University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2012 When One Should Forgive: Eirenistic Responses to Wrongdoing David Court Lewis [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Lewis, David Court, "When One Should Forgive: Eirenistic Responses to Wrongdoing. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2012. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1321 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by David Court Lewis entitled "When One Should Forgive: Eirenistic Responses to Wrongdoing." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy. Glenn Graber, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John Nolt, E.J. Coffman, Alfred Beasley Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) When One Should Forgive: Eirenistic Responses to Wrongdoing A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville David Court Lewis May 2012 ii Copyright © 2012 by David Court Lewis All rights reserved. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Glenn Graber for his insight, availability, and willingness to help me complete my dissertation. I would also like to thank everyone who supported me and all of my (sometimes crazy) dreams, especially Jenny, my mother and family, Jenny’s family, and my many friends and colleagues who provided both philosophical and spiritual support. iv Abstract In my dissertation I use Nicholas Wolterstorff’s conception of the good life (eirenéism), which serves as the foundation for his theory of rights, to argue for a new ethics of forgiveness that incorporates the necessary relational features of forgiveness, while at the same time providing substantive normative guidance in regards to when one should forgive. I, then, show that eirenistic forgiveness implies there is an obligation to forgive: a repentant wrongdoer has a right to be forgiven that creates certain obligations for victims to forgive. I, like Wolterstorff, find such an implication repugnant, and so I spend the majority of my dissertation addressing this implication. I address the obligation to forgive by developing and responding to Wolterstorff’s claim that forgiveness is a non- obligation-producing third-party obligation, and I argue that because forgiveness is like all other obligations, the acceptance of such a position implies that all obligations are third-party obligations. To avoid this conclusion, I provide an argument that shows that the two-party obligation to forgive is not repugnant, or at least not as repugnant as first seems. I spend the remainder of my dissertation showing how one can apply eirenistic forgiveness to a wide-range of difficult cases, that the right to seek punishment does not compete or override the obligation to forgive, and by examining whether or not eirenéism is a religious ethic or if it is an ethical system amenable to both theists and non-theists. v Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Two: Eirenéism as the Good Life .......................................................................... 9 Eirenéism as the Good Life ........................................................................................... 10 Wolterstorff’s Theory of Rights and Justice ................................................................. 20 Comparing Eirenéism with Eudaimonism and the Experientially Satisfying Life ....... 32 Chapter Three: Alternate Foundations of Forgiveness ..................................................... 50 A Feminist Foundation of Forgiveness ......................................................................... 51 Kantian-Based Ethics .................................................................................................... 59 Kristeva’s Forgiveness .................................................................................................. 62 Chapter Four: Towards a New Ethics of Forgiveness....................................................... 66 Eirenistic Forgiveness in Justice: Rights and Wrongs .................................................. 66 Forgiveness in Justice in Love ...................................................................................... 72 Eirenistic Forgiveness and he Repugnant Implication .................................................. 79 Chapter Five: The Unacceptability of Third-party Eirenistic Forgiveness ....................... 82 An Overview of Eirenistic Rights ................................................................................. 83 The Third-party Obligation to Forgive.......................................................................... 86 An Argument for Third-party Forgiveness ................................................................... 92 Chapter Six: Applying Eirenistic Forgiveness and Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 102 The Tri-level Nature of Rights .................................................................................... 103 Applying Eirenéism..................................................................................................... 110 Stealing .................................................................................................................... 110 Rape ......................................................................................................................... 124 Genocide and Mass Atrocities................................................................................. 134 Chapter Seven: Seeking Forgiveness .............................................................................. 147 The Life-goods of the Victim ...................................................................................... 149 An Obligation to Forgive vs. an Obligation to Seek Vengeance ................................ 158 The Obligation of Wrongdoers ................................................................................... 163 Two Different Approaches to Seeking Forgiveness ................................................... 167 Social Responsibility to Promote Forgiveness ............................................................ 176 Chapter Eight: Forgiveness as Religious Obligation ...................................................... 185 Reformulating Forgiveness as Third-party Obligation ............................................... 186 Eirenéism as Religious Ethic....................................................................................... 187 Reconsidering the Obligation to Forgive as a Religious Obligation ........................... 200 A Procedural Approach to Grounding Human Worth and Human Rights ................. 205 Chapter Nine: Concluding Remarks ............................................................................... 219 List of References............................................................................................................ 220 Vita .................................................................................................................................. 227 1 Chapter One Introduction Most philosophical accounts of forgiveness focus on the nature of forgiveness. Authors take their particular ethical framework and provide impressive arguments to show what counts as, and what falls short of, “true” or “genuine” forgiveness. The question of why one should forgive is given some attention in the philosophical literature, but is usually tackled by psychologists and theologians. A third question, of when one should forgive, is given little to no attention in philosophical literature. Authors who claim to be concerned with when one should forgive usually focus on crafting a set of conditions that must be met, based on what forgiveness is, in order for forgiveness to be appropriate. As a result, such accounts focus mainly on what counts as “true” forgiveness, not on the general moral conditions that suggest when a person is morally required to forgive. In this dissertation, I make up for this shortcoming by focusing exclusively on the question of when a moral agent ought to forgive. More specifically, I argue for a new ethics of forgiveness based on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s conception of the good life, called eirenéism, 1 which serves as the foundation for his theory of inherent natural rights. 2 Eirenéism maintains that each person has certain life-goods (goods in one’s life or history) that contribute to making one’s life and history a good life and history, that individuals have rights to these life- goods, and for a person to live the good life, his or her