What are you doing when you forgive?

 Yesterday’s note on moral mitigation raises the question of how one goes on after a moral failure. That gets us to the concept of forgiveness. What happens when you forgive someone?

We seem more confident when we state what forgiveness is not.

It’s not just pretending that nothing happened.

It’s not forgetting a wrong.

And forgiveness doesn’t depend on anything that the offender does or fails to do. The concept of forgiveness makes sense even if the offender is unrepentant or dead.

So what is forgiveness?

In a paper published in 1987, Joanna North took the concept apart, as philosophers do, and found these parts:

• The offense is taken seriously, not lightly dismissed. (Forgiveness doesn’t work unless the wrong is serious. We don’t really forgive the dog for chewing up a shoe. We might overlook the dog’s flaws, but we don’t forgive them.)

• We acknowledge that the victim of the wrongdoing has a right to anger and resentment.

• The victim gives up that right and instead tries “to offer the wrongdoer compassion, benevolence, and love.”

Forgiveness is a choice, after being wronged, about how to proceed.

I like the analysis.

Incidentally, North’s article has been cited hundreds of times. One of the interesting discussions is the relationship between forgiveness and pardon. It seems that most people take them to be logically distinct. A victim of a crime can forgive the wrongdoer, but the wrongdoer must still face the consequences of his behavior.

The ideas are distinct. In some cases, victims of crimes ask that the offenders be pardoned or paroled, and the state denies the requests.

But here the analysis has gotten murky to me. What is the state doing in such cases? Asserting its own right to anger and resentment?

• Source: Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy 62 (242): 499-508.