Gentleness, Forgiveness and Justice

I. Introduction

In Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger writes about his war experiences. Along with a great deal of violence and brutality, in the chapter “The Great Battle”, he relates a scene where humanity enters the stage. Jünger encounters an enemy officer on the battlefield. He holds his pistol to the man’s forehead and is about to shoot him, and he is convinced that he has the right to do so. But as the man pulls a photo of his family from his pocket, Jünger spares him. In Jünger’s words, what happened to him here was “a plea from another world.”^[1] In one world, there are rights and duties, including a supposed right to kill one’s enemy in war. In the other world, we find mercy, humanity and – as we will call it below – gentleness and mildness.

In other respects, Jünger leaves no doubt that he was prepared to kill in war. Yet here he is torn from the former world because he no longer perceives his opponent only as an enemy, but as a human being with other facets – in particular lovable ones – as a father and husband. In a well-known entry in his Sketchbook, Max Frisch describes this experience of not “thinking through a human being to the end”, of not reducing them to a few acts or characteristics – such as being an enemy – as being the essence of love:

“It is a remarkable fact that the person we love is the one whose nature we can say the least about. […] That is what is so exciting and unpredictable, so fascinating about love: that we can never get to the bottom of the people we love: because we love them; as long as we love them.”^[2]

For Frisch, love does not mean that we have no picture of, no idea at all about the character of the person we love, but that we never fully define them; we are aware of the limitations of every such picture. It is tempting to think that Hannah Arendt must have had this passage in mind when she developed her philosophy of forgiveness in The Human Condition. Like Jünger’s mercy, forgiveness is an expression of the same virtue of gentleness. Forgiveness is precisely about this open-mindedness, about not rashly reducing others to individual actions. But for Arendt, while love may be the Christian reason for forgiveness, philosophically it is not sufficient:

“If it were true, […]  as Chrsitianity [sic!] assumed, that only love can forgive because only love is fully receptive to who somebody is, to the point of being always willing to forgive him whatever he may have done, forgiving would have to remain altogether outside our considerations. Yet what love is in its own, narrowly circumscribed sphere, respect is in the larger domain of human affairs. Respect […] is a kind of ‘friendship’ […]; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities […] or of achievements […].”^[3]

II. The dignity of man as a complex being

What Arendt describes here is the fundamental right to respect for human dignity. It is not the individual personality owing to its achievements, but being human in itself that demands this respect from us toward all human beings. The starting point is the classic Kantian idea – and yet, on closer inspection, it turns out to be by no means entirely Kantian. In Kant’s view, our capacity for moral reasoning is the basis of our duties and rights.^[4] Measuring other people according to their fulfillment of these duties is a logically necessary part of respecting others. For Kant, Hegel’s dictum on punishment must surely also apply to the personal act of blame and accusation: By being accused of a crime, “the criminal is honoured as a rational being”.^[5] Thus, from a systematic point of view, there is no place in Kant’s ethics for the “other world”, the “world” of gentleness and therefore also for forgiveness. “Access to the problem of forgiveness” is “blocked in principle”.^[6] This is because of Kant’s separation of human beings into homo phaenomenon and homo noumenon. Moral action is located in the world of freedom and concerns us as abstractly conceived rational beings (homo noumenon). In this view, human weakness is a problem from the world of the senses, but it is not something to be recognized or respected.

What Arendt grasps philosophically by going beyond Kant is that the two worlds described by Jünger are by no means separate, independent worlds. They are inextricably interwoven. Because of their capacity for reason, human beings have rights and duties and moral responsibility – which in turn provides the yardstick for treating each other in an ethically correct way. Jünger’s view – which is certainly contestable according to modern revisionist ethics of war^[7] – was that he had the right (and perhaps even the duty) to shoot his enemy dead because of his involvement in the war and the threat he posed as an enemy. But humans are not only rational beings. Humans are more complex, they are fallible, they are vulnerable – and this side of them, or to be more precise, the complex, always interwoven overall picture, also deserves respect. Excluding this other “world” constitutes a problematic narrowing of human morality.

This is where the thesis of this essay comes in: Human dignity in a comprehensive sense demands respect for human beings as complex sensory and rational beings. We can guarantee this respect only if, firstly, we take seriously the rights and duties that can be derived within an ethical framework that is based on a narrowing of man to his rational part. The image of man underlying these Kantian ethics is indeed counterfactual and under-complex, but at the same time it is a necessary and correct assumption made in ethics. Without this counterfactual assumption (or one might say exaggeration and isolation of human reason), the fundamental precept of interpersonal respect and our practice of ascribing responsibility to one another cannot be meaningfully reconstructed. We can understand ourselves as moral actors only if we make this basic assumption. But this does not change the fact that it is counterfactual. It evaluates other people and their actions from a god-like vantage point of pure practical reason. Yet no human being has this vantage point, because humans are also always fallible and erring sensory beings. We all make moral mistakes and therefore no-one can adopt this standpoint as their sole standard without contradicting themselves.

Although we might imagine a person who applies very rigid ethical standards to himself and all others, if this strict standard were the sole basis for evaluating not only actions but also people, this person would have to despise all people, including himself, for moral missteps and – to the extent of the missteps – take objection to the personality. Even the morally and ethically best human being would be judged by their shortcomings in comparison to an ideal. From this perspective, a coherent derivation of the grounds for mutual respect instead of contempt does not seem possible – and yet this was precisely what the original moral evaluation set out to achieve. Even if one did not consider there to be such a self-contradiction, however, such an attitude would still reveal an enormous moral hubris, the making of excessive demands, and a misjudgment of human moral practice. It should be noted here that a complete character assessment is not what Kant has in mind, either. His ethics are about evaluating individual actions and breaches of duty. This is of course possible without self-contradiction or moral hubris.

However, this does not adequately capture our moral relationship with other people. If we know that we too are morally fallible beings, and yet we want to be respected as a whole being, we should also grant this claim to others. Secondly, therefore, respect for humans as complex beings demands just as much that we endeavor to counterbalance the excessive effects of our necessary counterfactual assumptions. Respectful and peaceful human coexistence requires such counterbalances – and human moral practice knows numerous such counterbalances such as forgiveness, reconciliation, mercy, equity, forbearance, compromise, and a willingness to seek peace instead of insisting on one’s own rights. These are all expressions of a virtue – i.e. an ethically valuable attitude and disposition of character – which is opposed to a narrow understanding of justice in the sense of a mere ethics of rights and duties between rational beings, and which therefore complements justice in the narrow sense (which remains central). We can call this virtue gentleness or mildness.

It is important to underline the point that such a virtue and virtues in general do not stand in contradiction to the assumption of ethical rights and duties. From the perspective of virtue ethics, the central question is what a person’s character must be like in order for him or her to have a disposition for good actions. From this perspective, ethically dutiful actions are those that an ideal virtuous person would perform. Conversely, from the perspective of a deontological theory of rights and duties, virtuousness would merely be the disposition to do one’s duty. Thus, Kant defines virtue as “the moral strength of a human being’s will in fulfilling his duty”.^[8] The crucial distinction to make here, however, is that there are different virtues and thus the emphasis that a type of behavior (such as forgiveness or forbearance) falls within the scope of a virtue does not yet constitute a conclusive ethical judgment about individual actions, because other virtues may conflict with it. Asserting the ethical value of gentleness is by no means to set this in absolute terms, but rather as a counterbalance (as mentioned above) to other virtues, such as justice in a narrow sense. Its application and weighting – and this is emphasized in the concept of virtue – must be determined on a case-by-case basis, and they are difficult to specify in abstract terms. Nevertheless, there are of course abstract guidelines in this regard, which we shall discuss below using forgiveness as an example. In conclusion, the virtue of gentleness does not contradict ethical rights and duties, but rather adds an essential, ethically valuable aspect to our thoughts and considerations in this regard.

However, gentleness then does not only mean, as in Aristotle,^[9] a counterbalance against wrong or excessive anger or vengefulness, but also against legitimate attitudes of justice in the narrow sense. It means giving up one’s own rights in consideration of and respect for human fallibility. In forgiveness, for example, this means giving up the (legitimate) right to blame; in forbearance, it means generously overlooking minor moral missteps; in striving for peace (just as much as in reconciliation and compromise on the individual level), it means the willingness not to assert one’s own legitimate positions by all means, but to seek a balance.^[10] Aristotle coined the term epikeia (equity) to describe a readjustment of justice in the individual case.^[11] This too has its place here. However, it does not cover the other cases of gentleness, as it is much closer to justice: It is the virtue of legal balance in those cases where general positive laws produce individual unjust results. Accordingly, one has a moral right to it. This does not apply to the other forms of gentleness in all cases. They are characterized precisely by the fact that at their core they are not subject to a logic of right and duty, but form a counterbalance to it.

III. Illustration with the example of forgiveness

Let us take a closer look at forgiveness as an example. Forgiveness refers to overcoming or foreswearing to blame a person, even though what they did is still considered wrong and blameable.^[12] So it is not a justification, excuse or toleration, but rather it combines belief in the wrongfulness of an act with refraining from blaming the person who did it.

In rare extreme cases, such an act of forgiveness may actually be necessary and demandable, particularly if the offense no longer says anything about the person who committed it. In this case, forgiveness is akin to an ex-post exculpation. The blame against the person who did the deed becomes unreasonable, for example due to remorse and a very long passage of time in relatively trivial cases. Imagine, for example, that you still blamed your neighbor for damaging your garden fence in an argument twenty years ago, even though this person has since become an exemplary neighbor. However, forgiveness is not normally necessary or demandable in this way. There may indeed be a duty to forgive in a broader sense, but this is then either a “mild” duty^[13] – i.e. a duty that, although it requires a specific action in an individual case, does not correspond to any right of another person, which means its fulfillment cannot be demanded – or an imperfect duty,^[14] i.e. a duty that does not correspond to any right and which, moreover, does not result in any obligation in a specific individual case or require specific individual actions, but allows flexibility in its fulfillment. To put this another way: In normal cases, an offender cannot with any ethical justification demand to be forgiven (“mild” duty) – and often one is also not required to forgive specific acts, but merely to show a basic willingness to forgive in life (imperfect duty).^[15] Let us take a closer look at these two cases:

If the blame in the specific individual case reveals a lack of insight into human fallibility and hence a lack of respect for a specific other person, a duty may exist in the individual case. However, fulfillment of such a “mild” duty cannot be demanded. It may exist if the person who committed the act has shown remorse and given sufficient reason to believe that the continued attribution of the offense to them as a person, while not completely erroneous, is nevertheless an expression of moral hubris – for example, someone who has committed a serious political offense but has credibly distanced themselves from the ideology, ended their membership of the groups concerned, and made serious efforts to make amends. The refusal to forgive then reveals a fundamental lack of gentleness and lack of insight into one’s own fallibility. This forgiveness cannot be demanded because after all it was still this person who acted in this way, but nevertheless it still seems morally necessary to recognize that they have changed and refrain from blaming them for their actions.

An imperfect duty, on the other hand, does not apply in individual cases. Here, moral hubris becomes apparent only in a pattern of behavior. Someone who never or only rarely forgives, even if the individual cases do not reach the status of a perfect or “mild” duty, also shows a lack of insight into human fallibility and thus a lack of respect for others. This is reflected in our everyday moral judgment when we blame someone for being resentful and unforgiving.

We can therefore distinguish between three levels of necessity for forgiveness: Perfect duties in those rare cases where blaming the person for their actions is no longer justified because the act can no longer be meaningfully attributed to them. “Mild” duties in cases where a continued attribution of the act to the person who did it is not completely erroneous in the specific individual case, but is the expression of a lack of insight into one’s own fallibility, such that the specific blame is misguided. And finally imperfect duties, which are a fundamental duty, albeit not obligatory in the individual case, to exercise the virtue of gentleness by forgiving from time to time.

However, these duties, including the imperfect duty, apply only to cases where forgiveness is permissible and ethically positive, i.e. only where forgiving is an expression of the respect discussed above, where the relationship between rational being and sensory being is adequately preserved. People are responsible for their actions, and the recognition of human fallibility must not negate this. Those who forgive prematurely violate fundamental duties toward themselves because the moral rights of their own person are not sufficiently respected,^[16] and such premature forgiveness also potentially shows a lack of respect for the other person because their actions are not taken seriously. Accordingly, we must have indicators that the act is not an expression of the personality of the person who did it. These could be remorse, the passage of time, the minor seriousness of the offense or better knowledge of the person. Without such indicators, forgiveness is not only not necessary, but is itself morally wrong (in breach of duty).^[17]

IV. Justice in the narrower sense and gentleness as pillars of ethics

Here we see precisely the relationship between our two ethical “worlds”, or rather the two fundamental pillars of a well-conceived ethics: justice in a narrow sense as the ethics of (perfect) rights and duties, and gentleness or mildness as a counterbalance in view of human fallibility. Taken in isolation, each of these pillars becomes ethically problematic. Justice in the narrow sense becomes problematic because it does not respect people as complex beings, and thus expresses moral hubris and a failure to recognize moral experience and the common human fate of fallibility. Mildness or gentleness becomes problematic because it alone does not sufficiently respect people – oneself and others – as rational beings and take them seriously. This was illustrated above using forgiveness as an example, but similar ideas could be developed for all other cases of mildness and gentleness, too.

Successful and valuable human coexistence is based on two fundamental ethical pillars: rights and duties between responsible rational beings on the one hand, and on the other the ability not always to demand and assert one’s rights, but also to respect and accept other people as fallible beings. Finding the right balance between these two principles (justice in the narrower sense and gentleness) represents the central task of human ethics and virtue.

V. A deeper look: forgiveness and reconciliation

Forgiveness takes place exclusively in asymmetrical relationships: here the victim, there the offender. Furthermore, the philosophical literature on forgiveness assumes by definition that forgiveness refers to actual violations of moral rights.^[18] Yet this ignores an interesting case that occurs constantly in reality, which at the same time calls into question the necessary asymmetry, namely the case of a wrongful accusation – and wrongful forgiveness. Often the accusation, the charge, is not justified at all. This is because people are not only morally fallible, they are also epistemically fallible. We do not know with certainty what is morally right or wrong. This is why we often blame for things that are objectively unblameable. This results in both the possibility of forgiveness without an actual prior violation of rights, and the possibility of mutual blame, which, as far as can be ascertained, does not feature in the discourse on the ethics of forgiveness.

When we mutually blame each other for something, the relationship is no longer asymmetrical. Instead of clear victims and perpetrators, there is instead the contradictory but mutual perception that oneself (or one’s own side) is the victim and the other the perpetrator. In these situations, a special importance attaches to reconciliation. Reconciliation is also possible in asymmetrical cases, and many standard examples are of course asymmetrical. For example, the purpose of many political reconciliation commissions is to come to terms with a one-sided injustice, such as apartheid in South Africa, or the suppression of indigenous peoples in Canada. However, there have also been reconciliation commissions following political conflicts and wars in which both or all parties believed themselves to be in the right – for example in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or in Northern Ireland.

Even in asymmetrical situations, however, reconciliation is not a one-sided process like forgiveness. While it is possible to forgive even the dead, or people you will never see again, reconciliation is a communal act. It implies forgiveness in a certain sense, which will be explained below, but also a joint process that makes it possible for the victims to forgive in the first place. In other words, it is intended to bring about the conditions for forgiveness described above, i.e. indicators that the act is not an expression of the personality of the person who did it. Reconciliation therefore requires a mutual willingness to cooperate with or make concessions toward the other. It is often particularly appropriate where people cannot permanently avoid each other, for example in families or political communities.

For exactly this reason, it often has something of the feel of a compromise. Both sides make concessions so that they can continue to get along with each other or get along with each other again. This applies all the more to symmetrical situations where both sides blame each other. Here it is very difficult for the reconciliation process to be directed toward genuine and complete forgiveness or its conditions, such as remorse. This would only work if one side recognized its error – and for a morally legitimate reconciliation this would of course have to be the side that was actually to blame because a reconciliation brought about by means of gaslighting or other manipulation has no moral value.

The more frequent case in symmetrical situations is that both sides refrain from blaming, meaning they forgive each other, even though they still believe in the fundamental blameworthiness. Here it is not the classic conditions of forgiveness such as remorse, the passage of time or the minor seriousness of the offense that are decisive for forgiveness, but above all a deeper knowledge of the person in relationships of proximity, and the desire for peaceful coexistence. As mentioned above, knowledge of the other person can indeed be a legitimate reason for forgiveness, inasmuch as it can call into question the conclusion drawn from the offense about the personality of the offender. It can make it easier to recognize that the act is more an expression of general human fallibility than of the specific offender’s personality. At the same time, such supposed knowledge, especially in emotional relationships such as the love cited by Frisch and Arendt, also carries the risk of premature and erroneous forgiveness because one thinks one knows the other person better.

However, the other reason for forgiveness in symmetrical situations of reconciliation, i.e. the desire for peaceful coexistence, is also particularly interesting. Here, a compromise replaces genuine forgiveness. One has no inherent reasons to forgive, but there is a serious willingness to stop blaming and accusing, at least outwardly. Ideally, this leads to the inner voice of blame being slowly suppressed too, by a shared future that makes other knowledge of the other person possible in the first place – and so creates space for genuine forgiveness. However, this is not a prerequisite for reconciliation.

The legitimacy of such a compromising reconciliation is strengthened by the epistemic fallibility of human beings, as discussed earlier. If we know that our moral judgments can be wrong and that there is a possibility that our opposite party is right in blaming us, it seems reasonable not to insist unconditionally on our own position. But here too there are moral limits, relating in particular to the degree of uncertainty of our own position, the comprehensibility of the other position, and the likelihood that the opposite party could reveal a different, better personality than that indicated by their act.