More on the Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

This just over the transom: 

Finally, a post on forgiveness. :-) But my spirit within me won't permit me to forgo responding to what you've written. You characterize the paradox this way: It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc.  But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive?  Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness.  That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.

 

That is not quite right.

The problem is this. Forgiving unconditionally -- forgiving someone without their apology, repentance, penance, etc. -- seems to amount to little more than condoning what they've done; it's hardly forgiveness but more of an acceptance of the wrong. On the other hand, forgiving on the condition that the wrong has been atoned -- the wrongdoer has apologized, repented, made reparations, performed penances, etc -- seems to be superfluous, insofar as after atonement has been made, the wrongdoer is not guilty of anything any longer and thus there is nothing to forgive, nor would continued resentment be appropriate. 

BV:  That's exactly what I said, though in a lapidary manner.  So I think we agree as to what the putative paradox is.  I call it 'putative' because I don't see it as a genuine paradox.

 

You write that, The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But this is contentious; not everyone sees this the way you do. For instance, Jesus seems to forgive wrongdoers unconditionally on two occasions, once in the pericope adulterae (at John 7.53-8.11) and again at Luke 23.34 when he is being crucified. A significant number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., David Garrard, Eve McNaughton, Leo Zaibert, Christopher McCowley, Cheshire Calhoun, Glen Pettigrove) defend the practice of unconditional forgiveness, as well. So it's unacceptable simply to accept the first horn of the paradox as is; there is the argumentation of all these philosophers to deal with!

 

 

BV: Yes, my assertion is debatable, but then so is almost everything in philosophy and plenty of what is outside of philosophy.  I don't think bringing Jesus in advances your argument.  Either Jesus is God or he is not.  If he is not, then he lacks the authority to contravene the existing law and forgive the adulteress.  If he is God, then two problems.  First, your argument then rests on a highly contentious theological presupposition.  (I will remind you that in conversation you said that you were not trying to work out the Christian concept of forgiveness, but the concept of forgiveness in general.) Second, granting that God has the authority to forgive and forgive unconditionally, that has no relevance to the human condition, to forgiveness as it plays out among mere mortals such as us. For one thing, God can afford to forgive unconditionally; nothing can touch him.  But for us to adopt a policy of forgiving unconditionally would be disastrous.

At Luke 23:34, Jesus is reported to have said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."  Note that Jesus is not forgiving his tormenters; he is asking God the Father to forgive them.  So this passage is not relevant to our discussion.  Besides, there is nothing here about unconditional forgiveness.  Jesus could have been requesting his Father to forgive the killers after punishing them appropriately.

Your mention of contemporary philosophers who support your position is just name-dropping.  To drop a name is not to give an argument.  I would have to see their arguments.  Is it unacceptable for me to hold to my understanding of forgiveness according to which it is morally objectionable to forgive the unrepentant in advance of studying the arguments of those you mention?  No more unacceptable than holding to the view that motion is possible in advance of studying the arguments of Zeno and his school, or holding to the reality of time despite my inability decisively to refute McTaggart.  I might just stand my Moorean ground: "Look, I just ate lunch; therefore time is real!"  Similarly with forgiveness: "Look, it is a wonderful thing to forgive, but only on condition that the offender own up to his wrongdoing, make amends, etc."

You also write, I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear.  His guilt has been removed.  But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him. You are forgetting another important aspect of forgiveness beyond the change in attitude, however, namely that it is a way of responding to wrongdoers as wrongdoers. Another way of putting this is that forgiveness is only possible when someone stands before us as guilty for some wrong done and is thus an appropriate candidate for resentment, anger, etc. If someone has atoned for their wrong and is no longer guilty, then there's no ground for resentment and thus there's nothing more to forgive! So the change in attitude after atonement has been made may resemble forgiveness, but it's hardly genuine forgiveness since there's no wrong to forgive any longer.

BV:  This is an interesting and weighty point, but I disagree nonetheless.  You may be conflating two separate claims.  I would say that it is a conceptual truth that if X forgives Y, then X perceives Y as having done wrong, whether or not Y has in fact done wrong.  This truth is analytic in that it merely unpacks our ordinary understanding of 'forgiveness.'  But it doesn't follow from this conceptual truth that there is nothing left to forgive with respect to a person who has atoned for his misdeed.   I say there is:  the mere fact that he has done me wrong in the first place.  Suppose he stole my money, but then apologized and made restitution.  In that case the demands of justice have been met.  But there is still something left to forgive, namely, his having stolen my money in the first place.  The apology and restitution do not eliminate the whole of the guilt, for the offender remains guilty of the misdeed.  After all, his apology and restitution do not retroactively make him innocent.  He remains guilty as charged.  The fact of his having committed the misdeed  can in no way be altered.  Though contingent at the time, it now has the modal status of necessitas per accidens.

There is obviously a difference between one who is guilty of an offence and one who is innocent of it.  That distinction remains in place even after the guilty party pays for his crime.  Your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent -- which is absurd.

Consider this. Forgiveness is commonly thought of as gracious; it is a generous way of responding to wrongdoers that goes beyond strictly what they deserve. How is it at all generous to change one's attitude towards a wrongdoer only once atonement has been made and she is effectively no longer a wrongdoer?

BV:  I agree that forgiveness is gracious and not strictly a matter of desert.  It is nevertheless generous to forgive even after atonement has been made.  For one is forgiving the offender of having committed the misdeed in he first place.  I deny that the offender is no longer a wrongdoer after the penalty has been paid.  Again, your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent.

Remember the Derrida quote I cited:

Imagine, then, that I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable. In this case, can one still speak of forgiveness? This would be too simple on both sides: one forgives someone other than the guilty one. In order for there to be forgiveness, must one not on the contrary forgive both the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repentance or promise? Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its name, if there ever is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable, and without condition? (On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, pp. 38-9)

BV:  John Searle once said of Derrida that he gives bullshit a bad name.  So an appeal to the authority of Derrida will have as little effect on me as an appeal the supposed authority of Paul Krugman in an economic connection.  The Derrida passage smacks of sophistry what with the rhetorical questions and the typically French amorphousness.  He seems to be advancing the following sophism.  If one forgives the one who has atoned, then "one forgives someone other than the guilty one."  But that is to confuse numerical identity with qualitative identity.

 

Thus I have to hold, pace tua, that genuine forgiveness must be unconditional, and conditionalized forgiveness is less than true.

BV: And I continue to maintain, pace tua, that only conditional forgiveness is morally unobjectionable and that conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness. 

 

 

Related articles

The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

Comments

[Peter Lupu]

In a couple of posts (“The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness” (3/13; 5:38am); and “More on the Putative Paradox of Forgiveness” (3/14/13; 2:35pm)) Bill advances two theses:

(CF) “Only conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.”

(MO) “It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc.”

In this response I wish to ignore for the time being whether there is a genuine paradox of forgiveness. Instead I wish to focus on an apparent tension between CF and MO.

But first we need to clear up a problem with CF. If I understand Bill correctly, conditional forgiveness is forgiveness conditional upon some kind of repentance extended by the wrongdoer toward the wronged. So unconditional forgiveness would be a case where forgiveness is extended even when repentance is absent.

Now, CF implies that unconditional forgiveness is not a genuine case of forgiveness. What would it mean for a case of forgiveness to fail to be genuine? Clearly, Bill cannot simply mean that in such cases forgiveness is not sincere: i.e., the forgiver fakes it or pretends as if he forgives the wrongdoer when in fact he really does not. Even if we suppose that one can pretend to forgive, this is not pertinent to the present case.

The alternative is that a case of unconditional forgiveness is not really a case of forgiveness. But how can a sincere act of forgiveness fail to be real? Suppose I sincerely assert (or think to myself) “I forgive you” for some wrongdoing and suppose I mean it with all my heart. Bill would insist, I suppose, that even with all the heartfelt sincerity, forgiveness still fails in the absence of repentance. I may simply be wrong in thinking that I forgave the wrongdoer. But how can this act of mine (mental or verbal) fail to be a real case of forgiveness? What is missing?

Well, Bill may respond along the following line: ‘to forgive’ is a success verb and the success-conditions require an external element; namely, that the wrongdoer repents. The sincere intentions of the agent are not enough. So even if the agent is sincere, when the external element of repentance is absent, forgiveness fails. Bill now has what he needs to explain how an agent can be wrong about whether they have forgiven a wrongdoer. Such failure occurs just in case the proper intentions to forgive are present, but the external element of repentance is absent. When both of these conditions obtain together, then the agent is liable to falsely believe that they have succeeded in their act of forgiveness.

I will now turn to the tension I see between CF and MO. CF (together with our account above) implies that a sincere attempt to forgive fails in the absence of the external element of repentance, even if the agent wholeheartedly believes (albeit mistakenly) that they have succeeded to forgive a wrongdoer. And it is at this point that I sense the tension with MO.

MO says that it is “morally objectionable to forgive those” who fail to repent for a wrongdoing. But according to CF, when repentance is absent, there is no act of forgiving, even when the agent sincerely intends to forgive. So I ask: How could something that fails to exist be “morally objectionable”? After all, according to CF, there is no act of forgiveness under the circumstances we imagine. So there is nothing to pin our moral objection on. Or is there?

I suggest that Bill’s idea is that it is morally objectionable to sincerely *intend to forgive* a wrongdoer in the absence of repentance. So Bill pins the moral objection on the agent’s sincere intention to forgive an unrepentant wrongdoer.

But what are the grounds for such a moral objection? Is the moral objection warranted because it is wrong for an agent to attempt to do something which they know, or should know, is doomed to failure? But according to this reasoning, the agent is at most blameworthy for being either ignorant or somewhat foolish. I do not think that under the circumstances either of these shortcomings rises to the level of moral blameworthiness.

Now suppose that the agent knows that the wrongdoer failed to repent for his wrongdoing, yet he still insists to sincerely forgive him. Is that morally objectionable? But on what grounds would this be morally objectionable? What is the moral failure exhibited by such an agent? I think Bill needs to offer us a justification why such an agent is morally blameworthy.

[arash]

"""
after atonement has been made, the wrongdoer is not guilty of anything any longer and thus there is nothing to forgive, nor would continued resentment be appropriate
"""
Maybe unconditional forgiveness targets the feeling of hatred as such, that is hating a person is inappropriate always, even when we are victims of her misdeeds.

[Steven]

Hi Peter,

Good comment. You write: Bill may respond along the following line: ‘to forgive’ is a success verb and the success-conditions require an external element; namely, that the wrongdoer repents.

This would not be a good route to take, insofar as we can forgive persons from whom repentance, atonement, etc., is impossible: for instance, the dead.

[Peter Lupu]

Steven,

Thanks for your astute point. I suppose much of my way-to-long post is not pertinent anymore in light of Bill's most recent post stating his position. In any case, it is certainly a very intriguing topic.