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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 September 2019
In this essay, I present an account of forgiveness as a process of emotional distancing. The central claim is that, understood in these terms, forgiveness does not require a change in judgment. Rationally forgiving someone, in other words, does not require that one judges the significance of the wrongdoing differently or that one comes to the conclusion that the attitudes behind it have changed in a favorable way. The model shows in what sense forgiving is inherently social, shows why we should be pluralists about it, and provides a basis for arguing against the existence of necessary conditions of forgiving.
This essay benefited from comments and criticisms by audiences at the Universidad de Antioquia and the philosophy colloquium at the Universidad de los Andes, as well as by the other contributors to this volume. I am especially thankful to Elinor Mason and Michael McKenna, who provided written comments that helped me see better what I wanted to say and sharpen my ways of saying it.
1 Different ways of stating the puzzle can be found in Kolnai, A., “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973): 91–106;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hieronymi, Pamela, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2001): 529–30;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Griswold, Charles, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 2;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Zaibert, L., “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009): 365–93;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Warmke, B., and McKenna, Michael, “Moral Responsibility, Forgiveness and Conversation,” in Haji, I., and Caouette, J., eds., Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 207–208;Google Scholar Kay Nelkin, Dana, “Freedom and Forgiveness,” in Haji and Caoette, eds., Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009);Google Scholar Gormley, S., “The Impossible Demand of Forgiveness,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22, no. 1 (2014): 27–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 See, for instance, Hampton, Jean, “Forgiveness, Resentment, and Hatred,” in Murphy, Jeffrie G. and Hampton, Jean, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 83–85;Google Scholar Hieronymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” 529–55; and L. Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36, no. 1 (2008): 33–68.
3 Examples of emotional accounts of blame can be found in Strawson, P. F., “Freedom and Resentmeent,” Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London and New York: Routledge, 1982); Wallace, J., Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);Google Scholar Wolff, S., “Blame, Italian Style,” in Wallace, R. J., Kumar, R., and Freeman, S., Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 332–47; Michael McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bennett, C., “Personal and Redemptive Forgiveness,” European Journal of Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2003): 127–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 One possible way to express the claim here is that the term “forgiveness” exhibits the kind of homonymy that Aristotle thought was characteristic of many theoretical terms. On that reading, emotional distancing would provide the term with what G. E. L. Owen (“Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle,” in I. During and G. E. L. Owen, eds., Plato and Aristotle in the Mid-Fourth Century [Göteborg: Almquist and Wiksell, 1960], 163–90)called a “focal meaning,” by reference to which other akin processes of reconciliation would derivatively count as acts of forgiveness. I thank Fred Miller for suggesting this way of putting it.
5 Lazarus, R., Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);Google Scholar Nussbaum, Martha, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” in Bilimoria, P. and Mohanty, J., eds., Relativism, Suffering and Beyond (New Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1997), 271–83.Google Scholar
6 D’Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, “The Significance of Recalcitrant Emotions; Or Anti-Quasijudgmentalism,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 (2003), 127–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Obviously, this is far from being a knockdown argument on behalf of the motivational theories of emotions. Also, it should be noted that affect and cognitive theories are not the only theories on offer. For a recent development of a perceptual theory designed to overcome these pitfalls, see Tappolet, C., Emotions, Values, and Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Helm, B., Emotional Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, develops a theory that dispenses with the distinction between the cognitive and the motivational as presupposed here.
8 Frijda, N. H., “The Psychologists’ Point of View,” in Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J. M., and Barrett, L. F., eds., Handbook of Emotions, 3rd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2008), 68–87;Google Scholar Scarantino, A., “The Motivational Theory of Emotions,” in D’Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, Moral Psychology and Human Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 156–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 I thank David Shoemaker for pressing me to address this point.
10 D. Debus, “Being Emotional about the Past: On the Nature and Role of Past-Directed Emotions,” Noûs 41 (2007): 758–79, is skeptical about the possibility of emotional distancing as characterized here. For her, autobiographically remembering an emotional event is itself a new emotional experience, where new and remembered emotions normally coincide. Debus does not exactly say how she thinks about emotions. Her argument works, I suspect, precisely because it presupposes a view of emotions as reducible to affectively-laden judgments.
11 There is indeed evidence that lay concepts of forgiveness have what seems like a prototype structure (J. Kearns and F. Fincham, “A Prototype Analysis of Forgiveness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30, no. 7 [2004]: 838–55; Lawler-Row, K., Scott, C., Raines, R., Edlis-Matityahou, M., and Moore, E., “The Varieties of Forgiveness Experience: Working Toward a Comprehensive Definition of Forgiveness,” Journal of Religion and Health 46, no. 2 [2007]: 233–48.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar If this is true, then no analysis of forgiveness in terms of sufficient and necessary conditions can simultaneously respect folk intuitions across the board.
12 Theorists have drawn the contrast intended here in different ways (see, R. E. Baumeister, J. J. Exline, and K. L. Sommer, “The Victim Role, Grudge Theory, and Two Dimensions of Forgiveness,” In E. L. Worthington, Jr., ed., Dimensions of Forgiveness (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 1998), 79–104; Adams, M. M., “Forgiveness: A Christian Model,” Faith and Philosophy 8, no. 3 (1991): 294;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Zaibert, L., “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009): 365–93;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Warmke and McKenna, “Moral Responsibility, Forgiveness and Conversation,” 189–212. For present purposes, these differences do not matter. The argument of this section is aimed at showing that, even understood as a process of emotional distancing, forgiveness is best understood as an intersubjective/public/social happening.
13 Warmke and McKenna, “Moral Responsibility, Forgiveness and Conversation,” 198–201.
14 Two examples of this view of emotions can be found in A. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Trade, 1999) and to a large degree J. J. Prinz, Gut Reactions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
15 McCullough, M. and vanOyen, C., “The Psychology of Forgiveness,” in Snyder, C. R. and Lopez, S. J., eds., Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford: Oxford Psychology Press, 2001), 446–58;.Google Scholar Bartlett, M. and DeSteno, D., “Gratitude and Prosocial Behavior: Helping When It Costs You,” Psychological Science 17, no. 4 (2006), 319–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
16 What I say here follows from recent communicative accounts of blame. For an in-depth discussion of the idea that blame is essentially communicative, see Michael McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); C. Macnamara, “Blame, Communication, and Morally Responsible Agency,” in R. Clarke, M. McKenna, and A. Smith, eds., The Nature of Moral Responsibility: New Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 211–36; and M. Fricker, “What’s the Point of Blame? A Paradigm Based Explanation,” Noûs 50, no. 1 (2016): 165–83. David Shoemaker and Manuel Vargas Moral Torch Fishing: A Signaling Theory of Blame,” (forthcoming) develop a signaling theory of blame, where these points are discussed in more detail.
17 Warmke and McKenna, “Moral Responsibility, Forgiveness and Conversation, 199. My emphasis.
18 Hampton, “Forgiveness, Resentment, and Hatred,” 83–85.
19 Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” 33–68.
20 Hieronymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” 529–55.
21 Ibid., 530.
22 The idea of blaming and forgiving as occurring in trajectories of social exchange is inspired by McGeer, Victoria (“Co-Reactive Attitudes and the Making of Moral Community,” in MacKenzie, C. and Langdon, R., eds., Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning [New York: Taylor and Francis, 2010], 299–326)Google Scholar who talks about blaming attitudes as essentially occurring in patterns of co-reactivity.
23 Linden, M., Baumann, K., Rotter, M., and Schippan, B., “The Psychopathology of Posttraumatic Embitterment Disorders,” Psychopathology 40 (2007): 159–65;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Znoj, H., “Embitterment—A Larger Perspective on a Forgotten Emotion,” Embitterment (Vienna: Springer, 2011), 5–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24 These judgments would seem to describe best what happens in contexts of relationship breakdown: the partner who ceased to care or the friend who systematically mistreats you might merit this kind of evaluation. Yet, to the extent that plenty of blame and forgiveness happens within healthy and good relationships, forming these judgments does not seem necessary for blame; revising them does not seem necessary for forgiveness either.
25 Murphy, Jeffrie, Punishment and the Moral Emotions: Essays in Law, Morality, and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 31;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Garrard, E. and McNaughton, David, “In Defense of Unconditional Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2002): 40.Google Scholar
26 Holmgren, M. R., Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Hieronymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness.”
28 Nelkin, “Freedom and Forgiveness”; Warmke and McKenna, “Moral Responsibility, Forgiveness and Conversation.”
29 Fincham, F., “The Kiss of the Porcupines: From Attributing Responsibility to Forgiving,” Personal Relationships 7 (2000): 1–23;CrossRefGoogle Scholar McCullough and vanOyen, “The Psychology of Forgiveness.”
30 Griswold, Charles, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy; J. G. Haber, Forgiveness (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991); Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, chap. 2.
32 Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, chap. 1.
33 Garrard and McNaughton, “In Defense of Unconditional Forgiveness”; Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness”; Norlock, K., Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 83–91.Google Scholar
34 C. Bennett, “Personal and Redemptive Forgiveness,” European Journal of Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2003): 127–44 and M. Fricker, “Forgiveness: Its Powers and Corruptions,” forthcoming.
35 The phrase “variable relevance” is taken from Jonathan Dancy, who uses considerations similar to the ones raised here to argue for skepticism about the existence of moral principles (see, for example, Dancy, “Moral Particularism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Winter 2017], Edward N. Zalta, ed. (2017), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/moral-particularism/>). The argument here is much weaker than that. The point is not that there are not any principles or plausible generalizations about forgiveness, only that there are no proper necessary conditions the offender needs to meet for forgiveness to happen. This style of argument is just a version of D. Davidson’s old argument (“Mental Events” in Actions, Reasons, and Causes [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001; 1970]) for the holism of the mental to the absence of rationality norms (See John McDowell, “Functionalism and Anomalous Monism,” in Mind, Value, and Reality [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985] and Child, W., “Anomalism, Uncodifiability and Psychophysical Relations,” Philosophical Review 102, no. 2 [1992]: 215–45, for discussion).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36 Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, 59–60.
37 One more caveat. In addition to norms stating conditions for forgiveness, other general norms might potentially apply to it. Nelkin, “Freedom and Forgiveness,” for instance, suggests that one must not forgive unless one thinks it is good thing to do it. I agree that such a norm might exist. But notice that that norm should not necessarily be read as an ethical norm; it could be a norm of rationality. Consider a close analogue: one must not intend to do something unless one thinks it is a good thing to do it.
38 Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, 59–60.
39 Allais, L., “Elective Forgiveness,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21, no. 5 (2013): 637–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40 Govier, T., “Forgiveness and the Unforgivable,” American Philosophical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1999), 59–75.Google Scholar
41 Garrard and McNaughton, “In Defense of Unconditional Forgiveness,” 39–60.
42 But see Novitz, D., “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58, no. 2 (1998): 209–315,CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a view of forgiveness that requires these things.
