Misconceptions

The Summer of 2024 Now Has Seen Three Published Criticisms of Forgiveness

At least three essays have appeared in the summer of 2024 criticizing the practice of forgiveness.  At my website, The Forgiving Life, at Psychology Today, I have two recent essays criticizing two essays critical of forgiveness, one from the New York Times (posted as a blog here at our International Forgiveness Institute) and another one at the Psychology Today website.

Well, another essay critical of forgiveness was published on July 29 this year at the Washington Post.  The point of this blog post is to examine the claims of that essay to see if they stand up to scrutiny.

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Susan Shapiro has the intriguing title, Eight Times It May Be Healthier Not to Forgive.  Let us examine each of the eight issues.

Point 1. If prejudice is involved. 

The argument is based on one case study in which a son did not want to forgive his mother for homophobic reactions to him.  This one event is used to generalize to all situations in which a person (the forgiver) is upset by harsh judgements from another person, invalidating forgiveness.  It is as if forgiving, in this case, would give the message: “Your homophobia is okay.”  Yet, this is not true about forgiveness.  A person can forgive another because the forgiver sees the other as wrong.  The forgiveness is toward the person, not toward the content of the other person’s thinking.  Some people would forgive under this circumstance while others would not.  We need to be gentle with each of these cases of non-forgiveness and forgiveness because this is the choice of the one who feels unjustly treated.  Thus, this issue of an absolute prohibition of forgiveness when the would-be forgiver suspects prejudice is not warranted.

Point 2. When you aren’t ready. 

Yes, this is a good point because the decision to forgive belongs to the one who has examined the situation and concludes that there was injustice.  If the person is not ready, then this person should not be pressured into forgiveness.

Point 3. When “sorry” is insufficient. 

Some people will not forgive until the other person or persons make adequate reparation either by a sincere apology or some other way that seems fair.  If the unjustly treated person is doing this to help the offending person to repent and change, then this is a good motive.  Yet, the offended person can help the other to change even after forgiving has occurred.  In addition, this kind of conditional forgiveness itself may be unhealthy because it gives way too much power to the one(s) who acted badly.  In other words, the wronged person may continue to live with unhealthy resentment until the other proclaims three little words: “I am sorry,”  which may never occur.  Why give that kind of power to anyone?  Thus, point 3 does not hold up to scrutiny.

Point 4. If there’s no regret or repairs. 

This argument, as in Point 3, treats forgiveness as conditional, dependent on what others do before you are able to forgive.  In other words, forgiveness is never your free-will choice, but instead is dependent on how others behave.  Thus, Point 4 does not hold up to scrutiny.

Point 5. When conditions aren’t met. 

Again, one case study is presented in which a person demanded fairness and, upon receiving it, proceeded to forgive.  Yet, what if the fairness never comes, which too often is the case in many people’s lives?  This is similar to Points 3 and 4 with the power given to others and so it does not stand up to scrutiny.

Point 6. If personal safety is compromised. 

The one case study was of a child who was raped in the home.  She was urged, mistakenly by a counselor, to go back into the home to keep the family together.  She was raped again.  The substantial philosophical error here is the counselor’s confusion of forgiveness and reconciliation.  It obviously was dangerous for her to reconcile with a father who is having extreme moral difficulties.  Also, the pressure to forgive by the counselor should not have occurred, as discussed in Point 2 above.  In equating forgiving and reconciling, Point 6 does not stand up to scrutiny.  Some do decide, by free-will choice, to eventually forgive such atrocities, while others do not.  A person can forgive and then not reconcile.

Point 7. When forgiving could endanger others. 

The one case study here is of a former police officer involved in the January 6 conflicts at the United States Capitol.  The former officer was fearful that if he forgave, the defendants might be let out of jail and hurt others.  This is another confusion, this time between forgiving and legal pardon.  Just because a person forgives from the heart does not mean that this person now wants to open all the jail cell doors.  Opening those doors is not the decision of the forgiver anyway.  It is the decision of a judge and jury that were not offended or physically hurt in the case.  Such confusion of forgiveness and legal pardon means that Point 7 does not stand up to scrutiny.

Point 8.  Before you have all the information.

This is one of two points (including Point 2) that is philosophically reasonable.  One example given is of a driver very upset with another driver, who stopped her car to save her choking child.  Once the other driver learned of this situation, there was nothing to forgive.  Why?  It is because the mother was not doing wrong even though it temporarily frustrated the one who might have forgiven without this important extra information.

So, in summary, the supposed eight points of unhealthy forgiveness have been reduced to two out of eight.  As further clarification, it is not forgiveness itself that is the problem in Points 2 and 8.  In Point 2, the problem centers on when a person starts to forgive (or is pressured to forgive), not on forgiveness itself.  In Point 8, the problem centers on gathering the right information and not on forgiveness itself.  The other points can and should be dismissed because of a lack of understanding of what forgiveness is or what it is not.  It is not reconciliation or legal pardon or placing it in the context of conditionality, waiting for apologies or recompense of some kind that may never happen.  In conclusion, it can be unhealthy to misunderstand forgiveness while thinking you see it clearly.

Is Forgiveness Overrated? A NY Times Reporter Seems to Think So

This month’s blog comes directly from our post at Psychology Today (July 5, 2024), which was in response to a critical article on forgiveness in the New York Times newspaper.  Click on this link to read the post on the Psychology Today website, or scroll down to read the entire text of the article below!

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Is Forgiveness Overrated? A NY Reporter Seems to Think So

When forgiveness is seen as inappropriate, philosophy is needed to avoid error.

KEY POINTS

• Forgiveness is accused of being “overrated” in a recent New York Times article.
• We use a philosophical lens to examine this indictment against forgiveness when a person is treated unjustly.
• Reasons are given for why the accusations against forgiveness are false.
• In the final analysis, forgiveness is innocent of all charges against it.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, something is overrated when it is “considered to be better than it really is.” The dictionary gives an example of a person who sees an award-winning movie and decides that it is not so great. In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to be overrated is to be valued too highly. Two synonyms for overrated at thesaurus.com are “exaggerated” and “overpriced.” Recently, the New York Times (Caron, 2024) published an article with the intriguing title, “Sometimes, Forgiveness Is Overrated.” The purpose of this post is to philosophically examine the content of that essay in the New York Times to see if the accusation of “overrated” is accurate or…..well….overrated.

Let us examine four points in the essay.

Point 1. What is the difference between forgiveness being overrated and the advice to forgive being so?

Nowhere in the essay is a clear distinction made between forgiveness as overrated and the advice given as overrated. The author states that an encouraging new movement is underway in which writers are “erasing the pressure” to forgive. Let us take an analogy of playing the sport of basketball. If an overbearing coach pressures middle school children to practice and practice to the point of wearing themselves out, is this the fault of basketball itself or the coach’s intemperate advice?

It seems that basketball itself is innocent of all charges because the sport remains what it is regardless of how seriously or nonchalantly the adult leaders take it. This lack of distinction is a crucial point within forgiveness. Is it the fault of forgiveness itself if some people put pressure on others to forgive? It seems that the answer is no because the people so pressuring and forgiveness itself are very different from one another.

Point 2. What is the difference between what forgiveness is in its essence and the degree to which a person can practice it?

In the essay, a mental health professional is confronted by my definition of forgiveness, which, in its very simple form, is to be good to those who are not good to the forgiver. Forgiveness, in its essence, as pointed out in the essay, includes compassion, generosity, and even love toward the offending persons.

Soon after this definition is introduced, we read this from the mental health professional: “Imagine saying that to a trauma survivor.” The statement obviously is a pejorative against the definition. Yet, the philosophical error is this: Neither the writer of the piece nor the mental health commentator is making the vital distinction between what forgiveness is in its essence and what a person can offer at the moment.

Consider the basketball analogy again. The essence of free-throw shooting is to put the ball in the basket. On its highest level, basketball would involve sinking 10 free throws on 10 tries because that is what the sport involves.

Yet, we have to make a distinction between basketball on its highest level and how it is actually performed by middle school students just learning the game. A middle school adolescent might be able to make four out of 10 shots, and that is fine in terms of one’s current actions in basketball.

It would be disingenuous to present to the young person that this is all there is to basketball, the sinking of four out of 10. To be truthful to the adolescent, we can say that the point is to make the shot (all shots) and then be realistic that very few people who play the game reach such perfection. We are showing the student the difference between the essence of the game and the realistic existence (the actual performance) in the game.

It is the same with forgiveness. We do a disservice to those who want to practice forgiveness if we lower the bar of what the essence is, saying that all you have to do is reduce a little anger and, presto, you have forgiven.

Point 3. There is the claim that forgiveness “could even be harmful.”

The point in the essay is that people need time to heal and to feel their emotions. It is as if forgiveness short-circuits a time for anger and mourning. This just is not the case. A part of the forgiveness process that has been in place for about a quarter of a century (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2000) is that the first step in that forgiveness process is to allow a time of catharsis, a time of grieving, a time of confusion and the expression of negative emotions. To cut out that process of examining anger and then to label forgiveness as potentially harmful is to miss an important point that forgiveness is not reductionistic. It does not ignore this initial aspect of exploring emotions and taking the time to do so.

Point 4. Forgiveness is the choice of the one offended.

There is scientific evidence that forgiveness offers both psychological and physical benefits to the forgiver, which the essay admirably references. This does not imply that people must listen to the advice of the scientists. Forgiveness is always the choice of the one treated unfairly. The timeline of forgiving is the choice of the one injured.

Philosophers refer to certain moral virtues as supererogatory. This means that such virtues are not required in societies. Forgiveness is one of these supererogatory virtues (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2024). It does not have to be offered at all by those who choose not to forgive.

Thus, when one author is cited as stating that there is a “blanket forgiveness industry” insisting that everybody should forgive everything, this is a misunderstanding of the supererogatory nature of forgiveness. The accusation needs to be directed against those who misunderstand the philosophical quality of forgiveness. It is not the fault of forgiveness itself.

In Conclusion

As we examine the four issues above, it becomes rather obvious that it is not forgiveness itself that is overrated but instead is people’s misunderstanding of what forgiveness is and how to go about it for oneself or when thinking that forgiveness may be good for others. The essence of forgiveness is different from what people are usually able to achieve, especially if they have not practiced forgiveness very often. This is fine and should not be a judgement on the one forgiving. People need to be gentle in their advice toward others, as importantly implied in the NY Times essay. Forgiveness as supererogatory is the choice of the forgiver which contradicts a “blanket forgiveness industry” insisting on it. The value of the essay is to raise red flags. The philosophical lesson in this rebuttal is to be sure we raise the right red flags so that we do not falsely accuse forgiveness of being overrated.

References

Caron, C. (2024, June 27). Sometimes, forgiveness is overrated. New York Times.

Enright, R.D. & Fitzgibbons, R. (2000). Helping clients forgive. APA Books.

Enright, R.D. & Fitzgibbons, R. (2024). Forgiveness therapy. APA Books.

Is Forgiveness Something Tied to Western Philosophies/Religions and Therefore Is Not a Worldwide Idea?

I came across the above question, which suggests that forgiveness does not have a universal essence to it.  Yet, some years ago, we at the International Forgiveness Institute did a study of forgiveness words in 26 different world cultures.  As you will see below, forgiveness is not confined to Western thought.

Here is a list of various cultures and their words for “to forgive” or “I forgive you”:

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Albanian prt falur
Catalan a perdonar
Castilian Para perdonar
Czech Odpoutm
Danish At tilgive
Dutch Te vergeven
English to forgive
Filipino upang patawarin
Finnish Annettakoon se teille anteeksi
French pardonner
German Ich verzeihe Dir
Hungarian n megbocs tok neked
Icelandic afyrirgefa
Irish a logh
Italian A perdonare
Maltese li nahfru
Norwegian Til  forlate
Polish Odpuszcza
Portuguese A perdoar
Romanian Pentru a ierta
Spanish Para perdonar
Swahili kusamehe
Swedish Frlta
Turkish BEN size bala
Vietnamese Ti tha th cho bn
Welsh i faddau

26 languages, 26 similar ways to communicate. This, of course, is no proof of the universality of “to forgive” or “I forgive you.” Yet, we put this term and this expression to the test and they were not defeated. At the very least we can conclude that forgiveness has a place in many cultures.

For each term or expression, we translated it from English into the other language. We then back-translated into English and retained the term/expression only if both forms of translation were consistent.  The important implication is this: We can be motivated to talk with others about forgiveness and can be quite confident that the other person, from a different culture, has words that mean forgiveness, the same word that we are using.

Why You Cannot Always Trust the Scientific Data on Forgiveness

When I teach a graduate seminar on the psychology of forgiveness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we as a class frequently read scientific studies with the word “forgiveness” in the title and then we commence critiquing the science that is reported. Too often, we find that what is supposed to pass for forgiveness actually is quite suspect and the conclusions should not be taken at face value. For example, when we forgive, we do so toward persons, not situations. To forgive is to willingly decide to be good to those who have not been good to the forgiver. The one who forgives has been treated unjustly by a person or persons and tries to reduce negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and increase positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward the offending person. Forgiveness does not mean to excuse, to necessarily forget, to necessarily reconcile, or to abandon justice. So, if a scientist, as an example, has a scale of “forgiveness” that asks the participants if they forgive situations (not persons, but situations), then this researcher is not studying forgiveness at all in this context, regardless of how many times the word is used.

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In this essay, I want to critique one study (out of four in the article mentioned below) which appeared in this published paper:

Luchies, Laura B. and Eli J. Finkel, James K. McNulty and Madoka Kumashiro, “The Doormat Effect: When Forgiveness Erodes Self-Respect and Self-Concept Clarity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2010), vol.98, no. 5, 734-749.

In their first study of the paper, they presented a “forgiveness” scale to newly married couples. The researchers continued to assess the couples in forgiveness, self-respect, and the degree to which each member of the couple showed “agreeableness” toward one another. The assessments lasted for five years and the conclusions by the authors are as follows:

“For participants who tend to forgive their spouse, the trajectory of self-respect over time depended on the spouse’s level of agreeableness…….The doormat effect subhypothesis was fully supported in that, for high forgiveness individuals whose spouse was low in agreeableness, greater forgiveness predicted significantly diminished self-respect over time.”

In other words, beware of forgiving unless the one you are forgiving has an agreeableness with you. Otherwise, you tend to devalue yourself and so forgiveness is dangerous.

Here is a critique of that study, that should give the reader of it pause in accepting the conclusions:

The forgiveness scale had nothing to do with actually forgiving the spouse because there were five vignettes that were made up. These were hypothetical situations that did not necessarily occur within the marriage, such as “failing to mail some important papers for the self, making a mess of the house.” There are two problems here: 1) The researchers were not assessing actual offenses and so there was no true construct of forgiveness toward the spouse being measured and 2) there were only five made-up stories and as you can see in the two examples above, they hardly constituted major violation of ethics for the most part.

The most serious problem in this study is the fact that the researchers never discerned what each participant meant by the word “forgiveness.” Some of the participants probably, when asked, would have said that to forgive is to “just let the incident go.” Others might have said that to forgive is to see the justification for what happened, so it really was not an injustice at all because of an extenuating circumstance. We, as the readers, just have no idea what each person means by the word “forgiveness,” so we cannot be sure if each participant was answering the questionnaire correctly. Even if many were answering it correctly, we still need to remember that these are made-up scenarios, and people may respond very differently to the hypothetical than to the real injustices against them.

Is there a “doormat” effect to forgiveness? If there is, it has yet to be accurately demonstrated. We should not give forgiveness a bad name by ambiguous science.

The Two A’s of Forgiving: Awareness Before Action

What precisely are you doing and not doing when you begin to forgive someone for something this person has done to you? I think the most basic problem is this: defining forgiveness before we actually practice it.

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Some would argue that you are acting weakly because only the weak are able to forgive; the strong always win out, much likeNietzsche proclaimed in the late 19th century. Some would argue that returning to an unhealthy situation exposes you to abuse, but this confuses reconciliation and forgiveness. Even if you are disregarding the person who treated you unfairly, some would argue that you are moving on by “forgiving.” Not one of these truly conveys what forgiveness actually is.

Goodness toward those who have treated us unfairly is what forgiveness is. This goodness can take the form of giving up resentment, showing mercy and compassion, and even showing agape love (though this love may take some time to develop and small steps toward it may be necessary). See the reference below for more information on agape love.  Most of the time, when people argue about forgiveness, the main point of contention is usually its definition.  If the definition is incomplete or wrong, then the process of going about forgiving someone who offended may be distorted. Awareness before action is the key to beginning forgiveness well.

Enright, R.D., Wang Xu, J., Rapp, H., Evans, M., & Song, J. (2022). The philosophy and social science of agape love. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 42(4), 220–237. https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000202