What is forgiveness?
By: Daniel Conrad
Tags: Character, Philosophy, Virtue, Forgiveness, Morality

musings on a confused concept

Say I wrong you, but you forgive me. What does that mean? I wronged you; whatever I did was bad, and presumably nothing about apologies and forgiveness changes the badness of my act. What is it to forgive someone?

Here’s an uncontroversial first step: you can’t accidentally forgive someone. Forgiveness is a voluntary act, one you are responsible for. All forgivings are willful forgivings.

Sometimes we try to forgive someone, but fail. If I stole something of value from you, apologized and perhaps even returned your belongings, and you say you have forgiven me — but still harbor resentment toward me, think less of me for having done you wrong, regard me with suspicion as a result — I really don’t think you’ve forgiven me. Perhaps for good reason! So forgiveness is at least something we may or may not succeed in doing — something we accomplish, or do not.

Let me introduce an element that might not be so easy to accept. Sometimes we say we have forgiven someone, but actually we merely stopped minding whatever it was that wronged us. Say you and I live together as housemates, and I constantly leave my dirty dishes in the sink; I rarely clean them myself. But you are an incredibly patient person, and too polite for your own good; you always clean after me.

Every time I see our sink clean and free of dishes, I apologize and say I’ll do better next time and thank you for cleaning. If you accept my apology, say you forgive me and reassure me that you don’t mind the extra work — here, I think you’re doing something other than forgiveness. “Getting over it,” maybe, but not forgiving. So forgiveness isn’t merely not minding how someone else is wronging us.

I think this sort of example suggests another element of forgiveness: You cannot forgive someone without having first received an appropriate apology. I, the messy housemate, am not truly apologizing for my actions. Patently, I have no intention to change my ways! I am inclined to act in such a way that wrongs you, however trivially, and I am doing nothing to re-train myself, to fix this disposition toward wrongful behavior. There is something wrong with my character, or I possess some vice, perhaps laziness or inconsiderateness, and I am doing nothing to fix this about the kind of person I am.

Whatever else apologies are, they are intentional actions that take one’s own character as the object of the apology, or its target. When I apologize — when I truly apologize, not when I feign apology or merely try to appease you or something similar — I identify what I did to wrong you, I explain what made that action a wrongful one, I understand why you are hurt (or perhaps why you should be hurt) by my behavior, and I undertake a project of self-betterment: I try to become a better person, the sort of person that won’t wrong you again, at least not in that way.

And here, a picture emerges of apology and forgiveness as a collaborative moral activity. I’ve wronged you, and you explain to me how I wronged you, and I realize the wrongness of my actions. I apologize and I promise that I will do better, and I truthfully attempt to make myself a better person. In return, if you accept my apology, you forgive me: you recognize that I am remorseful, that I intend to improve myself, and you adjust your beliefs about the sort of person I am as a result.

After I (say) stole from you, you would rightly think worse of me as a person; your idea of my character should have soured. But now you repair this image of me in your mind. Forgiveness takes the perpetrator’s character as its object.

This is an additional reason that forgiveness is not merely “getting over it”; when you choose not to mind the wrongness of my leaving dirty dishes in the sink, what you are getting over is my action, not my character. But when you forgive me, you do not forgive my action, you forgive me, the person, for what I have done — or perhaps more clearly stated, for the sort of thing I was disposed to doing: for some perverse element of my character, the kind of person I was.

In sum, I’m trying to tease out a picture of forgiveness as at least something that involves some work on the victim and the perpetrator’s parts — a moral repair job, of sorts — and takes our character as its object.

Here’s one problem for my view so far. Sometimes we apologize for something we did by accident or involuntarily, and often we forgive others for these kinds of mistakes. And if we understand an accidental or involuntary action to not reflect on our character, then surely it would be strange for these instances of forgiveness to take the accidental perpetrator’s character as their target.

We do call this forgiveness, but I think this is a slightly different action than the morally vital sense of forgiveness I’ve been talking about to this point. It seems a little different from “getting over it,” though. I “get over” your actions that are voluntary — blameworthy. I don’t “get over” some accident of chance, at least not in the same way.

I’m not sure we have a word, at least not in English, for what’s going on in cases involving involuntary or accidental actions that wrong others. Let me know if you have any suggestions for getting over this conceptual bump.

I wrote this before running even a cursory search of philpapers.org or Google Scholar for any of the philosophical or psychological literature on this topic; I wanted to be sure to share original thoughts, free of accidental plagiarism or anything like that. Please do recommend me any readings that pertain here!