Craig Agule – “Defending Elective Forgiveness”

In this post, Craig Agule discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Craig’s article can be found here.

Not all that long ago, I got angry at someone close to me. They had slighted me; it was not a terrible wrong, but it was enough to be angry (or, at least, I was angry, and several confidants told me that my reaction was reasonable). This person deserved my resentment, and I righteously felt it. But as time passed, and as our relationship continued, I found myself wondering what to do with my anger:  should I hold on to it, or should I forgive this person, letting my anger go? 

I kept coming back to two related puzzles. First, what sort of reasons would support or oppose my forgiving this person? For example, should I be thinking about whether they had taken responsibility? This person had acted poorly and never apologized. Or should I rather be thinking about the consequences of being angry? My anger was both unproductive and disruptive. Were those downsides of anger enough reason to forgive the unrepentant wrongdoer?

I came to see that there was good reason to forgive, but this brought me to the second puzzle:  If it was wise and prudent to forgive, then wouldn’t holding on to my anger be unwise and imprudent? The thought irked me.  Even if it would be reasonable to forgive, this person deserved my anger, and I was entitled to be angry. I was allowed to forgive, I thought, but not required to forgive.

I was irked because I suspected a tension in my thinking about forgiveness. On the one hand, I take forgiveness to be principled, in that we can forgive for reasons and we can offer others reason to forgive. On the other hand, I take forgiveness to be elective, such that, at least in many cases, it is acceptable both to forgive and to withhold forgiveness.

One way to defuse the tension is to pick between these two features of forgiveness, and so a number of philosophers defend principled forgiveness, deflating or abandoning electivity. We may identify reasons to forgive by thinking about the function of anger and blame. Perhaps we can say, with Miranda Fricker, that the point of blame is to bring the wrongdoer and the blamer into an aligned moral understanding. Or perhaps we can say, with Pamela Hieronymi, that the point of blame is to protest a past action that persists as a threat. If the point of blame is something like this, then we might have good reason to forgive in cases where blame has become pointless. If, for example, the wrongdoer has earnestly apologized, that apology might be adequate evidence that the wrongdoer has come to the right moral understanding and is therefore unlikely to repeat their wrong.

This can help us organize our thinking about whether and when to forgive. We think about the point of our anger, and we think about whether anger remains useful. Yet despite this advantage, this way of thinking also threatens the electivity of forgiveness. According to this framework, withholding forgiveness from a repentant wrongdoer might be irrational and even morally inappropriate.

In this paper, I argue that forgiveness is both principled and elective by looking closely at the nature of blame. Reactions like blame, I claim, are in the business of marking and making significance. When we blame someone, we prioritize their culpability and wrongdoing. This affects how we perceive and treat the person. When we forgive, our priorities change. The person’s wrongdoing and culpability is no longer quite as significant for our relationship.

Noticing the role of priorities at the heart of both blame and forgiveness helps to explain why forgiveness is elective. Our priorities are largely (although not entirely!) up to us, given that we have great freedom to settle for ourselves what sort of life we want to lead. Because forgiveness is largely a matter of our changing priorities, whether we should forgive has as much to do with who we are and want to be as it has to do with external facts, such as whether the wrongdoer has apologized. This is a deep sort of electivity!

At the same time, forgiveness remains principled. We might, for example, explain our forgiveness by reference to the wrongdoer’s apology. That apology might have been particularly important to us, or it might have causally prompted us to revisit our own priorities. The apology, then, provides an explanation for our coming to forgive, even if it does not compel forgiveness.

Thinking of forgiveness in terms of priorities helps us to reframe our thinking about forgiveness. For instance, it enables us to make sense of both conditional and unconditional forgiveness: sometimes we forgive because the things that we care about in the world have changed, and sometimes we forgive because our cares themselves have changed.

Thinking in terms of priorities also helps us to understand why forgiveness is not, normatively, entirely up to us. Although we have tremendous leeway to set our own priorities, there are some legitimate demands others can make on us regarding our priorities, often grounded in our relationships and interactions. Thus, there might well be some cases, albeit probably rare, where failing to forgive is blameworthy!

More generally, my defense of truly elective forgiveness pushes us to look inward in thinking about whether we should hold on to anger. Of course, we should think about the wrongdoer’s wrongs and culpability. Yet we should also keep in mind that when we hold on to our anger we prioritize, and so it is also important that we think about how our anger fits into what we care and should care about.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4647/.

About the author