Abstract
One account of forgiveness claims that to forgive is to forbear punishment. Call this the Punishment-Forbearance Account of forgiveness. In this paper I argue that forbearing punishment is neither necessary nor sufficient for forgiveness.
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Notes
According to Zaibert’s account, “to forgive is deliberately to refuse to punish” (2009, p. 368). Hobbes connects forgiveness to pardon and therefore punishment 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.’” (1969 [1651]). Of this law, Bernard Gert observes: “This virtue, which Hobbes calls having the facility to pardon, one can also call being forgiving” (2010, p. 98).
For ease of expression, I will suppress this disjunction and simply speak in terms of causing pain. In doing so, I do not mean to imply that a goal of punishment must be to cause pain (as opposed to harm), or that one cannot punish by causing harm.
Cf. Warmke (2011).
This is to say nothing about whether such forgiveness is appropriate or not. Not all forgiveness is appropriate. But inappropriate forgiveness is still forgiveness, and what we are concerned with here are the conditions for forgiveness as such.
It may not always be clear to the wrongdoer whether on a given occasion she is the recipient of blame or punishment, but these two constellations of practices are distinct constellations.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this question.
Or consider a judge whose job it is to punish criminals he has never encountered, a job he does “coolly”—he simply looks at the paperwork, decides what punishments to give, and pushes a button that effects the relevant punishments via a very complicated machine. Surely it would be a mistake to describe his actions as revenge-taking simply because he is punishing.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Eve Garrard, Michael McKenna, David McNaughton, Craig Warmke, and an anonymous referee for this journal for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Warmke, B. Two arguments against the punishment-forbearance account of forgiveness. Philos Stud 165, 915–920 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9996-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9996-2