Why does someone, S, deserve blame or reproach for an action or event? One part of a standard answer since Aristotle: the event was caused, at least in part, by S’s bad will. But recently there’s been some insightful discussion of cases where the event’s causes do not include any bad will from S and yet it seems that S is not off the hook for the event. Cheshire Calhoun, Miranda Fricker, Elinor Mason, David Enoch, Randolph Clarke, and others include (...) in this category some cases of glitches, forgetfulness, inattentiveness, the actions of one’s children or one’s country, and certain instances of explicit bias and implicit bias. Enoch and Mason argue that in these cases S should extend the realm of S’s responsibility. Drawing on Aristotle’s emphases on retrospective attitudes and the non-voluntary, this paper attempts to clarify the relation between quality of will and blameworthiness. I analyze cases where (1) S is clearly not morally responsible for an action or event, E, yet (2) S deserves reproach for E unless S has the appropriate retrospective attitudes (such as regret) or the absence of inappropriate attitudes toward E. (shrink)

The problem of necessary evil is a sub-class of the problem of moral dilemmas. In cases of genuine moral dilemmas the agent cannot avoid doing evil whatever he does. In some cases of genuine moral dilemmas, the options facing the agent are incommensurable. But in some other cases of genuine moral dilemmas, though wrong doing is inescapable, there is a rationally best course of action. These are cases of necessary evil. There are several views regarding the (...) class='Hi'>doing of necessary evil. On the closure view it is never necessary to do what is evil. This is the view of some utilitarians and of Kant. Then there are people who believe that it is sometimes necessary to do evil. Of these some (like John Gardner) believe that evil in such cases is justified even though it remains an evil; while there are others (like Gandhi) who believe that evil in such cases can never be justified but it can at best be excused or pardoned. Some even think that in some extreme cases the individual who does evil (even if it is the lesser evil) should be punished even though the individual could not avoid doing evil whatever he chose. The paper stresses the significance of the distinction between justified wrong doing, pardonable wrong doing, and excusable wrong doing. (shrink)

Spinoza shares with almost all apologists for forgiveness the idea that laying down one’s resentment of a wrong, contempt for a wrongdoer, and overcoming “bondage” to hatred, must be a primary ethical aim. Yet he denies that doing so authorizes pardoning a penitent wrongdoer. He argues that in civil society, it is actually a matter of charity and piety to collude in punishing a wrongdoer—dragging the wrongdoer before a judge, but not “judging” him oneself. I argue that Spinoza (...) offers no warrant to pardon whatever for those not authorized under civil law to punish. But I argue that the response to others’ hatred and deceit that Spinoza urges his reader to cultivate in Ethics 5p10, along with his argument that one may ‘turn the other cheek’ under conditions of oppression, where no sovereign power prosecutes claims of justice, mandates a broader emergent and reparative view of forgiveness. (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient (...) Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the \u201ccriminal\u201d was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.  . (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient (...) Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to _Discipline and Punish_, _Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling_ will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought. (shrink)

In this paper I critically examine Michael Moore's views about responsibility in overdetermination cases. Moore argues for an asymmetrical view concerning actions and omissions: whereas our actions can make us responsible in overdetermination cases, our omissions cannot. Moore argues for this view on the basis of a causal claim: actions can be causes but omissions cannot. I suggest that we should reject Moore's views about responsibility and overdetermination. I argue, in particular, that our omissions can make us responsible in overdetermination (...) cases. I go on to provide an account of how this may be possible. (shrink)

In this article, Alan Montefiore asks whether anyone could deliberately do something they knew to be wrong. He suggests, interestingly, that on this question we tend to divide into two groups, groups that hold fundamentally different perspectives on wrong-doing. The two groups muddle along unaware of the rift between them. Here, Alan Montefiore draws the rift to our attention.

ABSTRACT I argue that educators, by introducing young people to various ways of responding to wrongdoing, help prepare them for the task of acting in and taking responsibility for the world. I begin by introducing Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the world, the characteristics of action as unpredictable, boundless and irreversible, i.e. the frailty of human affairs. I then move to what Arendt calls the ‘power of forgiveness.’ Forgiving is an action, and as such is free and unpredictable. Moreover, forgiving concerns (...) the person not the deed. To understand the implications of this, I introduce Arendt’s understanding of being a person in distinction to being merely human. I then ask whether all deeds are forgivable, which brings me to the new crime against humanity. Finally, I ask whether one can be reconciled to acts, such as genocide and whether solidarity with the wrongdoer is possible. (shrink)

This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, (...) and the well-being of our social groups. These interests generate obligations against others to “do their homework” before closing inquiry. This alternate account makes better sense of puzzles that accounts of doxastic wronging fall prey to. (shrink)

My paper explores the power that forgiveness and the promise, as potentialities of action, have to counter the two difficulties that follow from the possibility of being able to begin something new or what Arendt calls the ‘frailty of human affairs’: irreversibility and unpredictability. Acts of forgiving and promising are expressions of freedom and natality, as they begin human relations anew: forgiveness creates a fresh beginning after wrong-doing, and the promise initiates new political agreements. Arendt argues that forgiveness (...) and the promise depend on plurality. They also create more favorable conditions for people to live together in the public world. Historically, forgiveness has been important in political thought in the form of pardon. In contrast, promises have been conceptualised in political thought primarily in contract theories. (shrink)

Do members of democratic societies have a moral right that others not actively prevent them from engaging in wrongdoing? Many political theorists think that they do. “It is a feature of democratic government,” Michael Walzer writes, “that the people have a right to act wrongly—in much the same way that they have a right to act stupidly”. Of course, advocates of a democratic right to do wrong may believe that the scope of this right is limited. A majority in (...) a democratic society, for example, may not have a moral right against being prevented from enslaving or arbitrarily disenfranchising a minority, or if it were to launch a wrongful aggressive war against another society. But many join Walzer in asserting that it would be wrong in principle to intervene to prevent some wrongs that democratic societies would inflict. This thesis, which we call the democratic right to do wrong thesis (DRTDWT), can be formulated as follows: DRTDWT – For democratic societies A and agents B, there is a class of wrongful policies and institutions X, such that if A chooses to implement members of this class pursuant to democratic procedures, B has a duty not to actively intervene to prevent the implementation of X. Our goal in this essay is to show that the DRTDWT should be rejected. (shrink)

The law sometimes permits what ordinary morality, or widely-shared notions of right and wrong, reproaches. Rights to Do Grave Wrong explores the relationship between law and common morality to clarify law's reliance on society's broad presumption that people will exercise their rights responsibly. More concretely, he argues that certain legal rights rest on tacit sociological assumptions as to who will exercise them, under what circumstances, and how frequently. Further, he argues that we depend on stigma and shame to (...) reduce and circumscribe the law's use. Some examples: though reneging on a debt is considered wrong, the law allows you to declare personal bankruptcy; international law allows museums to retain some masterworks looted from their rightful owners; in many countries abortion is permitted as a means of birth control. Using these examples and more, Osiel presents a "social scientific" analysis of law's interaction with social mores and the extent to which they limit our exercising rights to do wrong. The paradox he intends to elucidate is when and why it is appropriate for societies to champion de jure entitlements even as they successfully limit their de facto usage. (shrink)

This essay critically assesses Anna Stilz's argument in Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration that legitimate states have a right to do wrong. I concede that individuals enjoy a claim against external interference when they commit suberogatory acts, but I deny that the right to do wrong extends to acts that would violate the rights of others. If this is correct, then one must do more than merely invoke an individual's right to do wrong if one hopes to (...) vindicate a legitimate state's right to commit injustices. Of course, there may be distinctive features of legitimate states that explain why they enjoy moral protections that individuals lack, but I argue that the value of collective self-determination is not up to this task. And even if these arguments fail, self-determination would at most explain why legitimate states enjoy a right to commit injustices against their own citizens; it would provide them no moral protection when they violate the rights of outsiders. (shrink)

Rights to do wrong are not necessary even within the framework of interest-based rights aimed at preserving autonomy. Agents can make morally significant choices and develop their moral character without a right to do wrong, so long as we allow that there can be moral variation within the set of actions that an agent is permitted to perform. Agents can also engage in non-trivial self-constitution in choosing between morally indifferent options, so long as there is adequate non-moral variation (...) among the alternatives. The stubborn intuition that individuals have a right to do wrong in some cases can be explained as stemming from a cautionary principle motivated by the asymmetry between the risk of wrongly interfering and that of refraining from interfering. (shrink)

A posteriori physicalism is the combination of two appealing views: physicalism (i.e. the view that all facts are either physical or entailed by the physical), and conceptual dualism (i.e. the view that phenomenal truths are not entailed a priori by physical truths). Recently, some philosophers such as Goff (2011), Levine (2007) and Nida-Rümelin (2007), among others, have suggested that a posteriori physicalism cannot explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal the nature of phenomenal properties. In this paper, I wish to defend (...) a posteriori physicalism from this new and interesting challenge, by arguing that a posteriori physicalists have the resources to explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal at least something of what it would take for the corresponding phenomenal property to be instantiated. (shrink)

Picture perception and ordinary perception of real objects differ in several respects. Two of their main differences are: Depicted objects are not perceived as present and We cannot perceive significant spatial shifts as we move with respect to them. Some special illusory pictures escape these visual effects obtained in usual picture perception. First, trompe l'oeil paintings violate : the depicted object looks, even momentarily, like a present object. Second, anamorphic paintings violate : they lead to appreciate spatial shifts resulting from (...) movement. However, anamorphic paintings do not violate : they are still perceived as clearly pictorial, that is, nonpresent. What about the relation between trompe l'oeil paintings and? Do trompe l'oeils allow us to perceive spatial shifts? Nobody has ever focused on this aspect of trompe l'oeil perception. I offer the first speculation about this question. I suggest that, if we follow our most recent theories in philosophy and vision science about the mechanisms of picture perception, then, the only plausible answer, in line with phenomenological intuitions, is that, differently from nonillusory, usual picture perception, and similarly to ordinary perception, trompe l'oeil perception does allow us to perceive spatial shifts resulting from movement. I also discuss the philosophical implications of this claim. (shrink)

The pressure to obey : what would you do? -- Obedience and disobedience : when is which right? -- Breaking the habit : it takes more than you think -- Finding your voice : saying "no" so you are heard -- Understanding the true risks of saying "yes" -- The dynamics of authority and obedience -- Changing the dynamics -- The crucial lessons from guide dog training -- The price of teaching obedience too well -- Teaching intelligent disobedience : where (...) do the lessons begin? -- Doing right at work : saving lives and accomplishing missions. (shrink)

Are there moral rights to do moral wrong? A right to do wrong is a right that others not interfere with the right-holder’s wrongdoing. It is a right against enforcement of duty, that is a right that others not interfere with one’s violation of one’s own obligations. The strongest reason for moral rights to do moral wrong is grounded in the value of personal autonomy. Having a measure of protected choice (that is a right) to do (...) class='Hi'>wrong is a condition for an autonomous life and for autonomous moral self-constitution. This view has its critics. Responding to these objections reveals that none refute the coherence of the concept of a ‘moral right to do moral wrong’. At most, some objections successfully challenge the weight and frequency of the personal autonomy reasons for such rights. Autonomy-based moral rights to do moral wrong are therefore conceptually possible as well as, at least on occasion, actual. (shrink)

To claim that companies should not discriminate on the basis of race, gender or religion seems almost as trivial as stating that they should not use forced labor or dump radioactive waste into the local river. Among other things, non-discrimination seems to imply that companies recognize and respect a range of religious preferences, including allowing religious clothing, e.g., by allowing Muslim women to wear headscarves. However, many companies do not believe that employees generally should be allowed to wear the kind (...) of clothes they please. In this paper, we discuss the asymmetry between the status of religious and secular clothing. We conclude that religious exemptions to dress codes can discriminate wrongfully. To solve this problem, companies should not ban religious clothing. Instead, companies should liberalize their dress codes, so that employees would be allowed to wear secular and religious types of clothing on an equal footing. (shrink)

To claim that companies should not discriminate on the basis of race, gender or religion seems almost as trivial as stating that they should not use forced labor or dump radioactive waste into the local river. Among other things, non-discrimination seems to imply that companies recognize and respect a range of religious preferences, including allowing religious clothing, e.g., by allowing Muslim women to wear headscarves. However, many companies do not believe that employees generally should be allowed to wear the kind (...) of clothes they please. In this paper, we discuss the asymmetry between the status of religious and secular clothing. We conclude that religious exemptions to dress codes can discriminate wrongfully. To solve this problem, companies should not ban religious clothing. Instead, companies should liberalize their dress codes, so that employees would be allowed to wear secular and religious types of clothing on an equal footing. (shrink)

We designed an experiment to explore the learning effectiveness of three different ways of practicing dance movements. To our surprise we found that partial modeling, called marking in the dance world, is a better method than practicing the complete phrase, called practicing full-out; and both marking and full-out are better methods than practicing by repeated mental simulation. We suggest that marking is a form of practicing a dance phrase aspect-by-aspect. Our results also suggest that prior work on learning by observation (...) and learning by mental practice may not scale up to complex movements. (shrink)

To avoid the necessity of relying on trust in the matter of scientific authorship, most biomedical journals have adopted the uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals, which are produced by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors .1 The scientific journals that are members of the ICMJE routinely ask contributors to sign a statement that they accept full responsibility for the conduct of the study, had access to the data, and controlled the decision to publish. They even request (...) and publish information about the contributions of each person named as having participated.2,3 It turns out, however, that these requirements do …. (shrink)

In November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui announced the birth of two baby girls born through the use of in vitro fertilization technology and the use of the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. There has been nigh uniform international condemnation of the clinical trial for violating international norms governing genomic research, especially research in human embryos that has implications for the germline. At issue also is the question whether the parents and the clinical research team harmed, and therefore wronged, the two girls. Here (...) this question is engaged through application of the reasoning Derek Parfit has provided on the non-identity problem. One concludes that on this reasoning the parents are not morally culpable on that argument, although there is other reasoning that is to be considered to resist the Parfitian conclusion. (shrink)

Adorno's moral philosophy has often been accused of making aporetic prescriptions that are too taxing for moral agents. In this article, I defend his approach in terms of a theory of moral dilemmas. My guideline is Adorno's famous sentence that wrong life cannot be lived rightly. I argue that this claim is not distinctly prescriptive, as most of Adorno's critics believe, but is a claim about moral reality. Emphasizing realist aspects of his moral theory, I suggest that wrong (...) life is neither inconceivable nor an amoral or skeptical trope. Instead, Adorno's sentence about wrong life can be interpreted as a claim about the salience of particular moral facts. This, I conclude, allows Adorno to envisage moral reasons that motivate moral conduct case by case, although they are blocked overall. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with whether there is a moral difference between simulating wrongdoing and consuming non-simulatory representations of wrongdoing. I argue that simulating wrongdoing is (as such) a pro tanto wrong whose wrongness does not tarnish other cases of consuming representations of wrongdoing. While simulating wrongdoing (as such) constitutes a disrespectful act, consuming representations of wrongdoing (as such) does not. I aim to motivate this view in part by bringing a number of intuitive moral judgements into reflective equilibrium, (...) and in part by describing the case of a character that I call The Devious Super Geek who simulates wrong to particular people that he knows personally. I build bridging cases from the case of the Devious Super Geek to capture games in which one simulates wrong to imaginary members of extant, morally salient categories. The surprising conclusions that we are led to include not just that simulated wrongdoing is pro tanto wrong, but that simulated Just killing is pro tanto wrong, and also that the simulated killing of zombies and aliens is also pro tanto wrong. Finally, I describe how I propose to handle some potential objections and attempt to weigh the pro tanto wrong identified in the paper against some countervailing considerations in some all things considered judgements. (shrink)

We offer a critical assessment of the “exclusion argument” against free will, which may be summarized by the slogan: “My brain made me do it, therefore I couldn't have been free”. While the exclusion argument has received much attention in debates about mental causation (“could my mental states ever cause my actions?”), it is seldom discussed in relation to free will. However, the argument informally underlies many neuroscientific discussions of free will, especially the claim that advances in neuroscience seriously challenge (...) our belief in free will. We introduce two distinct versions of the argument, discuss several unsuccessful responses to it, and then present our preferred response. This involves showing that a key premise – the “exclusion principle” – is false under what we take to be the most natural account of causation in the context of agency: the difference-making account. We finally revisit the debate about neuroscience and free will. (shrink)

Can it ever be morally justifiable to tell others to do what we ourselves believe is morally wrong to do? The common sense answer is no. It seems that we should never tell others to do something if we think it is morally wrong to do that act. My first goal is to argue that in Analects 17.21, Confucius tells his disciple not to observe a ritual even though Confucius himself believes that it is morally wrong that (...) one does not observe the ritual. My second goal is to argue against the common sense answer and explain how Confucius can be justified in telling his disciple to do what Confucius thought was wrong. The first justification has to do with telling someone to do what is second best when the person cannot do what is morally best. The second justification has to do with the role of a moral advisor. (shrink)

Moral wrongness comes in degrees. On a consequentialist view of ethics, the wrongness of an act should depend, I argue, in part on how much worse the act's consequences are compared with those of its alternatives and in part on how difficult it is to perform the alternatives with better consequences. I extend act consequentialism to take this into account, and I defend three conditions on consequentialist theories. The first is consequentialist dominance, which says that, if an act has better (...) consequences than some alternative act, then it is not more wrong than the alternative act. The second is consequentialist supervenience, which says that, if two acts have equally good consequences in a situation, then they have the same deontic status in the situation. And the third is consequentialist continuity, which says that, for every act and for any difference in wrongness δ greater than zero, there is an arbitrarily small improvement of the consequences of the act which would, other things being equal, not change the wrongness of that act or any alternative by more than δ. I defend a proposal that satisfies these conditions. (shrink)

It is sometimes—but not always—permissible to let others do wrong. This paper is about why that is so.

Pardon powers are common but difficult to justify. A pardon power is, roughly, a power that is (a) possessed by a non-judicial official, (b) used to cancel legal liability to a criminal sanction in a particular case without thereby altering the law, and (c) unconstrained by law. So defined, pardon powers seem to be at odds with two constitutional principles. Contrary to the separation of powers, the pardon power gives to someone other than a judge a decisive role in determining (...) criminal liability in particular cases. Contrary to the rule of law, the pardon power is neither constrained nor ruled by law. -/- Here I provide a novel defence of pardon powers, in three steps. First, even an optimal legal code requires suboptimal results in some cases. In such cases there is a “gap” between what is required by the code we should have and what we should do absent that code. Adhering to the code in every gap case is undesirable: while it would avoid suboptimal results, it would create too much unpredictability. Deviating from the code in every gap case is also undesirable: while it would ensure predictability, it would produce too many suboptimal results. The best strategy is to adhere in some cases and to deviate in others, that is, to selectively deviate. The most important thing about selective deviation is that it leads to like cases being treated differently. This is the second step in the argument. Third, pardon powers are an appropriate vehicle for selective deviation. Selective deviation calls for a power that can be used to set aside the code without changing it. It calls for a power that can be used inconsistently. Moreover, it calls for a power that is not in the hands of a body institutionally disposed towards consistency in decision-making, such as the judiciary. That is, it requires a power with features (a)-(c) – a pardon power. -/- This argument overcomes the various objections to pardon powers. Contrary to the objection from the separation of powers, selective deviation is a task better carried out by non-judicial officials. Contrary to the objection from the rule of law, a power of selective deviation must be unconstrained to preserve the law’s guiding function. Overall, the features of pardon powers that seemed to be in tension with the separation of powers and the rule of law turn out to be favoured by those same principles. (shrink)

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g. distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent (...) insufficiently trusts the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases. (shrink)

The literature, as are the intuitions of many, is sceptical as to the coherence of ‘legal rights to do legal wrong’. A right to do wrong is a right against interference with wrongdoing. A legal right to do legal wrong is, therefore, a right against legal enforcement of legal duty. It is, in other words, a right that shields the right holder’s legal wrongdoing. The sceptics notwithstanding, the category of ‘legal right to do legal wrong’ coheres (...) with the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘legality’. In fact, once the parameters and features of the category of ‘legal right to do legal wrong’ are clarified, it becomes apparent that positive law contains actual doctrines that have the structure of a right to do wrong. One example is the doctrine of diplomatic immunity. This, and other examples of normatively sound legal doctrines that constitute legal rights to do legal wrong, demonstrate that such rights are not only conceptually coherent, but at times are normatively valuable. Moreover, looking to the law helps detect a category of rights to do wrong that has thus far gone wholly undetected in the literature, which is immunity from liability for violation of duty. (shrink)

Philosopher Myisha Cherry teaches us the right ways to deal with wrongdoing in our lives and the world Sages from Cicero to Oprah have told us that forgiveness requires us to let go of negative emotions and that it has a unique power to heal our wounds. In Failures of Forgiveness, Myisha Cherry argues that these beliefs couldn’t be more wrong—and that the ways we think about and use forgiveness, personally and as a society, can often do more harm (...) than good. She presents a new and healthier understanding of forgiveness—one that will give us a better chance to recover from wrongdoing and move toward “radical repair.” Cherry began exploring forgiveness after some relatives of the victims of the mass shooting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, forgave what seemed unforgiveable. She was troubled that many observers appeared to be more inspired by these acts of forgiveness than they were motivated to confront the racial hatred that led to the killings. That is a big mistake, Cherry argues. Forgiveness isn’t magic. We can forgive and still be angry, there can be good reasons not to forgive, and forgiving a wrong without tackling its roots solves nothing. Examining how forgiveness can go wrong in families, between friends, at work, and in the media, politics, and beyond, Cherry addresses forgiveness and race, canceling versus forgiving, self-forgiveness, and more. She takes the burden of forgiveness off those who have been wronged and offers guidance both to those deciding whether and how to forgive and those seeking forgiveness. By showing us how to do forgiveness better, Failures of Forgiveness promises to transform how we deal with wrongdoing in our lives, opening a new path to true healing and reconciliation. (shrink)

It is sometimes, but not always, permissible to let others do wrong. This paper is about why that is so.