Forgiveness: An ordered pluralism (original) (raw)

The literature on forgiveness displays a broad division between a conception of forgiveness as essentially earned through remorse, and a conception of it as fundamentally non-earned or ‘elective’—a gift. The two are plainly very different; yet each describes a real kind of forgiveness. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. How can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of one and the same kind? This paper explains how, by hypothesizing Moral Justice Forgiveness as a candidate explanatorily basic case; then identifying the primary role that it plays in moral life, and looking to see how far Gifted Forgiveness discreetly serves the same basic purpose. I show that indeed it does serve the same purpose, though in an intriguingly disguised manner—for in one or another formation of Gifted Forgiveness the shared moral understanding, which in the culprit takes the form of remorse, has become displaced in social space and/or time. In Gifted Forgiveness, remorse is no longer demanded from the culprit in the now, but has been displaced in time to become something hoped for in the future, and/or in social space to become something sourced from the moral community. The resulting account is pluralism about the two broad kinds of forgiveness, each with its own psychology and surface normativity; and yet an ordered pluralism—with Moral Justice Forgiveness revealed as the root kind, and Gifted Forgiveness a culturally contingent iteration.

A Change of Heart: Essays in the Moral Philosophy of Forgiveness

2012

List of papers Paper 1 Gamlund, E. The Duty to Forgive Repentant Wrongdoers. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 18 (5) 651-671 (2010) DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2010. 528602 Paper 2 Gamlund, E. Supererogatory Forgiveness. INQUIRY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 53 (6) 540-564 (2010) DOI: 10.1080/0020174X. 2010.526320 Denne avhandlingen tar for seg noen sentrale problemstillinger knyttet til tilgivelsens etikk.

paradoxes of forgiveness.docx

My paper will take into consideration different paradigms of justice besides traditional retributive justice, such as restorative or transitional justice. Since their primary goal is that of restoring relationships and re-creating social bonds, such paradigms of justice also contemplate the possibility of some forms of forgiveness being offered by the victims to the perpetrators. The paper will therefore proceed to analyse the various understanding of “forgiveness” and to debate how forgiveness can be conceptualised in a political framework, in light of its trasformative and liberating potential.

Forgiveness and Moral Reckoning

Philosophia, 2010

Charles Griswold’s seminal work, Forgiveness, is the focus of the present essay. Following Griswold, I distinguish the relevant virtue of character from something that is more like an act or process. The paper discusses a number of hesitations I have about Griswold’s analysis, at the level both of detail and of underlying conception.

The Impossible Demand of Forgiveness

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2014

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work, I argue that neither of the two standard accounts of forgiveness offer an adequate understanding of forgiveness. Conditional accounts insist on specifying the conditions an offender needs to satisfy in order to count as deserving of forgiveness. I argue that such accounts not only render forgiveness unintelligible (since forgiveness is intelligibly offered only to the offender qua offender), but also dissolve the ethical decision forgiveness demands of us. Unconditional accounts promise to do justice to both by insisting that forgiveness is a freely granted gift offered to the guilty as guilty. But I argue that when pressed to justify why one should forgive unconditionally and how one avoids the threat of condoning, they typically fall back onto the conditionalist’s ground and lose the electivity of forgiving. I conclude by arguing that genuine forgiveness would have to be purely unconditional but could never appear as such.

The Possibilities of Forgiveness

Journal of Religious Ethics, 41.3, 2013

Perhaps the best way to challenge anodyne popular conceptions of forgiveness is to highlight the ways in which “forgiveness,” like “justice” and “freedom,” is a rich and deeply contested term that relies for its content on divergent convictions about who we are and who we should seek to be. The essays in this focus issue articulate some of the many possibilities for practicing and thinking about forgiveness.

On Radical Forgiveness, Duty, and Justice

Philosophers have grappled with clarifying both the nature and ethical status of acts of forgiveness. Much discussion has been devoted to whether, say, acts of forgiveness can be performed by outside parties or whether such acts should be thought of as supererogatory rather than as moral requirements. In what follows, I will explore questions pertaining to ‘radical’ acts of forgiveness as they relate to considerations of duties and justice. Acts of forgiveness that tend to move us the most are often justified by appeals to self-duty. I will survey recent examples and show a possible philosophical basis for understanding them in terms of self-duty. This kind of basis has been virtually ignored by the vast philosophical literature on forgiveness. I attempt to show both that considerations of self-duty can provide a secular basis for justifying radical acts of forgiveness and that problems associated with this kind of forgiveness and justice are not as serious as they are often taken to be.

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