“Forgive, Because You Were Forgiven” – Abraham Mathew (University of Notre Dame)

By Abraham Mathew

In E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Margaret Schlegel discovers that her unwed sister Helen is pregnant and without a place to stay the night. She begs her husband Henry Wilcox to let Helen stay the night at their estate. Henry, however, is angered when he hears that Helen’s pregnancy resulted from an affair with a married man. Instead of letting her stay the night, he demands that Helen leave Howards End at once. Margaret is stunned. She reminds Henry of his own past: he had himself kept a mistress when they were engaged, and she had chosen to forgive him rather than end things.

“Will you forgive her,” she begs, “as you would hope to be forgiven, and as you have actually been forgiven? Forgive her for one night only. That will be enough.” Henry remains unmoved, angering Margaret:

“Not any more of this!” she cried. “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry. You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? […] Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent. Only say to yourself: “What Helen has done, I’ve done.” (Forster 2000, 262-3)

I suspect you share Margaret’s view that Henry’s refusal to forgive is a moral failure on his part. What’s more, the reason it seems so is precisely because he was previously forgiven himself. But that’s a striking thought when you think about it. Why should what happened between Henry and Margaret have any bearing on what Henry now owes Helen? How does being the recipient of forgiveness in one relationship make it wrong not to forgive in another—generating a requirement to ‘pay forgiveness forward’, as it were?[1]

In this paper, I offer an answer in three steps:

When you offer to forgive someone, you offer to treat them better than their wrongdoing strictly merits: to cease the resentment, reproach, withdrawal of fellowship, and other forms of blame that their behaviour warranted. In this sense, forgiveness is an extension of unmerited goodwill or grace. What’s more, some offers of forgiveness are more gracious than others. For instance, forgiving my parent’s murderer is far more gracious than forgiving a minor slight. In general, how gracious an offer of forgiveness is depends on a variety of factors, like the severity of the wrong, whether the wrongdoer has repented, and the prior relationship between wrongdoer and victim.

Being blamed involves social burdens like the ones listed above: being resented, reproached, and losing the warmth and fellowship of your peers. Forgiveness lifts these burdens. This fact, I argue, requires that we be consistent in a certain way when we forgive. Suppose Philippa forgives Iris for accidentally breaking a vase at a party. Shortly after, Betty breaks a vase of equal value under analogous circumstances and apologizes just as sincerely. Neither is a closer friend of Philippa’s than the other, neither has a history of carelessness, and neither has any excuse. In short, forgiving Betty would require no more gracious an offer of forgiveness than forgiving Iris did. But Philippa refuses to forgive Betty, for no good reason. Betty can rightly complain, “Why does Iris get relieved of the burdens of blame but not me, given that our situations are relevantly identical? Why am I being made to bear costs that Iris was spared, for no good reason?”

What makes Philippa’s refusal objectionable, I argue, is a consistency norm that governs how we forgive. All else equal, if you extend a gracious offer of forgiveness to one person, you cannot without adequate justification withhold an equally or less gracious offer from someone in a relevantly similar position. To do so would be to treat the person left bearing the burdens of blame unfairly, thus wronging them.

Whether or not you accept forgiveness matters, or so I contend: you could decline it, say, because you don’t think you are ready for it yet, or because you dispute you’ve done anything wrong in the first place.[2] But if you accept forgiveness, you voluntarily allow the burdens of blame to be lifted from you, and this generates a consistency requirement parallel to the one in step two. If you have accepted a gracious offer of forgiveness for yourself, you cannot subsequently withhold an equally or less gracious offer from someone in a relevantly similar position, without adequate justification. To do so is to avail yourself of a reprieve you are unwilling to extend to another who is no more deserving of blame, without adequate justification, and this is to treat them unfairly.

This is where Henry goes wrong. Margaret’s forgiveness of him is remarkably gracious. She commits to spending the rest of her life with him despite his infidelity. What he is asked to extend to Helen is considerably less gracious—merely to let her stay one night—and Helen’s moral situation is arguably no worse than Henry’s was. Having accepted a gracious offer of forgiveness for himself, he withholds a less gracious offer from Helen without adequate justification, treating her unfairly and thus wronging her.

If successful, my argument has important implications for our thinking about forgiveness. Here are two:

a) Forgiveness is not always discretionary: The standard view in the literature on forgiveness has been that forgiveness is always discretionary: a victim may always permissibly withhold forgiveness, it is never wrong not to forgive.[3] One motivation for this is that there is something essentially gift-like about forgiveness: it is to be accepted with gratitude rather than as something one is owed. And since gifts are products of unprescribed generosity, not obligation, so is forgiveness. But if my argument holds, this orthodoxy is mistaken. Forgiveness is sometimes required. But this needn’t rule out the giftedness of forgiveness. I maintain that it is an act of grace—an extension of unmerited goodwill—to be accepted with gratitude rather than as something one is owed. What my argument suggests instead is that we may have to countenance the possibility of obligatory gifts—things one is required to give, but which must nonetheless be accepted with gratitude rather than as something one is owed.[4]

b) Forgiveness is a more social practice than we tend to think: We tend to think of forgiveness as a private transaction between two people, with its norms fixed entirely by facts about their relationship: what the wrongdoer did, whether they have repented, and the like. If successful, my argument shows that this picture is incomplete. Whether you are required to forgive someone today can depend on what happened between you and someone else entirely. The norms of forgiveness are partly fixed by the wider network of relationships in which victim and wrongdoer are embedded, and by the histories of giving and receiving forgiveness that have shaped their respective places within it. Forgiveness turns out to be far less individualistic and far more social a practice than philosophers have assumed.

Take a look at the paper for a more detailed defence of each of the aforementioned steps and more implications!

[1] A similar puzzle is raised by the ‘Parable of the Unforgiving Servant’ in the New Testament. (See Matthew 18: 21-35.)

[2] In the paper, I give a more detailed defence of this uptake condition on forgiveness

[3] As Per-Erik Milam notes, this ‘Essential Electivity’ thesis is often taken for granted, rather than argued for, in the literature, although he helpfully lists a few that have explicitly defended it. Milam is one of the few dissenters against this thesis in recent years, alongside others like Mario Attie-Picker and Miranda Fricker.

[4] I’m not the first to have argued for the existence of obligatory gifts on basis of obligatory forgiveness being possible. See Mario Attie-Picker’s excellent paper here.