Forgiving Someone for Who They Are (and Not Just What They’ve Done)
2008; Wiley; Volume: 77; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1933-1592.2008.00213.x
ISSN1933-1592
Autores Tópico(s)Forgiveness and Related Behaviors
Resumo"I was sexually abused by an old man when I was 6 years old … he was 60 … i think I have forgiven him … my father left when I was 13 … i think i have forgiven him … i do not forget what they have done … i do not forgive what they have done but i forgive them for being the way they were that made them do the things they have done … and this makes no sense … but it is what i think and what i feel … does anyone else understand?"—bluemoon1 In the passage above, "bluemoon" describes her ambivalent feelings toward the man who sexually abused her and toward her absent father; she takes herself to have forgiven these men even though she does not forgive what they have done. This case is obviously under described, but what bluemoon seems to be saying is that she forgives these two men for being who they are (or were) as opposed to forgiving them for what they have done. However, as she recognizes, there seems to be something a bit odd about this stance: what does it mean to forgive someone for who they are as opposed to simply what they have done? Is such forgiveness coherent? If so, what sort of considerations would justify forgiving someone for who they are? These are the questions that I will consider in this paper. While philosophers have become increasingly interested in forgiveness, there is little in the ever-growing forgiveness literature that would be directly relevant to the issues raised by bluemoon's case. As I see it, philosophers have not openly taken up the questions raised by bluemoon because of a problem with the standard account of the nature of forgiveness. Bishop Butler defined forgiveness as the overcoming of excessive resentment.2 Influenced by Butler, many philosophers have understood forgiveness exclusively as the overcoming of resentment on moral grounds, and this Butlerian conception of forgiveness has become the basis of the standard philosophical account of forgiveness.3 Although this description of forgiveness is intuitively plausible, some have argued that the standard account of forgiveness is overly narrow. In his paper "Forgiveness," Norvin Richards articulates this objection as follows:4 … [A]bandoning resentment does not constitute forgiving, because a person can stop resenting and still have a hostile attitude of another kind … neither must it be resentment that one is forswearing: it should also count as forgiveness to abandon contempt for someone or disappointment in him. Taken together, these suggest that to forgive someone for having wronged one is to abandon all negative feelings toward this person, of whatever kind, insofar as such feelings are based on the episode in question.5 On Richards' account, to forgive someone is not simply to overcome one's resentment toward the person to be forgiven. Instead, genuine forgiveness requires that the forgiver overcome all of her negative feelings towards the person that she forgives, insofar as these feelings are based on the episode in question.6 Although he offers an important challenge to the standard account of forgiveness, Richards retains two central elements of the standard account: the belief that forgiveness is appropriate only when someone has wronged you, and the insistence that the feelings overcome through forgiveness must be based on a specific act or particular episode. In later sections of this paper, I will challenge both of these assumptions. Other philosophers have begun to acknowledge that the standard account of forgiveness is overly narrow. In his recent book, Getting Even, Jeffrie Murphy recounts Butler's definition of forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment on moral grounds but then goes on to offer the following caveat: I have now been persuaded by Norvin Richards and others, however, that it is a mistake to define forgiveness so narrowly. It is more illuminating—more loyal to the actual texture of our moral lives—to think of forgiveness as overcoming a variety of negative feelings that one might have toward a wrongdoer—resentment, yes, but also such feelings as anger, hatred, loathing, contempt, indifference, disappointment, or even sadness. There is no reason to think that even this list is complete.7 Despite the lip service paid to this expanded definition of forgiveness, philosophers (including Murphy and Richards) have failed to fully justify the claim that we can extend the notion of forgiveness in this way, nor do they seem to fully appreciate the ramifications of broadening the standard account of forgiveness. In particular, they have not acknowledged that expanding the definition of forgiveness in this way ought to change what reasons should count as morally good reasons to forgive. As I see it, moral theorists have not recognized the need to revise the standard account of morally good reasons to forgive because they are reticent to accept as "moral emotions" the wide variety of negative attitudes and emotions that one might have toward immoral persons. While Murphy cites hatred, loathing, and contempt as possible responses to wrongdoing, philosophers have traditionally regarded these as immoral emotions that have no proper role in the psychological life of the morally virtuous agent. Given this characterization of the negative emotions, moral agents should either: (i) strive to extirpate these emotions as much as possible, regardless of whether or not they have morally good reasons to do so, or (ii) simply ignore these emotions. I think this prejudice against the negative emotions is unwarranted. Once we recognize what role these emotions ought to play in our moral lives, we will be in a better position to understand when these emotions should be overcome through a process of forgiveness. In this paper, I will conceptualize forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment and contempt and I will refer to this understanding of forgiveness as "the expanded account." According to the expanded account, for x to forgive y, x must overcome her resentment and/or contempt for y on moral grounds. Of course there may well be other attitudes that can and should be overcome through a process of forgiveness (e.g., anger, indifference, disappointment, sadness, and distrust), and so my expanded account will remain overly narrow. However, by conceptualizing forgiveness in this way, I hope to establish that if we accept the expanded account of forgiveness, then we must overhaul the standard account of the morally good reasons to forgive. In what follows, I will use the term "forgiveness-R" to denote forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment and "forgiveness-C" to denote forgiveness as the overcoming of contempt. How will an investigation of the expanded account of forgiveness help us answer bluemoon's concerns about forgiving someone for who they are? As we will see in what follows, contempt is an attitude that takes as its object the person as opposed to (simply) the person's actions. In fact, it is contempt's person-focus that helps to distinguish contempt from other negative emotions, such as resentment, that typically take as their object a person's actions. Thus, once we have established what it means to forgive on the expanded account and determined when we have morally good reason to forgive, we will be well-positioned to turn back to bluemoon and give her some guidance about what it means to forgive someone for who they are and what sort of considerations will give us morally good reasons to do so. As should be clear, part of my task in this paper is to convince the reader that forgiveness-C ought to count as a form of forgiveness. In discussions, I have found a good deal of resistance to this idea. I will discuss specific worries concerning the coherence of forgiveness-C in section VI, but it may be worth pausing here to consider this objection in its most general form. Why think that overcoming a negative emotion other than resentment ought to count as a form of forgiveness? Moreover, what explains the philosophical presumption that forgiveness must be directed towards actions and not towards an offender's character as such? Richards and Murphy offer one strategy for responding to those skeptical of forgiveness-C: imagine someone who was insulted and responded with contempt toward her offender but did not feel resentment toward any of the offender's actions. Suppose this person eventually overcame her justified contempt for what looked like morally good reasons.8 Would we really want to deny that this person had forgiven her offender? Conversely, suppose that someone claimed to have forgiven her offender but still harbored contempt for the person in question. Wouldn't we be skeptical of the claim that the person forgave the offender? Reflecting on these types of cases may be sufficient to convince some that forgiveness-C is a type of forgiveness, but I think we can say even more in defense of the claim that forgiveness-C ought to count as a form of forgiveness. Recall Murphy's list of possible attitudes that can be overcome through a process of forgiveness: resentment, anger, hatred, loathing, contempt, indifference, disappointment, and sadness. Is there something special about resentment such that overcoming it, and it alone, deserves to be called forgiveness? I think not. Consider what these attitudes have in common. In addition to being described as "negative," these are all attitudes that can serve to separate persons from each other. The reason why overcoming resentment is a paradigmatic case of forgiveness is because resentment functions as a barrier between persons. If I resent you, I will resist spending time in your company, I will not openly engage with you, or sympathize with your plight. In short, my attention to what you have done will drive a wedge between us. Resentment is an attitude that is commonly overcome through a process of forgiveness because resentment separates us from one another, thereby making forgiveness possible. But the other attitudes on Murphy's list also serve to separate us from one another. Thus, insofar as these other attitudes serve to separate us from one another, then these attitudes ought to be included in the class of attitudes that one can overcome through a process of forgiveness. To see this, it might be helpful to consider a case that everyone would agree should not count as forgiveness. Suppose that, for some unknown reason, Sam routinely experiences happiness rather than resentment whenever he is wronged. Sam realizes that this is an aberrant response and he attempts to overcome this feeling through what he describes as a process of "forgiveness." While we all might think Sam is right to try and overcome his feeling of happiness at being wronged, I imagine that most people would deny that Sam's activity should count as a case of forgiveness. Why? Happiness is not the sort of attitude that can be overcome through a process of forgiveness because happiness is not an attitude that constitutes a barrier between the victim and the offender. In its most general sense, forgiveness can be understood as a way of removing attitudinal barriers between persons (or, in religious contexts, between persons and God). What then accounts for the tendency of philosophers to insist that forgiveness must be directed toward a person's actions and not the person herself? I suspect that the answer to this question has to do with the theological roots of some of our intuitions about forgiveness. Augustine's views concerning the attitudes we ought to take toward wrongdoers are particularly relevant: For this reason, the man who lives by God's standards, and not by man's, must needs be a lover of the good, and it follows that he must hate what is evil. Further, since no one is evil by nature, but anyone who is evil is evil because of a perversion of nature, the man who lives by God's standards has a duty of "perfect hatred" towards those who are evil; that is to say, he should not hate the person because of the fault, nor should he love the fault because of the person. He should hate the fault, but love the man. And when the fault has been cured there will remain only what he ought to love, nothing that he should hate.9 Augustine argues that we ought to take up a certain attitudinal stance: we should love what is good and hate what is evil. But since God created persons, they cannot be evil in themselves. Rather, any evil associated with persons must be the result of the person's freely chosen actions. Augustine contends that we ought to hate the fault, but love the person. Thus, according to Augustine's prescriptions, any negative emotion that we have toward wrongdoers is properly directed toward that person's actions. And, as the above passage suggests, when we forgive someone, our forgiveness must be for the individual's actions rather than for who he or she is as such. However, philosophical discussions of interpersonal forgiveness should not be constrained by its theological roots. In fact, when we look at our actual forgiveness practices and how we talk about forgiveness, the tendency for philosophers to treat forgiveness as an activity directed at actions and not persons seems even more misplaced. We typically say, for example, "I forgive you" or ask "please forgive me" rather than "I forgive you for stepping on my toe last week" or "please forgive me for borrowing your favorite shirt without asking on Thursday."10 The remainder of this paper will proceed as follows: In section II, I will offer an account of the nature of contempt, isolating features of this attitude that differentiate it from other attitudes which may be overcome through a process of forgiveness.11 In section III, I will set forth two requirements that any instance of purported forgiveness must meet, if it is to count as genuine forgiveness. In section IV, I will articulate what many regard as the two paradigmatic moral reasons to forgive on the standard account of forgiveness and show how these reasons must be reconceptualized if we accept the expanded account of forgiveness. In section V, I will sketch out what sorts of reasons ought to count as good reasons to forgive on the expanded account of forgiveness. I will close by anticipating and responding to several objections to my argument. For an act of forgiveness to merit high moral praise, the negative emotions overcome through the forgiveness process must have initially been fully morally justified. If these emotions were not fully morally justified, the act of overcoming them may, perhaps, still count as forgiveness, but it will not be a meritorious form of forgiveness. However, overcoming a morally objectionable12 attitude cannot constitute an act of forgiveness. Consider the racist who rids himself of his negative feelings toward a black colleague. While we would certainly encourage racists to overcome their feelings of contempt for people of other races, this process does not merit the honorific of forgiveness. Forgiveness has traditionally been understood as the overcoming of one's warranted or justified resentment and in the case of the racist, his contempt and resentment toward blacks was never warranted. Some may be hesitant to recognize forgiveness-C as a type of forgiveness because they view contempt as an immoral emotion that could never be justified and that should simply be extirpated as much as possible. According to these objectors, while we may have good, pragmatic, reasons for overcoming our contempt, this activity does not merit the honorific of "forgiveness." In this section, I will first offer an account of the nature of contempt and then go on to argue that contrary to what many philosophers have suggested, contempt may be a morally justified and praiseworthy response to certain forms of immorality. My aim is to show that contempt is not always a morally objectionable attitude and thus forgiveness-C can count as a form of morally praiseworthy forgiveness. As I will argue, there are four main characteristics of contempt that distinguish it from other emotional responses to immorality.13 In what follows, I will be assuming that emotions are at least partly cognitive states. Although we may, perhaps, come to feel contempt for non-persons as well as persons, I will focus my attention on the defining characteristics of contempt for persons. Ultimately, I will argue that given the nature of contempt, the reasons to forgive-C must be distinct from the reasons to forgive-R. First, and most importantly, contempt requires that the contemnor have certain thoughts about the status or standing of the object of contempt. In particular, contempt involves the idea that because of some moral or personal failing or defect, the contemned person has compromised his or her standing vis-à-vis an interpersonal standard that the contemnor thinks is important.14 In many instances, the object of contempt may not have done anything to open herself up to being contemned; rather, she simply lacks the appropriate status in the judgment of the contemnor. This lack of status admits of degrees. The contemnor may judge that the object of contempt is utterly worthless as a human being,15 or he may judge that the object of contempt fails to meet a particular interpersonal standard.16 So, while resentment is a response to a perceived harm or injury, contempt is a response to a perceived failure to meet a standard of personhood.17 Second, contempt is not simply a judgment or belief that the object of contempt ranks low vis-à-vis some interpersonal standard that the contemnor holds important, but is also a way of regarding or attending to the object of contempt. While this form of regard most often has an unpleasant affective element, the affective element of contempt can vary—contempt may be experienced as a highly visceral emotion similar to disgust, or as cool disregard.18 Hence, we cannot individuate contempt simply by its affective element. A third characteristic of contempt is the psychological withdrawal or disengagement one typically feels regarding the object of one's contempt. While this psychological withdrawal may manifest itself in a number of ways, this psychic distancing from the object of contempt is an essential characteristic of contempt that helps to distinguish contempt from resentment and anger. By psychologically distancing himself from the object of contempt, the contemptuous person is engaged in a process of active non-identification with the object of contempt. Finally, contempt has an important comparative element. David Hume emphasizes this aspect of the emotion in his discussion of contempt. He states that contempt involves regarding the "bad qualities" and circumstances of others in a certain way. Specifically, contempt essentially requires apprehending the bad qualities of someone "as they really are" while simultaneously making a comparison between this person and ourselves.19 Thus, for Hume, contempt has an essential reflexive element, i.e., the contemptuous necessarily make a comparison between their own qualities and circumstances and the qualities and circumstances of the contemned, and find the object of their contempt to be lacking.20 To summarize, in its clearest forms contempt for a person involves a way of negatively and comparatively regarding or attending to someone who has failed to meet a basic standard that the contemnor treats as important. This form of regard constitutes a psychological withdrawal from the object of contempt. Given this description of the nature of contempt it may be difficult to see why anyone would think that contempt is ever an appropriate response to immorality. Contempt is at the heart of racism, sexism and heterosexism, and can motivate a wide variety of immoral acts.21 If contempt were simply an immoral emotion then we may have reason to purge ourselves of contempt as much as we possibly can, but it would not be the kind of emotion that could be overcome through a process of forgiveness. To help us begin thinking about the important place for contempt in our moral lives, I would like to turn to an example of contempt discussed recently by Michelle Mason in her thoughtful and stimulating paper "Contempt as a Moral Attitude."22 Camille's Contempt In his film Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard portrays the increasing contempt Camille comes to feel for her husband Paul. As the film opens, Camille and Paul appear very much in love. But their relationship is threatened when Paul begins writing the screenplay for the unscrupulous producer Jeremiah. Jeremiah's untoward motives regarding Camille are immediately obvious. For example, when Paul asks why Jeremiah wants Paul to write the screenplay for his next project Jeremiah replies, "I hear you have a beautiful wife." Most troubling of all is the fact that Paul seems to encourage Jeremiah's attention toward Camille. Despite her obvious apprehension, Paul repeatedly suggests that Camille and Jeremiah spend time alone together. On a trip to Jeremiah's home, Paul presses Camille to ride alone with Jeremiah in his car, despite the fact that Camille expressly declines the invitation. When she realizes that Paul is willing to exploit her for his own professional success Camille responds with contempt. The example of Camille's contempt ought to cause us to rethink the idea that contempt is an "immoral emotion." Camille's contempt for Paul appears perfectly apt—we think that Camille ought to feel contempt for Paul. But how are we to distinguish morally justified contempt, such as Camille's contempt for Paul, from contempt that we regard as morally abhorrent, such as the contempt that sexist men have for women or racist whites have towards non-Caucasians? As I see it, contempt is morally justified if it is a response to the moral character of the contemned and not a response to some other feature of the person such as her race or gender.23 In what follows, I will refer to the morally justified forms of contempt as moral or appropriate and the forms of contempt which are inappropriate and condemnable immoral or inappropriate.24 A full articulation and defense of the conditions under which contempt is fully morally justified is beyond the scope of this paper. Here I am using the term "moral contempt" to refer only to instances of contempt which track moral failings of character. There might well be instances of morally permissible or fully morally justified contempt which are not connected to the moral failings of the contemned, e.g., one might have morally justified contempt for one's colleague who has bad personal hygiene yet not be committed to the view that bad personal hygiene is a moral failing of character.25 I concede that it is an open question whether contempt for someone because of his or her poor hygiene ought to count as fully morally justified. However, for the purposes of this paper, I will restrict my discussion to what I have termed "moral contempt." For even if we allowed that contempt for one's malodorous colleague could be morally justified, the idea that we could overcome this contempt through a process of forgiveness strikes me as doing real violence to the concept of forgiveness. However, nothing in what follows depends on this intuition. Having reviewed the general structure of contempt and sketched out a distinction between moral contempt and immoral contempt, I would now like to return to the topic of forgiveness understood as the overcoming of moral contempt. In section I, I argued that Butler's account of forgiveness is unsatisfactory insofar as he understands forgiveness exclusively as the overcoming of resentment. Despite this flaw in Butler's account, I think he is correct in understanding forgiveness in terms of the forgiver overcoming her negative emotions toward the wrongdoer. Articulating precisely what it is to "overcome" a negative emotion through forgiveness is difficult. Some have suggested that to overcome an emotion is to completely purge oneself of the emotion. This is not my view of what it means to overcome a negative emotion through forgiveness. On my view, to overcome an emotion is to no longer be led or dominated by the emotion.26 But genuine forgiveness requires more than simply overcoming one's negative emotions. As several philosophers have noted, for one person genuinely to forgive another, the forgiving agent must overcome her negative emotions for the right sorts of reasons while simultaneously maintaining her commitment to morality.27 In this section I will argue that two conditions must be met if an instance of overcoming moral contempt is to count as forgiveness-C. First, to count as forgiveness, one must actively overcome one's negative emotions. For example, if someone overcomes her resentment or contempt due to a head injury or pharmacological intervention, this would not count as a case of forgiveness. In fact, it is not clear that we should describe such an agent as having overcome her feelings at all since to "overcome" one's feelings suggests an intentional act on the part of an autonomous agent. Genuine forgiveness must be what I term agential. Forgiveness is agential when an agent intentionally overcomes her negative emotions for certain reasons.28 Additionally, many philosophers claim that for an act to count as genuine forgiveness, the forgiver must maintain certain views about the wrong done and the wrongdoer. Specifically, it is often held that the forgiver must maintain her view that the act in question was a moral wrong that the wrongdoer can legitimately be held responsible for and that she, as a moral agent, should not have been wronged.29 An agent who forgives yet who also wishes to retain her commitment to morality must meet these conditions; her forgiveness must be what I term non-complicit. Such an agent does not tacitly condone the wrong and therefore is not complicit in it. Since moral contempt is a response to what we might term badbeing rather than wrongdoing, the conditions required for non-complicit forgiveness-R will not be identical to the conditions required for non-complicit forgiveness-C. An instance of non-complicit forgiveness-C would require that the forgiver maintain the following three propositions: Because of a morally flawed character, the object of contempt has failed to live up to an important standard. The object of contempt is a member of the moral community and is responsible for her character. The contemnor can legitimately expect or demand that the contemned live up to the standard in question. To forgive-C is to overcome one's non-objectionable contempt on moral grounds and for one's appropriate contempt to be non-objectionable it must be initially warranted. But to deny any of the above judgments is to deny that the object of contempt actually warranted contempt in the first place. If one's contempt is unwarranted and thereby morally inappropriate, then overcoming this contempt cannot count as forgiveness. To see this, let's consider each condition in turn: (1) to give up the judgment that the object of contempt failed to live up to an important interpersonal standard because of her flawed character is analogous to completely excusing a wrongdoer or judging that no wrong was done at all. You may have come to relinquish the first judgment above because you have come to see that you were mistaken in believing the contemned's character was flawed or you may come to see that the failure to meet the relevant standard was completely excusable. In such cases, one's contempt would be inappropriate and should be overcome. However, if you overcome your contempt by relinquishing the first judgment you cannot be said to have genuinely forgiven-C that person. (2) Suppose you claim to have forgiven-C someone, but you relinquish the second judgment above, i.e., you no longer judge the contemned to be a member of the moral community who is responsible for her character. Perhaps you have given up this judgment because you discover that (unbeknownst to you) the individual in question grew up in an extremely abusive home. If the abuse was really serious, you may decide that the former object of your contempt was not at all responsible for the character trait you find contemptible. But if you overcome your feelings of contempt by relinquishing this second judgment you have completely exonerated the object of your contempt, not forgiven her. (3) Suppose you claim to have forgiven someone, but you relinquish the third judgment above, i.e., you no longer judge that you were in a position to legitimately hold the object of your contempt to the standard in question. Perhaps you realize that your own character is so severely flawed that it is hypocritical of you to hold others to standards that you consistently fail to meet. But to overcome your contempt by relinquishing this third judgment is not to forgive-C. If you relinquish this judgment, your contempt is no longer appropriate, but you have not forgiven the object of your contempt. In this section, I have argued that if an instance of overcoming one's contempt is to count as genuine forgiveness it must be both agential and non-complicit. However, the requirements for an instance of non-complicit forgiveness-C are distinct from the conditions required for an instance of non-complicit forgiveness-R. In light of this, I have offered my own three requirements that non-complicit forgiveness-C must meet. But I have yet to consider what sorts of reasons ought to count as good reasons to forgive on the expanded account of forgiveness. Let's turn to this question now. Reasons to forgive are considerations that call for or justify forgiveness. As I see it, forgiveness is possible only in cases where the negative emotion to be overcome is not morally objectionable, and forgiveness is morally praiseworthy only in cases where the negative emotions overcome through the process of forgiveness were originally morally justified. Given this, we always have prima facie reason not
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