Probing the Logic of Forgiveness,Human and Divine 1

A Punishment That Communicates

A plausible version of the communicative theory holds that punishment is at once reprobation, direction, and call to reform. Reprobation is met because the harsh treatment expresses a strong moral disapproval of wrongdoing by the state or some other authority. It communicates a kind of solidarity with the victim. But punishment also directs the offender’s attention toward the moral or interpersonal norms he has violated. And in doing this, penitential pain ostensibly respects the autonomy of the offender. It urges him to see himself as the real agent of wrongdoing, to come to terms with the offense, to acknowledge and repent of the crime. On the communicative view, harsh treatment is appropriate even if the offender is likely to harden rather than soften throughout the punitive process. What matters is the goal internal to the punitive process—the expressive, illocutionary function of penitential pain—rather than the actual outcome of the censure. Consider a statement of the communicate theory of punishment (CP) below.

Communicative Punishment (CP): Punishment is an illocutionary act by which the state or some other authority expresses to the offender (perhaps also to the victim and the community) moral condemnation of the offense, and this communicative act “has a purpose, such as educating the offender about the wrongfulness of his act, or inducing him to repent, atone for wrong, and reform his moral personality.” ³

Communicative punishment has some interesting psychological applications. If punishment administered by the state can educate offenders, perhaps in interpersonal contexts punitive emotions play an analogous role. In what follows I focus on a psychological analogue of (CP). This is because my topic is forgiveness, which paradigmatically is an interpersonal phenomenon. Taking our cues from the communicative theory, a moral justification for a victim’s felt resentment is readily available. Consider (CAP), below.

Communicative Attitudinal Punishment (CAP): The punitive reactive attitudes of the victim express a moral condemnation of the offense, and these communicative acts are intended to educate the offender (and others) about the wrongfulness of his ways, or to induce him to repent, atone for wrong, and reform his moral personality.

Incidentally, a pedagogical justification of divine wrath can be grounded in communicative theory. Consider (CDP).

Communicative Divine Punishment (CDP): Divine anger expresses God’s moral condemnation of the offense, and through it God seeks to communicate to deserving offenders (and perhaps to others) the sinfulness of their ways, so that they might repent, atone for their sins, and reform their characters. ⁴

As it stands, (CAP) intends to capture the function (or nature) of attitudinal punishment. The description, by itself, is not incompatible with forgiveness. Before I bring out a tension, let me clarify some things. Both (CAP) and (CDP) use the locution “moral condemnation of the offense.” Current philosophical orthodoxy imparts that moral condemnation involves both a cognitive and an affective response. The cognitive component consists of beliefs or reasons. To condemn a friend’s betrayal involves (minimally) having occurrent or dispositional beliefs about his culpable wrongdoing. And these beliefs are expressed in propositions such as, “It is wrong of him to betray me” or “Unkindness caused him to betray me.” The affective dimension of condemnation is standardly identified as resentment, though I am inclined to speak more broadly of “punitive reactive attitudes” or “corrective attitudes.” ⁵ These refer to complex feelings of disapproval with distinctive intentional objects. Fear feels differently than contempt, and sizzling anger has a phenomenology distinct from malice or resentment. And yet any of these can be coopted into the bundle of punitive attitudes provided they are connected to the desire for the pain of the offender—the desire that he feel suffering for the committed offense. As noted, according to (CAP) these punitive emotions should be seen as communicative actions. They express that a boundary important to my personhood has been violated; they send off a message to the offender, and perhaps even cry out to a community for help or recognition.

As we turn from moral condemnation to forgiveness, several observations are in order. To begin with, the essence of interpersonal forgiveness remains heavily contested, as no analysis has enjoyed of yet philosophical consensus or ascendancy. Luckily, we do not need a complete analysis in order to identify some of its central features. Whether it is an act or a process, a psychological disposition that unfolds over time or a one-time declarative event, interpersonal forgiveness paradigmatically involves at least two things. First, forgiveness is compatible with and even requires the cognitive dimension of moral condemnation. To forgive I must believe that I was wronged. Second, while forgiveness may be in tension with excusing, condoning, or forgetting the injury, it is clearly incompatible with long-lived resentment. To forgive, I must undergo a change of heart; I must dial down felt punitive emotions or ramp up good will.

For my purposes I need to sketch a final point. While (CAP) simply describes a pedagogical function of punitive emotions, some argue that such attitudes are prescriptive. For instance, Jeffrie Murphy claims “[a] person who does not resent moral injuries done to him … is almost necessarily a person lacking in self-respect.” ⁶ Others hold that relaxing moral anger without sufficiently compelling moral reasons signals much more than lack of self-respect. It indicates a disregard for the agency of the offender and for the norms of trust that govern personal relations in community. ⁷

According to a well-known Kantian view, the punitive attitudes I hold against a false friend show that I grasp the moral law. Since betrayal came through his agency, he is both causally and morally responsible for it. To reduce the felt condemnation without a sufficient reason is to treat the relationship between he and I as that between super-storm Sandy and an airborne log. But he and I are not simply “pieces of nature,” and the relations between us are not merely causal. While a natural event, his betrayal constitutes a breach of the normative. It ruptures bonds that hold between rational agents, and my retributive feelings should attend to these breakdowns, they should direct his attention to them, and they should demand an atoning response from him, regardless of ties of natural affection.

If retributive feelings are attuned to normative breaches, then the process of softening them (process required by forgiveness) presupposes a substantial moral transformation in offenders. Forgiving offenders centrally depends upon their acts of repentance, contrition, or atonement. If a victim softens her punitive attitudes in the absence of the offender’s repentance, she implicitly signals a culpable disregard for normative reality, a lack of self-respect, or an indifference to the offender’s restoration. Forgiveness becomes appropriate only if and to the degree to which there are signs of reparation. This notion of forgiveness that is repentance-responsive fits cozily in the conceptual scheme where punishment or punitive attitudes have pedagogical, therapeutic, or ultimately restorative functions. Or so it would seem. And yet, as Danaher shows, Christian thought and practice has not assimilated this conceptual scheme uncritically. On his telling, even when it largely accepted the boundaries set by this framework—i.e., that punishment (outer or inner) is necessary for restoration—the Christian tradition has, often in creative ways, de-emphasized the punishment and underscored the restoration.

A Grace That Communicates

In the remainder I want to motivate and sketch a picture distinct from repentance-responsive forgiveness. I suggest some philosophical and theological reasons to see a shade of interpersonal forgiveness as an expression of unmerited grace. When receptive to grace, I argue, forgiveness can be offered responsibly without demanding repentance. If grace-responsive forgiveness is psychologically compelling, at least three observations could be pursued at more length—observations especially pertinent to the thematic of this workshop. First, grace-responsive forgiveness could help us seek the reformation of offenders in ways distinct from and non-reducible to punishment. Our biological make-up and recent developments in punitive practices suggest a rather irrational bias toward retribution in our affections and actions. ⁸ Moreover, even our theorizing is not immune from this bias. A champion of retributive theory recently confesses, “I see in myself, alas, a person whose impulse to punish has been at least in some cases—very powerful, and Nietzsche has caused me to mistrust myself and the abstract theories I have been inclined to use to rationalize that impulse.” ⁹ If this confession tracks a more general motivational story, the moral psychology presupposed by retributivism seems quite sketchy. It’s not the noble steeds that pull the chariot of retribution, but malice and spite—the irrational nags of the soul. We are, it seems, over-determined in our predilection for retribution, and that affords a sufficient reason to distrust our punitive emotions, even while seeking the reformation of wrongdoers.

Second, grace-responsive forgiveness seeks goods distinct from reformation and restoration for offenders. I help my unfaithful friend with a new roof—not as a catalyst to his repentance, but because he needs it. A state or a justice system infused with grace-responsive agents builds music rooms and recreation rooms in prisons in order to affirm the intrinsic humanity of prisoners, and not to pull publicity stunts, or mollify punishment, or manufacture remorse for past wrongs. It may well be that their artistic endeavors resurrect contrition in prisoners and assuage the pain of exile, and perhaps even create hype. But if the collective agency of the state is bound by relevant normative concerns, it should envisage the growth of prisoners as citizens and persons. And the moral and aesthetic development of prisoners should not be tied essentially to an event from their past. Prisoners have personhoods primed for growth only through access to a variety of essential aesthetic and moral goods. Severely restricting access to these personal-growth goods because the prisoner has not fulfilled her other moral debts to society seems arbitrary and unjust.

Finally, it seems to me a fruitful but hard question whether and to what degree collective agents (churches, communities, states) could exercise analogues of grace-forgiveness. And here is one of my questions for Danaher. David Lurie of Coetzee’s “Disgrace” learns through secular liturgies of penance how to enter the suffering of others. But he is only an individual. Can we recover, re-imagine, or invent liturgies that counteract the emotional dynamics of blame and retribution at the structural level? What would these look like? Are secular practices of penance or the recovery of lament essential to this affective reorientation? Again, what do they look like concretely? I cannot pursue these questions here. Besides, other presenters at this symposium are much better positioned to make inferences about the causal and motivational powers of collective agencies. My task in the remainder of this article is to simply motivate a grace-responsive view of interpersonal forgiveness, by tapping some Kantian and aretic (virtue) intuitions. I will then close with an example of divine forgiveness.

Could we restore positive affections toward unrepentant wrongdoers while esteeming their agency and upholding the integrity of moral bonds? Some Kantians respond in the affirmative! The response is supported by two main assumptions: the first relies on epistemic humility, and the second focuses on available intentional stances. The first observes that the available epistemic evidence about my offender’s character underdetermines the range of possible reactive attitudes toward him. Lucy Allais helpfully begins the argument:

However, here we must note an important feature of judgments concerning people’s characters: they are judgments that we are never perfectly placed to make, and that are always underdetermined by the evidence. Kant famously argued that empirical evidence never puts us in a position to judge other people’s characters, but even without taking this strong line we can argue that we are never perfectly positioned to judge people’s characters, we are seldom well positioned, and of course, characters are not fixed, and can change. This means that beliefs about a person’s culpable wrongdoing, which we hold firm, do not epistemically mandate judgments about her as a person. ¹⁰

But how do I become aware of a person’s fuller character from my epistemically narrow position? Specifically, what available intentional stances could I take toward my offender’s whole character? How do I do that?

I find in the literature two main strategies. One is theologically robust, and the other deflationary. The first strategy is an application of a view that David Sussman attributes to Kant. Consider the phenomenon of repentance. If original sin thoroughly infects my volition, if even my best moral strivings are but fumbling expressions of a devious, fragmented will, I cannot really repent, because there is no stable unified agency to undergo the repentance process. ¹¹ How is then repentance possible? How is any moral progress possible? By God’s grace, says Kant. I can exercise a unified agency in repentance only by taking up God’s intentional stance with respect to my life. Only when I understand my strivings from God’s gracious perspective can they be rendered coherent. David Sussman puts it like this:

Grace offers me the hope that my seemingly quixotic efforts to change morally might nevertheless count the real beginnings of a fundamental change in myself. With such trust, I can coherently attempt to become a morally good person, with the thought that the correct description of my efforts derives from something I can now neither see nor know. I act with an understanding that my true moral character is to be found not as I appear to myself as a natural creature, but as the person I would be in a relationship with God, who considers the whole of my life from an attitude of both justice and charity. ¹²

This digression about penitent agency has an obvious application to forgiving agency. Were the victim capable of understanding her offender only under the hurt-wrought descriptions of devastator or violator, she would be locked into anger. But she can also regard him as the person he would be, could be, or might have been in relationship to God, as a being whose whole life is the target of divine justice and benevolence. Attending to him from the perspective of divine grace may allow her to construe the perpetrated harm as a complicated upshot of natural vicissitudes in the wrongdoer’s own life, and to construe his future action as that of a creature endowed with moral worth. And these reconstruals might suffice to mollify her moral anger or to restore her good will.

The deflationary Kantian strategy also becomes clear. It removes God from the picture as a subject endowed with a full character and personality, but preserves godlike intentional stances. The victim is to occupy a point of view from which she can hope that her offender’s character is better overall than what his offense has given reason to believe. We can now see the moral upshot of the Kantian response. If the epistemic evidence underdetermines my emotional responses to injury, and if I can occupy some gracious and hopeful intentional stances toward my offender, then I am not morally blameworthy if I do so. ¹³

Some will find this response to wrongdoing or violence wanting. Though modeled on the values of hope and grace, ¹⁴ Kantian forgiveness is defined by reference to the community of ideally rational creatures. The leap to this abstracted rational stance provides rather thin and reified descriptions of perpetrators, insufficient to combat the concrete (historical) guises under which they enter our rehearsed memories of suffered harm. Virtue ethics has a ready reply to these worries. It promises thicker descriptions of attitudes that find expression in particular historical communities.

According to Robert C. Roberts, forgivingness (the virtue of forgiveness) is the settled disposition to reduce moral anger “without abandoning correct judgment about the severity of the offense and the culpability of the offender.” ¹⁵ Specifically, the forgiving individual becomes disposed to overcome the affective construal of the offender as “bad, alien, guilty, worthy of suffering, unwelcome, offensive, an enemy, etc.” ¹⁶ Additionally, in her these punitive affective construals are overcome “on the basis of considerations of a certain type or types which promote a benevolent perception of the offender.” ¹⁷ Cementing forgivingness consists then both in developing a more refined “sensitivity” to all those anger-reducing and/or to all those benevolence-enhancing considerations.

According to Roberts, the offender’s repentance is one of the considerations that could rightfully initiate forgivingness. But it is neither alone, nor primary, nor required for a virtuous response to other salient conditions. Roberts discusses four of these: the existence of excusing circumstances, the suffering of the offender, moral commonality with the offender, and a relationship with the offender. Each provides a sufficient reason that in its own way could elicit forgivingness. In my view, its sensitivity to these distinctive salient conditions is explained by attunement to other virtues: forgiveness informed by justice characteristically responds to repentance, compassionate forgiveness is moved by the suffering of the offender, gracious forgiveness answers to one’s moral commonality with the wrongdoer, and loving forgiveness responds to the various offices of love. ¹⁸

Like a vine sprawling upon other vines, forgivingness grows in us along multiple dimensions, its growth guided by the stability, maturity, and depth of these other virtues. A person rich in grace and compassion readily takes as salient her offender’s suffering, and effortlessly recognizes that she too belongs in Primo Levi’s “grey zones.” As I see things, forgivingness functions distinctively as a commitment to soften punitive attitudes. It is primarily a matter of volitional organization. But its allied virtues of grace, love, justice, and lament provide the thick descriptions—the specific intentional objects of our affections. And the virtue finds distinctive entrenchment in distinctive communities.

When he emptied his gun in an Amish School house, Charles Carl Roberts IV did not foresee that the families of the girls he killed would forgive him posthumously. Some pundits found questionable, and even condemnable, the swiftness with which the Nickle Mines Amish granted forgiveness. ¹⁹ But to me their responses and their justifications reveal a conceptual framework in which forgiveness depends primarily on the gift of grace (enhanced by compassion), and not on the actual (or even physically possible) repentance of the wrongdoer. In interviews, the families of the murdered girls underscored that they forgave because God forgave them. They emphasized their common humanity with the killer and his family. Ostensibly grounded in the ethics of Jesus, entrenched over centuries of suffering and persecution, Amish grace is a stable non-retributive attitude that re-describes the offender and softens the felt moral anger. And if grace is the main associate here, the offender is re-described as a fellow neighbor, all, victims and victimizers the recipients of an undeserved divine gift.

A Grace That Subverts Punishment

We find a vivid portrayal of grace-responsive forgivingness as an expression of God’s moral character in the book of Jonah. Perhaps too obviously, the account targets a retributive understanding of God’s justice. But the radical divine grace and forgiveness can be taken to outstrip all punitive measures, even those aimed at restoration. In Jonah, divine grace prepares the way to repentance in one case, and forebears with an entrenched recidivism in the other.

Jonah’s actions and speeches betray a man so entrenched in his own conception of what divine justice demands that he cannot attend to the features of the God he meets in experience. From the first word commanding Jonah to go, to the concluding rhetorical question, God directs the prophet’s attention to his expansive compassion for all, including Israel’s archenemies. But Jonah’s retreat into the belly of the ship, the belly of the fish, and the shadowy booth discloses a persistent and expansive volitional solipsism—a willed separation from the reality of others. His only communications with the pagans in the story are brief sentences proclaiming first self-doom and then impending doom for them. And in his dialogue with God, Jonah oscillates between an accusatory anger and a defensive self-pity. Significantly, the prophet explains God’s forgiveness of Nineveh by reference to the memorable grace-formula Yahweh used to disclose his character at Sinai. But as others have noticed, Jonah does not celebrate or strive to model it. Instead, he accuses God for his forgivingness.

Jonah grasps that God is essentially forgiving, gracious, faithful, and compassionate toward Israel. But as he sees things, divine loyalty toward Israel demands punitive measures against those devastators, the Assyrians. The God who relaxes punishment either does not properly attend to the ruin the Assyrians brought on Israel, or knows it and does not care, in which case God fails in faithfulness to Israel. In either case, God has given up on truth, and Jonah will bring it back into divine focus through any means available, be it disobedience, disaffection, minimal conformance, or tantrums. Compassion to the unforgiveable, Jonah thinks, necessarily violates the truth of the victim. Behind his willful blindness, underlying his flight away from God and others, and underneath Jonah’s death wish, there is a huge wound that demands a retributive God.

Central to the story, however, is the divine desire to restore both the repentant violator and the unrepentant victim—both the contrite outsider and the callous insider. And restoration, though motivated by grace and compassion in both cases, is unpacked in distinctive ways. Jonah had come to Nineveh prepared to see divine anger scorch the pagans. Instead, proactive divine compassion arranges the conditions God knows would elicit God’s forgiveness. This throws the prophet in the throes of anger and despair. And, as we have seen, first Jonah accuses God of untruth, then upon losing his shade he reports anger-onto-death. How does God respond?

You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals? ²⁰

The reality of divine compassion is a truth deeper than the truth Jonah thought God needed to relearn. Recalling the immanent theology of the creation stories, God includes not only the Assyrians but also their cattle in the range of his mercy. If he is moved by the imminent doom of beasts (who are perhaps only pieces of nature), he will spring into action at the impending plight of ignorant people. The God attending to the movement of blistering winds, leafy plants, gnawing worms, swallowing fish, and many cattle, is especially moved by the plight of persons.

More subtly, God invites Jonah again to take up a divine compassionate stance. Compassion is present to him in a way that subverts retributive demands. Indirectly, God invites Jonah to consider that he too does not know his left hand from his right, and that he, no different from the Assyrians, is the beneficiary of God’s gratuitous grace. God spoke to Nineveh only through a reluctant, tight-lipped, doom-and-gloom preacher. But look at all the messengers God had sent him: God’s word, the sea storm, the big fish, the plant, the worm, and the blustering wind. All this gracious witness is lost on Jonah. He only persists and entrenches himself in callousness. If even a weaker version of Jonah’s truth applies, if even a weak retributivism rules the day, divine punishment is the only appropriate response to willful, persistent rebellion. But Jonah’s truth is not God’s truth. God gives long-lived grace to those wearied and diminished by wounds. We might say that he puts up with them, entertains their questions, and carries their burdens.

Finally, God plays to a common denominator in order to regain Jonah’s trust. Though corroded by anger, Jonah is not beyond the ability to lament. And if lament is not lost, compassion can blossom still. By drawing attention to his compassion for the lost plant, God attempts to pull Jonah’s sensibility from the brink of death. Jonah is resentful and peevish. But God aims to restore in him a disposition that the two of them share in common. Jonah impugns divine majesty. But God does not rebuff. Instead, God bids Jonah to drop his retributivism regarding people and to building on his natural pity for the desiccated plant.

In Danaher’s idiom we may say that the rhythms of God’s generosity decenter Jonah’s demand for retribution. The book ends with a rhetorical question. Will Jonah relinquish to God’s grace? Will we? If divine generosity is normative for us, as that loaded question implies, perhaps we, like Jonah, should learn to distrust our punitive emotions, our punitive policies, and perhaps even the theories that rationalize these.