Punishment, Forgiveness and Reconciliation (original) (raw)
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Philosophia, 2016
The article examines the political challenge and significance of forgiveness as an indispensable response to the inherently imperfect and tragic nature of political life through the lens of the existential, narrative-inspired judging sensibility. While the political significance of forgiveness has been broadly recognized in transitional justice and reconciliation contexts, the question of its importance and appropriateness in the wake of grave injustice and suffering has commonly been approached through constructing a self-centred, rule-based framework, defining forgiveness in terms of a moral duty or virtue. Reliant on a set of prefabricated moral standards, however, this approach risks abstracting from the historical, situated condition of human political existence and thus arguably stands at a remove from the very quandaries and imperfections of the political world, which it purports to address. Against this background, this article draws on Albert Camus's and Hannah Arendt's aesthetic, worldly judging sensibility and its ability to kindle the process of coming to terms with the absurd, and perhaps unforgivable character of reality after evil. As an aptitude to engage the world in its particularity, plurality and contingency rather than seeking to subdue and tame it under prefabricated standards of thought, namely, worldly judgement is able to reveal how past tragedies have arisen from the ambiguity of human engagement in the world and thereby also elicit the distinctly human capacities of beginning anew and resisting such actions in the future. As such, I suggest, it is well-suited to bring into clearer focus and confront the main political challenge and significance of forgiveness: how to acknowledge the seriousness of the wrongs committed, yet also enable the possibility of a new beginning and restore among former enemies the sense of responsibility for the shared world.
Reconciliation, Morality and Moral Compromise
Political reconciliation has a good reputation. It facilitates the transition from dictatorial to democratic regimes, supposedly heals the wounds of victims of atrocities, and has become the receptacle for a peculiar sort of justice – transitional justice. No doubt, superficially inspected, reconciliation works for the good. At close quarters, however, processes of reconciliation often appear as morally problematic. They often do not deliver what they promise, and the price they charge is exceedingly high in moral terms because political reconciliation tends to include some sort of amnesty for perpetrators of atrocities. In practice, therefore, political reconciliation is mostly a mixed blessing. This seems an inevitable result wherever lofty ideals meet political realities, but beyond the general strictures of Realpolitik political reconciliation also faces endemic moral problems which need to be addressed. The present paper will focus on these moral problems. Of course, it has to be acknowledged that the moral outlook of different kinds of political reconciliation varies considerably. Reconciliation between the descendants of perpetrators and victims of atrocities (descendant-descendant reconciliation, or DD-reconciliation henceforth) seems to be a good thing with very few inevitable drawbacks, because it helps people who have not harmed each other to live together in peace and harmony. Questions of crime, punishment, and violation arise in this context mainly in retrospect. The descendants of the victims may demand historical justice but this is a different matter from just punishment for atrocities. Recognition of historical justice by perpetrator descendants will usually be an apt precondition for reconciliation, but even descendants who fail to meet this precondition do not thus become perpetrators of atrocities themselves. This fact should facilitate reconciliation because it implies that true forgiveness for atrocities is not necessarily called for in cases of DD-reconciliation. Of course, DD-reconciliation need not be easy in practice, but from a moral point of view it comes with much fewer barbs and snares than reconciliation between perpetrators and victims. Most of the moral problems of reconciliation pertain to perpetrator-victim reconciliation (PV-reconciliation), which will usually come at a price that can be rejected from at least some reasonable moral points of view. Moreover, it will also be rejectable from actual points of view which we ought to respect. This diagnosis should worry us because most cases of reconciliation are of the PV variety, not least because DD-reconciliation has to build on some sort of previous PV-reconciliation. No doubt, PV-reconciliation is often a political necessity if ongoing warfare or atrocities are to be stopped, and for this reason its moral drawbacks may not be forbidding in practice, but those who use this instrument should know that they are running a moral blade.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Paradise Lost or Pragmatism
" Amongst men, forgiveness can only mean: to give up vengeance, to keep quiet and do as if nothing happened, which means: to walk away by principle, while vengeance will always remain with the other and does not put an end to the relationship. … Reconciliation , on the other hand, originates in the acceptance of what befalls us. … Whoever reconciles with the other just accepts to carry on his shoulder the burden that, anyhow, weighs on the other. This means that it re-establishes equality. This is why reconciliation is the exact opposite of forgiveness which establishes inequality. " (Hannah Arendt cited in Maggiori, 2005, section entitled Un ange passé, para. 2). In the past decade there has been an increasing focus on forgiveness and reconciliation in societies coming out of conflict. The concepts were previously the domain of philosophers and theologians but have become integrally linked to questions of political transition. Hayner (2001) pointed out, specifically with debates about truth commissions, that there has been a shift from focusing on the investigative aspects of the truth-telling process and cataloging human rights abuses to considering their social impact. Issues such as healing, reconciliation, apology, acknowledgment , and forgiveness (to a lesser degree) have become central to the transitional justice debate. Consequently, as the articles in this issue indicate, the concepts of forgiveness and reconciliation have fallen under the academic microscope. That said, the articles also demonstrate that dealing with and trying to understand the social, political , and psychological relevance of forgiveness and reconciliation in societies coming out of conflict is a complex and difficult subject that raises many questions. This brief response to the articles in this issue addresses four such questions: (a) Why are questions of forgiveness and reconciliation being posed now in political transition processes? (b) Is intergroup forgiveness possible? (c) How do recon
The Theory of Collective Reconciliation: A Trinity of Recognition, Responsibility and Reparation
Routledge, 2024
What does reconciliation mean and entail? Is collective reconciliation for entire societies or nations possible? This book aims to present it as a highly achievable albeit difficult and complex goal requiring political and collective commitment, resources, and – most importantly – the will to change. Reconciliation is the synthesis and an overarching process consisting of a trinity of recognition, responsibility, and reparation. Through comparative case studies where these different aspects have been implemented in a variety of degrees and combinations, the book illustrates how these constituent parts relate to each other and how they can enhance and complement one another. It also investigates whether there are scenarios where the omission of a certain part can in fact have a positive impact on the reconciliatory process in the short and long terms, the extent to which the order in which different measures are implemented matters, and how national cases differ from international ones. This volume is aimed at postgraduates, researchers, and academics of peace and conflict studies, as well as history, social sciences, political sciences, and legal studies.
The personal and the political: forgiveness and reconciliation in restorative justice
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2009
At the center of this paper are three questions: in the absence of a religious worldview, can one gain access to the concepts of forgiveness and reconciliation, can reconciliation be achieved in the absence of forgiveness or does the former depend in some way upon the latter, and can we make sense of a restorative approach to justice in the absence of either forgiveness or reconciliation? To answer these questions, I look closely at the concept of forgiveness in the first section of this article with the goals of disentangling it from its religious undertones and emphasizing its importance to the very concept of restorative justice. Drawing on both theoretical work and practical examples, I argue that forgiveness is not necessarily a religious concept—contrary to common perception—and that, contra Zehr, it is a foundational component of restorative justice. Having considered this first problem, I turn—in the second section—to a discussion of the concept of reconciliation, arguing that personal and political reconciliation must be separated from one another and from the concept of forgiveness. Ultimately, I conclude that forgiveness and reconciliation are quite different concepts, that the latter relies on the former, and that the latter is a goal rather than a necessary component of restorative justice. Drawing largely on the work of Hannah Arendt, Susan Dwyer, Trudy Govier, and Howard Zehr, as well as discussions with members of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, I argue that political reconciliation between groups can be achieved in the absence of personal reconciliation between individual victims and perpetrators in those groups. Further, I demonstrate that restorative practices open up the possibility of both types of reconciliation, but that they are ultimately founded only on the principle of forgiveness.
Forgiveness, Law and Politics Considerations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Journal of Politics and Law, 2013
In the context of the process of transitional justice of South Africa, this paper focus on the non-legal character of commissions as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to demonstrate their political character, and verify that they fit in perfectly in the exceptionality of the historical moment that is experienced by a political community in a transitional situation. This constituent and foundational exceptionality of such a community does not have insignificant consequences for the political and philosophical theory, and expounding them is the ultimate objective of this work. To this end, it first conduct a reflection from the point of view of the interaction between Philosophy and Law (and how it relates to these commissions) leading to another reflection which is more in line with the interaction between Philosophy and Politics.