The alteration thesis: forgiveness as a normative power

Abstract

What goes on when one person forgives another? In this paper I argue for The Alteration Thesis. According to the Alteration Thesis, it is an essential feature of forgiveness that it alters the normative situation created by the wrongdoing by means of an act undertaken with the intention of bringing this alteration about. In this paper, I will explain this thesis, defend it against counterarguments and consider some of its implications. Thinking of forgiveness along the lines suggested by the Alteration Thesis means going against the tide of much recent writing on forgiveness, which has seen forgiveness as consisting essentially in a change of heart towards the wrongdoer. But I will argue that the Alteration Thesis has a number of explanatory advantages over the change of heart approach. What goes on when one person forgives another? In this paper I argue for The Alteration Thesis. According to the Alteration Thesis, it is an essential feature of forgiveness that it alters the normative situation created by the wrongdoing. In this paper, I will explain this thesis, defend it against counter-arguments and consider some of its implications. A theory of forgiveness should be able to explain the ways in which it matters to us to forgive and be forgiven. One way in which it matters to us to be forgiven is shown by the familiarity of the fact that repentant wrongdoers will sometimes seek out their victims and look for their forgiveness, often going to great lengths to do so. An illustration is found in the following scenario from Simon Wiesenthal’s memoir, The Sunflower. An SS officer, Karl, who participated in an atrocity in which Jewish men, women and children were massacred is seriously injured and approaching death. He is now an inmate in a field hospital in which Simon, the narrator, is working. Karl is apparently overcome with remorse when he thinks about what he did, and, as death grows near, he feels impelled to look for a Jewish victim of the Nazi Endlösung in which he took part, and ask for forgiveness. This scenario is complex in part because Simon is not a direct victim of Karl’s actions; nevertheless, it seems as though Karl’s asking for a Jewish victim of the Nazi project is not accidental – there is a connection to Simon that makes it morally intelligible to ask him for a kind of forgiveness that could not come from e.g. a German civilian. I take it, therefore, that the scenario illustrates one key point: the comprehensibility of a person feeling an urgent need, before he dies, to be forgiven by a person who can intelligibly be thought of as a victim of his wrongdoing. One sceptical character later in Wiesenthal’s narrative suggests that the SS officer would have been better to approach a priest if what he wanted was to gain absolution. Nevertheless, it seems that for many of us, perhaps including Karl himself, such absolution is not enough, and that the relation to the victim is central. What we want is not simply an authoritative verdict on our wrongs, but a particular relation to the people we have wronged. The way the Alteration Thesis explains this is to say that we want forgiveness because we want the normative situation to be altered in ways that only the victim can alter it. In order to make that compelling, we need to say something more about what the Alteration Thesis involves.