Abstract
The standard view about the value of forgiveness is that forgiveness is always or at least in most cases morally laudable. To explain why this view is so dominant, we tend to point to the Christian championing of forgiveness. At closer inspection, however, things turn out to be more complicated. Undoubtedly, there are passages in the Bible that do recommend unconditional forgiveness and praise it as a virtue. But there are also passages that point to a different direction and express a more reserved view about forgiveness. Thus, there is leeway for a more nuanced Christian view on forgiveness than the standard view suggests. Bishop Joseph Butlerʼs (1692–1750) famous sermons on resentment and forgiveness represent such a nuanced view. Most importantly, Butler does not define forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment simpliciter, but only as the avoidance of excesses and abuses of resentment. In this paper, I reconstruct Butlerʼs qualified defence of resentment and his interpretation of the command to forgive our enemies. In the final sections, I examine two arguments in favour of forgiveness that can be attributed to Butler: the argument from common humanity and the argument that we should make a distinction between the act and the agent.
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Notes
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The painting also serves as the front cover of Murphy’s influential book Getting Even. Forgiveness and Its Limits (2003).
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For a more recent explanation of this distinction, see Murphy 2003, 23.
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Unfortunately, Butler’s terminology is not quite consistent. He predominately uses “resentment” as a more general term than “anger” but occasionally adopts a contrary terminology by classifying resentment as a subcategory of anger. For example, he writes, “But from this [i.e., sudden anger], deliberate anger or resentment is essentially distinguished” [VIII:7]. This sentence presupposes that “anger” is the more general term than “resentment” and that “anger” splits into “sudden anger” and “deliberate anger or resentment.” To avoid conceptual confusion, I simply stipulate that “resentment” ought to be used as the more general term than “anger.” In what follows, I use the terms accordingly. Griswold, by contrast, sees “resentment as a species of anger” (Griswold 2007, 22), that is, he uses “anger” as the more general term. I also deviate from Griswold’s interpretation of the passage in that Griswold thinks that by talking about “sudden anger” as “distinct from resentment, malice and revenge,” Butler “rightly associates malice with resentment” (Griswold 2007, 22). I find it more plausible to interpret “resentment, malice, and revenge” as an enumeration of distinct phenomena and to assume that Butler makes a clear distinction between resentment on the one hand and malice and revenge on the other.
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Strawson calls these impersonal reactive attitudes that we may have on behalf of others “vicarious or impersonal or disinterested or generalized analogues of the reactive attitudes,” that we have as the reactions to the quality of othersʼ will towards us, see Strawson 1962, 199.
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For this point, see Radzik 2014, 142–143.
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For a recent treatment of this question, see Bovens 2009.
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For this view on forgiveness as a normative power, the “alteration thesis,” see Bennett 2018.
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For a similar approach along these lines in the modern philosophy of forgiveness, see Johansson 2009 and Pettigrove 2012, chap. 5. While Johansson argues that forgiveness rests on “objectively unjustifiable benevolence” as part of the human nature that places forgiveness “outside of contexts of justification” (Johansson 2009, 543), Pettigrove explores the relationship between forgiveness and love and concludes that “love must in the end yield forgiveness.” (Pettigrove 2012, 103).
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For the notion of forgivingness in contradistinction to the notion of forgiveness, see Roberts 1995. Roberts distinguishes the virtue of forgivingness, that is, a disposition to forgive, from the act or process of forgiveness in which this disposition is typically exemplified.
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According to Moore, Christ’s appeal to the Pharisees’s guilt in order to dissuade them from stoning the adulteress is “pretty clumsy moral philosophy.” (Moore 1997, 114).
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For a critique of Moore’s rejection of the argument from human frailty, see also Murphy 2003, 89–90. Murphy argues that although Moore’s claim that most of us are morally superior to rapists and cold-blooded murderers is correct, Moore fails to see that we are morally superior to these criminals only because of moral luck—because we happen to have been brought up in better circumstances or because we happen to have never been placed in situations where we have been seriously tempted to commit a crime. Murphy therefore interprets Jesus’s injunction not to throw stones as teaching us a lesson in moral humility.
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The distinction between act and agent is often regarded as the “heart of forgiveness,” see Allais 2008, 50–63. For a detailed treatment of the problem of how we may understand forgiveness as involving some revision in judgement or change of view without releasing the wrongdoer from responsibility for his evil act, see Hieronymi 2001.
- 18.
For a more detailed treatment of the argument, see Hallich 2013, 1004–1005.
- 19.
This is how Hampton (1988, 83–85) expounds the argument.
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Hallich, O. (2022). A Christian View: Joseph Butler on Resentment and Forgiveness. In: Lotter, MS., Fischer, S. (eds) Guilt, Forgiveness, and Moral Repair. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84610-7_6
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