The details of the various formulations of forgiveness currently on offer may vary, but there is large consensus on what forgiveness must involve, and correspondingly, what it is not. To forgive, one must renounce the negative attitudes such as resentment and anger one initially held in response to a wrong done to her.1 Also, the negative attitudes must be justified if renouncing them is to constitute (in part) forgiveness. In other words, to forgive is not to revoke those negative attitudes, but rather to both affirm their validity and yet give them up. The negative attitudes are usually considered to be tied to a judgment about the act of wrongdoing, the judgment that the act is wrong and the agent is culpable for it.2 Forgiveness, at a minimum, is to renounce the 1Susan Wolf suggests the possibility of forgiving without renouncing negative attitudes because the victim developed no such attitudes in the first place even though she does judge that she has been wronged and the offender is responsible for it. I agree that this is indeed a live possibility, though I suspect that it’s seldom realized. In most cases where we are not so “bothered” about the wrongdoing, it’s because we think the act is either excused or justified. This is not forgiving though we may still use the term to refer to our response (mistakenly, I would say). Of course this is not what Wolf is suggesting. I can think of two ways in which someone can hold that judgment about the wrongdoing and yet does not develop negative attitudes towards the offender in response to the wrongdoing,and it makes sense to say she nevertheless forgives the offender (if she does). First, she does not judge that the offender actually disrespects her person despite the appearance of his act to suggest otherwise. Second, she judges that the offender does indeed disrespect her (through his act), but for some reason, she does not react with negative attitudes like resentment, as most people would. This does not need to be because she has an unusual psychological makeup. She may have internalized religious teachings that encourage positive attitudes to even one’s enemy, or she may be persuaded by secular views on the value of love, compassion, or respect of some sort for people to the extent that she no longer responds to offenses against her with resentment. Such cases are unusual, but the possibility of them highlights two important assumptions that discussions of forgiveness take for granted: (i) When someone judges herself wronged by another, she also judges that the offender harbors ill will towards her, or at least lacks respect for her; and (ii) When someone so judges the offender, she responds with negative attitudes such as resentment. Indeed, my own contribution to the discussion relies heavily on (i).
2Commentators have different formulations of the content of the judgment that must remain fixed for it to be a case of forgiveness, but I think they are more or less variations on the central theme of wrongful act and moral responsibility on the part of the agent.
negative attitudes while holding fixed the judgment about the wrongdoing.
On the face of it, there seems to be something paradoxical about forgiveness. On the one hand, one is to give up her negative attitudes. But on the other hand, she has to retain the judgment expressed by those attitudes. The basic challenge that every account of forgiveness has to meet is to explain away the apparent incompatibility between the two sides of forgiveness. It is widely agreed that not just any way of changing one’s attitudes can count as forgiveness even though a change in attitudes can come about in many different ways. We may suppress our anger or other negative attitudes by diverting our attention to something else, or if that works only temporarily, we may go through certain mind-training programs to alter our emotions. Or to use an example that commentators particularly like, we could change our attitudes by simply popping a pill if such a pill exists. But certainly these ways of changing our attitudes are not in the picture when we think of forgiveness as being somehow paradoxical, for if they are, no one would think there’s anything mysterious about forgiveness since we can very well hold the judgment fixed and alter our attitudes in one or more of these ways.3 Understanding is indeed unnecessary if one gives up her negative attitudes by taking a pill.
3There is some consensus in the literature regarding the reasons to forgive. Jeffrie Murphy’s thought that forgiveness must be done for moral reasons is often invoked in accounts of forgiveness. I think this is a mistake and I’ll briefly explain why. Let us look at the two cases that have motivated Murphy. First is the case of forgetting: “Sometimes we lose a vivid memory of old wrongs, become bored with our resentments, and simply forget (1998, p.507).” Murphy argues that forgetting cannot be forgiving since it “justhappensto us.” Then there’s the case of undergoing a change of attitudes for selfish reasons: “. . . my resentment so dominates my mental life that I am being made miserable. In order to regain my peace of mind, I go to a behavior-modification therapist to have my resentment extinguished. (Let us suppose there are such techniques.) (ibid.)” Murphy seems to have two concerns here. First, he wants to rule out certain ways of giving up negative attitudes as forgiveness; forgetting or modifying attitudes by certain psychological/therapeutic “techniques” do not count as forgiveness. Second, he wants to rule out certain motives or reasons for changing one’s attitudes. He rejects the second example as one of forgiveness on the grounds that the motivation is not moral but selfish. I think this claim is controversial. It is quite plausible to say that someone forgives but for bad reasons (eg. selfish reasons). It can still be a case of forgiveness, but deficient according to certain moral standards. And if we reject this part of Murphy’s view, all he needs to rule out the two examples is a condition on how the attitudes are to be changed, i.e. by way of a change in judgment.
Thus, an account of forgiveness must at least rule out the giving up of negative attitudes because (1) one has forgotten about the offense over time, and (2) one finds out that the perceived wrong is in fact (fully) excused or justified. (1) is a case of revoking negative attitudes that were unjustified in the first place, hence it is not forgiveness. (2) is also not forgiveness since by excusing or justifying the wrong, one has changed the judgment that makes forgiveness possible in the first place.
Those who confuse forgiving with excusing or justifying may believe the proverb is true, (partly) because a more thorough understanding of the offense (e.g., through gaining knowledge of facts that one is previously unaware of or mistaken about) may change the initial judgment that it is an instance of culpable wrongdoing. One may come to understand that the offender had legitimate excuses to act the way he did, and hence cannot be blamed for the offense. Or one may, given the new information or a corrected view of the event, realize that what the offender did was overall the right thing to do. In the cases where the offender is found to be fully excused or justified for his act, the victim would renounce her negative attitudes. There, to understand all is to forgive all, one may say. But as I said, this interpretation of the proverb rests on a mistake. The victim’s renunciation in such cases is not forgiveness, but acknowledgement of the incorrect judgment she made initially. Forgiveness is out of place here, for the negative attitudes turn out to be unwarranted in the first place.4
Hence, understanding may undermine the very condition that makes forgiveness possible — the judgment about culpable wrongdoing must be held fixed in a case of forgiveness. But the real question is: if someone has wronged me (which is true), will understanding her lead to forgiveness?
4It is an interesting question to ask whether someone who has come to a better understanding of the offense and consequently refuted her initial judgment about the wrongdoingafter she has “forgiven” the offender can still be considered to haveforgivenhim. I think it is still a case of forgiveness, though one of mistaken forgiveness, forwhen she gave up her negative attitudes, she still held judgment (W) unchanged, and that is all she needs for it to be a case of forgiveness.