Forgiveness and Identification

Scarre, Geoffrey

Abstract

Philosophical discussion of forgiveness has mainly focused on cases in which victims and offenders are known to each other. But it commonly happens that a victim brings an offender under a definite description (e.g. ‘the boy who kicked his football through my window’) but does not know to which individual this applies. I explore some of the conceptual and moral issues raised by the phenomenon of forgiveness in circumstances in which identification is incomplete, tentative or even mistaken. Among the conclusions reached are that correct and precise identification of the offending individual is not essential for forgiveness to take place; that an offender can, under certain strict conditions, be said to be forgiven by proxy where the victim has misidentified the offender and ‘forgiven’ the wrong person; and that proxy forgiveness of this sort is not subject to the objections commonly levelled against ‘proxy’ or ‘third-party forgiveness.’

Citation

Scarre, G. (2016). Forgiveness and Identification. Philosophia, 44(4), 1021-1028. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9688-9

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 11, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Mar 22, 2016
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Aug 15, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 15, 2016
• Journal: Philosophia
• Print ISSN: 0048-3893
• Electronic ISSN: 1574-9274
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 44
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 1021-1028
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9688-9