur from time to time throughout her life. However, once she has determined that forgiveness is the appropriate attitude towards her offender and has overcome her negative feelings towards him, it will presumably be possible for her to conquer these feelings again if they do recur.

Thus we can plausibly say that the victim has forgiven her offender when she first overcomes her resentment towards him. There is also a strand of discussion in the forgiveness literature that crucially implicates the forswearing of resentment or some other attitude or behavior. The difference between overcoming and forswearing or renouncing some attitude is not usually made explicit.

Sometimes the terms appear to be used interchangeably. The implication is that forswearing as an act of renunciation is something one does straightaway, whereas overcoming is not. One may forswear resentment by making a decision or making a commitment, but to decide to give up or commit to eliminate resentment does not imply that one has or will overcome it. Bishop Joseph Butler is commonly cited as the progenitor of emotion accounts. In a way, this is not surprising, for his legacy in the philosophical literature on forgiveness rests on two of his Fifteen Sermons Butler does indeed make clear that resentment and forgiveness are importantly related, and his interpreters have often attributed to him the view that forgiveness is the forswearing or overcoming of resentment Murphy Garcia and others have convincingly argued, however, that Butler did not advocate the Renunciation Model, for he advocated neither of these two theses Garcia ; Griswold Consider the claim that Butler held that resentment is a response to injury that is incompatible with good-will and therefore forgiveness.

What Butler actually says, however, is that forgiveness is perfectly compatible with an attitude of resentment.

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Butler held that resentment helps us to deal with those who harm us: When resentment has these ends it serves the public good and is therefore compatible with the general obligation to good-will [IX. Therefore, resentment as such is compatible with good-will. Butler does say that resentment can be dangerous, but it is not resentment as such that is the problem. But to let resentment carry one this far is to violate a general obligation to benevolence.

To forgive, then, is simply to prevent resentment from having this effect on us. Resentment itself is natural and innocent. It is only when it is indulged and allowed to bleed into revenge that a violation of goodwill occurs. But this is the work of forgiveness: Therefore, Butler does not think that forgiveness is the forswearing or overcoming of resentment. What, then, is forgiveness according to Butler? It is unclear whether Griswold thinks that Butler would require emotional change. If all that is required is that resentment be kept in check, this could be done without it ever having been excessive.

Other approaches to forgiveness claim that there is an important connection between forgiving and punishment. On these punishment-forbearance views of forgiveness, forgiving crucially implicates the forbearance of punishment. According to these views, when one forgives one commits not to hold a past wrong against someone and so the story goes were one to punish, doing so would be to hold a past wrong against the wrongdoer.

Punishment-forbearance accounts may come in a variety of flavors, depending on how one understands the logical relations between forgiving and forbearing punishment see, e. One could hold that forbearing punishing is necessary for forgiveness, or sufficient, or both. Alternatively, one could make a normative claim about the relations between forgiveness and punishment: Central and Marginal Forgiveness: Adam Morton - - Philosophia 38 3: Charles Griswold - - Cambridge University Press. What Christians Believe About Forgiveness. Williams - - Studies in Christian Ethics 24 2: Ethical Aspects of Self-Forgiveness.

David Konstan, Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea. Paul Hughes - - Journal of Value Inquiry 50 2: Zenon Szablowinski - - Heythrop Journal 53 4: Radical Forgiveness and Human Justice. Andrew Fiala - - Heythrop Journal 53 3: Paul van Tongeren - - Ethical Perspectives 15 3: Anthony Bash - - Studies in Christian Ethics 24 2: I will not pass this onto the next generation, and to endless generations of grandchildren. I remember a woman coming to see me amidst a terrible divorce.

Unfortunately, her ex-husband was a lawyer and a very good one, so he wangled most of the money and a lot of the custody of their children. She was just desperate and struggled in all these ways to protect herself. I will not do it. I will figure a way through this and I will not hate him—the bastard. As Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate, writes: It all depends on how you use it. If you use it to increase the anguish of yourself or others, you are degrading, even betraying it.

Yet the day will come when we shall understand that suffering can also elevate human beings. God help us to bear our suffering well. So here is a little bit about the architecture of forgiveness.

First, forgiveness does not mean that we condone what happened in the past. In fact, forgiveness might also include quite understandably the resolve to protect yourself and never let this happen again. And forgiveness is not sentimental, or quick.

The Ancient Heart of Forgiveness

And in the process, you need to honor the betrayal of yourself or others—the grief, the anger, the hurt, the fear. It can take a long time. And never takes a while. Forgiveness is also not for anybody else. Similarly, I remember sitting with the Dalai Lama and some Tibetan nuns who had survived years of imprisonment and torture. With us were guys who had just been released after 25 years in Texas state prison or 18 years in Ohio in a maximum security prison. And they were sitting with the Dali Lama and these little nuns who were imprisoned during their teenagers years for saying their prayers out loud.

And what we were afraid of was that we would end up hating our guards—that we would lose our compassion. That is the thing we most feared. One of the interesting things about forgiveness is that you find it in all different traditions. There are African indigenous practices of forgiveness. There is the mercy of Allah in Islam. So many of the modern neuroscience studies that researchers like Richard Davidson are doing, using fMRI machines and the like, validate this idea of neuroplasticity.

Indeed, in Buddhism, the teaching in three words is: The Buddha was a list maker: Similarly, here are 12 principles connected with the process of forgiveness. Understand what forgiveness is and what it is not. Sense the suffering in yourself, of still holding onto this lack of forgiveness for yourself or for another. So you actually sense the weight of not forgiving.

Reflect on the benefits of a loving heart. Your dreams become sweeter, you waken more easily, men and women will love you, angels and devils will love you. If you lose things they will be returned. People will welcome you everywhere when you are forgiving and loving. Your thoughts become pleasant. Animals will sense this and love you.

Elephants will bow as you go by—try it at the zoo! Discover that it is not necessary to be loyal to your suffering. This is a big one. But is that what defines you?

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