Myisha Cherry has entitled her recent book Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better. The occasion for forgiveness is some form of wrongdoing, whether grand or minuscule in scale. Cherry’s subtitle suggests that analytically, the text will identify that beyond the wrongdoing that creates the context for possible acts of forgiveness, there is also much being done wrong vis-à-vis forgiveness itself. In her analysis of how we can do better, the implication is clear: much of “what we get wrong” about forgiveness should not be forgiven, or at the very least calls for some response other than mere forgiveness.
Though Cherry’s work is written very effectively as a public-facing text intended for a general audience, as an academic work it nonetheless packs a clear philosophical punch. In deontological terms, Cherry’s ultimate position is that forgiveness is supererogatory. That is to say, while forgiveness in many contexts might be morally praiseworthy, it should never be regarded as a strict moral obligation. “Forgiveness,” Cherry writes, “is not a moral duty. It is a gift that victims share with us” (196). The first and obvious thing that can go wrong in the domain of forgiveness, then, is putting forth the demand that a wrong must be forgiven. Cherry’s text, though, is not written as a polemic against this view. To the contrary, Cherry’s analysis expresses a clear empathy for those who might commit precisely this wrong. Cherry responds to this empathy by seeking to diagnose its root causes, which in turn means that the point of such empathy is not forgive “what we get wrong” about forgiveness but to point to how we can stop doing wrong.
This diagnosis Cherry relates largely in the form of a discussion of the commonplace or “narrow” view of forgiveness. Cherry characterizes the common view as one in which forgiveness is, at heart, a means of letting go of anger. On such a view, the purpose or telos of forgiving must be to unburden the forgiver of emotions directed toward wrongdoers. Cherry shows, though, that this is an overly narrow conception of the emotional correlates of those contexts in which forgiveness is an option. “In many cases of wrongdoing, particularly with those closest to us,” Cherry writes, “we feel sadness and disappointment, rather than any form of anger. Similarly, if forgiveness always involves giving up anger (or contempt or hatred), how do we explain what is going on when a person reports that they have forgiven a wrongdoer, but their anger (or contempt or hatred) still comes and goes?” (16). So, too, for resentment. Since “resentment is not the only emotional response to wrongdoing” (19), it doesn’t work to maintain that we turn to forgiveness simply to overcome feelings of resentment.
Importantly, then, though Cherry’s study is very much attuned to emotions and could broadly be understood as a contribution to moral psychology, her account is not limited to the emotional dimensions of forgiveness. The narrow view against which Cherry argues “treats the emotional aspects of forgiveness as if they are the only important ones” (19). The broad view advocated by Cherry understands forgiveness as fulfilling and/or potentially fulfilling a variety of functions in service of a plurality of ends. Forgiveness thus “involves broad and overlapping moral practices that are undertaken in order to achieve specific moral aims” (21). Hence, the specific reason that someone chooses to forgive another is contingent, rather than necessarily being a matter of coping with anger or resentment, or even in coping with any emotion at all. “According to the broad view of forgiveness,” Cherry writes, “we forgive as a way to achieve some aim, such as healing or restoration of trust, by participating in some moral practice of forgiveness” (37).
Given the contingency of forgiveness’ ends, we circle back to the point about its supererogation. If as a “moral practice”, there is no necessary moral end of forgiveness, it would seem to follow that forgiveness is never a morally necessary means to an end. Hence, Cherry emphatically makes the case for the moral virtue of acts of refusing to forgive, or withholding forgiveness where it is not warranted (or, in some cases, not yet warranted). If forgiveness is ultimately a gift, one which no wrongdoer is entitled to receiving, then the potential forgiver who judiciously denies such a gift is seemingly engaged in a moral practice that is praiseworthy in its own right.
From this, it follows that another aspect of the “moral practice of forgiveness” whose contingency must be taken seriously is the form that the practice takes even where implemented. What does forgiveness look like? In the same way that gifts and gifting may take a variety of forms—some of which might not be fully evident to their recipients—the same holds for forgiveness. Cherry recounts, for instance, how her sister had pleaded with her to forgive her stepfather. “As strange as this might sound,” Cherry writes, “I believe that I have forgiven him. Of course, my forgiveness looks different from my sister’s, and one reason it is difficult for my sister to recognize my forgiveness is that she holds the common yet limited view of forgiveness” (9). For one party, a narrow view entails an image of forgiveness that only a narrow set of moral practices would appear to meet. But the broadened view of forgiveness called for by Cherry means, ultimately, that to understand the moral practice means to understand it even where the recipients of forgiveness are unaware of having been forgiven, which by extension implicates those third parties who might fail to see that an agent has indeed forgiven a wrongdoer.
If the narrow view were simply philosophically wrong about what forgiveness is, we might raise the challenge that “what we get wrong” about forgiveness ought nonetheless to be forgiven. However, Cherry shows that the wrongdoing in this case has a deeper reach than is often acknowledge. The narrow view of forgiveness is often coupled with implicit or explicit efforts to foster a “culture of forgiveness.” An obvious problem with a “culture of forgiveness,” though, would be its being premised on the expectation of forgiveness. On the one hand, this would seem to violate the sense of forgiveness’s being supererogatory: a culture of forgiveness might be one in which members would reasonably demand that their wrongdoing be forgiven and take failure by wronged parties to meet that demand as a moral failure. On the other hand, this would also seem to have the basic implication of, as a simple matter, promoting wrongdoing by eliminating a moral hazard (namely, the cost of one’s wrongs being unforgiven). Hence, Cherry surmises, “Forgiveness may be a good thing for many. But a culture of forgiveness much less so” (150).
While these points about a culture of forgiveness are clearly universal ones, in the context of the text, we might say that the reasons for noticing the problem are more specific. Cherry begins the text with a discussion of those who forgave Dylann Roof, the perpetuator of a white supremacist, antiblack racist massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Throughout the book, references to those wronged by racism and/or misogyny recur. What Cherry elucidates as a clear subtext and often explicit concern is the way in which “cultures of forgiveness” are, in effect, premised on the prior acceptance of certain forms of wrongdoing. A culture that seeks certain wrongs to be forgiven will espouse the virtues of (a narrowly-conceived) forgiveness, since such forgiveness functions as a de facto licensing of quotidian violations of the rights of vulnerable people.
Thus, in effect, what Cherry describes as being part and parcel of “what we get wrong” about forgiveness is the recurrent demand that women and people of color must forgive. When they are wronged—particularly, perhaps, where they are wronged by white men—the notion that they must forgive appears to carry much social currency. If forgiveness in general is morally supererogatory, but forgiveness in these cases is taken to be or implied to be morally obligatory, then the seeming implication is that the moral demands on women and people of color are simply higher than those on white men.
Though Cherry does not make an explicit case along these lines, one hypothesis here—certainly one with ample precedent in feminist philosophy, Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, etc.—would be that systems of domination and/or oppression involve the pretense that those who dominate are licensed to experience lessened moral duties while those are dominated face the presumption that it is legitimate to demand, morally, that they go above and beyond the moral duties that one’s humanity (or even status as adult, or specialized status as teacher, parent, peer, professional, etc.) implies. In other words, if patriarchy and antiblack racism are ultimately systems of domination, those systems involve the claim that the dominated must always do more than a coherent sense of moral duty (e.g., a Kantian one or a utilitarian one) could make sense of.
By the same token, men who such systems say are entitled to dominate women and white people who such systems say are entitled to dominate Black people are, therefore, allowed to wrong human beings in a way that a coherent humanistic sense of moral duty would have to prohibit. If we say that even in societies where patriarchy and antiblack racism are no longer officially or explicitly endorsed, their cultural force remains (to say nothing of their political, legal, or economic force), we might expect such societies to be ones in which calls for a “culture of forgiveness” would predominate. This might be so even in societies where, for instance, both legal and cultural apparatuses call for being “tough on crime,” for refusing to forgive the “wrongs” of many on the logic, in effect, that forgiving any crime would create a culture of criminality. The analysis can be extended further by considering, for instance, the sharp contrast between the lack of forgiveness extended to drug crimes versus the typicality of seemingly de jure forms of forgiveness afforded to those committing “white collar” financial crimes.
Hence, we might consider Cherry’s analysis of “what we get wrong” about forgiveness to go beyond moral philosophy and moral psychology and as being contributions to fields such as feminist philosophy, Africana philosophy, and critical theory. Cherry writes, for instance, that “We might extend an invitation to forgive to a Black man in ways that make him feel that he must prove how kind and nonviolent he is through forgiveness, even if the same invitation to a white man would have no such effect” (59). If we take other dimensions of the culture in which a “culture of forgiveness” might persist to be relevant, then any individual case of a demand for forgiveness becomes something more than a failure to respect the supererogatory nature of forgiveness as a moral practice. Where the frequency and/or intensity of calls to forgive falls disproportionately on Black people, we might conclude that ultimately such demands for forgiveness are implicitly demands to affirm the legitimacy of a racist or colonial society. Cherry’s similar discussion of efforts to create “cultures of forgiveness” in the workplace, which often emerge precisely in concert with women’s efforts to eradicate cultures of sexual harassment, suggests a similar analysis: women are expected to forgive precisely because, ultimately, they should only take issue with the excesses of patriarchal domination in the workplace and not with the patriarchy of the workplace itself.
Cherry offers a similar analysis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, one of the cases most frequently mined by recent work by moral philosophers on the topic of forgiveness. Cherry implies some of the shortcomings of many of her colleagues on this point by taking seriously some of the particular dynamics of the TRC. Cherry writes of the South African TRC that “ignoring and marginalizing those who refused to forgive and praising those who did was a subtle form of coercion that created an inappropriate pressure on victims to forgive” (75). Indeed, Cherry notes that such coercion was often linked to religion, where the expectation that people wronged by the apartheid regime, its agents, and/or its antecedents should do the Christian thing in forgiving those wrongdoers. But among many other things, we might note the problem of demanding a colonial regime be forgiven precisely on the basis of the very religion that that regime imposed upon many of the colonized.
Indeed, some readers might charge that Cherry grants the reception of the TRC by many moral philosophers a bit too much credence. That is to say, Cherry generally concurs with the sense that the forms of forgiveness demonstrated by many agents through the TRC were vital in building a post-apartheid nation, though this concurrence is tempered by her identification of the fraught nature of these proceedings where they veer into excess. Critics might contend, by contrast, that Cherry’s own account of forgiveness entails a less credulous view of the TRC’s aims given the ways in which the post-apartheid South African state was engineered to reinforce the de facto and de jure legitimacy of the distribution of private property apartheid had produced.
Similarly, for readers such as myself who come to this work taking the intersection of Africana philosophy and political theory as a more central concern than moral philosophy as such, some of Cherry’s conclusions might appear over-generalized because they rest, at base, on considering forgiveness from the standpoint of moral philosophy. For instance, could we envision forgiveness as something other than a moral practice? Could it be, as Hannah Arendt’s discussion of forgiveness in The Human Condition perhaps suggests, a political practice that is ironically at its best where we understand it as being divorced of moral content? Such an account might make sense of why the efforts to produce cultures of forgiveness may not be “moral practices” at all, though they may be practices that are presented as reflecting morality.
Nonetheless, even for the reader inclined to make such criticisms, any such shortcomings are worthy of being forgiven, even on Cherry’s rather circumspect view of forgiveness. Cherry has written a work in moral philosophy influenced by feminist philosophy and Africana philosophy and is thus attuned to elements of the moral matter at hand that many other moral philosophers miss. Indeed, this is a work in moral philosophy written for the general public, a “we” that Cherry owns being part of, rather than opposing in a spirit of academic detachment. As a moral matter, then, it would not work for Cherry to make of herself an exception: she has to interrogate—and successfully does—her impulses pertaining to forgiveness and the cultural location in which such impulses fit.
This is an extraordinarily accessible book in which Cherry is decidedly among the “we” she addresses, and thus takes seriously the implications of viewing forgiveness as a moral practice that any reader could “do better”—though not necessarily by forgiving more often. Ultimately, this is a text that lays out an approachable analysis of where much contemporary discourse on forgiveness goes wrong. Cherry offers a sophisticated and mature view of the place of forgiveness in relation to other moral practices and in relation to the variety of emotions with which it interacts. This is a work that will be of considerable use to those teaching undergraduates and students in secondary schools, as well as for philosophers and scholars seeking to engage the public on a variety of pressing matters. In short, Cherry has offered a compelling demystification of many aspects of forgiveness that we can, indeed, make use of in seeking to do better.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
