## 1. Forgiveness as a Response to Wrongdoing



An inevitable and unfortunate fact of life is that we are often
mistreated by others. Forgiveness concerns one kind of response to
those who wrong us. From the ancient Greeks to the present day,
forgiveness has typically been regarded as a personal response to
having been injured or wronged, or as a condition one seeks or hopes
is bestowed upon one for having wronged someone else.



The *Oxford English Dictionary* defines
'forgivable', the first entry under the general term
'forgive', as that which "may be forgiven,
pardonable, excusable", referring thereby to the quality of
deserving to be forgiven. Notwithstanding the association with
excusing conditions, forgiving is not, strictly speaking, equivalent
to excusing. For wrongdoing that is excused entirely, there is nothing
to forgive, since (as we shall see) agents who are fully excused are
not blameworthy or culpable. Moreover, the application of the concept
of forgiveness to non-moral behavior, as in the case of a forgivably
poor musical performance by a pianist, shows that forgiveness is not
always or necessarily a moral term. For this reason, there may be
similar practices of forgiveness in non-moral arenas of normative
appraisal (Haji 1998). However, we shall focus here on forgiveness as
it pertains to moral appraisal and moral responsibility. Further,
while most of our discussion will be focused on forgiveness for
conduct, we note the possibility that one may also be forgiven for
one's character or the kind of person one is (Bell 2008).


## 2. Cognate Phenomena


### 2.1 Justification



Sometimes we do things that appear to be morally wrong. Suppose I see
you, a total stranger, take a pear from a fruit stand and walk off
with it. I reproach you for having stolen the pear into which you are
now happily chomping. Yet you explain that you own that fruit stand
and have not stolen anything. In giving this kind of explanation, you
are offering a justification for your action--you are claiming
that despite appearances to the contrary, your taking the pear was
morally permissible. Offering justifications is commonplace in our
moral lives. But justification and forgiveness ought to be
distinguished. When conduct is justified, this implies that the
conduct was not morally wrong. But when conduct is forgiven, there is
no such implication. Indeed, in most cases (if not all), what we are
forgiven for are the morally wrong things we do. This is why it can be
offensive when someone says that she forgives you when you have done
nothing wrong.


### 2.2 Excuse



Sometimes we do things that are indeed morally bad or impermissible,
but for which we are not morally blameworthy. In such cases, so-called
excusing conditions render an otherwise blameworthy agent *not
blameworthy*. Recall our pear-taker. Suppose that you take the
pear, not from your own fruit stand, but from your neighbor's.
You have done something that you ought not to have done. Even so,
there may be facts about you or the context of your action that make
it the case that you are not morally responsible and blameworthy. When
we draw attention to these facts--that is, when we offer an
excuse for our action--we are not claiming that what we did was
not morally wrong. Rather, we concede that what we did was morally
wrong, but we provide putative reasons for thinking that we are not
morally responsible and blameworthy for having done so.



When conduct is excused, this entails that the agent who so acted is
not morally responsible and blameworthy for that conduct. But when one
is forgiven for one's conduct, this does *not entail*
that the wrongdoer was not morally responsible and blameworthy for her
conduct. It is often claimed that a necessary condition for
forgiveness is that the wrongdoer is morally blameworthy for her
conduct (see, e.g., Bash 2007: 5; Haber 1991: 33; Murphy 2003; Allais
2008; and Hieronymi 2001). Perhaps this is true (although see Gamlund
2011). But we need not insist, as a matter of conceptual necessity,
that forgiveness requires that agents be morally blameworthy in order
to show how forgiveness and excuse are distinct. For even if
there are certain cases in which one can be forgiven for non-culpably
having done wrong (say, in moral dilemma cases), this does not change
the fact that forgiven agents can be morally responsible and
blameworthy but that agents who are excused are not morally
responsible and blameworthy.


### 2.3 Condonation



There are many ways to respond to wrongdoers who are blameworthy for
their conduct. One such way is to *condone* their conduct
(Hughes 1995). "Broadly speaking, to condone", writes
Charles Griswold, "is to collaborate in the lack of censure of
an action, and perhaps to enable further wrong-doing by the
offender" (2007: 46). What is it to collaborate in the lack of
censure of an action? Griswold makes two suggestions: 



> 
> 
> One may condone in the sense of accepting while not disapproving (by
> not holding the wrong-doing against its author), or in the sense of
> tolerating while disapproving (a sort of "look the other
> way" or "putting up with" strategy). (2007:
> 46-7) 
> 
> 
> 



We can call the first kind of condoning--the one that involves
*accepting and not disapproving* of
conduct--A-condonation. We can call the second kind of
condonation--the kind that involves *disapproving of but
tolerating* conduct--D-condonation. A brief discussion can
help us to see how each differs from forgiveness.



According to Garrard and McNaughton, when 



> 
> 
> we condone an action, we say in effect that it wasn't really
> such a bad thing to do [...] Condoning an action amounts to
> saying (correctly or incorrectly) that the action wasn't really
> wrong. (2010: 85) 
> 
> 
> 



Jean Hampton also seems to have something like A-condonation in
mind:



> 
> 
> I will define 'condonation' as the acceptance, without
> moral protest (either inward or outward), of an action which ought to
> warrant such protest, made possible, first, by ridding oneself of the
> judgement that the action is wrong, so that its performer cannot be a
> wrongdoer, and, second, by ridding oneself of any of attendant
> feelings (such as those which are involved in resentment) which
> signify one's protest of the action. (Murphy & Hampton 1988:
> 40)
> 
> 
> 



In order to forgive, however, the victim must represent the putative
recipient of forgiveness as one who did something morally wrong (or
bad or vicious).



D-condonation occurs when an agent disapproves of someone's
conduct, but tolerates it. Griswold characterizes it as a sort of
"look the other way" or "putting up with"
strategy (2007). The forgiver, by contrast, does not paper over
wrongdoing--she is prepared to blame, but forgoes it.



Two other considerations help distinguish condoning from forgiving.
First, under typical circumstances, we can condone actions that are
not wrongs against us (Haber 1991: 59-60). We cannot, however,
at least in typical circumstances, forgive others for their wrongs
against others. Second, while we forgive agents *for* their
conduct (or perhaps their characters), when we condone, we condone
*the conduct* (or the character). It is infelicitous to say,
"I condone you for lying to me" whereas it makes perfect
sense to say, "I forgive you for lying to me".


### 2.4 Pardon and Mercy



The phrase "pardon me" frequently functions as an apology,
which might precede an act of forgiveness, or be a plea or request for
forgiveness, or some similar act of forbearance. And to pardon a
wrongdoer often seems indistinguishable from forgiveness, perhaps
especially in cases of minor wrong. However, the concept of pardon
also refers to a familiar and important legal and political power
quite unlike forgiveness. Black's Law Dictionary defines this
sense of pardon as "an act or an instance of officially
nullifying punishment or other legal consequences of a crime",
ordinarily "granted by the chief executive of a
government" (Garner 1999: 1137). In the United States, for
example, the President has the authority to grant pardons for federal
offenses, and state governors may pardon crimes against the state.



Although reasons for exercising the power of pardon often mimic those
given for forgiving wrongdoers, one clear difference between pardon
and forgiving is that the former is typically exercised by
third-parties as opposed to the victims of wrong. As discussed below,
standard philosophical views maintain that there are good reasons for
thinking that, with one important exception, third-party forgiveness
is impossible, inasmuch as forgiveness is the prerogative or right of
the victim of wrong. Another difference is that a central idea in the
legal and political concept of pardon is that of an offer that must be
accepted in order to accomplish its partial or complete end, such as
mitigation of a criminal punishment via commutation of a prison
sentence (Bingham 2009). Although on some views forgiveness is also an
offer, especially where reconciliation between a victim and wrongdoer
is attempted (Tombs 2008), the main sense of forgiveness seems not to
involve the idea of an offer at all, let alone an offer that must be
accepted by the wrongdoer in order for forgiveness to occur and
accomplish at least some of its ends, for example to discharge
one's duty to forgive others as commanded by God, or to move
beyond a potentially paralyzing negative emotion.



Furthermore, acts of mercy in general are to be distinguished from
acts of forgiveness (Murphy 1988; Murphy & Hampton 1988; Tosi
& Warmke 2017). First, manifestations of mercy, but not
forgiveness, are essentially overt. To extend or show mercy to someone
who has acted badly is to engage in some overt behavior: a parent may
lessen a guilty child's punishment. Forgiveness, however, is not
necessarily overt. It is possible to forgive privately; indeed
philosophical discussions of forgiveness have focused predominantly on
its private manifestations. Second, mercy is third-personal in a way
that forgiveness is not. A boss may reprimand an employee for telling
an inappropriate joke in the lunchroom even though termination would
be justified and the boss herself is not personally offended by it.
Here, a third-party shows mercy, and does so (we may presume)
justifiably. But forgiveness, if it is ever third-personal, is not
third-personal in *this* way. Barring exceptional
circumstances, you cannot forgive me for the offense I caused to a
co-worker--you simply lack the standing to forgive me for my
offense to *her*. Mercy is not paradigmatically second-personal
in this way. Third, mercy is often (if not always) connected to
authority in a way that forgiveness is not. It is natural to think
that in order for S to show mercy to P, S must be in *some*
kind of position of authority over P. Interpersonal forgiveness,
however, is tied to no such authority structures.


### 2.5 Reconciliation



When we are wronged, this typically damages our relationship with the
wrongdoer. Minor offenses might put strains on relationships that put
burdens on both persons involved; serious offenses might lead the
victim to terminate the relationship altogether. Further, when we
blame others for their wrongs against us, we often do so at the cost
of causing further relational damage. We might withhold expressions of
good-will, or alter our behavior in ways that make clear that we no
longer trust the other.



Although in many cases forgiveness will be accompanied by
reconciliation, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for
forgiveness. One reason for thinking that reconciliation is not
necessary for forgiveness is that the offending party may be, for
whatever reasons, unwilling to reconcile. But the fact that I am
unwilling to restore our relationship does not, all by itself, make it
impossible for you forgive me for the wrong I did to you. In other
cases, reconciliation is practically impossible. Perhaps I have
secretly moved to Fiji and you have no way to get in touch with me.
You can forgive me whether or not you know I am in Fiji. In still
other cases, restoring a relationship would be "morally
unwise", as Jean Hampton puts it (Murphy & Hampton 1988:
42-3, fn. 9). Doing so might expose one to additional
psychological damage, for example. Neither does reconciliation appear
to be sufficient for forgiveness. Relationships may be restored, at
least to some degree, for purely pragmatic reasons.


## 3. The Ends of Forgiveness



Even if reconciliation is neither necessary nor sufficient for
forgiveness, we can still recognize that reconciliation is, as Robert
Roberts (1995) puts it, the "teleology of forgiveness".
All things being equal, reconciliation is the goal to which
forgiveness points. Although there are reasons that sometimes make
reconciliation impossible or unwise, forgiveness is oriented towards
promoting pro-sociality and friendly relations (McCullough 2008: 114,
116). In some cases, this might mean that the end of forgiveness is to
repair a relationship to its *ex ante* state. In some cases,
however, only partial reconciliation may occur. In such cases, the
nature of the restored relationship should be "appropriate to
the situation of the parties after they have forgiven one
another" (Bash 2007: 25).



Common conceptions of forgiveness make clear that its main purpose is
the re-establishment or resumption of a relationship ruptured by
wrongdoing. In keeping with the common conceptions of forgiveness,
many contemporary philosophers argue that the resumption of
relationships disrupted by wrongdoing often requires a moral
reassessment of the wrongdoer by the victim, and that such a
reassessment involves relinquishing resentment or some other form of
morally inflected anger (Murphy & Hampton 1988; Murphy 2001), or
behavior such as seeking revenge (Griswold 2007; Zaibert 2009; Govier
2002; Hughes 2016).



Maintaining or perpetuating personal relationships is one of the
clearest and most important ends of forgiveness, though not the only
important one. Forgiving those who wrong us often helps us move beyond
strong negative emotions which, if allowed to fester, could harm us
psychologically and physically. Forgiveness benefits wrongdoers, as
well, by releasing them from the blame and hard feelings often
directed toward them by those they wrong, or helping them transcend
the guilt or remorse they suffer from having done wrong, thereby
allowing them to move forward in their lives. These ends of
forgiveness may be regarded as in general enabling in the sense that
they show how forgiveness sometimes helps people move beyond the
wrongs they endure or cause and the sometimes debilitating effects
those wrongs have on wrongdoers and victims alike. For some,
forgiveness has these forward-looking benefits because of the way it
transfigures the past. Emmanuel Levinas claims that "forgiveness
acts upon the past, somehow repeats the event, purifying it"
([1961] 1969: 283), a notion similar to Hannah Arendt's view
that forgiveness alters the ethical significance of a
wrongdoer's past by keeping it from having a permanent or fixed
character (Arendt 1958).


## 4. Standing to Forgive



It is standard to assume that not just anyone can forgive a wrongdoer
for a certain wrong. One must have "standing". If I
*lack* standing, then forgiving is not on the table for me; I
am not a candidate for forgiving. And so to doubt whether someone has
standing to forgive is not to doubt whether someone succeeded in
forgiving. Nor is it to doubt whether someone's forgiveness was
morally good, right or permissible. Rather, it is to doubt whether
that person can forgive in the first place.



Who has standing to forgive? It might be thought that one has standing
only if one is the victim of wrongdoing (in some sense of
'victim'). Jeffrie Murphy expresses such a view when he
says that 



> 
> 
> I do not have *standing* to resent or forgive you unless I have
> myself been the victim of your wrongdoing. I may forgive you for
> embezzling my funds; but it would be ludicrous for me, for example, to
> claim that I had decided to forgive Hitler for what he did to the
> Jews. I lack the proper standing for this. Thus, I may legitimately
> resent (and hence consider forgiving) only wrong done *to me*.
> (Murphy & Hampton 1988: 21, emphasis original) 
> 
> 
> 



On this view, only those who have been directly wronged have standing
to forgive. Suppose Alfred lies to Betty. Betty is thereby directly
wronged by Alfred. Though we will not attempt a full account of what
it means to be directly wronged by someone, the general idea is that
for Betty to be directly wronged by Alfred means that Alfred's
conduct itself constituted a wrong against Betty; he failed Betty,
morally speaking. Betty therefore has direct standing to forgive.



Suppose, however, that Alfred lies to Betty and this results in Betty
being very late in picking up her brother Todd. Alfred did not lie to
Todd, but *by* lying to Betty, there is a straightforward sense
in which this resulted in a wrong being done to Todd. Here, while we
can say that Betty was directly wronged and so has direct standing to
forgive, it is not true that Todd was directly wronged by Alfred.
Rather, it was something Alfred did to Betty that led to Todd's
being wronged *indirectly*. And because it would be fitting for
Todd to blame Alfred, and for Alfred to apologize to Todd, it is
plausible to think that Todd also has standing to forgive Alfred. Call
this *indirect standing*.



Though controversial, it may be possible to have standing to forgive
while lacking either direct or indirect standing. Such standing is
implicated in cases where one person forgives *on behalf of*
someone else who has or would have had direct or indirect standing.
Suppose Ted's adult daughter Maria is assaulted and left unable
to communicate for the rest of her life. Supposing that Maria has
direct standing to forgive her assailant, if it is possible for Ted to
forgive the assailant on behalf of Maria, he is able to do so in
virtue of possessing what we may call *proxy standing*.



Finally, consider *third-party standing*. What is labeled
"third-party" forgiveness in the forgiveness literature is
often a source of confusion. Charles Griswold rightly points out that
some kinds of cases of standing are misleadingly called
"third-party". For example, he asks us to imagine a case
in which the murder of a loved one injures us, and the matter of
whether to forgive presents itself to us in light of the loss
we've sustained. "This sort of case", he says,
"is not a matter of third-party forgiveness" (2007: 117).
The standing to forgive that would accrue to such a person, Griswold
says, would be (to put it in our above terminology) of the direct or
indirect variety, depending on how the case is fleshed out.
Griswold's own view of the matter is that third-party
forgiveness involves 



> 
> 
> a situation in which the question of forgiveness arises in light of
> your indignation at the loss suffered by another person, thanks to
> someone else's actions: here the matter concerns your forgiving
> their offender on their behalf for the harm done to them (not to you).
> (2007: 117) 
> 
> 
> 



Yet because Griswold has in mind an activity that involves forgiving
"on behalf" of the victim, this kind of standing to
forgive might be best thought of as proxy standing. Indeed, he argues
that in order to engage in what *he* calls third-party
forgiveness, the forgiver can only do so if she has
"standing", and one receives such standing only if one has
an "identification with the victim" (119).



We identify as third-party standing what both Glen Pettigrove (2009)
and Margaret Urban Walker (2013) have in mind in their recent
discussions of third-party forgiveness. Such cases, Walker writes,
involve 



> 
> 
> the scenario in which *A* forgives the offender *B* for
> something *B* did to the victim *C*, where *A* is not
> plausibly seen as a fellow victim, and where *A* forgives
> *B* on *A*'s own behalf, not on behalf of *C* or
> anyone else who might be a victim of the wrong. (2013: 495) 
> 
> 
> 



Such a putative forgiver, she says, is one who "suffered no
wrong" by the offender's actions (2013: 496). This
putative standing to forgive, therefore, is not reducible to any of
the aforementioned varieties: the forgiver was not wronged by the
offender (directly or indirectly), she does not forgive herself, and
she does not forgive on behalf of anyone else.


## 5. Theories of Forgiveness


### 5.1 Emotion Accounts



It is widely thought that forgiveness is fundamentally a matter of how
one feels about another. Jeffrie Murphy, for example, claims that
"[f]orgiveness is primarily a matter of how I *feel*
about you (not how I treat you)" (Murphy & Hampton 1988: 21;
cf. Hughes 1993: 108). Broadly speaking, emotion accounts of
forgiveness claim that forgiveness is best understood as fundamentally
a change in emotion. According to such views, were you to be wronged,
your forgiving the wrongdoer fundamentally involves your overcoming
(or abating, or eliminating, or forswearing) some relevant negative
emotion (e.g., resentment, hatred, rancor) that you experience because
you were wronged. For example, Kathleen Dean Moore writes, that
"the attitude of forgiveness is characterized by the presence of
good will and by the lack of personal resentment for the injury"
(1989:184). Norvin Richards claims that to "forgive someone for
having wronged one is to abandon all negative feelings based on the
episode in question" (1988: 79). Stephen Darwall also appears to
defend some kind of emotion account when he says that to
"forgive is, roughly, to forbear or withdraw resentment"
(2006: 72). 



Among the various emotion accounts, however, there is significant
disagreement on two main points: (1) about which specific emotions are
implicated in forgiveness; and (2) about what must be done with those
emotions in order to forgive. We survey emotion accounts by taking
these two issues in turn.



One way to differentiate between the varieties of emotion accounts is
according to the emotion or set of emotions that are thought to be
relevant to forgiveness. A cursory survey of the forgiveness
literature might give one the impression that there is widespread
agreement about which emotion is crucially implicated in forgiveness.
That emotion is resentment. The view that forgiveness crucially
implicates resentment is usually taken to be "received
orthodoxy" (Bash 2007: 161; cf. Kekes 2009: 490; Radzik 2009:
117; and Zaibert 2009: 38). But any impression of wholesale agreement
would be mistaken for two reasons. First, some emotion theorists argue
that overcoming resentment is neither necessary nor sufficient for
forgiveness. Such emotion theorists hold that in forgiving there are
*other* emotions that may or must be overcome. And second, even
among those who hold that overcoming resentment is either necessary or
sufficient for forgiveness, there is disagreement about *what
resentment is*. Some think of resentment as a "hostile
feeling" which aims at inflicting harm on the wrongdoer (Garrard
& McNaughton 2002), while others think of it as a kind of
"moral protest" (Hieronymi 2001), while still others think
of resentment as the paradigmatic sort of "moral anger"
(Hughes 1993). Whereas some describe resentment as a
"vindictive passion" (Murphy 2003: 16) others claim that
resentment "need not entail motivation to retaliate for the
wrong" (Holmgren 2012: 31). In recent work, Jeffrey Blustein
describes resentment as being a member of a class of attitudes that
are "feelings of insult" (2014: 33; cf. Murphy &
Hampton 1988: 44-5).



It is difficult to know what exactly these characterizations of
resentment amount to, what kinds of relations hold between them, and
perhaps most importantly, which view is correct. Indeed, this is one
of the more troublesome aspects of the philosophical literature on
forgiveness: while it is commonly thought that forgiveness crucially
implicates resentment, there is no such consensus about what
resentment *is* (*contra* Holmgren 2012: 35). And as we
have already noted, even though resentment is widely thought to be the
central or paradigmatic emotion that forgiveness implicates, not all
emotional accounts accept that view.



So here is a rough and ready way of categorizing the various emotion
accounts as regards the set of relevant emotions that forgiveness
implicates. Let *minimal emotionalism* be the view that in
order to forgive, one must overcome a very narrow set of emotions:
only "hostile retributive feelings", attitudes whose aim
is to see the offender suffer for what she has done (Garrard &
McNaughton 2002: 44). Examples of such emotions include the feelings
of malice, spite, or ill-will that might arise as a response to being
wronged. The minimal emotionalist can allow that there are lots of
negative emotions that one might experience upon being wronged (e.g.,
anger, sadness, disappointment, hurt), but they claim that forgiveness
requires only that we overcome a small subset of them--those
emotions that might be best described as vengeful or hostile.



Alternatively, let *moderate emotionalism* be the view that in
order to forgive, one must overcome *both* hostile retributive
feelings and what we may call *moral anger*. According to
moderate emotionalism, overcoming hostile feelings is not enough for
forgiveness. One may harbor moral anger towards a wrongdoer (so the
view goes) without thereby wishing that she suffers for what she did.
But *both* moral anger and hostile feelings must be given up in
order to forgive. Paul Hughes defends something like moderate
emotionalism. An attitude counts as moral anger according to Hughes if
it is "partially constituted by the belief that you have been
wrongfully harmed by another" (1993: 331). As Hughes notes, not
all anger is moral; if you are angry because a bird drops a gift on
your head, your anger is non-moral for it is not constituted by a
belief that the bird has done you a wrong. But because resentment is,
according to Hughes, a paradigm case of moral anger, it must be
overcome in order for one to forgive. Charles Griswold also appears to
have in mind a kind of moderate emotionalism:



> 
> 
> Forswearing resentment does not require giving up *every*
> 'negative' feeling associated with the injurious event
> [...] Forgiveness does however mean overcoming negative feelings
> that embody and perpetuate the key features of resentment, feelings
> that very often accompany resentment--such as contempt and
> scorn--*insofar as* they are modulations of the moral
> hatred in question. (2007: 41)
> 
> 
> 



Although Griswold thinks of resentment as a kind of moral hatred, he
does not think of resentment as involving a desire to inflict
suffering on the wrongdoer, but rather as a desire to "exact a
due measure of punishment" (2007: 26). In this respect his view
differs from Garrard and McNaughton, who *do* target those
emotions that involve desires to inflict suffering on the
wrongdoer.



Finally, let *expansive emotionalism* be the view that in order
to forgive a wrongdoer, the victim must overcome *all* negative
emotions that the victim has towards the wrongdoer on account of the
wrongdoing in question. Norvin Richards is commonly cited as a
defender of what we are calling expansive emotionalism: "to
forgive someone for having wronged one is to abandon all negative
feelings based on the episode in question" (1988: 79). On
Richards' view, not only must one overcome emotions like malice
and moral anger in order to forgive, one must also overcome emotions
like sadness and disappointment (1988: 77-79). In recent work,
Jeffrie Murphy has also endorsed a more expansive emotionalism.
Although he once argued that forgiveness ought to be construed
narrowly as the overcoming of resentment, Murphy has now, citing the
influence of Richards and others, become more ecumenical, writing that
we should 



> 
> 
> think of forgiveness as overcoming a variety of negative feelings that
> one might have toward a wrongdoer--resentment, yes, but also such
> feelings as anger, hatred, loathing, contempt, indifference,
> disappointment, or even sadness. (2003: 59; see also Holmgren 1993:
> 341 and Blustein 2014) 
> 
> 
> 



The set of emotions that victims might possess in response to being
wronged by another agent therefore form a large and diverse
landscape.



Emotion theorists claim that in order to forgive one must make certain
alterations to one's emotional life. But what kind of changes
must occur? Writers on forgiveness often speak of the
*overcoming* of resentment. In doing so we follow precedent
(e.g., Murphy 2003: 16; Holmgren 1993: 341). But other writers have
claimed that one is to "abandon" (Richards 1988: 184) or
"forbear or withdraw" (Darwall 2006: 72) resentment. Still
others claim that forgiveness involves "letting go" of
(Griswold 2007: 40) or the "elimination of" (Lauritzen
1987: 142) resentment. Rarely is much more said about the machinery of
these proposed changes to one's emotional life (notable
exceptions include Hughes 1993, Hieronymi 2001, and Blustein 2014). We
therefore want to know what kinds of changes are at issue with respect
to each of these claims, and what relations hold between them? Does,
for example, overcoming resentment entail that one has totally
eliminated it? There are at least two facts about the relevant notion
of overcoming about which most emotion theorists seem to agree.



First, emotion theorists have been keen to clarify that it is not just
*any* kind of elimination of resentment that is at issue. Were
you accidentally to fall and hit your head on a rock, thereby causing
your resentment to be eliminated, you would not have forgiven. Or if
your resentment simply withered away over the years via a process
outside of your control or ken, it is widely thought that you would
not have forgiven (cf. Horsbrugh 1974: 271). Emotion theorists
therefore usually require that the forgiver's resentment be
overcome for *reasons* (e.g., Murphy 2001: 561). What kinds of
reasons? Sometimes the right kinds of reasons are claimed to be
specifically *moral* reasons (Murphy 2003: 16; Griswold 2007:
40). Murphy suggests that the fact that the wrongdoer "repented
or had a change of heart", "meant well (his motives were
good)", or "he has suffered enough" are the right
kinds of reasons (1988: 24). But here, we should be careful to
distinguish between two different questions. One question is a
conceptual one, concerning what kinds of motivating reasons make
forgiveness possible *at all*. But another kind of question, a
normative one, concerns what motivating reasons make forgiveness, on
any given occasion, *appropriate* (or permissible or
praiseworthy). If Murphy is right, then it appears that one cannot
forgive because one wanted to win a bet. This raises questions as to
how moralized our conception of forgiveness ought to be. Should our
account of forgiveness require that in order to forgive, one must do
so for (only) moral reasons? Or could one forgive for merely
prudential reasons (Ingram 2013)? We will return to this issue
below.



Second, it is widely thought that the kind of overcoming of resentment
that is implicated in forgiveness involves what Marilyn McCord Adams
describes as "agent effort" (1991: 284). Even when one
eliminates resentment for (the right) reasons, it is possible to do so
using the wrong kind of *process*. Forgiveness therefore must
have the right kind of history. Suppose, for example, that one sought
to forgive and that the miracle of modern medicine produced a pill
that, if ingested, could immediately eliminate one's resentment.
It has seemed to many that taking the resentment-eliminating pill does
not qualify as forgiving (even if one were to take the pill for the
right kinds of reasons). Why? It's hard to say exactly, but many
philosophers think of forgiveness as a manifestation of a virtue, a
disposition to act and feel in certain ways (Roberts 1995; Pettigrove
2012). On this view, forgiving acts are properly understood as being
the kinds of things that must "go through" the agent in a
certain sort of way, either by way of an agential
"struggle" against resentment or a decision to give up or
do without resentment (what is commonly described as
"forswearing").



Still, many questions remain. First, which processes of overcoming the
relevant emotions are the right ones? Hieronymi (2001) argues that in
paradigmatic cases, resentment is eliminated by revising a specific
judgment that rationally supports it, namely the judgment that the
wrongdoer's past action stands as a present threat. For
discussions of this judgment-based approach to how forgiveness
overcomes resentment see Zaragoza (2012), Nelkin (2013), and Warmke
(2015). Blustein (2014) argues that overcoming the relevant emotions
should be understood as involving a certain kind of forgetting.



Second: need the relevant emotions be eliminated completely or perhaps
only moderated, and what are we to say if the relevant emotions return
(perhaps unbidden, perhaps not) at some point in the future? One
might, for example, hold that a forgiver must eliminate all traces of
the relevant negative emotion(s). It is uncommon to find this view
stated explicitly, but Haber has attributed to it to some philosophers
(1991: 7). Others have claimed that what is needed is not the total
and final elimination of resentment, but rather, some sort of
moderation. Margaret Holmgren, for example, allows that resentment can
reoccur:



> 
> 
> By overcoming her negative feelings at the time she forgives, the
> victim does not necessarily eliminate these feelings without a trace.
> They may recur from time to time throughout her life. However, once
> she has determined that forgiveness is the appropriate attitude
> towards her offender and has overcome her negative feelings towards
> him, it will presumably be possible for her to conquer these feelings
> again if they do recur. Thus we can plausibly say that the victim has
> forgiven her offender when she first overcomes her resentment towards
> him. (1993: 341-2)
> 
> 
> 



There is also a strand of discussion in the forgiveness literature
that crucially implicates the *forswearing* of resentment (or
some other attitude or behavior). P.F. Strawson claims:



> 
> 
> [T]o ask to be forgiven is in part to acknowledge that the attitude
> displayed in our actions was such as might properly be resented and in
> part to repudiate that attitude for the future (or at least for the
> immediate future); and to forgive is to accept the repudiation and to
> forswear the resentment. (1962: 76)
> 
> 
> 



The difference between overcoming and forswearing (or renouncing) some
attitude is not usually made explicit. Sometimes the terms appear to
be used interchangeably. Marilyn McCord Adams, however, distinguishes
*overcoming* an attitude (which she suggests involves
"agent effort") from *forswearing* an attitude,
which she describes as a "deliberate act" (1991: 284). The
implication is that forswearing (as an act of renunciation) is
something one does straightaway, whereas overcoming is not. One may
forswear resentment by making a decision or making a commitment, but
to decide to give up or commit to eliminate resentment does not imply
that one has or will overcome it.


### 5.2 Butlerian Accounts



Bishop Joseph Butler is commonly cited as the progenitor of emotion
accounts. In a way, this is not surprising, for his legacy in the
philosophical literature on forgiveness rests on two of his
*Fifteen Sermons* (1726): Sermon VIII ("Upon
Resentment") and Sermon IX ("Upon Forgiveness of
Injuries"). Butler does indeed make clear that resentment and
forgiveness are importantly related, and his interpreters have often
attributed to him the view that forgiveness is the
*forswearing* or *overcoming* of resentment (Murphy
1988: 15; Haber 1991: 16; Holmgren 1993: 341)



Ernesto Garcia (2011) has called this interpretation of Butler the
"Renunciation Model", according to which Butler holds: (1)
that resentment is a "negative vindictive response that is
incompatible with goodwill"; and (2) that forgiveness occurs
"only insofar as we forswear or renounce our negative feelings
of resentment towards our wrongdoers" (2011: 2). Garcia and
others have convincingly argued, however, that Butler did *not*
advocate the Renunciation Model, for he advocated neither of these two
theses (Garcia 2011; Griswold 2007: 19-37, and Newberry 2001).
This is not the place to explore Butler's view in great detail.
However, we can bring into relief enough of Butler's account of
forgiveness to show why he does not advocate the Renunciation
Model.



Consider the claim that Butler held that resentment is a response to
injury that is incompatible with good-will and therefore forgiveness.
What Butler actually says, however, is that forgiveness is perfectly
compatible with an attitude of resentment. Butler held that resentment
helps us to deal with those who harm us: it motivates us to insulate
ourselves from wrongdoers, and it motivates us to deter future
wrongdoing via punishment. When resentment has these ends it serves
the public good and is therefore compatible with the general
obligation to good-will [IX.9]. Indeed, as Butler puts it, resentment
is both "natural" [VIII. 11] and "innocent"
[VIII.19]. Therefore, resentment *as such* is compatible with
good-will.



Butler does say that resentment can be dangerous, but it is not
resentment as such that is the problem. Rather, he claims that when
resentment is allowed to become "excessive" it can easily
lead an agent to pursue revenge, not as a means to producing some
greater social good, but as a self-gratifying exercise that seeks
"the misery of our fellow creatures" [IX.10]. But to let
resentment carry one this far is to violate a general obligation to
benevolence. To forgive, then, is simply to prevent resentment from
having this effect on us. The divine command to benevolence is
therefore just the command to "prevent [resentment] from having
this effect, *i.e.* to forgive injuries, is the same as to love
our enemies" [IX.13.]. Resentment itself is natural and
innocent. It is only when it is indulged and allowed to bleed into
revenge that a violation of goodwill occurs. But this is the work of
forgiveness: to prevent resentment from leading us to seek revenge.
Therefore, Butler does not think that forgiveness is the forswearing
or overcoming of resentment.



What, then, *is* forgiveness according to Butler? Griswold
claims that Butler's forgiveness involves two aspects: (1) the
forswearing of *revenge*; and (2) a moderation of resentment to
an appropriate level (2007: 36). Yet according to Ernesto Garcia,
"Butlerian forgiveness simply amounts to being virtuously
resentful by avoiding both excessive and deficient resentment against
our wrongdoers" (2011: 17). On Garcia's interpretation,
Butlerian forgiveness seems to require no emotional change at
all--one can be virtuously resentful without ever having been
viciously resentful. It is unclear whether Griswold thinks that Butler
would require emotional change. If all that is required is that
resentment be kept in check, this could be done without it ever having
been excessive. On the other hand, if the requirement is that one must
go through the *process of moderating* one's resentment,
this would require some kind emotional change (although not one that
would require eliminating it entirely or even trying to do so). 


### 5.3 Punishment-forbearance Accounts



Other approaches to forgiveness claim that there is an important
connection between forgiving and punishment. The *Oxford English
Dictionary* includes "pardon" in its definition of
'forgive', and Hobbes drew a connection between forgiving
and the facility to pardon in his sixth Law of Nature: "A sixth
law of Nature is this, 'that, upon caution of the future time, a
man ought to pardon the offences past of them that, repenting, desire
it'" ([1651] 1969). Remarking on this law, Bernard Gert
writes, "This virtue, which Hobbes calls having the facility to
pardon, one can also call being forgiving" (2010: 98). In a
similar vein, Leo Zaibert has recently argued that "forgiveness
is deliberately to refuse to punish" (2009: 368). According to
the psychologist Robert Enright and his colleagues, forgiveness
involves "the casting off of deserved punishments"
(Enright et al. 1992: 88). On these *punishment-forbearance*
views of forgiveness, forgiving crucially implicates the forbearance
of punishment. 



According to these views, when one forgives one commits not to hold a
past wrong against someone and (so the story goes) were one to punish,
doing so would be to hold a past wrong against the wrongdoer.
Punishment-forbearance accounts may come in a variety of flavors,
depending on how one understands the logical relations between
forgiving and forbearing punishment (see, e.g., Londey 1986:
4-5; Wolsterstorff 2009: 203; Bash 2015: 53; Russell 2016). One
could hold that forbearing punishing is necessary for forgiveness, or
sufficient, or both. Alternatively, one could make a
*normative* claim about the relations between forgiveness and
punishment: forgiving a wrongdoing makes future punishment for that
wrong morally inappropriate (see, e.g., Swinburne 1989: 97).



Some reject these claims about the relationship between the
forbearance of punishment, instead finding "no clash between
punishment and forgiveness" (Mabbott 1939: 158; cf. Haber 1991,
Murphy 2003: 101; O'Shaughnessy 1967). For further discussion of
the relationship between punishment and forgiveness see Griswold
(2007: 32-33), Pettigrove (2012: 117-121), Russell (2016),
Tosi and Warmke (2017); and Warmke (2011, 2013).


### 5.4 Multiple-Stage Accounts



In an insightful chapter on the relationship between forgiving and
hatred, Jean Hampton argued that forgiveness is a two-stage process,
the first of which "involves regaining one's confidence in
one's own worth despite the immoral action challenging
it", which can be accomplished by 



> 
> 
> overcoming, in the sense of "giving up" or
> "repudiating", emotions such as spite and malice, and
> "overcoming" in the sense of "transcending"
> resentment. (Murphy & Hampton 1988: 83) 
> 
> 
> 



A further stage is required, however, for even after the first stage,
one might still hate the wrongdoer and hatred, according to Hampton,
is incompatible with forgiveness. Therefore, at the second stage, the
forgiver "reapproves" of the wrongdoer (Murphy & Hampton 1988: 83),
deciding to see the "wrongdoer in a new, more favorable
light" (84), "revising her judgement of the person
himself" (85).



This does not mean that the forgiver comes to approve of the
wrongdoer's action or the character trait that precipitated
it--that disapproval must remain in order for forgiveness not to
collapse into condonation. Rather, by having a change of heart towards
the wrongdoer himself, the forgiver frees herself from hatred and
indignation, allowing herself to accept the wrongdoer as a decent
person worthy of "renewed association" (Murphy & Hampton 1988: 83, 85). On
Hampton's account then, forgiveness requires both a change in
emotion towards the wrongdoer, and an intentional alteration of
one's assessments about the wrongdoer as a person, which is why
she holds that "forgiveness must be defined so that it involves
more than simply effecting certain psychological changes for moral
reasons" (1988: 37). Forgiving, therefore, is accomplished when
one successfully goes through both stages. For more on Hampton's
account see Radzik (2011).


### 5.5 Performative Accounts



The views of forgiveness canvassed thus far have, by and large,
focused on forgiveness as a private phenomenon, involving, for
example, a change in emotion. But another strand of thinking attends
to our social and linguistic practices related to forgiveness, most
notably, our practice of saying "I forgive you" or some
cognate expression. Joram Haber argued that the question "What
is forgiveness?" is best answered, "in the context of what
speakers mean when they employ the term" (1991: 53), even if
there are other ways to forgive besides uttering "'I
forgive you'" (1991: 40). According to Haber,
understanding forgiveness requires discovering what one does when one
performs the linguistic act of expressing forgiveness, typically by
way of the utterance, "I forgive you" (1991: 29).



To see what Haber and his followers have in mind, we need a bit of
background. J.L. Austin (1975) called attention to two ways to
understand what we do when we speak. In the first instance, we can
think of an utterance simply as a *locutionary* act, which is
simply the act of uttering a sentence with a certain sense and
reference. But we do not typically utter sentences simply for the sake
of uttering sentences. We also ask questions, make demands, warn of
threats, persuade detractors, express our preferences, *inter
alia*. Austin suggested that in addition to the performance of the
act *of* uttering a sentence, we may also perform an act
*in* uttering a sentence, what he called *illocutionary
acts*. Consider the sentence "I would like a ham
sandwich". The locutionary act is the utterance of the sentence
itself. The illocutionary act might be one of simply communicating a
desire, or it might be one of (in a different context) ordering a
sandwich at the deli counter.



One way to examine what a speaker does when one says "I forgive
you" is therefore to ask what illocutionary acts one performs
when one does so. Haber focuses on a class of illocutionary acts that
Austin called *behabitives,* 



> 
> 
> which include the notion of reaction to other people's behavior
> and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone
> else's past conduct or imminent conduct. (Austin 1975: 160) 
> 
> 
> 



Examples of locutions with behabitive force include statements like,
"I applaud you" and "I commend you", which
serve to express or exhibit the speaker's attitude about the
conduct of the intended audience. Understood as a behabitive, "I
forgive you" functions as an illocutionary act that communicates
to the audience that the speaker possesses certain attitudes about
her. Haber suggests that for *S* to say "I forgive
you" to *X* regarding some act *A* of
*X*'s, *S* represents (among other things) that
(*S*) has overcome his resentment for *X*'s doing
*A*, or is at least willing to try to overcome it (1991: 40).
Building on Haber's account, Glen Pettigrove argues that when a
speaker says "I forgive you", she reveals three facts
about herself: (1) that the speaker believes that she has been wronged
by the one to whom she speaks; (2) that the speaker has an absence of
hostile reactive attitudes that might have arisen in response to the
wrongdoing; and (3) that the speaker has some degree of positive
regard for the one she addresses (2004a: 379).



Speech acts may also function as *commissives*, which have the
illocutionary force of committing the speaker to an action or a course
of conduct. One might say, "I promise to buy you a tangerine
tomorrow", or "I will never lie to you again". In
doing so, the speaker places herself under an obligation to do (or not
do) what she says she will do (or not do). Pettigrove claims that in
addition to functioning as a behabitive, "I forgive you"
can also function as a commissive by committing the speaking to
forswear hostile reactive attitudes and retaliation toward the
wrongdoer and to treat her with an appropriate level of benevolence
(2004a: 385).



Used as a *declarative,* utterances or expressions may have the
effect of (to put it crudely) changing reality in various ways. An
appropriate authority might, for example, say, "I christen this
ship", or "I hereby find you guilty". By making such
an utterance, one is actually able to *make it so* that a ship
is christened or that one is found guilty. Understood as a
declarative, the utterance "I forgive you" (or one of its
cognates) makes it the case that one has been forgiven, thereby
altering the operative norms governing the interaction between victim
and wrongdoer (Warmke 2016a, 2016b). Much like one can declare a debt
forgiven (or a criminal pardoned), one can declare that one has been
forgiven by sincerely saying something like "I forgive
you" (Swinburne 1989). Such a declaration could release a
wrongdoer from certain kinds of personal obligations to the victim
(such as further apology or restitution, remorse or penance) (Nelkin
2013). It might also function as a way for the victim to relinquish
certain rights or permissions to continue blaming the wrongdoer
(Warmke 2016b).



Three clarifications about performative accounts are in order. First,
one need not think that performative forgiveness possesses only one
kind of illocutionary force. Pettigrove (2004a, 2012), for example,
argues that "I forgive you" can function as both a
behabitive and commissive. Some hold that it can function as a
behabitive, commissive, and declarative (Warmke 2016b). Second,
defenders of performative accounts need not hold that acts of
forgiveness *qua* performative, must always function in the
same way, for it might be that even if "the language of
forgiveness is quite often put to a performatory use, and it is not
always put to the same performatory use" (Neblett 1974: 269; cf.
Pettigrove 2012: 17-8). It may be that sometimes "I
forgive you" functions only as a behabitive, and other times
also as a commissive. Third, defenders of performative accounts need
not think that only *speech acts* (e.g., utterances of "I
forgive you") can fulfill the performative functions of
forgiving. Cognate communicative acts, gestures, and facial
expressions may achieve the same result (Swinburne 1989: 85).


### 5.6 Pluralist Accounts



Some philosophers have argued that forgiveness is just too diverse and
diffuse of a practice to be captured by a simple, singular theory.
Nick Smith observes that our "notions of forgiveness seem to
identify a loose constellation of interrelated meanings among various
beliefs, judgments, emotions and actions" (2008: 134).
Responding to the view that forgiveness is the same wherever it
occurs, William Neblett writes that 



> 
> 
> if there is anything about forgiveness that is always the same, no
> matter the context, it is very little, and it is none of the various
> things that philosophers are prone to say that it is, that it must be
> (like the wiping away of all resentment and ill-will). (1974: 273, cf.
> 269)
> 
> 
> 



Marilyn McCord Adams has suggested that forgiveness has two
"modalities", which she labels "performative
forgiveness" and "forgiveness from the heart" (1991:
294). Forgiveness from the heart, she writes, "involves a
*process* of letting go of one's own point of view
(regarding the situation, one's self and/or the victim, and the
offender)", which will typically "involve many changes in
feelings, attitudes, judgments and desires" (1991: 294-5,
italics original). Performative forgiveness, on the other hand,
"focuses on externals (material compensations or behavior) and
the formal structures of relationships, not on inner attitudes or
feelings" (1991: 294). Examples include "the public
acceptance of apologies for small injuries" and cases in which a
"civil suit could be pressed but is legally or officially
waived", either of which, she claims, may be accomplished absent
any "commitment to change one's attitudes or
feelings" (1991: 294). The key thought to which Adams draws our
attention is that the phenomena counting as forgiveness can be
understood as possessing an *interior* dimension or an
*exterior dimension* (and sometimes both) (cf. Zaibert 2009;
Warmke & McKenna 2013). Adams's forgiveness from the heart
occurs in this interior dimension insofar as it involves those things
that can be roughly described as psychological: judgments, beliefs,
emotions, feelings, decisions and intentions are interior aspects of
forgiveness. The exterior "performative" dimension
involves those things that can be roughly described as bodily. The
relevant kinds of bodily conduct might include things like utterances
of "I forgive you", gestures, friendly behaviors, or a
written letter or email.


## 6. Self-forgiveness



In the recent years, the topic of self-forgiveness has drawn
considerable attention (see, e.g., Williston 2012; Milam 2015).
Indeed, it does seem a commonplace that people claim to forgive
themselves both for wrongs they commit against others, and for
self-directed wrongs in the form of some sort of personal failure or
shortcoming, such as violating a commitment to another person; or
failing to adhere to a diet. Although there seems to be no logical
reason to think self-forgiveness as overcoming various forms of
self-directed moral reactive attitudes such as disappointment or
disgust is fundamentally unlike interpersonal forgiveness, there are
significant differences between the two. First, and notwithstanding
the fact that people may be angry with themselves, experience
self-directed loathing, and struggle to overcome such negative
emotional attitudes, it is not clear that the idea of resenting
oneself is coherent and, thus, whether forgiveness as overcoming
self-referential resentment is possible, at least on certain accounts
of forgiveness. This is because resentment in the sense at issue
requires such cognitions as that the wrongdoer is a moral agent and
the victim a moral subject whose rights are in some way violated by a
wrongdoer. That one and the same person is involved simultaneously as
agent and subject, wrongdoer and victim, in this drama is often
thought incompatible with the idea that resentment is necessarily
directed at other people (Arendt 1958).



Nancy Snow (1992) argues that self-forgiveness serves two important
self-regarding purposes (though see Hughes 1994). First, it serves the
purpose of restoring wrongdoers to full moral agency even in the
absence of the victim's forgiveness. This is similar to
Holmgren's claim (1998) that self-forgiving is a way of
restoring or maintaining one's intrinsic self-worth, which she
argues is an extension of her analysis of interpersonal forgiveness.
Zenon Szablowinski (2011) concurs, arguing that a failure to
self-forgive may be detrimental to a wrongdoer's moral and
psychological well-being, and that such forgiveness is morally
appropriate when a wrongdoer's guilt, shame, or self-loathing
reach significantly high levels. Second, it constitutes a second-best
alternative to full interpersonal forgiveness, in the sense that when
full interpersonal forgiveness is not forthcoming (and there can be
many reasons for this), self-forgiving is nevertheless an important
and sometimes morally appropriate response to having done wrong.


## 7. Divine Forgiveness



The topic of God's relation to human wrongdoing is an important
one in mainstream Western theological and philosophical discussions of
forgiveness, but it is by no means clear what the relationship is
supposed to be between God and forgiveness, and the connection between
that and the possibility of forgiveness between persons. This is
because there is some question whether the differences between divine
and human forgiveness are so significant that any comparison between
them is inapt. As one author puts the point, 



> 
> 
> The difference between the human and the divine should not be
> underestimated, and it is possible that it would not just be over
> optimistic but actually dangerous to expect people to model their
> behavior on God. (Tombs 2008: 592) 
> 
> 
> 



The concern expressed in this remark is that whereas God's
forgiveness is supposedly unilateral, unilateral human forgiveness may
be irresponsible, as when a victim of wrongdoing forgives a wrongdoer
irrespective of any signs of repentance on the part of the wrongdoer.
Another writer argues that the gap between human and divine
forgiveness is unbridgeable, for God's forgiveness is grounded
in "eschatological divine justice" not, as in human
forgiveness, in an awareness of "sinful solidarity with
humanity" (Williams 2008: 584-585).



If divine forgiveness is possible, what is its nature? Douglas Drabkin
reports that "there is no other way that God can forgive us, as
far as I can see, except through a change in emotion" (1993:
237). What kind of emotional changes might be at issue? For many, the
obvious candidate will be resentment. And so on this view, when we do
wrong, God has resentment towards us. To follow Jonathan Edwards, we
are "sinners in the hands of an angry God". God forgives
us by eliminating that resentment (though see Minas 1975).



One need not think that God gives up resentment, however, to adopt an
emotion theory of divine forgiveness. Douglas Drabkin has argued that
there is a kind of emotional change that is natural to suppose that
God experiences and that this change is a good candidate for divine
forgiveness. On his view, God, like any loving parent, will
"suffer on our account" when we do evil (235). "When
we repent", he says, "God feels our joy and ceases to
suffer" (235). He concludes: "This, I am suggesting, is
how God forgives us: by rejoicing in our repentance" (235).
However, on those theological views according to which God is
impassible (i.e., God is unable to suffer or have reactive emotions),
these kinds of emotion views will be off the table (see, e.g.,
Gavrilyuk 2004).



Another approach to divine forgiveness says that God forgives by
forbearing punishment. Some philosophical discussions of divine
forgiveness have proceeded as if this view (or something very much
like it) is the default position. For example, David Londey proceeds
to answer this question by operating with a conception of forgiveness
that crucially involves the remission of any "penalty or
sanction", including "moral censure" and "more
tangible punishments" that a wrongdoer is due (1986: 5). In
their respective replies to Londey defending the possibility of divine
forgiveness, Andrew Brien and Dean Geuras each assume a
punishment-forbearance view according to which forgiveness is the
forbearing of any punishment one ought to inflict (Brien 1989: 35) and
the remission of a deserved penalty (Geuras 1992: 65). Swinburne
argues that God's forgiveness is akin to the forgiveness of a
kind of debt: when God forgives us, the guilt that our wrongdoing
incurred is wiped away (1989). See also Bash (2015), Brien (1989),
Mackintosh (1927), Minas (1975), and Scheiber (2001).


## 8. Political Forgiveness



The power of pardon enjoyed by duly established political authorities
may be at best a loose cognate of forgiveness, but this is not to say
that all legal or political analogues to forgiveness are implausible
(for discussion see MacLachlan 2012, cf. Norlock & Veltman 2009). P.E. Digeser (2001) has argued
in favor of a conception of political forgiveness that breaks sharply
with the standard philosophical accounts of forgiveness as involving
the overcoming of resentment or other negative emotional states by
victims of wrong. Instead, Digeser seeks to divest political
forgiveness of any personal feelings whatsoever in favor of a
performative account in which such overt behaviors as pardoning a
criminal or waiving a debt signify forgiveness. Digeser claims that
separating the action of forgiving from its underlying motive and from
the constellation of feelings often thought to accompany interpersonal
forgiveness better suits a conception of justice as one in which
people get their due. On this performative conception, forgiveness
consists in political actors or institutions opting not to get their
due, for whatever reasons.



Digeser claims to have created a serviceable political notion of
forgiveness shorn of its usual psychological baggage. And surely, as
noted earlier, there is a sense of forgiveness in which an action such
as waiving a debt or an utterance such as "I forgive you"
is sometimes all that forgiveness is about. To this extent and in this
sense, debt forgiveness and political pardons may reasonably be
regarded as political forms of forgiving, and Digeser identifies four
forms such political forgiveness may take (2001: 9). First, political
forgiveness takes a *many-to-one* form when a group forgives an
individual. Suppose, for example, the American people could forgive
former President Clinton for lying to a grand jury, or that a
university community could forgive a dean who embezzled funds. Second,
we can recognize *one-to-many* political forgiveness, whereby
an individual forgives a group. One can imagine, for example,
exonerated prisoners forgiving police forces or the justice system for
wrongly arresting or convicting them (for even if no single member of
the police or justice system wronged the exonerated prisoner, their
joint action may have done so). Third, in *many-to-many*
political forgiveness, groups or collectives enter into forgiveness
relations with other groups or collectives. Examples may include the
aforementioned cases of U.S.-Japan and Tutsi-Hutu relations. Finally,
*one-to-one* political forgiveness involves individuals
forgiving other individuals. President Gerald Ford, for example,
famously issued an executive pardon to former President Richard Nixon
after his resignation amidst charges that he broke the law.



The past thirty or so years have seen a rapid increase on the part of
political leaders apologizing for and seeking reconciliation between
perpetrators and victims of moral atrocities. The ostensible aim of
such efforts has not only been to rectify past wrongs and give those
who have been wronged their due, but to heal deep and sometimes
longstanding wounds caused by such wrongs as well. The South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the mid 1990s is probably
the best-known example of such attempts to achieve reconciliation
between perpetrators and victims of intra-national collective wrongs
(Tutu 1999). Other instances of political apology, aimed in part at
effecting some form of forgiveness or reconciliation, include
Australia's "sorry book", which records
citizens' remorse over a former government policy mandating the
forced removal of aboriginal children from their natural parents in
the name of cultural assimilation, President Clinton's apology
to African Americans and subsequent proposals by scholars and
policy-makers of reparations for slavery, and Northern Ireland's
1998 Good Friday Agreement and the peace process initiated thereby
(Brooks 2004; Biggar 2008). Understanding forgiveness as roughly
synonymous with reconciliation supports the notion that these
collective endeavors are institutional forms of forgiveness (Radzik
2009).


## 9. The Ethics of Forgiveness


### 9.1 Forgiveness as a Virtue



Within Western traditions, forgiveness has often been regarded as a
"high" and "difficult" virtue (Scarre 2004), and its
opposite, unwillingness to forgive, as a vice. Yet this poses an
immediate problem of interpretation, namely, whether forgiveness is a
"high" and "difficult" virtue in the sense
that while it is morally laudable it is beyond duty (i.e.,
supererogatory). Since supererogatory actions are permissible, not
obligatory, it follows that a failure to forgive, at least in
circumstances where forgiving would be supererogatory, would not,
contrary to the aforementioned view, be a vice. However, widespread
and persistent disagreement within moral philosophy both about
supererogation and the deontic nature of forgiveness have led to
conflicting views on the relation between forgiveness and moral
obligation (see, e.g., Gamlund 2010; Lauritzen 1987). Some thinkers
have argued that forgiveness is a duty (Rashdall 1907) while others
have maintained that, like a gift with no strings attached,
forgiveness is utterly gratuitous (Heyd 1982). It might also be
thought that, similar to the duty of charity in Kant's moral
system, forgiveness is properly regarded as an imperfect duty. Unlike
perfect duties such as the obligation to justice or honesty, imperfect
duties allow for agential discretion over when and with respect to
whom to discharge the duty. In this way, forgiveness may be located in
a system of moral duties that allows for no supererogatory deeds at
all.



In contrast to duty-based approaches to forgiveness, virtue-based
perspectives suggest that the overcoming or forswearing of angry
reactive attitudes characteristic of forgiveness must be grounded in
or expressive of relatively stable and durable dispositions or
character traits (Roberts 1995; Sadler 2008; Radzik 2010). On such
views, forgiveness is a virtue, or is at least closely aligned with
one or more of the traditional virtues such as magnanimity or
sympathy. Within ancient Greek thought the views of Plato and
Aristotle on the relationship between anger and living virtuously are
noteworthy, as is the Christian traditions' understanding of
forgiveness as love or compassion.



Although forgiveness is not identified as a distinct virtue in
Plato's work, the Platonic perspective on anger illuminates the
general emotional landscape in which forgiveness has often been
located and from which it derives much of its value. In his discussion
on the nature of community and individual morality in Book IV of the
*Republic*, Plato makes clear that demonstrations of anger are
generally regarded as manifestations of intemperance, which is a vice,
and since angry emotions are ever a threat to overwhelm reason and
self-control they must be rationally controlled in the name of a
harmonious ordering of the different parts of the soul, which is the
essence of a morally good person (*Republic*, 439-442).
By contrast, Aristotle, in his discussion of virtues and vices
relative to anger in Book IV of the *Nicomachean Ethics*,
explains that "good temper" is the mean between the
extremes of irascibility, an excess of anger, and inirascibility, or
what he alternatively calls a "nameless" deficiency of
anger, and that the good-tempered person "is not revengeful, but
rather tends to forgive" (1126a1). Aristotle's general
perspective on morally appropriate anger is that the person of virtue
is "angry at the right things and with the right people, and,
further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought"
(1125b32). In general, both Plato's and Aristotle's views
suggest that anger controlled by or expressive of reason may be seen
as manifesting virtue, whereas anger ungoverned by rationality is a
vice.



A disposition to too readily forgive may be symptomatic of a lack of
self-respect, or indicative of servility, ordinarily viewed as moral
infirmities or vices (Novitz 1998). This recalls Aristotle's
idea that the person deficient in appropriate anger is "unlikely
to defend himself" and "endure being insulted" and
is for this reason a "fool" (*Nicomachean Ethics*,
1126a5), Kant's notion that a person who fails to become angry
at injustices done to him lacks dignity and self-respect (Kant [c.
1770-1794] 1997, cf. Sussman 2005; Ware 2014), and Hume's
assertion that since anger and hatred are "inherent in our very
frame and constitution" the lack of such feelings is sometimes
evidence of "weakness and imbecility" ([1740] 1958: 605).
That interpersonal forgiveness does not always serve morally laudable
aims suggests that a general account of the criteria for justified and
morally permissible or even obligatory forgiveness is needed to
distinguish appropriate from inappropriate forgiving.



Several virtue-theoretic perspectives contrary both to early Greek
notions that anger appropriately mediated by reason is a virtue, and
from the Christian view that forgiveness as transcending anger in an
act of love is a virtue, should be mentioned. First, Nietzsche's
conception of *ressentiment* as sublimated anger/envy directed
at the noble man suggests that both dispositional and episodic anger
may be manifestations of weakness or vice, not strength, self-respect,
or virtue (Nietzsche [1887] 1967; cf. Griswold 2007; Blustein 2014).
This is reminiscent of Plutarch's view that anger is like a
disease, and extreme or abiding anger such as rage or bitterness are
unnatural dispositional states (Plutarch [c. 100 CE] 2000). We should
add to these views the observation that the negative effects of being
angrily obsessed by someone's wrongdoing is not by itself a
justification for blaming or forgiving him. Put differently, though it
might be a bad thing to be angrily obsessed with having been wronged,
it does not follow from this that a victim of wrong must forgive the
wrongdoer. There are, after all, other ways of transcending or purging
recalcitrant anger which might be more appropriate than would be
forgiving. 



Nietzsche's view suggests the further idea that even episodic
angry emotions may be a sign of moral infirmity, insofar as such
emotions concede power to others by revealing one's
vulnerability to injury. But the truly noble or strong are thought to
have, in some sense, no such vulnerabilities. Second, some recent
popular views suggest that the uninhibited expression of anger and
rage is a good thing, insofar as such venting is cathartic. But on
consequentialist grounds alone it seems clear that controlling intense
anger rather than its unfettered expression is closer to what a good
life requires, for though anger may sometimes be enabling in
motivating constructive solutions to personal or political problems,
its indiscriminate expression is more likely to be disabling, both for
those expressing it and for those around them. This last remark
relates to a third disparaging view of angry reactive attitudes, that
of the Stoic Seneca, who maintains that all forms of anger are
inconsistent with the moral life because they dispose us to cruelty
and vengeance, which passions encourage us to see other people as less
than fully human (*De Ira*, c. 50CE). On this view, the person
of virtue is one who strives to extirpate anger in all its forms.
These three perspectives seem to imply that since anger is never an
appropriate emotion, forgiveness cannot be a virtue, at least in the
sense of overcoming justified anger.



What is the connection between forgiveness and another virtue, that of
justice? Forgiveness has long been regarded by some as in conflict
with justice, if not incompatible with it. Seneca (*De
Clementia*, c. 55CE) claimed that 



> 
> 
> Pardon is given to a man who ought to be punished; but a wise man does
> nothing that he ought not to do, omits to do nothing which he ought 
> to do; therefore he does not remit a punishment which he ought to
> exact. 
> 
> 
> 



Mercy, by contrast, is aligned with justice in the sense that
"it declares that those who are let off did not deserve any
different treatment" (*De Clementia*). Considering the
specific circumstances of individual cases is a matter of mercy,
"not of forgiveness". Mercy, unlike pardon and
forgiveness, is an exercise of equity, which is an application of
justice in light of the unique circumstances of individual cases. By
contrast, the prerogative of pardon associated with such political
executives as Presidents, Prime Ministers, and other authorities may
be viewed, according to Aristotle, as an exercise of equity in the
sense that such duly established authorities are commonly thought to
use that power as a way of mitigating the rigors of universal
standards of justice in their application to particular cases the
specifics of which appear to fall beyond the scope of the universal
rule (Wolsterstorff 2009; Bingham 2009).


### 9.2 Norms Governing Instances of Forgiveness



What about the morality of individual acts of forgiveness? Let us use
"positive moral status" as an umbrella term to capture the
status of an *instance* of forgiveness insofar as it is morally
good, morally virtuous, morally permissible, morally praiseworthy,
morally right, morally obligatory, or morally supererogatory. It is
commonplace to think that in order for an act of forgiveness to have
positive moral status, certain kinds of conditions must be met.
*Conditionalism* is the view that in order for an act of
forgiveness to have positive moral status, certain conditions must be
met either by the victim or the wrongdoer (or both). For example, it
might be thought that in order for forgiveness to have positive moral
status, the victim must forgive for certain kinds of good reasons. If
the victim does not forgive for those good kinds of reasons, then she
does something morally impermissible (or bad, or blameworthy, etc.) by
forgiving. We can call such conditions *victim-dependent*.
Alternatively, it might be thought that in order for forgiveness to
have positive moral status, the wrongdoer must, say, apologize to the
victim. This is a kind of *wrongdoer-dependent* condition. If
the wrongdoer does not apologize to the victim, then the victim does
something morally impermissible (or bad, or blameworthy, etc.) by
forgiving.



Notice, however, that this claim is to be distinguished from the view
according to which, absent a wrongdoer's apology, the
victim's "forgiveness" is not actually forgiveness
at all, but instead condonation or exculpation. On this latter sort of
view, the conditions for positive moral status for an act of
forgiveness are built into the very constitutive conditions for
forgiveness itself. We can call a view of forgiveness that builds the
conditions for positive moral status into the conditions for
forgiveness itself a "thick" conception of forgiveness. On
this view, forgiveness is, as such, always morally good, morally
permissible, or otherwise possesses some other such positive moral
status. (This is consistent with an act of forgiveness being all
things considered wrong if, say, forgiving in some case would cause
the death of innocent millions.) In contrast, a "thin"
conception of forgiveness is one that allows that an instance of
forgiveness can lack positive moral status. Of course, both thick and
thin conceptions of forgiveness can require (or not require) that
either (or both) victim-dependent and wrongdoer-dependent conditions
were first met. And so here, we will set aside this thick/thin
controversy and focus on the conditions for morally positive
forgiveness as such.



It is widely thought that in order for an act of forgiveness to have
positive moral status, the victim must meet certain conditions. The
most commonly cited kind of victim-dependent condition has to do with
the victim's motivating reasons for forgiving. Only some kinds
of motivating reasons make forgiveness morally positive. For example,
Joram Haber has argued that for an act of forgiveness to be
"appropriate" (such that were we to forgive we would not
risk "moral reproval"), the victim must forgive for a
reason that "preserves self-respect" and that the
"only reason that would serve this function is that the
wrongdoer has repented the wrong she has done" (1991: 90). For
Haber, then, it seems that unless the wrongdoer repents and the victim
forgives her (at least in part) for this reason, then that forgiveness
is morally inappropriate. Haber therefore has two conditions, one
wrongdoer-dependent (to repent for the wrong done), and one
victim-dependent (to forgive at least in part because the wrongdoer
repented). Jeffrie Murphy articulates a similar view, claiming that




> 
> 
> acceptable grounds for forgiveness must be compatible with
> self-respect, respect for others as moral agents, and respect for the
> rules of morality and the moral order. (Murphy & Hampton 1988: 24)
> 
> 
> 
> 



Examples of the kinds of moral reasons that Murphy has in mind
include: that the wrongdoer repented or had a change of heart, that
she has suffered enough, and that she has undergone humiliation, such
as "the apology ritual" (24).



There may be other kinds of conditions that a victim must meet in
order to effect morally positive forgiveness. Charles Griswold writes
that in the "paradigmatic scene", where forgiveness is
"at its best" as the manifestation of virtue (2007: 38),
in addition to forswearing revenge, moderating resentment, and
committing to give up any lingering resentment, the victim must also:
(1) revise her view of the wrongdoer as someone who is reducible to
the person who did the wrong; (2) give up any presumption of decisive
moral superiority and recognize the shared humanity of both parties;
and (3) address the wrongdoer and declare that forgiveness is granted
(2007: 54-8).



It is more controversial whether morally positive forgiveness requires
wrongdoer-dependent conditions. One of the foremost defenders of such
conditions is Charles Griswold, who argues that in the
"paradigmatic scene", there are numerous
wrongdoer-dependent conditions on forgiveness. Namely, the wrongdoer
must: (1) acknowledge that she was responsible for the wrong in
question; (2) repudiate the deeds and disavow the thought that she
would do them again; (3) experience and express regret at having
caused the particular wrong; (4) commit, by deeds and words, to being
the sort of person who doesn't do wrong; (5) show that she
understands, from the victim's perspective, the damage done by
the wrongdoing; and (6) offer some sort of narrative to explain why
she did wrong (2007: 47-51).



As noted above, Haber claims that repentance is necessary for morally
positive forgiveness, as does Wilson (1988). Swinburne claims that,
least in the case of "serious hurt", "it is both bad
and ineffective" to forgive when no atonement has been made
(where atonement includes some combination of reparation, repentance,
apology, and penance) (1989: 84, 86). Although he remains
non-committal about the necessity of wrongdoer-dependent conditions,
Jeffrie Murphy thinks that "it is not unreasonable to make
forgiveness contingent on sincere repentance" (2003: 36).



Why think that a wrongdoer must apologize, repent, or have a change of
heart in order for forgiveness to have positive moral status? Two
general reasons have been given. First, it is thought that in the
absence of apology and repentance, forgiving constitutes a failure to
take the wrongdoing seriously enough. If we give up our resentment or
discontinue blame while the wrongdoer continues to "stand
by" their mistreatment of us, we are in effect condoning the
wrongdoing (see, e.g., Kolnai 1973: 95-6). A second kind of
reason is that forgiving in the absence of apology and repentance
reveals a lack of self-respect. Forgiving the unapologetic will
usually, if not always, mean that the victim will "underestimate
their own worth and fail to take their projects and entitlements
seriously enough" (Novitz 1998: 299; cf. Murphy 1982: 505;
Griswold 2007: 64-5). In reply, Pettigrove (2004b, 2012: ch. 6)
and Garrard and McNaughton (2011) take on both the condonation and the
self-respect arguments, concluding that neither shows that forgiving
unrepentant or unapologetic wrongdoers necessarily puts one at moral
risk. For discussion of three other objections to the rejection of
wrongdoer-dependent conditions--that it has bad consequences,
that it is arbitrary, and that absent repentance resentment is still
warranted--see Garrard and McNaughton (2011). 



Eve Garrard and David McNaughton originally coined the term
"unconditional forgiveness" to refer to morally positive
forgiveness that doesn't depend on the actions or attitudes of
the wrongdoer (2002). The term itself may be misleading for the kind
of conditions on morally positive forgiveness they rejected are what
we are calling the wrongdoer-dependent conditions: they argued that an
act of forgiveness need not be lacking in positive moral status just
because the wrongdoer did not repent, apologize, or make restitution.
They did not mean to claim that *all* acts of forgiveness as
such have positive moral status, and so have recently clarified their
position, defending what they call "conditional unconditional
forgiveness" (2011; cf. Hoffman 2009). Their view is
unconditional insofar as morally positive forgiveness does not require
that the wrongdoer repent, apologize, or make restitution. However, a
victim's forgiveness may still be "defectively
facile" if she fails to grasp the moral significance of the
offense and so overcomes her hostile feelings too "smoothly and
easily" (Garrard & McNaughton 2011: 105). Her reasons for
forgiving may be bad ones and she may display her forgiveness in an
illegitimate manner. The illegitimacy of such forgiveness, however,
has nothing to do with the wrongdoer's actions or state of mind.




Margaret Holmgren articulates a similar view, arguing that once a
victim completes a certain kind of process, 



> 
> 
> forgiveness is always appropriate and desirable from a moral point of
> view, regardless of whether the wrongdoer repents and regardless of
> what [the wrongdoer] has done or suffered. (1993: 341) 
> 
> 
> 



Absent this process, however, the victim forgives prematurely, and her
forgiveness may therefore be incompatible with her own self-respect
and therefore inappropriate (1993: 341, 342). Notice that for
Holmgren, whether one's forgiveness is self-respecting depends
wholly on whether the victim herself goes through a certain kind of
process. On her view, forgiveness that is compatible with self-respect
does not depend on the actions or attitudes of the wrongdoer. What
kind of process is required? Holmgren identifies six general elements
of this process: the victim must (1) recover her self-esteem; (2)
come to fully appreciate the nature of the wrongdoing and why it was
wrong; (3) acknowledge as basic and legitimate her feelings of anger
and grief as a result of being wronged; (4) not withhold something she
needs to say or express to the wrongdoer about her beliefs and
feelings; (5) reassess the nature of her relationship with the
wrongdoer; and (6) determine whether she wants to seek restitution
from the wrongdoer (1993: 343-4).


### 9.3 Skepticism About the Morality of Forgiveness



All of the views canvassed thus far allow that, at least in some
circumstances, forgiveness has positive moral status. But some
philosophers have expressed skepticism about the morality of
forgiveness as such. For example, some "perfectionist"
views of morality might see forgiveness, not as having intrinsic moral
value, but as having only instrumental or remedial value. A
perfectionist view might hold that whatever attitudes or actions we
overcome or forbear in forgiveness were not morally good in the first
place: to feel resentment, for example, admits of moral error. And so
if one is in a position to forgive, this would reveal only that
something morally sub-par had already occurred in how a victim
responded to being wronged. Forgiveness might be thought then as just
the mechanism by which we expunge those already morally mistaken
reactions. Griswold argues that something like this perfectionist
scheme can be found in the ancients from Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics,
and the Epicureans (2007: 2-14). And though his views on what we
now call forgiveness are complicated, Nietzsche might be understood as
"seeing forgiveness as part of a moral system that must be
rejected *in toto*" (Griswold 2007: 15; cf. Blustein
2014: 23-30).



Modern-day skeptics about moral responsibility and blameworthiness
might also be committed to a remedial view of the moral status of
forgiveness (see, e.g., Pereboom 2014). If no one is morally
responsible and blameworthy for what they do, then morally reactive
attitudes like resentment will likely be inappropriate for both
epistemic and moral reasons. But if forgiving requires that one hold a
wrongdoer morally responsible and blameworthy for what they have done,
they are making a kind of moral mistake. Forgiving--understood as
giving up one's morally reactive attitudes or blaming
behaviors--might be what is required to reverse that mistake, but
the need to forgive itself is evidence that something has already gone
wrong as regards one's reactions to being wronged. According to
Martha Nussbaum (2016), another modern critic of forgiveness, not only
does forgiveness respond to an already normatively problematic
attitude (i.e., resentment), it also takes on in its
"transactional" form a kind of morally suspect
down-ranking: the victim demands apology and humility from the
wrongdoer thereby bringing her low until the victim is ready to move
on from her anger.



One contemporary critic of the positive moral status of forgiveness is
John Kekes (2009), who argues that the "standard view"
(*viz*. that forgiveness is always or at least sometimes
morally good) is "seriously flawed". The reason is simple:
"when blaming wrongdoers is reasonable, there is no reason to
forgive them; and when blaming them is unreasonable, there is nothing
to forgive" (2009: 488; cf. Kolnai 1973; Zaibert 2009; Hallich
2013). On Kekes' view, whether blame is reasonable depends on
(1) whether the blamer's belief about having suffered
undeserved, unjustified, and non-trivial harm is true; (2) whether the
emotion such harm elicits is appropriate; (3) whether the motive (for
blaming) is commensurate with the harm; and (4) whether the (blaming)
action, if there is one, remains within the limits set by the
blamer's relevant belief, emotion, judgment, and motive (2009:
501). And so if someone has done nothing blameworthy, then
"neither blame nor forgiveness is appropriate" (2009:
501). On the other hand, if someone has done something blameworthy,
then "blame [of the right kind and degree] is appropriate and
forgiveness is not" (2009: 501). Either way, to forgive would be
to do something morally inappropriate.



Kekes' argument relies on at least two crucial assumptions.
First, it assumes that forgiveness requires giving up the judgment
that one has been the victim of undeserved, unjustified and
non-trivial harm, a judgment that is "at the core of
blame" (2009: 498, contrast Pettigrove 2012: 6-7, fn. 12).
If an account of forgiveness had no such requirement, however, then
forgiveness would not be inappropriate simply because it required one
to adopt a false belief about the past. Second, the argument assumes
that when a wrongdoer is blameworthy, then either blame or forgiveness
is appropriate, but not both. Yet if one can forgive while still
judging truly that the wrongdoer did wrong, then it may be appropriate
*either* to continue to blame or to instead forgive.
Blameworthiness may provide reasons that merely *justify*
blame, even if forgiveness is *also* justified (Warmke &
McKenna 2013).


## 10. The Science of Forgiveness



For much of the history of modern psychology, the topic of forgiveness
was largely ignored. Piaget (1932) discussed the capacity of
forgiveness so far as it is related to the development of moral
judgment. Litwinski (1945) produced a study on the kind of affective
structure that would provide one with a capacity to forgive. Emerson
(1964) was the first to explore the association of forgiveness with
mental health, and Heider (1958) proposed an early working definition
of forgiveness (as the forgoing of vengeful behavior). Rokeach (1973)
promoted forgiveness as a valuable form of conduct, but didn't
say much about its nature. Discussions of forgiveness as it relates to
Prisoner's Dilemma situations and tit-for-tat strategies were
not uncommon (e.g., Gahagan & Tedeschi 1968)--the idea being
that forgiveness could be likened to a cooperative move following a
competitive move.



In the recent decades, forgiveness has enjoyed a significant increase
in empirical attention (McCullough, et al. 2000: 6, 7). Important
early work during this time included papers by Boon and Sulsky (1997),
Darby and Schlenker (1982), and Weiner, et al. (1991). Yet even after
decades of sustained empirical enquiry, psychologists remain divided
about how forgiveness ought to be defined. The "major issue
characterizing this new science of forgiveness", Everett
Worthington writes, "has been how forgiveness ought to be
defined" (2005: 3).



Some psychologists forward interpersonal models of forgiveness.
According to these approaches, forgiveness is an activity involving
communication (perhaps verbal, perhaps not) between agents.
*Reconciliation-based* models of forgiveness developed out of
research in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary ethics (Sapolsky
& Share 2004; de Waal & Pokorny 2005; Axelrod 1980a,b).
According to these views, forgiveness evolved as a mechanism for
affirming mutual cooperation between agents after an act of
defection.



Others have sought to define forgiveness by way of intrapersonal
models. According to these models, forgiveness occurs within
one's skin, as it were. DiBlasio's (1998)
*decision-based* model views forgiveness "as an act of
the will, a choice to let go or hold onto" resentment,
bitterness and the need for vengeance (1998: 76). McCullough and
various colleagues have posited a *motivational* model that
understands forgiveness as a process involving a decrease in
motivations to avoid or seek revenge, and an increase in benevolent
and conciliatory motivations (e.g., McCullough, Fincham, & Tsang
2003). *Cognitive* models conceive of forgiveness as a
reframing of the narrative about the transgression, the transgressor
and the forgiver (e.g., Gordon, Baucom, & Snyder 2000; Thompson,
et al. 2005). One forgives by changing one's assumptions,
beliefs, standards, or perceptions about the wrongdoer and the
wrongdoing. *Emotion-based* models see forgiveness as being
accomplished by the replacement of negative, unforgiving emotions
(e.g., anger, hatred) with positive, other-oriented emotions (e.g.,
empathy) (Worthington 2003; Malcolm & Greenberg 2000).



Still others have suggested *mixed models*, according to which
forgiveness has both interpersonal and intrapersonal modes or aspects.
Baumeister, Exline, and Sommer (1998) suggest that when one feels
forgiving towards an offender but does not communicate as much, one
has *silently forgiven*. Alternatively, when one does
not feel forgiving but tells the offender that she is forgiving her,
she accomplishes *hollow forgiveness*. When one both feels
forgiving and tells the offender so, she has accomplished *full
forgiveness*. Enright and Fitzgibbons (2000) have argued that in
order to forgive, cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes must be
made. 



As it should be clear, there is significant disagreement about the
nature of forgiveness in the psychological sciences, leading one
prominent psychologist of forgiveness to write that "no
consensual definition of forgiveness exists" (McCullough, et al.
2000: 7).