Must I be forgiven? LUC BOVENS Why do we find it upsetting when the victim of our wrongdoing refuses to accept our apologies? Why do we find it upsetting when the victim is unwill- ing to grant us the forgiveness that we are asking for? Let us introduce some terminology to address these questions. The offen- der initiates a redemption practice by apologizing or asking forgiveness. If the victim accepts the apologies or grants forgiveness, then the practice succeeds. If the victim does not accept the apologies or refuses to forgive, then the practice fails. Offender’s distress is the distress that an offender typically experiences when a redemption practice fails. As a matter of convention, the masculine pronoun refers to the offender, the feminine to the victim. So, suppose that we have two offenders who initiate a redemption practice and they are counterparts in all respects except for the fact that for the former the practice fails, whereas for the latter the practice succeeds. I will try to provide a normative account of the fact that the former typically experiences a kind of distress that is absent for the latter. That is, I will try to provide an account of offender’s distress that makes the emotion into an apt emotion. I start with three unsuccessful attempts that are implicit in the literature on forgiveness, then construct my own account, and conclude by showing how my account provides error theories for the unsuccessful accounts. 1. The threat of revenge Redemption practices stop the cycle of revenge. The victim commits herself to forswear resentment and taking revenge would be inconsistent with such a commitment (Butler 1827: Sermons VIII and IX; Griswold 2007: 38–43; Murphy 1988; Hampton 1988). One might suggest that this accounts for offender’s distress. The offender fears revenge and a successful redemption practice is what guards him from this threat. Consider the following objection. We want offenders to initiate redemp- tion practices because they feel bad about what they did, not to stave off revenge. The fear of revenge does not count as a good reason to initiate a redemption practice. Hence, the objection goes, what is distressing about a failed redemption practice should not be that one failed to stave off revenge. But this does not follow. The motivation for engaging in a practice may be very different from the reason for experiencing distress when the practice fails. Even if a wrongdoer initiates a redemption practice because he feels bad about what he did, the fact remains that the fear of revenge may be upsetting to him in response to a failed practice. Hence the objection does not hold. Analysis Vol 69 | Number 2 | April 2009 | pp. 227–233 doi:10.1093/analys/anp006 ß The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org must i be forgiven? | 227 at Library, London School of Economics on May 5, 2010 http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from