The Right to Forgiveness

Abstract

An almost universally held view in the literature on forgiveness is that wrongdoers cannot have a right to be forgiven. I argue this claim is false. Sometimes wrongdoers have a right to be forgiven. In Section 2, I show how widespread the view is that wrongdoers never have a right to be forgiven. In Section 3, I present a counterexample to this widely held view, arguing that promises can ground rights to be forgiven. In Section 4, I show how the case of promised forgiveness is instructive, as it points to other possible grounds for a right to forgiveness. In Section 5, I consider three objections to my view. Section 6 concludes by considering how the existence of a right to forgiveness informs debates about what forgiveness is, arguing that it gives us reason to prefer certain kinds of views of forgiveness over others.