Forgiveness in conflict and reconciliation – an insight into Arne Johan Vetlesen's understanding and applied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (original) (raw)
Related papers
Moral Projection and the Intelligibility of Collective Forgiveness
2009
The paper explores the philosophical intelligibility of contemporary defences of collective political forgiveness against a background of sceptical doubt, both general and particular. Three genera sceptical arguments are examined: one challenges the idea that political collectives exist; another challenges the idea that moral agency can be projected upon political collectives; a final argument challenges the attribution of emotions, especially anger, to collectives. Each of these sceptical arguments is rebutted. At a more particular level, the contrasts between individual forgiveness and collective forgiveness gives rise to various problems and the 'desiderata' for their resolution-authority, specificity and temporal proximity-are briefly explored. 1. Introduction. Forgiveness has traditionally been viewed as a process which involves an offender and a victim; it is viewed as a process in which the victim, in response to the repentance and apology of the offender, relinquishes the justified indignation previously directed at the offender. On such a construal forgiveness is moral because it involves the exercise of, or some approximation to the exercise of, a traditionally recognised moral virtue, the virtue of forgiveness; it is individual because it involves relations between two individuals, an offender and a victim; and it is temporally bounded because it might reasonably be expected to occur within the lifetime and within the living memory of offender and victim. More formally expressed: traditional forgiveness (F) involves three temporally distinct sequences of events (ti, tii, tiii) featuring an offender (O), and a victim (V). Thus: A victim (V) forgives (F) an offender (O) if and only if: (1) at ti O wrongs V, at which point warmth, respect and good will between O & V are replaced by justified resentment and indignation) (2) consequent upon (1) V experiences justified anger towards O and a breach in the hitherto cordial relations between O and V takes place (3) at tii O repents of the wrong; that is, O recognises the wrongness involved, displays sincere contrition and makes restitution to V (4) at tiii V forgives O (5) reconciliation between O and V occurs; that is, because of (3) and (4), O ceases to feel indignant and resumes warm personal relations with O.
Punishment, Forgiveness and Reconciliation
It is sometimes thought that the normative justification for responding to large-scale violations of human rights via the judicial appararatus of trial and punishment is undermined by the desirability of reconciliation between conflicting parties as part of the process of conflict resolution. This line of thought is likely to seem particularly plausible in the light of denunciatory conceptions of punishment. For such accounts see the fact that punishment involves, among other things, the imposition of harsh treatment in such a way as to constitute a public denunciation of wrong-doing, as central to it's being punishment at all. Since it is natural to think that publicly denounce someone's wrongdoing stands in the way of being reconciled with them, the aims of punishment and reconciliation seem to be in tension. Arguments of this sort go some way towards explaining why the paradigm of the judicial trial is often held to be an unhelpful one in societies that have recently experienced conflict, and why other kinds of process, such as truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs ) are thought to be preferrable. My aim in this paper is to resist this line of thought. While there may often be good pragmatic reasons for preferring other kinds of responses to large-scale human rights violations, there is nothing about the judicial paradigm itself that puts it normatively in tension with the goal of reconciliation. I shall argue that, on the contrary, judicial processes up to and including punishment are not only compatible with, but more or less indispensable for one particularly important kind of reconciliation to be possible. More specifically, I shall argue that although there are kinds of reconciliation which do not require forgiveness, and these forms of reconciliation may be the best we can hope for in many conflicts, reconciliation is nevertheless likely to require the expression of what Darrell Moellendorf has called 'political regret' and that the denunciatory role which punishment makes it particularly well-suited to this role.
Forgiveness and Moral Solidarity
2008
The categorical denial of third-party forgiveness represents an overly individualistic approach to moral repair. Such an approach fails to acknowledge the important roles played by witnesses, bystanders, beneficiaries, and others who stand in solidarity to the primary victim and perpetrator. In this paper, I argue that the prerogative to forgive or withhold forgiveness is not universal, but neither is it restricted to victims alone. Not only can we make moral sense of some third-party acts and utterances of the form, "I can or cannot forgive…" but also, we ought to recognize them as legitimate instances of third party forgiveness. Concern for the primary victim's autonomy tends to exaggerate a need for moral deference, while ignoring how others are called upon to support and mediate for victims of violence and oppression. I advocate a cautious extension of the victim's prerogative to forgive, one that grounds forgiveness in a double relation of sympathetic identification and attentive care. Following Jean Harvey's recent work, I call this relationship moral solidarity. Furthermore, I argue, there are important moral and political reasons to acknowledge third party forgiveness; these reasons are particularly evident in contexts of oppression. In fact, third party refusals to forgive may have particular moral significance. In situations of abuse, oppression and damaged self-respect, third party refusals may protect the agency of victims who too easily forgive.
III-In Defence of Unconditional Forgiveness
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2003
In this paper, the principal objections to unconditional forgiveness are canvassed, primarily that it fails to take wrongdoing seriously enough, and that it displays a lack of self-respect. It is argued that these objections stem from a mistaken understanding of what forgiveness actually involves, including the erroneous view that forgiveness involves some degree of condoning of the offence, and is incompatible with blaming the offender or punishing him. Two positive reasons for endorsing unconditional forgiveness are considered: respect for persons and human solidarity; and it is argued that the latter provides more plausible grounds for it than the former.
ON REVENGE PARDON AND fORGIVENESS
Political violence has long been a focus of psychoanalytic writing. Jessica Benjamin's concepts of the complementarity, or twoness, and that of thirdness can serve as a point of departure allowing us to challenge the dichotomy between positions of revenge and forgiveness (on the victim's part) and positions of evil and remorse (on the perpetrator's), and to suggest a spectrum of encounters between victims and perpetrators that includes four types of interaction: (1) between the position of extreme evil on the perpetrator's part, and the position of revenge on the victim's; (2) between the perpetrator's position of banal evil, and the victim's position of false pardon; (3) between the perpetrator's position of guilt and atonement, and the victim's position of full pardon; (4) between the position of remorse on the perpetrator's part, and the position of forgiveness on the victim's. A thorough analysis of various testimonies illustrates how these four positions manifest, with varying degrees of dominance, in every encounter (whether concrete or imagined) between victim and perpetrator.
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.