What Is Forgiveness?

Source: Courtesy of PxHere, used with permission

Forgiveness, or at least, some of the things that we call forgiveness, has been shown to have tremendous social, psychological, interpersonal, and political benefits. We mend relationships through acts of forgiveness; we restore social and political cohesion through public accountability followed by forgiveness. Entire countries sometimes say "sorry" for past wrongs in an attempt to forge better relationships moving forward.

But what exactly is forgiveness? When one party says to another that they are forgiven, what do each of the parties take this to mean, and what implications does it have for their behaviour moving forward?

It matters what we each assume we're doing when we offer and receive forgiveness. There is significant scope for misunderstandings about what it is that we, as individuals, collectives, and societies, are doing when we ask for, or offer, forgiveness, and what implications this has for our future interactions.

For instance, suppose that I, as a victim, think that in forgiving you, the perpetrator, I commit to letting go of future anger and resentment towards you, and that you commit to repenting of your actions and trying not to repeat them. But suppose that you, as perpetrator, think that I commit to declining to be involved in the criminal justice system in order to punish you, and that you, as perpetrator, commit to working through our issues in an open and communicative manner until we reach a resolution. Then, it may well be that we find ourselves in disagreement about what it is that we have each committed to when I forgave you. For perhaps I fully intend to you have punished, and perhaps you have not, yet, repented of your actions.

Until recently, while there was empirical research into the benefits of forgiveness, there was very little empirical research into what it is that we, collectively, take forgiveness to consist in.

Still whilst psychologists were investigating the benefits of certain sorts of behaviours that they took to be involved in forgiveness, philosophers were theorising about what forgiveness is. Unsurprisingly (this is philosophy after all) there is a good deal of disagreement about this.

There is broad agreement that forgiveness is something that can occur after a wronged party (the victim) judges that she has been wronged by the perpetrator, and that forgiveness is one way in which the victim can “get over” the perceived wrong.

Philosophers distinguish forgiveness from various other ways of getting over having been wronged, such as excusing the wrongdoer, merely forgetting that the wrong took place, or coming to judge that the seemingly wrong action was in fact justified. They have thought that what distinguishes forgiving from excusing, forgetting, and justifying is that after she has forgiven the perpetrator, the victim still judges that the action was wrong and that the perpetrator was culpable. Philosophers disagree, however, about almost every other aspect of forgiveness.

For instance, they disagree about to what extent forgiveness involves certain kinds of interpersonal interactions between the perpetrator and the victim. Some think of forgiveness as something that happens when the perpetrator recognises that they did wrong, repents, and in turn, is granted forgiveness, where both the repentance and the granting of forgiveness are explicitly communicated. On this view, forgiveness is a piece of communication between two parties.

On this view, it is not possible to forgive someone who is unrepentant (though of course there is some other attitude we can take towards them, such as, for instance, ceasing to be angry or resentful). Nor is it possible to forgive the dead, who cannot ask for forgiveness, who are no longer in a position to repent, and with whom one cannot communicate one’s intention to forgive.

Others hold that no communication need occur between victim and perpetrator, so that in theory, at least, it is possible to forgive the dead.

Indeed, some theorists have thought that letting go of negative emotions is all that is required for forgiveness, and hence that we can forgive the dead and we can forgive someone who is unrepentant. Others agree that letting go of hostile negative emotions towards the perpetrator is required for forgiveness to occur, but think that we need to let go of negative emotions for the right reasons: that is, because we see that the other party is repentant. For these theorists, it is not possible to forgive someone who is unrepentant, regardless of whether we have let go of negative emotions towards them. In turn, it is not possible to forgive the dead if they died unrepentantly.

There is also disagreement about whether we can forgive someone and then elect to punish them. Some hold that if forgiveness has taken place then this is incompatible with the victim electing to punish the perpetrator. Discussion of the role of punishment and forgiveness is particularly salient in the context of the criminal justice system, where victims are often involved in the process that will lead to the punishment of a perpetrator, whilst sometimes at the same time attempting to forgive the perpetrator.

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The upshot of this is that if we look at the philosophical literature, we see very diverse views about what sort of thing forgiveness is—a piece of communication between two parties, versus something that the victim, alone, can do—and about what the victim and perpetrator need to be like, psychologically speaking, for forgiveness to occur.

A recent study run at the University of Sydney attempted to determine the conditions under which we, the general population, rather than philosophes, think that forgiveness has taken place. The authors of the study ran a policy-capturing study to see how people weight a range of factors, such as, for instance, letting go of anger when making a decision about whether forgiveness has taken place.

The study presented participants with a series of short vignettes in which two individuals are described, one of whom wrongs the other in some way. The vignettes then describe the victim either as having let go of anger or not, as having let go of resentment or not, as having worked through the negative emotions and identified their source, or not, as intending to punish the perpetrator, or not, as justifiably believing the perpetrator to be remorseful, or not, and as the perpetrator being remorseful, or not. The study then determines which of these factors are most important in people’s decision regarding whether the victim has forgiven the perpetrator.

The results showed that people disagreed a lot about how important those factors were. Overall, the researchers found that only giving up resentment was important to the majority of participants (62.9%). Giving up anger (52.6%), believing the perpetrator has repented (49%), and intending not to punish (50.5%) were important to only half of the participants. The victim working through their negative emotion and reactive attitude and identifying their source (17.5%) and the perpetrator being remorseful (12.9%) were important to only a minority of participants. The last factor, however, was important in the opposite direction to the others. That is, participants were more likely to say that a scenario was one in which forgiveness occurred if it was one in which the victim still intended to punish the perpetrator, rather than forgoing punishment.

What is most notable about this study is that there is such disagreement about what sorts of factors count in favour of forgiveness having taken place. The researchers found that for each factor, a significant percentage of participants thought the presence of the factor was important, and a significant percentage thought it was unimportant. The authors concluded, that there is no single, shared, view about what forgiveness is, what it involves, and what sorts of behaviours (say the absence of punishment, or of resentment or anger) it requires.

It might be that many different communicative actions or psychological states go by the name "forgiveness" and many, and perhaps most of these might be psychologically or socially beneficial. But this research shows that in our quest to rebuild relationships, there is a significant danger that there will be miscommunications about what we are doing when we offer and receive forgiveness, which can ultimately lead to a further breakdown in those relationships. The take-home message here is that part of the process of forgiving should be one in which the parties articulate what forgiveness means to them so that both parties understand what is being offered, and what received.