The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness

Kathryn J. Norlock

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786601377
• eBook ISBN: 9781786601391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The feeling that one can't get over a moral wrong is challenging even in the best of circumstances. This volume considers challenges to forgiveness in the most difficult circumstances. It explores forgiveness in criminal justice contexts, under oppression, after genocide, when the victim is dead or when bystanders disagree, when many different negative reactions abound, and when anger and resentment seem preferable and important.

The book gathers together a diverse assembly of authors with publication and expertise in forgiveness, while centering the work of new voices in the field and pursuing new lines of inquiry grounded in empirical literature. Some scholars consider how forgiveness influences and is influenced by our other mental states and emotions, while other authors explore the moral value of the emotions attendant upon forgiveness in particularly challenging contexts. Some authors critically assess and advance applications of the standard view of forgiveness predominant in Anglophone philosophy of forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment, while others offer rejections of basic aspects of the standard view, such as what sorts of feelings are compatible with forgiving. The book offers new directions for inquiry into forgiveness, and shows that the moral psychology of forgiveness continues to enjoy challenges to its theoretical structure and its practical possibilities.

Chapter One

Intersubjectivity and Embodiment

Exploring the Role of the Maternal in the Language of Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Over the course of days, weeks, and months, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa featured stories of survivors and family and friends of victims.1 These stories exposed the years of suffering endured by victims, some of whom were still alive bearing scars, physical and emotional, from the trauma they suffered during the years of apartheid. As they spoke about their profound and irreparable trauma, they revealed their struggle to speak about the trauma as well as the continuing struggle to overcome it.

For years, the apartheid government denied its oppression of and systematic violence against black South Africans. The public hearings of the TRC, however, forced South Africans to hear the mournful wails and cries of anguish that expressed the difficulties the majority of the population had to live through. It was the best testimony yet to the violent years of an oppressive government. Mothers, wives, and grandmothers were the main transmitters of the memory of that traumatic past. They came with their brokenness to overcome silence, yet they were the ones who expanded our conceptual horizons about the power of public testimony and introduced the language of forgiveness into their encounters with perpetrators of gross human rights violations. They paved the way for a new language of hope in a society trying to heal itself. As a site of testimony, the TRC was transformed into a site for healing, and survivors became wounded healers. The public hearings of the TRC helped the nation reconstruct itself and to begin healing, and women’s testimonial voices were at the center of that process. Thus in this chapter I will draw from the public testimonies of the TRC and argue, from a constructionist perspective, that the stories that women survivors brought to the TRC were stories of healing and reconciliation. I will explore how gender and the maternal body might be central in shaping this discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation—in other words, not only how processes of reconciliation may be gendered, but also how they may be embodied. First, I want to briefly present some perspectives on forgiveness in politics and discuss my own views on the concept.2

The Issue of the Unforgivable

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the role of truth commissions in dealing with past atrocities and the capacity for truth commissions to create opportunities for lasting peace. For the first time in the history of dealing with past atrocities, forgiveness has become an acceptable, albeit contested, outcome of reconciliation processes in divided societies emerging from violent conflict. Stories of forgiveness that emerged at TRC public hearings were primarily personal; their telling in public, however, imbued them with the significance of a collective enterprise inspired at its core by a communal ethics. The debates about forgiveness in politics, however, have been characterized by notions of the “unforgivable,” a perspective inspired by the insights that Hannah Arendt described in her book The Human Condition and her analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.3 Arendt argued that “radical evil,” the kinds of acts committed by perpetrators in the service of oppressive, murderous, and genocidal state policies, are unforgivable. After South African stories of forgiveness at TRC public hearings, and after stories of reconciliation between survivors and victims of the Rwandan genocide, on the one hand, and neighbors who were involved in such acts, on the other, the argument that some acts are unforgivable requires reexamination. The examples of forgiveness and reconciliation witnessed in both South Africa and Rwanda suggest that the context of dealing with the past—particularly the public testimonies and encounters between individual victims and perpetrators—creates the possibility for the emergence of forgiveness and gestures of reconciliation. Understanding what it is about this context that opens up the possibility for victims or surviving family members of victims to reach out to perpetrators or their families would enrich the debates about alternative strategies to peace building in the aftermath of mass violence and political conflict.

Forgiveness after Mass Atrocity: Some Reflections

Stories of forgiveness that emerged at the South African TRC are significant not just because they set a precedent. Even more important is that the few stories witnessed at TRC hearings were illustrative of the critical attempts to bring people from two sides of a violent and hateful past together. It seemed that beyond the mere gesture of words of forgiveness, when forgiveness was expressed in the context of the dialogue about the past and in response to a remorseful perpetrator, forgiveness carried with it a sense of responsibility that was driven by a desire not for vengeance but for the higher priority of responsibility to the human community. The public hearings of the TRC imbued the dialogue process with a concept of human community that extended to others—even those responsible for gross human rights violations in the past. This inclusive concept of humanity recognizes that as an expression of being human, remorse transcends the evil deeds of the perpetrator. The capacity to recognize the transcendence becomes an important bridge for the victim or surviving families of victims to reach out to the perpetrator.

Dialogue will of course not solve every problem faced by a society that has suffered sustained violence on a large scale; however, it can create avenues for broadening commonly accepted models of justice and of healing deep fractures in a nation by unearthing, acknowledging, and recording a brutal past. Dialogue allows victims and survivors to revisit the sites of trauma, humanizes victims, and confronts perpetrators with their inhumanity. Through dialogue, victims as well as the greater society come to recognize perpetrators as human beings who failed morally, whether through coercion, the perverted convictions of a warped mind, or fear.

Far from relieving the pressure on perpetrators, recognizing the most serious criminals as human intensifies the pressure because society can then hold them to greater moral accountability. Indeed, demonizing those who have committed horrific deeds as monsters lets them off too easily. Managed carefully, dialogue condemns—but not too hastily, lest it foreshorten the accountability process and, perversely, excuse the criminal by dismissing him or her into the category of the hopelessly, radically Other. Sustained, engaged, ordered dialogue thus forces an offender to unearth what moral sensibilities he or she has buried under a facade of obedience to orders or righteous duty to country and to face what he or she has done in the sobering atmosphere of reflection on ordinary human lives now shattered. Thus dialogue invites the perpetrator to negotiate the chasm between his or her monstrousness and the world of the forgiven. The act of humanizing perpetrators is therefore at once punishment and rehabilitation. Finally, dialogue creates the possibility of setting the person’s actions, through testimony and witnessing, in the broader framework of the political-ideological context that may have supported and even directed his deeds.

On the scale of horrible things that can happen to people, there are some for which the language of apology and forgiveness may be entirely inappropriate. To say, however, that horrific deeds committed in the context of systematic human rights abuses by states are simply unforgivable does not capture the complexity and richness of all the social contexts within which gross human rights abuses are committed. In South Africa and in Rwanda, for example, despite the complex challenges that these two countries continue to face in terms of healing the past, the stories of forgiveness and reconciliation that have emerged have set a remarkable, though hotly contested, precedent in the history of atrocities. Thus while there may be value in recognizing and positing the limits of forgiveness, if such exist, some societies have found it more constructive to focus on discovering and nurturing the conditions that make forgiveness first conceivable, then ultimately possible.

Of course, in order to set conditions for forgiveness, it does indeed bear asking: When someone has committed the kind of “radically evil” acts that Arendt had in mind,4 what does remorse mean? How do we judge the genuineness of that remorse? How does one forgive unless one can find claims of remorse credible? In addition, how does one find them credible unless one first attempts to understand why the acts were committed? How do we know that the signs of alleged contrition are not simply a product of the perpetrator’s having been caught or of changes within the society that have destroyed his or her power base and support structures and have left him or her vulnerable?

Some of these questions have to do with the moral possibility—the psychological and epistemological possibility—of achieving authentic remorse in the wake of having performed the unthinkable. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” T. S. Eliot asks in “Gerontion.”5 The question is quite legitimate. Yet it remains equally legitimate that when perpetrators do in fact express regret, guilt, or contrition, however it may be ascertained, what seems to lie, as Nicholas Tavuchis has put it, “beyond the purview of apology”6 and what Arendt has referred to as unforgivable7 can in fact be transformed from an unforgivable deed into a forgivable one. In other words, the narrative that unfolds in the dialogue about the past may be along the lines of “this has happened and...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Intersubjectivity and Embodiment
• Chapter 2: What Victims Say and How They Say It Matters
• Chapter 3: An Aristotelian Perspective on Forgiveness Education in Contentious World Regions
• Chapter 4: Forgiveness, Exemplars, and the Oppressed
• Chapter 5: Resentment, Punitiveness, and Forgiveness
• Chapter 6: Once More with Feeling
• Chapter 7: Forgiveness and Reconciliation
• Chapter 8: In Defense of Third-Party Forgiveness
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors