https://blog.naver.com/ernest_scribbler/222722801626
1. Introduction
At least in many cultural spheres, the sequence of wrongdoing, apology, and forgiveness may constitute an ordinary pattern of moral interactions. But in ordinary context, the meaning of ‘forgiveness’ seems to be obscure. Forgiveness seems not to have a certain form and its contents, what the act of forgiveness should involve, seems hard to identify. With many philosophers' effort, however, I believe that the conceptual understanding of forgiveness has been advanced.[1] Philosophers mostly agree that forgiveness is a matter of how we feel about wrongdoing, or more precisely, that forgiveness entails the forgoing of resentment.[2]
However, despite its contribution to understanding forgiveness, I think the inquiry so far focuses too much on the internal feature of forgiver. The conception of forgiveness as forswearing resentment is partly helpful to understand forgiveness among individuals. But I think it does not capture the external or reciprocal feature of forgiveness, which I believe it to be essential, that may concern the restoration of relationship. Furthermore, I think that with the traditional conception of forgiveness we do not have much to say about the forgiveness between groups, because it seems hard to characterize what group resentment is and what it is to forswear it. For these reasons, I believe it would be better not to make reference to elusive internal feature, particularly emotion, when we try to understand what forgiveness is.
In this paper, I propose to understand forgiveness as approval, not as the matter of how we feel about wrongdoing. My proposal includes two distinct features that are neglected in traditional understanding, according to which forgiveness essentially involves forswearing resentment. Firstly, my suggestion, at least in itself, does not concern emotional feature. Secondly, it focuses on the social significance of forgiveness, rather than the internal feature of a forgiver.
In what follows, I will present some reasons to support my proposal. In section 2, I will firstly discuss the traditional understanding of forgiveness, which sees it as forswearing resentment and expound Pamela Hieronymi’s suggestion which I believe to give a plausible interpretation of forgiveness as an act done for reasons in traditional understanding. Then I will argue that the emotional feature is not essential to forgiveness, while the kernel of her interpretation can still hold. In section 3, I will present my own suggestion that apology and forgiveness, as a pair, can be understood together in terms of certain attitude, which I will call “separative attitude”, and the essential feature of them are request and approval, respectively. In the last section, I will note that there are three advantages in my suggestion.