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Abstract

This paper explores the virtue — "forgivingness" — that is associated with the practice of forgiveness (an action or state of mind taken towards an offender). Forgivingness is a disposition to forgive under appropriate conditions.
Originally published in American
Philosophical Quarterly 32(1995): pp. 289–
306. Reprinted in Cliff Williams, editor,
Personal Virtues (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005).
FORGIVINGNESS
ROBERT C. ROBERTS
1. Introduction
Virtues are personal traits that fit us to live our life well in its distinctively human
dimensions, and especially in its social ones. Thus the virtues of truthfulness (intellectual
honesty, sincerity, promise-keeping, forthrightness) are dispositions to live well with
respect to our powers to represent ourselves and features of our world in language and
gesture. The virtues of will power (courage, perseverance, self-control, etc.) are powers
to act, feel, and think well despite the urges, desires, emotions, and habits which tend to
undermine proper action, feeling, and thought. Generosity, gratitude and justice are
dispositions to live well (act well, think well, be properly affected) in contexts where
things can be given or received — things as diverse as material goods, the use of one’s
home premises, praise, and attention. In the present paper I want to describe the virtue of
forgiveness — which I shall call forgivingness, to distinguish it from the act or process of
forgiveness in which this virtue is typically exemplified. ‘The forgiving person’ refers to
the person with the virtue of forgivingness.
Why regard the disposition to forgive people their offenses against oneself as a
virtue? Anger (the emotion that forgiveness characteristically overcomes) can be
destructive in several obvious ways. It is reputed to be a cause of medical problems such
as hypertension and its ramifications. It also tends to reduce effectiveness in the pursuit
of tasks that depend on relationships with fellow workers, clients, employers, etc. But
more importantly for ethics, it is often a significant factor in the destruction of
friendships, marriages, and collegiality. Forgiveness has the advantage over mere control
of anger that it involves a genuinely benevolent (generous, giving, loving) view of the
other person and thus fosters attitudes, and not just behavior, characteristic of the various
kinds of happy relationships. And unlike condoning offenses, forgiving them does not
compromise the moral integrity of the offended one.
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Forgiveness is virtuous because one’s anger is given up without abandoning
correct judgment about the severity of the offense and the culpability of the offender. I
argue that acts of forgiveness, in which one lets go one’s anger without thereby
abandoning the relevant judgments about offender and offense, are possible because of a
certain looseness of fit between the judgments that constitute the cognitive content of an
emotion, and the emotion itself. The emotion is a special kind of perception in terms of
the cognitive content, such that if considerations of certain other kinds are brought to bear
on the offender and / or oneself, the judgment in which this content is affirmed may be
retained without the anger (that is, without the alienating special kind of perception).
So an enduring disposition to the act or process of forgiveness will match the
definition of a virtue as a trait that fits one to live one’s life well in some distinctively
human dimension — or it will do so at least within moral frameworks in which
relationships like friendship are important, yet must be maintained without the
compromise of integrity. Of the philosophical writings on forgiveness that I have read,
two refer to forgiveness as a virtue, and one of them has a couple of pages of analysis of
the concepti; but most of the literature is about the act or process of forgiveness, rather
than forgivingness. In what follows I shall argue that forgivingness is the disposition to
abort one’s anger (or altogether to omit getting angry) at persons one takes to have
wronged one culpably, by seeing them in the benevolent terms provided by reasons
characteristic of forgiving.
Thus the two main issues in the analysis of forgiveness are anger and the reasons
for which it may be aborted. In section 2 I compare anger with some neighboring
emotions that philosophers have proposed as characteristically overcome in forgiveness,
and sketch briefly my account of what anger, and emotion more broadly, is. In section 3 I
canvass a number of possible reasons for forgiving which, when incorporated into one’s
perception of the offender, dissipate one’s anger at him. Exploration of these
considerations suggests that the forgiving person is characterized by discomfort at
alienation from others and by a sense of justice and self-respect. Presumably the
forgiving person is not an indiscriminate forgiver; she may sometimes properly hold onto
her anger. So I sketch, in section 4, roughly the considerations that guide the forgiving
person as to when to forgive and when to withhold forgiveness. In a concluding section I
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delineate the character of the forgiving person using insights that have emerged in
sections 2-4.
2. The emotion that forgiveness overcomes
It is mildly controversial just which emotion is characteristically overcome in
forgiveness, though it is widely agreed to be something in the neighborhood of anger.
Aurel Kolnaiii makes it out to be indignation, and Bishop Butleriii seems to be behind the
idea that it is resentment, with several recent writers following Butler in this.iv Jean
Hamptonv suggests that the emotion relevant to forgiveness is “moral hatred.” In the
present section I canvass these suggestions to refine our understanding of the emotion
that forgiveness overcomes and begin sketching its relation to forgiveness. I argue that
we do not have a word that denotes the emotion and the only emotion that forgiveness
characteristically overcomes, but that ‘anger’ is the least troublesome term, and we can
use it as long as we stipulate a rather simple circumscription. Before I survey the
philosophical claims, let me state what I take emotions, and more particularly anger, to
be.
I have argued that emotions are best thought of as concern-based construals,vi that
is, perceptual states analogous to the ones we are in when we view the gestalt figures in
certain psychology books, or hear a snippet of melody as part of the subject of the C
minor fugue in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. To have an emotion is to perceive a state
of affairs in certain terms that define the emotion type (nostalgia, embarrassment,
romantic melancholy, indignation) and give the emotion its particular “object,” but
always on the basis of concerns (desires, attachments, carings). The concerns basic to an
emotion are to be numbered among its terms — they do not just move to action, but color
how things are “seen.” Among the terms of human emotions are almost always to be
reckoned certain propositions or language-dependent thoughts. Such propositions are
often, though not always, believed; but even when they are believed, they figure in
emotion only to the extent that the subject “sees” in terms of them. Emotions are more
perceptual than mere evaluative judgments.
Anger, on this account, is a construal of a situation as containing an offender and
an offended. The offender is construed as culpable for the offense (otherwise the emotion
is only irritation, annoyance, vexation, regret, grief…), which is construed as morally
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significant (important, serious); and the offender is construed as having punishment
coming to him. Thus the subject would like to punish the offender, even if only with a
harsh word or a dirty look, or would take satisfaction in seeing punishment meted out to
the offender by some third party, or even by Fate. That the offender appears to the victim
to be offensive and worthy to be punished is particularly relevant to forgiveness,
inasmuch as it is this appearance that drops out as forgiveness supervenes. Also, the
angry person (who may or may not be the offended) construes himself as in a moral
position to render judgment — that is, in a position of moral superiority. This we learn
from noting that anger can be undermined by getting the subject to construe himself as on
a moral footing with the offender (see section 3, Moral commonality). It shows that
forgivingness is a dispositional attitude concerning oneself, and not just offenders; it
involves a particular kind of self-understanding.
The tradition I follow, of interpreting forgiveness as the overcoming of an
emotion, is exemplified in the modern philosophical writings with which I interact, as
well as in the Judaism and Christianity of the Bible from which our contemporary
concept chiefly derives. But sometimes forgiveness is not a forswearing or avoidance of
emotion. A graduate school colleague of twenty years ago phones you out of the blue and
asks forgiveness for once enviously slandering you in the presence of some other students
and a professor. Nothing came of the slander and you were unaware of it until now;
knowing of it, you are emotionally indifferent. Your forgiveness in this case is not much
of a psychological process at all, but simply the act of saying “I forgive you.” This kind
of case does not undermine the defining place of anger in the concept of forgiveness.
First, it is uncharacteristic. Second, the offender feels the need for forgiveness because he
feels guilty, and guilt can be regarded as self-directed anger or as a sense that the
offended one should be angry or would be justified in being so. Third, while forgiveness,
in the present case, is not a withdrawal of anger, it is an act of assuring the offender that
one is not disposed to be angry. In these ways forgiveness’s reference to anger remains
even in this nonstandard case.
Indignation. Kolnai selects indignation as the emotion that forgiveness dispels,
perhaps because to be indignant is to be especially confident of being morally right and to
see the offense one is angry about as especially morally aberrant. As a strongly “moral”
and retributive form of anger, indignation fits forgiveness, which applies
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paradigmatically where the offended one emotionally ascribes moral guilt to the offender.
But many cases of indignation actually rule out forgiveness, since one can be indignant
about an offense that is not against oneself, but one can only forgive offenses against
oneself.vii And forgiveness is appropriate to many cases where there is no indignation or
even the possibility of it, but only, say, resentment or some milder or less confident form
of anger.
Resentment. One reason to favor resentment as the emotion relevant to
forgiveness is that it accords with the logic of forgiveness inasmuch as it is limited to
offenses against the resenter. (I could not, as a white North American, have forgiven the
Afrikaners for their offenses against South African blacks; in parallel it would be bad
English to say that I resented their offenses, while it is perfectly natural to say that I was
angered by them or indignant about them. Perhaps African Americans, in an attitude of
strong identification with native South Africans, could resent the Afrikaners’ actions.)
But I think resentment is in a worse position than indignation since ‘resentment’ is
reserved for anger that is to some extent brooding and defensive. The resenter not only
construes himself as culpably offended against in some matter of importance; he also
construes himself as to some degree impotent or restrained in the matter of avenging the
offense. Thus the suggestion that resentment lasts awhile, and that the resenter harbors
his anger, and only reluctantly, or perhaps indirectly, expresses it. So to take resentment
to be always the emotion that is overcome in forgiveness seems to rule out a powerful
and frankly angry person’s forgiving his offender. To take the extreme case, it rules out
God’s ever forgiving anyone, since God is too much in control for his wrath ever to be
resentment.viii
Resentment appeals to some theorists because of its durability or grudge-bearing
quality; some of the most dramatic cases of forgiveness are ones in which a person
triumphs after struggling with a recalcitrant, gnawing, destructive anger. These cases also
appeal to people who emphasize that forgiveness is a kind of therapy for the forgiver. But
such dramatic and therapeutic cases are not the only ones, and in a discussion of the
virtue of forgiveness this kind of case will not take center stage. Forgivingness will tend
to shorten the anger, and in some cases forgivingness is exemplified without there being
any actual anger to be overcome, aborted, forsworn, or abandoned. I conclude that
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because of resentment’s passivity and durability, making it the emotion overcome in
forgiveness artificially narrows the field of forgiveness.
Moral hatred. Jean Hampton suggests that the emotion relevant to forgiveness is
moral hatred. On Hampton’s analysis, moral hatred differs from two other kinds of
hatred, malice and spite.ix Malice springs from low self-esteem and seeks (in vain) to
establish one’s own worth by diminishing that of the offender, who is construed as
having diminished one’s worth or shown it to be low. Malice is self-defeating because it
is essentially competitive (I’m OK insofar as I’m better than my offender) but since its
strategy is to show or cause the offender to be worthless, then insofar as it succeeds, it
fails to show the malicious one to be worth much. Spite is similar, except that instead of
seeking superiority to its object, it seeks to bring the object down to its own miserable
level. Hampton’s example is the AIDS victim who seeks to feel better about herself by
infecting others. On Hampton’s view, you cannot have forgiven someone if you still feel
spite or malice towards him, but spite and malice are not the emotions characteristically
overcome in forgiveness because forgiveness applies to moral offenses and moral
offenders, and in malice and spite we construe our offenders too little in moral terms and
too much in terms of their relevance to our own status.
What Hampton calls moral hatred seems to be not so much an emotion on its own,
as a dimension of what she calls indignation. It seems to me that at this point her
phenomenology is right but her vocabulary is not well chosen. ‘Indignation’ is too narrow
a word for the emotion that includes “moral hatred,” and ‘moral hatred’ is too strong for
this aspect of the emotion. An example of her own illustrates both points.x A normally
self-possessed mother whose young child lies to her will protest the wrong, which is also
an insult to her (and her sense of the insult and her motive for protest will be anger,
though Hampton does not say this). As Hampton notes, because of the mother’s position
and self-confidence it will be improper to say that she resents the child’s action. But it
seems equally inappropriate to say the mother is indignant towards the child. If she is
indignant, she has exaggerated the moral seriousness of the offense. It seems better just to
say that she’s angry.
If she forgives the child, it seems too strong to say that she has overcome her
“moral hatred” of him. But on my account of emotion it is clear enough what Hampton
has in mind with this phrase. In the anger-construal the moral offense is synthetically
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locked onto the offender so that he looks offensive, alien, and unwelcome; he looks
guiltyxi and deserving of suffering (punishment); he has decidedly not the look of a friend
(even if he is a friend), and in the extreme case he has the look of an enemy. As it dawns
on the mother of the little liar that she has been offended against in this matter of
importance, her vision of her son — however fleeting, in whatever degree of intensity,
and whatever the degree of conviction or disbelief she may attach to her perception —
comes into the focus of anger and she sees an OFFENDER, one who needs, not to be
hugged and cuddled, but to be held at a distance, to be shunned and punished. It is this
vision of the other as properly alien on grounds of guilty offense that, it seems to
Hampton and me, is characteristically overcome in forgiveness. Hampton is right to think
this vision of the offender is separable from the issues surrounding what she calls malice
and spite, issues of wounded self-esteem interpreted in a matrix of invidious comparison
and competition. Whatever other perceptual features may be present in such special
versions of anger as indignation and resentment, they share this experience of the
offender as alien, unworthy, and due to be punished.
An advantage of the view of emotion that I am trading on is that it clarifies how a
victim can fully believe that his offender has culpably wronged him in a morally
significant way and even deserves to suffer punishment for her offense, yet without being
angry at her. Since emotions are construals (instances of “seeing-as”), their cognitive or
propositional content is not just whatever the subject happens to believe about the object
of his attention. They are a matter of “seeing” in terms of one or another proposition, and
for this purpose only some of the occurrently believed propositions will be picked out.
When the victim succeeds in forgiving his offender he does not see her, in that specially
vivid and concern-based way that constitutes anger, in terms of his beliefs about her
offense against him; instead he sees her in other, more benevolent terms that derive from
his reasons for forgiving her. The victim’s forgiveness consists in his overcoming the
retributive emotion, not by ceasing to make the retributive judgment, but by becoming
undisposed to the alienating retributive construal. A non-emotional analogy may help
convince the reader that my distinction between judging a proposition to be true and
seeing in terms of it is not gratuitous. A famous gestalt figure can be seen, alternatively,
as a pretty young woman or an old lady. You can look at the figure and currently judge
that there is an old lady to be seen in the figure, without actually seeing her.
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I propose, then, that the emotion overcome in forgiveness is anger, and that the
facet of anger that makes it important sometimes to overcome it, even in its morally
purest forms, is the view of the offender as bad, alien, guilty, worthy of suffering,
unwelcome, offensive, an enemy, etc. We do need to circumscribe the concept of anger
as forgiveness applies to it, in a way that people were probably trying to do in making
resentment the emotion overcome in forgiveness: forgiveness applies only to anger about
offenses against oneself.
In forgiveness the perception of the offender as alien, evil, etc. is abandoned not
just in any way, but on the basis of considerations of a certain type or types which
promote a benevolent perception of the offender. Thus our next task in the analysis of
forgiveness is to clarify how the angry vision is overruled, and I do so by examining
kinds of considerations that may undermine anger at an offender. The concepts of anger
and forgiveness will be clarified by determining just what bearing these considerations
have on anger, and by determining which of the possible ways of dispelling one’s anger
are characteristic of forgiveness. Our explorations will also make clearer the concept I
have been expressing with such words as ‘overcome,’ ‘give up,’ ‘abandon,’ ‘abort,’ and
‘dispel.’
3. Considerations favoring forgiveness
The chief considerations favoring forgiveness are 1) repentance of the offender;
2) excuses for the offender; 3) suffering of the offender; 4) moral commonality with the
offender; and 5) relationship to the offender. Forgivingness consists in sensitivity to such
anger-reducing considerations; self-management in forgiveness consists in exploiting
such considerations with a view to reducing one’s anger. Such exploitation can be more
or less intentional and self-conscious. The more intentional form may be called self-
control; as it becomes more automatic we may speak of increments in the virtue of
forgivingness. Though forgiving self-control clearly differs from forgivingness, the line
between them is not clear. Without sensitivity to the forgiveness considerations, forgiving
self-control won’t work; and even the person who is most mature in forgivingness will
have to employ some forgiving self-control since, as I shall argue in section 5, the
forgiving person is not unsusceptible of anger.
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Repentance. That the offender has expressed remorse for the offense and sought
forgiveness is perhaps the paradigm reason for forgiving. It is instructive to see why.
When the offender asks forgiveness he is showing that he takes (roughly) the same
position of moral disapproval of the offense as the offended one takes. He invites the
other to construe him as in attitudinal solidarity with her, as on her own side with regard
to evaluating the offense. In the last section we saw that anger envisages the offender as
an alien, someone opposed to oneself, and his repentance goes a long way toward
overcoming this impression.
The paradigmatic status of repentance as a reason for forgiving suggests that the
aim of reconciliation, a return to the status of being fellows, is basic to forgiveness. It
suggests too that being fellows is largely a matter of attitudes, and in particular emotions
— of how we view each other, from the heart. Forgivingness and the practice of
forgiveness are at home in an ethic of community or friendship — one underlain by a
sense of belonging to one another. But they require that there be strong differentiation of
individuals as well, so that the one can bear responsibility for offending the other, and the
other can choose to forgive. The centrality of repentance tells us that the forgiving person
has an underlying proneness to see others as fellows, a concern to live in peace with
them. She may get angry and alienated from people, but she remains uncomfortable with
that. The more encompassing the class of people she feels this way about, the greater the
scope of this virtue in her. Some ethical outlooks, say a warrior or honor ethic, assume
that having enemies is natural and appropriate; others, like Christianity, assume that all
enmity is unnatural, abnormal, and inappropriate. Paradigm individuals from these
traditions will differ in the scope of the disposition to feel discomfort at having an enemy,
and this will be an important difference in the structure of their forgivingness.
Kolnai says at one point that forgiveness is “re-acceptance,” and Norvin Richards
objectsxii that if so, then to forgive a person one offense is to forgive him all his offenses
against oneself; but sometimes we forgive a person one injury, but not another, so
forgiveness cannot be re-acceptance. This objection does not touch my claim, which is
not that forgiveness is reconciliation, but that it aims at it. If S has committed two wrongs
against me, w1 and w2, and I have forgiven S for w1, but not for w2, I am still alienated
from S, despite forgiving him for w1. Nevertheless, my forgiving S for w1 will be
motivated by a concern for reconciliation. Another objection would touch my claim:
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Consider the stranger whose car drenches you with mud…she stops to
apologize, insists on paying your cleaning bill, and so on. Surely it is
possible to forgive this woman, just as it would be if she were an equally
repentant friend. But to call this “re-accepting” her or “re-establishing our
relationship” is rather strained: there was no relationship, and there is none
after she drives away.xiii
Richards is too quick to say there was no relationship. Some moral outlooks make it quite
explicit what that relationship is: members of a kingdom of ends, brothers and sisters,
children of God, fellow sojourners upon this earth; and even people who do not explicitly
share in such a tradition may be shaped in their vision of others by some such conception.
The stranger’s injury of the pedestrian disrupts this relationship: he is angry at her for
having injured him, she is alarmed at having done so; the repentance and forgiveness
reestablish the disrupted relationship. Forgivingness belongs in an ethic in which at least
some people are conceived as in a relationship that can be disrupted by injury and anger;
insofar as forgiveness can be extended to strangers, they too are construed (if only
subliminally) in this way. I speak of a vision of the other as in this community with
oneself, or the sense that these offenders ought not to be one’s enemies, because this is
not just a belief of the forgiving person, but a basic form of his vision of himself and
other human beings. As an emotionally integrated belief, it is the stuff of which virtues
are made. One welcomes the repentance of offenders, is on the lookout for possibilities of
reconciliation. The more generally susceptible the forgiver is to this reason, the more
deeply forgiving a person he is, other things being equal.
Excuses. From the cross Jesus of Nazareth prays, referring to those who have
crucified him, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Jeffrie Murphy,
thinking Jesus has misunderstood the grammar of forgiveness, suggests an improved
formulation. Jesus should have said, “Father excuse them for they know not what they
do.”xiv It is true that Jesus is excusing his offenders; does it follow that he cannot be
forgiving them? It would, were Jesus excusing them of all wrongdoing. In that case there
could be no question of forgiving them, because forgiveness applies only to culpable
wrongdoing. But it is implausible to think that Jesus regarded his crucifiers as guilty of
no wrongdoing. They surely noticed they were crucifying a man, and knew this was
wrong; perhaps they even knew he was innocent. But still, they did not know what they
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were doing: crucifying the Holy One of God. Jesus’ words suppose some offenses to be
more forgivable than others. There are mitigating factors, degrees of guilt, and
corresponding to these, degrees of forgivability. A good excuse may show an offense to
be more forgivable — that is, less properly angering — than it seemed.
Forgivability may be ethical or psychological. It is an ethical matter that the crime
of crucifying an innocent man is more forgivable than crucifying the Holy One. It is a
psychological matter that some people may be unable to forgive a certain kind of offense
against themselves — unable to overcome their perception of its perpetrator as detestable
and alien — but able to forgive another, that strikes them, emotionally, as less terrible. In
either case, excusing the crime may render it forgivable by reducing its perceived
offensiveness, either bringing it into the range of offenses that are ethically forgivable, or
bringing it within the forgiver’s psychological range. Both kinds of forgivability are
relevant to forgivingness. The person with the virtue of forgivingness will be one whose
psychological range is relatively more encompassing than that of people who are less
forgiving, up to the limit of ethical forgivability.
In the last subsection we saw that the forgiving person is open to the repentance
of his offender, because he is uncomfortable being alienated from fellow human beings,
or from the particular human being who has alienated him. For a similar reason, the
forgiving person is open to excuses for his offender, indeed is prone to look for such
excuses. But openness for the offender’s repentance and for mitigations of his guilt are
special moral forms of the disinclination to stay angry, ones that show sensitivity to the
moral weight of the offense. They are to be contrasted with an inability to recognize
offenses for what they are, which might result from being undiscerning, or from a
perverse self-image, perhaps in the form of one of Thomas E. Hill's character-types, the
Uncle Tom, the Self-Deprecator, or the Deferential Wife.xv But moral stupidity, though it
effectively reduces one’s disposition to anger, is as far from being characteristic of
forgivingness as the disposition to bear grudges is. The forgiving person’s higher
tolerance of offenses must be a morally intelligent tolerance. It must be characterized by
an ethically concerned practical wisdom that enables the forgiver to recognize the offense
as an offense, and also to know, at least virtually, a reason why he does not take offense.
An excuse that makes the offense more forgivable is such a reason.
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Another way not to take offense is condonation. Like the excuser and unlike the
morally stupid, the condoner recognizes that a wrong has been done; but he neither
forgives nor mitigates the wrong with an excuse. Like the forgiver, the condoner gives up
his anger or doesn’t get angry, doesn’t seek retribution. But unlike the forgiver, the
condoner’s failure to get angry is sub-morally motivated: by an aversion to getting upset,
by a fear of the consequences of angry behavior, by a distaste for effort or trouble. An
example would be employees who quell their tendency to get angry at their employer’s
injustice towards them out of fear of losing their jobs. That such motives prevail against
the sense of offense indicates a lack of the moral seriousness, or integrity, characteristic
of forgivingness. The forgiving person’s interest in her offender’s repentance and in
excuses for his action springs not only from a discomfort with being alienated from him,
but also from a robust concern for justice and a robust self-respect.
Suffering. Brand Blanshard remarks:
Malice in others, particularly if they pose as our friends, is of course
deplorable. Still as a rule it is far more damaging to the malicious person
than to his victims; and as a reflective man contemplates it steadily, he
sees that most of his resentment against it is a waste of his own substance.
Malice is the symptom of moral disease, the sign of a maimed and
disfigured spirit. It always has its causes in frustration, inadequacy, self-
misjudgment, and the like. To the master of serenity, like Marcus
Aurelius, it has seemed a more appropriate object of compassion than of
anger…xvi
Blanshard does not tie these remarks to forgiveness proper, but we can see here four
possible reasons to forgive. If we take the reference to disease in a strong sense,
connecting it with the supposed “causes” of malice, then we may see the malicious
person as a patient rather than as an agent, as a victim rather than as a criminal. This
gives us a compelling reason not to be angry at the offender. But Murphy is right: this is
not forgiveness, but excuse.xvii The second reason is suggested by Blanshard’s remark that
resenting others’ malice is a waste of one’s own substance. Therapeutic motivations in
this egoistic form seem to be outside the spirit of forgiveness, which is a species of
generosity.xviii The third reason is more explicit in the following from Butler:
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…though injury, injustice, oppression, the baseness of ingratitude, are the
natural objects of indignation, or if you please resentment…; yet they are
likewise the objects of compassion, as they are their own punishment, and
without repentance will for ever be so. No one ever did a designed injury
to another, but at the same time he did a much greater to himself.xix
Butler’s point is that the disfigurement resulting from malice is adequate punishment for
the crime. In my anger I wish retribution — that the offender suffer as he deserves. Then
I reflect that by his malice he has maimed himself, and satisfy my thirst for his
punishment by noting that he got what he deserved. This is not forgiveness either, but
pure retributive justice. Forgiveness involves suppressing, forgoing, aborting, starving, or
by-passing the anger, whereas the present reflection dispels it by satisfying it. One who
habitually satisfied his anger by this mental strategy might give the appearance of being
forgiving, since he would feel no impulse to vindictive behavior. But if he expressed this
strategy openly by saying, for example, “That jerk deserves his misery, and I feel OK
about what he did to me, when I consider that he is as miserable as he deserves to be,” no
one would regard him as displaying forgivingness.
The fourth reason for forgoing anger at an offender we might call compassion
pure and simple. It is compassion, because it construes the offender in terms of his
damage, weakness, suffering, inadequacy, etc.; it is pure because it does not vindictively
regard this harm as his rightful punishment for the offense, but something to be regretted
and if possible corrected for his sake; and it is simple because it adds no rider that the
offender is a mere patient, but allows that he has responsibility for what he has done.
Because in compassion we wish the offender well, having compassion for him is at odds
with being angry at him, in which we wish him punitive harm. A moving example of
forgiveness motivated by the suffering of the offender is found in Leo Tolstoy’s War and
Peace. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s marriage to Natasha Rostov must, at his father’s
insistence, be delayed a year. Prince Andrei departs for a time, and while he is away the
rake Anatole Kuragin alienates Natasha’s affections and they attempt to elope. The
elopement fails, but in Prince Andrei’s view it destroys any possibility of marrying his
beloved Natasha. Prince Andrei pursues Kuragin to Petersburg and into Turkey with the
intention of provoking him to a duel, but does not find him. At the battle of Borodino
Andrei is severely wounded and carried into a tent-hospital where he is laid on one of
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three tables. On one of the other tables lies a man sobbing and choking convulsively,
whose leg has just been amputated. Gradually, Prince Andrei recognizes him as Kuragin.
He remembered Natasha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in
1810, with her slender neck and arms, with her timid, happy face prepared
for ecstasy, and his soul awoke to a love and tenderness for her which
were stronger and more pulsing with life than they had ever been. Now he
remembered the link between himself and this man who was gazing
vaguely at him through the tears that filled his swollen eyes. Prince Andrei
remembered everything, and a passionate pity and love for this man
welled up in his happy heart. Prince Andrei could no longer restrain
himself, and wept tender compassionate tears for his fellow-men, for
himself and for their errors and his own.xx
Forgiveness here is a matter of refocusing the wrongdoer: while “remembering
everything,” Prince Andrei switches from seeing Kuragin in terms of the harm he had
done him and his desert of punishment — the terms in which he had pursued him for
months — and now sees him benevolently in the suffering and weakness of his humanity.
The crisis created by the battle activates a disposition to forgive that neither Andrei nor
anyone else knew he had. Note that in this example the compassion seems to work
without the aid of the other two considerations we have looked at: Kuragin does not
repent, nor does Prince Andrei learn or reflect on any excusing circumstance.
It seems clear what this reason for forgiveness implies about forgivingness. An
important dimension of the virtue will be an ability and disposition to take the viewpoint
of sufferers, in particular of sufferers who have offended against us. It is an ability to
transcend, or detach ourselves from, our own position as one who has been harmed, and
take the position of the other almost as if it were our own.
Someone may grant that compassion dispels anger in the way I have described,
and even that when this happens it may be genuine forgiveness, but object to my talk of
compassion as a reason for forgiveness. Prince Andrei does not consult a reason for
forgiving Kuragin, but is simply caused to do so by the vision of Kuragin's suffering. I
invite the reader to consider the following. As a construal, an emotion may be a reason
for doing something or (as in the present case) for not feeling another emotion, because a
human emotion is typically a propositionally determined perception. If asked why he has
15
a medical check-up yearly, the fifty-year-old may say he fears latent diseases, which on
my view of emotion is to say that he sees himself in terms of the proposition (among
others),
I am under threat from latent diseases.
Similarly, if we ask Prince Andrei why he is no longer angry with his offender, he may
say, “Look how miserable he is.” And in saying so, he commends to our perception the
proposition in terms of which he construes the offender. But to speak of reasons here is
not to exclude talk of causes. The occurrence of compassion causes anger to fade, in
much the way that seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck excludes, for the moment, the view of
the duck-rabbit as a rabbit.
The forgiving person is one in whom such reasons as the offender’s suffering and
weakness habitually cast into the shadow legitimate reasons for being angry.
Consideration of the significance of repentance and excuses in the two preceding
subsections has suggested that a basic aspect of forgivingness is a concern for benevolent,
harmonious fellowship with others. The relevance to forgiveness of compassion — a
disposition to care about others in their adversity — seems to point in the same direction.
Moral commonality. The concern for harmonious relationship is also reflected in
the forgiver’s proneness to appeal to moral commonality with his offender as a reason
that resolves his anger. The following story is told of Moses, called the Robber or the
Negro, who before he became a monk lived by robbery:
A brother at Scetis committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba
Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone
to say to him, ‘Come, for everyone is waiting for you.’ So he got up and
went. He took a leaking jug filled with water and carried it with him. The
others came out to meet him and said to him, ‘What is this, Father?’ The
old man said to them, ‘My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them,
and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.’ When they heard
that, they said no more to the brother, but forgave him.xxi
Since they finally forgive the brother, we can assume that his fault was some offense
against the members of the council. As a reason to forgive him, Abba Moses invites his
fellow monks to consider their own faults. But how is this a reason?
16
We can dismiss a common but spurious inference: That if we all do some wrong,
it is less reprehensible than if only some of us did it. Abba Moses seems to suggest,
instead, that a sinner is not in a position to judge another sinner. What can be meant by
‘judge’ here, and what has it to do with granting or withholding forgiveness, with being
angry or forswearing one’s anger? The judge sits in a superior position vis-à-vis the
defendant; as judge, he is removed from the defendant, so it is incongruous for one
criminal to sit in judgment of another. Abba Moses is inviting the council to see
themselves as on the “same level” as this offender.
This interpretation is borne out by something in the logic of anger. Anger takes
the superior, “judgmental” position. The angry one construes himself as in the position of
judge and the offender as defendant, as in the inferior position — at least with respect to
the matter about which he is angry. Anger is thus a down-looking emotion. This need not
be an invidious or contemptuous looking down; pride and contempt have a significantly
different grammar from anger. But the social ordering ingredient in anger explains why
resentment is so unpleasant and thus often unconscious: being a form of anger, it has the
compulsion to look down, but it is also a construal of oneself as impotent with respect to
the offender — as looking up at him. So an aspect of the grammar of anger is undercut by
the recognition that one is guilty of offenses similar to the offender’s, and this recognition
is a reason for forgiving the other. This is why humility is closely allied with and
supports forgiveness. One who is inclined to insist on the moral difference between
himself and offenders — a haughty or self-righteous person — will be unsusceptible to
this consideration and more likely to remain angry.
In some moral outlooks, such as Judaism, one’s likeness to the offender is always
a reason to forgive, and one is seriously deficient in forgivingness, to the extent that one
lacks humility.xxii This is so because of a doctrine (or insight) that before God we are all in
the wrong, even if there may be people we have not sinned against. By contrast, in an
outlook like Aristotle’s, where some people may very well be perfectly good and one
may legitimately have a strong sense of one’s moral superiority to others, this reason for
forgiving will be available only on some occasions. Insofar as reasons to forgive become
embedded in a person’s habitual perception of offenders, Jewish forgivingness differs, as
a virtue, from Aristotelian forgivingness.
17
A related reason to forgive is that the offended one has himself been forgiven
some similar offense. Jesus of Nazareth tells a parable about a servant who owed his king
a sum of money so vast he couldn’t pay. The king resolved to sell him into bondage to
raise money for the debt, but the man begged patience and out of compassion the king
forgave him the whole debt. The servant himself was owed a small sum by a fellow
servant, but when the latter asked for patience the servant had him thrown in debtor’s
prison. Hearing of this, the king summoned the servant and said, “You wicked servant! I
forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy
on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?”xxiii Literally the parable is not about the
forgiveness of offenses, but about the remission of debts — a matter having nothing to do
with overcoming anger and the alienation it entails. But it is probably to be read as saying
that God’s having forgiven us our offenses against him should be a compelling reason for
us to forgive those who offend us. Let us read the ‘should’ as a virtue-should — as saying
that one who is properly formed emotionally will find, in his being forgiven, a
compelling reason for forgiving others. Because the servant was insensitive to this
consideration the king takes him to be “wicked.”
How does somebody’s forgiving me become a reason for me to forgive somebody
else? What is the wicked servant’s defect, that blinds him to the connection between his
receiving forgiveness and his being called on to give it? Is there a principle of justice
here, to the effect that I owe as much forgiveness as I receive? Or does this reason
collapse into the one just discussed, namely that it establishes my being on the same
“level” as my offender and thus militates against my being angry at him? (In this case my
having received forgiveness is not the reason for forgiving, but rather my needing it.)
Neither of these interpretations is quite right. It is neither justice, strictly speaking, that
the servant lacks, nor simply humility (though he does lack that).
The servant lacks gratitude and empathy. By involving the forgiver’s benevolent
beneficence towards the forgiven, acts of forgiveness exemplify a kind of generosity. So
the attitude which properly receives and acknowledges forgiveness is gratitude. But
gratitude requires humility, in that it is a glad response to a one-down situation, that of
being indebted.xxiv The servant, however, takes the king’s grace for granted. That is, he
forgets or emotionally underrates the magnitude of his debt, and thus the goodness of the
king. Generosity can be exemplified by cancelling a debt; gratitude, however, is not a
18
disregard for the debt, but a glad dwelling in it and gracious acknowledgment of it. The
grateful person construes himself as indebted to his benefactor, even though, and
precisely because, the benefactor has canceled his debt. If the servant sees these things
clearly, he will see himself, with a certain gladness, as being unrepayably indebted to the
king. Grasping this more than intellectually, he will be sensitive to the commonality
between himself and his own debtor — that is, will identify with his own debtor, see him
as like himself and be concerned for him on analogy with his concern for himself. This
attitude is called empathy. But instead he regards himself as scot-free, forgets his former
debt and the king’s goodness, and thus fails to perceive the analogy between his own
situation and the other servant’s. That connection, then, can be expressed in the following
proposition: In his indebtedness to me, my fellow servant is like me in my (now canceled)
indebtedness to the king; and my fellow servant's faring well, like mine, is important. The
virtues by which such a proposition can move a person to forgive — virtues which lie
therefore in the background of forgivingness — are gratitude and empathy.
Relationship. In our discussion of the previous four reasons for forgiving, it has
emerged that the teleology of forgiveness is reconciliation — restoration or maintenance
of a relationship of acceptance, benevolent attitude, and harmonious interaction. So it
comes as no surprise that close, non-instrumental relationship is one of the most
important reasons people give for forgiving: “I forgive her because she is my friend
(sister, wife, daughter, mother, colleague).”
We can distinguish two ways that a person may desire reconciliation, one that has
the offender in benevolent view, and another that is purely instrumental. Imagine an
estranged couple, angry and alienated over marital crimes against one another. Though
Piet is still very angry at Tieneke, he wants to be reconciled with her. But what does he
want, in wanting that? They have three young children, and Piet believes the children will
suffer psychological damage if he and Tieneke are not reconciled. So he has an
instrumental desire for reconciliation with her: reconciliation with her is a means of
protecting the children. As long as this, and nothing more, remains Piet’s reason for
seeking reconciliation, Piet cannot forgive Tieneke. He may succeed in putting away his
anger at her, and he may live with her in a kind of harmony that is better for the children
than divorce, but he cannot forgive her. Piet is over his anger, all right, but the way he is
over it is not forgiveness.
19
I noted at the beginning of this section that a kind of self-control is often involved
in forgiveness, a more or less intentional management of one’s anger by reference to the
considerations characteristic of forgiveness. But there are other ways of controlling anger
that do not replace it with a benevolent view of the offender. For example, Piet reminds
himself that 200 years from now Tieneke’s offense against him will matter to no one,
least of all to him, or he tells himself that no one can really hurt him unless he consents to
be hurt, and thus he takes upon himself responsibility for his injuries. Or he convinces
himself that the course of the world is inevitable (including the vicious actions of
Tieneke). Or he construes Tieneke as literally beneath contempt and her hatred or
disregard of him as meaning nothing. The ability to mitigate or dispel anger in such ways
as these is self-control, but these ways of overcoming anger are not the self-control
characteristic of forgiveness, even if they result in one’s getting along well enough with
the person one was formerly angry at. Such a control of anger does not have the offender
in benevolent view.
This is not just control of the behavior characteristic of anger — scowling,
yelling, insulting, etc. — but control of the view that one takes of the offender. The Stoic
and Nietzschean exercises mentioned in the preceding paragraph are designed to dispel
the perception that is (I hold) identical with anger. In the one, Piet sees the offense as
unimportant, in another he sees himself as invulnerable to hurt, in another he sees
Tieneke as non-culpable or merely contemptible rather than deserving punishment, etc.
etc. But even though the anger itself is dispelled, none of these cases is forgiveness,
because the motivation characteristic of forgiveness (desire for a benevolent relationship
with the offender) and the replacement perception characteristic of forgiveness (the view
of the other as friend, fellow, lover) are absent.
This non-forgiving self-control of anger may promote forgiveness. If Piet
succeeds in controlling his anger at Tieneke, even if only for the sake of the children and
using Stoic strategies, Tieneke may respond by becoming lovable, and as a result he may
begin to regard her with genuine benevolence. Or Piet’s demeanor of non-anger towards
her may transform his construal of himself into that of a person benevolently disposed
towards her, and what was a simulacrum of benevolence changes gradually into the real
thing.
20
4. Withholding forgiveness
The forgiving person has in him anger-defeating principles — sensitivities to
forgiveness considerations. But he is capable of anger, and the anger-defeating
sensitivities don’t always apply — don’t always meet with fit objects. The patterns of
affordance and refusal of forgiveness define the virtue no less than the nature of anger
and anger’s interactions with the considerations characteristic of forgiveness that
undermine it. So, briefly and with an imprecision befitting the subject matter, we must
indicate when the forgiving person will withhold forgiveness. Let us look for proper
limits to forgiveness corresponding to the five considerations favoring forgiveness,
reversing, however, the order of the first two considerations.
Severity of the offense. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov is a paradigm
of forgivingness (see his response to being stoned and bitten by the boy Ilushaxxv). But he
has his limits. His brother Ivan tells of a gentleman general who lords it over his serfs. An
eight year old serf boy throws a stone in play and hurts the paw of the general’s favorite
hound. The general orders the boy locked up. The next morning
“the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents,
dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade.
The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all
stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It’s a
gloomy, cold, foggy autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general
orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers,
numb with terror, not daring to cry.... ‘Make him run,’ commands the
general. ‘Run! Run!’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs.... ‘At him!’ yells
the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds
catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!”xxvi
Ivan challenges the mild Alyosha to say what should be done with the general, and
Alyosha murmurs reluctantly that he should be shot. It is no doubt the heinousness of this
crime — its despicable pettiness, calculation, and cruelty — that blocks Alyosha’s access
to the considerations that characteristically soften the anger response in him.
Alyosha is not properly in a position to forgive the general, since the general’s
crime was not committed against Alyosha. If the murdered boy were Alyosha’s little
brother, then Alyosha would himself be in a position to forgive or withhold forgiveness.
21
Given what we know about Alyosha, it seems clear that the despicableness of the crime is
not an absolute barrier to forgiveness. Imagine that the general comes to Alyosha and
begs his forgiveness for murdering Alyosha’s little brother. At first Alyosha is skeptical
about the depth of the general’s repentance, but as a token of it he is willing to divide his
property among his serfs and adopt the life of a mendicant. He does this, and Alyosha
receives him as a brother.
Unrepentance. Lesser offenses may properly remain unforgiven, at least for a
time, because of the offender’s unrepentance. Your brother is a (supposedly) recovering
heroin addict. He calls you up, says he needs a place to live and a job and can you help
him out. You invite him, along with his girlfriend and their baby, to come live with you
while he gets on his feet. You lay down some house-rules: No smoking indoors, no drugs,
look hard for a job, regular Bible study at the rehab center, cooperate in the family life
(the house is really too small for two families). A couple of weeks into their stay, you
have incontrovertible evidence that they’ve been smoking pot in the house and that some
of the job-hunting excursions were used to find heroin. Confronted with the facts, your
brother lies to you at first, but then concedes that it’s all true. You’re a forgiving person
and you love your brother but you’re mad, and not by any deficit of virtue. You judge
that this is not the time for forgiveness.
The justification for remaining angry is that the offender is currently active in his
offense. Any gestures of allying himself with your moral position seem to be more or less
shameless manipulation and persistence in crime. It would be a sign of moral flaccidity to
forgive at the moment. Here your forgivingness is not displayed in forgiving, but consists
in a readiness to forgive whenever real repentance becomes evident.
What if repentance is not forthcoming? Fed up with your brother’s unwillingness
to do what needs to be done, you turn him out of the house. Three years later he is still a
miserable addict, and has not even apologized for the deceit and the six fruitless weeks of
freeloading. Maybe he even resents your not giving him another chance. I judge that in a
forgiving person the anger will have faded to sadness under the bleaching influence of
compassion and brotherly affection.
So it seems that for the forgiving person neither the heinousness of the offense nor
the absence of repentance is enough by itself to prevent forgiveness. Together, they may
very well be. With no deficit of forgivingness, the mother of the serf boy may find herself
22
unable to forgive the general if he remains unrepentant. But if her forgivingness consists
in a dispositional desire to live in benevolent and harmonious relationship with all
persons, she will feel uncomfortable with her enmity, and so will be disposed to hope for
his repentance and the possibility of forgiveness.
Lack of suffering. The suffering of the offender can evoke a compassion that
dispels anger without changing the forgiver’s judgment about the offender’s culpability
and desert of punishment. So in some cases forgiveness does not occur because the
offender does not suffer or is not perceived to do so. We can well imagine that without
the experience in the hospital tent, or something similar, Prince Andrei would not have
forgiven Kuragin. But the lack of suffering of the offender is not a consideration that
characteristically moves the forgiving person to withhold forgiveness. The effectiveness
of such a consideration seems to suppose a vindictiveness inconsistent with
forgivingness.
Lack of commonality. Our fourth consideration favoring forgiveness is the moral
commonality of the forgiver, and so we may ask whether a lack of such commonality
might block the forgiving person’s forgiveness. Might the uprightness of the offended
party — the moral distance between himself and the offender — be a reason for not
forgiving the offender? Applied to the case of Ivan Karamazov’s general, the mother’s
thought would now be not, “the crime is too heinous to be forgiven without extraordinary
repentance,” but “he is, morally, so different from me that I cannot receive him as a
fellow human being; were I more of a sinner, perhaps I could…”. Whether this
consideration ever properly blocks forgiveness seems to vary with moral outlook. In a
Christian framework it rings false because of the teaching that all are in very deep moral
trouble if rated on their own merits. But in an outlook from which such teaching is absent
— say, Aristotle’s — perhaps the moral merit of the forgiving person could sometimes
supply him a reason for withholding forgiveness from an offender.
Lack of relationship. Something analogous can be said about the possibility that
lack of relationship of offender to offended might justify withholding forgiveness. In
some moral outlooks — say, Nietzsche’s — two people may be naturally foreign to one
another if one is, say, a naturally slavish sort of person and the other is naturally noble. If
at the center of forgivingness is a concern for harmonious and benevolent relationship
with (certain) others, then the fact that an offender does not belong to the class of persons
23
with whom it is fitting to have that kind of relationship provides a good reason for
withholding forgiveness. In outlooks that recognize no moral classes, such a
consideration would be unavailable to justify withholding forgiveness. Still, if “he is my
brother” favors forgiveness, could not “he is not my brother” be a reason for withholding
it, in some imaginable circumstances? Even an egalitarian morality may recognize more
and less proximal relationships. If we have duties to our families that we have not to the
population at large, might the forgiving person also be disposed to forgive family
members in circumstances, and for offenses, in which he would withhold forgiveness
from less closely related persons? Imagine that you take some refugees into your home,
and they exploit you just as severely and intentionally as your brother does in our
example. And let us continue to assume that you are an ideally forgiving person. It would
seem to follow from our discussion in section 3 that their being less closely related to you
might lead you to forgive them somewhat less readily than you forgave your brother,
since one of the anger-defeating sensitivities that that situation called into play may not
be called into play here.xxvii
Forgiving persons do not always forgive, any more than the courageous always
take action in the face of danger, or the generous always give lavishly, or the
compassionate always help. Like these other virtues, forgivingness is a complex
disposition to respond to complex circumstances. It is not possible to delineate with
precision the practical wisdom possessed by the ideally forgiving person, but the
foregoing discussion begins to indicate the boundaries.
5. Concluding overview
Let me summarize our results. The act or process of forgiveness is a dispelling of
justified anger at one who has offended against oneself, in particular a dissolution of the
victim’s retributive gestalt of the offender. It is, however, not just any such dispelling or
dissolution, but one in which the judgment ingredient in the anger — that the offense is
significant and the offender culpable — is retainedxxviii, and the emotion is dispelled by any
of a set of considerations that bear, in various ways, on the concern to be in a benevolent
and harmonious relationship with the offender. I have suggested that an understanding of
how the judgment characteristic of anger can be retained while the anger itself is
overwhelmed by the benevolence-considerations depends on having a view of emotions
24
in which a person’s emotions can change without change in her judgments.xxix The account
of emotions as concern-based perceptions or construals meets this requirement. Thus
when the angry one construes her offender in terms of the offender’s good will as
expressed in repentance, or compassionately in terms of the offender’s suffering, or in
terms of the offender’s close relationship to the victim, or in terms of the victim’s moral
commonality with the offender, with perhaps the help of mitigating excuses for the
offender, the retributive construal is apt to be supplanted by a more benevolent one. But
this new way of seeing the offender by no means rules out the judgment that the offender
is culpable of a significant offense and deserves some punishment. The emotional state is
rather a matter of what features of the situation are perceptually salient to the victim, in
this special “seeing-as” sense of ‘perceptual.’ This, then, is my account of forgiveness as
an act or process. Forgivingness is a disposition for this act to be performed or the
process to occur. What then is the psychological make-up of a person with this virtue?
A dispositional concern to be in benevolent, harmonious relationship with others
is basic to forgivingness. The forgiving person tends to feel uncomfortable with the
alienation from others that his own anger at them brings. In general, the wider the range
of persons to whom this concern applies, and the stronger the concern, the more forgiving
will the person be, other things being equal. One thing that may not be equal is the
person’s dispositional concern for justice and the related sense of self-respect. Someone
who is willing to pay any price to be in harmonious relationship with others does not
have the integrity requisite for forgivingness. He will be a condoner and will tend toward
moral stupidity. So the concern for harmonious relationship must co-exist in the
personality with a disposition that makes one prone to anger. H.J.N. Horsbrugh seems to
deny this when he says,
…a perfectly forgiving person has no occasion to forgive since he is
animated by such a forgiving spirit that no conceivable injury can destroy
his good-will or give rise to feelings of resentment or hostility towards his
injurer.xxx
This description fits better the morally stupid person than the perfectly forgiving.
Sometimes an eminently forgiving person will exemplify the virtue by feeling no anger at
all. But it is wrong to make the obviation of acts of forgiveness generally characteristic of
the perfectly forgiving person. Such unsusceptibility to anger would undermine
25
forgivingness. The eminently forgiving person has it in him to become angry on
occasions when this is called for.
So the forgiving person will at times engage in active self-control of her anger; in
some moments of anger she will activate the kind of anger-mitigating considerations that
we explored in section 3. After all, anger may be quite intense, and is a disposition
against benevolence. Thus forgivingness involves a certain amount of self-awareness and
self-management skill. The forgiving person has to “know,” for example, that her anger
can be reduced by finding excuses for her offender, by considering her own moral
resemblance to the offender, by focusing compassionately on the offender’s misery, by
remembering her own indebtedness; and she has to be somewhat practiced in turning her
mind to these considerations. Sometimes her concern for benevolent, harmonious
relationship will dispose her mind in these directions, so that she just finds herself
automatically free of the anger; at other times she will struggle to deny herself, and will
have to draw on her repertoire of anger-mitigating considerations. But most importantly
— and here I return to the fundamental insight of section 3 — she must have the basic
concern for harmonious relationship with her offender that motivates a susceptibility to
these considerations and a willingness, when this is difficult, to transcend her anger.xxxi
NOTES
i R.S. Downie in “Forgiveness” Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1965): 128-134, and Jeffrie
Murphy in Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), co-
authored with Jean Hampton, cited hereafter as Hampton and Murphy. See pp. 133-4 of
Downie for the analysis. Murphy confuses forgivingness with forgiveness as an act, for
he says that “forgiveness is not always a virtue” (p. 17). It is not always appropriate to
forgive — to perform an act of forgiveness, or allow a process of forgiveness to proceed.
But if forgivingness is a virtue, then it is always a virtue — barring a radical change in
our environment. (As Hume points out, distributive justice would not be a virtue in a
world of complete abundance, and similarly forgiveness would not be a virtue in a world
lacking moral offenses.) That compassion should occasionally be withheld does not mean
that compassion is sometimes not a virtue; courage is not sometimes not a virtue just
because sometimes it is better not to act courageously.
26
ii “Forgiveness” in Ethics, Value, and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978), pp. 211-224.
iii Fifteen Sermons (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1860; reprinted in facsimile
by Ibis Publishing, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1987), Sermons 8 and 9, “Upon
Resentment” and “Upon Forgiveness of Injuries”. Butler reverses what I take to be our
contemporary usage, and makes anger a kind of resentment: “Resentment is of two kinds:
hasty and sudden, or settled and deliberate. The former is called anger…” (p. 94).
Indignation is likewise made out to be a form of resentment: “it is resentment against vice
and wickedness” (p. 95f). But he does not insist on his terminology: “It hath been shown,
that mankind naturally feel some emotion of mind against injury and injustice, whoever
are the sufferers by it; and even though the injurious design be prevented from taking
effect. Let this be called anger, indignation, resentment, or by whatever name any one
shall choose; the thing itself is understood, and is plainly natural” (p. 102). Since 1962
the focus on resentment may also have been encouraged by Peter Strawson’s influential
paper “Freedom and Resentment” in which he makes some tangential comments on
forgiveness. The essay is reprinted in P.F. Strawson, editor, Studies in the Philosophy of
Thought and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 71-96. In the Oxford
English Dictionary, definition 3 of ‘forgiveness’ is “To remit (a debt); to give up
resentment or claim to requital for, pardon (an offence).” And definition 4 is “To give up
resentment against, pardon (an offender).”
iv For example, Jeffrie Murphy in Hampton and Murphy; R.J. O’Shaughnessy,
“Forgiveness” Philosophy 42 (1967): 336-352; Paul Lauritzen, “Forgiveness: Moral
Prerogative or Religious Duty?” Journal of Religious Ethics 15 (1987): 141-154; Anne C.
Minas, “God and Forgiveness” Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975): 138-150.
v Hampton and Murphy, pp. 79-87, 147-157.
vi See Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), especially Chapter 2.
vii Some exceptions to this last claim are noted by William Neblett in “Forgiveness and
Ideals” Mind 73 (1974): 269-275; see p. 270.
viii Anne C. Minas points out the oddness of ascribing resentment to God, “God and
Forgiveness” pp. 147-8.
27
ix Hampton and Murphy, pp. 60-79.
x Ibid., p. 55.
xi To be distinguished from “looks as though he feels guilty.”
xii “Forgiveness” Ethics 99 (1988): 77-97, p. 79.
xiii Ibid. The connection of forgiveness with reconciliation leads John Wilson to think it
strictly impossible to forgive an offender who does not repent. “Why Forgiveness
Requires Repentance” Philosophy 63 (1988): 534-535. Forgiveness is “a bilateral
…operation” (p. 534) But this is to confuse forgiveness with reconciliation. Forgiveness
is an attitude of one person toward another, not a pattern of interaction between them.
Often, the benevolent putting away of anger precedes repentance, or persists in the face
of unrepentance.
xiv Hampton and Murphy, p. 20, Murphy’s italics.
xv “Servility and Self-Respect” Monist 62 (1979), pp. 87-104.
xvi Reason and Goodness (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1961), p. 445.
xvii See Hampton and Murphy, p. 20.
xviii For a discussion of forgiveness as therapeutic, see chapter 10 of my Taking the Word to
Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapies (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993).
xix Fifteen Sermons, p. 111.
xx Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 37.
xxi Benedicta Ward, ed., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, (Kalamazoo: Cistercian
Publications, 1975), p. 117.
xxii On Jewish humility, see Daniel M. Nelson, “The Virtue of Humility in Judaism: A
Critique of Rationalist Hermeneutics” Journal of Religious Ethics 13,2 (1985): 298-311.
xxiii Matthew 18.23-35.
xxiv This is no doubt why Aristotle’s great-souled man has difficulty with gratitude. See
Nicomachean Ethics 1124b10. For an elaboration of the emotion and virtue of gratitude,
see my “The Blessings of Gratitude” in Robert A. Emmons and Michael McCullough,
editors, The Psychology of Gratitude (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 58-78.
xxv The Brothers Karamazov, Book IV, Chapter 3.
xxvi Ibid., Book V, Chapter 4.
28
xxvii For simplicity’s sake I ignore the fact that the closer relationship provides not only an
extra reason for forgiving, but also extra reasons for anger. If we took that factor into
consideration, it might turn out easier to forgive the strangers than to forgive one’s
brother. This fact is presumably behind William Blake’s comment that “It is easier to
forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
xxviii Though it may be revised. See the discussion of excuses.
xxix For moral psychologists who think that change of emotion necessarily involves a
change of judgment, see Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), chapter 1 and passim; Hampton and Murphy, the Introduction;
Robert Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1976) and “On
Emotions as Judgments” American Philosophical Quarterly 25 (April, 1988): 183-191;
and Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), chapter 10. For an author who rejects the judgment theory, see Patricia Greenspan,
Emotions and Reasons (New York: Routledge, 1988).
xxx “Forgiveness” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4, 2 (1974): 269-282, p. 281. Downie
makes a similar comment, p. 133.
xxxi I gratefully acknowledge help from the National Endowment for the Humanities in
providing a summer stipend to write this paper, and support from the Pew Charitable
Trusts during its final revision. An anonymous reviewer for the American Philosophical
Quarterly suggested important revisions, as did my colleagues in the philosophy
department at Wheaton College.
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The adaptation of the Forgivingness Questionnaire (FQ) has been performed for diferent languages and with diverse samples. So far, no psychometric properties were evaluated for a Spanish version of the FQ. The main aim of the current study was to examine the psychometric properties of the FQ in two Spanish samples: adolescents and emerging adults. A total of 1,076 participants: 419 adolescents (56% females; Mage=13.78 years) and 657 emerging adults (64% females; Mage=21.06 years) completed the Spanish version of FQ and other measures. The results of confrmatory factor analysis indicated a good ft for the three-factor model of the FQ, and high reliability for both samples. Convergent validity was supported and multi-group analyses showed the invariance of the factor structure of FQ across gender. These results provide evidence of good psychometric properties of the FQ as a tool to measure dispositional forgiveness among Spanish adolescents and emerging adults.
Forgiveness: Moral Prerogative or Religious Duty?
  • Paul Lauritzen
Paul Lauritzen, "Forgiveness: Moral Prerogative or Religious Duty?" Journal of Religious Ethics 15 (1987): 141-154;
especially Chapter 2. vii Some exceptions to this last claim are noted by William Neblett in
  • V Hampton
v Hampton and Murphy, pp. 79-87, 147-157. vi See Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially Chapter 2. vii Some exceptions to this last claim are noted by William Neblett in "Forgiveness and Ideals" Mind 73 (1974): 269-275
Minas points out the oddness of ascribing resentment to God
  • C Anne
Anne C. Minas points out the oddness of ascribing resentment to God, "God and Forgiveness" pp. 147-8.
  • R J O'shaughnessy
R.J. O'Shaughnessy, "Forgiveness" Philosophy 42 (1967): 336-352;
vii Some exceptions to this last claim are noted by William Neblett
vii Some exceptions to this last claim are noted by William Neblett in "Forgiveness and Ideals" Mind 73 (1974): 269-275