Forgiveness and Moral Reckoning

Forgiveness is no simple matter either to execute or to understand. Charles Griswold explores forgiveness both in its guise as a virtue⎯I’ll call it “forgivingness”⎯and as something that’s more difficult to categorize, something like an act or process. Griswold’s Forgiveness provides a classical philosophical analysis of the act or process, “a theory of paradigmatic forgiveness⎯of what forgiveness would have to be in order to be perfectly accomplished.” Griswold’s is a fine book, one that serves as at once an able introduction to and an accomplished advanced treatment of a set of difficult and important questions. One of the important lessons of philosophers like Kripke and Wittgenstein is an approach to philosophic criticism that attends both to the details of views under discussion as well as, perhaps even more significantly, the underlying conception, what Kripke refers to as the picture of the domain. I will initially focus on a number of my hesitations concerning Griswold’s analysis of forgiveness, the act or process, his concern in the central portions of his book. I will raise matters of detail that at the same time signal the need for a very different underlying conception. Afterward, I turn to the virtue, some of whose features make this need even more dramatic.