Accepting Forgiveness
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Accepting Forgiveness Jeffrey S. Helmreich1 Received: 6 November 2019 / Accepted: 1 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Forgiving wrongdoers who neither apologized, nor sought to make amends in any way, is controversial. Even defenders of the practice agree with critics that such “unilateral” forgiveness involves giving up on the meaningful redress that victims otherwise justifiably demand from their wrongdoers: apology, reparations, repentance, and so on. Against that view, I argue here that when a victim of wrongdoing sets out to grant forgiveness to her offender, and he in turn accepts her forgiveness, he thereby serves some important ends of apology and reparation, no matter what else he did—or did not do—by way of repair. Although much overlooked, the simple act of accepting forgiveness joins victim and offender in affirming and acting upon some important shared background assumptions, including many of those expressed in standard apologies. Perhaps more surprisingly, I argue that accepting forgiveness also fulfills the duty to counteract any concrete harm wrongfully inflicted. The argument helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of forgiveness, including that a victim can change her offender’s normative status, making him a less fitting target of the resentment, indignation and shunning of others, and even his own guilt pangs, simply by forgiving him. Keywords Forgiveness · Apology · Reparations · Redress · Speech Acts · Reconciliation Victims of wrongdoing may want to forgive their offenders, even if they received no apology or anything else by way of repair. A storeowner, for example, may want to forgive her employee for shoplifting a drink he seemed to need urgently, despite his failure even to acknowledge the theft. Perhaps she values their relationship more than holding him to account, and views forgiveness as necessary to maintain it. Or perhaps she likes him too much to hold the act against him. Or perhaps she believes in granting forgiveness precisely when it is unsolicited—as a noble act of grace, mercy, generosity or some other moral (or religious) virtue. * Jeffrey S. Helmreich [email protected] 1
University of California, 71 Humanities Instructional Building, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
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Whatever her motivations, an influential view of forgiveness would have her withhold it, partly on the grounds that it compromises on the moral repair she ought to demand, at least if she takes seriously the wrongdoing and the principles it violated (Haber 1991 and Novitz 1998: 85, 90). Alternatively, one might object that without apology and some attempt at redress, her putative forgiveness is not really forgiveness at all, but a way of condoning the wrongdoing (Griswold 2007: 62–69, 120–123), even to the point of acquiescence in it (Kolnai 1974: 96). Even those who defend or praise such “gifted” forgiveness agree with its critics that something is forgone—that the unilateral forgiver stands ready to give up on the most meaningful and valuable forms of
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