Forgiveness

If I have done you a serious wrong, I bear a burden. I can be relieved of that burder by forgiveness. What is the burden and what is the relief?

The burden need not consist of anything emotional or dispositional on your side, such as your harboring resentment or being disposed not to interact with me in as amicable a way as before or pursuing my punishment. For, first, if I secretly betrayed you in such a way that you never found out you were wronged, my burden is still there. And, second, if you die without forgiving me, then the burden feels intact—unless perhaps I believe in life after death or divine forgiveness.

The burden need not consist of something emotional or dispositional on my side, either. For if it had to, I could be relieved of it by therapy. But therapy might make it easier to bear the burden, or (if badly done) may make me think the burden is gone, but the burden will still be there.

People often talk about forgiveness as healing a damaged relationship. But that’s not quite right, either. Suppose I have done many grave wrongs to you over the years that have completely ruptured the relationship. You have finally, generously, brought yourself to forgive me some but not all of them. (A perhaps psychologically odd story: you are working backwards through your life, forgiving all who have wronged you, year by year. So far you’ve forgivenes the wrongs in the last three years of your life. But my earlier wrongs remain.) The remaining ones may be sufficient to make our relationship remain completely ruptured.

The burden is fundamentally a normative feature of reality, as is hinted at by the use of “debt” language in the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our debts as we forgive those indebted to us”). By wronging someone, we make a move in normative space: we burden ourself with an objective, and not merely emotional, guilt. In forgiveness, the burden is removed, but the feeling of burden can remain—one can still feel guilty, just as one’s back can continue hurt when a load is removed from one’s back.

Insofar as there is a healing of a relationship, it is primarily a normative healing. There need not be any great psychological change, as can be seen from the case where you have forgiven me some but not all wrongs. Moreover, psychological change can be slow: forgiveness can be fast, but healing the effects of the wrongdoing can take long.

So far we have identified the type of thing that forgiveness is: it is a move in normative space that relieves something that the wrongdoer owes to a victim. But we are still not clear on what it is that the wrongdoer owes to the victim. And I don’t really know the answer here.

One possibility it is that it has something to do with punishment: I owe it to you to be punished. If so, then there are two ways for the burden to be cleared: one is by being punished and the other is by being forgiven. I can think of one objection to the punishment account: even after being adequately punished, you still can choose whether to forgive me. But if punishment clears the burden, what does your forgiveness do? Maybe it is at this point that the psychological components of forgiveness can enter: it’s up to you whether you stop resenting, whether you accept the clearing of the burden? Plus, in practice, it may be that the punishment is not actually sufficient to clear the burden—a lifetime in jail is not enough for some crimes.

Another possibility is that there is something normative and emotional. I owe it to you to feel guilty, and you can clear that debt and make it no longer obligatory for me to feel that way. That, too, doesn’t seem quite right. One problem is circularity: objective guilt consists in me owing you a feeling of guilt, but a feeling of guilt is a feeling that I am objectively guilty. Maybe the owed feeling has some other description? I don’t know!

But whatever the answer is, I am convinced now that the crucial move in forgiveness is normative.