In giving this kind of explanation, you are offering a justification for your action—you are claiming that despite appearances to the contrary, your taking the pear was morally permissible.
Offering justifications is commonplace in our moral lives. But justification and forgiveness ought to be distinguished. When conduct is justified, this implies that the conduct was not morally wrong.
But when conduct is forgiven, there is no such implication. Indeed, in most cases if not all , what we are forgiven for are the morally wrong things we do. This is why it can be offensive when someone says that she forgives you when you have done nothing wrong. Sometimes we do things that are indeed morally bad or impermissible, but for which we are not morally blameworthy.
In such cases, so-called excusing conditions render an otherwise blameworthy agent not blameworthy. Recall our pear-taker. You have done something that you ought not to have done. Even so, there may be facts about you or the context of your action that make it the case that you are not morally responsible and blameworthy.
When we draw attention to these facts—that is, when we offer an excuse for our action—we are not claiming that what we did was not morally wrong. Rather, we concede that what we did was morally wrong, but we provide putative reasons for thinking that we are not morally responsible and blameworthy for having done so. When conduct is excused, this entails that the agent who so acted is not morally responsible and blameworthy for that conduct.
It is often claimed that a necessary condition for forgiveness is that the wrongdoer is morally blameworthy for her conduct see, e. Perhaps this is true although see Gamlund But we need not insist, as a matter of conceptual necessity, that forgiveness requires that agents be morally blameworthy in order to show how forgiveness and justification are distinct.
For even if there are certain cases in which one can be forgiven for non-culpably having done wrong say, in moral dilemma cases , this does not change the fact that forgiven agents can be morally responsible and blameworthy but that agents who are excused are not morally responsible and blameworthy. There are many ways to respond to wrongdoers who are blameworthy for their conduct.
One such way is to condone their conduct Hughes What is it to collaborate in the lack of censure of an action? Griswold makes two suggestions:. We can call the first kind of condoning—the one that involves accepting and not disapproving of conduct—A-condonation. We can call the second kind of condonation—the kind that involves disapproving of but tolerating conduct—D-condonation.
A brief discussion can help us to see how each differs from forgiveness. In order to forgive, however, the victim must represent the putative recipient of forgiveness as one who did something morally wrong or bad or vicious. The forgiver, by contrast, does not paper over wrongdoing—she is prepared to blame, but forgoes it. Two other considerations help distinguish condoning from forgiving. First, under typical circumstances, we can condone actions that are not wrongs against us Haber 59— We cannot, however, at least in typical circumstances, forgive others for their wrongs against others.
Second, while we forgive agents for their conduct or perhaps their characters , when we condone, we condone the conduct or the character. And to pardon a wrongdoer often seems indistinguishable from forgiveness, perhaps especially in cases of minor wrong. However, the concept of pardon also refers to a familiar and important legal and political power quite unlike forgiveness. In the United States, for example, the President has the authority to grant pardons for federal offenses, and state governors may pardon crimes against the state.
Although reasons for exercising the power of pardon often mimic those given for forgiving wrongdoers, one clear difference between pardon and forgiving is that the former is typically exercised by third-parties as opposed to the victims of wrong. As discussed below, standard philosophical views maintain that there are good reasons for thinking that, with one important exception, third-party forgiveness is impossible, inasmuch as forgiveness is the prerogative or right of the victim of wrong.
Another difference is that a central idea in the legal and political concept of pardon is that of an offer that must be accepted in order to accomplish its partial or complete end, such as mitigation of a criminal punishment via commutation of a prison sentence Bingham First, manifestations of mercy, but not forgiveness, are essentially overt.
Forgiveness, however, is not necessarily overt. It is possible to forgive privately; indeed philosophical discussions of forgiveness have focused predominantly on its private manifestations. Second, mercy is third-personal in a way that forgiveness is not. A boss may reprimand an employee for telling an inappropriate joke in the lunchroom even though termination would be justified and the boss herself is not personally offended by it.
Here, a third-party shows mercy, and does so we may presume justifiably. But forgiveness, if it is ever third-personal, is not third-personal in this way.
Barring exceptional circumstances, you cannot forgive me for the offense I caused to a co-worker—you simply lack the standing to forgive me for my offense to her. Mercy is not paradigmatically second-personal in this way. Third, mercy is often if not always connected to authority in a way that forgiveness is not. It is natural to think that in order for S to show mercy to P, S must be in some kind of position of authority over P.
Interpersonal forgiveness, however, is tied to no such authority structures. When we are wronged, this typically damages our relationship with the wrongdoer. Minor offenses might put strains on relationships that put burdens on both persons involved; serious offenses might lead the victim to terminate the relationship altogether. Further, when we blame others for their wrongs against us, we often do so at the cost of causing further relational damage.
We might withhold expressions of good-will, or alter our behavior in ways that make clear that we no longer trust the other. Although in many cases forgiveness will be accompanied by reconciliation, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for forgiveness. One reason for thinking that reconciliation is not necessary for forgiveness is that the offending party may be, for whatever reasons, unwilling to reconcile.
But the fact that I am unwilling to restore our relationship does not, all by itself, make it impossible for you forgive me for the wrong I did to you. In other cases, reconciliation is practically impossible. Perhaps I have secretly moved to Fiji and you have no way to get in touch with me. You can forgive me whether or not you know I am in Fiji. Doing so might expose one to additional psychological damage, for example.
Neither does reconciliation appear to be sufficient for forgiveness. Relationships may be restored, at least to some degree, for purely pragmatic reasons. All things being equal, reconciliation is the goal to which forgiveness points.
Although there are reasons that sometimes make reconciliation impossible or unwise, forgiveness is oriented towards promoting pro-sociality and friendly relations McCullough , In some cases, this might mean that the end of forgiveness is to repair a relationship to its ex ante state.
In some cases, however, only partial reconciliation may occur. Common conceptions of forgiveness make clear that its main purpose is the re-establishment or resumption of a relationship ruptured by wrongdoing.
Maintaining or perpetuating personal relationships is one of the clearest and most important ends of forgiveness, though not the only important one. Forgiving those who wrong us often helps us move beyond strong negative emotions which, if allowed to fester, could harm us psychologically and physically. Forgiveness benefits wrongdoers, as well, by releasing them from the blame and hard feelings often directed toward them by those they wrong, or helping them transcend the guilt or remorse they suffer from having done wrong, thereby allowing them to move forward in their lives.
These ends of forgiveness may be regarded as in general enabling in the sense that they show how forgiveness sometimes helps people move beyond the wrongs they endure or cause and the sometimes debilitating effects those wrongs have on wrongdoers and victims alike. For some, forgiveness has these forward-looking benefits because of the way it transfigures the past. It is standard to assume that not just anyone can forgive a wrongdoer for a certain wrong.
If I lack standing, then forgiving is not on the table for me; I am not a candidate for forgiving. And so to doubt whether someone has standing to forgive is not to doubt whether someone succeeded in forgiving. Rather, it is to doubt whether that person can forgive in the first place. Who has standing to forgive? Jeffrie Murphy expresses such a view when he says that. I do not have standing to resent or forgive you unless I have myself been the victim of your wrongdoing.
I may forgive you for embezzling my funds; but it would be ludicrous for me, for example, to claim that I had decided to forgive Hitler for what he did to the Jews.
I lack the proper standing for this. Thus, I may legitimately resent and hence consider forgiving only wrong done to me. On this view, only those who have been directly wronged have standing to forgive. Suppose Alfred lies to Betty. Betty is thereby directly wronged by Alfred. Betty therefore has direct standing to forgive. Suppose, however, that Alfred lies to Betty and this results in Betty being very late in picking up her brother Todd.
Alfred did not lie to Todd, but by lying to Betty, there is a straightforward sense in which this resulted in a wrong being done to Todd. Here, while we can say that Betty was directly wronged and so has direct standing to forgive, it is not true that Todd was directly wronged by Alfred.
And because it would be fitting for Todd to blame Alfred, and for Alfred to apologize to Todd, it is plausible to think that Todd also has standing to forgive Alfred.
Call this indirect standing. Though controversial, it may be possible to have standing to forgive while lacking either direct or indirect standing.
Such standing is implicated in cases where one person forgives on behalf of someone else who has or would have had direct or indirect standing. Supposing that Maria has direct standing to forgive her assailant, if it is possible for Ted to forgive the assailant on behalf of Maria, he is able to do so in virtue of possessing what we may call proxy standing.
Finally, consider third-party standing. The standing to forgive that would accrue to such a person, Griswold says, would be to put it in our above terminology of the direct or indirect variety, depending on how the case is fleshed out.
We identify as third-party standing what both Glen Pettigrove and Margaret Urban Walker have in mind in their recent discussions of third-party forgiveness. Such cases, Walker writes, involve. This putative standing to forgive, therefore, is not reducible to any of the aforementioned varieties: the forgiver was not wronged by the offender directly or indirectly , she does not forgive herself, and she does not forgive on behalf of anyone else.
It is widely thought that forgiveness is fundamentally a matter of how one feels about another. Hughes Broadly speaking, emotion accounts of forgiveness claim that forgiveness is best understood as fundamentally a change in emotion. According to such views, were you to be wronged, your forgiving the wrongdoer fundamentally involves your overcoming or abating, or eliminating, or forswearing some relevant negative emotion e. Among the various emotion accounts, however, there is significant disagreement on two main points: 1 about which specific emotions are implicated in forgiveness; and 2 about what must be done with those emotions in order to forgive.
We survey emotion accounts by taking these two issues in turn. One way to differentiate between the varieties of emotion accounts is according to the emotion or set of emotions that are thought to be relevant to forgiveness. A cursory survey of the forgiveness literature might give one the impression that there is widespread agreement about which emotion is crucially implicated in forgiveness.
That emotion is resentment. Kekes ; Radzik ; and Zaibert But any impression of wholesale agreement would be mistaken for two reasons. First, some emotion theorists argue that overcoming resentment is neither necessary nor sufficient for forgiveness. Such emotion theorists hold that in forgiving there are other emotions that may or must be overcome. And second, even among those who hold that overcoming resentment is either necessary or sufficient for forgiveness, there is disagreement about what resentment is.
It is difficult to know what exactly these characterizations of resentment amount to, what kinds of relations hold between them, and perhaps most importantly, which view is correct. Indeed, this is one of the more troublesome aspects of the philosophical literature on forgiveness: while it is commonly thought that forgiveness crucially implicates resentment, there is no such consensus about what resentment is contra Holmgren And as we have already noted, even though resentment is widely thought to be the central or paradigmatic emotion that forgiveness implicates, not all emotional accounts accept that view.
So here is a rough and ready way of categorizing the various emotion accounts as regards the set of relevant emotions that forgiveness implicates. Examples of such emotions include the feelings of malice, spite, or ill-will that might arise as a response to being wronged. The minimal emotionalist can allow that there are lots of negative emotions that one might experience upon being wronged e.
Alternatively, let moderate emotionalism be the view that in order to forgive, one must overcome both hostile retributive feelings and what we may call moral anger. According to moderate emotionalism, overcoming hostile feelings is not enough for forgiveness. One may harbor moral anger towards a wrongdoer so the view goes without thereby wishing that she suffers for what she did.
But both moral anger and hostile feelings must be given up in order to forgive. Paul Hughes defends something like moderate emotionalism. As Hughes notes, not all anger is moral; if you are angry because a bird drops a gift on your head, your anger is non-moral for it is not constituted by a belief that the bird has done you a wrong. But because resentment is, according to Hughes, a paradigm case of moral anger, it must be overcome in order for one to forgive. Charles Griswold also appears to have in mind a kind of moderate emotionalism:.
In this respect his view differs from Garrard and McNaughton, who do target those emotions that involve desires to inflict suffering on the wrongdoer.
Finally, let expansive emotionalism be the view that in order to forgive a wrongdoer, the victim must overcome all negative emotions that the victim has towards the wrongdoer on account of the wrongdoing in question.
In recent work, Jeffrie Murphy has also endorsed a more expansive emotionalism. Although he once argued that forgiveness ought to be construed narrowly as the overcoming of resentment, Murphy has now, citing the influence of Richards and others, become more ecumenical, writing that we should. The set of emotions that victims might possess in response to being wronged by another agent therefore form a large and diverse landscape.
But what kind of changes must occur? Writers on forgiveness often speak of the overcoming of resentment. In doing so we follow precedent e. We therefore want to know what kinds of changes are at issue with respect to each of these claims, and what relations hold between them? Does, for example, overcoming resentment entail that one has totally eliminated it? There are at least two facts about the relevant notion of overcoming about which most emotion theorists seem to agree.
First, emotion theorists have been keen to clarify that it is not just any kind of elimination of resentment that is at issue. Were you accidentally to fall and hit your head on a rock, thereby causing your resentment to be eliminated, you would not have forgiven. Or if your resentment simply withered away over the years via a process outside of your control or ken, it is widely thought that you would not have forgiven cf.
Horsbrugh What kinds of reasons? Sometimes the right kinds of reasons are claimed to be specifically moral reasons Murphy 16; Griswold But here, we should be careful to distinguish between two different questions. One question is a conceptual one, concerning what kinds of motivating reasons make forgiveness possible at all. But another kind of question, a normative one, concerns what motivating reasons make forgiveness, on any given occasion, appropriate or permissible or praiseworthy.
If Murphy is right, then it appears that one cannot forgive because one wanted to win a bet. This raises questions as to how moralized our conception of forgiveness ought to be. Should our account of forgiveness require that in order to forgive, one must do so for only moral reasons? Or could one forgive for merely prudential reasons Ingram ? One is more likely to choose to ignore the virtue of forgiveness as a way of handling personnel situations involving intense conflict or mild disagreements, favoring instead the negative feelings of resentment, anger, revenge or retaliation.
Business people seem less concerned with growth in virtue and character; interestingly they allow their character and ultimately their work relationships to deteriorate because they hold onto feelings of anger and resentment. Is there a place for forgiveness in our interpersonal relationships in general and in corporate life in particular?
I believe there is. A study of the virtue of forgiveness shows that it is a misunderstood virtue, but one that deserves attention. In this article I will examine the virtue of forgiveness, defining what forgiveness is and is not, and will illustrate how it might be situated as an essential human resource management strategy.
The Journal of Business Ethics publishes original articles from a wide variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives concerning ethical issues related to business. Since its initiation in , the editors have encouraged the broadest possible scope. The term 'business' is understood in a wide sense to include all systems involved in the exchange of goods and services, while 'ethics' is circumscribed as all human action aimed at securing a good life.
Systems of production, consumption, marketing, advertising, social and economic accounting, labour relations, public relations and organisational behaviour are analysed from a moral viewpoint. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits. Find in Worldcat. Go to page:. Your current browser may not support copying via this button.
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