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Notes
More specifically, according to Roberts the emotion we overcome in forgiveness is anger, see Robert C. Roberts, “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995): 289–306. According to Richards, forgiveness involves overcoming a whole range of negative emotions including sadness, disappointment, frustration as well as resentment; see Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics 99 (1988): 77–97. According to Sher, forgiveness involves overcoming blame; see George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Lucy Allais, “Dissolving Reactive Attitudes: Forgiving and Understanding,” South African Journal of Philosophy 27 (2008): 1–23. Espen Gamlund, “The Duty to Forgive Repentant Wrongdoers,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (2010a): 651–671.
P.F. Strawon, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Freedom and Resentment (London: Methuen, 1974), 1–24. See also Gamlund, op. cit., Roberts, op. cit.
Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (with Jeffrie G. Murphy) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 80.
Ibid., 42.
See Roberts, op. cit.
See Roberts, op. cit. See also Thomas Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 160.
See Hampton, op cit., p. 86.
I will use the term “blameworthy” in the following sense: an agent is blameworthy for performing a morally wrong action, i.e., an action for which the agent has no (objective) justification and no responsibility-undermining excuse. In short, an agent is blameworthy, if she performed an all-things-considered unjustifiable action and is morally responsible for doing so. The term “blameworthy” should be understood here non-affectively and is probably replaceable by the closely related term “culpable.” On this understanding, “being blameworthy” is just having an entry in one’s ledger of moral responsibility. See esp. Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) on the ledger metaphor. I believe this usage is intended by Michael Zimmerman when he says “A person can be praiseworthy or blameworthy without anyone’s being aware of this, without anyone’s taking note of it, without anyone’s actually praising or blaming him” Michael J. Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), p. 39.
Alluding to Chalmers (David Chalmers, "Facing Up the Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 200–219), I call this the “hard problem of forgiveness” to distinguish it from other worries about forgiveness such as, among others, the question whether forgiveness is ever a strict duty (and not just permissible), or the question whether forgiveness is only justifiable if the offender repents and apologizes. The distinction is not meant to imply that the latter issues are easily resolvable. But they do not seem to concern the very essence of forgiveness in the same way as the hard problem does. Kolnai and Hieronymi are especially clear on this matter. See Aurél Kolnai, “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1974): 91–106 and Pamela Hieronymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2002): 529–555.
See Strawson, op. cit., p. 23.
See Jonathan Bennett, “Accountability,” in Zak van Straaten (ed.), Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P.F. Strawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 14–47, p. 24 and p. 29. Galen Strawson describes his father’s view as a “non-rational commitment theory of freedom,” see Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 84.
András Szigeti, “Revisiting Strawsonian Arguments from Inescapability,” Philosophica 85 (2012): 91–121.
P.F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism. Some Varieties (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 39. My italics.
Jay R. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). See also Hieronymi, op. cit., Scanlon, op. cit., etc.
I think there can be non-emotional reactive attitudes too, i.e., reactive attitudes which do not involve reactive emotions. But nothing crucial hinges in the following on this.
This means that emotions and a fortiori affective reactive attitudes need not involve a propositional cognitive component, and perhaps not even cognitive construals à la Roberts. Here I go along with the view that even without such a component emotions can be taken to be representations of evaluative concerns. For the idea that emotions are representations of non-propositional evaluative concerns, see Christine Tappolet, Émotions et Valuers (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000); Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “The Significance of Recalcitrant Emotion (or, Anti-Quasijudgmentalism),” in A. Hatzimoysis (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 127–146; Sabine A. Döring, “Why Be Emotional?,” in Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 283–301. If this idea is on the right track, then the role of emotions is often similar to non-inferential, non-conceptual perceptual inputs, and possibly also similar to non-inferential intuitions, see also Tim Crane, “The Nonconceptual Content of Experience,” in Tim Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 136–157.
See Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, “The Thing Called Emotion,” in Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 41–62.
I will set aside the issue whether those above are indeed all essential characteristics, and whether perhaps other characteristics should be included in the list or not.
Richards (op. cit.) and Roberts (op. cit.) discuss cases of forgiving strangers such as that of a careless driver who splashes dirt on your clothes. Granted, in such cases there is no acquaintance prior to the offense. But it is plausible to argue that the offense itself creates the requisite minimal degree of personal contact between offender and victim. See also the discussion on the personal concern of emotions in Section 2.2.3.
Murphy op. cit., p. 21: “[…] I do not have standing to resent or forgive you unless I have myself been the victim of your wrongdoing.”
Oliver Hallich, “Can the Paradox of Forgiveness Be Dissolved?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2013): 999–1017, p. 1004.
See Roberts, op. cit., p. 297.
For an argument that emotions can be characterized as truth-apt cognitive states even in the absence of propositional content, see Mikko Salmela, “True Emotions,” Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2006): 382–405.
Perhaps genuine reconciliation between victim and offender is impossible without forgiveness by the former. But that is not the received view, not at least in psychological forgiveness research, see, for example, Michael E. McCullough and Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet, “The Psychology of Forgiveness,” in C.R. Snyder and S.J. Lopez (eds.), Handbook of Positive Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 446–458, p. 447.
Thus some (e.g., Richards, op. cit., p. 79) doubt that Kolnai is right to say that gestures of “(re-) acceptance” typically follow forgiveness.
See Hieronymi, op. cit., p. 551.
See Roberts, op. cit.
I will come back to this point in Section 3.3.
See Ben-Ze’ev, op. cit., p. 43.
See Roberts, op. cit., p. 293.
An alternative approach is to emphasize the role of repentance and apology in changing the significance or standing of the offender (rather than that of the offense) in the victim’s eyes (see, for example, Roberts, op. cit. and Richards op. cit., pp. 87–92 on the second approach). On this second approach, repentance and apology change primarily how the victim relates to the offender rather than how the victim relates to the offense. Hieronymi, who favors the first approach, is clear about this distinction (op. cit., p. 547).
It may also be true that emotions, or at least reactive emotions, can also create interpersonal relations. Bennett makes this point about reactive attitudes in general. The reason, he says, why reactive attitudes have such a relationship-generating potential is that reactive attitudes are “forms of address” directed at other members of the moral community, see Bennett, op. cit., pp. 29–30.
See Kolnai, op. cit., p. 104.
It is a more complicated question which I cannot discuss here whether it follows from the personal nature of forgiveness that the addressee of the reactive attitude can only be a single person (or a few clearly identified persons such as the three thugs who robbed me). Can we forgive a corporation or a political party for causing some harm? Can we forgive a large random group of people on the beach for failing to prevent the drowning?
The same questions arise for other emotions that resemble forgiveness in having a partial and personal concern in the sense discussed above.
See esp. Kolnai, op. cit.; Hieronymi, op. cit.; 2002; Hallich, op. cit.
See Gamlund, op. cit.; and also Espen Gamlund, “Supererogatory Forgiveness,” Inquiry 53 (2010b): 540–564.
There is a difficulty here about how to arrive at the core relational theme of an emotion type. On some approaches a sufficiently fine-grained application of the first method will produce the core relational theme so there is no real difference between the first and second ways of distinguishing emotions. This is how I read the kind of metaethical sentimentalism advocated by Jesse Prinz, see Jesse Prinz, “The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgments,” Philosophical Explorations 9 (2006): 29–43; Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jesse Prinz and Shaun Nichols, “Moral Emotions,” in J.M. Doris & The Moral (eds.), Psychology Research Group The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 111–146. By contrast, rational sentimentalists, who accord a decisive role to the rational endorsability of emotions, need to rely on both methods whereby the second will be a necessary corrective of the first (see works by D’Arms & Jacobson cited below).
Prinz and Nichols, op. cit., p. 119.
D’Arms and Jacobson, op. cit., p. 139.
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “Sentiment and Value,” Ethics 110 (2000): 722–748, p. 66.
D’Arms and Jacobson, op. cit., p. 108.
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “Anthropocentric Constrains on Human Value,” in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 99–126, p. 109.
Although, as usual, the devil is in the details. Can two emotion types differ only in their valence? That depends on what exactly we mean by emotional valence (I will come back to this in Section 3.3).
It is even said that we are “entering a golden era of [empirical] forgiveness research,” McCullough and Witvliet, op. cit.
The list of potential references is too numerous here. In cultural anthropology, see works by Joel Robbins (e.g., Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)). For issues in applied ethics, McCullough and Witvliet, op. cit., is a good place to start.
Many use the term “formal object” to refer to the emotion’s core relational theme. See, for example, Fabrice Teroni, “Emotions and Formal Objects,” Dialectica 61 (2007): 395–415.
For simplicity’s sake, I talk about forgiving actions in this paper. We need not answer the question here whether forgiveness can also be directed at other people’s attitudes or character.
See, for example, Hampton, op. cit., and Hallich, op. cit.
I take condoning to be just a blatantly objectionable attempt to justify wrongdoing, and so not to constitute a separate category of response.
See Kolnai, op. cit., p. 100.
Some people may argue that the core relational theme of these reactive emotions is not just broader than that of resentment, but also that there is no overlap between their core relational theme and that of resentment. That is, if anger is a fitting response, resentment cannot be. Strawson (op. cit., p. 4), I think, comes close to saying this here: “If someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. But I shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that I shall not feel in the first.” We do not need to settle this issue here.
See esp. Kolnai, op. cit., and Hieronymi, op. cit.
The “paradox of forgiveness” eloquently presented by Kolnai (op. cit.) consists in the fact that, on the one hand, it often looks like that once that factor obtains (after t2) there is really nothing left to forgive – after all the offender is now a different person. On the other hand, before that factor obtains (from t1 to t2) forgiveness is unjustified and morally objectionable since by stipulation nothing of moral significance has changed since t1.
For example, the solution taken from Roberts here is unlikely to distinguish forgiveness from sympathy.
Surprise and wonder are the most frequently discussed exceptions. In fact, some argue that because surprise and wonder are not valenced they are not emotions. See Kevin Mulligan, “Emotions and Values,” in Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 475–500.
See Louis C. Charland, “The Heat of Emotion: Valence and the Demarcation Problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005): 85–101, and Giovanna Colombetti, “Appraising Valence,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005): 103–126.
Although Charland (op. cit.) has offered important objections to the idea that the valence of the token emotional experience is determinate. His suggestion is that the valence of affect is crucially influenced by the prior evaluative commitments of the person who introspects them. See also Colombetti op. cit., pp. 117–118.
See esp. Colombetti, op. cit. In philosophical discussions, the valence of the emotion type overall is usually taken to be determined by the valence of the core relational theme of the emotion (or by the valence of its formal object if you wish). That is, the valence of the evaluative aspect is thought to determine the valence of the emotion tout court. Thus guilt would be a negative emotion on this view because it tracks moral wrongdoing.
See François Schroeter, “The Limits of Sentimentalism,” Ethics 116 (2006): 337–361; and for a similar idea, András Szigeti, “Emotions and Heuristics,” Journal of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2013): 845–862.
Which is not necessarily to say that fear is not a reasons-responsive attitude subject to norms of correctness. But whether fear is appropriate will depend on whether its object is fearsome, not on whether it is dangerous. This is how I understand François Schroeter’s critique of sentimentalism in Schroeter, op. cit.
See Döring, op. cit., and Karen Jones, “Emotion, Weakness of Will, and the Normative Conception of Agency,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 (2003): 181–200.
In these respects, emotions are comparable to intuitions, see esp. Sabine Roeser, Moral Emotions and Intuitions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). We should also recall here the two points made earlier (i) about emotions being representations of non-propositional evaluative concerns, and (ii) about emotions being truth-apt even in the absence of propositional content. These two points explain not just why conflicts between reflective judgments are likely to occur, but also why in some cases emotions can be more reliable epistemically speaking.
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Szigeti, A. Focusing Forgiveness. J Value Inquiry 48, 217–234 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9422-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9422-4