COMPETING CONCEPTIONS OF FORGIVENESS

Few people dispute that a willingness to forgive, when appropriate, is laudable – an expression of what Roberts (1995) calls the virtue of forgivingness. And nearly all agree that, in order to forgive, the victim needs to overcome at least some negative feelings towards the person who has wronged her. Beyond this point, there is considerable dissension. Four questions, in particular, have been at the forefront of recent debate.

1. • When is it appropriate to forgive?

2. • What are the negative feelings and attitudes that must be overcome in forgiveness?

3. • What else has to take place in order for the victim to have forgiven the wrongdoer?

4. • What justifies forgiveness?

These questions are obviously related in a number of ways. For example, with respect to the first question, there is marked disagreement about whether it is appropriate to forgive the unrepentant. To some extent, this disagreement reflects competing models of what it is to forgive that find expression in differing answers to the other three questions. On one conception, reflected in the popular phrase “wiping the slate clean”, forgiveness involves a restoration (so far as is possible) of the status quo ante. On this model, as regards the second question, forgiveness may involve not only the cessation of resentment, but also of indignation, blame and even (on one account) all negative feelings whatever.

Some people on the political Left are very reluctant to deploy the concept of evil, and distrust the use to which others put it. This reluctance and distrust are, I shall argue, unnecessary. What I hope to do here is to outline a case for evil and the Left – that is, a case for saying that the Left can legitimately appeal to the concept of evil, and that it can be of some use to them.

I don't intend to offer a complete theory of evil here: it's a highly disputed area, and the case for saying that the Left can legitimately deploy the idea of evil shouldn't depend too much on the details of any specific theory. But a broad characterisation of it, based on our common understanding of the term, can be provided, and should be enough to underpin the argument for the viability of the term in the lexicon of the Left. Similarly, I won't attempt to offer a watertight definition of what it is to be on the Left – it's most unlikely that any such definition exists. I'll treat the Left as being that large group of people who are especially concerned, in the political arena, with equality, diversity, democracy, the reduction of suffering, concerns about class, and concerns about human rights. A member of the Left will be a person who is particularly committed to these things, or at least to some largish subset of these things.

Esther Mujawayo lost hundreds of relatives, including her mother, her father, and her husband, in conditions of unspeakable brutality and horror during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In her writings after the end of the massacres she wrote:

The need for forgiveness (if forgiveness is in fact what's needed) arises out of human conflict. The perpetrator's wrongdoing is the locus of that conflict; it may indeed have started it, and it has to be handled in some way or other by the victim.

A man lies in the rubble of a building that has been blown apart by a bomb. He will survive, but his daughter crushed there beside him will not. He holds her hand as she lies dying. Later, when he has been rescued, he says that he forgives the terrorists who have killed his daughter; he wishes them no ill.

Many people would regard the unconditional forgiveness that is offered in this case as absolutely admirable, even saintly, in its ability to rise above the hatred and enmity that would be a natural response to so terrible an event. (In fact, many people did so regard it, since this is the case of Gordon Wilson, who lost his daughter in the Enniskillen bombing in Northern Ireland). But some would not and did not find it admirable, thinking that forgiveness isn't the right response, the appropriate response, to those who deliberately choose to murder innocent and helpless victims. Whether forgiveness is always appropriate and admirable is something that people disagree about, sometimes quite strongly, and often they find it hard to understand the position of those who don't share their views on this troubling topic. On the one hand, some say, how can we fail to admire a person who rises above rancour and hatred and vengefulness, and offers goodwill to those who have injured him so badly? On the other hand, comes the rejoinder, how can we fail to be angry and outraged at the offender's terrible crimes, and why should we pretend that they don't matter and that a just punishment for them isn't important?

This is an issue that matters in everybody's life.

What can you expect to find in this book, and – perhaps just as importantly – what can you not expect to find? In these pages, we try to answer two central questions about forgiveness: first, what exactly are we doing when we forgive someone who has wronged us or behaved badly towards us? And second, what reasons are there to forgive, and what reasons are there to withhold forgiveness? Addressing these two questions is the central aim of this book.

People use the term “forgiveness” to cover a number of things. Thus we can talk not only about forgiving wrongdoers, but also about forgiving debts. In this book we are interested only in the first kind of forgiveness, not in the second. This is because to forgive a debt is simply to let the borrower off having to repay the money, with no implication that the borrower has done anything wrong. There are important and interesting questions about whether, for example, advanced industrial nations should forgive the debts owed to them by developing nations, but they won't concern us here, because what we're interested in is the fact that when we forgive a person, it must be because we think that they have done something wrong, something for which they need forgiveness. It's this forgiving attitude towards wrongdoing that we want to focus on, in order to see more clearly what it involves, and to find out what reasons (if any) there are for adopting it.

We've seen that the main objections to forgiveness can be met, if we have a suitably robust conception of forgiveness.

Before we return to the more philosophical debate, we should pause to consider what we can learn about forgiveness from empirical research. In recent years, work by psychologists on the topic of forgiveness has become a growth industry (if you visit the American Psychological Association's website and type in the word “forgiveness”, you'll find over 150 results straight off). The hope behind some of these projects is that we'll be able to find ways to encourage conflict resolution, especially in countries torn apart by racial or ethnic violence. Substantial backing for such research is provided by, among others, the United Nations; forgiveness is one of the topics it supports, alongside research primarily concerned with relieving the pain and distress suffered by victims. Some studies focus on forgiveness in close personal relationships, especially marriage, while others are directed towards forgiveness by and between groups. Yet others study self-forgiveness, and at least one project looks at the issue from the perspective of the perpetrator rather than the victim, and asks what motivates perpetrators to seek forgiveness.

While the emphasis varies from group to group, for nearly all the psychologists engaged in these projects, theoretical research is undertaken with a therapeutic aim. They want to understand how forgiveness works in order to make it easier for people to forgive, because they think that forgiveness is likely to help healing of both victims and remorseful perpetrators, and to resolve conflicts.