The Moral Psychology of Sadness by Gotlib Anna

Author:Gotlib, Anna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International

Chapter 6

Forgiveness and the Moral Psychology of Sadness1

Jeffrey Blustein

1. Forgiveness and the Problem of Sadness

“Forgiveness mean[s] overcoming negative feelings that embody and perpetuate the key features of resentment. . . . The moral sentiment(s) given up by forgiveness must embody the features evident in resentment.”2 “Forgiving means overcoming anger and vengefulness.”3 These claims about forgiveness (or forgiving) purport to tell us what forgiveness must be, in a definitional or conceptual sense, and so are quite strong. Resentment and other emotions that “embody features evident” in it—what Paul Hughes, somewhat confusingly, calls kinds of “moral anger”4—also figure prominently, if not exclusively, in empirical accounts of the sort of emotions or feelings that are overcome or given up when forgiveness is achieved. These accounts do not necessarily have a position on, or rest on, assumptions about what forgiveness “must” be as a conceptual matter, but describe its normal or typical manifestations.

These and other views like them, conceptual as well as empirical, about the relationship between forgiveness, on the one hand, and emotions of moral anger, including resentment and indignation, on the other, are quite common in the contemporary philosophical literature, so common, in fact, that I have elsewhere called them features of “the standard view of forgiveness.”5 I will call these and kindred emotions vengeful emotions or passions.6 Of course, the standard view as I understand it leaves room for other negative emotions in the moral psychology of response to wrongdoing. It acknowledges that there is a rich phenomenology of emotional response to being wronged and that we do not just respond with anger or resentment: depending on the nature of the wrong and the prior relationship between the wrongdoer and the one who is wronged, there is also disappointment, shame, and grief, for example. But there is a pronounced tendency within much contemporary philosophical writing on forgiveness to emphasize vengeful emotional responses to wrongdoing. They figure as—and here several terms may be used—the main, or the exemplary, or the most fitting responses to culpable wrongdoing, and as a consequence, forgiveness is said to be best understood as the overcoming or forswearing of them, not of the other negative emotions that may accompany them. If these other emotions are overcome in the process of forgiving, then this might—or might not—be salutary from the standpoint of the victim’s psychological health. But they are, from the standpoint of what a philosophical account of forgiveness ought to emphasize, secondary, since in the cases of central interest it is the overcoming of vengeful emotional responses to being wronged, and not the accompanying emotions, that qualifies the change as one of forgiveness.

The origin of the standard view can be traced to Bishop Butler’s famous account of forgiveness in Sermons VIII and IX of the Fifteen Sermons.7 Here, he characterizes resentment as a type of anger, what he calls “settled anger” that has as its object “injustice or injury of some kind or other,”8 and forgiveness as a process of moderating anger at personal injuries so that it does not become excessive and morph into malice or revenge.

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