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Forgiveness is an everyday phenomena, and one which might be said to be a part of the fabric of most people’s interpersonal lives. Equally, forgiveness often emerges as something controversial and puzzling in the extreme cases: the family of a murder victim who proclaim forgiveness for the perpetrator; the tabloid headlines that pronounce some crimes to be unforgivable. And forgiveness is also philosophically intriguing. It could easily seem that forgiveness stands opposed to justice: it seems that justice is about giving what is deserved, but when we forgive, we give what is not deserved. Is this right? What are we doing if we forgive? Or, what do we receive from others if we are forgiven?
This course introduces a few of the issues that emerge in consideration of the meaning and value of forgiveness, and asks us to think carefully about the intuitions we have in this area.
In this first week we ask what we mean by ‘forgiveness’, and explore why it might be a philosophically interesting question. We will also explore a perhaps trickier question: who gets to say what forgiveness is, and how it should be understood? It will turn out that even the basic task of giving an answer to the question ‘what is it?’ is normatively fraught. In other words, we will find ourselves employing judgements of value in the course of giving a definition. This might be true of most moral concepts, but it seems to be particularly acute in the case of forgiveness.
Reading/resources:
We continue to explore the question raised in the first week by examining two detailed accounts of forgiveness developed within recent-ish analytic moral philosophy: Charles Griswold and Lucy Allais. This involves careful consideration of what kind of change forgiveness involves, and its relationship to the moral sphere more generally.
Reading/resources:
In this session we explore the work of Jacques Derrida, who turned to the concept of forgiveness late in this career, in dialogue with the work of Vladimir Jankelevitch. For Derrida, forgiveness is not so much a stable concept, as the name we give to an ineliminable conflict within our moral thought-world, between the aspiration towards the unconditional gift, and the incessant inscription of the unconditional gift within moral economies and give-and-take. Perhaps most intriguingly, Derrida claims that forgiveness ‘lives by the unforgiveable’; that is, it is only when we encounter that which seems unforgiveable that we are in a position to wrestle with the idea of forgiving at all. We will try to work out what this means, and what we should make of it.
Reading/resources:
In this sessionwe explore three enormous questionsrelated to God and forgiveness. Firstly, the question of how we mightunderstand what it means to talk of Gods’ forgiveness. If God is changeless,and forgiveness involves ‘a change of heart’, then surely God cannot forgive?
Reading/resources:
- Brandon Warmke’s article on divine forgiveness is available here.
- Marilyn McCord Adams’s article on Christian forgiveness is available here.
We explore thequestion of how might we understand the relationship between divine and humanforgiveness. In the gospels, Jesus speaks of human forgiveness as a response todivine forgiveness (‘forgive as you have been forgiven’) but also as acondition of divine forgiveness (‘if you do not forgive….’). This leads us tothe question of atonement, because for Christians, divine forgiveness isunderstood as being accomplished through the death (and resurrection) ofChrist. What kind of understanding of forgiveness is implied here, and doesthis have wider implications?
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Stuart is the Theology Lead at LJC. He graduated with a degree in Literature and Theology from the University of Hull in 2000. From 2003-9 he studied Philosophical Theology part-time at the University of Nottingham, whilst continuing to work in the third sector with vulnerably-housed or homeless people, and young asylum seekers (as well as pulling pints in a pub). He was Lecturer at York St John University for almost a decade, before moving to London Jesuit Centre in 2021. He now lives in South East London, and spends as much time as he can in the woods.
