In a recent article in this journal Brandon Warmke argues against my account of forgiveness. I here offer answers to his objections, and suggest ways in which I think he has misinterpreted my views. This exchange with Warmke also gives me the opportunity to insist on my general thesis that it is advisable to study punishment and forgiveness together. It is precisely the conceptual proximity of these two phenomena which make my account of forgiveness uncommon, and which make it more (...) promising than other accounts. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that forgiveness involves the cancellation of a moral debt. This way of speaking about forgiveness exploits an analogy between moral forgiveness and economic debt-cancellation. Call the view that moral forgiveness is like economic debt-cancellation the Economic Model of Forgiveness. In this article I articulate and motivate the model, defend it against some recent objections, and pose a new puzzle for this way of thinking about forgiveness.

One account of forgiveness claims that to forgive is to forbear punishment. Call this the Punishment-Forbearance Account of forgiveness. In this paper I argue that forbearing punishment is neither necessary nor sufficient for forgiveness.

To love someone, Eleonore Stump tells us, is to have two desires: a desire her objective good and a desire for union with her. In Atonement, Stump claims that loving someone—understood as having these desires—is necessary and sufficient for morally appropriate forgiveness. I offer several arguments against this claim.

In this, the first essay in a two-part series, I begin by distinguishing between three kinds of inquiries about divine forgiveness. I then canvass two approaches to theorizing the nature of divine forgiveness, developing them in various ways, and noting where, in my estimation, there are problems.

ABSTRACTHieronymi and Zaibert think that forgiving requires resolving not to inflict any further punishment. Murphy, Garrard, Allais, and Pettigrove suggest that it is always possible for a victim to forgive a perpetrator while continuing to punish. In this paper I defend a middle-ground position: the non-adversarial account of forgiveness, according to which forgiving is sometimes but not always compatible with continuing to punish. When the perpetrator accepts continued punishment, it is no obstacle to forgiveness. But if the victim continues to (...) inflict punishment that she knows is rejected by the perpetrator, she is still holding the wrong against the perpetrator, and has not yet forgiven. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to test empirically an idea that many philosophers find intuitive, namely that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. Many philosophers find it intuitive that moral agents are responsible only if they know the particular facts surrounding their action. Our results show that whether moral agents are aware of the facts surrounding their action does have an effect on people’s attributions of blame, regardless of the consequences or side effects of the agent’s actions. In general, it was (...) more likely that a situationally aware agent will be blamed for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. We also tested attributions of forgiveness in addition to attributions of blame. In general, it was less likely that a situationally aware agent will be forgiven for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. When the agent is situationally unaware, it is more likely that the agent will be forgiven than blamed. We argue that these results provide some empirical support for the hypothesis that there is something intuitive about the idea that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. (shrink)

Forgiveness is often understood as a primarily interpersonal experience, a type of moral response to a wrongdoing that has particular effects on the personal relationship between the one wronged and the wrongdoer. However, some have also attempted to defend another kind of forgiveness, one that takes place in public and applies to a wider range of practices in a specifically political context. That such a concept of forgiveness is possible is not particularly controversial. But the way that this political forgiveness (...) is unified—if it is unified—with personal forgiveness has not been clarified. By approaching the question phenomenologically, it becomes possible to root forgiveness, both personal and political, in the more fundamental context of the shared human world. Hannah Arendt's analysis of forgiveness does just this. In so doing, Arendt accounts for both the role of forgiveness in private human relationships and the way in which this role is fundamentally political. (shrink)

Philosophers discussing forgiveness have usually been split between those who think that forgiveness is typically virtuous, even when the wrongdoer doesn’t repent, and those who think that, for forgiveness to be virtuous, certain pre-conditions must be satisfied. I argue that Darwall’s second-personal account of morality offers significant theoretical support for the latter view. I argue that if, as Darwall claims, reactive attitudes issue a demand, this demand needs to be adequately answered for forgiveness to be warranted. It follows that we (...) should reject the thesis that unconditional forgiveness is appropriate in the absence of repentance. (shrink)