Just Forgiving: An Examination of the Relationship between Justice and Forgiveness

This thesis explores the contested relationship between justice and forgiveness. Both actions may be viewed as morally praiseworthy in isolation, but the relationship between them is fraught with ambiguity and debate. Justice gives each person what is due them, forgiveness appears to forego what is due. Some critics suggest this difference in content is evidence of an incoherent moral system and recommend the removal of forgiveness from the canon of moral acts. Others attempt to ease the tension by reformulating one of these concepts. The standard move is to re-define forgiveness as the overcoming of certain emotions, typically anger and resentment.

This thesis criticises this move, primarily on the grounds that it further confuses rather than clarifies the nature of forgiveness. And, as it turns out, problems such as this are not easily defined away. Restorative justice has taken the rare alternative approach. It redefines justice—to mixed results. This thesis does, however, agree with both approaches, in that, any satisfactory solution to this problem will be found through engagement with what is fundamentally true of these concepts.

The claim of this thesis is that forgiveness and justice are compatible rather than contradictory. It argues that justice is, in form, a relational obligation. Relational obligations are obligations that link two parties. Here, one party owes it to another to do or abstain from doing some action. The content of the obligations we have to others are derived from a number of sources, most notably from what the person in question deserves. If this be correct, justice stands for the moral principle that acknowledges human persons as objects of moral demands. Although to do justice is one thing and to forgive is another, like justice forgiveness shares the relational form and applies to the same suite of obligations. The heart of the matter hinges on what forgiveness does and why. Wrongdoing can be thought of as a debt, if “debt” is understood as a defaulted relational obligation that incurs secondary obligations.

The claim developed and defended here is that forgiveness waives this debt.

Although the “debt” is met in different ways by the two, forgiveness and justice share a form, apply to the same content, and each has a similar result: although neither guarantee reconciliation, both remove barriers to it.

As indicated, this thesis is fundamentally concerned with a moral question, but the problem takes on a new importance when the wrong in question is legally actionable—when it constitutes a tort or a crime. Any serious answer to our question, then, must take moral and legal justice into account. How this question is answered will depend on the function of law and how important we take that function to be.

The argument of this thesis is that criminal law and forgiveness are not compatible.

Restorative justice draws attention to a neglected aspect of justice and, in doing so, finds a place for forgiveness in public life.