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.

Preventing suffering

Theodicies according to which sufferings make possible greater moral goods are often subjected to this objection: If so, why should we prevent sufferings?

I am not near to having a full answer to the question. But I think this is related to a question everyone, and not just the theist, needs to face up to. For everyone should accept Socrates’ great insight that moral excellence is much more important than avoiding suffering, and yet we should often prevent suffering that we think is apt to lead to the more important goods. I don’t know why. That’s right now one of the mysteries of the moral life for me. But it is as it is.

Famously, persons with disabilities tend to report higher life satisfaction than persons without disabilities. But we all know that accepting this data should not keep us from working to prevent disability-causing car accidents. While higher life satisfaction is not the same as moral excellence, the example is still instructive. Our reasons to prevent disability-causing car accidents do not require us to refute the empirical data suggesting that persons with disabilities lead more satisfying lives. I do not know why exactly we still have on balance reason to prevent such accidents, but it is clear to me that we do.

Mother Teresa thought that the West is suffering from a deep poverty of relationships, with both God and neighbor. Plausibly she was right. We probably are not in a position to know that affluence is a significant cause of this deep poverty, but we can be open to the real epistemic possibility that it is, and we can acknowledge the deep truth that the riches of relationship are far more important than physical goods, without this sapping our efforts to improve the material lot of the needy.

Or suppose you are witnessing Alice torturing Bob, and an oracle informed you that in ten years they will be reconciled, with Bob beautifully forgiving Alice and Alice deeply repenting, with the goods of the reconciliation being greater than the bads in the torture. I think I should still stop Alice.

A quick corollary of the above cases is that consequentialism is false. But there is a deep paradox here that cuts more deeply than consequentialism. I do not know how to resolve it.

Here are some stories, none of which are fully satisfying to me in their present state of development.

Perhaps it is better if humans have a special focus on the relief of suffering and improvement of material well-being of the patient. An opposite focus might lead to an unhealthy condescension.

Perhaps it has something to do with our embodied natures that a special focus on the bodily good of the other is a particularly fitting way for humans to express love for one another. While letting another suffer in the hope of greater on-balance happiness might be better for the patient, it could well be worse for the agent and the relationship. Maybe we should think of what Catholics call the “corporal works of mercy” as a kind of kiss, or maybe even something like a sacrament.

Perhaps there is something about respect for the autonomy of the other. Maybe others’ physical good is also our business while moral development is more their own business.

I think there is more. But the point I want to make is just that this is not a special question for theism and theodicy. It is a paradox that all morally sensitive people should see both sides of.

Coming back to theodicy, note that the above speculative considerations may not apply to God as the agent. (God cannot but condescend, being infinitely above us. God is not embodied, except in respect of the Incarnation. And we have no autonomy rights against God, as God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.)

Role kinds

Some kinds of roles succeed in imposing norms on those in roles of that kind. For instance, friends should help each other because they are friends, and spouses should be faithful to each other because they are spouses. Other kinds of roles do not succeed in imposing any norms. If I hurt you, I cannot rationalize my action by saying that I did that because I was your enemy. That may be an explanation, but being an enemy imposed no norm on me. At most it imposes merely apparent norms (before Socrates, the Greeks thought you should treat your enemies badly--they were wrong). What makes the difference? What gives some roles the genuine normative power they have?

Here is a natural law hypothesis I am attracted to. There are some natural human roles, and they each impose norms on those who fill them. I've in effect argued that spouse is one of those roles. Some other plausible examples: parent, child, friend, authority, subject of authority. Our nature specifies a potentiality to such roles, and gives them their normative power. There is a classificatory hierarchy between the natural roles. Spouse is a sub-role of friend, for instance. (An interesting and controversial question: are husband and wife natural sub-roles of spouse? If so, there will be further norms to being a husband and to being a wife.) And then all roles that have normative power are either natural roles or sub-roles specialized on the scaffolding of one or more natural roles, inheriting all their normative power from the natural roles. For instance, the roles of president and monarch are socially constructed sub-roles of authority, and their normative power over those in the role entirely comes from the role of authority. What about the normative power of the role over other people? That I suspect actually comes from the other people having the roles of citizen or subject, respectively, which are both sub-roles of the natural role of subject of authority. Being a monarch spouse is, on the other hand, a constructed sub-role of two different roles: monarch and spouse. (Think here of object oriented languages with multiple inheritance.) And while spouse is natural monarch is a constructed sub-role of authority.

In the above, I was talking about roles considered as general types, like spouse or parent or monarch. These types have tokens: spouse of Bill, parent of Joey, monarch of Canada. One can think of these token roles as also sub-roles, specializations of the role. An interesting question: is there any token role that is natural? That would be a token role whose normative force comes not just from the type role that it is a token of, as when being a spouse of Bill gets its normative force from being a spouse of someone-in-general. I think one plausible case is when the role is with respect to God. Being a subject of God may be a natural role. (What about friend of God? Perhaps that, too, but there the relevant nature may be a grace-nature.)

We can ask some interesting structural questions. Is there a highest level natural role? Perhaps being human or being a person. I have in the past speculated that it might be friend, but I now think that's mistaken, because friend roles are tied to particular individuals, while some of the other roles are not: an authority need not change qua authority when subjects are replaced by others (through conception, death and migration), but a friend does change in respect of friendship when friends come and go.

And how is this all tied to love? I suspect like this. Love isn't itself a role. But the roles determine which form one's love should take. Maybe in fact that is how they exercise their normative force, and that is what explains why there can't be a natural role such as enemy.

Templates for relationships

I wonder if human nature might not come along with a finite number of more or less flexible normative templates for love-relationships. These templates would define the basic forms of love that are appropriate to us. An attempt to create new basic relationships, or to transcend the boundaries between these, would then be failures insofar as a relationship is defined normatively. Thus, two siblings might attempt to enter into a romantic relationship, and they might behave romantically together. But, nonetheless, they would not be having a romantic relationship, because the normative features of a romantic relationship would be objectively absent: thus, there would in fact be no obligation—but only a false belief in the obligation—to nurture the kind of intimacy that a romantic relationship calls for. We would say that the siblings are not in a valid romantic relationship, where we use "valid" in the technical sense in which we say that only an "invalid promise" (i.e., no promise at all, but only the appearance of one) results from coercion.

One way to make plausible such a story would be through a scepticism about the possibility of our creating new normative facts, other than by simply by making the antecedents of pre-existing conditional ones true.

Of course the difficulties then are epistemological: how do we know what all the templates are?