Forgiving everyone everywhere for everything they've done to you, or will do, or might have done

Occasionally, I publish bits and pieces that I had been planning on publishing in a journal before I left academia. This is an early stage draft/collected notes I had for a project on… well, pretty much what the title says. Stylistic, grammatical, syntactical, etc. mistakes are very likely present in abundance.

I want to argue that there is a case for forgiving everyone for everything that they have ever done to you, and everything they might have done to you. That case depends on far too many suppositions to establish it as true - my goal is much more modest, I only wish to establish that it is coherent, and has a certain degree of attractiveness. More (or less) than a view, I believe the perspective I outline could perhaps be described as a moral-aesthetic. Although I will describe it using arguments and propositions, it goes further than these capture. I will not try to persuade the reader of the superiority of this way of seeing things, nor do I necessarily endorse this way of thinking; rather, I want to show the reader why it lingers in my thoughts.

Astute readers will notice that there is more than a cursory reflection between my thoughts here and Christianity as it is popularly understood. The thought that we are all essentially wrongdoers, and that, therefore, we’d best forgive others if we want to have any claim on their forgiveness, is certainly most closely associated with Jesus in our culture, although there are sources in many other religions. While Jesus made this claim in a religious context, I want to see if it is possible to give this belief a secular foundation. I am not making an argument here, so to speak, ‘in Christian philosophy’. I am not a Christian. Nor do I conceive of this argument as something like Thomas Jefferson’s bible- Christianity without the God bits. I do not read Koine Greek and I am not an expert on Jesus of Nazareth, but it seems to me that as least as he comes down to us in the surviving gospels, he was an essentially religious figure, and any effort to ‘secularize’ the message of the gospels as written would be silly. Equally, though, there is little point in denying that the argument I lay out here has parallels with his thought as it comes to us in the historical records. It is an engagement with Jesus, as he comes down to us, and is commonly interpreted rather than working in the history of philosophy.

The moral aesthetic I have in mind works like this:

Suppose you reject moral luck, in the sense that you think that if a person would do wrong but for moral luck, their moral position is already equivalent to that of a wrongdoer. Moreover, you extend this concept of moral luck quite far. If someone could have done wrong, if circumstances were different, they are guilty of that wrong as surely as if they had actually done it. Of course, changes in circumstances so great so as to make the person not themselves anymore will not get that person into hot water, but suppose you accept that things can vary quite a bit before getting to that point. Suppose that you believe that every single person on earth would do awful things but for their circumstances. From this, it follows that every person, on earth, is in a morally equivalent position, a position of equal guilt, to someone who has done awful things to you, and from here, a particular option becomes attractive - or so I shall argue- forgiving everyone for everything they have ever done, failed to do, or could do or have failed to do, especially since one is just as guilty as all others.

Kinds of moral luck

Perhaps the most compelling form of moral luck is resultant luck. Consider two drivers who both drive equally dangerously- one kills someone and the other doesn’t. Even if, for pragmatic reasons, different punishments are warranted, it still seems to many that the two are morally equivalent, and that there is at least a pro tanto case for not treating them differently.

We will not, for the most part, be discussing resultant luck in this piece, although it certainly qualifies as a kind of moral wrong that arguably requires forgiveness. Instead, we will be focused on circumstantial luck and constitutive luck.

Circumstantial luck: Alice, for the most part, does the right thing in life. Consider someone- Alice*- just like Alice in every respect, except that they live in a world where, 1 year ago, there was a fascist coup. This person has become a collaborator with the evil authorities in order to protect themselves. If one rejects the exculpatory properties of moral luck, one rejects the claim that Alice is in a morally superior position to Alice*.

How powerful is circumstantial luck? To what degree could any of us be forced to do wrong in the wrong circumstances? Prima facie, there is good reason to think that circumstantial luck might have quite powerful effects- although the literature in social psychology on the influence of person versus situation is mixed, there is at least some evidence for situational effects. Also, the sheer range of possible circumstances you might be pushed into is bewilderingly large; it is hard not to think that there are not, in the space of possibilities, at least some situations which would ‘trip you up’, morally speaking. None of this amounts to anything like a proof that there are grave crimes for which you are guilty, given that circumstantial moral luck does not shield from guilt, but it is certainly plausible.

The wrongs you might do but for constitutive luck are, presumably, broader still.

Constitutive luck: Alice is a good person. However, at a nearby world, Alice* had some experience which turned her bad - let us say an experience that was not at all her fault. Maybe she was hit on the head during infancy. Maybe a kindhearted uncle wasn’t present during her childhood, and as a result, she grew up with few positive influences in her life and turned violent. Alice is an upstanding citizen, but Alice* is a ruthless mobster who calls hits on people when they are so much as inconvenient.

While there is some doubt in relation to circumstantial luck, it is, I think, wholly plausible that everyone would do at least one very wrong thing, but for constitutive luck. Perhaps there are possible beings who can only be made to do the wrong thing by being altered so severely that they are no longer themselves, but it seems unlikely to me that any humans fall into that category.

We will start out assuming a version of the argument that one is guilty for all the things that one would do but for resultant, circumstantial and constituent luck. We will later weaken the argument to remove constituent luck.

The total wrong

What is potentially up for forgiveness? All the wrongs each person would do to us were things different. Call the totality of their hypothetical and actual wrongs the total wrong. The portion that an individual needs to forgive will be the total wrong against them. The total wrong against them might include wrongs that are not primarily against us, but only secondarily. For example, wrongs against those who are our loved ones, or could be, if things were different.

Should we forgive everyone for everything they could or have done wrong? The argument.

Let us state the argument a little more formally, although keeping in mind my earlier caveat that this is a view not easily captured by a concrete set of propositions:

1. But-for moral luck (of various kinds), every single person on earth would do terrible things to you.

2. Morally, it matters little whether someone has harmed you, or would, but for moral luck (moral luck isn’t exculpatory.)

3. If someone has done terrible harm to you, you have to decide whether to forgive them.

4. By 2 & 3, if someone would do terrible harm to you, but for moral luck, you must decide whether to forgive them.

5. By 1 & 4, you must decide whether to forgive every person.

6. Therefore, you must either

a. Forgive no one

b. Forgive some people but not others.

c. Forgive everyone

7. In order to live in the world with humans, of which you are one, without facing terrible alienation, and either be a hypocrite or hold yourself in contempt, you should reject (A).

8. There are problems with (B) which make it untenable.

9. Therefore, the most tenable option is to forgive everyone

There is, as with many problems of moral luck, a problem of transworld identity here, but we will just exclude it because these issues are not relevant to our argument. Our argument may be most plausible on a version of transworld identity that relies upon a concept of similarity rather than shared origin. This is because it is more plausible, at least to me, that I share guilt with what someone fundamentally similar to myself might have done, than that I have it because someone with whom I share identity in a Kripkean sense would have done awful things. Perhaps, though, this reflects nothing but my own metaphysical intuitions on transworld identity, transposed to the moral realm.

Premise 2: Why moral equivalence plausibly includes equivalence of necessary forgiveness

Perhaps the plausibility of premise two comes down to the question of the degree to which you buy the idea of moral luck, particularly in forms like constitutive and circumstantial luck, that it is just something arbitrary that separates you from having done wrong in these cases. If you really accept the idea that moral luck dissolves excuses like “I didn’t actually do it”, then premise 2 is likely correct. As Pivoarchy (---) has noted in relation to blame, intuition is perhaps more sustainable in relation to resultant luck & circumstantial luck than constitutive luck, though for the moment we will treat it as if it were true for both kinds of luck. Towards the end of the article, we will work on a more relaxed version of the argument, which only depends on circumstantial luck.

That moral luck prima facie necessitates forgiveness is at least plausible in some cases. Suppose you found out that, but for the smallest of chances on a particular day, your partner would have betrayed you in a major way- e.g., having an affair. Would this not need forgiveness? I would think yes.

But perhaps this is only driven by the act’s extreme proximity to the actual world, or by the fact that it is circumstantial luck rather than constitutive luck.

What if someone more or less like your friend in their constitution, but born in a totalitarian regime, would have persecuted your counterpart, does this also require forgiveness? One might very plausibly say no. Perhaps even more troublingly for our position, suppose you have a friend who would not, under any circumstances constituted as she is, do anything to harm you in any world. Only if her constitution were changed would she harm you. Is it really plausible that she needs forgiveness?

Reasonable people, I think, might disagree. For our purposes, all we need to establish is that there is at least a coherent and somewhat attractive view on which, since moral luck does not change one’s fundamental culpability. Thus, those benefitting from moral luck and so avoiding wrongdoing still need forgiveness.

There are important non-normative, perhaps even ‘empirical’ questions here. Just how much tweaking would it take for a broadly innocent person to do something awful? How much would we have to change their circumstances? Would changing their circumstances be enough, or would only changing their constitution suffice? How much would we need to change their constitution? Would it require so much tweaking as to render them no longer themselves? People will fundamentally differ about this question. Although the literature on the person versus the situation in empirical psychology is relevant here, it is doubtful that it can resolve the question. This combines with the ethical question- how much distance is enough to get you off the hook (particularly relevant if we adopt something like the counterpart theory). We will simply take it as a given in this piece that someone, in some sense not so distant from you, to let you off the hook would do something awful, at least until the section where we relax our assumptions somewhat.

But what does it mean to forgive in this context?

Forgiveness might, in this context, be defined in a number of ways: suspending the right to punish, letting go of resentment, or feeling a particular emotion called forgiveness. The literature on forgiveness is massive and is not our primary target in the context of this piece. The moral aesthetic we outline here is compatible with many of the various approaches to forgiveness in the literature. Plausibly, the account we give here gives reason to ‘forgive’ in many different senses of the term.

An account of forgiveness that equates it with suspending the right to punish would have the implication that you should never punish, and this would be a paradoxical result for many. Punishment, with its various purposes such as deterrence and incapacitation, is often thought to be necessary to prevent various social disasters. However, an account of forgiveness which sees it merely as suspending the right to punish (or wish for punishment) purely for the sake of retribution would be compatible with punishment. Moreover, such an account would still be compatible with a negative form of retributivism about the ethics of punishment, in which the punished having committed wrongdoing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for punishment. On this combination of views, when one forgives, one rejects any claim to a right to punish for the sake of punishment, but not a claim to punish if a person has (actually) done wrong and punishing them would lead to good consequences.

Premise 7 and the reasons to reject option A

In premise 7, we stated that the fundamental reason to reject option A is to enable you to live in the world with other people. There are a lot of different things that might be meant by this, and in this section, we will spell them out.

There are, as I see it, three primary reasons

i) The social and personal difficulties of living with a world full of unforgiven people

ii) The moral difficulties of living in a world full of unforgiven people

iii) The avoidance of hypocrisy or self-disdain

With regard to i)

It will be extremely unpleasant, not to mention difficult, to live as a human in a human society and hold all of humanity as, in an important sense, disgraceful.

With regard to ii)

It would be highly self-defeating if a moral attitude aimed at holding wrongdoing in proper contempt were to encourage wrongdoing or discourage right-doing by reducing the motivation to do good. Holding everyone unforgiven might make it harder to do the right thing, and this might give us reason to forgive.

With regard to iii)

If one despises humanity as a whole, then it is difficult to see why one should exempt oneself- after all, other people have exactly the same complaints against you that you have against them. Thus, if one is to despises humanity as a whole, either one must choose hypocrisy or one must choose self-disdain. It is not impossible to live in a state of self-disdain or unforgiveness; indeed, plenty of people do it. It is, however, unpleasant. It is unclear, at this point, what function this disdain has; it is unclear whether it has any useful or salubrious function as part of your life or moral existence, so why not simply discard it.

Premise 8: Why it is difficult to forgive some people but not others

Suppose you forgive some people but not others. The first question would be, how? How is it possible to regard some people as morally superior to others in the face of the pervasive moral luck we face, if you accept the argument we have so far given vis-à-vis moral luck? Or to forgive some people but not others, despite seeing no moral difference between them.

The most natural suggestion is to try to divide people by matters of degree. It may well be that all people would treat us unethically if things were to go wrong, but that doesn’t mean that some people aren’t more eagerly induced to it than others. We might also divide qualitatively, for example, between those who could be induced to do evil on the basis of mere circumstantial luck, and those who would only do evil if they faced bad constitutive luck.

The problem in using this as a dividing line is epistemic.

With regard to constitutive luck, it is possible, for example, that someone who is very dear to you is, in almost all worlds, a moral monster- arrogant, cruel, and enormously destructive. But for a fortunate accident that happened when they were young, they would be so in our world. Similarly, it is possible that someone who seems to you to be extremely unethical in their behaviour has gotten morally unlucky- in the majority of worlds- including the majority of worlds close to here- they are very kind- it’s just that in this world, in particular, they have gotten very morally unlucky. Of course, these are extreme cases, and one might insist that they are improbable, but it seems very plausible, too plausible to reject, that many of your friends would do something very wrong in at least one world where there character was shaped differently, perhaps a world that is not too far from the actual world.

Even if we try to divide between those who would do terrible things but for reasons of constitutive luck, and people who could be induced by merely circumstantial luck to do evil, the epistemological problems are substantial. Our knowledge of moral fortitude in counterfactual circumstances is tenuous. Opinions may vary on whether an average person would do to do morally awful things if the circumstances were just so as to promote wrongdoing (but not so well designed to promote wrongdoing as to be almost impossible to resist, and hence greatly mitigated), but it seems plausible, at least, that one cannot know that any given person wouldn’t do the wrong thing in a variety of circumstances. Perhaps it is even plausible that we cannot know that a given person would do the wrong thing in a large variety of circumstances, perhaps even more than most people, but they just happen to live in an ‘island of moral stability’ where this is not happening.

Other proposals for portioning out forgiveness on a less-than-total basis are pragmatic- we should forgive all and only those whom it would suit our interests to forgive

A central presupposition one might appeal to is:

It is unjust to forgive one person but not another, for pragmatic reasons. Reasons for forgiveness or non-forgiveness should be moral.

But not everyone will accept this. It is particularly popular in our time to hold that forgiveness is a wholly discretionary right. Many will say that it is the right of the wronged to withhold or grant forgiveness on even a whim, let alone a strong, pragmatic reason.

But, there is a final argument against forgiving some people, but not all, for their total wrong. Suppose you withheld forgiveness from a person for their total wrong on pragmatic grounds- it just didn’t seem advantageous for you to forgive them. You would, I think, nonetheless want others to forgive you for your total wrong. In fact, you might be annoyed if they didn’t. Yet this annoyance could have no justification if you yourself had chosen not to forgive some people on arbitrary, non-moral grounds.

Excursus on hypocrisy

I do not in, in this piece, intend to define the concept of hypocrisy. However, I do want to insist on the following claim:

If you hold yourself superior to X, even though you cannot know, and know that you cannot know, that you are morally superior to X, then you are being hypocritical.

Furthermore, I wish to add a social corollary:

To hold that others should hold you superior to X, even though you cannot know that you are in a morally superior position, and also know that you cannot know, is hypocritical.

A looser and less demanding route to the same conclusion?

The conclusion we have arrived at, we arrived at only through the invocation of highly demanding premises- individuals are culpable for acts that they avoided only through moral luck to the same degree that they are culpable for wrongs they actually committed.

I now want to tell a weaker version of this story in which we still retain a duty to forgive everyone for everything they’ve ever done.

1. We are responsible for what we would do if the circumstances were different (circumstantial luck, but not constitutive luck)

2. Consider P & Q, and Q’s act A, If P cannot show that they are, in some overall sense, significantly morally superior to Q, such that they would never do anything equivalently bad to A if the circumstances were different, then they should forgive Q’s act A. Reasons for this claim:

a. If they do not do so, then there is prima facie reason to think that any positive moral self-regard they have is hypocritical, because they cannot know that they possess the superiority that they implicitly claim.

b. If they do not do this, they cannot consistently claim a right to positive moral regard from others, because they cannot know that they are not morally inferior to at least one person they themselves disdain.

3. Given the epistemic uncertainties of circumstantial moral luck, it is extremely difficult to show that one would never do anything so bad as A]. It could be that we are good people only due to a run of extremely good moral luck, or that the doer of A only did something so wrong due to extremely bad moral luck.

4. Thus, we should forgive all bad acts, because we cannot establish that we are superior to their doers.

Preliminary thoughts- misfortunes

Although the premises are less demanding, the non-normative claims they depend upon are perhaps more dubious- perhaps I really can know that I would never do certain sufficiently abominable acts, for example, sadistically motivated serial killing. Perhaps then I have a right not to forgive these extremely abominable acts, even if I am required to be forgiving in general.

I am sceptical of this argument because it’s difficult for any of us to know how we would respond to brain damage, trauma, etc. There is evidence to support the contention that at least in some cases, these are implicated in wrongdoing. Call these negative, undeserved events that lead to an increase in wrongdoing misfortunes. I want to suggest that even if a difference in constitutive luck is not normally a basis for holding two people guilty :

1. Where X would have done a wrong W1 as bad as Y’s wrong, W2.

2. But X didn’t, because X didn’t suffer some misfortune M, while Y did suffer misfortune M.

3. We should not regard X as morally superior to Y.

• Variation, what if we make this about two separate misfortunes? Do we need a criterion that holds them alike in some respect? E.g., an equal severity requirement?

1. Where X would have done a wrong W1 as bad as Y’s wrong, W2.

2. But X didn’t, because X didn’t suffer some misfortune M1, while Y did suffer misfortune M2.

3. We should not regard X as morally superior to Y.

I think it is extremely unlikely we can exclude these as a plausible possibility in cases of sadistic serial killing, etc, at least without our current technological and scientific prowess. True, these are constitutive rather than circumstantial luck, but I find saying “I can feel superior to X, because X did things due to awful misfortunes happening to them that haven’t happened to me” dubious in cases of misfortune-constitutive luck.

Getting fat for the winter sleep is much easier with love in your heart, especially love for salmon.