Cowley 2010genuine Forgiveness
Cowley 2010genuine Forgiveness
Cowley 2010genuine Forgiveness
I. INTRODUCTION
forgiveness of all his children. One thing that seems to distinguish the
Christian understanding of forgiveness from the Aristotelian is the ques-
tion of conditionality. In this paper I do not propose to examine either
Aristotle or Christian theology at all, but to focus instead on this ques-
tion of conditionality, that is, whether the offender has to fulfil certain
conditions in order to make forgiveness ethically appropriate.
Charles Griswold (2007) offers one of the most recent and certainly one
of the most systematic analyses of forgiveness. He follows a number of
philosophers who claim that forgiveness must be norm-governed and
conditional, and challenging this will be my task in part I.1 I will argue
that, as a conceptual matter, forgiveness can only be unconditional. I
have not been the only one to argue this. In part II, I consider but then
reject the ‘defence of unconditional forgiveness’ offered by Garrard and
McNaughton (2002). Part III will then develop my own argument for
why and how genuine forgiveness must be elective and unconditional,
and I draw on Bernard Williams’ notion of ‘practical necessity’ in this
regard.
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(iv) She “must commit to becoming the sort of person who does not
inflict injury, and that commitment must be shown through deeds as
well as words.”
(v) She “must show that she understands, from the injured person’s per-
spective, the damage done by the injury.”
(vi) “[T]he offender’s regretful address would offer some sort of narrative
accounting for how she came to do wrong” (2007, 49-51; italics orig-
inal).
It is important to note that there are two sets of conditions that are rele-
vant here. The conditions that make forgiveness appropriate (such as
those proposed by Griswold above) should be distinguished from the
conditions that make the victim’s decision and action a reliably recognis-
able case of forgiveness in the first place. For example, if the victim
claims to have forgiven the offender, and yet keeps trying to take revenge,
then what he or she has done is probably not forgiveness, irrespective of
the words he or she may utter. In the present contribution, it is only the
appropriateness conditions that I will be challenging.
The other thing that forgiveness has to be, according to Griswold, is
norm-governed. Norm-governance means that the repentant offender
‘earns’ or ‘qualifies for’ forgiveness, that forgiveness has become ‘appro-
priate’, and that the victim is ‘entitled’ to forgive, in accordance with
relevant norms (these are the words Griswold uses). These norms should
be distinguished from any logical or moral obligation.6 The metaphor of
‘wiping the slate clean’ is misleading because it seems too close in con-
ceptual terms to debt-repayment. Griswold looks to the etymology of the
word ‘forgive’ in search of a clue, and argues that giving is also norm-
governed, and that “gifts are normally accompanied by the expectation
of reciprocity” (2007, 63). But these norms and expectations work in a
particular way. When I am invited to dinner, there are norms governing
the sort of gift to bring, the amount of money to spend on the gift, the
presentation of the gift etc. Such norms do not require a specific gift on
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e.g. of altruism and virtue. The genuinely courageous person is not con-
scious of his or her courage at the moment he or she expresses it. People
who worry or gloat about their courage are more concerned with their
appearance to others than with the proper object or end of the coura-
geous action. At the same time, courage is of course subject to external
norms. D.Z. Phillips puts it well in his discussion of the psychology of
caring:
Is not the form of the imperative ‘You ought to heed these consid-
erations if you care or if you are interested’? This is not so. To think
otherwise is to confuse the conditions under which a man has rea-
sons for paying attention to moral considerations with his paying
attention. He will not have such reasons unless he cares, but the fact
that he cares is not his reason for caring. If, hurrying to the cinema,
I stop to help the victim of an epileptic fit, while it is true that, in the
absence of considerations of personal advantage, I should not have
stopped unless I cared, it does not follow that my reason for helping
him is because I care. The reason is to be found in the suffering of
the epileptic (1992, 133).
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By way of a final response, Griswold would spell out two limiting situa-
tions that seem to be implied by the radical electivity I am proposing.
The first situation would see the offender attempting to do everything to
be forgiven, not only the conditions laid out by Griswold, but even ad
hoc conditions stipulated by the victim, and still he or she could be
refused forgiveness with impunity according to my account. Indeed, the
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trying to make sense of the offender’s action, and Griswold would surely
agree with this too. But this will come too close to understanding the
offender’s action, and thereby excusing or justifying it – rather than for-
giving it. Instead, I would argue that forgiveness becomes a genuine issue
and marks a real achievement precisely when I cannot understand the
offence, no matter how hard I try, no matter how hard the offender
repents, because the offence is incomprehensible. At this point there is a
gap between the situation and the victim’s decision, and in this gap lies
the electivity.
Not only is the offence incomprehensible, but it is also prima facie
unforgivable. Its very nature as an offence, when first appreciated, is
incompatible with forgiveness. I am referring here to a famous paradox
described by Jacques Derrida:
I don’t know about the rest of Derrida’s argument, but I think this
expresses a profound insight about the failure of conditional accounts.
First, we should be clear to understand ‘unforgivable’ not as meaning
‘very serious’, and I declared at the start that I am not discussing war
crimes and genocide. Instead, we are talking about a personal, individual
reaction coloured by bafflement and hurt. For Derrida, the very notion
of an offence being in principle forgivable already entails its being for-
given, in some possible world or at some point in the future; so the
nominally forgivable offence is nothing more than the first move in
another norm-governed transaction. Whether or not the act is then nom-
inally forgiven adds nothing new to our understanding of that act.
Griswold has little time for Derrida.13 For Griswold, either an act
is forgivable or it is not. Some acts might be genuinely unforgivable,
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beliefs are answerable to the way things are in the world; we might be
mistaken, and sometimes we can be legitimately criticised by others with
a better view of the world or more accurate beliefs. Much of our ethical
talk (for example, “one has a moral duty to do X in such a situation”, “it
would be cowardly to do Y here and now”) is grammatically similar to
talk about tables and chairs, and so invites a similar interpretation. In a
given situation, there is a singular moral fact of the matter, ‘out there’, to
which each of us – anyone who stumbles upon the situation – is answer-
able, regardless of who we are. This perspective on the world and on the
agents operating in it might be called ‘third-personal’ in that it asks what
‘one’ ought to do, where ‘one’ means anybody finding themselves in that
situation: the familiar principle of universalisability. Sometimes, of course,
there will be features of a particular agent that distinguish him or her in
morally relevant ways from other agents, so that the same situation might
generate different moral obligations for different agents (e.g. when facing
the same situation of a drowning swimmer, the trained lifeguard will
have different obligations than a non-swimmer). But the obligation is still
universalisable across that narrower class of people.
Griswold is a realist: he believes there is a fact of the matter about
whether what A did to B was an offence, about whether A was therefore
an offender, about whether A therefore owed an apology to B, and about
whether B had an imperfect duty to forgive A. As we saw, there is also a
fact – a timeless fact – about whether the offence was appropriately for-
givable.
I am inclined nonetheless to accuse Griswold of neglecting the first-
personal perspective, that is, the perspective within which I do not ask
what ‘one’ ought to do, but what I ought to do, regardless of what other
people feel or say I should do. The offence (what I consider to be an
offence) has been committed against me, and I am left with the ques-
tion of whether to forgive. As part of that deliberation, I may consult a
friend, and that person may advise me one way or another. I may also
take into account the fact that the offender has not repented, or offered
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insufficient repentance. But in the end the decision is still not made until
I make it. This is the radical electivity that I believe is essential to for-
giveness. And in making my decision, there is no implication that I am
correctly discovering, out there, what ought to be done, nor the opposite
implication that I am failing to discover what ought to be done. My
friends might indeed blame me for whatever I decide, but pace Griswold,
this does not imply that they have better access to a moral fact; all it
means is that, as far as they can tell, they would have decided differently
if they had been in the same situation.
Griswold might well reject this as a recipe for facile subjectivism,
and this is not entirely incorrect. The decision to forgive or withhold
forgiveness, as well as the reasons given, will tell us about the subject and
the way he or she sees the world. However, just because the decision is
personal does not mean that it is merely personal; decisions to forgive are
not expressions of arbitrary preference such as musical and gastronomic
taste. Unlike the paradigms of subjective taste, the offence in question is
experienced as serious – and objective. The wrongness of the offence is
experienced as something out there, in the world. Deliberations about
whether to forgive are deliberations about the world, about the offender,
the offence, his or her repentance etc.
In the same way as my emphasis on the personal perspective does
not constitute a slide toward full subjectivism, neither is it a slide toward
mere feelings. The popular discussions of ‘therapeutic’ forgiveness in the
self-help literature are all about feelings and attitudes, and how to dispel
or overcome them, without any necessary connection with the reality of
what happened or what was said. In my account, victims still experience
the world, from within their perspective, as making objective ethical claims
on them, claims that they discover ‘out there’.
One way to understand the role of the personal is to consider the
phenomenon of ‘practical necessity’, a term coined by Bernard Williams
in his 1981 article of the same name. Practical necessity refers to a dis-
tinctive experience, whereby the agents describe themselves using the
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first person rather than the third person (‘I’ rather than ‘one’), such that
they commit themselves to no implicit universalisability. Consider the
example of Martin Luther, standing at the Diet of Worms, wondering
how far to take his protest against the corruption of the Catholic church.
He declares that he “must” go through with the protest, that he “cannot
do otherwise”. In making this declaration, he is not advising or prescrib-
ing his like-minded friends to join him in their protest; he is simply
speaking for himself. At the same time, he is not expressing a whimsical
preference as conceived by subjectivism: he is taking himself as respond-
ing to an objective ethical demand, and a very serious one at that, one
that he knows will involve a risk to his life.
Luther’s action still makes sense to his like-minded observers: he is
protesting against the Catholic church for good reasons, and his protest
coheres with many other ethical values and principles that he and his
observers share. But against the reasons for protest will be intelligible
prudential reasons to stay quiet, and most of Luther’s friends will find
that these latter reasons easily override the reasons to protest. The prac-
tical necessity that Luther acts under is not a duty generated by an
impersonal weighing of all relevant reasons, themselves generated by
the situation: unlike his friends, Luther found that the reasons to protest
silenced the reasons to keep quiet. And yet there is no necessary sense
that Luther was right and his friends were wrong or weak or selfish; or
that Luther was irresponsible, or power-hungry, or self-absorbed, or
neglectful of his family, while his friends were not. The reasons gener-
ated by the situation did not compel action. At the same time, neither
Luther nor his friends were necessarily ignorant of relevant facts or rea-
sons (I stress this ‘necessarily’, since it might well have been the case
that Luther was no more than an adroit political schemer, acting on
strictly Machiavellian considerations).
All that one can say, at least in Luther’s situation, is that Luther
found that he had to protest and his friends found that they had to stay
quiet. The reasons that Luther can give for his action make sense to his
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friends, and yet they do not ‘add up’ to the action: viewed from outside,
there is a gap between Luther’s declared reasons and his action, and
there is nothing further about the situation, or about likely futures result-
ing from different decisions that could be made in the situation, that
would be news to Luther. In one sense, therefore, Luther and his like-
minded friends face the same situation; in another, they face different
situations as revealed by the fact that Luther found he had to continue
with the protest, and his friends did not. The gap between reasons and
action, the same gap between Luther and his friends, is therefore essen-
tially mysterious, since there is nothing further that can be said about it.
We can imagine Luther being blamed for his decision – perhaps his
family would be legitimately angry at being placed at risk, perhaps his
friends believe that the move is politically misguided and will harm the
cause. And Luther can listen to the reasons offered by family and friends,
and yet he finds he is ‘unable’ to help them. They may continue to blame
him, but there is an important sense in which the blame finds no pur-
chase in Luther, for Luther cannot be other than who he is. This is
because the family and friends are themselves conceiving of the situation
from within their own perspectives. There is no overarching perspective
to which they can appeal in blaming Luther for his actions.
I suggest that the challenge posed to moral realism by Williams’
account of practical necessity will be useful in making sence of why gen-
uine forgiveness should be unconditional and elective. Griswold was try-
ing to make explicit the basic norms that moral actors follow when
engaging in the practice of determining when to forgive. I am suggesting
that while there is room for reflecting on the offence, the victim is not
thereby reviewing Griswold’s conditions; instead, what is going on is
something akin to victims discovering that they ‘must’, or that they ‘can-
not’, forgive.
There might seem to be a problem here. I have been arguing that
genuine forgiveness must be elective. And yet here I am speaking of prac-
tical necessity, as if the agent did not have a choice, as if he or she was
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the victim decides to revise their decision. In the same way that the origi-
nal situational package does not dictate the appropriate response, nor does
it dictate the appropriate revision (e.g. as a ‘correction’ of an earlier ‘mis-
take’). The process of revision is as essentially mysterious and unpredict-
able as the original process of decision.
What about the two objections that I anticipated Griswold making, the
‘sheer bloody-mindedness’ objection and the ‘battered housewife’ objec-
tion? According to the first, the victim refuses to forgive no matter what
the offender does, and observers blame him or her for being bloody-
minded and unforgiving. I have been describing the failure of such blame
in finding purchase on the victim, but surely there have to be some situa-
tions where we, as observers or offenders, correctly think the victim was
being stubbornly unforgiving?
My response to this is not going to please Griswold. When faced
with the offence and the offender’s sincerely repentant efforts, the vic-
tim is not only considering the particular offence, but he or she is also
re-evaluating the entire antecedent relationship with the offender in the
light of the revelation that the offender ‘had it in him or her’ to commit
the offence. In other words, what is at stake is a much larger situational
package than Griswold had assumed, reaching further into a past that is
less and less accessible, even in principle, to outsiders. If the victim
deliberates sincerely and discovers that he or she cannot forgive the
offender, this will almost certainly alter the relationship, if not destroy it
altogether. But there is a very real sense in which it is only the victim’s
relationship to re-evaluate: it is the victim and the offender who are
alone in that relationship. In the case where the offender and the victim
have no antecedent relationship (e.g. the victim was mugged by a stran-
ger), the victim still faces a decision of how much he or she wants to try
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the forgiving act or words. Despite the expression “forgive and forget”,
true forgiveness does not forget – although it does not dwell on it either.
I suspect that the wife tries to forget or ignore the abuse by focusing her
attention on her husband’s better qualities; or else she tries to excuse it
by imagining her husband as ill and needy; or else she tries to justify it by
focusing on the prudential benefits of remaining in the marriage, e.g.
perhaps she lacks the confidence to leave him and go it alone.
I believe that this reduction of the wife’s apparently forgiving behav-
iour to something else would account for most cases that baffle us as
observers. But there are probably some cases of genuine forgiveness of
brutal husbands, and my response to such a counter-example would echo
my response to the first: the reminder that such a decision to forgive is
made within a context of a long and private relationship. Marriages are
one of the most opaque objects in the universe, often opaque even to
their participants. As close friends to the battered wife, we can urge her
to leave, we can offer her help and shelter and money, we could talk to
the husband; but if all that fails, and the wife is not legally incompetent,
then there may be nothing more we can do – or think. Yes, we continue
to believe she is inappropriately forgiving of the unforgivable, yes, we
wouldn’t put up with it if we were in her shoes, and yes, we continue to
hope that she will one day see the light. Once again we are back at the
mystery at the heart of forgiveness, a mystery that has to do with those
striking moments when we are struck by the otherness of the other.
WORKS CITED
Allais, Lucy. 2008. “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness.” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 36: 33-68.
Bennett, Christopher. 2003. “Personal and Redemptive Forgiveness.” European Journal of
Philosophy 11: 127-144.
Calhoun, Cheshire. 1992. “Changing One’s Heart.” Ethics. An International Journal of
Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy 103: 76-96.
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NOTES
1. In addition to Kolnai (1973) himself, the most famous conditional account is that of
Jeffrie Murphy (Murphy and Hampton 1988).
2. For reasons that will become apparent, I use ‘putative’ above, thereby giving explicit
priority to the victim’s perspective on the event. I do not want to beg any questions by taking the
offence as given, for whether it was offensive at all might be part of the conflict between offender
and victim. The victim may be over-sensitive or self-important.
3. Again, I want to avoid describing the offence as in fact unjustified or unexcused, and
prefer to focus instead on the victim’s impression.
4. Griswold’s book offers a much more detailed analysis of forgiveness, which I do not
have space to summarise here. However, it is not directly important to the question of electivity,
which is my main concern. Allais (2008) also offers a nuanced discussion of the concept, but
without much interest in the electivity question.
5. Griswold considers one popular interpretation of “distancing oneself”: Augustine’s dic-
tum to “hate the sin, love the sinner”. As if the offender approaches the victim and invites him
or her to jointly condemn the aberration. But Griswold is right to reject this: first, because it
sounds like the offender is asking to be excused rather than forgiven; second, because the
offender should be asking to be forgiven precisely for committing the offence. Loosening the ties of
moral responsibility for one’s freely-chosen past actions (in the way the pop existentialist might
advocate) threatens to undermine too many important components of people’s lives, such as
promises and debts, not to mention contracts and friendships. However, some sort of distancing
is one of the conditions for repentance, argues Griswold (2007, 55).
6. Schimmel (2002, chapters 2 and 3) argues that within Jewish thought, it is generally
regarded as wrong to forgive unrepentant sinners, although it becomes obligatory if they truly
repent and make appropriate restitution (cited in Allais 2008, 38)
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7. Jacques Derrida (2001) also examines the practice of gift-giving in his discussion of for-
giveness, but comes to a much more radical conclusion than I: that only the saint (my term, not
his) can give a genuine gift, everything else is mere ‘economy’.
8. This question echoes the question posed in discussions on the theory of punishment: if
offenders are genuinely repentant, what is the point of punishing them?
9. Griswold (2007, 64) does not, saying that apologising need not involve “humbling”, and
the victim need not “relish” it. He then reiterates his concern about condoning the offence.
10. This particular consideration is of central concern to Jeffrie Murphy (Murphy and
Hampton 1988). Not only might forgiveness be inappropriate, but there is nothing wrong with
cultivating a lingering muscular resentment insofar as one’s mental health will allow it.
11. The term ‘offender’ comes from my Schematic Case, not from Gerrard and
McNaughton.
12. Derrida’s writings are notoriously difficult, and I do not have the space (or the exper-
tise) to go into them any further in this paper. It will suffice for my purposes to explore this one
insight.
13. See footnote 22 on p. 63 and footnote 52 on p. 90 of Griswold (2007).
14. My account involves a type of forgiveness that will seem prima facie similar to two other
types in the literature, that described as “personal” by Christopher Bennett (2003) and that
described as “aspirational” or “full-blooded” by Cheshire Calhoun (1992). For reasons of space I
cannot go into the important differences between our accounts, but suffice to say that mine is
more radical.
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