Class 14.1: Forgiveness
Last week we began to think about how to move forward from relationships by thinking about apology. This looks at conflict from the point of view of someone who has done wrong - or at least who is perceived by the other person as having done wrong. Today we switch perspectives and look at the point of view of the person who perceives that wrong has been done to them. This leads us to the topic of forgiveness.
Jada Twedt Strabbing
Jada Twedt Strabbing teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her research has concerned moral responsibility, forgiveness, reconciliation, the philosophy of religion, and the history of the philosophy of religion. It is not a coincidence that Strabbing is interested both in forgiveness and in the philosophy of religion; forgiveness is a central concept in Christianity, and so part of the explanation of why philosophers have paid as much attention to forgiveness as they have is that it is of special interest in understanding Christianity in particular. If you pay attention to the acknowledgements footnote at the end of Strabbing’s article, you will see that many of the places where she presented this work before publishing it were for audiences with a special interest in the philosophy of religion or in theism in particular. Pay attention to see what you think Strabbing’s view says about theology.
Philosophical Definitions
Strabbing’s article follows a pattern that is very familiar to readers of philosophy articles but is not quite like anything else that we have read this semester. Rather than trying to solve a problem, argue for one side of an ongoing debate, or introduce a new concept, as many of our other authors have done, she is trying to offer a kind of definition or account of what forgiveness is. This kind of definition is what philosophers often call an ‘analysis’.
Philosophers have been in the business of trying to give analyses of things for thousands of years. In some of the earliest written records of the history of Western philosophy, Plato describes Socrates as asking his interlocutors to say what courage, or justice, or piety are. Socrates is not content for people to give examples of courage, justice, or piety - he wants them to show that they understand these things by being able to give them a definition - to say what makes things courageous, just, or pious. Nor would Socrates be satisfied with a dictionary definition. Dictionaries provide a lot of insight into how people use words, but they can be wrong, or they can split slightly different uses of common meanings of words.
A good philosophical analysis of forgiveness needs to do at least three things. First, it should state a necessary condition for someone to count as having forgiven someone else. That is, there shouldn’t be any examples or possible examples of genuine forgiveness that don’t fit the definition. Second, it should state a sufficient condition for someone to count as having forgiven someone. That is, there shouldn’t be any examples or possible examples of things that fit the definition but aren’t genuine cases of forgiveness. And third, it should be explanatory. For example, “A forgives B just in case it is true that A forgives B” states a condition that is both necessary and sufficient, but it isn’t explanatory, so it is not a good analysis. It doesn’t tell us what it is to forgive someone.
Strabbing makes one more point about good analyses - they should have the right relata. For example, if love is a relation between two people, then a good analysis of love should include places for each of these people - and not just for one, or for three. Strabbing thinks that many existing accounts of forgiveness before she wrote her article go wrong on this point, even before we consider whether they are necessary, sufficient, or explanatory.
Counterexamples
A counterexample is an example or possible example that shows that an analysis is either not necessary, or that it is not sufficient. If you think hard enough about what Strabbing’s analysis says, you may be able to think of a counterexample to it. Indeed, I believe that she actually mentions an example in her paper that can be used as a counterexample to her analysis, unless we use some interpretive charity to reword it a little bit. Doing philosophy is hard!
