Wiping the slate clean: The heart of forgiveness

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 33-68

  Allais, Lucy ^a  

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EID: 42049112785     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2008.00123.x     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. A number of people have helped me enormously in the development of my ideas in this article. In particular, Michael Morris and Jonathan Westphal have repeatedly and generously given me extensive and extremely helpful comments, for which I thank them. For commenting on various versions of the material on which this article is based, I am also extremely grateful to the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs, Matthew Densley, Paul Davies, Imogen Dickie, Eve Garrard, Robert Hanna, David McNaughton, Lwandile Sisilana, John Tasioulas, Jens Timmerman, David Velleman, Jeremy Watkins, and members of the audience at the Pacific APA in Portland, the British Society for Ethical Theory in Bristol and seminars at Wits, Rhodes, and Sussex universities.
2. One is forgiven for a wrong; here, a wrong is understood, as is standard, as a complex function of the harm caused and the culpability of the agent, where the harm includes not just such things as loss or damage suffered, but also the disrespect or ill will shown to the victim. Thus, the 'culpable' in 'culpable wrongdoing'i s redundant, but I will use it sometimes for emphasis.
3. See Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 34; Aurel Kolnai, "Forgiveness," in his Ethics, Value, and Reality (London: The Athlone Press, 1977), p. 217; Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 41.
4. There are two problems with this. First, the victim's (reasonable) concern with her own mental hygiene does not amount to forgiving, since it need not involve a change in her view of the perpetrator-or any thought about the perpetrator at all. Second, many philosophers question whether overcoming resentment is always a good thing for the victim. For example, Murphy argues that resentment defends and asserts the victim's self-respect (Murphy and Hampton, pp. 16-18; see also, in the same book, pp. 56, 59-60; and Joseph Butler,"Upon Resentment," in Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Cathedral [London: Macmillan and Co., 1913]). Similarly, some philosophers suggest that forgiving too easily or quickly may reveal a lack of self-respect or lack of concerns about one's own well-being. For example, Schimmell says that "to demand of a victim that she forgive the unrepentant sinner who has harmed her is considered by many non-Christians to be morally wrong. It can also be emotionally damaging to her."Solomon Schimmell, Wounds Not Healed by Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 70;
5. Cheshire Calhoun, "Changing One's Heart," Ethics 103 (1992): 76-96
6. Margaret R. Holmgren, "Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons," American Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1993): 341-52
7. Howard McGary, "Forgiveness," American Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1989): 343-51
8. David Novitz, "Forgiveness and Self-Respect," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1988): 299-315
9. This is argued by
10. William R. Neblett, "Forgiveness and Ideals," Mind 83 (1974): 269-75
11. See Thaddeus Metz, "Judging Because Understanding: A Defence of Retributive Censure," in Judging and Understanding: Essays Exploring the Alleged Tension Between Judging Persons and Understanding the Circumstances Leading to Moral Failings, ed. Pedro Tabensky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006): 221-40, and
12. John Tasioulas, "Punishment and Repentance," Philosophy 81 (2006): 279-322.
13. The idea that this is at the core of forgiveness is expressed by a number of writers; see for example
14. Paul M. Hughes, "What Is Involved in Forgiving?" Philosophia 25 (1997): 33-49
15. Berel Lang, "Forgiveness," American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1994): 105-117
16. Pace Derrida On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, to say that an act is unjustifiable and inexcusable does not mean that it is a monstrous evil of the sort that might be regarded as unforgivable-small wrongs can be unjustifiable and inexcusable. This means that to say that forgiveness comes into play in relation to unjustified, unexcused wrongdoing does not mean, as Derrida suggests, that it comes into play only in relation to the unforgivable, which would make it essentially paradoxical (as it is in his view).
17. David Sussman, "Kantian Forgiveness," Kant-Studien 96 (2005): 85-107
18. Schimmel, Wounds Not Healed by Time, chaps. 2-3.
19. See ibid., chap. 7.
20. A related strategy is Hieronymi's view that what justifies resentment is not just the beliefs concerning the wrongness and culpability of the offense, but the additional belief that the wrong represents a continuing threat. She argues that repentance and apology undermine the additional belief and therefore justify abandoning the resentment; forgiveness is justified when having resentment is no longer appropriate, because the harm no longer threatens.
21. Pamela Hironymi, "Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXII (2002): 529-55.
22. Hieronymi suggests that while her account foregrounds the kind of forgiveness in which the wrongdoer has apologized (thereby, she argues, undermining the grounds for resentment), unilateral forgiveness could be possible in cases in which the victim receives strong community support because the community support enables her to not be threatened by the wrongdoing (Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness, p. 553). However, although such support might make it easier for the victim to recover, and perhaps to put the perpetrator out of her thoughts, it is hard to see how it would justify her feeling differently towards the specific perpetrator.
23. "Forgiveness and Self-Respect," p. 30.
24. Piers Benn, "Forgiveness and Loyalty," Philosophy 71 (1996): 369-83
25. In the absence of a stronger account, the weaker notion of forgiveness would still have an important role to play, since it may well be that we frequently do not overcome resentment at the point at which it is appropriate to do so.
26. It is important to note that the TRC was not officially concerned with forgiveness, but rather with amnesty (for perpetrators) and an opportunity to be heard, and, supposedly, reparations (for victims). Forgiveness is essentially interpersonal, and, unlike amnesty and mercy, is not something that can be offered to perpetrators by an independent authority. However, much of Archbishop Tutu's discourse about the TRC, in his capacity as its chair, explicitly linked it to forgiveness, and it seems to have facilitated some remarkable processes of forgiving.
27. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London and Johannesburg: Random House, 1999), p. 114.
28. Ibid., p. 115.
29. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), pp. 14-15.
30. Forgiveness and Mercy, pp. 15, 16, 24. See also
31. Trudy Govier, "Forgiveness and the Unforgiveable," American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1999): 59-75
32. Norvin Richards, "Forgiveness," Ethics 99 (1988): 77-79
33. Robert C. Roberts, "Forgivingness," American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995): 289-306
34. See, for example, Newberry, who argues that contemporary commentators misrepresent Bishop Butler's position as a result of wrongly attributing to him the cognitive account of emotion prevalent today.
35. Paul A. Newberry, "Joseph Butler on Forgiveness: A Presupposed Theory of Emotions," Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 233-44.
36. For an account of how feelings can be fitting, see
37. Michelle Mason, "Contempt as a Moral Attitude," Ethics 113 (2003): 234-72
38. Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, "The Moralistic Fallacy: On the 'Appropriateness' of Emotions," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000): 65-90
39. We do not need to deny that the cognitive and the affective are intertwined in numerous respects, nor to see emotions as unintentional feelings, in order to see them as distinct from straightforwardly cognitive states like beliefs. One reason for this given by a number of writers is that emotions are at least sometimes cognitively impenetrable, in the sense that we may sometimes disbelieve the proposition corresponding to the intentional content of the emotion. See
40. Robert C. Roberts, "What an Emotion Is: A Sketch," The Philosophical Review 97 (1988): 183-209
41. Karen Jones, "Trust as an Affective Attitude," Ethics 107 [1996]: 4-25
42. "Freedom and Resentment," p. 76.
43. There might also be problems with the necessity of the condition. Some think that forgiveness should be an open possibility where there is no resentment to start out with, for example, for the 'cold fish' who does not feel angry. I do not argue here that forgiveness must allow for this kind of case, but I present an account that does.
44. Of course, therapy could be aimed at helping the victim to be forgiving. Further, my point is not to deny that one could embark on a course of attitude-changing for reasons other than thought of the wrongdoer, and using a variety of techniques, but nevertheless end up with the changed attitude towards the wrongdoer that constitutes forgiveness. Rather, my aim is to exclude therapeutic dispelling of retributive emotions where this is understood as processes that the victim undergoes to get rid of negative emotions for her own sake, and that do not involve a changed view of the wrongdoer. For example, she may want to learn to not dwell on the wrongdoing, and to put him out of her thoughts, for the sake of her own peace of mind, although her view of the wrongdoer and his action remains unchanged. She may learn to cease feeling resentment by focusing on thinking of him as beneath contempt, or not worthy of her response.
45. Forgiveness and Mercy, p. 24.
46. Forgiveness and Mercy, pp. 39-40.
47. Other examples of this kind of strategy would be to say that forgiveness involves overcoming resentment on grounds of compassion, or on grounds of solidarity-the thought that 'there but for the grace of God go I' (see
48. Eve Garrard and David McNaughton, "In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness, " Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society CIII [2003]: 39-60
49. See Govier, "Forgiveness and the Unforgivable," p. 64.
50. Forgiveness and Mercy, pp. 83-85.
51. "Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons," p. 348.
52. A similar objection could be made to the idea that forgiveness involves coming to have goodwill towards the wrongdoer, since we may fail to forgive a loved one for a specific offense, without ever having ceased to have goodwill towards her.
53. This is argued by Garrard and McNaughton,"In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness," pp. 41, 47.
54. See Novitz, "Forgiveness and Self-Respect."
55. This seems to me to be a possible problem with Adams's account, according to which forgiveness involves, miraculously, adopting a God's-eye perspective of the wrongdoer and understanding what led her to perform her action
56. Marilyn Adams, "Forgiveness: A Christian Model," in Faith and Philosophy 8 [1991]: 277-304).
57. As Hieronymi puts it, appeal to the point of view of the offensive action is illicit, because "the 'other side of the story' is, by hypothesis, a story of wrongdoing"("Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness," p. 536).
58. "Changing One's Heart," p. 95. On this account forgiveness will be permissible only in relation to acts for which it is morally permissible not to require the wrongdoer to account for her action, which means that forgiveness will not be possible for seriously wrong acts.
59. This could also be presented as a self-standing account of forgiveness; here I consider it as a way of completing the retributive emotion account. The objections I present here would also count against the self-standing account.
60. P. Twambly, "Mercy and Forgiveness," Analysis 36 (1976): 84-90.
61. "In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness," pp. 41, 47. Note that their explanation of wiping the slate clean is only a small part of their complex account of forgiveness, which I do not argue against here.
62. Jeremy Watkins, "Forgiveness and Its Place in Ethics," Theoria 71 (2005), p. 44.
63. Roughly, mercy involves imposing less than what justice requires, or less than what you are entitled to, on the grounds of compassion. This objection applies more clearly to those who see wiping the slate clean as the waiving of punishment or compensation than those who see it as not insisting on atonement, which is less obviously a requirement under justice. However, I group these accounts together in the sense that they all understand wiping the slate clean in terms of not insisting on what is, in some sense, owed, or that to which one is entitled.
64. It is less clear that waiving the requirement for atonement could be appropriately situated in this personal context, at least with respect to some of its aspects: Penance is not typically understood as something owed to the victim, and therefore it is not clear that the victim could have the authority to waive it. Closely related to the metaphor of 'wiping the slate clean' is the idea of, with respect to some wrong, ceasing to 'hold it against' the wrongdoer. If, as Strategy 4 suggests, 'holding against' is understood in terms of something the wrongdoer owes, it must be something that is owed to the victim, which calls into question the idea that waiving the requirement for penance could be part of forgiveness.
65. Similarly, if we understand forgiveness with respect to waiving the demand for what is owed in terms of apology and penance, we will rule out the possibility that you could think you have succeeded in wiping the slate clean, but find that you have not. This supports seeing wiping the slate clean in terms of a way of feeling towards the wrongdoer, rather than a way of acting towards her.
66. However, on the face of it, the problem looks harder for forgiveness than for mercy: With mercy we need to justify treating people in ways that are more lenient than justice requires, but with forgiveness it seems that we need to justify thinking of them differently at the same time as not thinking differently about their wrongdoing.
67. Tasioulas, "Mercy," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society CIII (2003): 101-32
68. Murphy discusses the following as standard grounds for forgiveness: (1) He repented or had a change of heart; (2) He meant well; (3) He has suffered enough; (4) He has undergone humiliation, e.g., the apology ritual; (4) For old time's sake (Forgiveness and Mercy, pp. 24-25).
69. See references in n. 5 above.
70. Forgiveness and Mercy, pp. 24-25.
71. Clearly, there are many respects in which the agent and his act cannot be separated; it is only with respect to the way the victim thinks and feels about the wrongdoer as a person that I am suggesting a separation can be made.
72. "Freedom and Resentment," pp. 75-80. Strawson gives as examples of reactive attitudes resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, and some sorts of love (ibid., p. 79).
73. See Mason for a development of this idea with respect to a single affective attitude ("Contempt as a Moral Attitude," p. 239). Note that although I do not exclude other ways of cashing out 'form of regard', here it is understood as affective.
74. Like the broader topic of emotions, characterizing and understanding such attitudes is a large task on its own. I simply assume that there are such attitudes, and that they are distinct from beliefs. Optimism and pessimism are examples of affective attitudes: They essentially involve ways of affectively seeing the world. Some see trust as an example of an affective attitude, in that it is not just a calculated risk, but involves taking an optimistic attitude towards the trusted, and being disposed to have a range of feelings towards her. See Jones, "Trust as an Affective Attitude," and
75. Lawrence C. Becker, "Trust as Noncognitive Security about Motives," Ethics 107 (1966): 43-61
76. "Freedom and Resentment," pp. 75-80.
77. Stephen Darwall, "Presidential Address to the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association," 2004, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sdarwall/.
78. Strawson in fact calls forgiveness a reactive attitude ("Freedom and Resentment," p. 75).
79. I do not argue that forgiveness must always involve the re-establishment of trust, but rather that ceasing to trust is a clear indicator of a changed way of affectively regarding the wrongdoer. Whether and when forgiveness involves trust is a complicated issue that goes beyond my present scope.
80. See, for example, R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 59-61.
81. See references in n. 5 above.
82. Penrose discusses what he calls 'understanding', which he sees as a dissolving of the vicarious retributive reactive attitudes. On his account, understanding involves a dissolution of retributive reactive attitudes, without elimination of the judgment that the wrongdoer ought not to have acted as she did, as a result of sympathetic identification with the wrongdoer that enables us to see her wrongdoing as something we ourselves might have done (Brian Penrose, "Understanding 'Understanding' in The Reader," in Judging and Understanding: Essays Exploring the Alleged Tension between Judging Persons and Understanding the Circumstances Leading to Moral Failings, ed. Pedro Tabensky [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006]). Thus, what he calls understanding seems to be the 'vicarious' (in Strawson's sense) equivalent of forgiving.
83. This is something it makes sense for the wrongdoer to want even after punishment has been fully implemented.
84. The relationship between retributive reactive attitudes and retributive emotions is an issue that requires further development. It seems to me difficult to see how a person could cease letting her affective view of you as a person be affected by your wrongdoing but still feel angry about it, in which case overcoming of retributive reactive attitudes would involve overcoming retributive emotions, although the reverse does not always hold.
85. Ordinary usage indicates that resentment need not always involve esteem evaluations in response to wrongdoing, for example, the resentment people feel towards city-dwellers whose second homes push up property prices in their villages. Also, resentment can be felt towards people whom you see as having what they are not entitled to, without seeing them as having wronged you.
86. Hurt can be seen as a reactive attitude: It is not appropriately felt other than as a response to the actions of persons (it is not appropriate to feel hurt by machines or the weather), and it is a response to the way in which another manifests lack of goodwill towards you which it involves affectively seeing the other as valuing you less than you want her to. Thus it involves seeing her as a person who fails you in some respect in the way she values you. When she wants you to stop feeling hurt, part of what she wants is you to cease seeing her as someone who fails to value you as you would like.
87. The problem here might be more than just our epistemic limitations: It might be that there is not something determinate to be known, if being free means that there is a sense in which we are all equally capable of great good and great evil.
88. He says that "we cannot observe maxims, we cannot do so unproblematically even within ourselves; hence the judgment that an agent is an evil human being cannot be reliably based on experience" (Immanuel Kant,"Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reasons," trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], pp. 57-215 6: 21, p. 70).
89. As Goldie puts it, a character trait is not a fixed disposition, but a set of dispositions that are continuously shaped by the emerging narrative of a life (The Emotions, p. 210).
90. See n. 23 above.
91. As Hume says, we "consider the action as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper... We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs" (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], III: II, i, p. 477).
92. This suggests not only that it is reasonable to form esteem respect attitudes that express evaluations of persons in response to their actions, but further, that not doing so might undermine recognition respect.
93. Some people think that you can forgive someone for something at the same time as confidently judging that she will do the same thing again. I do not think that this is a standard case, but on my account, the sense we can make of it is that you do not feel towards her as you would if your attitude towards her as a person, and the manner and extent to which you esteem her, were determined by your judgment that she is likely to act in this way again. Despite your judgments that she is likely to act in this way again, your feelings towards her as a person, the ways you regard or esteem her, are not correspondingly more negative. Another nonstandard case is that of someone who does some wrong that is highly out of character. It might be said that in this case the wrong action does not seem to support seeing the wrongdoer's character differently. However, my account is not that retributive reactive attitudes necessarily involve a view of the person as a character of a specific type, but that they involve seeing the wrongdoer more negatively, as 'lowered' in a way that corresponds to her wrongdoing. For example, you could continue to think of someone as generally honest while thinking worse of her for this one act of dishonesty.
94. See Schimmel, Wounds Not Healed by Time, pp. 61-88.
95. A further issue, which I do not discuss here, is whether repentance sometimes makes forgiveness obligatory, for example, in a case in which the perpetrator makes reparations that really do undo the harm, and has plausibly demonstrated that she has done what she can to condemn the wrong and distance herself from it, and to show that she has changed. I make three comments about this. One, whether you ought to forgive is a separate issue from whether she is entitled to demand forgiveness. Two, certainly, it can be appropriate to resent someone for holding something against you, but this might be because they are not really entitled to holding it against you in the first place, or that it is out of proportion to what was done. Three, calling someone 'unforgiving' can be a rebuke, and it seems plausible that someone who never forgives will miss out on much that is of value in relationships, but this need not make forgiveness obligatory in any particular case.
96. Schimmell holds, in addition, that forgiveness for murder is impossible, because the only person who could be in a position to do the forgiving is no longer around to do it. However, we do not need to say that Mhlauli forgives on her father's behalf to say that she can forgive the wrong done to her.
97. This assumes an act rather than character-retributivist justification of punishment; it might be harder for a character-retributivist to see forgiveness and punishment as compatible. Of course, in the case of the TRC the wrongdoers were not censured through punishment; whether this involved a failure to condemn wrongdoing adequately is a moral question about the justification of the TRC. On my account, this further question need not be resolved in order for us to see those who were willing to forgive as not guilty of any moral compromises or condonation.
98. You could resent whoever it is that regularly parks his car such that you cannot get out of yours, without knowing who it is.
99. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night, pp. 14-15.
100. Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy.
101. Watkins, "Forgiveness and Its Place in Ethics."
102. Both Twambly, "Mercy and Forgiveness," and Adams," Forgiveness: A Christian Model," find the criminal court analogy in Kolnai, "Forgiveness."
103. Twambly, "Mercy and Forgiveness."