Anna-Bella Sicilia (University of Arizona), “In defense of genuine un-forgiving”

Philosophical Studies, 2024

By Anna-Bella Sicilia

At some point, you’ve probably forgiven someone who wronged you. Suppose, later, you wanted to take your forgiveness back. Could you?

In my recent paper, “In defense of genuine un-forgiving,” I ask and answer two related questions about experiences like this: (1) Once you’ve forgiven someone, is it ever possible to take it back? (2) If it’s possible to take it back, is it ever morally permissible to do so? I think the answers are “yes” and “yes.”

I am thinking primarily of cases involving wrongdoers who are committed to moral improvement when they accept forgiveness, but whose plans for moral improvement don’t come to fruition. Maybe they accept forgiveness for an act of dishonesty, but later revert to telling the same kinds of lies. Maybe (as in my leading case in the paper) they lose their temper repeatedly over silly mistakes, commit to improving their anger issues in light of your forgiveness, but fail to make progress and continue to exhibit a hot temper. While there might be other situations that make un-forgiving appropriate, I focus on these sorts of cases, in which (I think) un-forgiving seems the most natural.

So, are these really cases in which someone takes back forgiveness, or is taking back forgiveness impossible? You might think taking back forgiveness is impossible if you think there’s a better explanation for what occurs in such apparent acts of un-forgiving. Maybe we’re doing something else when we think we’re undoing our act of forgiveness. In this part of the paper, I entertain two possible alternative explanations. First, you might think these are instances in which we never forgave in the first place; all we’re doing is coming to realize that our previous attempt to forgive didn’t go through. Second, you might think these are cases in which we leave our earlier act of forgiveness intact but decline to forgive for some new offense. It turns out that committing to these alternative explanations of apparent un-forgiving cases would force us to place some overly stringent requirements on our ability to forgive and to interpret our emotional and moral lives in implausible ways. (You’ll need to read the paper to get the details.)

What about (2)? I argue that un-forgiving is not merely possible, but sometimes morally permissible and indeed morally valuable. To understand the moral value of un-forgiving, we need to think about its relationship to moral development and forgiveness itself. Un-forgiving makes sense in the wake of what I call “faithful forgiveness.” We undertake faithful forgiveness when we say things like “I forgive you, but you have to promise never to do it again,” or “I forgive you, so long as you never do it again.” This involves forgiving with the explicit condition that forgiveness will be revoked with serious re-offense. Faithful forgiveness facilitates and encourages a wrongdoer’s efforts to morally improve. It offers her the social infrastructure she might need to avoid re-offending, while simultaneously reflecting the importance of a victim’s moral expectations for her. It reflects a victim and wrongdoer’s shared investment in the latter’s character, allowing the wrongdoer to be forgiven unless she proves herself unworthy of this investment. Our acts of forgiveness are importantly informed by whether (as Andrei Kolnai somewhat playfully puts it in his 1974 paper “Forgiveness”), the wrongdoer “is engaged in an ‘upward’ movement or struggle or is on the contrary gliding down the slope” (100). If we can faithfully forgive, this means we can also un-forgive, and that acts of un-forgiving can play an important role in holding wrongdoers striving toward “upward movement” to account.

In the remainder of the paper, I respond to some lingering worries (Does faithful forgiveness sacrifice self-respect? Is it problematically invasive? Does it make forgiveness undesirably risky?) and defend the idea that un-forgiving is sometimes better suited to serve the goal of relational repair than permanent forgiveness. In challenging our paradigm of permanent, no-take-backs, forgiveness, this picture is not intended to replace a conception of permanent forgiveness. But it reveals the value in recognizing multiple paradigms for forgiveness and forgiving relationships. At least some acts of forgiveness can be revoked, and our moral lives are better for it.

Since there are only a small handful of philosophical discussions of un-forgiving at the moment, my hope is that this pitch for possible and permissible un-forgiving is an invitation for more discussion and debate, both about the contours of forgiveness itself and its afterlives. Acts of forgiveness are frequently situated in ongoing and developing relations of involvement, between people whose characters are continuing to develop as well. Un-forgiving plays an important role of the development of our characters and our relationships.