Suppose Anna hurts Bob, and Anna finds this really cognitively painful to think about. So she makes some token effort to make it up to Bob, then tells herself that it was really hard for her to do that but she has now made up for it. Yet Bob doesn’t at all think Anna has made up for it. I think it saves Anna from self-deception to actually care about whether Bob believes she’s earned his forgiveness.
There is the counterargument of course, that Bob may abuse this to demand disproportionate recompense for the harm caused, and (if she believes this is happening) Anna may come to the conclusion that she’s not going to keep working on earning his forgiveness. My preferred way of dealing with this is not to say “I have decided that I have been forgiven for my act” but instead to say “I believe I have done enough to make up for my behavior, and while Bob has not forgiven me, I’ve made the decision to move on. I’m sad this is the outcome but I think this is the right call.”
My preferred way of dealing with this is not to say “I have decided that I have been forgiven for my act” but instead to say “I believe I have done enough to make up for my behavior, and while Bob has not forgiven me, I’ve made the decision to move on. I’m sad this is the outcome but I think this is the right call.”
Is there any material difference between these…? On your preferred method, you are still deciding that you don’t, after all, care that the party wronged by you believes that you haven’t earned forgiveness. The same check on self-deception is removed in just the same way.
Anyway, it may be instructive to consider how Jewish religious law handles this. As explained by Maimonides, when one person has wronged another, forgiveness requires, first, that the transgressor:
Recognize and discontinue the improper action.
Verbally confess the action, thus giving the action a concrete form in your own mind.
Regret the action. Evaluate the negative impact this action may have had on yourself or on others.
Determine never to repeat the action. Picture a better way to handle it.
This having been done, the next step is to actually make up for the wrong:
When one has caused harm to others, whether by stealing from them, embarrassing them or anything else, then teshuva [repentance] requires that restitution and reconciliation be arranged between the parties involved. The damaged party must forgive the perpetrator before Divine forgiveness is granted.
What if the damaged party refuses to grant forgiveness? In that case:
However, a person is only obligated to ask for forgiveness three times. After three refusals, the person is no longer held accountable for that action, as he/she has proven their true regret. The person who will not accept a sincere apology after three requests for forgiveness, however, is guilty of bearing a grudge.
This, you will notice, works very much like the fictional forgiveness ritual referred to in the top-level comment.
Needless to say, much depends on the question of whether restitution has in fact been made. In a Jewish community, such questions would presumably be decided by a rabbi or similar authority. This seems to me to be the critical missing piece: that the transgressor does not unilaterally assume the authority to decide when he has been forgiven, but neither does the transgressed-against. There are criteria for forgiveness, they are reasonably well-defined, and there is an authority which may be appealed to for adjudication of whether the criteria have been satisfied. You cannot get out of performing due restitution just because you don’t feel like it, but neither have you incurred infinite or even disproportionate debt to someone.
Finding a trusted third-party to make a call on it removes the incentive problems that the transgressor and harmed parties have, and is a better solution than the one I named (if involving such a third-party with an appropriate cost is possible).
My preferred way of dealing with this is not to say “I have decided that I have been forgiven for my act” but instead to say “I believe I have done enough to make up for my behavior, and while Bob has not forgiven me, I’ve made the decision to move on. I’m sad this is the outcome but I think this is the right call.”
Is there any material difference between these…?
There is not a material difference, but from my definition of forgiveness the first epistemic state involves deceiving yourself about whether you have been forgiven.
Another way of phrasing my point: you may decide to give up on being forgiven by the person you have wronged, but for goodness’ sake don’t also deceive yourself about whether you actually have been forgiven.
Finding a trusted third-party to make a call on it removes the incentive problems that the transgressor and harmed parties have, and is a good solution if possible.
Indeed, although I would like to emphasize that the way this solution works is by having a pre-existing trusted third party which is already, to begin with, integrated into the framework, and which is seen by the transgressor, the transgressed-against, and all relevant bystanders, as the appropriate arbitrator.[1] If you have to search for some mutually trusted third party after the fact, that is very unlikely to work well.
In other words, this sort of solution works well within the framework of a community. (This is par for the course for the halakha, which is constructed as a body of law by which Jewish communities are to operate and by which Jews ought to live in their communities, not merely as a contextless code of personal conduct.)
This further suggests that the answer to the question in the OP—i.e., what is the proper response to mistakes that have harmed others?—is inseparable from the task of building functioning communities, within which questions of this sort can get workable answers.
Note that “why should any particular person be seen by all and sundry as the appropriate arbitrator in matters like this” is another question which is very hard to answer outside the context of a community of people with some shared understanding of morality.
This removes a check on self-deception.
Suppose Anna hurts Bob, and Anna finds this really cognitively painful to think about. So she makes some token effort to make it up to Bob, then tells herself that it was really hard for her to do that but she has now made up for it. Yet Bob doesn’t at all think Anna has made up for it. I think it saves Anna from self-deception to actually care about whether Bob believes she’s earned his forgiveness.
There is the counterargument of course, that Bob may abuse this to demand disproportionate recompense for the harm caused, and (if she believes this is happening) Anna may come to the conclusion that she’s not going to keep working on earning his forgiveness. My preferred way of dealing with this is not to say “I have decided that I have been forgiven for my act” but instead to say “I believe I have done enough to make up for my behavior, and while Bob has not forgiven me, I’ve made the decision to move on. I’m sad this is the outcome but I think this is the right call.”
Is there any material difference between these…? On your preferred method, you are still deciding that you don’t, after all, care that the party wronged by you believes that you haven’t earned forgiveness. The same check on self-deception is removed in just the same way.
Anyway, it may be instructive to consider how Jewish religious law handles this. As explained by Maimonides, when one person has wronged another, forgiveness requires, first, that the transgressor:
This having been done, the next step is to actually make up for the wrong:
What if the damaged party refuses to grant forgiveness? In that case:
This, you will notice, works very much like the fictional forgiveness ritual referred to in the top-level comment.
Needless to say, much depends on the question of whether restitution has in fact been made. In a Jewish community, such questions would presumably be decided by a rabbi or similar authority. This seems to me to be the critical missing piece: that the transgressor does not unilaterally assume the authority to decide when he has been forgiven, but neither does the transgressed-against. There are criteria for forgiveness, they are reasonably well-defined, and there is an authority which may be appealed to for adjudication of whether the criteria have been satisfied. You cannot get out of performing due restitution just because you don’t feel like it, but neither have you incurred infinite or even disproportionate debt to someone.
Finding a trusted third-party to make a call on it removes the incentive problems that the transgressor and harmed parties have, and is a better solution than the one I named (if involving such a third-party with an appropriate cost is possible).
There is not a material difference, but from my definition of forgiveness the first epistemic state involves deceiving yourself about whether you have been forgiven.
Another way of phrasing my point: you may decide to give up on being forgiven by the person you have wronged, but for goodness’ sake don’t also deceive yourself about whether you actually have been forgiven.
Indeed, although I would like to emphasize that the way this solution works is by having a pre-existing trusted third party which is already, to begin with, integrated into the framework, and which is seen by the transgressor, the transgressed-against, and all relevant bystanders, as the appropriate arbitrator.[1] If you have to search for some mutually trusted third party after the fact, that is very unlikely to work well.
In other words, this sort of solution works well within the framework of a community. (This is par for the course for the halakha, which is constructed as a body of law by which Jewish communities are to operate and by which Jews ought to live in their communities, not merely as a contextless code of personal conduct.)
This further suggests that the answer to the question in the OP—i.e., what is the proper response to mistakes that have harmed others?—is inseparable from the task of building functioning communities, within which questions of this sort can get workable answers.
Note that “why should any particular person be seen by all and sundry as the appropriate arbitrator in matters like this” is another question which is very hard to answer outside the context of a community of people with some shared understanding of morality.